Glass Frequency

On a pier locked in ice, a weary operative meets a ghost from his past for a final, fractured exchange. But in a world of cracked mirrors, the deadliest truths are the ones staring back at you.

I leaned against the railing, the metal so cold it felt sticky. My breath plumed white, a temporary ghost in the gloom. I’d been waiting for an hour that felt like a lifetime, which, at my age, was saying something. They teach you patience in the game, but they don’t tell you how it curdles over the decades, turning from a virtue into a simple state of decay. Waiting. It’s all I seem to do anymore. Waiting for a contact, waiting for a pension, waiting for a winter that doesn’t ache quite so much.

The pier was officially condemned, but unofficially it was a boardroom for people like me. No cameras, no civilians fool enough to brave the splintered wood and the North Sea trying to chew it down. Just the gulls and the ghosts. Tonight, it felt like there were more ghosts than gulls.

Footsteps, light and sure, sounded behind me. Not the crunch of a heavy man, but the soft tap of someone who knew how to walk without being heard. I didn’t turn. You never turn first.

"You’re late, Isabelle," I said to the Ferris wheel. My voice was a gravelly thing, a tool worn down with misuse.

"The trains are always slow in the snow," she said. She stopped a few feet away, the space between us a negotiation. "You look old, Tim."

"That’s the idea." I finally turned. She looked the same. That was the infuriating thing about Isabelle. Time had signed a non-aggression pact with her. The same dark hair, the same pale face that gave nothing away, the same eyes that held the cold certainty of a surveyor’s map. She was wearing a dark coat that drank the grey light, making her a column of shadow.

"Did you bring it?" I asked.

She didn’t answer right away. She was looking past me, at the churning, ice-flecked water. "Do you remember Lisbon?" she asked, her voice quiet, almost carried away by the wind.

Lisbon. Of course I remembered Lisbon. A city of seven hills and one catastrophic mistake. My mistake. "That was a long time ago. We’re not here to reminisce."

"Aren’t we?" She finally met my gaze. "It all feels connected. A pathway that started there and ends… here. On this rotting piece of wood in the middle of nowhere. It feels neat. Too neat."

"There’s nothing neat about it," I rasped. "It’s just a job. The last one. Give me the drive and we can both go find somewhere warm."

She smiled, a fractional thing that didn’t reach her eyes. "There is no ‘warm,’ Tim. Not for us. There’s just the cold, and then the colder." She reached into her coat, but her movements were slow, deliberate. Teasing. Or warning.

My hand tensed in my own pocket, fingers resting on the familiar shape of my sidearm. My knuckles ached. The damp was getting to them.

"It’s not what you think it is," she said, her hand still inside her coat. "What they told you it is. It never is."

"I’m not paid to think. Just to collect."

"That was always your problem. You were the perfect instrument. Point, shoot, collect. Never mind the music you were making." She took a step closer. The air crackled. Or maybe that was just the static in my own head.

---

That’s when the lights flickered. The string of bare, caged bulbs lining the pier, powered by some wheezing generator on the shore, buzzed and strobed. One moment there was the flat, dead grey of the afternoon, the next a series of brilliant, epileptic flashes. In the first flash, Isabelle was standing right in front of me, her hand out of her pocket, holding not a drive, but a shard of mirror.

In the second flash, she was ten feet away, back where she started.

In the third, there were three of her, standing in a triangle around me. All identical, all silent.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a panicked bird in a cage of old bone. This wasn't right. My mind, I thought. It's finally coming apart. The years of pressure, the things I’ve seen. The seams are splitting.

"What is this?" I snarled, pulling my gun. The metal was frigid against my skin. It felt real. It felt like the only real thing in the world. I aimed it at the Isabelle in the centre.

### A Prismatic Failure

"It’s the pathway, Tim," all three of them said in unison, their voices overlapping into a discordant hum. "You wanted a new one. This is what they look like." In another strobe of light, they weren’t Isabelles anymore. One was a younger version of her, from Lisbon, her face streaked with rain and regret. Another was an old woman I’d never seen, her features contorted in a silent scream. The third was me.

A perfect, unflinching copy of myself, standing there in my worn wool coat, its face a mask of weary disgust. It raised a hand, not holding a gun, but open, as if in offering.

The main lights died completely, plunging us into a profound darkness broken only by the distant, indifferent glow of the town across the bay. The generator had given up. But the air was no longer empty. It was thick with the ozone smell of a lightning strike and the sound of shattering glass, a crystalline cascade that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

I felt a sharp, searing pain in my side. I looked down, but could see nothing. I stumbled back, my boots catching on a raised plank. My gun felt impossibly heavy. The world tilted, the horizon a sick, sliding line.

Another flicker. A brief, silent pulse of green light, like deep-sea phosphorescence. In that momentary glow, I saw one figure. Isabelle. Standing over me. She wasn’t holding a mirror anymore. Her hand was empty.

"The collection is complete," she said, her voice a single, clear note in the sudden quiet. Then she turned and walked away, her footsteps making no sound on the groaning wood.

I tried to call out, but the only thing that came out was a wet, choked cough. I lay there on the frozen pier, the wind relentless, the teeth of the cold biting deeper. I looked at my hand, expecting to see blood. There was nothing. I pressed my palm to my side, where the pain had been a white-hot poker. There was no wound. No tear in the fabric of my coat. Just a profound, hollow ache.

The snow began to fall then, thick, heavy flakes that melted on my face like tears. I closed my eyes, and for a long moment I wasn’t sure if I was on a pier in the north of England or on a sun-baked street in Lisbon, or somewhere else entirely. I wasn't sure if I was dying, or if I had already been dead for a very, very long time. The only certainty was the cold, and the groan of the wood, and the weight of the sky.

---

Was any of it real? The question hung in the air, as visible as my own breath. I pushed myself up, my body a symphony of protest. My side was a dull throb, a memory of a wound rather than the wound itself. I was alone. Utterly. The snow was already covering her tracks, assuming there had ever been any to begin with. The pier stretched back to the shore, a solid, unwavering line. No tricks of the light. No impossible geometry. Just rotting wood and the promise of land.

My gun was still in my hand. I hadn’t fired. I checked the magazine by feel. Still full. A useless weight. I tucked it away, the cold metal a familiar, if hollow, comfort against my ribs.

I started the long walk back. Each step was a question. Was the drive real? Was Isabelle? Was the man from Lisbon finally cashing in his chips? The pathway she’d talked about… it didn’t feel like an escape. It felt like a loop. A Mobius strip of wet pavement and bad decisions. You walk it forever, thinking you’re getting somewhere, only to end up right back where you started, just a little bit older, a little bit colder, with one more ghost to keep you company in the dark.