She found the buyer’s address: a nondescript stall in the Mercatus Temporalis, the black market for cross-time oddities. The vendor was a woman in a patrician’s stola, but her eyes had the flat, hungry look of a deep-timer—someone who’d lived so many branches she’d forgotten her original face.

Back in her office, Juniper the golden retriever brought Libby a fresh coffee.

Libby’s console, a beautiful crescent of smoked crystal and forbidden math, painted the scenario in blood-red light. The purchase had originated from Timeline 734-Gamma, a quiet branch where Rome never fell and humanity got to steam engines by 200 BCE. Normally, a lovely place. But now, a ghost buyer had used a shell corporation registered in the Cretaceous Period to acquire one share of “Aethelred’s Despair.”

The regulator hummed, and reality folded like a paper fan. Libby landed in a side-alley of Timeline 734-Gamma’s prime city, Nova Roma. The sky was a soft bronze, and airships drifted lazily above marble towers. It was beautiful. It was also humming with a low, wrong frequency—like a violin string about to snap.

The woman smiled. It was not a nice smile. “Oh, Trade Marshal. I don’t have it. I’m just the courier. The buyer wants to meet you.”