And then she was drifting, drifting . . .

The first thing Dorothy was certain of was the packed earth beneath her knees, the slight damp seeping through her cloak. She was kneeling . . . and then she was doubled over, one hand propped against the ground. She could feel the moist dirt beneath her palm, now. She curled her fingers into the ground and the dirt crumbled between them, which was good. That was exactly how dirt was supposed to behave. It was a strange thing to think, but her head felt swimmy, her chest full and hot, and she wasn’t entirely sure that matter would act the way it was supposed to.

She opened her eyes, but the air was thick with a gray haze that might’ve been smoke or might’ve been clouds dropped down from the sky.

Where am I? she wondered.

And when?

She began to choke, deep, hacking coughs that felt like they were pulling up bits of her lungs. Thoughts began to form in the haziness of her mind:

Ash. The dagger. The Professor’s theory.

“Ash,” Dorothy choked out, when she could breathe again. In her hand there was something warm and wet and firm. Roman’s dagger. She couldn’t see through the smoke but, if that’s what she was holding, it was almost certainly covered in blood. Ash’s blood.

Her stomach turned over.

Oh God . . . What had she done?

She began to panic, trying to wave away the thick gray smoke, trying to see anything. “Ash? Are you alive?”

She thought she heard a groan, but she could hardly make it out through the roaring sound that filled her ears. God, what was that sound? She’d thought it was her own heartbeat, adrenaline causing her blood to pump hard and fast, blocking out all other noise but, now, she could tell that the sound wasn’t coming from inside her at all. It was something else, something close and loud.

There was movement in the smoke. Blinking, Dorothy thought that she saw something, some animal flying through the sky. She squinted . . .

No, what she saw was moving too smoothly to be an animal. It was a machine of some sort. The smoke billowed and cleared around it. Light flared behind distant clouds, illuminating an object, sleek and metallic against the black.

An airplane, Dorothy thought, with a twist of déjà vu. And now she looked around her, taking in her surroundings. Gnarled branches and flattened grass and the heavy smell of campfire smoke. She was in the wooded area just behind the church where she was to marry Dr. Charles Avery back in 1913.