VARIANT SAMPLE: Mirror Souls — Jazz Age

The mirror in the Moretti twins' dressing room at The Gilded Flagon was older than jazz itself—older than prohibition, older than the war that brought America into modernity. It was a Victorian thing, two-faced as the brothers who kept it, with panels that swung open to reveal not the back of glass but another mirror, and behind that, another still, a corridor of reflections stretching into infinity.

Alistair Moretti stared into the nearest surface and adjusted his tie with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. Edmund stood behind him in the reflected corridor, his expression unreadable—the way it always was when the sync was running. They didn't talk about the sync. Nobody at the Flagon knew that the Moretti brothers shared dreams, that Edmund sometimes woke screaming from memories that weren't his, that on nights when the whiskey ran low and the band played too loud, Alistair could feel his brother's thoughts like radio signals through the walls of his skull.

"Lieutenant O'Brien's here," said Mama Rosa, the club owner, appearing in the doorway with a bottle of something that wasn't legally spirit and wouldn't kill you if you drank enough of it. "He's asking questions about Ashford."

Alistair caught his brother's eye in the mirror. Edmund gave the tiniest nod—the signal they'd developed over twenty-eight years of shared existence. I remember tonight. Whatever happens tonight, I remember.

Because that was the terrible advantage and the terrible curse of being a Moretti twin: at the end of every night, you were never alone in your memories. And if one of them did something unforgivable—shot Julian Ashford IV in the private vault beneath his Fifth Avenue townhouse on the night of the Winter Gala—the other would remember it too. Two faces. One crime. Two sets of fingerprints that would be found at the scene, because the sync had been running, and the sync didn't care about the law.