I paused for the briefest moment. “I found it in Jonah’s room. On my birthday.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why haven’t you turned it in?”

“I don’t know. I just … wanted something of his, I guess.”

I hadn’t meant for her to know about the cuff, but relief at being able to set down one secret lifted a little weight from my shoulders. Still, telling her that I’d used the cuff to see Caesarion … I couldn’t. “Did you see the girl that left about ten minutes before the fire started?”

Analeigh frowned, probably trying to keep up with my train of thought. “The one who said she was sick and threw up on the forelady?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, I saw. Lucky girl.”

“What if she wasn’t just a lucky girl? What if she knew what was about to happen? That if she didn’t get out then she never would.”

Silence stretched between us as our eyes locked, Analeigh chewing on her bottom lip the way she always did while she was thinking. “How would she know?”

“Maybe someone told her.”

“Who would just tell that one girl, Kaia? If someone knew about the fire—and no one did, because none of the contemporary investigations or any of our reflections on the time period have revealed any indication of arson—but if they did, why wouldn’t they warn everyone?”

The questions were so Analeigh. She saw everything, remembered everything, and analyzed it quicker than any other Historian in our class, or any class, for that matter.

“That girl? Her name was Rosie Shapiro. She’s Jonah’s True.” I paused, running my fingers over the dials on his cuff. “I think he warned her.”

Chapter Ten

“What?” Analeigh gasped, her mouth falling open.

“I saw it in her eyes. She knew.”

My best friend wasted no time grabbing her personal comp and punching up the archived files on the Triangle Fire. The holo-files could only be accessed from the Archives, along with all of the stored reflection, but everything else could be viewed remotely.

“It says here that Rosie Shapiro died in the fire. That she jumped out the window on the eighth floor and was claimed by her family two days later.”

I nod. “I know. I saw it before we left, when I was looking her up.”

Analeigh kept scrolling, her eyebrows drawn into a sharp point across the bridge of her nose. “Wait. Oh my stars, look at this.”

Her face went white as she shoved her comp in my face. I grabbed it, scanning the list containing details on over a hundred dead girls without seeing anything worth freaking out over. “What?”

“There are two records for Rosie Shapiro.” She leaned over and stabbed her finger at the screen, rolling it back up until she found the entry that caught her eye. “There.”

Her breathless wheezing infected my own nerves. I peered at the screen, my heart catching in my chest when I saw what she’d seen a moment ago: another Rosie Shapiro. She had the same date of birth as the one on Jonah’s little blue card, but her date of death was different. According to this second archive, Rosie Shapiro had escaped the Triangle factory via the roof and died in Chicago, Illinois at the age of eighty-seven.

“Impossible,” I breathed, unwilling to admit that my brother had changed history even after seeing her leave the building with my own two eyes.

“Well, something happened, because according to our archives, Rosie Shapiro both survived and perished in that fire we saw today.” Analeigh paused. “She survived. Somehow. Even though in those original victim rosters, she definitely didn’t.”

“It was Jonah.” My heart settled a little with the admission, making room for the slightest bit of wonder. The tiniest sliver of jealousy that Jonah had been able to save the girl he loved.

At what cost?

Analeigh took the comp back, reading in silence. Her fingers worried at the pieces of lint on her quilt as my mind stumbled through the implications of this entire scenario. The only thing we knew for sure was that Rosie left the Triangle when she wasn’t meant to. I felt pretty solid in my assumption that Jonah had warned her at some point during his stint with the Historians, given their connection, but what I couldn’t wrap my mind around was how he could have known the resulting ripples wouldn’t implode the world as we knew it.

“Does it say any more about her? The Rosie that lived?”

“A little. She married and moved to Chicago in her early twenties. Had six children with her husband—they were married for fifty years before he died. She did an interview once for the paper about surviving the tragedy, and said how every year on March 25th she had a panic attack. That she never locked her doors again, not ever, after that day.” Analeigh pushed her glasses up on her nose, squinting closer at the screen. The gears in her head ground almost audibly as she tried to make sense of this unique and possibly horrifying scenario. “If Jonah really changed this, if he really warned her and she lived when she wasn’t supposed to, he could have killed us all, Kaia.”

The Elders taught us that the reason we couldn’t interact at all was because no one could predict the spiderweb effect of altering even one insignificant life, one innocuous day. There were simply too many options. Perhaps Rosie Shapiro had been no one of consequence, but what if she’d given birth to a murderer who’d strangled John F. Kennedy before he became president? From there, what if the man elected in his place had started a nuclear war with Cuba?

The entire existence of human history could be altered by slipping a single, tiny block out of place. Saving Rosie Shapiro could have made every single one of us disappear.

As much as I loved my brother, as hard as I wanted to believe in him, my throat burned with shame. Tears filled my eyes and I bit my lip as I nodded, bunching the quilt in my fists. “I know.”

The alarm signaling the end of lunch interrupted us, but neither of us moved. We were due in the next Reflection session in five minutes for a quick debrief on the Triangle Fire so that didn’t leave much time for melting down. Along with all of the thoughts about my brother and the rules we’d both broken, I was wondering how Rosie lived with herself all those years. How could she leave all of those girls to die?

The answer to the last question seemed obvious enough—she had to, and Jonah would have known that. If those 146 girls hadn’t died, women’s and workers’ rights would have been delayed by years. The leaps the United States made in the early twentieth century in proper working conditions, which propelled the country to a place of prominence in the world, would have been hampered or stalled.

It horrified me that people had to see those burned, broken bodies lying in the street with their own eyes before taking action made sense to them. But they hadn’t died for nothing.

“If he saved her, Kaia, when do you think he did it?” Analeigh’s voice shook. It brought me back to the present. Genesis. Sanchi.

“I don’t know.” I hadn’t thought about the logistics. Jonah had disappeared nearly three years ago, the year he’d been certified a full Historian. “Maybe that’s what made him leave.”

The Elders could have found out. The lecture Booth had passed along yesterday sprang to mind, along with his mention of my brother and the strange reference to changing the past—it sort of made sense.

He could have been talking about Jonah and Rosie.

“If it’s been three years, we should have seen repercussions from the alteration.” Analeigh stood, running her fingers through her long blond waves. Bags drooped under her eyes that hadn’t been there before we left this morning.

Fatigue rolled balls of lead through my limbs, too. I wanted to skip the afternoon and hide under the covers. I wanted to forget the looks on those girls’ faces as they leaped to their deaths, stop wondering what Jonah had done and whether or not he had broken everything. Most of all, I wanted—needed—to forget the whisper in the back of my mind wondering if I could do the same for Caesarion. Save him.