As I wove my way through the sleepy streets toward what would soon be the infamous Griffin’s Wharf, I started my search for the Butterfly in earnest. Considering the time period, the odds were that the Butterfly would be a white male, probably in his twenties so that he would easily blend in with the event. When people first started trespassing into history, they weren’t careful about that kind of thing. They floundered about in the wrong clothes with the incorrect haircut and speech patterns like the proverbial bull in a china shop. Or, to steal the words of one of my favorite professors, like a whale in a bathtub. They stuck out. As time went on, though, and the Academy started sending Glitchers in to capture them, the Butterflies got smarter and a lot sneakier. Especially the Butterflies that joined up with Mayhem.

The first step was to figure out what about this event could be easily derailed. How could someone forever alter the future? Usually that question was clear, but tonight it wasn’t. The event was too large; too many people were involved and spread across too wide of an area. Even an incredibly skilled Butterfly wouldn’t be able to completely stop this event. So where was I supposed to look?

Before I could figure it out, we were at the harbor, and I was following the stream of men on board the closest of the three boats. There were only a few sailors guarding the cargo, and they quickly decided that tangoing with a pack of angry colonists with hatchets was a bad idea and got out of the way. The Boston Tea Party began. Barrels of tea were dragged across the deck of the ship, laid on their sides and hacked at with the crude hatchets until they cracked open like eggs, revealing the rich dark tea inside. Some of it spilled out onto the deck, filling the air with the pungent odor of distant lands, before the barrels were hurled overboard into the water.

Not wanting to gain any unwanted attention, I got to work and was just levering my first barrel across the deck when I caught sight of the other British East India ship under attack, the Beaver. Glancing in the other direction, I could just make out the third ship, the Dartmouth, as it was converged on by more angry Sons of Liberty. I must be on the Eleanor, then, I thought, and even as I felt the familiar smugness of knowing the details of this historical event inside and out, I felt a tug of fear. What if the Butterfly was on one of those other ships? How would I ever know? And that’s when I saw Regan Fitz board the boat.