She’d sometimes wondered when or where she’d originally come up with the name Quinn Fox. A year ago, she’d said it was her name because she knew that a girl named Quinn Fox had landed in New Seattle around that time. But if time were a coil, then somewhere along the line back and back, she must’ve thought up the name herself.

The only clue she had came from the locket. There was an animal of some sort carved on the front, but the years had worn it down until it was no longer recognizable. Dorothy’s first thought was that it was a dog, or a cat, but now she believed that it was a fox. Her mother’s grandmother’s maiden name had been Renard, which was French for fox. So that fit.

But where had Quinn come from? Dorothy turned the locket over, studying the name engraved on the back. Like the fox, it’d been worn until only a few lines, and a curve remained. It could read “Colette” or “Corinne” as easily as “Quinn” and Dorothy would never know for sure. Her grandmother’s name had been Mary, and it clearly didn’t say that. So it hadn’t belonged to her, originally, but to someone else.

Dorothy sighed and turned away. If the locket hadn’t belonged to her grandmother that meant there was some other woman who had passed it down, a great-grandmother or a distant aunt whose name—or a twisted version of whose name—Dorothy now used as her own. It was so strange to think that there was an entire line of family she would never know, a family whose legacy she carried on, hundreds and hundreds of years later.

Would they be proud of how far she’d come? She’d never worried about that before. She’d been so concerned with survival that it had been impossible to think about whether she was dutifully carrying on her family’s legacy.

Now, she wondered.

She removed her cloak and draped it over the back of her faded, blue chair. Beneath, she wore thin, black trousers, a slim-fitting shirt, and knee-high leather boots. They were simple clothes, but even simple clothes were hard to come by in New Seattle, especially if they were new. Most people had to scour the thrift stores downtown, hoping to find things in their size with few holes, unworried about whether they matched or had any semblance of style.

Dorothy could’ve brought something back from the past, obviously, but she’d wanted something from this time period, something modern, and so she’d bribed border security to get a few basics shipped in from the Center. The clothes had been expensive, but, at the time, she’d thought they were worth it. Now, with money as tight as it was, she felt guilty about the extravagance.

Dorothy only ever removed her hood when she was in this room, alone, and now she stopped before the full-length mirror that hung from the back of her bathroom door and stared in open fascination at the horror that was her face.