Getting into the museum was surprisingly easy.

Come morning, we ate a small breakfast, during which I and Raven continued our mental resistance training, and then set off toward the museum proper.

It was an imposing building. Constructed almost entirely of reddish brick and holding an almost victorian style of architecture, it looked somewhat out of place in the surrounding city, which had a lot of modern buildings built from concrete, glass, and steel. It reminded me of Up, and how Carl's house had looked in the city of skyscrapers.

The front door was shut tight, so I tried my luck at walking around the accessible wall, to find some flaw in the security net, like a janitor's entrance, or something similar.

After some searching, I did find an innocuous door off to the side, which was sadly locked, but held our way of entry next to it: small, unsecured side window. The only problem was, the window was extremely strong. Several strikes from a rock did nothing but scruff the surface a little.

I eventually got lucky, and accidentally hit the frame, not the door itself, which splintered. Encouraged, I performed percussive pathfinding on the window's frame, until it was sufficiently loosened, and then used our inside ladder to act as a makeshift battering ram, and the window caved inward, not releasing a shrill shriek of alarm or anything of the sort.

Encouraged, I climbed inside with Raven on my shoulder.

On the other side was a kitchen. A guest kitchen, from the looks of it, made to prepare meals for a lot of people - the whole thing probably held enough raw food to supply myself and my bird friend for the foreseeable future, if we were inclined to stay here. Which we were not.

During my search, I uncovered something incredibly disgusting; Just as I predicted in the small lakeside town, the kitchen's devices losing power meant that the food had begun to spoil. All of the meat was very fortunately stored in a seperate cooling chamber, but one look through the tiny window told me everything I needed to know about the state of the meat inside. Who knew that maggots would breed this quickly? definitely not me. I could have also gone without that image in my mind for the rest of my life.

After gagging slightly, I swiftly located the exit, which led to a small corridor - most likely some sort of internal staff passage. There were signs, but they were labelled nonsense ...well, not nonsense, but I couldn't read a jumble of numbers and letters that probably meant something to someone who didn't exist anymore.

The hollow feeling in my chest returned, but I quickly pushed it back down. Once we were safe, once whatever my reflection was making us do was done, I would have time to mourn them, but we were on the clock. The shadow demon or his friends (because of course he had friends, oh joy) would have tracked us by now.

I'd asked my reflection earlier that morning why he and his comrades didn't just zap themselves to me, or used their apparent god powers to destroy me like they had my species, but she didn't respond beyond a raised eyebrow.

Not that I could raise one eyebrow, which miffed me a little, and I spent the rest of breakfast trying to do so.

Eventually, we reached the end of the corridor, and trying to prod at my impeccable luck, I started opening random doors.

After some varying results, including an unlabeled set of toilets, some storerooms and a few offices, I finally reached the end of the little passage, and with it, a large set of double doors. These doors were special, because for one, they were double, which was a deviation, but these were also made of wood. Running my hand over one, I felt that it was very expensive wood.

I felt some apprehension at opening this door, after all, this was an illegal act and if anyone caught... The thought ended before it could properly finish. My human-society-conditioning was kicking in, and I was in no way ok with that. I was less than ok, anti-ok! I pushed the doors open with incredibly prejudice, slamming them into the metaphorical face of a fat policeman telling me this was an offense punishable by jail time, and stepped into the large hall beyond.

***

The museum, it turned out, was huge. Not only did it have two floors, not counting the cellar, but it was extremely large and plannedly designed.

Too often i felt the burning feeling of being watched on the back of my neck, only to turn around and see a security camera on the ceiling - intellectually, I knew that there was noone behind it, but the synthetic eyes still evoked a feeling of presence, of security and protection.

Cameras weren't the only measure the museum used to guard its artifacts, either - every glass case was streaked with tiny, almost imperceptible wires; parts of an incredibly complex alarm system. I knew by the first time I saw one that this heist wasn't going to be easy. Either I would have to disable the system, which appeared to run on a local power supply, wait for said supply to run out or chance it.

Just smashing the display of our target diamond was an absolute emergency plan, as I'd spied the security bulwarks at almost every door and window, and I could almost certainly guess what they would do if the most expensive thing in this entire place were to be stolen.

The Diamond wasn't hard to find, either - at least, its display case wasn't. There was one, enormously huge, incredibly inconvenient problem, though: It wasn't there.

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The case was there, obviously. It was also informatively labelled, "The Hope Diamond", with some interesting flavor text beneath. I wondered who had been paid to write it, before turning my thoughts back to the pointed absence of our target.

What could this mean? Had someone taken it? But who?

No, I reasoned. There was no one left to take it, unless there were other humans, which I instinctively knew not to be the case. I'd examined this feeling before, and it was as if something inside my head, some thread of consciousness that had always been there, answered the question with a resounding "No" when I stated it, mentally or otherwise.

I slapped my head.

It obviously wasn't in its case, no. Where do museum items, especially valuable ones, go when the place is closed?

The Vault, of course.

***

The Vault was harder to find. It took combing through the cellar to reach its door, and breaking into a security office to steal a key to said door, before I finally stood before the solid steel door.

It was a comical thing, actually, since it looked almost exactly like one would imagine a "vault door" to look like; It was round, made of metal, and had a very large wheel on it, complete with four rods for turning.

I saw no obvious lettering, so it either wasn't a number lock or one had to listen to the sound and count the clicks, or it could only be opened with a key, or similar.

Raven was somewhere upstairs, searching every office and security room for a key, or a keycard, or something of the sort, after she'd learned how to operate doors with her, admittedly light, frame.

Meanwhile, I was turning the little security center that held the vault door on its head, trying to find a mechanism or a key, or any hint on how to open the massive block of solid steel, before I finally found it.

It looked incredibly out of place, but at the same time, very fitting.

It was indeed a lock, but not one with a traditional key. not even a keycard, because that would have been too easy.

No, it was something much worse, much more insidious.

It was an iris scanner, affixed to the wall next to the vault door.

I sunk to the floor, defeated.

This door was the only thing blocking me from our target, and it could never, ever be opened again. The people it was keyed to open to? Dead. Gone. Vanished. Maybe raptured, but in the last few weeks I'd ceased believing in any sort of benevolent god.

I pulled the mirror shard from its little scabbard, and explained the situation to my reflection, who was listening intently.

Then, she laughed. It was not something I'd heard the likes of before, I could recognize my own voice, after all, but the laughter had a quality to it that told me she did not worry one bit about what I'd said.

Then, she got real close to her side of the mirror, one of my own hazel eyes staring at me through the surface.

"Watch this, human."

Her eye flicked to green.

***

"Raven! Where are you?"

A fluttering sounded from somewhere, and I saw a black blur quickly approaching down the little maintenance corridor, holding what appeared to be several keycards and a bundle of small keys in her talons.

She dropped them into my outstretched hand, before landing on my shoulder and inclining her head. I noticed that her head movements weren't as jerky as they'd been the previous few times I'd noticed them.

"Turns out, these are worthless. Sorry. The door is locked using an Iris scanner. It looks in your eye, which is different for everyone, and knows who you are."

Raven nodded in understanding, and poked one of the keycards.

"There isn't a reader for those, what do you mean?"

She poked it again, more aggressively this time. I set the rest of the miscellaneous security essentials down, and looked at it.

"Cathy Helm, Inspector General? How does this help me?"

She stretched her neck further out, poking the backside of the card.

I turned it over, and all my questions were answered.

There was a face looking back at me.

***

Later that day, my reflection still hadn't managed to fool the iris reader. She'd grabbed the reflection of the keycard inside her world, and done something to it that caused a slight sting of pain behind both of my eyes.

When it subsided, the keycard's reflection had enlarged greatly, and my own reflection was left staring intently at the face of the now person-sized portrait.

After that, she'd requested to be set up facing the iris scanner, with the other mirror shard capable of reflecting me, and started altering her eyes to match the woman in the picture.

I have to say, she was relentless, even though the sound of the scanner repeatedly cycling and beeping in the negative threatened to drive me to madness.

Eventually though, as the sunlight from outside was starting to dim a little, there was the, at this point already familiar, slight hum of the scanner. Unlike before though, this time the negative beep was replaced by a positive ding, which ripped me from the riveting account of the life of Van Gogh I'd swiped in one of the offices upstairs.

And then, with a deep click and then no sound at all, the vault door slowly swung open.

Inside the vault, everything was quiet. It was even quieter than outside, with even my footsteps muffled, and our breathing holding no echo at all in the dampened room. I'd barricaded the vault door open with a toppled metal closet, not wanting this vault to become my tomb, despite the assurances my reflection gave that she's be able to get us out if push came to shove, so to speak.

And so, I crept through the silent vault, the two mirror shards held together in front of me, Raven on my shoulder, searching for the case containing our dear diamond.

Which we eventually found, and unlocked, using the key our inspector general had left behind with her keycard.

No surprises awaited us inside, just a dusty cabinet containing a silver amulet, set with the largest diamond I'd ever seen. It seemed to sparkle in the low neon lighting, almost unnaturally so - I strained my eyes, and noticed a very, very faint light coming from the stone itself.

Regardless of that, I couldn't just stand there, marveling at the stone itself - I had to grab it, and then go.

So, I wrapped the amulet containing the stone in its metal claws into the silk it was lying on, and shoved it unceremoniously into my pocket, before turning and sprinting out of the vault.

I don't know why, but the vault itself had inspired a sense of terror and dread from me, which I couldn't quite place. I was irrationally afraid of being locked inside, starving or running out of air, so I ran out the vault, up the stairs, and out the front door (which could be unlocked from the inside using the investigator general's key), and stormed outside into the waiting evening air, letting out a breath I didn't even notice I was holding in.

We'd actually done it. One step closer to salvation, or whatever it was that my reflection was planning.