Willis’s eyes seemed to bore into her. “Ash used to see visions of his future,” he said, very slowly. “Prememories, they’re called. It’s a phenomenon that can sometimes happen when you pass through an anil. The brain short-circuits, forgetting that the future hasn’t happened yet. When you have a prememory, you can remember an experience from the future as easily as you might remember a real memory.”

Cold dread slithered down Dorothy’s spine. Her mouth felt suddenly dry.

She’d had a prememory before. When she first traveled through time with the Chronology Protection Agency, she’d had a series of short, dreamlike premonitions of her future. It had been unnerving, to say the least, when those premonitions had actually started coming true.

What had Ash seen? Had it been something bad about her? Had she done something terrible?

She wet her lips, her heart beating in her throat. “Are you trying to say that Ash saw his own death?”

The look in Willis’s eyes suggested that she might be better off not knowing. “He did,” he said, after a moment. “He had a recurring prememory, one that he saw nearly every time he entered an anil. In the prememory, he met a woman outside the anil, and she stabbed him. It was only recently that he learned that the woman from his prememory was Quinn Fox.” Willis nodded. “You.”

Dorothy’s dread was sudden and sickening. No wonder they were all so sure of her guilt.

She touched her cloak, nerves creeping up the back of her neck as she felt the paper in her inner pocket rustle. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard of someone seeing visions of their own death before it had happened. Roman had left her a note before he’d died. I’ve been haunted by memories of my own death, it read. So, it seemed, he’d been familiar with prememories, too.

She dropped her hand, refocusing her attention on Willis. “I was trapped in my room at the Fairmont until Zora showed up and took out the men guarding my door,” she said very carefully. “This note that Zora found, it asked Ash to meet at midnight, but I couldn’t have gotten there in time. Whatever Ash saw in his prememory, I couldn’t have done this.”

Willis studied her through slits of eyes, chewing his lip. There was a stretch of silence, and then Zora released a low sigh.

“I did find her at the hotel,” she said, resigned. “She’s telling the truth about that.”