Dome, the footage that was supposed to prove that the world was breaking. The trees hovering over the water, their origin unknown; the cornfield that had appeared on the ocean floor and no missing-persons report to match the farmer trapped in his tractor. If she assumed that Nero was correct about the connection between universes, maybe that farmer hadn’t been from Earth but from Genetrix.
“What’s the date? Day and year?” she said.
“April twenty-ninth, 2020,” he replied.
“Shit,” Sloane said. “It’s only March back home.”
“Time discrepancies seem to be common when traveling between universes,” Nero said. “We’ve found some ways to stabilize it, but we can only approximate.”
Sloane indulged in a moment of terror when she realized that even if they managed to get Nero and Aelia to send them back home, they might be thrust millennia into the future or, worse, into the past. Then she pushed the thought aside. She couldn’t worry about that now. “I’m looking for a missing-persons report from about . . . a few months ago, I guess, our time,” she said. “An odd case—a farmer from somewhere in the Midwest. A corn farmer. Just . . . disappeared while on his tractor. A John Deere, so probably American.”
Nero raised his eyebrows but didn’t ask her anything. Instead, he put his whistle between his lips and turned toward the stacks. He raised a hand, then waved it carelessly as he let out a high, sweet note like the trill of a bird. “Certain frequencies are like pathways for particular workings,” he said, taking the whistle out of his mouth to speak. “And there are a lot of categories for workings. But once you find the right pathway, intent is what guides the magic, not striking the right note. So I must know my heart’s intent and be able to shape it. I want to find this for you. But I need a more specific intent. The missing tractor, I think, is more specific than your date range.”
He tucked the whistle between his lips and blew it again, a long, slow note. His eyes closed, and Sloane waited for something to happen. But when Nero opened his eyes and spat out the whistle, nothing in the library seemed to have changed. He smirked and gestured for her to follow him.
He led her away from the towers of books and into a back room, where newspapers were stacked in neat piles on every surface. Most bore the name Chicago Post, which wasn’t a newspaper Sloane was familiar with, although the New York Times made an appearance too. But what Sloane had first dismissed as reflected daylight was a glow coming from a few of the piles as particular newspapers lit up within them. She moved toward one of them, eyes wide and hands outstretched, and searched out the right issue from the layers that had dulled its brightness. She read headlines as she flipped through the papers: “Resurrectionist Sighted Near South Side Grocery Store”; “New Siphon Regulations Issued by European Union Might Cause Problems for Refugees”; “Birmingham: The Next Haven City?”; “Airborne Killer Whale Spotted Near Alaskan Coast.”
The glowing newspaper was the Peoria Chronicle, and on the front page was the headline “Farmer in Iowa Goes Missing—Along with Half His Crops.” The text beneath it read:
Trevor Sherman, who owns a corn farm in central Iowa, disappeared while driving home in his tractor one week ago, as did an irrigation system and a square quarter-mile of corn. The Chronicle’s Midwest correspondent was able to verify this in person.
Beneath the article was a half-page photo of a circle of bare dirt and half an irrigation pivot in the middle of a cornfield. Something had sliced cleanly through some of the remaining corn stalks, cutting them at a neat diagonal. The same was true of the metal irrigation pivot.
Sloane said, “Before we came to Genetrix, we saw a report of a man and his tractor appearing on the ocean floor out of nowhere. I wondered if that man was from Genetrix. Looks like the answer is yes.”
“Not our first disappearance,” Nero said. He tapped the newspaper she held. “Keep reading.”
Sloane skimmed past descriptions of the man’s children (three of them, all teenagers) and the quotes from his wife to one of the later paragraphs:
Disappearances and reappearances of this nature have been occurring across the globe in recent months, including the incident on the Sunshine Coast in Australia just last year in which a large iceberg appeared on the beach. Some magical