The fog rolled in off the Thames like a shroud drawn slowly across a corpse, and Edward Ashworth stood at his study window watching it consume the garden paths he had laid out three months ago, when hope was still a thing he possessed. The house behind him was vast and cold, a Georgian pile of red brick and white stone that had belonged to his father and his father before him, and now belonged to Edward alone. He was twenty-eight years old and he had already seen it all end.

It began with the dreams, though Edward would never call them dreams in polite company. They came to him in the small hours, when the gas lamps in the street below burned low and the housekeeper had gone to her room and the silence of London pressed against the windows like a living thing. In these dreams, he stood in the Ashworth textile mills and watched them burn. Not the gentle, contained fire of a properly managed furnace, but a raging, devouring inferno that consumed everything—the looms, the cotton bales, the thirty-seven young workers who slept in the attics during the night shift. He could smell the burning hair. He could hear the children screaming. He woke each time drenched in cold sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

On the third morning after the first dream, Edward went to his father's study and found him at the desk, surrounded by ledgers and correspondence from merchants in Manchester and Leeds. The old man looked up over his spectacles, his face already lined with the stress of maintaining an empire his father had built from nothing.

Father, Edward said. I need to speak with you about the mills.

Your father does not require advice from a son who has spent two years in Paris learning nothing but bad wine and worse French, his father replied without looking up from his papers.

This is not advice. Edward's hands were shaking, but he clasped them behind his back so his father would not see. The night shift—thirty-seven people sleeping in the attics. The wiring in the east wing is frayed. The cotton dust, it is—

His father finally looked up, and his eyes were cold. You have been reading too many sensational novels. The mills are safe. I built them.

I am not reading a novel, Edward said quietly. I have seen them burn.

His father laughed, a short, sharp sound that echoed in the study like a gunshot. Then he returned to his ledgers, and Edward knew that nothing he could say would change anything.

He was wrong. The mills burned six weeks later, on a Tuesday in November, and thirty-nine people died—not thirty-seven, as Edward had dreamed, but thirty-nine. Two more children, twin boys who had been brought to the attic that week because their mother was ill. Edward stood on the embankment across the river and watched the orange light reflect on the water, and he understood for the first time that his visions were not predictions but prophecies, and that every time he tried to prevent them, they grew worse.

Eleanor died in the spring. She was twenty-two, with hair the colour of wheat and a laugh that could fill a room, and she had been coughing since the previous autumn. The doctors called it consumption—the terrible wasting disease that took young women by the hundreds in London's slums and, occasionally, in the houses of the wealthy. Eleanor was different, Edward told himself. Eleanor would not die. He had seen her death in his dreams, yes—her lying in her bed, her hand cold in his, the rain falling against the window—but this time he would be ready. He summoned the best physicians in London. He moved her to a room in the south wing where the sun fell all day. He ordered fresh air brought into the house every morning, windows flung open even in winter.

Dr. Blackwood of the Royal Neurological Society attended Eleanor for the final month. He was a tall, severe man with thinning hair and eyes that seemed to look through you rather than at you. He examined Eleanor with the cold precision of a surgeon and then turned to Edward in the corridor and spoke in a voice so low that Edward had to lean close to hear.

Your sister's condition is worse than I initially feared. But I want you to understand something, Mr. Ashworth. The mind can be as dangerous as any disease. The stress you are under, the obsessive concern—these things can manifest physically. You must not allow your anxiety to worsen her condition.

I am doing everything I can, Edward said.

Dr. Blackwood studied him for a long moment. Then he said, quietly: What are you doing, Mr. Ashworth?

Eleanor died on a night when the rain fell so hard that the gutters overflowed and the Thames rose to its highest level in twenty years. It was not consumption that killed her, Edward would learn later. It was pneumonia, brought on because he had forbidden her from sitting by the window, convinced that the draught would hasten her death. She had begged him, just once, to let her feel the rain. He had refused. And when she died, her eyes were open, looking toward the window, toward the rain she had been denied.

After the funeral, Edward sat in Dr. Blackwood's consulting room in Harley Street and told him everything. The dreams. The mills. The thirty-nine children. Eleanor's hand going cold in his. He spoke for an hour, perhaps two, and when he finished, Dr. Blackwood made notes on a pad and then looked up at him with an expression that was neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic, but something worse: professional curiosity.

What you are describing, Mr. Ashworth, is a condition we in the medical profession have observed in cases of severe familial stress and hereditary neurosis. Your mind is attempting to process the anxieties you carry—about your father's health, about the mills, about your sister—by creating elaborate scenarios in which you can anticipate and prevent disaster. But the mind is not a crystal ball. It is a machine, and like all machines, it can malfunction. Your dreams are not prophecies. They are symptoms.

Edward left the consulting room and walked through the foggy streets of London without direction, until he found himself standing on the embankment again, looking at the dark water of the Thames. He thought of Lady Catherine Devereaux, his fiancée, and the letters she had been receiving from her mother in Derbyshire. The Devereaux family was old but impoverished, and Catherine's mother had made it clear that a marriage to the heir of an Ashworth mill—especially one now shadowed by tragedy—would require careful consideration.

Edward understood now. He understood everything. His visions were not a gift. They were a curse, placed upon him not by any supernatural power but by the twisted machinery of his own mind, shaped by guilt and grief and the terrible weight of a family history he had never asked to inherit. Every time he tried to change the future, he only accelerated its arrival. Every act of love became an act of destruction.

He stood in the fog for a long time, watching the water move silently beneath the bridges, and he made a decision. He would no longer fight. He would no longer try to prevent what was coming. If Catherine's family withdrew the match, let them. If his father's health failed, let it. If the mills burned again, let them burn. He would stand at the window and watch the fog roll in, and he would do nothing.

Behind him, the windows of Ashworth House glowed faintly in the darkness, warm and yellow and alive. Edward did not look back. He turned and walked away into the fog, his footsteps muffled by the wet cobblestones, disappearing into the vast indifferent city that had swallowed his family one generation at a time.