The pocket watch sat at the bottom of a shoebox marked “ESTATE – MISC,” and Nora Quill almost didn’t notice it. She’d spent three hours sorting through the contents of a storage unit her great-aunt had left behind, mostly old letters and a moth-eaten quilt, when her fingers brushed cold metal beneath a layer of yellowed tissue paper.

The watch was silver, tarnished to the color of an overcast sky, with a hinged cover etched in a pattern of vines that curled around a single word: Toujours. Always.

Nora turned it over. On the back, in handwriting so faded it had nearly vanished into the metal, someone had scratched a date that made no sense at all. Not a date that had happened yet. A date almost a hundred years in the future from whenever it had been etched.

She laughed it off, slipped the watch into her coat pocket, and forgot about it until that evening, when she pressed the small catch on its side and the world fell away beneath her.

---

The first thing Margaux noticed was the smell of horses and roasting chestnuts, and the second thing was that she was standing in the middle of a crowd in clothes that weren’t hers, on a wide gravel path lined with iron lampposts. Above her, rising into a sky gone soft and gold with evening light, stood a tower unlike anything she had ever seen. It looked like something a child might draw if you asked them to imagine the future: a lattice of dark iron climbing higher than seemed possible, its top lost in a haze of cloud and bird flight.

She knew, somehow, that it was new. That people had argued about whether it should exist at all, that some had called it an eyesore and others a miracle, and that millions had come from all over the world that year just to walk beneath it and ride to the top in its iron elevators.

She knew her name was Margaux, that she sold flowers near the Trocadéro, and that she had absolutely never been to Paris before this morning, except that some other part of her insisted she had been here, just like this, a hundred times.

“You’re staring at it like it might fall on you,” said a voice beside her.

The man was perhaps thirty, dark-haired, with ink stains on two of his fingers and a notebook tucked under his arm. He had an accent she couldn’t place, something that wasn’t quite French, and eyes the color of strong tea.

“I’m trying to decide if I like it,” Margaux said.

“Everyone is trying to decide that. My employers included.” He nodded toward the tower. “I work on the elevators. Hydraulic systems. It’s the strangest job I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some strange ones.”

“What’s strange about lifting people up and down?”

“Nothing, until you do it inside something this tall, in front of two million people, and it has to work every single time.” He smiled, and something in Nora, buried under Margaux like a stone under a river, turned over completely. “Julien Ferrand.”

“Margaux.”

They talked until the gas lamps came on along the Champ de Mars, about the tower and the exposition’s electric lights and the strange new machines on display in the Gallery of Machines, the phonographs and the moving sidewalks that Julien thought were a passing fad and Margaux thought were the most wonderful things she had ever seen. He walked her home along the river, and at her door he took her hand and pressed something into it. A small silver watch, his own, the one his grandfather had carried.

“For luck,” he said. “I have a feeling I’ll need to find you again to get it back.”

“Then you’d better not lose track of me.”

He laughed, and the sound of it was the last thing Margaux heard before the gravel path dissolved beneath her feet and the gaslights bled into darkness, and Nora was standing in her own kitchen again, the watch warm in her closed fist, her heart pounding as if she’d been running.

---

The second time, there was no gravel and no gaslight. There was the high, thin wail of a siren and the smell of smoke and brick dust, and Eleanor was crouched in a doorway on a street she half-recognized, in a city she somehow knew was London, in a year that some instinct supplied without being asked: 1944.

She wore a heavy coat over a uniform, and a tin hat sat crooked on her head, and parked at the curb was an ambulance with a dent in its side panel that she remembered putting there herself, three weeks ago, in a different street.

The all-clear hadn’t sounded yet, but the bombs that fell now didn’t come with warning anymore. The new rockets arrived faster than sound, faster than fear, and you only knew they’d struck because the ground shook and then, a heartbeat later, the noise caught up to the destruction that had already happened.

A man stumbled out of the smoke toward her, RAF blue under a layer of gray dust, blood at his temple but walking on his own power, which in this city in this year counted as good news.

“You’re bleeding,” Eleanor said, already reaching for her kit.

“So is half of London, love, you’ll have to get in line.” He winced as she cleaned the cut, and then he looked at her properly, and his whole face changed, the way a room changes when someone opens the curtains. “Have we met?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Funny. I’d have remembered.” He held out a hand that was shaking slightly, from the blast or from something else. “Julian. Flight Lieutenant, for what that’s worth tonight.”

“Eleanor.” She wrapped a bandage around his head, and her fingers found a thin chain at his collar, an old silver watch tucked beneath his shirt, the case scratched and worn smooth at the edges. “That’s lovely. Family piece?”

“My grandfather’s, then my father’s, then mine. Never could get it to keep proper time, but I can’t bring myself to leave it behind.” He caught her hand before she could pull away, just for a moment. “Strange thing to say to a woman I’ve known for ninety seconds, but I have the oddest feeling I owe you something.”

“Everyone in London owes someone something this week.”

“Not like this.” He was still holding her hand. “Have dinner with me. If we’re both still standing tomorrow.”

“If we’re both still standing tomorrow,” Eleanor agreed, and for one whole minute, kneeling in the rubble with the sirens finally easing into silence, she felt something settle into place inside her chest that she hadn’t known was missing.

She never got the chance to find out about dinner. The street dissolved, the smoke and the sirens thinning into nothing, and Nora was on her kitchen floor, the watch clutched so tightly in her hand that its edges had left marks in her palm.

---

The third time, the ground beneath her was mud, actual mud, churned by half a million bare and sandaled feet, and the air was thick with woodsmoke and patchouli and the sound of a guitar somewhere not far off, tuning itself up against a backdrop of rain that had clearly been falling for hours.

Wren had been here three days, she somehow knew, on a farm in upstate New York that belonged to a dairy farmer named Yasgur, at a festival that had outgrown every estimate anyone had made about it. People said half a million had come. It felt like more.

She was soaked through, sitting on a damp army blanket with strangers who felt like old friends, when a young man dropped down beside her with two guitars and a grin that seemed permanently affixed to his face.

“You look like you’ve lost something,” he said, nodding at the way her hand kept drifting to her coat pocket, to a small silver watch that had no business being there in 1969 either, since by her best guess it should have belonged to someone else’s grandfather by now.

“I think I’m looking for someone, actually,” Wren said, and the words surprised her as they left her mouth.

“Aren’t we all.” He held out a hand. “Jules. I’m supposed to be playing in about an hour, assuming my fingers haven’t turned permanently into prunes.”

“Wren.”

“Wren.” He said it like he was testing how it felt. “That’s a good name. Small, but it gets everywhere.”

They talked through the rain, about music and mud and the strange feeling, which Jules admitted to and which Wren had been too afraid to say out loud, that he had met her before. Not like her. Her. In another place, wearing another face, at another point in a story neither of them could quite remember the shape of.

“I keep dreaming about a tower,” Jules said. “Made of iron. And a city on fire. Sounds mad, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Wren said, very quietly. “It doesn’t.”

He took her hand, and the watch in her pocket grew warm, and Wren had just enough time to think not yet, please, not yet before the rain and the mud and the music dissolved, and Nora was sitting on her kitchen floor in the dark, crying without entirely understanding why.

---

It took her two more weeks to find him, though “find” wasn’t quite right. He found her, or they found each other, the way two people who have been walking toward the same point for a very long time eventually arrive.

His name, this time, was Julian Marsh, and he ran a small shop on the other side of town that restored antique clocks and watches, and Nora walked in on a gray Tuesday afternoon holding a silver watch with Toujours engraved on its case, because some instinct she didn’t question told her this was where it needed to go.

Julian looked up from his workbench, and went very still, and Nora watched the same recognition cross his face that she’d seen cross three other faces in three other eras.

“You’re the one with the watch,” he said.

“You’re the one without it,” Nora said, and her voice shook. “I think it’s been yours. This whole time. Every time.”

He reached under his counter and set something beside her watch on the glass case: a small brass compass, old and worn, its needle spinning uselessly, its case engraved with a single word that matched hers exactly.

“I’ve had this since I was a kid,” Julian said. “Never could explain it. Just knew I couldn’t get rid of it. And I keep having these dreams. Paris. London. Some farm in the rain.”

“Me too.” Nora’s hand was trembling as she set the watch down beside the compass. The moment the two pieces of metal touched, something in the room seemed to exhale, a tension she hadn’t known she’d been carrying her whole life, finally releasing.

Neither of them vanished. The shop stayed exactly as it was, dust motes hanging in the gray afternoon light, the smell of oil and old brass and the rain just beginning against the window.

“I think,” Julian said slowly, “we were always looking for the version of this where neither of us had anywhere else to be.”

“Found it,” Nora said, and for the first time in four lifetimes, toujours didn’t mean a promise made in passing. It meant now.

Feature Photo by Саша Алалыкин