It was the forensic lab; she recognized it easily. The chief pathologist stood with his back to her, dressed in the usual white coat with gloves, boots, skullcap, mask, and goggles. He took up a bone-cutting saw and bent over the corpse on the stainless steel slab before him.

“I know this nightmare,” Miranda said. “It doesn’t signify anything more than first-year jitters in the criminology course.”

Just then, the corpse shuddered and shifted, unexpectedly unfurling a large fishy tail. “You can’t hurt me. I’m a mermaid,” she protested bitterly to the pathologist.

“Mermaids don’t drown,” he noted absently. “Please lie back. I have to prepare the site for grafting.”

“Chance!” Miranda yelled. “I don’t want to do this!”

“The legs are ready,” sang a new voice behind her.

Miranda whirled around. In real life, the pathologist’s assistant was a short, middle-aged, motherly woman. In the nightmare, the person standing in the doorway with two severed legs clasped in his arms was most definitely not her.

The saw whirred to life, and the corpse began to shriek. Miranda screwed her eyes shut, clapped her hands over her ears, and screamed louder. Something hit her in the face, scratched and scraped over her skin, fluttered and twisted in her hair like the wings and claws of a bat or a bird. She thrashed out in panic.

“Dead end,” Chance said.

The horrible noises stopped like a radio switching off. Miranda opened her eyes, panting, and saw that she’d been wrestling with a wall of twiggy foliage. She turned around.

“Dead end,” Chance repeated quietly, seeing that she had awakened fully. “Let’s go outside. I have to think about this some more.”

He showed her the way out, an arch positioned right behind them over the traces of Miranda’s steps. Miranda stumbled out and immediately lay flat on the warm grass, her lips pressed tight, while Chance sat calmly nearby, rearranging the notes and spreading them out.

“The Mermaid, as you called her, was found without feet, victim of an untidy amputation that resulted in further complications and the loss of both legs above the knee.” He kept his tone carefully dispassionate as he listened to Miranda’s breathing become slower and more even. “A few days after your initial meetings with her, she was found in the hospital pool, drowned.”

“She should never have been left unsupervised,” said Miranda, dragging her hand over her eyes and forehead. “Look, Chance, I’m a bit confused. Why are you going through my notes again? We know who did it. He was tried and convicted, and he’ll suffer the penalty. If we’re supposed to ‘detain him on the path to immortality,’ please tell me what that entails, because if we can just twist time, go into the past, and get this bastard before he has a chance to hurt anyone, I’d like to do it now.”