Chapter 1 — The Mirrors of Vetranta

On Via del Vetro, there is a shop that has never really opened nor closed. Its façade is a barricade of baroque mirrors, convex, concave, oval, cut into teardrops of mercury. The townsfolk say that’s where the city combs its hair before going out. Tourists take selfies and leave with their faces a little blurrier. I wait. I’m not quite sure what I’m waiting for, but this morning I cleaned my raincoat three times, which means I’m nervous—or that yesterday’s rain had a sentimental texture.

My name is Ivo Serra. Officially, I’m an investigator of private affairs. Unofficially, I’m a poor sleeper who collects contradictory versions of the same memory. Vetranta took away my sense of straight lines and gave me a nose for blind spots. You adapt.

The murder was delivered to me folded inside a dream. It starts with Mara’s bread—Mara d’Albano, bakery on Piazza dei Girasoli. She kneads dawn in her arms as if she could convince the day to return. Her bread brings dreams; not a rumor, a habit. Customers, with the first bite, see their next night ahead of time, like a private trailer. Last night, I saw a man fall in front of the mirror shop, while his reflection remained standing.

So I wait. The rain has stopped falling but the cobblestones keep a varnish of confession. The mirrors murmur—the sound of a radio between stations, the syllable of a name I know too well to recognize. A delivery truck halts; a courier on a bike zigzags—tight jersey, calves of a messenger of the gods—and chuckles in a breath that sounds like gossip: “Too early, Ivo.” He disappears before I decide whether I really saw him.

At 9:17, a man steps out of the side alley. Hesitant blue suit, late tie, rigid briefcase. I know that face, without ever meeting it. Dreams have the courtesy of letting you believe you remember. He walks straight to the door that exists only when you look for it, and raises his hand as if to knock on glass. Simultaneously, in the convex mirror to the right, I see him raise his left hand. The gestures don’t align; a slight video lag. My nape understands before I do: impossible.

“Monsieur!” My voice cracks on the pavement. He ignores me—or rather ignores my audible version. The mirrors quiver; the oval of mercury stretches, swallowing his reflection. The first crack is discreet, like a bone tightening. The man falls. His reflection stays standing. And I exhale a “no” that must, somewhere, mean “it’s starting again.”

I crouch. Pulse: present but erratic, tempo of a fish out of water. No visible wound. Passersby freeze; Vetranta sometimes has the decency to pretend not to see. In the mercury oval, the man’s reflection looks around, incredulous, then fixes on me and shakes its head with an almost tender slowness. I reach out to the glass; cellar-cold, breath of salt. Drops slide upward as if gravity had changed its mind.

“Inspector Serra?” The voice comes from behind me, half-syrup, half-irony. Mara. She’s kept her apron; her hands smell of warm crumb and sesame. “I think this belongs to you.”

She hands me a little blond loaf, braided, still warm. On its crust, sesame has drawn—by accident or obstinacy—a broken line I know well: the outline of an old lighthouse on the cliff. My grandfather kept that lighthouse. Or else I remember someone who remembered. The reflection in the oval begins to speak, lips mute, but his voice carries through the glass like a ripple in molten tin.

“Ivo, listen. The door opens at 9:21. You must say the word.”

“What word?” I ask a mirror, which is the first sign my day has taken a strange angle.

“Vetranta,” whispers the reflection. “But not like that. Backwards.”

Anatretv. The syllables taste of metal. The mirror blinks. Behind me, someone laughs—a bicycle bell, a pantomime of Hermes; I don’t turn fast enough. The hands pass 9:20 and the air thickens. The glass breathes.

The reflection is not a reflection—it admits it with a raise of my own eyebrow. It looks like me. Too much. A bad joke, or proof that the city repeats its pranks. I see my own coat, a bit more worn, a scar I haven’t yet earned. He—I use the pronoun cautiously—shapes the words: “You can’t save both.” My heart decides beating is only one option among others.

The body on the cobblestones groans. I pull out my phone to call for help; the screen fills with a white feather—not a notification, a real feather that falls into the screen and dissolves into letters. The bread has chosen, murmurs Mara, as if she were reading a recipe. She lays a hand on my arm. “If you call, they’ll come with the wrong words. If you talk to the mirror, it will answer with the right ones.”

I’m not superstitious, but I am professional. I choose the most plausible source of information. I speak to the glass.

“Anatretv.”

The shop unfolds. Mirror frames turn like shutters; a corridor reveals itself, lined with portraits that blink with the indifference of old oil paint. The air smells of storm and damp foliage. At the end, a table. On the table, a leather-bound notebook, wine stains, corners bitten by use: Fiora’s notebook. I know it without knowing how, which is my favorite way of being sure.

The reflection of me—call him Ivo’ to spare my ego—advances from the other side of the corridor. Here, perspective refuses a vanishing point. “Don’t waste time,” he says. “The man on the ground is an anchor point. If his reflection escapes, the street empties of meaning for a week. Remember 2019? The month without sea?” I nod as if it happened. Maybe it did.

“Who is he?”

“A courier of the gods, disguised as a hurried man. They’re testing the door.”

I glance at Mara. She has set the bread on the table; the crust cracks like dry wood. “We don’t have much time,” she says. “The word isn’t enough. We need the key.”

“What key?”

She doesn’t answer. The notebook does, or rather its spine exhales a dry lute note, an uncompromising E. I open it. The pages are covered with tight, black, regular script; between the lines, red annotations describe gestures, shadows, a twisted alphabet where each letter carries weight. In the margin, a name: Fiora degli Alfani. And a tiny seal, thrice repeated: a lighthouse.

I read fast. Too fast. Some sentences slide off; others snag like brambles. Reality agrees to be corrected if you speak its grammar. Shadows are bilingual. Gods pay rent in attention. Behind me, footsteps. A man enters, blue suit, tie now decided, briefcase invisible. Except it’s not the same man. It’s Hermes, and he doesn’t pretend for long. He winks, and the room winks with him.

“You’re playing with beta versions, Ivo,” he smiles. “Mirrors don’t like being used as doors; they prefer to be treated as ports. And a port has to be mapped.”

“What are you testing, exactly?”

“The elasticity of your role.” He places a tied envelope on the table. My name is written on it, but in the hand of someone who doesn’t exist yet. “Act as if you already accepted.”

I don’t like others writing my future with my pen. I open the envelope. Inside, a sheet of tracing paper. On it, the diagram of my grandfather’s lighthouse, annotated in a strict hand: Debug Beacon, version R0.4. At the bottom, a note: When the stars slip their angle, reset the sea. I look up. “Is this a joke?”

“No,” says Mara. “It’s a protocol.” She points to the notebook page where Fiora drew a correspondence: mirror = memory, bread = medium, lighthouse = loop. The words make me feel I’ve already had this conversation, in another street where rain rose toward the sky.

The body on the ground stirs again. Its reflection, in the oval, begins to fade, resolution breaking down—pixels large as fingernails; ugly. Ivo’ lays his palm on the surface. “You must choose. I hold the reflection, you consolidate the anchor. Or the opposite. But only one Serra can leave this room with the notebook without setting off a cosmic alarm.”

I’ve never been good with binary choices. “And if I refuse both?”

Hermes laughs, a sound of well-oiled chain. “Then the city will vote. And the city has capricious tastes.”

Mara steps forward, her dark eyes full of yeast and secrets. “Ivo, listen to me. What you eat listens back.” She takes the braided loaf, breaks it in two. The smell fractures my memory: childhood morning, sea below, my grandfather’s wrinkled hand on my shoulder, lighthouse purring like a mechanical cat. I bite. Dreams surge— a room with walls covered in numbers, a woman in an ink-stained dress (Fiora), a garden after collapse where a woman named Eleni speaks to the poplars.

The taste lingers like a decision. I reach for the notebook; Ivo’ looks at me like a suspicious mirror. “You know how to read shadows?” he asks.

“No.” I turn the page. “But I know how to ask a shadow for help.”

My shadow on the floor pulls away a little too much, like an actor tired of his role. It stretches, thins, settles on the notebook with the delicacy of a cat on a keyboard. The inked letters respond. Some lines light up, others dim. The key appears: three gestures, one word, one breath on glass. I perform them. The mirrors ring like crystal. The oval regains its reflection, the man on the ground breathes in, and the world recovers a millimeter of credibility.

Hermes nods, reluctantly pleased. “Good. Port mapped.” He puts on a cyclist’s cap that wasn’t there a second ago. “You’ll receive a package tomorrow at 9:21. Don’t be late, even if you already were.”

“And the murder?” I rise; my knees protest. “I saw that man die.”

“You saw a version. Enough to trigger an inquiry, insufficient to conclude.” He tucks an envelope under his front wheel—how?—and vanishes down the corridor like a poster peeled off a wall. The mirrors return to mere pretentiousness. The man on the cobblestones opens his eyes. He looks at me and doesn’t see me—his gaze slides, like a mouse without a sensor. Nadir would say latency’s bad.

Mara gathers the crumbs. “You’ll have to choose again, Ivo. Not now. But soon.”

“Between what and what?”

“Between the truth that breaks and the lie that holds.” She smiles. “I set aside a loaf for tonight. The one that helps you not lie to yourself too long.”

I’d protest that I never lie to myself. My tongue decides silence. I take the notebook, slip it inside my coat. It weighs more than leather should. Outside, the rain hesitates, then resumes in whims. In the shop, a mirror lags—a quarter-second—behind my head-turn. I mark the anomaly like folding a page.

When I step out, the street has that Monday feeling though it’s Tuesday. The lighthouse far on the cliff lights its eye beyond its allotted hours, a blink that feels like a yes. I’ve got the start of an inquiry, a notebook that speaks shadow, a divine courier delivering futures, and a murder annulled by antiphrase. I’ve also got an unpleasant feeling: somewhere, another version of me just made the opposite choice.

I walk toward the Sunflower Piazza. Mara’s bakery breathes cinnamon and patience. On the counter, a little chalkboard sign: Today, feathers possible. I laugh, once. The chalk erases itself.

I bite into bread I didn’t buy. The crumb reveals a discreet pattern, three spirals and a line: an address. The old lighthouse. The dream arrives ahead of the night: I’m expected there, under the iron stairs, with a lantern and a name. Fiora.

The city loves appointments it never made.

I raise the collar of my coat. The mirrors behind me only return my back. For now. Tomorrow, 9:21, a package. Tonight, a lighthouse disobedient to tides. And in between, the question postponed like unpaid rent: to prefer the truth that fractures, or the illusion that holds.

I turn right. The sea breathes like an antique engine. Vetranta blinks. And I blink too, out of courtesy.

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