The smell hit him before the air even finished collapsing: cheap coal soot, wet pavement, and the distinct sweet funk of a nineteen-nineties city alleyway.

Alex didn’t flinch. He just leaned his shoulder against the rusted cinderblock wall, took a slow drag off a cigarette he didn’t really need, and kept his eyes on the narrow gap between the dumpsters.

A hard snap split the quiet, sounding less like lightning and more like a dry pine limb cracking under two feet of snow. The shadow behind the grease bin twisted, sheared sideways, and spat out a girl in oversized denim and scuffed high-tops. She stumbled forward, catching herself on the green steel of the dumpster, coughing hard on the sudden humid exhaust.

Erin. Mid-twenties, though to her, she’d only had the ability since her sixteenth birthday. Back when she was a kid in the late nineties, everyone told her the vivid “daydreams” she had during history class were just an overactive imagination. Then she figured out she wasn’t remembering history… she was visiting it.

“God, that stinks,” she wheezed, brushing dark hair out of her face. She looked down at her hands, grinning with that bright, restless adrenaline she always had after a jump. “Tell me that wasn’t close. I tried to dial it right into the loading dock behind the diner.”

Alex blew a stream of smoke toward the overcast sky. “You missed it by three hundred yards and two decades.”

Erin paused, her grin slipping a fraction. She looked him up and down, taking in the black canvas jacket, the grease-stained jeans, and the way he held himself. He didn’t look old; his face wouldn’t ever give him that luxury; but the sheer gravity of him had shifted. He wasn’t the warlord who’d held an iron grip on a northern settlement eight hundred years ago, nor was he the loud captain of the guard she’d seen in a dozen different sieges. Those lives brought too much noise, too much spotlight.

Lately, Alex preferred the edges. A quiet word in the ear of the right councilman, a discreet nudge to the chief of police, pulling levers from the dark to make sure the right people stayed in charge. He fought on the right side of things, always had, but he stopped putting his name on the banners.

“How long?” she asked, her voice dropping the cocky edge.

“Twenty-two years,” Alex said evenly.

Every single second of it was cataloged behind his eyes. He didn’t get the mercy of forgetting; he remembered the mud in the Ardennes like he’d stepped out of it an hour ago, just like he remembered the smell of the pine grove where she’d vanished back in seventy-four.

“I told you about pushing the margins,” he said, flicking the ash off the end. “You get sloppy, you change a detail, and it ripples. You leave a boot print in the wrong ditch and somebody misses a train.”

“Nobody missed a train, Alex. The timeline bends, it doesn’t shatter.” She stepped toward him, wiping rain off her cheek. “I was only gone for four minutes. I watched the Apollo landing on a three-inch screen in a department store window.”

“And while you watched a television, I buried three partners,” he said, not angry, just cold. “Two heart attacks, one car wreck on the turnpike. The paperwork takes six months every time I have to forge a new identity, and the tax board doesn’t like ghosts.”

He stepped away from the wall, tossing the cigarette butt into a puddle where it hissed out.

“You’re losing your grip on the mark, Erin. The gaps are stretching. Come on. I parked down the block, and we need to talk before your next twitch throws you into the middle of the Atlantic.”