ETTA FELT HER WAY ALONG the edge of her dreams, carried by the soft rocking of memory.

The waves thrashing beneath her suddenly steadied to a gentle pulse that mimicked her own. Faces ringed around her in the dim candlelight, whispering, their rough hands tugging at her bruised skin. She pulled back to the cool silk and shadows of her mind, searching for that bit of light she’d seen: the moon on water stained with midnight.

He found her first, as he always did, from across the length of a ship. The parts of her that had dimmed with loss flared again, flooding the aches and fears until nothing but the sight of him remained. The tide kept the same pace, dipping, rising, with each step they took toward one another.

Then, suddenly, he was there, she was in the circle of his arms, and her face was pressed to the folds of his rough linen shirt. She breathed in his sea scent, her hands sliding along the strong planes of his back, seeking the familiar warmth of his skin. Here, here, here—not without, not anymore. The simplicity of it took root in her chest, blossomed into all of the possibilities she had dreamt about. A rough cheek brushed her smooth one and his lips moved against her ear, but Etta couldn’t hear a word, no matter how hard she gripped him, drawing him closer.

The world beneath her eyelids shifted again; the shadows pulled back, just enough to see the others around her, the curve of the Underground tunnel. A violin’s notes slanted against the air, and she realized they were swaying to its sound, moving in a slow, endless circle of two. She thought of the way she had taken his arm, stroked the strong veins and ligaments, created a masterpiece of his pulse and muscles and bones. The walls shook and banged and roared, and Etta thought as she looked up, as she tried to see his face, Let them roar; let it all fall apart.

He ducked his head down and drifted back, receding. She tried to catch him, his sleeve, his fingers, but he disappeared like a warm breeze, and left her overturned and alone.

Don’t leave me, she thought, as the heaviness in her body subsided and she resurfaced in her skin, flushed with panic, not now, not now—

Nicholas called back, laughing, And now, good-morrow to our waking souls….

Etta opened her eyes.

The fire that had singed her veins in the desert was gone, at least. But she felt as insubstantial as the specks of dust dancing around the flickering lamp on the nearby bedside table. She stayed still, keeping her breathing even, and surveyed the room beneath her lashes.

And there, right at the foot of the bed, slumped in a high-backed chair, was a man.

Etta caught her gasp and swallowed it back. All she could see from the bed was the crown of his head, his thick, dark hair. Candlelight caught the few silver strands mixed into it. He wore a simple shirt and dark slacks, both crumpled from the position he had slept in. One hand rested on the open book in his lap, a loose bow tie woven between his fingers; the other arm had fallen over the side of the chair. His chest rose and fell slowly with each deep, sleep-drugged breath.

Her discomfort at the thought of being watched while she slept, unable to do anything about it, was defused by how weak of an effort this guard had put into the task.

A breeze caught the tears and sweat on her face and ruffled his open shirt collar. The window, framed by long crimson velvet curtains, had been left open.

Slowly, so as not to make a sound, Etta shifted up, biting her lip against the pain that lanced from her scalp down to her toes. Her eyes skimmed quickly around the room, searching for anyone else, but saw no one. A handsome little writing desk was nestled up against the floral wallpaper, a short distance from a bureau that looked so large, Etta had a feeling the room must have been built around it. Both had been carved from the same gleaming wood as the bed; leaves and vines arced along their edges, the pattern weaving in and out of itself.

It was a pretty little gilded prison, she had to admit. But it was already past the time when she needed to be searching for a way out of it.

Several candles were burning in the room: on a side table, on the desk, in a sconce near the door. It was the only reason she could make out her own reflection in the dusty mirror hanging over the bureau, though the image was split by an enormous crack across its center, and distorted from hanging at a crooked angle.

Oh God.

Etta rubbed at her eyes and examined herself again with growing disbelief. She knew her time in Damascus had given her pale skin some color, but now her face, ears, and neck were sunburned to the point of peeling. Her greasy hair had been braided away from her bruised face and hollow cheekbones. She looked ill—worse than that. If someone hadn’t cleaned the dirt from her face and arms, she would have guessed she’d been dragged beneath a taxi through Times Square. Repeatedly.

Yet, somehow, the worst thing about it all was that someone had taken her clothes from Damascus off her—while she slept—and replaced them with a long, ankle-length nightgown, tied high and prim at the throat with a hideous mauve ribbon. She hoped it was the same person who’d taken the care to wrap and bind her shoulder—the same person who had cleaned her up the best they could. Still, she shuddered, both at how vulnerable she’d been and how badly it could have gone for her.

Unable to ignore the stinging pain a second longer, Etta turned her attention to her left shoulder, peeling the fabric back to inspect the itchy bandage that covered it and her upper arm. Biting her lip, she fought the unhelpful rush of tears that came as she pulled the fabric away from the sticky, healing wound.

It was a hideous, grim shade of pink—not the sheen of new skin, but the furious color of a burn. The splotch was still swollen with an uneven blister. The tightness in her throat became unbearable; Etta heaved in a breath, her gaze darting back over to the sleeping guard.

Let’s go, Spencer. Run first; think later.

As soon as she could manage without feeling as though she would vomit from the motion, Etta swung her legs around and pressed her toes into the dusty Oriental rug. Just as she began to test whether her legs could bear her weight, a fast clip of steps drummed out beyond the closed door at the opposite end of the room.

In a rush of motion that smeared black across her vision and made her head feel like it was collapsing, Etta dropped to her hands and knees, ducking down until the bed blocked her from the view of anyone who might come barreling through the door.

“…have to get…”

“…try telling that to him…”

The voices trailed past, disappearing as quickly as they’d appeared, but the faint buzzing in her ears had subsided long enough for her to detect the strains of garbled music rising up through the floorboards. The clinking of glasses cut into the rising voices that bubbled like champagne froth.

“—three cheers—!”

“A toast!”

Fear woke inside Etta all at once, blazing through her confusion.

It seems like this Ironwood does have some luck left to his name, after all.

Both Nicholas and Sophia had warned her that Cyrus Ironwood had guardians watching each of the passages. She hadn’t recognized the man who’d spoken to her, but it didn’t matter, seeing as that single word, that single name, was enough for her to know she was in serious trouble.

But even that thought was devoured by another fear.

Where is Nicholas?

Those last few seconds in the tomb were splintered in her memory. She remembered the pain, the blood, Nicholas’s horrified face, and then—

The only way to describe the sensation she had felt next was as if some invisible rope had knotted around her center and yanked her through a veil of imploding darkness. Etta pressed her fists against her eyes, unknotting the idea inch by inch.

I’ve been orphaned by my time.

The timeline has changed.

My future is gone.

Panic swelled in her chest, hot and suffocating. It fit—all of these pieces fit with what Sophia and Nicholas had explained to her. Time had reached out and snatched her, tossing her through a series of passages before spitting her back out at whatever the last common point was between the old timeline she had known and the new one they had inadvertently created.

Because the Thorns took the astrolabe? Etta knew carelessness could change the timeline, but not severely enough to cause travelers to be orphaned. That required intent. Focus and strategy. Taking the astrolabe from her, preventing her from destroying it—that hadn’t been enough to orphan her, but something else had. They must have used it. That was the only explanation she could think of. The Thorns had used the astrolabe and irrevocably changed—broken—some event or moment in history.

And now she was here, with the Ironwoods, and Nicholas was not.

Colors burned beneath her eyelids, blood beat between her ears, a crescendo that broke over her in a frenzy of pain and grief.

Mom.

She couldn’t think about her right now. Ironwood had sworn to kill Rose if Etta didn’t return with the astrolabe by his deadline. But…She took in a deep breath. Knowing what she did about her mother now, Etta had to believe—she had to hope—that Rose was alive, that she’d already escaped from wherever the Ironwoods had been holding her.

Now it was her turn to do the same.

She forced herself to relax the muscles bunching up her shoulders, to breathe the way Alice had taught her to when her stage fright was at its most crippling. The anxiety, the terror, they were useless to her; she breathed in, out, in, out, until they were chased out of her mind, replaced by a floating, graceful measure of notes. The music was soft, serene, filling the shadows in her thoughts with light. Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. Of course. Alice’s favorite, the one Etta had played at her instructor’s birthday, a few months before…before the Met concert. Before she’d been shot just outside the mouth of the passage.

Stop thinking. Just go.

Her guard shifted in his chair as she slowly rose, and adjusted his own position with a soft sigh. The book was on the verge of slipping out of his hands, onto his feet. She didn’t let herself wonder at how strange that was, that the guard had felt comfortable enough to take off his shoes and curl up with a book.

It doesn’t matter. There was a literal window of opportunity, and she needed to take it now.

Its frame creaked in quiet protest as Etta pushed it open further. She leaned out to assess her options, quickly recoiling back into the room.

The moon was high overhead, illuminating the bruised remains of a city. There were no streetlights, save for a few distant lanterns, but Etta had a clear view of the hills that rolled down beneath her window, of slanted, winding streets that disappeared beneath heaping mounds of brick and wood, only to reappear again, scorched.

The air held a hint of smoke and salt. An insistent wind carried thick fog up from a distant body of water, as if the city was breathing in the clean, cool mist. Skyscrapers had whole sections of themselves scooped out, their windows knocked loose like teeth. But here and there, Etta saw buildings and structures that looked freshly built—all framework and unfinished brick faces. While many streets and patches of ground had been cleared, the sheer scale of the destruction reminded her of what she had seen in wartime London with Nicholas.

She had the ghost of an idea where she was, but it fled before she could grab onto it. The when seemed more obvious. The furniture, the expensive draperies and bedding, the hideous Victorian-doll-like nightgown someone had stuffed her into, the destruction…late nineteenth century? Early twentieth?

Well, she thought, hoping to prop up her spirits a bit, the only way out is through.

She was on the second or third story of a house, though it was difficult to tell by the steep angle of the road below. This side of the house was covered in an intricate puzzle of wood scaffolding that extended from the roof above her to where the long beams were anchored on the ground.

She stuck an arm out, testing the distance between her and the nearest support. Her fingers easily folded around the rough wood, and before she could question the decision, before she could consider all the reasons it was a very, very terrible idea, Etta climbed up onto the window frame and swung her legs around first to its ledge, then toward the nearest horizontal plank of scaffolding.

“This is insane,” she muttered, waiting to make sure the wood could at least hold some of her weight. How many times growing up had she seen news reports of scaffolding collapsing in New York City?

Eight. Exactly eight.

The blood drained from her head all at once, and she was forced to wait, heart beating an impatient rhythm, until her balance steadied again. Etta held her breath, arms trembling from the strain, as she scooted off the window ledge and onto the wood plank in front of her.

It didn’t so much as groan.

There, she thought, good job. Keep going.

In some ways it was like heading down a strangely constructed ladder. Every now and then, Etta felt the structure tremble with her added weight, and some gaps between the planks and beams were almost too wide to reach across. But she gained confidence with each step, even as the wind plucked at her back, even as she realized she had no idea where to go once she reached the ground.

The bay windows on the floor below were longer and jutted out from the house. More dangerous yet, the glass was glowing, light spilling out onto the scaffolding. Etta crawled forward to peer through her cover of darkness; if the room was occupied, she’d have to move closer to the edge of the scaffolding to avoid being seen by its occupants. But first she wanted to know who, exactly, was in the building—the enormous house—and why they’d taken her in.

The room was larger than the one she’d just climbed out of, and lined with stately, dark wood shelves that contained row upon row of books. There was a desk stationed in front of the window and a large broad-backed chair turned away from her, but the room was otherwise empty.

“Come on,” she whispered. “Move it, Spencer.”

Her lip began to bleed as she dug her teeth into it, trying to keep from crying out in pain each time she dropped down and overextended her hurt shoulder. Gripping the beam she’d been sitting on, as if she were on the monkey bars, she stretched her toes out and felt a tremor of panic deep in her gut as they barely scraped the beam below.

Too far. Her arms strained under her weight as she looked to her right, her left, trying to judge how far she’d have to shift and scoot over to reach the nearest vertical support and slide down it. No—she wasn’t going to make it, not with her shoulder on fire and her entire body shaking.

Not going to make it. She looked down again, this time to the ground below, the slant of the street, and tried not to picture what she’d look like lying there in a broken heap of gauzy white fabric and blood. If she could drop softly enough, she might be able to balance, catch herself—

A sudden movement at the window in front of her snapped her attention forward again. A bemused face stared at her through the glass. She blinked rapidly, her breath locked inside of her throat. The window creaked open, out toward her.

“Well, that’s a bit of trouble you’ve gotten yourself into, old girl—”

Arms reached for her, and Etta didn’t think, didn’t speak, just kicked. Her heel connected with something hard, and she took some satisfaction in the surprised “Cripes!” laced with pain in response.

“That was uncalled for!” came the same voice, now muffled as he clutched his nose.

The pain in her shoulder and left arm stabbed straight through her fear, and her fingers spasmed and relaxed their grip on the beam. A gasp tore out of her as she dangled there by one arm. Her jagged fingernails dug into the wood as she frantically tried to line up her footing below before she lost what grip she had.

“Take my hands—come on, don’t be a fool about this,” the young man was saying. Etta leaned back out of his reach, struggling to pull far enough away, as he climbed onto the frame. “Really? You think the better option is breaking your neck? I’m hurt.”

The wind picked up, tossing her loose hair into her eyes, lifting the hem of her nightgown.

“I can admire the intent here, but you should know that all it would take is one shout from me and you’ll be swarmed by unhappy Thorns having to climb down to fetch you. I doubt you want to die, either, so let’s have it, then—I’ll help you back inside, as easy as pie.”

“Thorns?” Etta’s brows knitted together. Not Ironwoods?

She didn’t recognize the sounds at first, the odd rumbles and creaks, but the vibrations under her hand—those, she understood. The whole structure of scaffolding was being shoved to the left by the wind, leaning, until she heard a snap and felt something clip her bad shoulder as it fell behind her.

Then she was falling, too.