The Mirrorman
You’ll never see me.
Nobody sees us, only what we use our magic to show them. My family named me Nick, but all our lives we were raised moving from one identity to another, learning the arts of deception, observation, and the secret of illusion magic.
I didn’t even see my own sister had survived, when our family’s one mistake got my parents killed.
Now, years have passed—years I spent thinking I was alone. Now I find Valerie again, living a life even better-hidden than mine.
A life that’s only revealed when she’s charged with murder. Now she needs her brother.
The real killer is out there, and he has no idea how many secrets, tricks, and magical faces I can call up to drag him out of hiding.
But… I’ve never imagined a threat like him, to our whole way of existence. Or that everything we know about our lives might have been deceiving us.
And it’s the things you don’t see that get you.
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My sister’s alive. With her own face.
It was real, that image up on the news screen. That face I still knew better than anyone’s, that taut, contained look on her as she walked between the two uncaring policemen. Alive.
I knew I had to be freezing up, staring… At the edge of my awareness the ring of people around our poker table began to glance over, but there was no looking away for me.
Police, taking my sister away in handcuffs.
The scar-pale headline below the image, with the word “murder,” and her name.
Of course she was older now, but that was her real face with none of our magic over it, the same held-inside expression she would have.
Even her real name, Valerie. Valerie “Landis” on the screen, but apart from that it was the name our parents gave her—
Dad. Mom. A tingling, throbbing filled up my skin. Can they be alive too?
The other players’ looks thickened around me with an unspoken “What?” That screen stood off along the side of the bar and clear of the card club here in the back, its voice swallowed in the thin daytime crowd’s jangle of sounds and pockets of stillness. Stillness ready to flood with echoes of anything I let slip.
Focus, Nick! If they are alive, what would they say to see you like this?
The heartbeats kept ripping through me, but I let emotions settle into the usual pit within me for later, and managed to look back at the table. Cards were already flowing out to the players… longtime players, new visitors, even the tiny man I’d seen palming cards twice this morning.
Settle in, Nick. Like I had every moment of my life. Small, intent motions around the table gathered cards in…
It was Valerie, and “murder.” No way I could sit here for another minute just to make these people forget me staring. They didn’t know this face I’d been using anyway. But the cheat was winning, and the sweet old woman to my right had to watch her chips dwindle—
I pried the edge of my cards up for a glance at them, and the motion steadied my muscles. I tossed the hand in the discard pile to fold, with a simple “I’ve had enough. Great game, guys.”
Mumbles of disappointment and suspicion began—when I’d tried to keep this identity a simple one, too—but I scraped the chair back and lurched up with a wave of dizziness. For more than ten years I’d been alone and now these people scowled at me for leaving… even the little hunched-over cheat at my right…
But those reactions stayed bubbling away in their pit, safe as always. Heart still racing, I caught up my bag and cashed out my chips. With the money in hand I was free to walk, to run to Valerie.
Instead I edged back, toward one other thing I’d meant to do here.
That small man with the twitching eyes. I’d seen him palming cards before, no doubt about it—he was one of the best I’d ever seen, and the others must have suspected something from the odd furtive looks he made, but all their savvy hadn’t caught him yet. They weren’t raised in a family of illusions.
Valerie and I could be a family again, I’m losing time.
The cheat glared up at me. I couldn’t be standing close enough to spy on his cards, but he still stared a warning at me. He looked at the face I kept, of an identity that didn’t exist—how does Valerie exist, are my parents—
“I can throw you out myself,” he hissed. His mistake.
I drew back a step as the players began calling for more cards. The cheat took one, and I reached my will out.
Just a scrap of soft, unseen magic from the moonstone in my pocket rippled out to paint onto the covered side of his card. Before he pulled it in it had become the Jack of Diamonds, and then I placed the same image under a card going to the old woman two chairs down. And that one duplication would be the most they’d notice, since the real jack was safely buried in my own discarded hand.
The cheat sent another glare over at me, no threat to my control. Holding exact illusions over two cards in other peoples’ grasp was no challenge, compared to the one on my face that sat so tightly that all my own expressions shone through enough for a fair poker game… but working on cards was something I hadn’t practiced. Still, that skulking little man offended me.
If they knew I was living among them, some of them should be grateful. Except, that longtime wish felt a touch hollow now: if these players knew I’d spent a lifetime watching details to work my illusions, would they believe the truth, that I never cheated in these games?
It was the least of what I’d never do to them. And none of it mattered today.
Slowly, steadily, I walked out through the bar. The middle tables looked dotted with tourists, some looking at a distance at the gambling they let us openly play here in Jacksontown. Wisps of beer smell fought the air conditioner.
Valerie’s moment on the news feed was long over, but it had been my sister. Not sixteen now, any more than I was still fourteen. Her clothes in that image had looked well-off, and the house behind her had been even better.
And they took her. For murder. Or it’s all a trap, or…
My fingers shook, as I leaned against the wall, and I slowly drew out my phone.
“Hey, hey, she’s got that jack too!”
“Goddamn cheat—”
And their shouts were aimed at the real card shark they already suspected, not the old woman who’d been coming to these games longer than most of us. Of course they never looked at me.
The A/C pressed its coolness into my skin, as my phone walked its way into maximum-secure mode. The shouting swelled to mean nobody was watching the cards anymore, and I let my outstretched will relax and the illusions fade unnoticed. Exposing him was a small gift, part of my passing through here like our family tried to do.
Except the three of them were dead. Until today.
The phone was ready. I’d never gotten real access to police systems—and I should have set that up!—but the news sites told me the start of it:
“Valerie Landis arrested… in connection with the murder of her boyfriend, Derek Russo, in their house at…”
Murder?
Boyfriend?
Of course, it had been twelve years.
Twelve years, and just like me, she was still living in the same city it had happened in. She had the same first name… like I was still mostly Nick again. Did that mean she’d been looking for me? Had they all been looking for me, after all this time?
But they had died, all three of them. Since that moment, when the gang stumbled into our hiding place—
I was walking, shaky steps toward the exit as that packed-away memory tore open yet again:
My father’s head exploding, gone before we ever knew there was a bullet or anyone there to fire it, the last moment for that heavy-featured real face like mine would grow up to be… my mother staring in horror more real than anything, and cut down seconds later…
Then me running, under frantic wraps of illusions as I heard Valerie caught too close to the bodies and shot to pieces too. Or that had been how it sounded, through the pounding of my feet, my heart…
The same thudding in my footsteps now, trying to tear free of here and send me racing for the street.
I’d lost my family—or I’d only lost them, scrambling away hidden under every trick I knew and too afraid to check our rendezvous spots afterward. If the Silencers were real after all, real magic-killers hunting us and not some boogieman our parents kept us in line with…
But when I dared to follow up, it had been just a gang. And my father, mother, and sister were still gone.
Whatever had gone down then…
My sister was alive.