I died on a Tuesday. Or rather, I thought I did. The last thing I remember is the taste of laudanum on my tongue, the ceiling of that Whitechapel lodging house spinning above me like a dark sky, and the pocket watch on the bedside table stopping—truly stopping, not just pausing but surrendering to time forever. Then: nothing. A void. A silence so complete it felt like the world had ended.

And then I was awake.

The light was wrong. It poured through windows I recognized—my father's townhouse on Pall Mall, the ones I hadn't seen in five years. The sheets were clean linen, not the yellowed cotton of the lodging house. My hands, when I raised them, were steady. No tremor. No needle marks. I was twenty-two again. Or rather, I had always been twenty二十二.

The watch was on my wrist. The silver one I'd found by the Thames, the one that had started everything. Its hands were frozen at midnight.

"Mr. Blackwood? Are you quite alright?"

I turned. The maid stood in the doorway, a basin of water in her hands. Her name was Mary. I remembered her—she'd served me in Whitechapel too, though in that life she'd been too frightened to look me in the eye.

"I'm fine," I said. And then, before she could leave: "What date is it?"

She blinked. "June the third, sir. 1887."

Six months. I had six months before everything began to fall apart.

My father's suicide. The scandal that would follow. Isabella Whitmore's carriage accident on the road to Richmond. My descent into the opium dens of the East End. The slow, quiet death of Thomas Blackwood III, last of a line that had been declining since the Napoleonic wars.

I would not let it happen again.

The first week was a blur of frantic activity. I went to the Exchange every morning, not to gamble on railway stocks like the other young brokers, but to position myself. I sold short the companies my father would later manipulate. I bought land in areas I remembered would be developed. I accumulated wealth quietly, methodically, like a man building a fortress brick by brick.

The watch helped. Or rather, my mind helped, and the watch was merely the trigger. When I turned the crown, the visions came—five minutes of future, clear as daylight. A gentleman tripping on the sidewalk. A horse rearing at a carriage wheel. A broker shouting a price that hadn't been quoted yet.

I told myself it was instinct. Pattern recognition. My subconscious processing information faster than my conscious mind could track. I told myself many things.

Isabella noticed the change. "You seem different, Thomas," she said one evening at a dinner at Mayfair. She was beautiful in the way that made men uncomfortable—too intelligent, too observant, too aware of the games people played. "You look at me as if you're memorizing my face."

"I might be," I said. And it was true. In the other life, I had lost her. I would not lose her again.

But the visions were changing. They were becoming less precise, more emotional. I would turn the crown and see Isabella's face—not in five minutes' time, but in some undefined future, her eyes filled with a fear I couldn't interpret. I would see my father's study, the rope already tied to the beam. I would see my own hands, shaking, holding a syringe.

"Are you sleeping, Thomas?" Isabella asked. "You look terrible."

"I'm fine," I said. The same words. The same lie.

The first crack appeared in September. I had a vision of a conversation between my father and Lord Harrington—Harrington, who would soon advise my father to invest in the South American railway scheme. In the vision, my father said something about "taking risks" and "the family name." I knew this conversation was coming. I knew it would happen on a Thursday at the Athenaeum.

So I went to the Athenaeum on Wednesday.

I found my father in the reading room, the Times spread before him. He looked up, surprised. "Thomas? What brings you here?"

"I need to speak with you about Harrington," I said.

His expression shifted—caution, suspicion. "What about him?"

"Don't trust him. The South American railway is a scheme. He's been paid to recommend it."

My father stared at me. "Where did you hear this?"

"I didn't hear it. I know it."

He laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. "You know it. How, exactly?"

I had no answer that wouldn't sound like madness. So I gave him numbers instead—projected costs, expected returns, the names of investors who would pull out within a year. Numbers I remembered from the other life, when I'd read the parliamentary inquiry.

He listened. I saw him listen. But when I finished, he closed the Times and said, "Thomas, you've been working too hard. Take a week. Go to the coast. Breathe some sea air."

He didn't believe me. But he didn't dismiss me entirely. He filed the information away, as a prudent man does, and proceeded with caution where he might have been reckless.

It was a small victory. But it was enough to make me believe I could change everything.

October passed. November arrived. Isabella and I walked together in Hyde Park, and for the first time, I allowed myself to feel something like hope. Maybe I could do this. Maybe I could save my father, save Isabella, save myself.

Then came the vision that broke me.

It was late at night. I was alone in my room, the watch in my hand. I turned the crown, and the world dissolved.

I saw Isabella. Not as I knew her—in the sunlight, laughing, her hair caught in the wind. I saw her in a hospital room, pale and still, her hand in mine. I saw the doctor shaking his head. I saw myself, older, hollowed out, sitting in a room full of bottles, the watch on the table beside me, its hands still frozen at midnight.

And I saw something else. Something I hadn't seen before.

In the corner of the hospital room, reflected in a mirror I hadn't noticed at first, was another figure. A man I didn't recognize. Standing behind Isabella's bed. Watching her. Watching me.

I snapped back to the present, gasping. The watch clattered to the floor. My heart was hammering.

That figure. I didn't know who it was. But I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that he was part of the story. Part of the future I was trying to change.

And the worst part—the part that kept me awake until dawn—was the question I couldn't silence:

Had I always known about him? Or had my mind created him, the way it created everything else?

I picked up the watch from the floor. Its hands were still frozen at midnight. I held it in my palm, feeling the cold silver against my skin, and I understood, for the first time, that the curse was not the visions.

The curse was believing I could control what they showed me.

OTMES v2 Code: PSY-1887-London-PATHOLOGY-4ACT-1300W-NO-SUP-PER-1PL-LIM