***

  Sarah struggled to open her eyes, a momentary disorientation making her brain think she was upside down. She sat up, the bright lights of the interrogation room surprising her.

  And then she saw her hands. No, not just her hands. Dried blood flaked off her forearms and stiffened her clothes. She rubbed some of the blood away from her wrist, shocked to find Pegasus’s handwriting. Her heart thumbed loudly against her chest. How could this be real?

  If this was real, could she have been injured enough to lose track of what happened?

  There was no excruciating pain, though a couple of spots along her legs and arms felt sensitive to the touch. Had she been in a fight? And whose blood was that if not hers?

  Cold traveled along her veins, settling in the pit of her stomach as a reminder of Pegasus’s death in that other world.

  The most obvious possibility was that something had gone wrong during a mission, but she wasn’t dressed for a mission. She was also not in the equally baffling red dress she’d seen before in the smoke-filled room.

  The door opened, and Sarah found herself faced with the man from her dream—the one who’d ordered her to be taken away.

  “What should we do with you, Phoenix?”

  Sarah looked down at her wrist. Was this real? But then, who was this man?

  She rubbed at the words on her wrist, wanting to accuse them of lying. But—weren’t they lighter than they had been last time she looked? When had she checked last? The words were too faded, and there was no smudge from a previous version of the letter ‘g’.

  He slammed his palm onto the table and Sarah startled, jumping half out of her seat.

  And almost dropping her tablet on the floor. Setting it down on her desk beside her keyboard, she drew in a series of deep breaths. The security monitors, with their unchanging feed of empty corridors, helped to anchor her mind in that moment.

  On her wrist, the words were as she expected them to be, smudged ‘g’ and all. There was no sign of blood on her hands, just four little halfmoons where her nails had dug into her palm.

  “Where were you just now?” A hand as gentle as his voice brushed against her shoulder.

  Sarah looked up at Pegasus, managing a smile. Her fingers traced the words on her wrist. “We’ve done this somewhere else.”

  “This moment?”

  “No, the writing.” She showed him her wrist. “I was in an interrogation room just now. This was there, in your handwriting, but it was slightly different. It seemed more faded.”

  “Could you be seeing the future of our own world?”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Sarah examined the writing, pointing at the g. “There wasn’t a smudge.”

  “The same, but not. Scorpion’s right, every little difference counts.” He pulled out a marker from his pocket—was he just walking around with those?—and drew two little hearts right underneath the previous sentence. “How about now?”

  Sarah laughed, pulling him closer to wrap her arms around his waist. “Better.” She caught herself the next second, releasing him.

  Pegasus sat down on the corner of her desk, careful to move her tablet aside. “Why were you in an interrogation room? Was it a continuation of the previous dream, where you were detained?”

  “Well, I did see the man from that dream, but I wasn’t wearing the same clothes.” She’d been in her pajamas last time. “And I was covered in blood, but it wasn’t mine. No one had gotten injured last time. Unless this was from a different world where I was also accused of being a traitor, I don’t see how it matches.”

  “Did you learn anything?”

  “Not really. I came right back before I could ask anything. I didn’t even think about what to ask.”

  “I’m relieved you weren’t the one injured.”

  Sarah couldn’t say she agreed. With how often they were together, he was the most likely candidate.

  Perhaps sensing her mood, Pegasus slid off the desk and pulled a chair over, rolling her chair to the side. “I saw we got a reply about Wilbur Black.”

  Sarah let him have the keyboard. “Already? I didn’t expect them to take less than forty-eight hours.”

  Pegasus opened the files, scrolling through them. “Seems Wilbur Black didn’t cause any trouble after leaving prison.”

  “Promising enough.”

  Pegasus started scrolling faster, and she gave up on trying to keep up.

  “Went to live with his uncle. Took over his business after the uncle passed.”

  “Business?” She blinked at the screen. “Anything relevant?”

  Pegasus shook his head. “Bakery.”

  Sarah stopped herself as she was about to lean her head on his shoulder. “Huh. I wonder if he knows how to bake.”

  “You can ask if we find him.”

  “I’m honestly not sure what to ask him. Or if I should just hand him over to Lore.”

  Pegasus skimmed through the last report, dated six years ago. “That might be difficult.” The cursor lingered at the end of the file.

  Sarah felt like grabbing the mouse from him and scrolling back up and down until the thing showed her what she wanted to read. “That’s not what I was expecting. Or hoping for.”

  Deceased.

  Wilbur Black had died before Sarah was even aware of the WRO.

  Sarah skimmed back up, looking for a cause of death. Car accident. She tapped her fingernail on the screen. “Does it being an accident make it any less likely to repeat itself across worlds?”

  Pegasus shrugged. “I guess it depends on the difference between worlds. I think the more similar the worlds, the more likely accidents would happen the same way.”

  In her visions, how many times had she fallen inside that decrepit old building while running away from the WRO and almost died?

  “The other Robyn hadn’t hurt her shoulder,” Pegasus said.

  Sarah nodded. It was one of the differences the medical examiner found between the impostor and her sister. “So there’s no way to know if he would have also been dead in that other world.”

  Pegasus scrolled through some of the other reports. “The alternate Lore could’ve had better luck.”

  Sarah scratched at her head, fishing a hair tie from her pocket to put her hair up. “I wonder if it really was Wilbur Black that the other Lore focused on. Our Lore didn’t seem to take note of him. And I have no idea how her mind works, so maybe she saw something I didn’t.”

  Pegasus pointed at the screen. “Our Lore could’ve looked into him and found the report saying he was dead.”

  “Yeah, could be.” Sarah bushed a couple of stubborn hairs back. “I guess I could try talking to her about it directly. Maybe say I saw the file by accident and ask for her opinion. Depending on how that goes, I can ask her to look at mistakes two and three.” Bringing attention to her own oddities wasn’t exactly what she wanted to do, but she’d rather not miss anything that might be important.

  “I can always say it’s my suspicion.”

  “No. Everyone knows I’m the one looking at the files.” She glanced over at Lore’s station. Again, the woman was absent. Sarah was starting to wonder where she’d been disappearing to. “Lore’s not really a spy, is she?”