The morning came not with the soft blessing of sunlight, but the groan of weary wood and the rustle of bodies stirring to life. Roosters crowed in the distance. The scent of morning smoke drifted from cookfires. In the modest hut that Elias now apparently lived in, if "inhabited" could describe his eerie existence, light filtered through the gaps in palm-woven walls and spilled over a carved wooden table filled with jars, dried roots, and stained cloths.
He sat still, studying the rough grain of the tabletop. His hands—these hands—were folded neatly in front of him, fingers slightly twitching. The skin was dry around the knuckles, tough from work. The nails still bore the marks of whatever ritual he'd performed the night before. Ash crusted the nail beds, dark like dried blood.
There was a name in this life: Louvier.
Papa Louvier.
He had not spoken it aloud yet. Saying it would make it real.
Someone knocked, a gentle, practiced rhythm of three quick taps. Elias didn't move.
The curtain was pulled back, and Rae stepped in.
Or rather, not Rae.
Not quite.
The woman wore her face, same alertness, same stubbornness in the set of her jaw, but her hair was wrapped, and her clothing was of the period: a faded cotton dress with a kerchief at the waist. Her voice, when she spoke, was lower, more careful, as if she'd trained it to a dialect she wasn't quite fluent in.
"You're late for the morning blessing, Papa," she said with practiced familiarity, though a flicker in her eyes betrayed her wariness.
Elias stood slowly, unsure of how stiff this body should feel. "What… is your name?" he asked cautiously.
She blinked. "It's Seraphine. You know that."
So she wasn't Rae, not exactly. But like Elias, she was… borrowed.
Was this what the Watcher meant? That each leap would not only take him backward but wrap him in someone else's life entirely?
And what is borrowed, the Watcher mused in his mind, must eventually be returned. Sometimes gently. Sometimes with fire.
He shook the thought off.
Seraphine stepped aside as Elias followed her into the rising heat of the day. The village bustled, small but alive, families preparing food, men hauling water, children weaving together bundles of sugarcane. No one looked twice at him. He was the priest. The houngan. The constant.
They trusted him.
A lie he was now forced to live.
Seraphine handed him a shallow bowl filled with water and herbs. "You have to bless the fields. They believe your voice wards off sickness."
"And if I say the wrong words?"
She hesitated. "Then they'll say the loa have abandoned you."
Or worse, the Watcher whispered, they'll think the wrong one has possessed you instead.
As Elias began walking toward the edge of the field, he felt the weight of memory, or perhaps muscle memory, pulling his steps into a rhythm. Louvier had done this hundreds of times. His body knew how to move even if Elias did not.
The people bowed their heads as he passed.
It should have comforted him.
Instead, it felt like walking among ghosts.
He muttered the blessing in French-inflected Kreyòl, imitating the tone he'd heard from Louvier's recorded voice on a wax cylinder in Roe's lab. It seemed to satisfy them. Hands clapped. The sick girl smiled. The old woman from the fire circle the night before gave a slow nod, though her eyes remained sharp as knives.
"Papa Louvier," a young man said, rushing up beside him. His forehead gleamed with sweat. "There's news."
Elias turned. "What news?"
"The fires," the man said. "They've begun on the northern plantations. Slaves rising. They say they've seen visions, spirits telling them to take back the land."
Elias's breath caught. History was happening. This was August 1791.
He was standing at the edge of the Haitian Revolution.
The mirror hadn't brought him here by accident.
Later that evening, Seraphine pulled him aside in the darkness of the hut. "You're not him," she said flatly.
Elias froze.
"You don't speak like him," she continued. "Your eyes don't move the same. You're… watching everything too hard. And last night, you didn't call down the names of the dead. You just lit the sage. That's not what Louvier would do."
"Then why haven't you told them?" he asked.
"Because I don't know what you are yet," she said. "Maybe you're not him. But you came when we needed him. Maybe that's enough."
Elias sat down heavily.
"I know what you're thinking," she added. "That this place isn't yours. That you're stealing someone's breath and you don't know how to give it back. But Louvier's body never woke after he collapsed last week. He was going to die. Maybe this is a second chance. Maybe the gods sent you."
"Or maybe someone else did," Elias murmured, thinking of the mirror, the relic, the smoke.
The Watcher chuckled softly, as if sitting in the corner of the hut, legs crossed, head tilted.
Now you're learning to ask the right questions. But the wrong answers are still more fun, don't you think?
Outside, the night air carried a faint glow, distant fires on the horizon. Another plantation burning.
History unfolding.
Elias stood and stared at the mirror fragment tucked into a pouch at his waist.
The relic was humming.