Read Chapter 13: The Aftermath of a Dance

The river water was still cold in his bones when Alex stumbled through the door of a café on the Rue Saint-Honoré, dripping onto the sawdust floor. The proprietor looked up from behind his counter, took in the soaked coat, the pale face, the way Alex's hands trembled as he gripped the doorframe, and said nothing. Paris in July had seen stranger sights.

Alex slid into a corner table with his back to the wall. The café was nearly empty—a few old men nursing glasses of wine, a woman reading a broadsheet by the window. No red heels. No one watching.

He ordered coffee and stared at his hands while he waited for it. The map fragment was gone, dissolved in the Seine's murky embrace. Jean-Baptiste's careful work, the partial layout of the Bastille's lower levels, all of it reduced to pulp in a river that didn't care about revolutions.

But that wasn't what unsettled him most.

The assassin had called him *Alexandre*.

Not *Renard*, the name he'd adopted. Not *monsieur* or *citizen* or any of the generic addresses that kept him invisible in the chaos of Paris. The man had used his chosen identity, the one he'd built like a scaffold around himself since arriving in this century. And he'd done it with the casual confidence of someone who knew exactly who he was hunting.

The coffee arrived. Alex wrapped his hands around the cup, letting the heat seep into his palms. He needed to think.

What did he actually know? The Bastille would fall on July 14. He'd taught that date to hundreds of students over the years, scribbled it on whiteboards, watched them yawn through documentaries about the Revolution. It was as certain as the sunrise. But knowing the outcome of a battle didn't mean knowing every soldier in the field.

Someone had discovered him. Someone with enough resources to employ an assassin who dressed like a courtier and fought like a soldier. That suggested not a street-level agent but a hand reaching down from somewhere higher. Versailles, perhaps. The police. One of the noble factions that swirled around the King like flies around a corpse.

And that someone had known where he'd be.

Alex replayed the afternoon: the walk to the bridge, the careful route he'd taken through side streets, the momentary pause at the railing to catch his breath. Had he been followed since the print shop? Since the hovel? Or had the assassin simply been waiting at the river, betting that a man with secrets would eventually pass that way?

The coffee was bitter. Alex drank it anyway.

He had to consider the possibility that Jean-Baptiste had been compromised. The assassin had learned Alex's name from somewhere, and Jean-Baptiste was the only person besides Pierre who knew it. But Jean-Baptiste had no reason to betray him—the man's entire family was at risk if the plot unraveled. And if the assassin had taken Jean-Baptiste first, there would have been no note, no map fragment, no meeting at all.

No. The leak was elsewhere.

The man in the gray hat. The message Pierre had missed. Alex kept circling back to them, the two loose threads that had dangled since his first days in Paris. He'd assumed they were coincidences, the debris of any busy street. But what if they were connected? What if the message Pierre was meant to carry had been intended for someone who could have protected him—or someone who needed to know he was coming?

He finished his coffee and ordered another.

The American embassy was on the Rue de Richelieu, a modest building that couldn't decide whether it wanted to look like a Parisian hôtel or a colonial governor's mansion. Alex presented himself at the door with his best approximation of an American accent, which in this century sounded more like a London merchant with a head cold. The secretary who received him was thin, sharp-nosed, and unimpressed.

"Your name again, monsieur?"

"Renard. Alexandre Renard." He'd spent the walk over rehearsing his story. "I'm a scholar. A historian of sorts. I have information that may be of value to Mr. Jefferson."

The secretary's eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch. "Mr. Jefferson is not presently in Paris."

"Then Mr. Adams."

"Mr. Adams is in London."

Alex felt the ground shift beneath him. He'd been counting on the embassy as a refuge, a place where the long arm of French royalist intrigue might not reach. But the Americans' best minds were scattered across Europe, and the man standing before him looked like he'd rather be filing paperwork than entertaining a soaked stranger with a wild story.

"I see." Alex straightened his coat, trying to look more presentable. "Then perhaps I might speak with whomever is in charge."

The secretary studied him for a long moment. Then, with a sigh that suggested he'd already catalogued Alex as an inconvenience, he gestured toward a door at the end of the hall.

The man inside was middle-aged, broad-shouldered, with the ruddy complexion of someone who'd spent more time on a ship than in a salon. He introduced himself as Mr. Short, the chargé d'affaires, and did not offer Alex a seat.

"You're American," Mr. Short said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"You don't sound American."

Alex had prepared for this. "I was educated in London. Spent years abroad. The accent—" He waved a hand. "It's a mongrel thing."

Mr. Short nodded slowly, his eyes moving over Alex's damp clothes, the cut on his hand he hadn't noticed, the exhaustion that must have been visible in his face. "You said you have information."

"Yes. About—" Alex hesitated. How much could he reveal? The truth would sound like madness: that he was from the future, that he knew how the Revolution would end, that he'd come to prevent a catastrophe he couldn't name. Even if Short believed him, what then? The Americans had their own interests in France, and they weren't necessarily aligned with Alex's.

"About the unrest," he said finally. "There are forces moving against the King. I have reason to believe there will be violence within the week."

Mr. Short's expression didn't change. "There is always violence within the week, Monsieur Renard. Paris has been a powder keg since the spring. The question is what you want me to do about it."

Alex's throat tightened. He'd come here seeking sanctuary, but the chargé d'affaires saw him as just another supplicant with a half-baked prophecy. The Republic—the one Alex had grown up in, the one that had embassies and intelligence services and safety nets for citizens abroad—wasn't here yet. It wouldn't exist for another two hundred years.

"I need somewhere safe to stay," he said. "Just for a few days. I've made enemies, and I need time to—"

"I'm sorry." Mr. Short's voice was flat. "The embassy cannot shelter private citizens in matters of political dispute. It would compromise our neutrality with the Crown."

"The Crown just tried to kill me."

"Did it?" Mr. Short's eyes sharpened. "Who sent the assassin?"

Alex opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn't know. That was the terrible truth at the center of everything. He didn't know who had found him, or how, or what they wanted beyond his death.

"I don't know yet," he admitted.

"Then I cannot help you." Mr. Short walked to the door and held it open. "My advice, Monsieur Renard: leave Paris. The countryside is safer, particularly for a man with debts he cannot name."

It was the closest thing to a dismissal Alex would get. He rose, nodded stiffly, and walked out into the corridor, past the secretary's smug face, out the front door, and into the gray afternoon.

The streets were filling with people again, the panic of the cavalry charge already fading into rumor and complaint. A fruit seller shouted her wares. Two priests hurried past with their heads down. Somewhere, a child was laughing.

Alex stood on the embassy steps and felt the weight of his isolation press down on him. He had no allies here. Pierre was a boy with more courage than sense. Jean-Baptiste was a printer with his own family to protect. The Americans had refused him. And somewhere in Paris, the man in red heels was licking his wounds and planning another attempt.

If the French royalists knew Alex Carter, then they knew something about the future. They might not believe in time travel, but they believed in prophecy, in omens, in the kinds of secrets that could be sold to the highest bidder. Someone had told them about him. Someone had given them his name.

*Or,* a quieter voice suggested, *someone else from the future is already here.*

The thought was dizzying. He gripped the railing, steadying himself. Was that possible? Had he not been the first? And if another traveler had arrived before him, had that person come to help or to hinder? The assassin had known his name—not just his alias but the truth beneath it. That kind of knowledge wasn't gleaned from observation. It was handed over like a coin.

Alex began to walk, not sure where he was going. The café was out of the question—too exposed. The hovel where he'd hidden with Pierre was safe for another night, perhaps, but the boy deserved better than to be dragged deeper into a conspiracy that kept growing teeth.

He needed information. He needed to find out who was hunting him. And he needed to do it while appearing to be exactly what he'd claimed to be: a neutral observer, a scholar with an interest in the day's events, a man with nothing to hide.

A double game, then.

He'd learned to play those in conference rooms and academic committees, in the careful dance of tenure and publication. The stakes had been lower then—a failed grant, a bounced article. But the rules were the same. Keep your enemies guessing. Feed them what they expect. Draw them closer while you step aside.

Alex turned down a narrow street and found himself in front of a tobacconist's shop. Through the window, he could see shelves lined with snuffboxes and pipes, their brass fittings catching the light.

The assassin had worn a distinctive perfume—something floral that clung to his clothes even after the river. It was the kind of scent that came from court, from close proximity to power. If Alex could trace its source, he might find a thread leading back to whoever had hired the man.

He pushed open the shop door. A bell chimed.

The proprietor, an old woman with rheumy eyes, looked up from her needles. "Monsieur?"

Alex smiled his most charming smile—the one he'd used on department chairs and difficult students alike. "I'm looking for a gift," he said. "Something memorable. My cousin in the provinces is fond of fine scents, and I've heard there's a particular blend worn by those at court. Something with rose and citrus, perhaps?"

The woman's face remained blank, but Alex caught the flicker in her eyes. Recognition, or wariness, or both.

"Many scents are sold in Paris," she said carefully. "You would need to be more specific."

Alex leaned forward, lowering his voice. "The kind worn by a man who does the King's quiet work. You understand."

For a long moment, she said nothing. Then she reached beneath the counter and produced a small velvet pouch, its contents clinking softly as she set it on the wood.

"It's not the scent you should be chasing, monsieur," she said. "It's the box it came in."