I was back inside the mountain. The icy air of the Glitch room hit me first, racing into my smoke-filled lungs, and I coughed, doubling over as my body attempted to adjust to the drastic change. It was a few seconds before my eyes stopped watering and my body stopped heaving long enough for me to stand up straight. As I took in the room through streaming eyes, I noticed two things simultaneously. The first was that we were the first ones back—the other platforms sat empty. The second was that there was no we. There was just a me. Regan was nowhere to be seen. I spun to look behind me, as though she was playing hide-and-seek, but the only other person on the platform was Agent Chris. Except, was it Agent Chris? The stranger I’d brought back through time stumbled to her feet and whirled to face me, her cuffed hands reaching for my neck as she let out a scream of rage. I stumbled backward just as two techs and Professor Callaway vaulted onto my platform. All three of them grabbed the woman, and it was then that I saw her face for the first time, and it was not Agent Chris’s face. In the craziness of the burning factory, I’d done what I’d been training to do—I’d relied on my partner and cuffed the target before I’d gotten a decent look at her.

I watched in numb disbelief as the woman screamed and scratched, trying to escape despite the Chaos Cuffs still firmly around her wrists. It took the techs a moment, but they eventually had her in hand and led her off the platform.

Callaway turned to me, his blue eyes wide. “Where’s Regan?”

I swallowed hard. “March twenty-fifth, 1911.”

Callaway’s jaw dropped in horror. But before he could launch into a lecture about how partners always Glitch in and out of events together, there was a loud popping sound to our left, and we both turned to see Tess and Eliana reappear on their platform, a bedraggled man clutched between them. A second later the same sound echoed to my right, and I turned to see Blake and Corban reappear, each holding the hand of a middle-aged woman with gray hair. Was I the only one who had screwed this up? I shut my eyes, which was a mistake because I was instantly bombarded with the images of the burning building, with the terrified faces of the workers who would never escape, with the smell of the acidic smoke and the screams of people who knew they were about to die. I stumbled off my platform, barely getting my head in a trash can before I threw up.