She didn't notice, but she had just lifted off the ground. Her curls floated in the air as she held her arms open in front of the book. The church bells were striking twelve. On the sixth hit, the apartment lights went out. The book began to glow with a light of its own as she kept reading, and the windows started to rattle as her voice grew louder. There was a crack, and the glass blew inward. It stayed suspended in time for a second before the shards floated toward her—but by the time they reached her, they were nothing but sand. The sand didn't touch her; it hit an invisible bubble and began to delineate its edges. The book was protecting itself. The sand on the ground started to lift, moving between her hands and forming a ball as every particle spiraled around her arms. In the center, a red glow emerged. The sand melted, morphed, and began to take the shape of a small mirror. When the last grain had been integrated, she spoke the final word and dropped back to the floor. The lights flickered back on. The windows were whole again. Floating above the book was a small, delicate mirror. She took it by the edges, careful not to leave fingerprints, and turned to the mirror hanging on her wall. She pressed the smaller one over one of her eyes, holding it between her eyebrow and her cheek. Looking into the infinite reflections, she reached inside the mirror on her face and pulled out a ball of light. As she ate it, the mirror in front of her changed. Random images began to play—a memory, long lost but needed to understand the future. The eye not covered by the glass started to change colors as the people in the reflection moved, taking on the hue of whoever was doing the most talking. At the end of the memory, a hand extended from the mirror like a question. She nodded. The hand reached into her chest, took the ball of light, and the mirror glowed. Her eye shifted again—a blue outline merging with green, finishing in yellow just before the pupil. A new memory played, but nothing in it had happened yet. She didn't recognize a single face, and her eye remained still even when they spoke. As the vision ended, the same hand reached out, stretching the images and twisting them into a ball of light, which it tucked into the mirror over her eye. There was a sudden, blinding flash. By reflex, she squeezed her eyes shut. The small mirror cracked and dissolved back into sand, and she felt her other eye painfully shift back to its natural brown. Instinctively, she placed a hand over her heart and closed the book. As she slid it back onto the shelf, she knew exactly what she needed to do next.