Chapter 2: The Weeping Glass

Chapter 2: The Weeping Glass

The silver tears running down the mirrors were not water. They were liquid paradox, the physical manifestation of a reality stretched to its breaking point. The sound wasn't weeping; it was the tiny, crystalline fractures of logic giving way. My Lítost surged, the familiar ache behind my eyes intensifying into a thrumming agony. It was like seeing the world through a shattered kaleidoscope, each shard of broken mirror reflecting not just the room, but the trauma that saturated it. My own ghosts flickered at the edge of my vision—the smell of industrial smoke from my hometown, the phantom echo of a scream that was once my own.

Flint and Shimmer reacted as expected. They drew their standard-issue reality anchors, small, humming devices meant to stabilize minor temporal slips. They were about as useful as trying to dam a tsunami with a teaspoon.

"Control! We have a Class-Three Ontological Breach at Elysian Bites! Requesting immediate containment!" Flint yelled into his comms, his voice tight with panic. Shimmer just stood there, his face ashen, his gaze darting between the multiplying reflections of the monochrome corpse.

This was my chance. My desire was singular and sharp: find something tangible, something the killer missed, before the ABI’s memory-wipers and narrative-patchers arrived to sanitize the whole affair into a footnote. The chaos was my cover.

Ignoring the officers and the groaning architecture of the room, I moved back to the body. The cold it radiated felt more profound now, a pocket of absolute nothingness. If Glitterati was behind this, her power was terrifying. To erase a being from existence was one thing, but to do it so forcefully that reality itself began to weep was another. It was sloppy. Arrogant.

My eyes scanned the cartoon corpse. The pinstripe suit, the fedora, the silly spats. Everything was part of a cohesive, albeit absurd, whole. Except... there. A bulge in his jacket pocket. It was small, incongruous. It wasn't drawn in the same stark, black-and-white style as the rest of him. It had color. Faded, chipped plastic color.

My action was swift. With two fingers, I reached into the pocket of a dead idea and pulled out the artifact.

It was a Pez dispenser.

The plastic was a cheerful, primary-school red. The head on top was a generic, smiling duck with a chipped yellow beak. It felt solid and real in my palm, a chunk of mundane history in a place of lethal fantasy. It didn't belong here. More importantly, according to the rules of this murder, it shouldn't exist. If the victim's entire concept had been deleted, all his associated properties should have vanished with him. This cheap plastic toy was an anchor, a stubborn piece of data that had refused to be erased. It was a flaw in the killer's code.

At that moment, the chiming of the weeping mirrors coalesced into a single, resonant tone. The smirking, blurred face in the main mirror solidified. It was a woman—or the impression of one. She flowed out of the glass like smoke, her form resolving itself into something that was both breathtaking and deeply unsettling.

She wore a gown that seemed woven from captured twilight, its colors shifting from bruised purple to midnight blue with her every breath. Her hair was a cascade of platinum that floated as if underwater, and her face… her face was a masterpiece of beautiful uncertainty. One moment it was sharp and angular, the next soft and round. Her eyes were emerald, then sapphire, then the color of old gold. She was a living art installation, a constant state of becoming. The only constants were her impossible grace and the dangerous, knowing smirk that had been there from the start.

"Well now," she said, her voice a layered melody, like three different people speaking at once. "This is a much more interesting mess than I anticipated."

Flint finally found his courage. "Identify yourself! You have breached a secure ABI zone!"

The woman turned her shifting gaze on him. Her smile widened, and for a split second, her face glivered, becoming a perfect, mocking reflection of Flint’s own terrified expression. He stumbled back, his hand flying to his face as if to make sure it was still his.

She dismissed him with a flick of her wrist and her attention landed squarely on me. Her eyes, now the color of mercury, didn't just look at me; they scanned me. I felt a pressure against the edges of my Lítost, a curious probing, like a connoisseur examining a rare vintage.

"A broken man in a city of flawless fakes," she mused, taking a graceful step towards me, her feet making no sound on the floor. "Your grief is… exquisite. It has texture. Most emotions in this city are as thin as cellophane."

My hand instinctively tightened around the Pez dispenser in my pocket. "Who are you?"

"A fan of intriguing stories," she replied, her gaze flicking down to the monochrome corpse. "And this one has a very loud silence at its center. Someone tried to edit the manuscript, but they weren't as thorough as they thought." Her eyes met mine again. "They didn't account for an editor of their own, did they? Someone who can still read the deleted passages."

She knew. She could see what I saw. This was the surprise, the variable I hadn't accounted for. She wasn't part of the crime, but she was something far more unpredictable.

"I'm just a consultant," I said, my voice deadpan.

"Oh, I love a man who lies to himself," she laughed, the sound like wind chimes in a graveyard. "You are the only thing holding this man's ghost in the world, Jack Vektor. Your pain is his anchor."

The turning point. She knew my name. Of course she did. Beings like her didn't deal in information; they dealt in fundamentals. Names, faces, identities. That was their currency. This was Lux, one of the Faceless Fae. A trafficker of secrets and dealer of new lives. She was a legend in the underworld, a chaotic force of nature that the ABI pretended didn't exist because they had no way to control her.

"What do you want?" I asked, cutting through the pretense.

"Want?" She tilted her head, her face momentarily resolving into the sharp, predatory features of a fox. "What a transactional little question. For now, I just want to watch. This city has become so dreadfully boring, all polished narratives and predictable arcs. But this… an impossible murder, a celebrity suspect with god-like power, and a tormented detective who can see the seams of reality."

She glided closer, her scent a strange and intoxicating mix of night-blooming jasmine and old paper. "This is a story worth reading to the end."

Before I could react, her hand, slender and cool, darted out. It didn't go for my weapon, it went for my jacket pocket. Her fingers brushed mine for a fraction of a second, and a jolt like static electricity shot up my arm. When she drew her hand back, the red Pez dispenser was resting in her palm.

"What a curious little artifact," she said, examining it with genuine fascination. "So delightfully tacky. So wonderfully… real."

"That's evidence," I growled, taking a step forward.

"Is it?" she purred, her form starting to shimmer and dissolve at the edges. "Or is it the prologue to our next chapter?"

She began to fade back towards the weeping mirror, her image wavering. "Don't worry, Jack Vektor. I'll keep it safe for you. Consider it... an investment in the plot."

Her smirk was the last thing to disappear, leaving me alone with two rattled cops, a deleted corpse, and the chilling certainty that I was no longer just investigating a murder. I was part of a story being written by things far older and more dangerous than me. And one of them had just stolen the only clue I had.