“Because it’s fun to watch you squirm,” she said softly, still trying to find herself. He was overly anxious, wanting to move and keep moving, but as she glanced at the dead man, she didn’t wonder why. Pulse slow, she felt the new aches settle in, clueless as she looked out the huge windows at the dark city. “What day is it?” she said, and heartache marred Jack’s handsome face as he realized how deep the damage was.

“We’ll check your phone. I bet you wrote it down,” Jack said, avoiding her question as he took her elbow and carefully helped her through the secretary’s office and into a maze of low-partitioned cubicles. “Do you remember where the elevators are? I have a lousy sense of direction.”

“I don’t remember the friggin’ task, Jack. What day is it!” she snapped, and he stopped.

Facing her, he gently turned her right hand up to show her a watch. She didn’t wear a watch. Ever. “February the seventh. I’m sorry, Peri. It was a bad one.”

Peri stared at the watch. It looked like something Jack might have given her—all black and chrome, having more functions than a PTA mom with twins, but she didn’t remember it. “February?” The last she knew, it was late December. “I lost six weeks! How long did I draft?”

Emotion flashed over Jack, relief and then distress. “Thirty seconds?” he said, putting a hand on the small of her back and getting her moving again. “But you created a massive potential displacement. You were going to die. The guard? He was the one who did it.”

And now she was alive instead of him. That was a lot of change to absorb. She was lucky she’d lost only six weeks in those thirty seconds. She’d once drafted forty-five seconds, but the changes made had been so small that she’d lost only the time her draft had created. Conversely, a tiny mishap after her final drafting exam at Opti had resulted in forgetting her entire last year at Opti’s academy. There were rules, but so much impacted them that estimating time lost from time rewritten was chancy at best.

“The car is outside,” Jack said as he led her through the dark to the elevators. Jack walked just a shade faster than she, falling into a well-practiced role of filling in the gaps in a way that wouldn’t make her feel stupid. If she didn’t move too fast, she could at least look as if she knew where they were going. There was an art to it, and they’d both had time to refine it. “We fixed the camera on the south elevator, right?” he asked as he hit the down button.