26.1

ACT YoE 4,191 / LT November 13, 2009, 1159

PRT Headquarters

Brockton Bay

Ward Dorms

Melissa sat stiff in the little chair, knuckles pressed to her knees. She caught her own reflection in the antique mirror—except it wasn’t hers, not really.

The mirror had been delivered by one of Kid Win’s drones, a polished glass frame in tarnished brass, carted in like fragile cargo. He’d waved off her thanks with some comment about needing extra compartments in his tinker’s toolbox, as if that was an adequate trade. She’d wanted to ask—why not just build a bigger toolbox? —but she’d learned that there were questions you didn’t ask tinkers. They lived in their own logic, and poking at it only got you tangled.

Now the mirror was installed, fixed against the far wall. A small half-table and a pair of chairs completed the arrangement. At first glance, it appeared to be a cozy little setup for tea. Look closer, and the illusion cracked. One of the seats wasn’t occupied by her. It was occupied by the other her.

Eve.

She’d given her name after Melissa had asked what to call her. Eve sat opposite, the same body, the same face, but overlaid with the impossible: silver eyes that caught the light and refused to let it go, hair that poured down in a perfect cascade without frizz or flaw. Melissa suspected—no, she knew—that space manipulation played some part. Hair didn’t flow like that unless you were cheating.

“Sit,” Eve said. The voice was Melissa’s, but not. The cadence was different, too sure of itself, like a woman who’d spent a lifetime giving orders instead of second-guessing them. Eve leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. “Let’s start heavy. I’ve been talking to Rabbit about your world.”

Melissa’s pulse jumped. Rabbit. A ghost of the net, a name that conjured up firewalls eaten alive and databases gutted. Wanted posters were circulated by both governments and corporations. Eve mentioned him as one might talk about a colleague in accounting.

“There are problems,” Eve went on. “Chief among them, the stupidity of your politicians.”

Melissa blinked. “The laws that restrict tinkers?” she asked, because it was the first, most obvious connection.

“Exactly.”

The word rang with authority.

“The problem is twofold,” Eve continued. She lifted a finger, silver light catching against her nails. “First, everything can be classified as tinkering. Second, punishing people for doing it doesn’t discourage—it accelerates. You take someone who was tinkering in their garage, a half-hobbyist, half-innovator, and you turn them into a criminal overnight. Where do they turn? Crime pays. Especially when their tech is worth billions on the black market.”

Melissa frowned. “Everything can be classified as tinkering?”

“Everything,” Eve confirmed, with a calm that suggested she’d mapped this territory far beyond Melissa’s ability to follow. “It’s the neat trick of power. Want to remove someone troublesome? Redefine their skill set until it resembles tinkering. Get the public’s sympathy on your side. No better way to demonize a healer than to claim the woman fixing eyes is a bio-tinker. Instant fear. Hatred. Isolation. And isolation,” she added, “is the perfect recipe for a broken trigger.”

Melissa shuddered. The word broken sat heavily in her chest. She’d seen it once. A classmate. Triggered ugly, twisted, screaming with a power that ate itself as fast as it lashed out. She remembered the aftermath, the way the school never quite recovered from the scorch marks on the walls or the way people looked at each other, wondering if they’d be next.

Eve watched her. Silver eyes sharp, dissecting. Melissa hated how much of herself she saw in the expression—the same tilt of the head, the same subtle twist of the mouth when she had the upper hand in an argument. It was her face, but stripped of uncertainty, polished until it gleamed.

Melissa swallowed. “You sound like you’ve thought this through. A lot.”

“I have.” Eve’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Your world plays the same games mine did. Governments are using fear as leverage. Corporations pulling strings where no one can see. The people in the middle crumbled until breaking was the only choice. And every time someone breaks, it’s an excuse to tighten the noose.”

The room felt smaller. The mirror loomed, stretching wall to wall. Melissa shifted in her seat, resisting the urge to stand, to break the symmetry of the setup. She stared at the silver-eyed reflection across from her. Her jaw was tight, her nails biting into her knees through the fabric of her pants. Eve had the same posture, the same lean, except where Melissa trembled faintly with nerves, Eve was still. Fixed. A portrait of control wearing her face.

“Why?” Melissa asked. The word slipped out smaller than she meant. She hated that.

Eve tilted her head. The silver hair shifted in defiance of gravity; a sheet of molten metal caught in a perpetual cascade. “Why do broken triggers happen, or why do governments cling to the same tired mechanisms?”

Melissa licked her lips. Her gaze skittered to the wall-to-wall mirror, to her own reflection layered behind Eve’s. It was as if she were the ghost here, not the one sitting across from her. “Both.”

Eve leaned forward, elbows pressing into the table, fingers laced. “Because broken things are useful. A broken parahuman terrifies the public. They see the footage, they see the mess left behind—smears of blood, walls torn out, the screaming that never quite fades from memory. They don’t see the bureaucrats behind it. They don’t connect the dots. Fear pushes them toward accepting stricter laws, tighter chains. Convenient, for those that want such things.”

Her voice didn’t rise, didn’t need to. Melissa could almost imagine the words echoing inside her own skull, threading into places her thoughts normally stayed clear of.

“And triggers?” Melissa asked, pushing, because if she didn’t keep her own momentum, she’d fold under Eve’s. “The broken ones. Why?”

Eve’s eyes gleamed brighter. “You know. Isolation. Desperation. The shard reaches deeper, taking more when there isn’t enough of you left to give. Sometimes it latches wrong. Sometimes the person’s self-splinters. That’s the benign explanation.”

Melissa felt her stomach twist. “Benign?”

“The less benign one,” Eve said, “is that something—someone—designed it this way. A system where suffering is the ignition key. Where failure, pain, and loss are the fuel. Broken triggers aren’t accidents, Melissa. They’re part of the pattern. The shard digs deep, tears flesh from soul, and if the host cracks apart in the process?” A small shrug. “Collateral, all the creatures that gave you these shards care about is saving their race from extinction.”

Melissa thought of her classmate again, the screams echoing, the smell of burning. A hand gripped hers under the desk in memory—one of the few who hadn’t joined the staring crowd. That same hand pulling away once whispers started.

Her throat felt tight. “You’re saying it’s—intentional?”

“I’m saying it’s not corrected.” Eve’s smile was thin, sharp. “If you have a machine that makes weapons, and sometimes the weapons explode in the user’s hands, you fix the machine. Unless… unless the explosions serve a purpose. Who knows what inhumane minds think?”

Melissa swallowed. She wanted to deny it, to call it paranoia, conspiracy. But the words stuck. Because she’d seen how the world handled parahumans: carrot and stick, but the stick was bigger. Always bigger.

Eve leaned back, silver eyes boring into her. “I can alter reality’s binding laws. Lucky for you, and all the people on your planet. Now, call it. Say the word. [Status]. Just as I taught you in the Dream.”

There was weight in the way Eve spoke. Melissa thought of her own power, of space folding in on itself, her struggles to control it.

With that in mind, she spoke the word that echoed with meaning written in reality’s code, “[Status].” It vibrated the world, like a t tuning fork just slightly off.

Instantly, her mind conjured unbidden the status sheet—a weird artifact of her shard or of Eve’s influence, she couldn’t tell anymore—flickered in her head’s eye:

Name: Melissa Byron (Vista)
Age: 11
Ability: Space Manipulation (1/100)
Sealed Space Effects: [Locked]

She blinked, pushed it away. A reminder of how little she understood about herself.

Eve hadn’t looked away. “You’re still a child. But the world doesn’t wait for children to grow. It breaks them, then uses what’s left. You can learn to be used. Or you can learn to use.”

Melissa shivered. Her voice cracked when she asked, “And what happens to the ones who don’t pick either?”

Eve’s smile widened. Too wide. “They shatter.”

The mirror stretched around Melissa like a cage, silver light filling her peripheral vision. The air felt thinner. She gripped the edge of the table, hard, grounding herself in the physical, in the now.

Eve tapped the tabletop sound transmitting from the mirror’s realm, each finger tap too loud in the stillness. “Brace yourself, my Chosen. You’re about to get a massive upgrade. [Binding Contract: First Clause Complete].”

The words carried weight that Melissa didn’t understand, not yet. She could feel something shifting, like the world itself had leaned closer to listen.

She glanced again at her status, watching it shift and alter in real-time.

Status: Melissa Byron [Vista]

Age: 11
Designation: Human (Host)
Shard Codex Identifier: [Spatial Convergence Node]

Core Attributes

• Body: Developing, insufficient. The subject exhibits strain when sustaining higher-order manipulations.

• Mind: Expansive, adaptive. Latent capacity for abstraction exceeds peer average.

• Soul: Fractured imprint, stabilized by shard anchoring.

Primary Ability

• Space Manipulation – Level 1/100
  Current Access: Localized compression, minor folding.
  Constraints: Energy expenditure rises exponentially with distance and scale.
  Risks: Prolonged use may cause dissonance between physical coordinates and host perception → vertigo, hemorrhage, reality shear.

Sealed Functions [Locked]

• Convergence Lattice: Large-scale warping.

• Dimensional Bridging: Access to non-local topologies.

• Stasis Fields: Time-linked stability effects.
  (Shard denies access. Keys required: trauma, isolation, escalation.)

Observed Passives

• Spatial Awareness (Minor): Intuitive grasp of topology.

• Shard Alignment Drift: Host identity tethered increasingly to shard priority schema.

• Potential for Broken Trigger: Elevated.

Projected Trajectory

Outcome branches indicate a high probability of catastrophic escalation unless the host stabilizes through external anchors (social ties, support structures).

Risk rating: [Amber / Red].

A flicker of insanity caused Melissa to look at Eve, and her shard interpreted the movement with diligent stupidity.

Melissa blinked, and the world broke into text.

Not real text, not words printed on paper, but something overlaid in her vision. Lines, categories, the sterile voice of her shard trying to explain itself in the way it always had when she pushed too far. Status. Numbers, warnings, red flags.

Her own screen was familiar, in the way a doctor’s report might be. She could read between the lines. “Fragile,” “developing,” “risk of catastrophic escalation.” It hurt to see it written out, but it made sense. She was eleven. She wasn’t supposed to be… finished.

Then her eyes slid sideways, and the second screen bled into view.

Not her. Eve.

The words there didn’t look the same. Too much. Overflowing. Places where the letters seemed to glitch, spill sideways, refuse to fit into neat columns. It was like trying to read a library and a storm simultaneously.

Her breath hitched.

Status: Eve Smith [“The Silver Witch”]

Designation: Non-Standard Host (Ascended Entity)
Age: [Data Corrupted]
Race Classification: Silver Prime Anomaly
Shard Codex Identifier: [Dust-Library Core | Traveling Witch Subroutine]

Core Attributes

• Strength: [Beyond Host-Scale]

• Dexterity: [Beyond Host-Scale]

• Constitution: [Beyond Host-Scale]

• Intelligence: Recursive; self-propagating.

• Charisma: Synthetic resonance. Baseline comprehension compromised.

Primary Laws

• Primarius Space: Authority over topology, distance, and dimensional layering.

• Secondus Silver: Transmutative property; matter-state overlay into argent spectrum.

Affinities Detected

• Paper, Ink, Dust, Space.
  (Cross-domain overlap: Creation, Erasure, Preservation. Unclear if boundaries exist.)

Manifestations

• Elemental Projection – “Mugen no Gin’un”
  Silver Dust Arsenal: Defensive/offensive restructuring of particulate fields.
  Path of Homeward Slash: Creates rifts enabling instantaneous traversal.

• Apex Manifestation – “Hakugin no Rinne”
  Endless Radiance: Aura disrupts hostile psychic contamination.
  Samsara of Silver: Host consciousness embedded in particulate field; predictive response exceeds shard metrics.

Observed Passives

• Immortality Protocols: Host state reconstitutes from conceptual residue.

• Consumption Trait: All phenomena interpreted as sustenance. (Warning: applicability includes energy, memory, and time.)

• Balance of Power: Automatic equalization across attributes. Deviations corrected by hostile absorption.

Sealed Functions [Partial Redaction]

• Ritual of Time – Unlocked.

• Ritual of Space – Fully Active.

• Ritual of Dust – Recursive.
  (Note: Host accesses functions normally reserved for Entity-scale administrators. Designation mismatch unresolved.)

Projected Trajectory

Host exceeds the shard framework. Classification within “cape” schema: invalid.

Local probability branches collapse in proximity.

Suggested Directive: Do Not Engage. DO NOT ENGAGE!!!

Level 1/100. That was hers. A clean number, manageable. She clung to it, even though it meant she was at the bottom. A long climb ahead.

Eve didn’t have numbers. She had broken brackets, corrupted data, and entire categories stamped Beyond Host-Scale. As if the command that measured Melissa, interpreted by her shard, threw in the towel when it looked at the being in the mirror, wearing her face.

Her stomach flipped.

It wasn’t just the gulf between them, though that was bad enough. It was the way the shard—the cold machine voice that defined everything in her world—was afraid. It warned itself. Do Not Engage. DO NOT ENGAGE!!!

Eve caught her staring. Those silver eyes gleamed with the same clinical sharpness as the words floating in Melissa’s head. As if she could read the diagnostics too, maybe even had written them.

Melissa’s throat went dry. Her knuckles hurt from gripping the edge of the table too hard. “You—” She stopped, swallowed. “Aren’t from around here, I take it?”

Eve smiled, and Melissa hated how much it looked like her own smile when she was plotting mayhem. “No,” Eve said softly, “I’m just visiting, you know how it is, accept a Summon, visit random places with eldritch races, learn fascinating new tricks.”

The mirror pressed in around her, silver light making her own reflection look small, pale, half-erased. She wanted to look away, to shut her eyes, but the screens didn’t vanish. They stayed there, side by side. A child’s diagnosis next to something the shard couldn’t measure.

Her chest hurt. Because she understood what it meant, in the same way she’d understood what it meant when a building creaked under its own weight. The gap wasn’t just wide. It was unbridgeable.

Unless—unless Eve reached across.

Unless Eve pulled her up.

Melissa shuddered. For the first time, she wasn’t sure if she wanted that. Yet, she had already made the deal in a Dream, but it was valid to Eve, enough to bridge the distance and empower a young girl she didn’t even know.

Melissa couldn’t breathe. The twin readouts lingered in her vision like afterimages burned into her retinas. Hers: fragile. Eve’s: infinite.

Then the text shifted.

Melissa gasped. It wasn’t her doing. The neat, clinical diagnosis for her own shard—something she’d only ever seen in flashes when she pushed herself too far—was unraveling. Lines of text jittered, letters bending, rearranging. Her shard didn’t control it. Something else did.

Eve.

“Brace yourself, we aren’t done yet,” Eve said, her voice low, even. A doctor telling you the scalpel was already in. “[Binding Contract: Second Clause Complete].”

Melissa’s pulse hammered in her ears. “W-Wait—”

But the thing wearing her skin didn’t listen.

Status: Melissa Byron [Vista] — [Hive-Shard Override in Progress]

Core Attributes

• Body: Developing → Stabilized by external reinforcement.

• Mind: Adaptive → Anchored in recursive pathways.

• Soul: Shard tether rewritten. Interference detected.

Primary Ability

• Space Manipulation – Level 1 → 5/100
  Access Expanded: Compression, folding (local → regional).
  Constraints Reduced: Energy expenditure moderated by secondary tether.
  Risks Amplified: Identity drift, perception fragmentation. External contamination is possible.

Unlocked Functions [Forced]

• Convergence Lattice – Partial Access Granted.

• Dimensional Bridging – Seal Cracked.

• Stasis Fields – [LOCK STATUS COMPROMISED].

Observed Passives

• Shard alignment drift → Accelerated.

• Anchor dependency established: [Eve Smith].

• Probability of broken trigger: [Recalculated]. Output → Absorbed risk, externalized cost.

Melissa’s hands shook. She tried to push her chair back, but the mirror seemed to swell, space folding subtly so that her retreat didn’t create distance. She wasn’t moving away. She couldn’t.

The shard, the thing in her head given by alien gods, screamed. Not with sound, but with static, error messages, red-text warnings scrawled across her inner vision. The shard didn’t want this. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Shards didn’t get rewritten. Hosts weren’t supposed to feel foreign hands inside their frameworks.

And yet Eve’s silver eyes gleamed, patient, watchful.

Melissa choked out, “You—you’re rewriting it?”

Eve tilted her head. “Yes. I’m closing doors you never needed opened. Replacing the locks with mine. What’s the phrase? Those in my service serve none but me.”

Melissa’s stomach lurched. The words in her vision shifted again:

New Passive Established

• Pact Anchor: Host shard now recognizes Eve as the primary stabilizing node.

• Dependency: Loss of anchor will destabilize the shard-host link.

Melissa felt it. Like cold fingers tracing through her chest, hooking into something she couldn’t name. Not body, not mind, deeper than both. A tether pulling tight.

Her breath came fast. “That’s—” She struggled to find the word. “Servitude?”

“No,” Eve said gently. “Protection. Before my intervention, if anyone else tried to chain you, they would succeed. Now? The option is gone. Because I closed that door. You are my Chosen. Mine. With this step, you are safe, shielded, no longer at risk in ways you couldn’t even comprehend.”

The mirror’s light pulsed silver, too bright, and Melissa had to squeeze her eyes shut. But even in the darkness behind her lids, the status lingered, imprinted.

Her shard’s voice—usually cold, neutral—was gone. Drowned out. Only Eve remained.

Melissa’s knuckles ached from how hard she was gripping the table. She forced her eyes open, silver light searing her vision. “Who would want to chain me?”

Eve smiled. Not cruel, not kind. Solid. Just like a statue of charismatic ice. Charismatic ice, with perfect hair. “Everything beyond the tiny pebble of your world.”

Melissa’s chest clenched as the tether locked into place. Not just a metaphor. She felt it — a line of silver thread spooling from somewhere inside her ribcage, winding taut, sinking into Eve’s reflection across the table.

Her breath stuttered. The chair creaked under her as she tried to push back again. No space to move. The mirror folded around her like the walls of a maze, collapsing corridors faster than she could flee.

Then the pain hit. Because such a gift wasn’t free.

It wasn’t sharp. Not stabbing or burning. It was stretching. A pressure deep in her chest, radiating outward. Every bone in her arms hummed like tuning forks, every joint pulling as if her body were being asked to occupy more room than it had.

She whimpered despite herself.

The status readout flared again, jagged edges of red and silver text fighting for dominance.

Status: Melissa Byron [Vista] — [Upgrade Sequence Active]

• Body: Recalibrating. Stress fractures predicted → reinforced with an argent tether.

• Mind: Expanding grid access. Cognitive pathways stretched. The host may experience disorientation.

• Soul: Integration in progress. Expect identity bleed.

Her vision fractured. The room around her no longer looked stable. The table was both near and impossibly far. Eve’s face doubled, tripled, each one existing a fraction of a centimeter apart, reflections folded over reflections. Melissa’s eyes couldn’t keep up.

Melissa pressed her hands to her temples. “Stop, stop, stop—”

“Breathe,” Eve said, calm as ever. Not commanding, not comforting. Simply stating.

Melissa obeyed. She didn’t want to, but her lungs filled anyway, as if her body listened to Eve before it listened to her. The silver tether pulsed in time with her heartbeat.

And then—release.

Space itself synchronized with her.

The wall shifted outward, then contracted back like it had never moved. The table seemed to lengthen by a meter, then snap short again, her hands suddenly much closer to Eve’s than they had been.

Melissa jerked in her seat. Her power had always been deliberate, effortful, requiring constant strain. Now it was reflexive, tied to her mind in new instinctive paths.

Her shard’s diagnostic flared again, shrieking in sterile language.

New Functions Engaged

• Convergence Lattice – Partial: Host can warp entire rooms with perfect precision.

• Dimensional Bridging – Cracked: Thin-space traversal possible (short range). Stable.

• Spatial Reflex Loop: Mind synchro-linked to minor folds. Adapting.

Her skin prickled. She could feel air currents that weren’t real, breezes from hallways that shouldn’t exist, the faint tug of doors she hadn’t opened but could, if she just leaned a little on the tether. If she wanted it. If she was willing to push.

Melissa’s stomach heaved. She doubled over, hands clutching her knees, bile rising in her throat. “It’s too much—”

Eve reached across the distance of impossibility. Her hand didn’t touch Melissa’s, but the tether tightened, and the nausea vanished like it had never been there.

“Not too much,” Eve said. “Only new. You’ll adapt. You always adapt.”

Melissa swallowed bile. Her hands were still shaking. She forced herself to look up. Eve’s silver eyes were steady, unwavering.

“You’re mine. My Chosen, my agent in the waking world,” Eve said. No malice, no heat. Just truth. “What I build, does not break.”

Melissa’s shard screamed once more, then went silent. Not acquiescence — obliteration. The will that had been there, erased like a stained grease spot under the dishwashing rag.

The silence, somehow, was worse than the scream.

Melissa’s breathing evened out, but only because the tether enabled it. Each inhale came with calm, as if the air folded before it entered her lungs. Each exhale pressed outward, even as her mind gently tugged at the corners of the room.

She wasn’t even trying to. That was the worst part. This was definitely going to require some mental gymnastics.

Eve waved her hand in a lazy swipe.

The antique mirror buckled at the edges, not with cracks but with warps, its frame stretching sideways like soft taffy. The little half-table groaned, wood warping as if it existed in two positions at once.

Melissa squeezed her eyes shut. “That’s cheating.”

The tether pulsed. Not stopping. Redirecting.

Her chair lurched backward, even though she hadn’t pushed. The air between her and Eve bent, compressing into a sharp line that forced the distance open. She stumbled, nearly fell—except the floor folded under her, flattening into a slope that kept her upright.

Her shard’s readout stuttered across her inner vision:

Status: Vista — Upgrade Complete?

• Convergence Lattice [Partial]: Active.

Local objects are realignable. Spatial integrity 100%.

• Dimensional Bridging [Cracked]: Minor slipstream access detected.

Threshold opened [17m]. Destination: Line of sight.

• Spatial Reflex Loop: Continuous.

The host currently controls a 0.5m radius field. Permanent.

Melissa’s heart jumped into her throat. Because she saw it.

Behind her chair—where wall met floor—there was a tear. A ripple in the plaster, faint and shimmering like heat haze. It wasn’t just distortion. She could see through it.

On the other side: blackness. Not empty black, but the kind of black that hinted at depth, like staring down a well that didn’t end.

Her breath hitched—fear—and the tear widened.

She choked and clapped a hand over her mouth, desperate not to make it worse.

Eve tilted her head, watching with silver calm. “Good,” she said.

Melissa’s eyes stung. She kept her palm pressed to her lips, lungs burning. If she exhaled, what would happen? Would the wall collapse inward? Would the hole widen and swallow her whole?

Her vision blurred with tears. The tether pulsed once, soothing her body into taking the breath she was trying to hold. Her mouth opened against her will.

Exhale.

The tear flared open. The smell of salt and ash rushed in from nowhere, a wind from an impossible direction stirring her hair. The black space beyond shifted, shimmering with faint silver threads—like Eve’s hair, like Eve’s eyes.

Melissa sobbed. Not because of the power, but because she couldn’t close it.

She looked across the table. Eve sat perfectly still, hands folded, smile faint. “You, see? Already, you can open doors.”

Melissa’s voice was a broken whisper. “Where does it go?”

Eve’s silver eyes gleamed. “Anywhere you choose.”

The tether thrummed in agreement.

The tear pulsed in rhythm with her pounding heartbeat.

Each thud widened it a fraction, threads of silver webbing outward through the plaster like veins under skin. The air tasted wrong—copper and salt, like blood poured into seawater.

Melissa clutched the table with both hands, fighting not to fall toward it. Because that’s what it felt like: a slope into nothing, tugging her chest first, tugging her soul.

Her shard’s overlay crackled across her vision:

Dimensional Bridge [Cracked]

• Rift Stability: Low

• Destination: Unmapped topology

• Host Safety: Compromised if contact occurs

Recommendation: Abort. Save yourself!

But the shard’s voice was faint, buried under static. Like it had been shouted down.

Melissa’s throat locked tight. She wanted to scream, but that could mean it would get worse right in front of her, very bad, and she couldn’t risk it. She couldn’t risk opening some hell-dimension here. Her lungs ached. Spots swam in her vision.

A hand—Eve’s—didn’t touch her, but the tether tugged, silver thread vibrating. The rift shuddered, threads collapsing inward, then folded like paper being smoothed flat.

The wall was a wall again. There was no space monster rift.

Melissa sagged against the table, gasping, chest heaving. The chair creaked under her weight. She kept blinking, as if the black well would linger in her sight, burned in like staring at the sun.

Eve’s voice came soft. Too soft. “That was a glimpse. Nothing more. You see how easily it answers to you now.”

Melissa’s knuckles were white against the wood. She croaked, “It almost—” She stopped. Words failed her. How do you tell the monster in your mirror that the strange rift-door is about to devour you?

Eve’s silver eyes didn’t blink. “Almost gobbled you up? Yes. That’s what space does when you do not command.”

Melissa stared at her reflection, pale-faced, hair clinging damp to her temples. Eve looked the same, except not. Perfect. Composed. A version of herself that hadn’t flinched, hadn’t broken.

The tether thrummed again, soothing like a lullaby, but the more it calmed her, the more Melissa wanted to scream.

“What do you really look like?” Melissa finally asked as her mind calmed.

Eve glanced away for a moment with a soft smile before she turned back to Melissa. “To put it in a nice way, I’m drop-dead, mind-melting, brain-scrambling gorgeous. How does the book put it? Ah, yes. Do not look upon the face.”

Melissa blinked, “You’re a god?”

Eve’s face turned deadly serious before she said, “No, nothing so limited. Think of me as…royalty. Dark royalty.”

Melissa blinked, looking at the bright shining image in the mirror before saying, nonplussed, “Dark royalty just…doesn’t seem to fit.”

Eve tossed her hair, which somehow defied all logic to be completely straight, still, and said, “The truth won’t change even if you can’t understand it. Now, set your Spatial Reflex Loop to zero.”

Melissa did as she was told, then gave a questioning look at the mirror.

Eve sighed and said, “The most common method of killing a parahuman?”

“A bullet…oh,” Melissa said as her mind informed her that all objects entering her field would now become absolutely still. Great. Now she was breaking physics without even trying. On the other hand, she was now also bulletproof.

Melissa was expecting this to be a nightmare with all the paperwork.