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1983—Orchard Street
Esta didn’t waste time. Still holding her breath, she took the contents from the opened safe and started shuffling through, searching for some sign of the key. Already, her lungs were starting to ache. Soon they would begin to burn. She didn’t have much time.
The safe was filled mostly with papers. A stack of ledgers seemed to list the contents of bank accounts—or some kind of accounts. A quick look told her that Nibsy’s business holdings went quite a ways into the past. There was also an accordion folder filled with loose-leaf papers—notes, it looked like. As she flipped through the sheets of paper, she realized it was research. Spells. Rituals. There were answers here, she thought, her skin prickling with awareness.
The next item was a small, unremarkable notebook. She almost set it aside, but when she riffled through the pages, she noticed that something was wrong with the writing. The words written on the paper weren’t steady or stable. After a certain date, the letters vibrated and changed, rotating through any number of combinations. It looked like the news clipping she’d taken back to the past originally had looked when she changed the past.
It was some kind of diary, she realized from the few stable entries. Nibsy’s diary. The dates on the pages—nearly a century of them—remained steady, even as the entries blurred and shifted. Occasionally a name she recognized would shimmer to the surface, along with a few words. A phrase here. A sentence there. But before she could finish reading what the words said, they would blur again. Erasing and changing over themselves.
Professor Lachlan had kept a record of everything he’d done. But why were the entries so unstable? Hadn’t the past already happened?
She flipped back to one of the few stable entries and allowed her eyes to scan over the contents. I left him in the cemetery, bleeding into Leena’s grave. The great Dolph Saunders. Finally facedown in the dirt. Exactly where he belonged.
Esta felt grief twist in her chest. She’d never doubted Harte when he’d told her how Dolph had died, how Nibsy had betrayed them all and took more than Dolph’s life—took everything he’d worked so long and so hard to build. But to see it there, stark and clear in the too-familiar writing she recognized from her childhood lessons?
She blinked back tears and turned the page.
The last stable entry detailed something about a gala at Morgan’s mansion in May of 1902. Every page after was unsettled. Every entry remained indeterminate.
She realized immediately what the notebook meant. History could still be rewritten.
Esta flipped forward through the notebook, taking in page after page of entries that continued to shift and morph, until she found another that wasn’t completely impossible to read: December 21, 1902. The Conclave.
As she watched, portions of the handwriting grew less erratic, the words solidifying into a clear description of what happened at the Conclave. The entry looked old, with the ink faded from the years, but there were places where words held steady. There on the page were names that she recognized: Viola. Jianyu.
They’re dead. There, clear and solid and steady in the middle of the notebook’s otherwise chaotic pages, was the description of how they died. They’d turned on each other. Nibsy had somehow turned them on each other. The words only grew steadier and more legible as she read, as though her being there, her knowing about their deaths, was somehow stabilizing that version of the past and making it absolute.
Her head spun, and she flipped the pages backward and then ahead, urgently searching for some other outcome. They could go back. They would go back and stop this—
A new line wrote itself into the notebook, an impossible future that couldn’t be. The shock of seeing her name there on the page alongside Harte’s made her nearly drop the diary. She gasped, trying to catch it, and accidentally inhaled some of the strange fog that had filled the library. Suddenly, she felt off-kilter, but she couldn’t tell if it was from the terrible future the notebook had just revealed or from the opium-laced fog. With shaking hands, she picked up the notebook again by the edge of its cover. As it flopped open, a page came loose.
No. Not a page—a piece of a page.
The fog was already working on her affinity as she reached for it. Her magic was growing more slippery, but she knew before her fingers grasped the small piece of parchment that this was what she had come for.
Time was slipping away from her, but she had to know. Flipping the diary open again, she read the steady lines in the bold, neat hand, and her head spun with a combination of the opium in the air and her complete horror at the knowledge of what was coming—of what she couldn’t stop. Viola’s death. Jianyu’s. And now, added to theirs, her own. And Nibsy Lorcan the victor.
No. She wouldn’t let it happen. She knew now, didn’t she? Knowing meant she could prepare. Knowing meant she could avoid that particular future. That had to change things, didn’t it? But the names on the page remained maddeningly steady and clear.
Her head was still spinning, and her lungs were burning with the effort not to take another breath, but the power floating through the air in the strange fog had already done its work. Her affinity wavered, and then she lost hold of the seconds completely.
Esta tried to pull time slow again, but it was pointless. She tucked the notebook into her dress, knowing already that she was out of time. Professor Lachlan had been expecting her to come for the key, and he probably already knew she was there. She had to get outside. She had to get away before he caught her.
She sprinted for the back stairwell and took the steps two at a time, holding the handrails as she went. At the bottom, she reached for the dead bolt she’d resecured, but now the lock wouldn’t turn.
Probably another security feature—a trap to keep her in.
It didn’t matter, because Esta knew the building like the back of her hand. She knew every corner and niche to hide in, every twist of every hallway. She’d slipped out enough times as a child. Professor Lachlan couldn’t keep her there. And besides, she still had Viola’s knife.
But she’d barely started to slip it into the space between the door and the jamb when she felt more than heard the presence behind her on the stairs. When she turned, Professor Lachlan was standing on the landing above her, watching. He stepped into the light, allowing the hazy, yellow glow to illuminate him, casting his features in shadows.
On instinct, Esta reached for her affinity, but it was still deadened. Glancing at the hallway and then to the door that led out to the back of the building, she tried to decide which was her better chance for an escape. Neither was ideal.
Again, she pulled at the seconds, but again and again, they slipped through her fingers. She needed to stall.
The man on the steps looked younger than the one who had raised her, but he was dressed in the usual tweed he’d worn through her entire childhood. Even looming above her as he was, the Professor was a small man. He was more than a hundred years old, but he barely looked sixty. Still, Esta wasn’t fooled into believing that he was frail, not with his hand resting softly on a familiar cane.
The Professor began to move easily down the steps toward her, and she noticed that he didn’t limp anymore. The cane was more an affectation now than a requirement.
