Eva saw the mirror on the ground and threw herself sideways before her brain had finished processing the image.
Then she registered the black cloth still covering it and let out a breath.
"Nearly gave me a heart attack." She straightened, looked at it. "Left behind in the chaos, I guess. But why here, exactly? Right where I landed?"
The question sat uneasily. She pushed it aside and started moving toward it carefully, one step at a time. Whatever else was going on, Evelyn was still inside that thing.
Heels on concrete. A clean, deliberate rhythm coming from the shadows.
A woman stepped into the light. Black tactical suit, fitted close, weapons arranged along the belt with the practiced density of someone who used all of them regularly.
A hooded cloak in the same dark color, falling to the knee. Silver hair catching the moonlight as she turned, and then two green eyes finding Eva across the distance.
"E — Evelyn?? You're out? How did you, wait, something's off."
The woman who might have been Evelyn looked at her and smiled. The smile had an edge to it that Evelyn's never did, something openly amused and slightly predatory.
"Well, little Eva. Yes, I'm 'out.' Where's Raphael?"
She ran her tongue along her lower lip. The lipstick was a red so vivid it looked aggressive, the kind of color that wanted to be noticed and didn't care what you thought about it.
Eva's frown deepened.
"Raphael is... wait. No. You're not Evelyn. Who are you?"
The woman laughed, low and easy, looking at Eva with the specific warmth of someone who finds a younger person genuinely entertaining.
"I am Evelyn. Just not the one you know. You can call me Vigo. Vigo Evelyn."
Eva's head was already full of the problem of how to get Evelyn out of a magic mirror. A mystery twin emerging from the shadows was not an improvement to the situation.
"Vigo. I don't care who you are or what your relationship to Evelyn is. Tell me where she is."
Vigo glanced down at the cloth-covered mirror at her feet with a thoughtful expression, then laughed again, lighter this time, brighter, nothing like Evelyn's quiet warmth.
"For all practical purposes? Dead. Simple as that."
Eva's hand tightened. The disbelief lasted about two seconds before she heard the carelessness in the tone and recognized it for what it was.
"Stop playing games. Where is she?"
Vigo crouched and picked up the mirror, dusting off the cloth with two unhurried pats.
"I'm not lying. For you people, seeing her again is going to be very difficult. She's gone somewhere very far away. What's the meaningful difference between that and dead?"
She tilted her head and smiled like she was waiting to be disagreed with.
Eva pulled the handgun from her belt, the one that had come down with the projection device, and leveled it at Vigo's head.
And then she noticed the mole.
Right eye, not left.
Evelyn's was on the left.
"You're a fake. You came out of that mirror world, didn't you. A reflection. The real Evelyn has her mole on the left side, which means she's still in there."
Vigo spared the gun a glance. The expression she returned to Eva's face was the particular dismissiveness of someone who has decided the weapon isn't relevant.
"'Fake' is a bit rude, don't you think? Who gets to define fake? Who gets to define real? I made a concession on the name. I could just as easily be Evelyn."
She pulled the cloth away from the mirror and looked into its surface directly, not at her own reflection so much as through it, at something on the other side.
Her fingers moved. Her voice dropped into something lighter, almost playful. "Hello~"
Whatever reaction she saw in the mirror made her laugh silently, shoulders moving.
Then she looked back at Eva.
"I'll tell you, since I actually like you. Good energy. The device is called a Mirror of Self. What it does is swap the real-world self and the mirror-world self. The 'true self' out here, and the 'sin self' in there, exchanged."
She closed her mouth on the subject and didn't reopen it, instead delivering one sentence with the air of someone dropping a stone into water just to watch the ripples.
"Everyone has a shadow. Another version of themselves. But have you ever thought about what it looks like from the shadow's perspective? What are you, to them?"
Eva started to push further and Vigo was simply elsewhere, appearing directly in front of her in what seemed like a single step, one foot sound against the pavement, the distance between them erased.
"Shh. Listen first."
A gloved finger pressed against Eva's lips. It stayed there a moment, then moved with a familiarity that had not been earned.
Vigo leaned in close, her voice dropping to something warm and unhurried, the tone at complete odds with what she was saying.
"The original plan was to use this on your physical body. Release your mirror-self and put you in. But I changed my mind, an Eva corroded by Acedia's sin sounds deeply boring. You're much more interesting as you are."
The exhaled breath against Eva's ear was warm enough that the sensation traveled up the projection channel all the way to the helicopter, and Eva's real body flinched.
"Raphael, on the other hand." A soft laugh. "A version of him fully consumed by Superbia, I'd like to see that. Kingly arrogance, maybe. A general's dominance?
Either way, not this closed-off version he currently is. Much more interesting. Much more worth having."
Her fingertip moved from Eva's lips to her chin, tilted it up slightly, then pressed once, gently.
"So tell me. Where is he?"
Eva looked at her. Thought about pulling the trigger. Couldn't.
She didn't know enough about what the swap actually was, physical substitution, soul-level substitution, something else entirely. If Vigo was harmed or killed, she had no way of knowing whether that door closed on Evelyn permanently.
She couldn't take the risk.
"Get lost."
She said it quietly. Then she cut the projection herself.
Vigo looked at the empty space where Eva had been, eyebrows raised slightly, and ran her tongue across her teeth with an expression of mild amusement.
"Adorable. Pity." She turned back to the mirror and spoke to it the way some people speak to themselves in empty rooms, or perhaps to whoever was watching from the other side of the glass.
"A witch who loses herself in an ordinary life, forgetting what she is. Truly pitiable."
She paused.
"Superbia. First of the old sins. The ceiling on that one is very, very high."
She looked up at the helicopter suddenly and shook her head.
"Fool."
---
In the helicopter, Eva's consciousness snapped back into her own body and her hands came up immediately. The pilot had already engaged the hover lock, his sidearm drawn and aimed across the cabin.
"Sir. What is this?"
The pilot listened to something in his earpiece. Several seconds passed before he answered.
"Direct order from senior command. Raphael Alanster and Eva are suspected of homicide of Evelyn Vigo during active mission. You're both being placed under arrest. Please cooperate."
Eva stared at him.
"...What?"