Mirrors have been deadly for over a year now. Ever since the Fracture, looking at your own reflection has become an exercise in suicide. It took everyone a few days to figure it out at first, to start smashing their mirrors into powder or tossing them into the sea, but by then it was too late for the rest of the world.

Looking into a mirror creates the fog. In the fog lurk the Beings. Beings shred people, and often anything else they touch as well, to pieces. This is a chain of events that is particularly unfortunate when you have a giant ring of immense mirror shards orbiting over your head. No one is sure why the Shatter Ring didn’t do to us what it did to the rest of the world. But although we may have been spared instant annihilation, we’re still cut off from everything, and the mirrors we have down here on the ground are still plenty dangerous. Especially with more and more materials being added to the Reflectivity Index every day. The aliens—whoever they are, whatever they want—must be ramping up their attacks, because with every month that passes, stuff that is less and less reflective starts suddenly producing fog. Like glasses, for example. Which is fine with me. More goods to sell.

But sometimes, when I’m smuggling a load of newly too-reflective goods out through the tunnels beneath City Hall, I can’t help but wonder how far it will end up going. When will soap bubbles be too reflective? When will everyone be required to get rid of their window glass? I think one day the ocean itself will be too still, reflect too much of the sky, and then it will be the end of us all.

I pull a little handheld machine, a lux meter, out of my pocket. It looks a bit like a Geiger counter, except it’s for measuring light instead of radiation. It’s the best way to check a mirror’s reflectivity without actually looking at it. “Should we test it?” I ask Elliott, my voice savagely glib. “Just so you can make sure you’re getting a quality product.” I rip the masking tape off the mirror’s surface before he can answer.

Something unravels in my gut. I steel myself against the too-familiar feeling: like there’s a string tied to the mirror and the other end is wrapped around one of my ribs, a small, vulnerable, free-floating one. The sensation is weird and queasy-making, and it’s been happening every time a mirror is uncovered nearby lately. Which is extra inconvenient for someone who makes a living the way I do. I haven’t been sure what to make of it—some sort of physiological reaction to the danger, probably—so I mostly just try to ignore it.