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“You want to rescue him,” Élise said. She’d been eyeing me with knitted brows as I thought. “Don’t you?”

“I want to rescue them all,” I said, half in exasperation—partly at myself, I think.

She shook her head. “I knew it. I knew you saw him as one of your cats.”

She was scowling but there was amusement in her gaze, and I couldn’t hold back a laugh. “You’re going to say he doesn’t deserve it.”

She gave a resigned shrug. “Well, they don’t either, really. Is there anything more contrary and self-centred than a cat? Yet I’d risk my life for them.” She gestured at the floor. No, not the floor—the basement. “Is he down there now, do you think?”

The question made me feel like even more of a ghost than I already did. I pictured Havelock, three years younger and brokenhearted from Valérie’s betrayal, hunched over his worktable only a few yards from where I stood.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Even if he is, though, this isn’t where he lost the lantern, so we can’t go down there.”

Élise made another inarticulate noise and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

I released the breath trapped in my chest and said, “Trust me, Élise. Please.”

She looked up, glaring at me. “All right. But if this doesn’t work, we’re going back in time to when you agreed to move into his goddamn shop, and I’m going to beat you over the head with one of your file folders.”

I gave a shaky laugh, and then we both froze. We’d been keeping our voices down, to avoid waking the baker sleeping upstairs in what was my room but also wasn’t yet. But now the floorboards were creaking overhead in a pattern that I recognized: someone had walked to the window, as if to identify the source of a disturbance, and was now moving down the hallway towards the stairs.

I seized Élise’s hand and we fled into the street.

To step into that dark city was to enter another world. Without human-made light, the stone buildings rising to either side looked like walls of trees, watchful and quiet. It didn’t help that the wind carried with it the charcoal tang of magic. A man hurried past on the opposite side of the street, bundled into his cloak. Some people had moved through the city like that in those dark days, with a furtive haste, trying to evade the weather. Others had thrown parties. Some musicians had set up on street corners. A few businesses had been looted, but only a few; overall, the city’s reaction to the end of the world had been as varied as the people living in it. I had been too worried about the cats to leave the shelter, so I’d huddled indoors, watching the storms come and go through the window.

Which was a relief—I didn’t like to think what would happen if I saw myself in the street.

“Where are we going?” Élise said, when at last we paused for breath beneath the awning of a library. The city’s libraries had remained open during the apocalypse, and I could see several people inside, clustered around a table where a single candlestick was burning.

“Mount Royal,” I said.

“Yes, but where?” Élise pressed. “The park is too large—we need specifics. And when did Havelock lose the lantern?”

“I’m not certain of that either,” I admitted. “Havelock told me it happened on the second night. It’s only about an hour till midnight”—we had just come into view of the clock tower—“so we should go to the park and wait, I guess.”

“You guess,” Élise repeated in a despairing sort of voice. “Please tell me that you know how to get us back to our time after all this is over.”

“Of course,” I said, trying to project confidence. “The enchantment leaked into the oven, so we will simply return to the oven and speak the incantation again.”

“I wish you were a more convincing liar,” Élise said with a groan. “I would very much like to believe that you know what you’re doing right now.”

We hurried on. On the next block, I noticed a small shape moving inside an overturned garbage can. As it heard our footsteps, it limped out, mewling.

I was moving before I was even conscious of it. The black cat was so scrawny that her age was difficult to guess—six months, perhaps? One of her front legs was shorter than the other three, which made her walk with a curious shuffle, her back end trying to get ahead of her slower front half.

“Agnes!” Élise cried. “Are you mad? Just leave her.”

But I had already scooped the kitten up and tucked her into my coat. “She’s not heavy,” I said, as if this were the primary concern.

“What were you just saying?” Élise said in a scolding voice. “About changing the past? That it would throw the world into chaos?”

“I can’t leave her,” I said. Given her deformity, this creature was even more defenseless than most. I added a little desperately, “Perhaps cats are an exception to all this.”

“Perhaps,” Élise said. “If any beast were an exception to the laws of space or time, it would be cats. Well, I should have known you’d find someone to rescue, even at the end of the world.”

I excavated from my pocket a few bits of dried meat, which I always carry with me, and the cat devoured them with gusto. She seemed content to nestle into the warmth of my inner coat pocket, alternating between licking my neck and sticking her head out occasionally to gawp at the ominous scenery with interest. Cats are rarely troubled by the things humans fret over, which apparently included the apocalypse, and I found myself comforted by her insouciance.

We passed through the university grounds and came to a corner where a dense row of hedges and maples provided a shield against the tempestuous weather. Several vendors had set up food stands painted in gaudy colours. Here there was the most activity I’d seen—at least a dozen people milled about or huddled under umbrellas on the benches, and on the whole the place had a defiant, festive atmosphere. The crêperie was advertising a twenty-five percent “end of the world” discount.