“Oran Mohandas!”

It was almost never a good thing to get your name called by the warden. The last few guys he’d called for either hadn’t returned yet or came back so messed up, they couldn’t remember their own names, so you can imagine my trepidation as I stood up to follow the man out. The thoughts swirling through my head cycled between desires to protest or ask questions and self-stifling. It was best to keep your head down in that prison; those who disturbed the peace were readily punished.

“In here, son.” I was directed into a small office with a pair of chairs sitting across from each other, one filled by some dude in a sharp suit. Slightly graying hair above the type of charismatic but stately face you’d expect to see on the front of a finances magazine, I would learn later that his name was Argus.

“Have a seat.” Argus indicated the creaky prison chair in front of him, and I sat down quietly, waiting to be spoken to while curiously looking Argus over. “Your file says you’re twenty-one years old with a ‘reflection projection gift’,” he read from a manilla folder and I nodded quietly in reply. “Tell me how that works.”

“My gift?”

“Mn. What can you do with it? What are its limits?”

I sighed a little and settled into a deeper slouch on my chair, feeling petulant and cautious. “What’s in it for me?”

“If your gift is deemed useful, it gets you a ‘get out of jail mostly free’ card, and you’ll come work for us.”

“And who is us?”

Argus grinned crookedly and leaned forward, leveling his eyes with mine. “Tell me about your gift.”

“Fine. I can project my reflection through one reflective surface into another, giving me eyes and ears in the new location.”

“Limits?”

“No limits. Well, not exactly. The longer my gift is active…. It’s hard to explain, but I become less… less real.”

“Less real how?”

“It’s like my body starts to become a reflection itself, losing its physical form. Like, I can’t touch things or interact with stuff for a while afterwards, you know?”

“Countermeasures?”

“Time. Rest. Food?” I laughed from discomfort as Argus seemed to ponder my answers, looking me over with a shrewd, calculating stare.

“How long can you sustain a projection before you start to… fade?”

“Uh….” I honestly had to think about that. How long did it take for the average girl to try on three different outfits? “Maybe twenty minutes?”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“And how long after you start to fade can you sustain your gift before it becomes dangerous?” Argus pressed.

“Another ten minutes, so about thirty minutes in total.”

“How good are you at finding specific targets through reflections?”

“What do you mean?” I frowned.

“Say you were looking for a specific person.”

“Ok?”

“How long would it take for you to find them?”

“Well, it depends on a few different factors.”

“Such as…?”

I sighed and started listing them off. “How well I know their face, how far away they are, what sorts of reflective surfaces I'm in front of, and what sorts of reflective surfaces they are in front of. The clearer the reflection on both sides, the easier it is to identify them.”

“Say you had a picture of them in front of you for reference and they were standing in front of a mirror somewhere in this city. How long would it take for you to find them?”

“Five minutes tops,” I said, something akin to a smug pride leaking into my voice despite efforts to remain neutral.

“Prove it.” Argus surprised me by handing me a photo of some random dude and the one thing I’d been deprived of since my incarceration: a mirror. I snatched both greedily, studying the face in the photograph, memorizing his features while Argus pulled out a phone and a stopwatch. The man in the photograph appeared to be in his mid-twenties, his nose a distinctive triangular shape, his eyes dark, and his dirty blonde hair shaved in a buzzcut.

“This is a current picture?”

“‘Taken this morning,” Argus confirmed.

“Then I’m ready.” My eyes snapped to the mirror. Argus clicked the red button on the stopwatch as my eyes began sifting through the multitude of images in front of me, or rather, in front of my reflection. Brushing aside all females, all men approximately teen-aged and younger, all men thirty or older…. Sorting through body types, hair color, eye color, face shapes, nose shapes- Ah! “Found him!”

“Tell me where he is.”

I ran through the reflective surfaces around him, picking up clues from each one. “He’s in a room with a lot of windows, high up like a skyscraper, cushy seating, mustard-colored couch…. Ah, here we go! Aayu Tower, room 2514.”

I heard a small beep as the stopwatch was paused. “And what is he doing?”

“He’s humming something. He’s a bit tone-deaf, and he’s looking at his reflection in a mirror…. Man, he’s really fascinated by himself,” I snickered, returning my projected reflection to the far corner of the mirror my subject was staring into. “Oh! Oh, wait. He’s checking his phone. He’s lifting his hand…. He’s… showing numbers with his fingers?”

“What are the numbers?”

“Wait. He stopped. No. He’s starting over. 2-2-5-2-3-1-5-4-4-1.”

“Excellent,” Argus’s voice seemed to mutter more to himself than to me.

“Do you want anything else?”

“No. I have what I want. You can put the mirror down now. Excuse me a minute.”

I put the mirror down like a good boy while the suit stepped through the door to make a phone call, though I’ll admit that I was tempted to peek. The truth is, my gift was the whole reason I was in that prison in the first place. I got too comfortable spying on all the coeds in the college dorms while they were… in compromising positions. One of them figured me out, and then there was this whole harassment complaint filed and then added to, and then somehow it was equated with assault…. Anyway, suffice it to say that I became at least somewhat repentant after six months in prison. Rehabilitation therapy and zero access to the reflective surfaces that fed my addiction in the first place will do that to you.

Argus returned to the room with the warden on his heels. “I have good news, son,” the warden declared with entirely too much false positivity, “Mr. Argus here would like to hire you and has appealed your case to a judge to make that legal. You are free to go with him as your guardian until the end of your sentence. What do you say, son?”

“So… six months?” That’s not so bad. That’s like an internship, and anything would beat staying in here. “Uh, thank you, sir,” I nodded.

“Oh, no,” Argus returned with a smile, “thank you.”