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“You know, Wells,” says Auclair, “if this is your way of finally making a move, it’s not your best.”

“Quiet,” she snaps. Then, too late: “Wait, finally ?”

But Auclair doesn’t answer. He’s spotted what they’re hiding from.

She watches, horrified, as his eyes bounce between Georginas.

If he has any sort of reaction, he doesn’t show it.

He is as calculating as ever, his mouth thinning into a tight line.

He doesn’t say a word to her at all until the other her has disappeared into the building.

A cold feeling overtakes Georgina as she realizes the earlier version of her is heading into Professor Elrod’s morning seminar.

Auclair hadn’t attended that day. She remembers spending the entire class watching his empty chair, gripped by suspicion, her throat pinched tight.

Across the alley, he’s studying her closely. Too closely.

“Georgina Wells,” he says, and suddenly – horrifically – he’s smiling. A wide, beatific grin that sets her blood racing. “You’ve done something bad.”

***

It’s late afternoon by the time he finally stops making Georgina repeat herself.

She sits perched on the edge of a leather couch – the same leather couch she’d glimpsed in his memories – too afraid to move even a muscle.

She’s imagined Orson Auclair’s apartment before.

Mostly, she’s imagined it burning down. Bulldozed.

A wrecking ball flying straight through his window just as he’s finishing his breakfast.

She never, ever imagined this.

The sun through the window is pale and feeble.

A late November’s glow, casting the shelves upon shelves of books in a wan, buttery light.

It feels entirely too personal – being here, seeing his things – but there’d been no getting around it.

He’d practically wrestled her into his car back on campus: “ Use your brain, Wells, where’s the one place you won’t be? ”

His apartment smells like leather. Leather and old books, the slight smack of coffee grounds. She wished she didn’t like it so much. She wished it didn’t make her miss him. Horribly, awfully, humiliatingly, even though he’s standing right in front of her.

Twenty-four hours ago, the sheer luxury of his accommodations – a penthouse studio overlooking the harbor – would have made her loathe him even more. She would have thought of a thousand cruel things to say about privilege and nepotism. She would have rented a crane herself.

Today, Georgina can’t stop picturing his face as he collapsed.

She can’t stop thinking about her name, written along his forearm.

She wonders if the future is inevitable, or if the sheer cataclysm of what she’s done has eroded the banks of time enough to form little tributaries of possibility.

She wonders if she’ll ever find her way back to December.

“Tell me again,” he says, bracing his hands against the back of the adjacent loveseat.

“Which part do you want to hear?”

“All of it.”

“I’ve gone through it twice. What else could there possibly be?”

His eyes flick to hers. “You’re leaving something out.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.” He studies her closely. Too closely. “I’ve known you a long time, Wells. You don’t think I recognize when you’re hiding something?”

Georgina debates her options for a fraction of a second. She could lie. She could evade. She could open the window and fling herself out of it. In the end, she settles for the truth. “The transference of your memories was…personal.”

“Personal,” echoes Auclair.

“Private.”

“ Private?”

“Would you stop repeating everything I say?”

“Would it kill you to be a little more forthcoming?”

“They were intimate memories, Auclair. Of an…of an intimate nature.”

Auclair blinks. “Sex.”

“God.” Her cheeks flame. “Yes.”

“You and I, having sex.”

She doesn’t know which is worse – that he says it so easily, or that there’s no question at all as to whether the second participant was her. He is as sure of it as anything. You and I . Even the way he says it is awful. Flat. Blunt. Apparent. As if he’s saying, who else would it be but you?

“Do you have to be so forward? This is hard enough.”

The chilly look he slants in her direction borders on incredulity. “Let me get something straight. You murdered me—”

“Not yet .”

“—and you want me to censor myself? So that you can be more comfortable?”

“None of this is comfortable.”

“You’re telling me.” He regards her coldly, and she sees the exact moment a new idea occurs to him. A new and terrible idea. “I could kill you.”

“Are you insane?” She lurches to her feet. “Out of the question.”

“Not you you, of course,” he muses, and falls to pacing. “The you on campus. You’re not very strong. Your abilities are unpredictable. It’d be easy.”

“Easy?”

“Practical, even.”

“ Practical?”

“Now who’s repeating who?” He rounds on her in a flash. His eyes are brighter than she’s ever seen them. Wilder. “Think about it. If I take you out of the picture today, in November, you won’t be around in December to shred my brain to ribbons.”

“Except you’d be killing the me that’s here in front of you, as well.”

His smile flickers. “That’s not really my problem, is it, Wells?”

“You’re seriously considering it. I can’t believe you.”

“You killed me first.”

“What I did was an accident . This would be premeditated.”

“Trivialities.” He yields several steps in her direction. “You, Georgina Wells, are a living, breathing fucking accident. It’s you or me, and I choose me.”

He’s too close, crowding her against the glass.

Against the wide, mirrored window she’d just moments ago considered flinging herself out of.

She can hear the click of his swallow. Can see the hammer of his pulse in the hollow of his throat.

The setting sun leeches the colors out of the apartment, until everything goes gray and formless.

Everything but Auclair, set ablaze by the dying light.

“You won’t do it,” she finally says.

He’s watching her too intently. “Won’t I?”

“No.”

“You seem very sure of yourself.”

“I am.” There is nothing left between them but a sliver of rapidly fading sunlight. “For one, we have no idea if anything we do will have an impact on the future. You could kill me now, and something else might kill you that day in December. You’ll slip on ice. You’ll choke on your supper.”

His mouth quirks. “Can you give me a dignified hypothetical death, at least?”

“For another,” she adds, ignoring him, “I saw your memories.”

She’s close enough to see his pupils dilate. “They were that incriminating, were they?”

“You seemed to be having a good time,” she says and immediately regrets it. The words hang between them, incendiary and irretractable. She blinks and sees her legs, hitched around his middle.

“Tell me,” he demands.

“What purpose would that serve?”

“It would satisfy my curiosity.”

He’s too close. Too close, and there’s nowhere to run.

“Nothing good will come of it,” she whispers.

“They’re my memories, Wells.”

“Not yet, they’re not.”

His smirk screws into a grimace. She’s known him long enough to recognize it for what it is – sheer determination.

Her fight-or-flight kicks in and she tries to snake out from beneath him, but he’s too quick.

He snatches her forearm, folding it into the small of her back.

She’s spun out, her chest cracking against glass.

The glittering palindrome of Boston Harbor falls away from her in a dizzying scope.

This time, there’s no shifting of sand, no soft, subdural landing. He knifes clean into her head. She’s back in Souza’s Transference seminar, pondering the resignation on Auclair’s face. He’d known what was coming. He’d known, and he’d let it happen.

She can feel everything – the hunk of blue chalcedony in her fist. The clumsy toppling of transference.

And then they’re in his memory. A matryoshka nightmare.

She sees herself in that dark room, bronze glimmering over her head.

The fall of books. The clatter of wood. Her back pressed against a shelf, her eyes glazed gold.

She’s buffeted from all sides, caught in a frantic shutter-reel.

Her bloody nose. His body on the floor. His father.

His mother. Her own face, four years younger and screwed up in frustration.

Faster. Faster. Faster. And then, all at once, slow.

Everything careens to a stop in a mess of white, tangled sheets.

And there, before her, is her golden coronet of hair.

Her sun-glazed skin. His mouth at her throat.

“This moment. This.”

Another drop follows. A physical one this time.

She slams to her knees in the chilly penthouse.

A thin shard of chalcedony clatters to the floor.

Outside, the sky is full-dark. Her reflection in the glass is tear-streaked and trembling.

Georgina doesn’t need to look over her shoulder to know that Auclair has recoiled from her.

She can feel the loss of him, like a limb. Can hear his voice, tight, empty, cold.

“Get out.”

***

She sleeps in the campus gym, huddled on a bench in the locker room.

She showers there, too, dressing in a hurry.

She sticks to the outskirts of campus, avoiding crowds, her stomach rumbling.

She left her bag behind the day she fled Souza’s classroom, which means she transferred with nothing but the clothes on her back.

There’s a strange sort of dissonance, having no form of identification.

No wallet. No keys. No meal card. She feels unsettlingly adrift, nameless and out of place. A lost, hungry ghost.

Pilfering snacks from the canteen is out of the question. For one, getting caught will attract unwanted attention. For another, there’s a chance she might run into November Georgina, sleepy and unsuspecting, and there’s no telling what sort of damage that will do.