Chapter XV: The Mirror Fractography
The weekend should have brought relief.
No lectures, no chalk shrieking against boards, no professors calling him out with the kind of smug precision that only men who had never doubted themselves could manage.
But Nathaniel Cross woke to silence that was louder than any lecture.
His flat was heavy with stillness, the sort that lingered after storms—yet the rain had stopped. For the first time in weeks, the city outside did not sing with water, but with a brittle quiet. A silence waiting to be broken.
Nathaniel sat up in bed, drenched in sweat, his scar pulsing like a brand beneath his shirt. He pressed his palm to it, muttering to himself, "Enough... enough of this."
If his body was changing, if the scar was rewriting him piece by piece, then he needed to know.
He was an engineering student. Not a doctor. Not a physicist. But problem-solving was in his marrow. Equations. Systems. Variables. If the body was a machine, then perhaps he could treat it like one.
He would test himself.
He would know.
The desk was cluttered with more than just assignments. His notebooks of equations sat beside scattered sketches of circuits and potion diagrams, AutoCAD drafts alongside jagged scrawls of light filters and chemical formulations.
But Nathaniel shoved the assignments aside, clearing space until the desk was bare. He placed a mirror against the wall, a spiral notebook beside it, and uncapped his pen.
"Test one," he whispered.
He leaned forward.
His reflection stared back—gaunt, dark-haired, his eyes too bright.
No—not bright. Wrong.
He had seen himself every day of his life, but this was different. His irises were too sharp, pupils contracting unnaturally fast even in dim light. He raised a hand to wave before his face, and the eye tracked it with inhuman swiftness, like a predator's focus.
He wrote quickly.
Reflex response: accelerated. Iris contraction abnormal.
He leaned closer, breath fogging the glass. Beneath the skin around his eye, faint veins glimmered—not red, but silver, like threads of mercury.
He froze.
The scar pulsed in answer.
He slammed the notebook shut.
Homework still loomed. A half-completed problem set for Engineering Economics, graphs and cash-flow projections littered across his bed. A differential equations assignment glaring at him from its folder. And the dreaded AutoCAD project—a model that refused to align properly, mocking him with every jagged line.
The weight of deadlines bore down even as his body screamed at him to investigate further.
He tried to force himself to the equations.
Risk tables. Investment return calculations. Numbers that should have demanded his attention. But the pen in his hand twitched, restless, and his eyes wandered back to the mirror.
Back to himself.
And he saw more.
Test two.
He dragged his lamp across the desk, angling it harshly toward his face. The sudden burst of light stabbed across his vision. His scar seared in response, but Nathaniel clenched his jaw, refusing to look away.
The lamp's bulb flared, filaments glowing molten white. He should have flinched, should have blinked. But instead—
He saw deeper.
He saw the vibration of the filament itself, its trembling hum, the microscopic dance of atoms flickering heat into light. He saw the faint ripple of dust particles floating across the glow like drifting planets.
He jerked back, breathing hard.
"Not possible."
His pen scratched frantically into the notebook.
Vision: magnification + spectral sensitivity. Perception extending beyond human range.
The words looked ridiculous on paper, like the ramblings of a madman. But they were true.
His scar pulsed in silent affirmation.
The assignments waited, impatient.
AutoCAD. He booted his laptop, the screen filling with sterile grids. The cursor blinked, waiting.
He began to draw the model required by his instructor—a mundane bridge structure, load-bearing analysis, truss formations. But his hands betrayed him. The lines he drew bent into spirals, layers, shields. Not assignments, but defense. Not bridges, but armor.
He deleted, tried again. Again the lines curved into structures not of engineering but of necessity.
Circles around circles, overlapping shields like lenses, each annotated instinctively with symbols he hadn't meant to write.
"Stop it," he muttered, deleting the lines.
But the cursor moved again. His hands obeyed the scar more than his own mind.
The design that formed on the screen was impossible—yet it felt inevitable. A lattice of angles meant to bend light, redirecting rays into impossible patterns.
He realized what he was drawing.
A cage for vision.
A way to blind himself.
His chest constricted. He slammed the laptop shut, trembling.
Afternoon blurred into evening. The assignments sat untouched.
Nathaniel lay on the floor of his flat, staring at the ceiling, trying to slow his thoughts. But even here, his sharpened vision betrayed him.
He saw the microfractures in the plaster, the thin trail of a spider threading its web in the corner, the faint discoloration where water had once seeped through the ceiling.
Every detail screamed at him.
And beyond the ceiling—
He felt the world extending. He could see if he allowed himself, stretching vision outward past roof and sky and stone. He clenched his eyes shut, but even darkness refused him.
He saw the blood behind his eyelids, the capillaries branching across them like rivers.
He pressed his palms against his eyes, desperate.
"I'm breaking," he whispered.
But the scar pulsed again, like a heartbeat not his own.
Test three.
Pulse. Breath. Reflex.
He measured himself as an engineer would measure stress on a beam.
He counted his pulse—too fast. He timed his breath—too shallow. He stretched his fingers before his eyes, testing tremor against stillness.
Then he pushed further.
He held his breath, stopwatch in hand. Time slowed strangely, each second a world unto itself. At ninety seconds his chest burned, but his vision remained crystalline. At one hundred twenty, veins bulged, lungs screamed, yet his body endured beyond what he'd ever managed before.
When he finally gasped, collapsing against the desk, he scrawled the result.
Endurance: beyond normal. Not baseline human.
His hands shook.
"Not possible," he whispered again. But possibility was irrelevant now.
He wasn't just studying anymore. He was changing.
And someone was watching.
Night again.
Homework still unfinished, equations still unsolved, models still corrupted by instinct he didn't understand. But the mirror glared from the desk. The scar glowed faintly in his chest, like an ember no one else could see.
Nathaniel stood before the mirror one last time. His eyes cut through his reflection, seeing too much. Veins of silver pulsed faintly beneath his skin. His pupils narrowed unnaturally, then widened again, as though testing their new strength.
He whispered, "What am I becoming?"
The scar pulsed.
And from the corner of his eye—
The figure returned.
Not outside this time. Not across the street.
But in the mirror.
Watching.
Silent. Patient. Closer.
Nathaniel staggered back, breath ragged, notebook falling from his desk, pages scattering like wounded birds.
The watcher did not move. Did not blink. Only existed in the glass.
And Nathaniel Cross, trembling in his silent flat, realized with dawning horror:
He could diagnose every part of his body, measure every tremor, record every change. But the truth was larger.
The machine he was studying was no longer his own.