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Georgina bites back a retort and squares her shoulders.

Stares deep into his eyes. The minutes bleed away from them, charted by the loudly ticking clock at the back of the room.

And then, like the feel of sinking into soft sand, there’s a shift.

A giving way. Her focus snags on the outer edge of something – a circle.

Not flat, like a drawing, but soft and pink.

There’s movement, too. The heave of a breath.

The arch of a spine. Not a shape at all, but a girl.

A girl with a fine curtain of hair, strawberry blonde.

A pert, freckled nose and heavy-lidded eyes. Hazel eyes. Her eyes.

She topples back into herself as though shoved. In the opposite chair, Auclair is tight-lipped.

“Here we go,” he says ruefully.

“That’s all you have to say for yourself? Here we go? What sort of sick fantasy was that?”

But even as she says it, she knows it’s not true. That wasn’t a fantasy.

It was a memory. An impossible, implausible memory.

Across from her, Orson Auclair looks as stoic as she’s ever seen him. There’s something fatalistic in his eyes. His face is stone, his jaw is set.

“Georgina,” he says, and nothing more.

She reaches for the chalcedony and grips it hard, the jagged edges biting into her palm.

She casts out of herself, searching for the riptide pull.

That esoteric shift. This time, there’s no uncertainty.

This time, she dives. Distantly, she hears Auclair curse.

Something heavy topples to the ground. Professor Souza shouts her name.

Georgina doesn’t heed it. She is looking down at herself – at her arms pinned above her head, her wrists shackled in a long-fingered grasp.

The same grasp that once held her notebook aloft over the cobbled well in the Tempus courtyard.

“ Trust me, I’m doing you a favor.” The same hand that once cut off her escape the night after the solstice gala.

“ You’re an explosion waiting to happen, and no one sees it but me.

If you had any brains at all, you’d drop out before you kill someone. ”

In the memory, his hands slip down to cup her face. There’s a glimmer of bronze. A fall of books. The clatter of wood against a hard floor. She is flush with color, a name breaking at her lips. “ Orson, quick. We have to be quick.”

She plunges deeper. Knifing into his head. Chasing after his most private thoughts.

Another memory. A window, ferned in frost. Her, seated on a leather couch, a blanket around her shoulders. Her voice, curling through the ether like smoke. “ What if I’m just going to keep killing you? What if this is all there is?”

A hand at Georgina’s wrist wrenches her back to herself.

She is on her feet, blood trickling freely from her nose.

She swipes at it with her own free hand, knuckles coming away bloody.

Professor Souza’s grip is ironclad, her face white.

All around them, the rest of the class has gone silent. Only Auclair makes a sound.

A horrible, gasping noise.

He’s on the floor, his head tipped back, foam gathering at his lips.

Professor Souza’s voice comes out tight. “Someone, call an ambulance.”

There’s the sound of running footsteps. It’s followed by a great and terrible quiet as, on the floor, Orson Auclair – the object of Georgina’s rage, her ire, her most deeply buried affections – goes still.

His spine, previously arched, falls flat against the floor.

After that, everything happens in staccato.

Professor Souza kneels at his side. Checks his pulse.

Shakes her head. No , Georgina thinks. No. No. No.

“She killed him,” someone says. Constance, maybe. The words echo horribly.

Souza reaches down and shuts Orson’s eyes. He looks like he’s sleeping this way, the tension gone out of his face. For a single, manic moment, she thinks maybe he is. Maybe this is some elaborate, awful prank. It wouldn’t be the first one he’s played. It wouldn’t even be the cruelest.

But that was when they were children.

They’re adults now, and his chest is still.

His skin has gone the color of stone.

“Everyone out,” orders Souza.

No one argues. They leave their things, making their way toward the door in a desolate single file. She is left alone in the room with Professor Souza and the body.

His body.

Panic creeps in, cold and absolute.

“Ms Wells,” says Souza. She’s directly in front of her. Blocking her view. All Georgina can see is the limp curl of Auclair’s fingers. “ Ms Wells!”

She staggers backward, her thoughts wobbling, as if she’s only managed to partially reattach her consciousness. Another step, and she collides into a chair so hard she sends it clattering to the floor. The room is tight. Airless. Her mouth is ash. Her chest is a gulf.

Georgina flees, shoving out into the hall. Breaking into a run.

There’s no escaping the thoughts she ripped clear out of him.

No outrunning that cold, careening feeling of being stuck inside Orson Auclair’s head – as if he’d died within her, still entombed inside her mind.

She sees flashes of moments that aren’t hers.

A long, dark hall, a man at one end. A voice, sharp and bitter.

“Your footwork is abominable. Get up. Do it again. You have the Auclair legacy to uphold.”

A woman with hair gone silver and a sharp, displeased face.

The lights of a Christmas tree glittering behind her as she pores over the honor roll, parchment stamped in Tempus Academy’s familiar seal.

“ Outranked by that charity case of a girl again? Orson, sweetheart, really – it’s as if you enjoy the humiliation. ”

She sees herself, seventeen years old and standing outside a makeshift door.

A lesson. High school. Senior year. Her brows are furrowed, her nose crinkled.

Nothing happens. Nothing at all. She hears the woman’s voice again, disembodied this time, memories colliding one into the other like thunderheads.

“ I’ve heard a rumor that she can’t even control her abilities.

A girl like that ought to be locked up in a cell before she kills someone. Keep away from her, Orson. I mean it.”

Georgina sees it all in ribbons. In tatters. In broken skeins of memory, pooling at her feet.

She trips down a set of steps, clinging to the railing, unsure where she is, where she’s going.

Blinded by memory: a bed, early morning, snow piled high against the window and her hair spread out like a halo beneath the glow of a sunrise.

The voice of Orson Auclair twining around her spine. “ This moment, this moment.”

Up ahead, she spots a door. In memory, perhaps, or out of it. She trips through it, toppling out into the sunlight. Into wind. Into a quad of dull green grass and a sky that is bleak and white and vast. The snow is gone. A last gasp of leaves still clings to the trees in brittle cups of brown.

And in front of her—

In front of her—

“Don’t tell me you finally managed to drift, just to get in my way,” says Orson Auclair. His jacket is expensive. Suede. His hair is windblown. A stray lock hangs down into his eyes. Georgina knows, immediately, that something is terribly wrong.

“You’re alive.”

It’s not what she means to say. It comes out anyway, surprising both of them.

“Should I be otherwise?” He peers down at the cardboard cup in his hand. “Did you slip poison into your latte when I wasn’t looking? Very good sleight of hand, Wells. I’m impressed.”

Slowly – too slowly, perhaps – she pieces it together.

Because the coffee he’s clutching is her coffee – with her name scribbled onto the side.

She can recall, with perfect clarity, how he’d plucked it right out of her hand on the way to class that morning.

“ Is this for me? Wells, you shouldn’t have. ”

Today is Wednesday, November nineteenth. Wind-whipped. Cold.

One week, three days, and two hours before Orson Auclair dies.

Before she kills him.

“It’s your birthday,” she ekes out.

He looks at her strangely. “It is.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“That’s the thing about time, Wells. It marches ever on.”

Her mind is a sieve. Her grip on reality runs away and away. “We argued in the student center,” she says, remembering. “You and I. Just a few minutes ago.”

“You are a paragon of equivoques today,” he notes, around a sip of coffee. “Not to change the subject, but weren’t you just wearing a skirt?”

In all her studies, she’s never come across anything like this – drifting against the current.

She’s always been taught that time is a river, flowing fast. Everyone is carried along in its torrent.

Some people – people like Orson Auclair and, theoretically, Georgina – can cross the stream.

She knows the process cold, even if she can’t make herself do it.

A capable drifter knows how to find the shallow places.

The muddy banks. The fords. An experienced drifter can find a way across.

But there is no swimming against the current.

That’s time travel, and it’s impossible.

“You were definitely wearing a skirt,” confirms Auclair, who has been having a silent epiphany of his own. “It was far too short for a puritan like you. One sharp wind, Wells, and anyone could see up your—”

She stops listening. Across the quad, she sees the door to the student center open. Out comes a rush of familiar faces. And with them, red-faced and coffee-less and looking for a fight, is a girl with a strawberry-blonde ponytail and a pleated gingham skirt. And she’s headed straight this way.

“Shit.”

Auclair raises a ’brow. “Pardon?”

“Hide.”

When he doesn’t spring immediately into action, she grabs a fistful of his jacket and tugs him after her into the gap between buildings. They’re wedged unceremoniously between the metaphysics building and the freshman dormitories, the narrow space dotted with shrubs.