Nicolas doesn’t see me. He’s stopped in the intersection, peering down the other road, first one way and then the other. Thunder cracks again. Nicolas tugs out his pocket watch and shakes his head.

He does not see a trap. He sees only a missed connection. Has the other man left? Or has he not yet arrived?

I pick up my pace. Something moves ahead. Bramble bushes rustle at the roadside. Nicolas doesn’t hear it. He’s squinting back down the way he came.

Two uniformed figures step from the shadows.

I open my mouth to scream a warning when something moves in the hedge to my left. A figure steps out, a long-barreled musket in hand.

The assassin. Nicolas’s killer . . . exactly where I’d seen him in the echo, a shadowy figure emerging from the bushes behind the young pirate, gun rising to shoot him in the back.

Only that gun isn’t aimed at Nicolas. It’s aimed at me.

4

I cannot see my attacker’s face. I see only a slight figure, swathed in shadow, just as it is in the echo vision. The gun barrel rises. Rises straight at me.

I let out a yelp and start to run. My foot twists, and I stumble just as the gun fires with a deafening blast. White-hot pellets strike my arm, still raised as I fall.

A snarled shout erupts down the lane.

From where Nicolas is.

I have failed. All this, and I still failed to help him, and now someone has shot at me.

Someone is still shooting at me. As I scramble to my feet, the musket muzzle rises, reloaded and ready to fire again.

I run for the bushes. At the last second, I remember they are brambles. I don’t care. Cannot care. I close my eyes, and I dive into them as the gun fires again. Then I am scrabbling through the thick, thorny brush.

Another shot fires. The pellets scorch past, hitting just enough to light my thigh afire. I keep going until I’m on the other side of the bushes. A dark and open field ahead calls, shouting for me to run, just run.

That would be entirely the wrong thing to do—race across an open field with my light hair a clear target for my assailant. While later—presuming I survive—I will claim that I had the presence of mind not to run into that field, what truly stops me is my leg.

My injured leg folds, and I stumble and fall. I glance down to see that it is, as I thought, only a scratch, barely bleeding. Yet I can smell the coppery stink of it. When blood drips onto my trouser leg, I realize that’s where the smell is coming from. My arm. Which had been hit before I dove into the hedges.

Blood soaks my sleeve. Did one of the pellets pierce an artery?

I pluck at my sleeve with an interest devoid of any emotional connection, which can only mean one thing: I am in shock. As a doctor’s daughter and a nurse’s sister, I know all about shock, and I have the wherewithal to recognize that this is what I am experiencing.