“Gesundheit.”

The sensation of a sneeze, which had arrived first, was unmistakable.

The buzz. The slight tinnitus in the ears. The sprites of light that danced in one’s vision.

A time leap was always a bit jarring to the senses. 

Garry reappeared an instant later, six inches above the floor and dropped onto his knees.

“Ow.”

I suppose, under the circumstances, that was a reasonably encouraging thing for him to say.

Maddie screamed. Theo jumped backward into the bookcase. I grabbed the edge of the table, although I’m not sure why. Tables are famously useless during temporal emergencies.

Garry stayed on all fours for a moment, blinking hard.

“Everybody still here?”

“No,” I said.

He looked up.

That was when he noticed the empty chair.

Winnie’s chair.

Nobody said anything.

The clock on the wall clicked.

24 seconds.

Winnie had been gone for twenty-four seconds.

That doesn’t sound like very long. It takes about twenty-four seconds to tie a shoe if you aren’t in a hurry. It takes about twenty-four seconds for Maddie to decide whether she wants chocolate or vanilla ice cream, although she will choose chocolate every time.

But during a warp storm, twenty-four seconds is a very long time.

Especially if you are the person missing.

“Where did you go?” Theo asked.

Garry sat back, exhausted, against the sofa.

“Tuesday.”

“Which Tuesday?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“I was busy falling through Tuesday, Theo.”

The house groaned around us.

Not the ordinary sort of groan houses make when wood cools or foundations settle. This one began low beneath our feet, climbed through the walls, and ended somewhere above the ceiling in a sound like a gigantic finger being dragged around the rim of a wineglass.

The windows bowed inward.

Then outward.

Then inward again.

“Another swell,” I said.

We all knew that.

Nobody needed me to say it.

The warp storm had been building for eleven hours and forty-three minutes, although “building” makes it sound as if it had begun somewhere and was traveling toward us.

It hadn’t.

It was everywhere. Or nearly everywhere.

Dr. Voss had once explained that space-time wasn’t really two things, space and time, but one thing. A four-dimensional fabric in which three directions tell you where and one tells you when. Gravity bends that fabric. Mass bends it. Energy bends it.

Enough energy can make it do very peculiar things.

And apparently, somewhere in the galaxy, someone, or something, had given it a good hard shake.

Now the ripples were crossing one another.

Interfering.

Amplifying.

Folding.

And we were caught inside the temporal equivalent of a hurricane. Except hurricanes merely threw houses around.

This one threw Tuesdays.

The clock clicked again.

25 seconds.

“Winnie!” Maddie called.

There was no reason to call.

Still, I was glad she did.

“Winnie!”

Nothing.

Garry pulled himself to his feet. “I saw something.”

We all turned.

“When?”

“When I was gone.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know where.”

“Garry.”

“I DON’T KNOW, AGATHA.”

He almost never shouted.

That frightened me more than the windows.

He rubbed his face.

“There were stars. Lots of them. And they were moving.”

“Moving how?”

He looked at me as if to say “You know how.”

“Stars move.”

“Not like this.”

The clock clicked.

26 seconds.

I looked at Theo.

Theo looked at Garry.

Garry looked at Maddie.

And Maddie looked at me.

Nobody spoke.

Sometimes people imagine that important decisions come with speeches.

They don’t.

The truly important ones often happen in silence because everybody in the room reaches the same conclusion at approximately the same moment.

Winnie wasn’t coming back.

Not on her own, at least.

And we all knew it.

I turned toward the lamp.

Maddie saw me do it.

“No.”

An antique lamp stood on the end table beside the sofa. Brass base. Crooked shade. Sixty-watt-equivalent LED bulb.

Warm white.

Three thousand kelvin.

I knew because I had changed it myself.

“Agatha.”

I stared directly into it.

“DON’T!”

Too late.

The photic reflex had already begun. A tiny itch blossomed high inside my nose.

There are things your body decides before you do. Pull your hand from a hot stove. Blink when something flies toward your eye. Kick your leg when a doctor taps the tendon beneath your kneecap.

And, if you happen to be one of somewhere around one in four people, when you stare into a bright enough light…

My nose tingled.

“Oh no,” Garry whispered.

The photic sneeze reflex.

Scientists had much fancier names for it. The best one was ACHOO syndrome, which stood for Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst.

I always suspected someone had invented the acronym first and worked backward. But whatever you called it, the theory was fairly simple.

A bright light hits the retina.

The optic nerve carries the news toward the brain.

And somewhere in all that electrical traffic, the signal gets its wires crossed with the trigeminal nerve…the enormous sensory network responsible for, among other things, telling your brain what was happening inside your nose.

Then the brain receives a message that was never sent.

IRRITANT DETECTED.

I prepared to sneeze.

Normally, this was mildly inconvenient. For me, at this particular moment, it was transportation.

My eyes began to water.

The storm groaned again. The lamp stretched upward. For perhaps half a second, it was eight feet tall.

Then two inches.

Then normal.

27 seconds.

“Agatha, please,” Maddie said.

I didn’t look at her.

If I looked away from the lamp, I might lose it.

The sneeze was building.

First came the tickle.

Then the pressure.

My core tightened.

The muscles between my ribs prepared themselves.

My throat opened.

My lungs began taking in air without asking permission.

Sneezing is surprisingly violent. A coordinated neurological event involving your face, throat, chest, diaphragm and abdomen, all recruited in fractions of a second to expel something your nervous system has decided does not belong inside you.

Except I wasn’t trying to expel dust.

I was trying to expel myself.

“Agatha,” Theo said quietly, “the probability…”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

One chance in 10⁵⁷. Approximately, that is.

We had calculated it once as a joke.

The odds that an uncontrolled manual jump during a major temporal disturbance would intersect the path of one specific human being, assuming an accessible space-time volume of…

It didn’t matter.

One in 10⁵⁷.

A one followed by fifty-seven zeroes.

People are bad at understanding numbers that large.

A million feels large. A billion feels larger.

But 10⁵⁷ is the sort of number that stops being a number and becomes a polite mathematical way of saying:

You must be kidding.

The chance of finding Winnie was nearly zero.

The chance of finding her and returning was even worse.

My nose twitched again.

“Maybe she’ll come back,” Maddie said, quickly and in a panic.

28 seconds.

“She might.”

“Then wait.”

Another pressure wave passed through the room.

The carpet rippled. The books on the shelves briefly became a flock of startled birds before remembering they were books.

I swallowed. That was new.

“Agatha.”

I finally looked at my sister.

Maddie was ten and had two front teeth slightly too large for her face and a habit of sleeping with one sock on. She could explain quantum entanglement using two stuffed rabbits and a shoelace, but she still refused to go into the basement alone.

She knew exactly what I was doing.

More importantly, she knew exactly what might happen.

“I’ll find her,” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“No.”

“You could end up anywhere.”

“Yes.”

“Any when.”

“Yes.”

“You could end up before Earth exists.”

“I know.”

“Or after the Sun…”

“Maddie!”

Her mouth closed.

The sneeze was close now.

Very close.

There is a strange moment just before a sneeze when your body belongs almost entirely to itself.

Your eyelids narrow. Your jaw loosens. Your lungs fill.

Every voluntary plan is temporarily demoted beneath a reflex older than language.

I felt the pressure gather behind my face. The room began to hum…not the storm.

Me.

The first time it happened, I was six. I sneezed at the sun and spent eleven minutes in 1843. That had been difficult to explain.

Now I could feel the boundary thinning around me.

The warp storm had weakened the normal architecture of time so badly that every second seemed loosely attached to the next.

I imagined them as pages in a book with the binding cut away. All you needed was a gust of wind.

Or a sneeze.

29 seconds.

I looked at Garry.

He gave me the smallest nod.

Theo’s eyes were wet.

He pretended they weren’t.

Maddie stared at me as though she were trying to memorize my face.

I hated that.

So I smiled.

Not because I wasn’t afraid. Actually, I was terrified. But courage is a strange thing.

People talk about it as though it replaces fear.

It doesn’t.

Fear is always with you. Your hands still shake. Your heart still pounds. Your stomach still feels hollow.

Courage just decides something else is more important.

Winnie was somewhere. Not nowhere. And that was what was important right now.

Somewhere, in the impossible roaring ocean of space-time, Winnie existed.

Maybe ten minutes ago. Maybe ten million years from now.

Maybe on Earth. Maybe on a planet whose light hadn’t reached Earth yet.

Maybe she was standing in this exact room in the year 3126, shouting our names into dust.

But somewhere. And somewhere could be found.

My lungs filled.

My eyes squeezed shut.

The room vanished behind a red haze of capillaries and light.

The storm rose around me.

I thought of Winnie. Only Winnie.

Her ridiculous laugh.

Her purple shoelaces.

The way she said technically whenever she was about to tell you that you were wrong.

Twenty-nine seconds.

Thirty.

My nose burned.

The reflex took over.

And in the final fraction of a second, before my diaphragm contracted and the universe opened beneath my feet, I heard Maddie say my name.

Then…

“Achoo!!”