Shaking my head, I forced myself to focus. I looked just like anyone else at the theater. The problem was that the Butterfly, wherever he or she was, did too. There was movement in the balcony to my right, and I glanced up to see the president and his wife taking their seats with their friends Clara Harris and Major Henry Rathbone. Those friends were one of the reasons they were late; they couldn’t get anyone else to come with them tonight. Had Ulysses S. Grant’s wife not been mad at Mrs. Lincoln, he would have been here instead of Rathbone, and Lincoln’s wouldn’t have been the only assassination.

A movement to my right caught my eye; a slim man, probably thirty or so, had just stood up from his seat. I watched him leave, looking for a clue that would let me know he was the Butterfly. Because if he wasn’t, and I took him down, then I would cause even more damage to the future. It was one of the biggest rules of Glitching: you could not, under any circumstances, accidentally become a Butterfly. You had to be in the past, but not interfere or interact with it in even the tiniest, most inconsequential way. I had to make sure I touched no one, talked to no one, and didn’t change the course of anyone’s future by my actions. I was here to take down the Butterfly. That was all.

The man in question paused to talk to someone sitting in the aisle, and I immediately dismissed him. Butterflies never knew anyone from the time period they were messing with. Then I saw her. Two rows up on my right, a woman got up and made her way quickly down the aisle toward the exit. She was the Butterfly. Don’t ask me how, but I knew it instantly at a bone-deep level, but because I’d have to give a concrete reason for the identification in my debriefing, I took the extra half second to identify where she’d gone wrong. Like me, she wore an elaborate dress trimmed with lace and her hair was twisted back into a knot at the base of her neck. I bit my lip; nothing was out of place there. Then I saw it. In her ears were three tiny holes where earrings were supposed to be. No one in 1865 had multiple piercings. She was it.