Light, blinding and sudden, flooded my vision, and the world tilted. I was pitching forward over my feet, stone rushing up to meet me. My arms, covered in furs, scraped against the flooring. Nausea surged up from my stomach.

  “Cassie?” My mother loomed over me, her hand outstretched.

  I recoiled from her touch. “Stay back!” I shouted.

  She pulled her hand back to her chest. Her eyes were wide, staring at me.

  My heart was pounding. Another jump was at the tip of my fingers. Find yourself. My father’s soft voice echoed in my mind. Breathe. The crisp air no longer smelled of the pine and dirt of the forest. It smelled instead of minerals and the soft cedar smoke from the hearth. Somewhere outside, faint voices drifted through the walls.

  I looked up, reaching for some anchor on where and when I was. It was only my mother and I here. The blocky wooden writing desk under the window, the green and gold vanity strewn with hair ornaments, the white curtains of a canopied bed, this was my old room at my father’s estate. I stumbled to my feet and through the glass doors.

  The narrow balcony overlooked a long lawn covered in patches of snow. In the center, yellowed grasses protruded from the half-frozen pond. It was encircled by a gravel drive that continued out to the tree line. Something was moving there.

  A chestnut mare drawing a matching carriage emerged. Atop it was a manservant in a wide-brimmed hat. He glanced up, revealing unruly red sideburns. Deerum. The lump in the path.

  “Are you alright?” I whirled around to find her only an inch from me, cornering me.

  “Stay back”, I said, pressing against the limestone railing.

  Her brows knit as she whispered, “I’ll fetch your father.” She hurried from the room, leaving me alone.

  The seasons had changed, summer to winter.

  I stumbled forward to the center of the room and pulled at my clothing, ripping the button free from my coat to reveal the corset below. I clawed at the outer petticoat and pulled at the strings behind my back, trying to loosen them. I heard my frustrated cry, but my mind was numb, refusing to acknowledge the thought. With a penknife from the desk, I sawed into the stitches at the seam until at last the fabric gave enough to pull the hooked corset free. I felt my stomach. It was soft.

  “No,” I breathed. Eleanora.

  I held on for five years. I stayed quiet and good and safe. I didn’t boast of my gift. I didn’t step out of line. I didn’t harm anyone or get in the way. I kept every piece of me in check. She was a gift, proof of my patience. In a moment of panic, I erased her.

  All of that nervous energy left my body. I lay on the bed in my slip, holding my empty stomach.

  The door opened. The thick Pearilian accent of our family aide, Fitz, called out from the doorway, “Sire, she’s here.”

  A wheelchair ricketed across the stone tile. It was a sound I missed, a sound I should have loved. My father wheeled to my bedside and placed his withered hand on my cheek. I thought I would never feel his warmth again. Was this what I had been searching for when I turned back time?

  “My dear, did you use your skill?” His voice was just as I remembered, calm and clear.

  I nodded. Fitz cursed somewhere in the room.

  “Fitz, get her journal.”

  I looked into my father’s green eyes. Stephan Derullia was a man who looked at once ten years older and ten years younger than his sixty years. His body had withered at an unnatural rate, a condition for which doctors could offer no cure. My mother had stepped in where they could not.

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  Like many natives of the Pearl Coast where bloodlines regularly mixed, her skills were weak and unusual. She once owned a beauty salon in the capital where she lifted the effect of time from ladies’ faces. After my father lost his first wife to childbirth, he travelled to meet my mother in hopes of a cure. The effects of her work were temporary, but he would call on her every day to stave off the disease’s effects just a little longer. His face remained younger than his fifty years, but his body crumpled in on itself. Now, he grew weary just to speak. In two months, we would lower him into the ground.

  “How long was it?” He asked.

  “6 months, I think.” I said softly.

  “Was it just the one jump?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He smiled. “You did well.”

  His words made me sick. I turned away from him.

  Fitz was back. His shoulder-length curly brown hair was tied half up, and he wore the double-breasted mint green ceremonial attire of the Derullia house. In his hand was the unbound journal. “You need to read this. Sit up.”

  “I can’t.”

  Fitz set the book down on the bed and grabbed both my wrists. His thin but strong body was built like a fencer's. He pulled me up to a seated position and wrapped behind my shoulders, holding me upright. The heavy book landed on my lap. “Read first.”

  The journal began where they all did, that day when I was 13 and Fitz was 20. I didn’t need the book to remember the grasping for air or his rough hand pulling me by the collar of my dress. But I still recorded it again and again, careful to keep each failure separate so they didn’t bleed together.

  I flipped the papers to find the most recent entry.

  First Tathensday, Seeders Month, Imperial Year 221

  Today, Lila and I experimented with adjusting the amount of ethanol in the chemical formula. There’s not much time before the Baron of Fesserton arrives. I wonder if he will be as charming as father says he is. His letters are kind, but perhaps he won’t be the same in person. I tried on the new dress that Mother ordered and it is perfect. I imagine the next dress I buy will be a wedding dress.

  I remembered this day. When Griffin had heard that my father couldn’t travel for the wedding, he arranged for an engagement ceremony to occur here at the estate. I had waited out by the entrance to watch him and his wedding party arrive. It took him a week just to travel here, but he took the time.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” my father asked.

  “We were attacked on the road back from a party. They’d been hired to kill us.” I touched my stomach. “I was three months pregnant.”

  In the silence that fell over the room, I heard the soft clopping of horses drawing up to the entrance.

  Then my father said, “We’ll cancel the wedding, Cassia. Wesley will understand.”

  It would be easy to stay and live like a ghost in my brother’s house. I was practiced at fading into the background. I could let time tick past, but what good would it do? What was the use in staying small when I couldn’t even protect what I loved? Griffin would find another wife, and the killer would find another opportunity. I had left Griffin to death once already.

  “I don’t want that. I’m going to find who hired them.” I stood up and crossed the study.

  “You can’t be serious,” said Fitz.

  “If that’s what she chooses…” said Father.

  Fitz scoffed. “This is absurd. She just jumped. She’s clearly not stable and there’s someone targeting her life. How long do we have before she turns back time again and all of our work is undone?”

  I rifled through the papers on my desk. “I’ve changed. Even now, I only jumped one time. I’m close to controlling it.” I singled out one of my designs and passed it to Fitz. He looked at me, an eyebrow raised. “If we find a means for production, I can fix the design. This time, I will find who wanted us dead and I’ll come prepared.”

  —

  Lila pulled taut on the thread as she clicked her tongue. She was a heavyset woman ten years my senior who kept her bonnet so tight that her golden locks dared not peek out for fear of punishment. Even the newly repaired seam of my dress didn’t reveal that it had been torn only minutes ago.

  “I was nervous.” I pinned back my curls. She liked the style where the hair overlayed a braid that crossed my forehead. It was an aggravating style that itched constantly where the ends of the hair doubled back to tickle my scalp, but now was not the time to make any waves.

  “I haven’t said a thing, my lady,” Lila knotted the string and used my same penknife to cut the thread.

  “It’s just with the wedding so close…”

  Lila stood up and shook the dress. “It’s no business of mine that you ruin your best dress. It’s your right, my lady, for you to make a fool of yourself attending an engagement party in your everyday wear. If you’d like, instead we could raid your sister-in-law’s closet and see what kind of face she makes as you greet your groom in her evening gown.”

  Lila held out the dark blue evening gown and I stepped in. She tightened the silk ribbon at the back. “Cassia, I know you’re nervous. It’s not my place to question, but I’ll never understand why your father didn’t give you a proper debut. It’s not right for you to be holed up out here in the countryside. Your mind is alive. This could be your chance to be where discoveries are made, to push the boundaries of what’s possible.” She spun me around to face her again and smiled warmly. “There, you look like a woman ready to meet her future.”