Chapter Seventeen

Unseen

Portman scratched his chin, as he looked questioningly at the hundreds of thousands of broken pieces of mirrors on the floor. The greenish light was still illuminating the place, even though they had put some emergency spotlights on the place where the box had been destroyed.

"Anything interesting?" Emmeline asked.

Portman felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He didn't dislike Emmeline, but having her behind him made him feel a sense of dread. Although she seemed to have a certain familiarity with SID agents, she had a reputation as a woman of few words. Not for nothing was she the head of SIGN in that part of the UK.

"No. It looks like it went back to size once it opened," Portman explained.

His colleague was moving a few feet away, with another group of SIGN specialists checking out the pieces as he did.

When they all saw the animal and then the cloud of crystals, which flew after it down the street, almost all of them thought that part of that cloud was also the material of which the mirror box was composed. But it was not. There on the ground, broken into thousands of pieces, was a quantity of glass that seemed to actually correspond to that of each of the mirrors.

Portman took a piece of the wood from the frame and observed how the engravings had returned to normal, the same with the large pieces in the back, which although splintered and broken also showed once again the engravings of the city in the ocean of fire, with its pillars and creatures. The one that was in better condition and had not suffered so much damage was the one on the lid. The drawing of the represented unknown constellations could still be seen.

Some of the technicians were picking up pieces of the mirrors and putting them into huge suitcases. Portman nagged his partner to look. It was obvious to him that SIGN's real objective was to get hold of the box, although he didn't know exactly what had happened with the strange transformation.

"Excuse me, ma'am," said Portman. "The box is under the supervision of our team."

"We're just going to put it in containers so it can be taken away when the truck returns."

"... Oh. I understand."

Portman and his partner tried to hide their expression of surprise. After all they were almost certain that Emmeline's real target was the artifact. Portman then realized. It was quite simple, with all the trouble the animal was causing in the city, Emmeline was most likely trying to get as little grief from the Council as possible later. Well, I couldn't blame her for that. As soon as the whole mess was over, it was going to be a problem.

At least the SID was used to it. SIGN, being an organization set up by the British government for national security, had a much more closed and local jurisdiction. Emmeline was simply covering her back against an eventual torrent of lawsuits that might come down from the city against her organization.

Emmeline, in turn, was not asking questions like Portman. While she couldn't deny that she was a little concerned about the liability she felt for having loaned the place out. The fact was that both teams followed Oxy's guidelines for assembling the damn device, and that mitigated the effects of any future complaints that might fall on her and her agents. What was worrying her more at the moment were the live reports she was seeing, through her Neurowire, of what was happening in the city.

The animal had entered the new part of the city, and the tactical police had deployed their officers in special suits to guard the entrances, in case they had to repel any attempt by the animal to enter the subway part of the city.

Portman and his partner continued with their checking duties, and a SIGN technician approached them with a container to put the larger fragments in, while some cleaning robots just went upstairs.

The fey made a grimace to say something to his partner, and there he stood with his wide mouth half open, showing his white pointed teeth.

Not just him, though.

His companion, with a large shard of mirror in her hands. Emmeline, who was gesturing with her hands, while handling her Neurowire, the technicians and even the cleaning robots stood still.

Nothing moved, nothing could be heard. Everything had stopped in a strange sort of bubble of unreality.

The raindrops had stopped on their way to the surface and remained petrified, weightless in the air. The dust in suspension in the place had also stopped. Perhaps time had stopped. Or maybe something was simply moving too fast to be captured by mundane reality. Not even the Neurowire's quantum systems, or the security systems, which handled hundreds of millions of data per thousandth of a second, were producing or recording any data of what was happening.

But something was happening. As if out of nowhere, two figures were walking slowly around the place.

They were two fey girls. One of them had silver hair tied in two pigtails at the nape of her neck, and so long that it almost touched her ankles. She wore a uniform with a striped vest and a pleated skirt. The other was much smaller, almost girlish in appearance. The latter had blonde hair and amber eyes and something else that made her appearance stand out. Above her head hovered a halo that emitted a soft whitish glow. She wore a black suit and jacket. Both wore fedora hats on their heads.

The smaller one looked at the scene, with a slight gesture of disapproval, even though both did not show many expressions on their faces.

"What a mess," she said pouting.

"Let's hurry, Priscilla," said the girl with the pigtails.

Priscilla nodded and with light steps stepped away from her companion and walked around looking at everyone present. She stopped and looked at Portman in particular, with scrutinizing eyes. "Weiss! Let's hurry up. There's a empath here," she said pointing accusingly at him with a frown. "This isn't right, he wasn't supposed to be here, he should be in the truck, right?"

The young woman named Weiss glanced sideways at Priscilla and looked to where she was pointing. "It's just a variable that changed. Don't worry, it will somehow correct itself."

"They're not correcting like they used to. The more it advances the less they will correct," she said with a sad look on her face, and the halo wobbled above her head.

"Don't worry," Weiss repeated, and gave her a weak smile.

The little girl finished her tour and, after a few seconds of pondering something, she started back, but this time as she mumbled something quickly and touched each of them. When she reached Emmeline she stopped and frowned, annoyed. "This woman is still as strong as ever," she thought. She touched Emmeline's hand and murmured her strange prayer again. Then she turned back to where Weiss was standing. She in turn had been looking at the pieces of the box scattered about, as if calculating something in her mind.

"Ready?" Weiss asked Priscilla. And she simply nodded with a serious gesture. "Okay, here we go."

"It's a drag. Why can't we just keep the puppy?"

"We can't bring him with us. They have another way of thinking and while his body has changed, he wouldn't survive the jumps like we do. His mind is not made to process it. He will be fine between humans and them. His body has changed enough to survive. We still don't know how he got here, but at least with Nevermore, he'll be fine. At least this way, he'll be one more cog in the world and won't have any problems. "

"That's a shame. I like him"

Weiss reached into the right pocket of her vest and pulled out what looked like an antique pocket watch on a long chain. On the top and bottom, it was richly adorned with a kind of triskellion and gears in a style reminiscent of Damascus patterns of decoration. The girl opened it and behind the crystal a different kind of pattern could be seen, but the hands were stationary. Where the numbers should have been on the dial they were replaced by characters in an unknown language, that bore some resemblance to runes rather than ordinary numbers.

Weiss moved the hands, until they were in a similar position to the time they were supposed to be marking. "Ready."

Priscilla raised and extended both arms forward and closed her eyes as the halo on her head rose and grew in size, increasing in diameter but not in width, giving the impression that all the people inside had been surrounded by a sort of thin hoop that wobbled endlessly.

Weiss in turn closed her eyes and the hands of the clock began to move in the opposite direction.

From the floor and the containers, slowly, pieces of broken glass and pieces of wood began to rise. Then these began to rotate around both of them, as they passed around the people gathered at the site.

The pieces of glass, small and thick, moved at incredible speed, but the most terrifying thing was the transformation of the people around them. From being beings that moved freely until a few seconds ago, now they had become sieves and mere pieces of flesh, where the glass pierced them and cut them into pieces at each of their turns.

There was Emmeline, with her face shattered as a piece of thick glass pierced her from side to side and split her head in two halves as if it were an orange. Half of Portman's body had moved a few centimeters and was now floating completely independent of her legs. The same happened to his companion, who had lost parts of her head and had a huge hole in her chest, through which a cloud of fragments and splinters had just pierced her.

"Don't overdo it!" Priscilla complained.

"I can't control the movement of the fragments. Wait until they're already coming together and we're done. This is also going to help get that pup back to normal size."

As the bodies of the agents and technicians continued to be mutilated, the fragments of mirrors and wood began to join with each other in their respective parts. Crystals were reattached, while fragments as small as a grain of sand and final splinters like needles were attached to larger pieces. Everything was going in reverse for the mirror box. In no time at all the box was complete once again. Again began the configuration it had last taken. The time of the artifact went backwards, with the passing of the hands of the clock that Weiss was holding.

Finally the box simply stopped and remained assembled as if its destruction had never existed. In the exact spot where they had finished assembling it, before Zi and the dog were released.

Priscilla pressed her lips together and the ring decreased in size, until it disappeared for a second and then reappeared covering the whole space. Weiss opened her eyes and moved the hands of the clock again. She glanced at the shredded pieces of cloth and flesh, floating weightless in the air, and closed her eyes again.

"Time for us to join the others," she said and closed the lid of the watch.

"What do you think changed her mind?" whispered Portman, to his companion.

"...!"

The wide-mouthed fey opened his eyes wide and so did his partner. He touched his stomach and neck, while his partner touched her chest. Further away Emmeline put a hand to her face. All the others, farther away, had the same confused expression. No one said anything for a few seconds as the sound of rain was the only thing that could be heard.

"What just happened?"

They didn't know why but they had the feeling as if something had gone through each of them. A stinging and overwhelming sensation that lasted barely a second, but it was more than enough to leave an unpleasant impression on everyone present.

The same sensation of vertigo and chills as when looking into the void.

They all looked at each other, without knowing what to say, but they could feel that it was the same for each of them.

Emmeline opened her eyes wide and the others did the same.

What until a second ago was nothing more than a pile of scattered glass and broken wood, by some strange ingenuity, had been put back together.

"What the hell just happened here?" Emmeline asked.