As quickly as it had appeared, the dream world dissolved. Sam felt the impact of her feet against a hard surface, but they made no sound, and she quickly understood why—surrounded by blank white walls, it was clear she was in a time hollow. The sterile emptiness of the space was a startling contrast to the sparkling Hall of Mirrors, and the change nearly knocked the wind out of her. She glanced down and, sure enough, she was back in her velvet gown from 1865. Had her experience in Versailles even been real or had she gone into some sort of coma and imagined the whole thing? And why was she in a time hollow?

"Hello?" she called.

No one answered. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, as if expecting someone to appear, but nothing happened. "Hello?" she tried again. "…JB?" the name caught in her throat and she blinked away the tears that threatened to escape. Don't be pathetic, he isn't coming back, she reminded herself. He made himself perfectly clear.

"Sorry for the delay, Miss Cretney," said a voice from behind her. Sam yelped and spun around, only to come face to face with a young woman—or a girl. It was hard to tell. She was thin, and even in her black pumps, she stood no taller than Sam. Her brown hair was knotted in a sensible bun and her plain blazer and high-necked blouse told Sam she meant business. Yet, she appeared so young, it was almost comical, like a little girl playing dress-up with her mom's clothes.

"You can put your hands down, I'm not going to hurt you. I'm Cira," the girl said. Sam glanced down and realized her arms were outstretched defensively. She relaxed them and returned her attention to Cira. JB wasn't kidding when he'd said how young Cira was for a time agency director. She looked about sixteen years old. Of course, Sam, being someone who even at thirty-two couldn't enter a bar without some ID, knew that didn't mean much. She figured Cira was probably in her twenties or thirties.

"You must be confused," Cira said matter-of-factly. "I'll do my best to catch you up."

"What am I doing here?" said Sam. "How did I get from London to…wherever I was just a few seconds ago?"

"Versailles."

So it was real. At least, the location was real. "Are you the one who lured me there with that light? And what about all the…" All the what? Magic? Hallucinations? Sam wasn't sure what to call them.

"I imagine you're referring to IR's mess."

"Interchronological Rescue? They did this?"

"Not exactly," said Cira, and Sam could tell she enjoyed holding all the answers. Her voice had sounded strictly professional and authoritarian through the elucidator, but seeing her in person, Sam sensed it was a bit of a show, a performance she put on so people would take her seriously. Sam couldn't blame her, really. Back when she was getting her PhD, she'd engaged with plenty of older historians who thought they were experts on all of human history just because they could list the names of every World War II weapon, and she'd had to stand up in front of them at conferences and make them believe that the study of fashion through the ages counted as "real" history. If working through the ranks of the time agency was anything like Sam's career, she understood why Cira tried so hard to create a rigid persona, especially if many of the people working under her were once her superiors.

"Not exactly?" Sam repeated. "I don't understand."

"Of course you don't," said Cira in what Sam thought was supposed to be a sympathetic tone. It sounded more condescending. "Let me start with why I brought you here, then we'll work our way to the big questions."

"Okay," said Sam. "Why did you bring me here?"

"You're here because it's time to return you to where you belong and fix this big disaster."

Sam's heart stopped. "Where I belong? You mean my original identity?"

"That's right."

Her pulse resumed at triple-speed. "What? But JB said time would be safe if I stayed in 1865!"

Cira shrugged. "He was mistaken."

"But…" Sam wasn't sure if it was possible to faint inside a time hollow, but it certainly felt like she might pass out. She inhaled slowly and scratched at her thumbs, grounding herself. "Does this mean I'm going to die?" She hated how small and childish she sounded, but she had to ask.

"Nothing is guaranteed. We won't know for sure until you return to the moment you were kidnapped and see how it plays out. In theory, you should be compelled to follow your original instincts once you get there, even if there's no tracer. Your memories of that life will return and whatever happens next will…well, happen."

Sam wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but she didn't like the sound of it. "So you're just…going to send me back now? That's it?"

"I'm open to answering questions first. I believe the agency owes you that, at least."

Okay, this was good. Sam had hundreds of questions, and it would also buy her time to come up with an alternative solution that didn't involve going back to wherever she was from. "How did you find me?" The question she really wanted to ask was, Who was I, originally? But right now she figured it was best to stay as far away from that topic as possible.

Cira cracked a slight smile. "That's a long story. It took a lot of investigation to figure out what was going on. The man who'd been toying with you—the one in the hood—was playing quite the game, it turns out. I'd always suspected he was somehow involved with IR, but I didn't have probable cause to do an additional search of their old headquarters until recently. And when we finally did that search, we hit the jackpot—a hidden lab full of rare drugs and secret technology. If only I'd been allowed to investigate it when the agency first raided them!"

Sam's head was spinning again. "The hooded man is part of IR?"

"Not exactly," said Cira, which seemed to be her favorite phrase. "He wasn't in the picture right away. At first it was just a few of Rathbone's loftover loyal goons that set up the lab, but they weren't bright enough to maintain the secret themselves. So they sought out someone intelligent and crazy enough to cause so much chaos through history that the agency wouldn't be able to track anything properly. We thought their goal was to block all access to you, but it turns out, the real thing they were hiding was that lab."

"So the hooded man came from somewhere else and got recruited by IR later?"

"IR simply gave him access to the tools that would allow him to cause maximum damage to time. Before that, he was just a rage-filled man from the nineteenth century with a desire to kill. You might be familiar with the name 'Jack the Ripper?'"

"Of course," said Sam, slightly offended. What historian didn't know about Jack the Ripper? Then the weight of Cira's words stunned her silent.

"Well, those murders weren't supposed to happen. 'Jack' had actually committed an earlier murder and would have been arrested and hanged if IR hadn't traveled back in time to strike a deal with him—they'd get rid of the evidence and give him the tools to murder across time as long as he agreed to cause as much damage to history as possible."

"The tools," Sam said, "meaning fully functional elucidators and the weird drugs that were used on me and Poe?" She felt sick to her stomach.

Cira's response was no comfort. "Oh, much more than that. The lab we found held all sorts of things the agency had no idea existed. My favorite has to be that hideous beast costume he used in Gévaudan. IR is certainly creative, I'll give them that. The agency can make human disguises—or, we could before we blew our costume budget on a John Hudson getup—but cryptid-like animals! That was impressive. Of course, they had to go and waste all that potential on the murder of an important historical figure…"

"She had a name," said Sam. "Lucie. I think she was a friend from one of my past lives," she realized.

"She was more than that," said Cira. "She was supposed to die a martyr during the Reign of Terror."

"What else did you find?" Sam said, not wanting to think about Lucie's demise any longer.

"Too much to name. There were all the documents on you and your previous lives, there were—"

"You know about all of them?" Sam gasped. She was shaking now, both from excitement and terror.

"I've only had time to skim them," said Cira. "It's just your original identity that I read in detail—and no need to ask about that. You'll learn shortly."

"But my other identities…"

"Like I said, I only had time to skim. The priority was finding you, and luckily for me, Jack's advanced elucidators could be tracked from monitors in the lab, including the elucidator he gave to Poe."

"Wait…" Sam needed a moment to process this information. "This is the elucidator that Poe was threatening us with back in Baltimore? The one JB and I ended up taking?"

Cira nodded. "Yes, that's how I found you. And I would have loved to fetch you the minute K'Tah destroyed his own elucidator, but of course there are so few accessible pockets of history now that things are so chaotic, and those pockets are constantly changing depending on Jack's moves."

A surge of hope briefly overcame her. "You didn't know JB was going to destroy the elucidator?" Was it possible he'd destroyed it because he did care about her after all?

For a minute, Sam thought she saw Cira's stoic expression falter, but it must have been her imagination because she said, "Of course I didn't know at first. Time agents have to make split-second decisions all the time. We couldn't exactly return you to your rightful place in history if you died in a fire, now could we?"

"But why destroy the elucidator before coming after me?"

"To maintain your trust, of course. He saw how you reacted when he drew away from you in the courtyard in Baltimore. We couldn't have you doubting his loyalty to you when we were so close to finding out who you really were."

"But—"

"With all due respect, Miss Cretney," said Cira, "have some dignity. This isn't how anyone wanted things to play out. No one expected you to fall in love with Agent K'Tah, but it seems that's what happened. If he had to play into it to keep you within the agency's grasp, so be it. He was doing his job, it's not personal."

Sam had never felt so humiliated in her life. Of course it was personal. She'd invited JB into the deepest corners of her soul, shared her biggest secrets, her greatest fears. She'd dissolved into his kiss, had even begun to undress him in the heat of what she believed was mutual desire. She would have given him everything. And the whole time, he'd been playing her.

Despite her best efforts to maintain her composure, Sam found herself collapsing to the floor. Her eyes stung and the tears were back before she could stop them.

"Perhaps I was too harsh just now," said Cira, and she did appear somewhat regretful. "I realize this isn't easy for you. Believe me, I understand how cruel this all must seem from your perspective. We're all just doing our best to save history, and this was the only way it could be done. I'm sorry."

"Tell me about the light," said Sam, eager to change the subject. "What is it? Why am I always compelled to follow it?"

"Ah, yes." Cira's face brightened, like she'd been waiting for Sam to ask. "K'Tah told you about tracers, right?"

Sam wiped her eyes, then nodded. "He's mentioned them."

"Well, we never really understood them fully, just took them for granted as convenient guides for time travelers until they disappeared."

"Are you saying the light was a tracer?"

Cira gave a third, "Not exactly," then explained, "It's artificial. IR has apparently been studying tracers and their effects on people. The light you keep seeing is a faux tracer, of sorts, designed to mimic tracers' abilities to lure people like moths to a light bulb. With some experimentation, they were able to manipulate it into a form that was only visible to you."

"Why would they do that?"

"Laziness." Cira grimaced. "It was much easier to lure you out of one life and into the next that way. They didn't want to get their hands dirty and kidnap you themselves. Of course, it didn't do IR much good when they went after those thirty-something kids. They soon found out that the process of making a personalized faux tracer is different for each individual. And, again, because they're lazy, they decided it was less complicated to just orchestrate over thirty kidnappings than it would be to make that many faux tracers from scratch. Oh," she added, "but they did manage to make one for your dog before all that."

Sam flew to her feet, heart thudding. "What? You mean Tony?"

"Probably. Was that your dog's name?"

"Yes! Where is he? Does IR have him?"

"No, they had no need for a dog. They returned and dropped him off in the woods a day or two after you'd given up searching."

"The woods!" Sam shouted. "Why? They couldn't have, I don't know, left him at my doorstep?" She was shaking so hard, her teeth chattered, unable to contain her rage.

"I told you, they're lazy."

"Well, what happened to him? Is he—" the grim expression on Cira's face shut her up immediately, and she realized she probably didn't want to know. "Never mind. Just…just tell me more about the light—faux tracer. Whatever."

"What do you want to know?"

"Like, why was it showing up while I was with JB? Hadn't IR finished experimenting on me by then?"

"Sure, but Jack found it to be a useful tool to bring about more chaos."

Sam cringed every time Cira called the hooded man "Jack." The "Jack the Ripper" moniker put a bad taste in her mouth anyway, considering it was the made up name given to the killer by the press in 1888 when they fabricated a letter from the "Ripper" just to sell more papers. Calling him "Jack" made him sound like a mischievous prankster, not a mass murderer of innocent women.

"He wanted to see how far he could lead you before you found the strength to resist," Cira continued. "You'd developed a bit of immunity over the years. It was only this last time that he had any chance of getting to you since you were in such a vulnerable state."

Sam shook her head, confused. "Wait, I thought you were the one who lured me out of the cottage."

"Oh, that was the plan, but Jack got to you sooner. We would have brought you straight here, not to Versailles."

"Why did he want me at Versailles?"

"That's where the faux tracer was strongest. I imagine that's because Versailles is the only place you visited at least once in each of your past lives, so the emotional ties to the place would have been very powerful. Tracer scholars theorize that it would have been powerful enough to cause visions and a sense of euphoria, perhaps even multiple tracers at once. Did that happen?"

Sam sighed, recalling those enchanting few moments. "Yes."

Cira closed her eyes and smiled. "That must have been quite spectacular. I wish I could have seen it myself."

"I'd happily let you take my place if I could," said Sam flatly. She was tired and miserable and sick of Cira's inability to read a situation. "And all the baggage that comes with it."

Cira seemed to finally take the hint and exchanged the wistful smile for a neutral line. "That's fair. I'm being unprofessional and I apologize. We should actually get going unless you have more questions"

"So none of it was real?" It was rhetorical, but she still felt compelled to ask. "The whole time it was just you and the hooded man messing with my head?"

Cira frowned. "I think the agency deserves more credit than that. We were fighting for control of the faux tracer up to the last second. Be thankful we actually won."

"Why?" Sam laughed bitterly. "I have no free will either way. Why should it matter to me whose puppet I become?"

"You don't care whether you're a force for good or evil?"

"You say that like I even have the option of siding with IR."

"Is that what you want?"

"Of course not. That isn't the point." She shook her head, exasperated. "It doesn't matter anyway. My existence is a mistake, right? I'm not supposed to be here."

"I'm glad you understand," said Cira. "Your existence outside of your native time has created ripples upon ripples of damage. It's altered the lives of everyone you've met outside of where you belong. For all we know, there have been births and deaths that were never supposed to happen."

Births and deaths that were never supposed to happen, Sam repeated in her mind, and something like hope twinkled in her chest. "If I go back to my native time, Tony might have a chance with someone else, someone who won't leave him alone in the woods…right?"

"It will take some time for history to heal itself fully," said Cira, "but once the ripples even out, there's a good chance he'll have a full life with a different owner."

That was all Sam needed to hear. She took a deep breath and locked eyes with Cira. "Okay. I'm ready."