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“There’s more,” she says. “Something I didn’t yet know how to speak of.”

Mannie glances at her sharply. “Amelia.”

“No,” she says, and for the first time there’s steel in her spine. “They must hear it.”

She opens the portfolio. When she draws out the next sheet, I know at once she’s spent a great deal of time on it.

“When I touched the tablet, a pathway led me to this vision here. I could feel the significance of it. There was no escaping watching the way this scene played out.”

It shows a narrow room, close and shadowed. A man stands in the foreground, his face only partly turned, his coat cut in a fashion nearer our own time. Opposite him stands another figure in a hooded cloak. Smaller. Slighter. A woman, if the shape of her is anything to go by.

In the man’s hands is a hand-drawn picture of a thing I know at once.

A broken half of basalt with clear markings.

“In the dream, the cloaked figure speaks to him. Not always clearly, but after I touched the tablet, the words came sharper.” Amelia swallows. “She calls him Town Major.”

Robert steps nearer the table so abruptly that Róisín startles beside me.

“Can you place it?” he asks. Robert’s not built for panic, so the moment I hear it in him, I know we’re in for it. “Any date at all?”

Amelia shakes her head once. “Not exactly. Only that it’s recent. Recent enough that in the dream, they speak of the raid. Of Oliver Bond’s house.” Her fingers tighten at her sides. “And of the great discovery made there.”

The blood leaves Robert’s face so quickly it’s almost frightening to watch. For one terrible moment, he looks neither angry nor even shocked, but sick. Amelia looks concerned by his reaction.

Then he turns his head slowly toward Róisín.

And that—more than anything—appears to confuse Amelia. Whatever she expected, it wasn’t this. It looks like she’s about to reach out and touch him when he speaks.

“I’m sorry, Rosie.”

He says it with such naked misery that I know this is about to truly hurt her.

She stares at him, one hand coming to rest at her throat, her face beginning to change. “For what?”

Robert’s throat works once.

“The newly appointed Town Major,” he says. “It’s Sirr.”

He doesn’t need to say the rest. She only needed to tell me that name once for it to be branded into my brain.

Róisín makes a sound I hope never to hear again—small, aching, and torn clean out of her.

“No.”

She folds before I can think, and I barely catch her, my arm locking around her before she hits the floor.

“No!” she cries, the word torn raw from her. Then the rest comes in a rush. “Damn him. Damn them. Him, his mother, her mother, and every cursed soul that ever raised such evil into the world. Useless, filthy, wicked lot of them.”

She’s sobbing now, one hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking. She’s proud enough that she’d sooner spill blood than tears in front of others, and seeing them forced out of her like this makes something savage rise in me.

Ellen steps quietly to Amelia’s side. Leaning near, she murmurs something too low for me to catch over the broken sound of Róisín’s crying.

Amelia goes still. Then she turns to look at Róisín, and the sorrow that comes over her face is so stricken it needs no explanation.

She bends her head closer to Ellen, but I catch the shape of the words in her mouth. “I didn’t know.”

Ellen answers in the same soft voice, tears bright in her own eyes.