She loses sight of Niko as she throws herself downstairs, skittering into a trash can and sending a pizza box flying. There’s one way she can prove totally, definitively, that Jane is more than she seems. That this isn’t in her head.

August knows this route. She memorized it before she started taking it, determined to understand. It’s a two-minute ride between Canal and Prince, and Jane left in the opposite direction. There’s no physical way Jane can be on the next train to pull up, even if she ran for it. She should still be on her way through Manhattan. If she’s on this train, then August knows.

One minute.

August is alone. It’s nearly four in the morning.

The rush of the train comes, headlights spilling onto the toes of her sneakers.

The brakes grind, and August pictures the night fifty feet above, the universe watching as she tries to piece together one tiny corner of its mystery. She stares down at her shoes, at the yellow paint and chewed-up gum on the concrete, and tries to think about nothing but the place where her feet touch the ground, the absolute certainty of it. That’s real.

She feels unbelievably small. She feels like this is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in her entire life.

She lets the train cruise past until it coasts to a stop. It doesn’t matter if she chases down a particular car. The outcome will be the same.

August steps through the doors.

And there she is.

Jane looks exactly the same—jacket slouched, backpack at her side, one shoe coming untied. But the train is different. The last one was newer, with long, smooth blue benches and a ticker of stops along the top next to the advertisements. This one is older, the floors dustier, the seats a mixture of faded orange and yellow. It doesn’t make any sense, but here she is. She looks as confused to see August as August is to see her.

“When I said not to be a stranger,” Jane says, “I didn’t think you’d be back quite so soon.”

They’re the only two people in the car. Maybe they’re the only two people alive.

Maybe one of them isn’t alive at all.

This is it, then. Jane did the impossible. She is, whatever she is, impossible.

August crosses over to her and sits down as the train sways back into motion, carrying them toward Coney Island. She wonders if Jane has ever, even once, gotten out at the end of the line and sunk her feet into the water.

August turns to her, and Jane’s looking back.

There’s always been a schematic in August’s head of how things are supposed to be. Her whole life, she managed the noise and buzz and creeping dread in her brain by mapping things out, telling herself that if she looked hard enough, she’d find an explanation for everything. But here they are, looking at each other across the steady delineation of things August understands, watching the line blur.

“Can I ask you something?” August says. Her hand fidgets up to her ear, tucking her hair back. “It’s—uh. It might sound weird.”

Jane eyes her. Maybe she thinks August is going to ask her out again. Jane’s beautiful, always improbably beautiful under the subway fluorescents, but a date is the last thing on August’s mind.

“Yeah,” Jane says. “Of course.”

August curls her hands into fists in her lap. “How old are you?”

Jane laughs softly, relief flashing in her eyes. “Easy. Twenty-four.”

Okay. August can work with that.

“Do you…” She takes a breath. “So what year were you born, then?”

And—

It takes only a second, a breath, but something passes over Jane’s face like the headlights of a passing car over a bedroom wall at night, gone as soon as it was there. Jane settles into her usual sly smile. August never considered how much of a deflection that smile was.

“Why’re you asking?”

“Well,” August says carefully. She’s watching Jane, and Jane is watching her, and she can feel this moment opening up like a manhole beneath them, waiting for them to drop. “I’m twenty-three. You should have been born about a year before me.”

Jane stiffens, unreadable. “Right.”

“So,” August says. She braces herself. “So that’s … that’s 1995.”

Jane’s smile flickers out, and August swears a fluorescent light above them dims too.

“What?”

“I was born in 1996, so you should have been born in 1995,” August tells her. “But you weren’t, were you?”

The sleeve of Jane’s jacket has ridden up on one side, and she’s tracing the characters above her elbow, digging her fingertips in so the color flows out of her skin under the ink.

“Okay,” she says, trying on a different smile, her eyes dropping to the floor. “You’re fucking with me. I get it. You’re very cute and funny.”

“Jane, what year were you born?”

“I said I got it, August.”

“Jane—”

“Look,” she says, and when her eyes flash up, it’s there, the thing August glimpsed before—anger, fear. She was half-expecting Jane to laugh it off, like she does her cassette player and her backpack full of years. She doesn’t. “I know something’s … wrong with me. But you don’t have to fuck with me, okay?”

She doesn’t know. How can she not know?

It’s the first time Jane’s let it show, her uncertainty, and the lines of her are filled in a little more. She was this dream girl, too good to be true, but she’s real, finally, as real as August’s sneakers on the subway platform. Lost. That August can understand.

“Jane,” August says carefully. “I’m not fucking with you.”

She pulls out the photo, unfolds it, smooths out the crease down the middle. She shows it to Jane—the washed-out, yellow-tinted booths, the faded neon of the sign above the to-go counter. Jane’s smile, frozen in time.

“That’s you, right?”

It comes over Jane in a breathless rush, like the train blowing August’s hair back as it hurtles into the station.

“Yeah … yeah, that’s me,” Jane says. Her hands only shake a little when she takes the photo. “I told you. I got a job there right after it opened.”

“Jane.” The train trundles on. The word is almost too quiet to be heard over the noise. “This photo was taken in 1976.”

“That sounds right,” she says distantly. She’s stopped tracing the tattoo on her arm—instead tracing the shape of her chin in the photo. August wonders what the distance is between the person in front of her and the one in the photo. Decades. No time at all. “I moved here a couple of years ago.”

“Do you know what year?”

“God, probably.…’75?”

August concentrates on keeping her face and voice calm, like she’s talking to someone on a ledge. “Okay. I’m gonna ask you something. I swear to God, I am not fucking with you. Try to hear me out. Do you remember the last time you weren’t on this train?”

“August…”

“Please. Just try to remember.”

She looks up at August. Her eyes are shining, wet.

“I—” she starts. “I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s—it’s blurry. It’s all blurry. As far back as I can remember. I know I—I worked at Billy’s. 1976. That’s the last thing I remember, and I only know because you reminded me. You—you brought that back, I guess.” Her usual confidence is gone, a shaky, panicked girl in its place. “I told you, I think, um. Something’s wrong with me.”