You meet who you might call your lodestar at a campus party you did not want to attend. [1] On principle, you dislike attending things, though you have nowhere better to be; by this point you have died three times. Later, you will be hard-pressed to explain why you let your glossy-haired business-major roommate drag you along. Hard-pressed, really, to explain yourself at all.

Business majors carry no interest for you. Most things do not. You wear one of your stupid reenactment frock-coat outfits and tie a cravat around your telltale throat. In minutes, you are bored half to agony in the corner, Bud Light sweating in your hand. You’ve been trying to get into alcoholism, reasoning it’s more fashionable than your current vice, a halfhearted cutting habit that mostly manifests as an inability to relax around sharp objects. A proper addiction would be a good deal sexier and explain a good deal of your issue. As you have yet to find an alcohol you can taste without gagging, this remains a work in progress.

It’s your roommate who introduces the two of you. Which you might interpret as a debt paid for all the homework you’ve done for her, if you believed she cared enough about you to pay debts. She bounds over swaying-drunk, grinning. The stranger at her heels is not dressed for a house party. She is dressed for a charity gala or perhaps an election, her long-sleeved dress almost trailing, a deep garnet red. Real velvet. It occurs to you that your primary character trait in your roommate’s head may be “dresses weird.”

“Sydney!” your roommate halloos. “Where’d you gooo? You gotta meet Mary-Caine—come on, you’d have more fun if you weren’t in the corner.”

“Oh, god bless you, I doubt that,” you say, tipping your drink in greeting.

Your roommate brays. “Don’t mind her,” she says to the stranger. “Sydney hates everything.”

“Don’t mind them,” you correct, mostly as a matter of form; having hair past your shoulders nets you miss and ma’am on the daily. To the stranger, you extend your hand and your name: “Sydney Archer.”

Her handshake is firm, brick-tight. She is shorter than you are (most people are). Stockier than you are, too (most people are). Not pretty, exactly, but striking, thick dark eyebrows, a jaw that could be hewn from marble. Her hair falls ruler-straight to her shoulders, pale gold—perhaps this is the first snare, that her hair reminds you of high school Lucy. The second snare is her name. “Mary-Caine Adair,” she says, like she’s giving you her business card. “Biochemical engineering and pre-med.”

Look who’s got that figured out and a ballgown for house parties. Your roommate says, “Sydney’s pre-law,” as if you go to class.

Mary-Caine Adair arches an eyebrow at you. You recall, as you slouch a little lower, that you are handsome when you don’t slouch. “I am a wretch,” you say, “and I have no interest in anything, and I did not want to be here.”

Your roommate laughs like she’s under duress. “I need another drink,” she tells Mary-Caine. “Sydney’s cool. She’s just edgy.”

“They,” Mary-Caine Adair says, so calmly you almost miss it. Your roommate does miss it, already halfway to the drink table. The silence and Mary-Caine’s gaze settle on you. Does she expect a thank-you?

You sip your drink. You grimace. She is giving you a look that could melt metal.

“You have quite the name,” you say.

“Lapsed Baptist parents,” Mary-Caine says, blunt, unsmiling. “You have quite the outfit.”

You’ve been told. “Born in the wrong decade.”

Mary-Caine tilts her head, a twitch that feels like a challenge. “What’s the right decade?”

“Seventeen-nineties, if I got to pick.”

There—a flash of triumph in her eyes, lighting her face to wildness. “I thought so. The waistcoat. Double-breasted.” Abruptly her hand is on the flaps of your waistcoat. (Rather close to double breasts, indeed.) Her fingers climb to the froth of burgundy lace at your throat. Accusingly: “I can only find white cravats. Where did you get this?”

She has you practically backed against the wall. Her knuckles are cool against your throat. If she pressed down she would choke you, which is a thought you think with your cunt. Later you will find out she carries a switchblade.

“I do light time travel,” you manage. “Not on purpose.”

It’s a necessary non-answer; you can’t say you sewed it yourself, based on your memories from Revolutionary France. It’s also a dodge that makes you sound like an asshole. But Mary-Caine Adair snorts, which makes your heart squeeze double-time. Then her eyebrows draw together, sharp. “What happened to your neck?”

You realize too late your cravat has slipped down. Her finger presses against your pulse-point, against the scar necklacing your throat.

“Oh,” you say, a touch breathless (she is so very close). “You know. Nothing yet.”

You dress like that because in high school the French Revolution grabbed you by the throat. Which is to say, in high school you had your first kiss. As soon as you graduated—minutes, even, after the cap fell back into your hands—you looked back on those four years as one haze of drudgery. But you remember the kiss. You will remember it every time you dress yourself for the rest of your life. [2]

You were fifteen; you were Charlotte Susan, not Sydney yet; your English teacher had assigned A Tale of Two Cities. After the memory at hand, you would cease caring about assigned reading. From then on you cruised through class with Wikipedia plot summaries and two a.m. essays. You didn’t dislike the books. You’ve always liked classic literature. You just got tired of it, was all, the same as you got tired of after-school theater and violin practice and combing your hair.

But in the memory, you weren’t tired of it yet, potentially because your next-desk neighbor in English had golden hair and always smiled at you. You were not familiar with the feeling this gave you, the buzz in your fingers when she lent you pencils. In fact it bothered you at first. You wanted to talk about Dickens; you got distracted looking at her.

Her name was Lucy Cooper. You trudged with her to the homecoming football game, scoffing at school spirit (even then you were a poseur, and willing to compromise the posing for a girl). You stood with her in the bleachers in the night chill (you were trying to make friends!), then offered her your sweater (you were being polite!), then rubbed your goosebumping arms (well, you couldn’t quite ask for it back) until Lucy took your hand and tugged you down the steps and then, under the bleachers in the dark, kissed you. Her ChapStick was strawberry. Walls down, attacked on all fronts, you were startled enough to put your tongue in her mouth.

She bit it, or your lip, or you bit your own tongue or lip—whatever the case, you came up with blood in your mouth and then, quickly, blood thundering in your ears. “Sorry,” Lucy said, “oh, no, Charlotte, I’m sorry,” and you said, “It’s fine, it’s fine” (ith fine, ith fine) and your vision blurred as it came upon you: The ringing in your ears. The knot in your chest. The full-body trembling, the sweat breaking on your back, the sudden crashing feeling that the end of the world was bearing down like a panicked horse—

You fled for the closest bathroom tasting iron. This was exceedingly poor manners.

Everyone remembers their first—kisses, fucks, panic attacks. But you remember it for more than that. You remember what you saw in the cracked bathroom mirror. At fifteen, you were already fox-faced and droopy-eyed—long straight nose and dark tattered hair, freckles spattering your face and down to your throat, where the scar had not been and now was.

It was a perfect garroted red line. It looked five years faded. It had not been there an hour ago. Had Lucy brushed against you wrong, somehow—but her hands weren’t made of pocketknives. You thought of Dickens, of tumbril carts trundling to the guillotine, of rolling heads. Your fingers found the groove in your skin. Your throat surged with bile. The great crashing-down of the world came upon you again, and with it, conviction:

You understood what it was, though you had never seen anything like it. It was an un-scar, a not-scar, a ghost for a wound that had not happened yet. And oh!—that yet. That is what you would remember, more than the kiss. The terror.

The capital-T Terror came next. If you were not googling variations on “am I gay quiz accurate for girls,” you were in the history section of the library looking for books about the French Revolution. The mark on your throat hadn’t faded. Dabbing concealer over it in the morning, you got to thinking that it looked a little like—well, like your head was going to fall off, didn’t it?

You read dozens of books on the Reign of Terror. You tied your hair back in 1790s-low ponytails. You memorized names and dates and tragedies. You picked a new name from the Dickens. You picked up paralytic nightmares and woke choking. You would be in good company, at least, if they guillotined you. It seemed that every historical hero, every mad genius and towering rebel leader, met a sticky end. And young, too. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Danton, Desmoulins—none of them had hit forty before they were fed to the slick silver teeth of Madame la Guillotine. A perfect narrative circle. Almost Nietzschean (he who beheads traitors might take care …). How beautiful, to believe in anything so madly that you’d die for it. And how mercifully smooth the scar. It would be, you thought, a very sharp blade.

In your later recollections, the scar marked the boundary line between Charlotte Susan and Sydney. In truth, the shift wasn’t immediate. You had the usual tormenting stretch of realization, the appropriate amount of crying in the shower and layering sports bras to flatten unasked-for breasts. But that’s all dull. You prefer to imagine it neatly. Charlotte Susan was a little girl, bouncing curls and bright eyes, unmarked, promising. Sydney stopped wearing their skirted uniform, stopped practicing the violin, stopped doing their homework, looped red ribbons around their neck and called it cravat chic.

You spent a good deal of high school scrolling through digital museum archives while your teachers droned on about calculus and Newton’s laws of motion. You had always been a little odd, a bit dreamy, a touch, so to speak, queer—which meant nobody noticed a difference, which meant, mercifully, no one ever asked if something had changed.

A strange thing happens to you in college. Not the inability to do anything that bores you without feeling like you’re being lit on fire. If that were strange, your professors would ask if you’re okay, rather than sending frustrated emails about how your essays are “quite brilliant,” and if only you would turn them in when they’re due … No, the strange thing is that you come detached from time. [3]

Really, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. You frequently lose hours to your books; you have been late to every doctor’s appointment since you learned to drive. So, spitefully, time has lost track of you. It starts while you’re dreaming—tossing and turning, the rattle of carts in the streets outside your windows. Sometimes you wake into strange rooms, strange silk nightgowns sliding sleek against your skin. You roll over; you go back to sleep.

At first, you suppose this is just what happens when you sit on your laptop every moment you’re in class, skimming the top of your life instead of entering. If at times the setting around you seems to shift—if sometimes, in the corner of your eye, the walls look like aged marble—well, it isn’t as if you’ve been sleeping. You think this until the first time you walk out of class and find yourself on cobblestone streets, the mouth of the Théâtre des Tuileries behind you where the lecture hall ought to be.

You recognize it instantly, of course. That’s your first thought—I know this!—with a spark of excitement your real life hasn’t kindled in months. Then the shock, but that fizzles fast. If you’re going insane, it’s not new. If you’ve really walked straight into revolutionary Paris, you may as well enjoy it. At least you’re dressed the part.

It will take you several time-drifts to realize how your clothes change—your waistcoat is too well-hemmed to be dorm-room DIY, and you never did buy buckled shoes. In the moment, you’re more concerned with scoping out the streets. When you duck into a tavern, the aubergiste greets you as Citizen Archer. You check your chest, surreptitiously (bound, not gone—how cruel this mortal coil!). Then you taste-test absinthe, wander into your thoughts, and come-to in the campus cafeteria.

By the time you meet Mary-Caine Adair, you’ve been everywhere and a half. Mostly revolutionary France, because you are (disgustingly) yourself; but now and then, you stumble into other whens: a crowded jangling theatre district in Renaissance London; a smog-choked New York City that must be early twentieth century; a 2090s Seattle with the swelling Sound slavering at its shores.

It’s not time travel, per se. Closer to time drift, a record-scratch skip to the life you might have had in Georgian England or Early Byzantium. Your new neighbors never seem surprised to see you. Sometimes you wonder after the other Sydneys, the ones whose ghost spaces you’ve stepped into, their lives preserved in chronometric amber—papers and bottles left scattered across floors and desks, books splayed indecent with their spines cracked, beds unmade and musty—and you wonder if there’s ever been a you who escaped from yourself.

You have enough wherewithal to track the calendar and avoid the squares of Paris when the executions start. (Despite the inefficacious cutting bout, you don’t like blood.) Still, the bloody promise of 1793 draws you in—the start of the Terror, the toppling of the king, the rise of the ruthless and radical. When you venture near the slaughter, it’s in the crowd crush at Louis XVI’s execution, a jostle of cheers and sweat and blurring faces. A flash of silver—and at the base of the guillotine’s platform someone cries in a high brassy tone, “For the Republic!”

The owner of the voice is crimson-clad, cockade-badged, his golden hair cropped short. You’re struck by the youngness to his face, the stoniness. You dislike men. But there is something about him, the tug and draw of his thick dark eyebrows, the flair of his red velvet waistcoat—

Ah, you think. There you are.

After the party, you’ll claim you lured Mary-Caine Adair into your bed with ravishing facts about eighteenth-century reenactment fashion. It’s sort of true. Your first texts are about historical costuming; it seems even biochemical engineering pre-med students have useless interests. But really what happens is she keeps showing up where you are. She’s there, and she’s there, and she’s there, and inevitably you’re entangled.

Which is to say: Mary-Caine finds her way into your bed at the same time you realize you have found your way into her various lives. You are unhooked from the warp and weft of time; you are not unhooked from Mary-Caine Adair. Interwoven with her, if anything. In New York, she works in the shirtwaist factory two lines down from 1910s Sydney (who you should call Charlotte, since she’s the lone alternate who still wears the skirts and the name). In Georgian England, you’re both dressed as men again, and Mary-Caine argues over education and labor rights with schoolfellows in the taverns you frequent. In 2090s Seattle, she’s a rising politician on the screens in your apartment, which you suppose a twenty-one-year-old can be when the sea is swallowing history outside.

Over coffee, you ask your base-level Mary-Caine if she’s going into politics. She scoffs. “Change in politics takes forever,” she says, tapping her switchblade on the table. (She tells you she was a menace in high school who carved her initials into every table she could reach. Now she just twiddles with it, which makes regular fidget toys feel ignoble.) “The advancements in medicine right now—that’s going to change the world. Artificial hearts. Genome editing.”

“Lapsed Baptist indeed,” you say. “Playing God.”

Mary-Caine’s eyes pin you to the wall. “I’m not interested in God,” she says. “I’m interested in fixing things.”

Sex with her is nothing like the sex you’ve had before. She fucks you fast and hard, so hard your eyes brim with tears and your thoughts scatter to the winds. Always she sits atop you; always you sprawl beneath her, fuck-drunk and wet-cheeked, and gaze at her until she hisses and crosses her arms. You’re not actually looking at her sports bra; you’re praying for her to purse those stony lips and spit in your face. Even in a time when no one carries a rapier, you would gladly die on the point of her blade.

The first time you die, it’s unexpected. [4] Also, it’s Seattle Sydney’s fault. A full year before you meet Mary-Caine, you wake up in your 2090s apartment with a thudding hangover (criminal—your double has escaped consequences) and no edible foodstuffs (even worse—the chores fall to you!). Head-split, squinting, you stumble outside to find a grocery store. The sun off the Puget Sound blinds you; you are not watching where you are going; you catch a scream of tires and an upside-down window-glimpse of the sky—

You lurch awake in bed. Your bed, that is. The one in your college dorm. You’re wearing flannel pajamas. You stagger to the bathroom and heave like you’re hungover.

The death doesn’t stick. You expect that Seattle Sydney’s life is closed to you now; you go about your day stalked by the guilt of ruining it for someone else. A week later, you wake in their apartment again, unbruised. The same follows for Revolutionary France Sydney (horse-drawn carriage incident), then Georgian England Sydney (cholera; this is your least favorite). In the mirror, you touch your throat, touch the scar. Where did the other Sydneys get theirs? You’re beginning to suspect there’s only one real finale for any of you, written on your body all along.

In the 1790s, you start watching executions. Mostly you are watching for her—him—that rapturous angelic figure in red. But you are watching for the flash of silver, too.

In the fall semester, present-day Mary-Caine (who says you can just call her Mary, fuck’s sake, Sydney, that’s annoying) moves in with you. The upside is you’re obsessed with her. The downside is Mary (owner of an anal-retentive Google Calendar, who starts her work immediately after class and doesn’t stop until it’s done) gets a full-face look at how you live. Specifically: the hills of undone laundry, the accruing mountains of undone homework, the swamp of forgotten appointments on the calendar page you never flipped when the month rolled over. You haven’t been on time in five years. You’ve taken to calling it stupid asshole disorder.

Mary-Caine has none of your problems. Other ones, maybe. Like scaring the pitiful life out of you by showering in the pitch dark. “Saves power,” she explains, the first time you walk in on her—she, perfectly sensible; you, waiting for your heart rate to realize you’re not in Psycho—“Can you get out? I’m naked.”

She has a 4.0; she has an internship; she has a volunteer position administering flu shots. “Maybe you need a job,” she says, as she guts your apartment closet, excising abandoned skirts and half-finished sewing projects. “Routine.”

“I’ve had jobs,” you say. “I sucked at them.” You don’t work during the school year; you can barely do your schoolwork as it is, which bodes well for the rest of your life.

“Hmm,” Mary-Caine says. “You don’t wear this, right? We can donate most of this.”

You draw the line at your reenactment clothes.

Mary-Caine’s wardrobe is paltry next to yours: a few dark button-downs, plain slacks. She doesn’t do her own reenactment costuming anymore; you suppose she’s too busy with serious pursuits. Her last indulgence is the red velvet dress, which hangs mostly untouched. The same color as a young man’s Parisian waistcoat. You wonder, not for the first time, if she knows. If she ever dreams of blood in the streets.

“What,” you say out loud, “is having three outfits too bourgeois?”

She rolls her eyes. “All this stuff comes out of sweatshops, Sydney. And I don’t need to look pretty. Just professional.”

The thing is, you don’t think she knows.

Mary’s other problem is she thinks she can fix you. “Sydney, come on, you can do this,” she says, when you’re lying on the floor staring at the ceiling instead of writing your midterm essay for Historical Theory and Methods.

It’s not that you dislike Historical Theory and Methods. More that the prompt for this paper is so boring, you would rather smash your face into a table than have to write a word. You are getting very near smashing your face into a table. But then you would be bored at the Urgent Care and have to do the paper anyway. Maybe if you hit yourself with a brick, or broke one of your fingers, or tried the cutting thing again and pathetically showed your professor.

“It’s due in three days,” Mary says.

You know. You also know you haven’t turned in a single paper this semester. It’s just that the part of you that knows is bound and gagged. You can’t move. You couldn’t define urgency with a knife to your neck.

“This is untenable,” Mary says. “Go to the doctor.”

You explain to the doctor your general malaise, slothfulness, incapacity, antimotivation, laziness, lateness, apathy for anything but certain historical periods and your girlfriend. (Partner.) (Roommate?) You explain that you have read the WebMD page for depression thirteen hundred times and it cannot explain why sometimes you get manic-fast and whirling, or why mustering focus feels like trying to move against a crowd. You are not going to kill yourself, you explain; you are just going to be like this forever. You suggest that it’s bipolar. Or brain damage. The doctor nods, notes, nods again. He prescribes you an SSRI for depression. You take it for three months and forget to refill the prescription.

You always imagined the guillotine larger. [5] On its platform, crowds frothing around it, it looks small, slender, almost fragile. From the edge of the audience, you wonder what it feels like to kneel on that platform. Terrifying, you guess, but there must be some sense of finality, fulfillment. Resignation, at least.

What would it feel like to touch it? To run your hands—gentle, careful, heedful of splinters—up the smooth, wooden slats, until you reach the blade? To flick your thumb over the steel, a cut so clean it hardly hurts, and feel the metal shiver?

The Dickens character whose name you stole dies on the guillotine. But he dies for something deeper than Jacobin paranoia—that would have been a meaningless end to a meaningless life of sin and self-loathing. He dies to save the husband of the woman he loves. It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to, than I have ever known—

In the middle of a midterm, your thoughts get so closely knotted that you cannot find the next limping word in your sentence. You put your head down on the desk and hope to die. You raise it in a Paris tavern. You register, first, that this cannot be worse for your exam grade; second, that a golden-haired young man is tapping your hand.

“Citizen Archer. I thought I’d find you here,” says Citizen Adair. His voice is lighter than your Mary-Caine’s, winking, but his stare is the same: sharp, appraising, unsmiling. You refrain from checking for 1790s Sydney’s incorrigible makeshift binder. Does Adair know that you resemble him in that regard, if no other? “I hoped to ask your thoughts on my speech for the committee,” Adair says, “but perhaps I ought to take you home.”

Based on the bedroom debris, Citizen Archer drinks more than they eat, which at least saves money when bread prices hike. You’ve gotten in the habit of leaving notes so they know your time here wasn’t time they spent blackout. It occurs to you that it would have been pretty fucking nice of them to write anything back, like explaining how biblically you know this Mary-Caine. Also, to stop getting wasted before you get body custody.

Citizen Adair takes you back to your ye-olde-apartment (fourth floor in a tenement; you haven’t got a fireplace, which you suppose gives Citizen Archer more reason to drink in the winters). You can walk fine, but you indulge a properly platonic appreciation for his touch at your hip. He doesn’t ravish you fiercely on the bed. Instead, on your doorstep, he levels you a stern look. “The republic needs young men with our brains,” he says. “You oughtn’t addle yours for earthly pleasure.”

Young men, he says. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know. It doesn’t mean he does know, either. There were women throughout history who wanted only to be taken seriously, nothing more … transcendent.

“Pleasure is a word for it,” you mutter, tongue-tied more by his closeness than the drink. You want to play with the buttons of his velvety waistcoat. You want to touch the line along his jaw where his golden hair furs into almost-sideburns. Do the bindings under his clothes look the same as yours, a clumsy constriction required of liberty? Does he know you’re exactly the same?

(After he leaves, you read his speech through the absinthe fog. First, you learn that his name is Jean-Baptiste; then, that he’s angling for the next spot under Robespierre on the Committee of Public Safety, despite his age—after all, Saint-Just did it first. You wonder about your ethical responsibility as a time traveler to warn him about the Thermidorian Reaction. You fall asleep in the unmade bed and dream of golden hair in your mouth.)

Mary has just pulled out of you, panting, when you croak, “Can I try something?”

She’s appropriately suspicious. The last time you tried something during sex, she choked you nearly unconscious before realizing you didn’t plan on tapping out. Allegedly, this was upsetting. You still dream of her wire-strong fingers around your throat, index finger against the groove of your scar. How safe the pressure felt, protective. How beautifully empty your mind.

“No risk of hypoxia this time,” you say, already sinking to your knees.

“Promise.” Mary stands bare but for the grace of her sports bra and the harness. Her thighs are feathered with downy hair and dotted with acne scars. You kiss the inside of each leg; then you take her strap-on all the way into your mouth.

This you haven’t done before. There are rules. You nixed Mary’s knife play proposal because blades make you itchy, and Mary nixed your ever putting your fingers inside of her. But this is her inside of you, your hands on her hips, your nails digging into the skin. She stares down at you from on high, and you suck her cock until you gag, tears bleeding through your lashes. You want to see her in bloody velvet. You want to die at her feet.

Mary’s hand clenches around your chin. You look up, captive, drooling.

“Sydney, what the fuck is this?”

Well.

You get her dick out of your mouth like extracting a mozzarella stick and sit back on your haunches. Hoarsely: “Thought it might be hot.”

“It’s not,” Mary says. “It’s stupid. It’s not like I can feel it.” Whirling away, stomping across the room to return to the land of the cockless, she adds a snarling, “Jesus Christ.”

“Sorry,” you say, soft, but she doesn’t turn around.

The other Sydneys are allergic to life. Unless this is your influence, since you’re the one who keeps on dying. But you’re not the one who: catches the Bubonic plague (Renaissance England Sydney; close quarters in a theater troupe); chooses to live in a city choked by air pollution (2090s Seattle Sydney; lung problem); refuses to see a doctor about a gash (Georgian England Sydney, who you suspect made the gash in the first place); enlists in the army with a sword (Early Byzantium Sydney; not an athlete); or starts working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (1910s New York Charlotte, though, to be fair, maybe you should have predicted that one). You are the one who drinks yourself to alcohol poisoning in the Paris tavern, but 1790s Sydney is the one who put your tolerance sky-high, so it feels like their fault.

Yet 1790s Sydney is the best off. They managed to befriend Jean-Baptiste Adair. More and more often, you drift into Paris to find Citizen Adair hunched over your desk, scribbling orations: The republic should be rid of Marie Antoinette. The war on Lyon must be swiftly ended. He slides them to you across the table. You mark up his manuscripts with more focus than you did your roommate’s homework. Sometimes, in the passing of paper over inkwells, his hand brushes yours.

Mary doesn’t often linger after she fucks you. She always has somewhere to be; she’s started her med-school apps months early, for which you hate her. But now and then she stays, head on your shoulder, one hand stroking your hair, one hand squeezing gently at your breasts.

At least someone’s getting pleasure out of those. “I’ll probably cut these off someday,” you tell her, yawning. For the sake of your neck, you amend, “Supposing I live that long.”

Mary circles her thumb slowly around your nipple till you shiver. “Pity.”

“You could come with me. Two-for-one deal. We’d match.”

She goes still at your side. “Come with you to cut my tits off.”

“You don’t think you’d ever want to?” you drawl, because you love sticking your hand close to fire. “You wouldn’t have to fuck with your bra on.”

Mary rolls away like your touch scalds.

“Sydney,” she says—soft as silver, cool as wood. “I don’t think I’m anything like you at all.”

You die.
You die.
You die.
You die.
You die.
You’re getting quite good at it, really.

When finals loom, you are four essays overdue. You think about walking in front of a car. You think about dropping out. But the only idea you have for what to do after that is to walk in front of a car. When you slink out of your last class, you can barely stumble across campus. You think of grabbing someone’s shoulders, pulling their face close to yours and begging: Don’t you find this half as hard as I do? Doesn’t anybody see how hard this is? Doesn’t anybody see?

At home, you lie on the floor in the fetal position for three hours. Then you scrape yourself up and sit at the counter with your laptop and a coffee. When Mary gets home, you do your best to ignore her, to tread carefully. You succeed until she sniffs your cup.

“Shall I be offended?” you ask, arch. You’ve discovered that if you drink a great deal of caffeine, you can shift yourself from too fast to pin down a thought to just alert enough to write a paper. You expound on how this has proven more effective than your antidepressants.

Mary listens, which is more than she owes you, considering your general and specific bullshit. Then, lips pursed, fire-eyed, she says, “I don’t think medication can fix you. It doesn’t make anyone a better person. It just makes you a better cog in the capitalist machine.”

“What a wonderful way to think about it,” you intone. “That means I haven’t got to do anything.”

It remains wonderful until you crawl into bed. Then the words turn over in your head again. I don’t think medication can fix you. Clearly that’s true. Oh, God, that is going to be true forever.

1910s New York Charlotte slips stumbling-drunk into the Hudson River, haunted by dreams of the fire. 2090s Seattle Sydney is recurrently dying of lung issues. Which sucks.

You scrape through finals on five extensions and the grace of your business-law professor. By the time you’re done, winter break is half-withered, along with Mary’s patience. She has a host of solutions (pomodoro timer / white noise / take a walk / go to bed earlier / new book once you’ve worked / sleep less / sleep more / energy drink / go back to the doctor / Sydney please / go back to the fuck / ing doctor this isn’t how nor / mal people live) which you don’t care to try, because it’s exhausting enough getting out of bed every day.

“You should have gone home for break,” you tell her from the floor.

“Yeah,” Mary says, “I fucking should have, but you can’t be here alone.”

Very little pierces your numbness. This shouldn’t feel like she’s stepped on your stomach. You curl into a spidery ball on the floor and consider that stepping on your stomach would be better, as you would probably get off on that.

She isn’t looking at you. She’s annotating one of your history books, probably writing little anti-monarchist jabs in the margins. “Maybe you should go home. Take a sabbatical. Lean on your parents.”

Even stupid assholes can read between the lines. She thinks you’re either childish or sick; someone needs to scoop soup into your mouth and do your laundry. What a terrible use of time for Mary-Caine Adair, who means to fix the world.

“I don’t talk to them much,” you say limply.

“Oh,” Mary says. Like she’s talking around glass in her mouth. “Is it because …”

You need a moment to catch her drift. Lately she’s given gender—yours, hers, anyone’s—a wide berth.

“Oh, they don’t give a damn,” you say. “They put Sydney on my birthday cards.”

“Nice of them,” Mary says, in a tone that makes you clench. Perhaps not so lapsed Baptist, after all.

“I assure you, there is no tragic backstory,” you say. “It’s just—” You gesture halfheartedly. You almost say beyond medication, but if she knows that it bothered you, she will most likely huff and explain she didn’t mean it like that, which you know, which does not help, because knowing never helps you, because nothing does.

“Hmm,” Mary says.

She says it like maybe you are fundamentally broken. But she finds you the number of a psychiatrist specializing in ADHD and trauma. You take the slot you’re offered, eight a.m., and resolve to get out of bed before noon; you show up half an hour late to a cancelled appointment.

There is an execution every day now in 1793. Citizen Adair no longer stands at the guillotine’s side shouting jubilantly for the Republic; he hangs back, lips pressed pale, cheeks going gaunt. The prisoners marched to the platform are faces you recognize, men who Jean-Baptiste whispered with in taverns. Here it begins, you suppose: the snake eating its own manic-paranoiac tail. The heat rises in the city; the tension rises in the Committee of Public Safety. Citizen Adair says you have the mind to speak for Robespierre, but you’d risk the madhouse trying to convince him you already know what’s coming. This history was written before you stepped in, and you have never had it in you to care very much about anything.

The blade falls. A thin finger of blood runs down the silver, slow as a caress. When you dream, it’s all lips on cool metal, teeth in your throat, pressure between your thighs until a bright spike of pain brings you finally to thoughtlessness.

Renaissance England Sydney’s theater troupe botches a performance. The trapdoor opens too early; you fall through the stage; the ladder beneath goes right through your neck.

You honestly don’t care at first. Acting’s dull; the only part you like is stitching up the costumes, and you haven’t even run into Shakespeare. At least it wasn’t plague this time. It takes you some weeks to realize you haven’t gone back to the Renaissance since. You don’t understand until Byzantine Sydney catches a sword to the throat and you never see Byzantium again. Back in your apartment, you throw up in the sink. In the mirror, you touch your neck, picturing the ladder spearing through your throat, bursting from the skin at the center of your scar.

You wake up with a bruised knee. You have not bruised your knee; you have not done anything except lie on the floor and, in your brief moments of quickness, start three sewing projects at once and abandon them all. You touch your knee. You touch your throat. You wonder. [6]

Pathologically, you’re ready for this. It has been five full days since you washed your hair, ten since you did a dish, twenty since you held a sword or walked a stage. Mary speaks to you very little lately, which you can’t hold against her; you deserve to be knocked about in a way you aren’t hot for. You camp out in the kitchen and wait for her to come back in a mood.
She does. As usual, she doesn’t say why. You watch her hang her coat; you rest your hand on your chin and drawl, “By the by, I’m not going back to the doctor.”

Mary cuts her eyes at you.

“God has decreed I shall be like this forever,” you say, drawing a line in the grime on the kitchen table, “and who am I to deny his will.”

“Well, that’s fucking stupid.”

“I disagree!” you say. “I assume it’s what you were thinking when you said you could never transition—”

And Mary hisses, “Sydney, shut the fuck up.”

Against all odds, this manages to scare you—not the words but the fact of her losing her temper. Then the fact of Mary-Caine struck speechless, sputtering, before she bursts out, “Jesus, what is actually wrong with you? Do you ever think maybe I feel this way because of you?”—This time she does step closer, and you brace—“I get it, you don’t care about anything, you just— And now you, you’ve put all these fucking ideas in my head, like I don’t have enough to worry about, like— Like— You know I didn’t even think about it before you said!”

She will hit you any moment. She will slam your leg into the wall, and you’ll thank her for giving you something to cry about for once.

“—and you’re so fucking pretentious, oh, of course you know what Mary-Caine’s problem is. Sydney the problem-solver. Have you ever fucking tried to solve anything?”

Her face close to tears violates the natural order. She’s meant to look stoic, marble. You stare at her, and she stares at you, and you open your mouth, and she whirls and marches back out.

You taste bile. You go into your bedroom and close the door and slam your knee into the wall until you can’t feel the throb.

The next morning, you wake up in Jean-Baptiste’s apartment, face pressed into his daybed cushions. Your cravat has come untucked, which you have the presence of mind to find embarrassing.

“Sydney,” Jean-Baptiste says softly.

You rise up onto your elbows, which hurts (no human body should be subjected to pre-GC2B binders this long). “Salutations. Where am I, colleague dear?”

“You stayed late. I didn’t wish to make you walk in the dark. These are … distrustful days. I hear of spies.”

He perches half-undressed on the arm of the couch. You wouldn’t see it if you didn’t know what to look for, but in his state of dishabille, you can make out the lines of cloth pressing through his undershirt. You don’t understand how 1790s Mary-Caine got somewhere your Mary-Caine can’t. He looks at you with sickening kindness. You want to cry into his shoulder like a child, beg him to tell you what to do.

Rising makes your whole chest throb. You sit back down. Jean-Baptiste’s eyebrows draw together. “Sydney,” he says, “are you ill?,” because of course he’s dealt with 1790s Sydney drunk. You want him to touch you. Your hands go to your first button.

“Mary, I’m sorry,” you say, tremulous. The name lands: a jump in his hands, the shine of his wide eyes in the dark. “I’m not— I shouldn’t be here. With you. But I need to know if you know about me.”

“Sydney,” Jean-Baptiste says as you let your waistcoat fall, prying apart layers of wool and linen. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean—”

You catch his hand and plunge it down your shirt. Shock lights his face first, then open horror.

“Sorry,” you chatter-tooth out. “Sorry. I don’t— I just wanted—”

His expression falls away with his hand. “Citizen Archer,” he says, rising, “I think you should go.”

Georgian England Sydney gets their throat slit in a bar fight you suspect they started. You can’t say for sure; you get into their skin just in time to taste the blood. Waking in the apartment, you think, No, please, stop, stop ruining it—

New York Charlotte has a noose of fabric scraps in her shabby tenement room. You can’t burn it; she hasn’t kept candles since the first death by factory fire. You worry through your shirtwaist shift, wondering what kind of note to write her, until the fire repeats and the building crumples and you take a spar of rebar to the throat and it stops mattering.

The day before spring semester starts, Mary knocks on your bedroom door.

“Hey,” she says when you open it (your hair unwashed and tangled, your pajamas rumpled). “I wanted to say sorry.”

“I fear you have our roles mixed up,” you say feebly.

She shifts her weight like she’s sizing you up in the ring, studying your tells. “I shouldn’t have screamed at you. I just— Sydney, I don’t know how to help you. It’s like you don’t want to be helped. So I don’t know what to do.”

The school year looms, long-shadowed. Every day there is something new to do, something new sliding away from you, something new you have forgotten and need to make up, and you keep waiting for it all to make sense. You keep waiting and it never comes.

“I’m sorry,” you tell her. “I really am.” I’m in love with you, you want to say. I’m trying, I promise, it just doesn’t look like it, you want to say, but you aren’t sure if that one’s true anymore.

Mary does a strange thing then. She smiles: awkward, too toothy, like she never learned how. “It’s okay,” she says. “We’ll figure it out. There’s got to be—something that helps you. I’m not going to, to abandon you just because the meds … We just have to find something else.”

We, like you’ve ever raised a hand to help yourself. You see it like a prophecy: She will make your life her work, and you will waste it on her. In the 2090s, Seattle Sydney reacts catastrophically to a new chemical for purifying water. As you tear at your closing throat, blood welling under your nails, you register that anaphylaxis is worse than cholera. A knot in your lungs, a roar in your ears, a crashing wave of doom: it feels so like your old panic attacks.

They come for 1790s Sydney in the early hours of the morning. [7]

You are awake, of course (no change of era can fix your sleeping habits). Poorly dressed, hair brambled, breasts unbound. You do not recognize most of the men who break down your door. You recognize the one in red.

To his credit, he doesn’t hang back in shame. He’s the one who stands before you while the others wrench your hands behind your back. “Citizen Archer,” he says, “you have been accused of plotting against the Republic. Can you prove those accusations false?”

How young he looks. How old you feel. The set of his lips is the same stony challenge as always—how much is he gambling? Does he hope this will make his name, brand him a savior of the revolution, save him from the blade? Does he expect you to confess, to deny it, or to thrust forth the sheaves of paper covered in both of your handwriting and drag the both of you down? You have done a great deal of dragging Citizen Adair down. If anyone could survive the revolution, you think. If anyone could change the world.

“Mary,” you say, soft enough that only he will hear, and the name’s sweet on your lips. “Mary-Caine.” Oh, you sorry soul, you love her bad. And you think you see him realize it then, too late, a flash in his eyes like the fall of a blade.

“If I might have my arms,” you say. When they let go, you tie your ponytail with tingling wrists, the way it ought to look, messy enough to edge rakish; then you let them bind your hands.

The second time you say, “Can I try something?”—both of you panting, Mary pressed sweaty against you—she says, “What if I just say no.”

“You haven’t got to do it,” you say. Hands at your cravat: “I just figured, you’ve got the switchblade, and I dearly wish you’d cut this off me.”

The glint in Mary’s gaze hurts worse than the lines she starts to draw on both your forearms—a last kindness; you were always too scared to bleed for her before. The red makes your stomach turn. You shut your eyes. You can at least appreciate her surgical precision. She is going to be a brilliant doctor. How far will Seattle Mary-Caine rise? Will Georgian England Mary-Caine drag workers’ rights from the hands of the rich? Will 1910s New York Mary-Caine raise her burned hands from the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and spark a labor revolution?

“The waistcoat?” Mary murmurs against your skin, and you shrug. You don’t give a damn about it anymore. She cuts through the shoulders. It sheaves off you like a corn husk. Then your undershirt. Not your binder. Hell, maybe she’ll wear it.

The chill of the blade against your neck. The tug on your cravat like that first night when she backed you to the wall. Suddenly you get it—how it feels on your knees on the guillotine platform. Not resignation after all. Just dazzling, crashing relief. [8]

Mary’s switchblade snips the last threads. Here it is, you think, my better thing; you fall grinning onto the knife.

Endnotes

1. Warning: this story ends with the loss of your head. [return]

2. In the pre-revolutionary era, capital punishment meant drawing and quartering: tying the accused to four horses and sending them in four directions. The guillotine was conceived as swifter, painless, more humane. [return]

3. After storming the Bastille, revolutionaries overthrew the French calendar. The months were shuffled and renamed; 1792 was declared Year One of the French Republic, the year that saw the first use of the guillotine. [return]

4. During the “Reign of Terror,” the new republic’s Committee of Public Safety, seized by paranoia, consigned over sixteen thousand to the guillotine. Most were eventually guillotined themselves, most famously the radical Robespierre. [return]

5. Nearly thirty thousand people died in the Reign of Terror. It is, of course, impossible to calculate how many died of malnutrition pre-revolution. [return]

6. Public executions were public entertainment. The first demonstration of the guillotine was widely attended. Spectators left disappointed by its swiftness; they had hoped for a more dramatic show. [return]

7. Robespierre’s protégé was Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, the “angel of death.” Arrested with Robespierre, he refused to speak until his execution. [return]

8. Detained by his enemies, Robespierre attempted suicide to preempt the guillotine. He survived the attempt and was brought to the guillotine in excruciating pain, his last words a scream of agony.

Editor: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors