Within the Space of a Second (The Mark of the Time Traveler #1)

Prologue Mariella

I’ve dreamed of my death every night since I was seven years old.

I tried to explain the dreams to my mother—the volatile tension twisting through my body, and the cold shadows slithering beneath my skin.

But there were no words for a terror so consuming it stole the breath from my lungs and left me paralyzed.

She’d find me perched on the top stair of our porch, slick with sweat, stammering about being so small I was scared I might disappear.

“It’s only a nightmare, Mari,” my mother would whisper through the darkness, rocking me against her chest as electrical current licked my fingertips. “Everyone gets them.”

The strange symptoms peaked when I was twelve. This time, my mother wasn’t there to reassure me, and I soon learned the other girls at boarding school weren’t like me. They didn’t wake at night screaming, bodies scalding, electricity whipping through their limbs.

My isolation worsened after my mother died, but when I was seventeen it stopped. I finished school and found medication that made everything—the nightmares, the paranoia, and the symptoms—go away, smothering my oddities like a weighted blanket.

At seventeen, my life began.