The woman had come around from the other side and was now standing over him. Her high heels were inches from his face, her long legs rising up for what seemed like forever.

“Other than the Reddit group,” she said, her voice barely audible through a strange rushing sound that was now filling Charles’s ears. “Did you give this paper to anyone else?”

The part of his brain that was still thinking logically realized it was a very strange question. What did that matter?

“What’s happening to me?” he gasped, his tongue barely forming the words.

“It’s a paralytic,” the woman responded, from atop those long, long legs. “It comes from the Brazilian rainforest. It doesn’t have a name, actually, but it’s derived from the skin of an indigenous yellow frog. I put it in your coffee. That doesn’t matter now. Charles, concentrate. Did you give this paper to anyone else?”

A paralytic? From a frog? Charles blinked, realizing his eyelids were the only thing that still felt normal. His arms and legs couldn’t move, and his chest, his chest was growing heavier by the second.

“Paralytic. My coffee.”

“Yes. The effect starts in the skin, you felt the tingling? Then it moves to the muscles. First the big muscle groups, the legs, the arms. Eventually, makes its way to the lungs. I can reverse it, but we really don’t have much time. Did you give this to anyone else? Or send it to anyone? A friend? A colleague? Anyone?”

She’s poisoned me. Why? It didn’t make any sense. He’d never met her before. He was a history professor. An expert on Paul Revere. Why would anyone want to poison him?

Paul Revere. His paper. His groundbreaking, life-changing paper.

She knew about the Reddit group, so she must have found it there. But how? The Reddit group was small, three or four scholars from universities around the world, the type of people who spent evenings searching obscure message streams for conversations about Paul Revere. How had she stumbled into that world, how had she found his paper, which he’d only emailed to the group the morning before? Or had she been monitoring the thread the whole time? Read the paper, then come to Charlestown to find him?

Seduce him?

Poison him?

“Please,” he tried, his words crashing together like a train derailed from its track. “Help me. I can’t breathe.”

And at that moment, he suddenly realized—he had sent the paper to one other person. Yesterday morning, after he’d emailed it to the Reddit group. But not via his computer, not even through his phone. A hard copy, via the postal service, of all things. Because he’d wanted the recipient to feel the weight of the thing in his hands.