Black Water #5
"Put a hand against the glass. Tested it." He lifted his own hand only halfway, then let it fall. "Not like someone asking to be let out. More like someone checking whether the surface was a wall."
Fear moved across Marin's face first. The colder structure followed, the one that turned fear into questions instead of permission to panic. "Anything directed at me?"
"No." The answer came quickly because he had already examined that possibility. Both of them heard what it ruled out, and the room remained no safer for it.
Marin took one step toward the flooded floor. Oliver caught her wrist. The grip was light enough that she could have continued without resistance. She looked down at his hand, then up.
"I wouldn't," he said.
She did not make him explain. Marin looked at the mirror, the water and the dark beneath the chart table, then stepped back on her own. Oliver released her immediately. The small exchange steadied him more than any assurance could have.
"Now possibility," Marin said. "Were you using it?"
"No."
"Were you reaching for it?"
"No." Oliver thought through the distinction before continuing. "Near possibilities sometimes arrive without invitation. This didn't feel like that."
Marin waited. He knew she wanted description, not conclusion.
"Possibility feels like information," Oliver said. "Routes. Outcomes. Things reality might permit if I push. This felt presented. Like something had chosen a shape and put it where I would recognize it."
The words made the room colder despite the ordinary damp. Marin looked at the mirror again. "A future?"
Oliver shook his head. "I don't know."
Her gaze returned to him. "You sounded more certain before."
"About what it wasn't, not what it was." He made himself be precise. "Older is possible. Drowned is possible. Anything beyond that is guesswork."
Marin absorbed the boundary, and Oliver saw her accept it rather than press for the satisfying answer. That restraint was its own form of intimacy. His shoulders loosened by a fraction.
The tender shifted beneath them. Metal groaned aft, followed by the distant slap of water against a bulkhead. Marin glanced toward the passage. Practical danger reclaimed the room.
"We are leaving."
Oliver looked once more at the mirror. He wanted another minute with it badly enough to notice. "Agreed."
Suspicion crossed Marin's face because immediate agreement remained an unusual event. Oliver gestured toward the frame before she could comment. "Take it."
Her eyebrows rose. "The mirror."
"Evidence."
Marin looked at him, then at the glass. "You want to take the haunted mirror."
"I want you to take the haunted mirror." Oliver kept his hands conspicuously away from it. "That feels like meaningful professional separation."
A breath of reluctant amusement escaped her. "That distinction will not survive contact with Jasper."
"Few distinctions do."
They removed the frame together without touching the glass.
Oliver kept most of the weight in his left hand; Marin noticed and shifted her grip without comment.
By the time they reached the upper deck, Elias had been transferred to the launch and Jasper stood by the rail looking as though patience had become a commodity somebody else had purchased.
His eyes went to the mirror. "No."
Marin did not slow. "Evidence."
Jasper pointed at Oliver without taking his eyes from the glass. "That is what he calls everything immediately before it ruins a week."
Oliver started to answer, saw Marin's expression and reconsidered the amount of humor the morning had already consumed. "Fair."
Jasper blinked at the concession, which was almost worth giving it. Marin carried the mirror aboard. Oliver followed while the tender shifted behind them and water climbed another handspan through the stern.
The launch pulled away. Oliver stood at the aft rail and watched the wreck diminish into grey water. Marin came beside him. Her shoulder touched his arm, not asking and not reassuring, simply establishing the ordinary fact of her presence.
The western sea opened beyond the wreck.
Somewhere past the visible horizon lay the Sable Strait, the Maw, whatever Hollowfang had removed before scuttling the tender, and perhaps the oldest absence in Oliver's life.
He wanted the answer. The route. The danger.
The horizon. Marin. Want moved through him without apology.
A cloud crossed the sun. His shadow stretched beside Marin's across the launch deck and, for a moment, the two shapes touched. Then Oliver's shadow turned its head toward her while Oliver remained facing west.
Marin's fingers closed around his wrist. He looked down too late. Both shadows lay normally across the boards.
"You saw it," he said.
Marin's grip did not loosen. "Yes."
Neither of them tried to name motive. Oliver looked back toward the sea. The older man in the mirror had frightened him. The moment the image stopped pretending to be a reflection had frightened him more. Beneath both fears, curiosity remained alive and bright enough to be dangerous.