“You thought you were different, didn’t you?” he asked again, and I shook my head. The stained-glass light washed his face now, his teeth glistening in a frightening smirk, and a knot tightened in my stomach.

“Where are you from?” I asked to disrupt whatever he was a memory of. The question would draw him out, at least momentarily. He wasn’t addressing me, I knew that. It wasn’t me he was seeing. There was nothing but happenstance to account for the fact that he’d stopped at my dormitory, no reason but chance that he’d spoken those words to me in particular, and still I recoiled from his accusation.

“Where are you from?” I demanded again.

In the next moment, Walter was struggling to breathe. His shoulders heaved, puffs of his breath breaking against my skin. There was something feral about the sounds coming from him. I feared he would open his mouth and an unearthly beast would claw its way out. And then—finally and because he had no choice—he answered.

“September 20, 1915. I’m standing at the mirror, but I recently stood above my father’s bloody body. I could have killed him this time and I’m not sure I didn’t.”

“It isn’t 1915 anymore, Walter,” I said, flinching and turning my head each time he snarled. “This is 1925 and you didn’t kill your father.”

Before I can explain the Vault and the memories, and without rearing back, a young Walter Gordon slams his forehead into mine.

I am the mirror before him and I shatter into pieces.

The memory comes though I’m not asleep. I am unconscious and so the record begins.

I am the as yet unreplicated Dolores, young and complete and wearing a fashionable capelet over my corseted dress with elbow-length powder-blue gloves that match my dress and capelet exactly. My long copper hair is rolled and pinned a thousand times to climb above my head like a halo, roses woven in. It is August 11, 1906. It’s been less than a year since I began dressing like a debuted woman and I still feel as though I’m in a glamorous parade each time I take to the city streets.

I am accompanying my parents to brunch, where an impressive young man will join us. This one is in town for little more than a day and, like the others I’ve met so far who live outside Montreal and therefore haven’t been introduced at some social event, I am the reason he’s here. My parents and I have taken a coach far from Centre-Ville and we’ve only just disembarked when it happens.