It was going against mine, too, because I wasn’t great at this sort of thing. I’d tried to get inside the head of a recently deceased solder—as in, the blood was still warm—for the Senate once. He’d witnessed a murder—his own—and we’d needed to find out who had done it before more people died.

Only it had been a disaster, and that was with Billy helping me!

Of course, that had been using necromancy to try to peer into a dying brain, something I’d never done before. This was a lot more familiar—and even less likely to succeed, because Gertie was right. Old, weathered items rarely yielded good results.

The idea of touch clairvoyance was to pick up on imprints—the memories of traumatic events that could sometimes be preserved by surrounding items. It was sort of like a ghost, only instead of the spirit of a person being left behind, it was their memory and emotions, which trauma could sometimes stamp onto an item the way that carving channels in a record preserved sound. Some people could then come along and experience those recordings, if they handled the object.

I was one of those people, although I wasn’t the best at it. Ever since I was a child, I’d had to be careful about what I touched, but some seers had to spend their lives in padded gloves. I kind of wished I had one of those here now, because this… was a longshot.

Just like a record left out in the elements would eventually be unplayable, the skull—assuming it had even imprinted with something in the first place—was likely unreadable now. But I was desperate enough for information to give it a try. I nodded at Gertie, and approached the viewport, waiting.

It didn’t change much, at least on this side, other than for a bit more rippling. The tiny waves running over the surface made it look even more like that kiddie pool, if it had somehow been flipped onto its side. Or like a miniature stargate, ready to whisk a person off to another realm—one with literal monsters prowling around.

I’d time traveled more often than I could remember, but this one had me swallowing. I looked through the viewport into the dark, empty eye sockets of the fallen fey, and caught the glimmer and gleam of something moving in there. It was just water, captured in a crevasse of bone; I knew that. But I nonetheless jumped when Gertie spoke again.

“When I say you withdraw, you withdraw,” she said harshly. “Otherwise, you may lose an arm.”

I nodded again, feeling like a bobble head doll—and an idiot, for risking so much on such long odds. But at least I managed not to grip my arm protectively. I really hoped I wasn’t about to end up with body parts separated by several hundred years.