He takes a step closer, his legs unsteady. Francis’s lips are cracked and all the color has gone out of them. But his lips are parted, as if he does yet have something to say. Harry doesn’t want to hear what his brother’s dead mouth might have to say. He doesn’t want to look at his dead face up close like this, but fear fixes him to the spot. Francis’s hair sticks to his forehead in damp curls. Dirt accentuates the contours of his cheeks. Fatigue hollows his eyes. But then Francis’s eyes flash open, pupils dilated. His wide, dark-lashed, blue eyes address Harry’s own.

HARRY SCREAMS. TERROR tears out of him and then there is the shock of black silence. The black is the dilation of a pupil just an inch from his own. When he gasps, his breath mists the mirror. His eyes refocus and the mirror is breaking. He watches the fissures spread. It is a sigh and then a crackle and only the shattering rush of noise right then at the end. His own reflected face falls in fragments.

“Harry!” It is her voice through the paper wall. “Harry, what’s happening?”

He slides down to the floor and sits among the splinters. There is glass everywhere now. The half-lit lines of the room are alien for a second. He puts his head between his knees and tries to remember how to breathe. He hears her door open and close and then she is banging at his. He watches the handle turning. She keeps banging. He reels back, re-tracks.

“Harry! Please let me in.”

He cuts his hand on the glass as he stands. There is blood on his shirt and now hand-printed on the door. Edie looks pale under the electric light. There are other voices and faces in the corridor. She pushes him back into the room and shuts the door behind them.

“Harry, what’s happened?”

She holds his hands between hers and steers him toward the washbasin. Harry watches as she pours from the jug. His blood swirls pink in the white basin. The water is cold. His hands are trembling. He can hear Edie breathing.

“Harry?”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She takes his hands from the water and dries them on a towel. She turns his hands over, runs her fingertips over them, and pulls a piece of glass from his palm. Her fingers tremble, he sees, and she gasps at the same moment that he does, as if that sharp flinch of pain is her own. There is a smear of red on the shard of glass. He recalls her, earlier that day, holding a piece of blue glass up to the light, the quivering triangle of blue light on her throat.

“You’re shivering. Talk to me,” she says.

“I broke the mirror.”

“But why?”

“I didn’t mean to.”