Zinnith Aster had survived worse. Truly. She had once texted "ily" to her boss instead of "I'll email you," triggering a week of side-eyes and suspiciously prompt HR reminders. She'd been on a date so bad the guy made a 12-slide Google Slides presentation to explain why ghosting him was "a miscommunication of energy." She had navigated family reunions where cousins tried to sell her crypto and accidentally joined a neighborhood Zumba group she was too embarrassed to quit.
But this?
A rural road, a dead GPS, and a thunderstorm that sounded like it wanted a fight?
This was new, even for her.
Rain came down in chaotic sheets, lashing sideways across the windshield of her beat-up Toyota like nature had a grudge. Wipers struggled against the onslaught, squeaking pitifully across the glass. Zin leaned forward, squinting, fingers tight on the wheel, the GPS voice frozen mid-sentence like even it had given up. The cheerful blue line was gone. Replaced by a blank map and an endlessly spinning circle.
"You had one job, Karen," she muttered, giving the dash a solid thump. "Get me through busy streets of London maze, not lead me into the next Blair Witch reboot."
Her phone flickered. Then glitched. Then died with the solemnity of a Shakespearean actor.
She stared at the black screen in disbelief. "Great. Fine. Betrayal is cool."
She let out a dramatic groan and threw the phone into the passenger seat. With a sigh, Zin flicked on her hazard lights-out of spite more than safety-and guided the car onto what looked like a shoulder but quickly revealed itself to be a trap. Her tires sank into wet earth with an audible slurp. She threw it in park, grabbed her tote bag, and stepped out into the downpour.
Big mistake.
Water hit her in the face like a slap. Cold and relentless. Wind tugged at her hoodie, and the air smelled like ozone and distant regret. Her sneakers squelched into the mud like they'd given up on her, and she immediately slipped, catching herself on the car door with a muffled curse.
"Perfect," she gritted, yanking the hood tighter over her head. The rain made it hard to see more than a few feet in any direction, trees looming like shadowed towers on either side of the narrow road.
There was no signal. No passing cars. No lights in the distance.
Just trees.
Just rain.
Just her.
And the strange object in her tote bag-small, heavy, tucked beneath receipts and lip balm and a crumpled protein bar wrapper. The heirloom. Her mother had practically thrown it at her on the way out the door that morning.
"Just keep it with you," she'd said, in that too-casual voice parents use when something isn't casual at all. "It was your father's. He always said it was... special."
Zin hadn't asked what "special" meant. At the time, she thought it was just emotional clutter. Something her mom couldn't throw away but couldn't keep staring at either.
But now?
Now it pulsed.
Just faintly.
Just enough for her to notice.
Warm and humming through the fabric of her bag like it was reacting to the storm.
Zin froze.
"No," she said aloud. "No no no, don't be creepy. You're a weird old compass or whatever. You are not alive."
Lightning tore through the sky again, closer this time. The thunder followed immediately, so loud it rattled her ribs.
She looked down the road. Nothing but trees and shadows.
She looked at the bag. Felt the thrum again.
And for the first time that day, Zin Aster wondered-deeply, sincerely, and with growing unease-if she should've asked more questions about her dad.
She narrowed her eyes at it. "You better not be haunted."
That's when the lightning struck the tree five feet to her left.
The explosion of light swallowed everything.
When Zin came to, her first thought was: Wow, this dirt smells aggressively... dirt-like.
Her second: Where the bloody hell am I?
She squinted against the sunlight, sharp and golden overhead. No clouds. No storm. No car. No road. No Karen the GPS to yell at. Just grass, sky, and silence, broken only by the hum of distant birdsong and the unmistakable rustle of trees that were much too tall and pristine to belong anywhere near modern infrastructure.
Zin sat up slowly, every joint aching. She blinked a few times, half-expecting to see a billboard or at least a cell tower. Nothing. Just wilderness and a narrow dirt path that looked like it hadn't seen a tyre in two hundred years.
"Brilliant," she muttered, brushing mud off her sleeve. "Next stop: Victorian tuberculosis."
And then-hoofbeats.
At first she thought it was thunder again, her brain still catching up. But it was faster. Sharper. Getting louder.
She turned just in time to see a horse charging toward her at full speed. The rider was tall, broad-shouldered, and moving like he had absolutely no intention of slowing down.
"MOVE!" he barked.
Zin scrambled to her feet, barely managing to throw herself out of the way before the horse thundered past, hooves kicking up a storm of dust and gravel. She landed hard in the brush, caught a thorn to the side of her leg, and let out a colorful string of words she immediately regretted when she heard someone dismount nearby.
"Are you injured?" the man asked briskly.
Zin sat up from the shrubbery like an angry forest goblin, leaves in her hair and murder in her eyes. "Oh, just peachy, thanks. Nothing like being nearly flattened by a galloping wardrobe extra."
The man took a step closer, frowning. He had pale blue eyes-icy and appraising-and neatly combed brown hair, not a strand out of place. His coat was dark, tailored, and clearly hand-stitched, paired with a waistcoat and crisp white shirt that hadn't seen a washing machine in its life. He looked like he took himself very seriously, which only made Zin more annoyed.
"I beg your pardon?" he said coolly.
"You should," she snapped. "Is barreling at women on country roads your usual approach to introductions, or am I just lucky?"
"You were in the middle of the road."
"I didn't know it was a road! Where I'm from, roads tend to have-oh, I don't know-tarmac? Signs? At least a painted line or two?"
His brow furrowed. "Tarmac?"
Zin stared at him. Hard.
Her eyes flicked down to his boots, up to the cravat, then back at the ridiculously well-behaved horse. She turned her head slowly, absorbing the scenery. The path. The quiet. The utter lack of anything modern.
Her brain tried to connect the dots and threw up an error message instead.
"Right," she muttered, more to herself than him. "No signal. No buildings. No normal."
Then, louder: "What year is it?"
The man tilted his head, clearly suspicious now.
"Eighteen seventy-two."
Zin stared at him like he'd just spoken fluent Martian.
"Eighteen seventy-two," she repeated, voice flat.
"Yes," he replied, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
She blinked. "Right. No big deal. Just... only about a century and a half off. Totally fine."
"Off from what?" he asked, watching her closely.
Zin took a shaky step backward. "From reality," she muttered, then caught herself. "Never mind."
He narrowed his eyes. "You speak strangely."
"You think I'm the strange one here?" Her laugh came out high and wrong. "You're dressed like you just crawled out of a Brontë novel and nearly ran me over with a war horse."
He raised an eyebrow. "You were in the road."
She threw up her hands. "It's a path! It has no signs, no pavement-this whole place looks like someone hit pause on history class. And I swear, if this is some kind of heritage village tourism prank, you're all going to get sued into oblivion."
He stepped closer, calm and unreadable. "You're shaking."
"I'm processing!" Zin snapped, stepping back again. "You're telling me it's 1872, I have no phone, no car, no idea how I got here, and you're standing there like you're about to offer me tea and tuberculosis!"
There was a pause. The only sounds were birdsong and the faint rustling of leaves.
"You're not well," he said at last.
"No kidding," Zin muttered. "I mean-do I look well?"
She paced a few steps, clutching her bag like it might contain answers. "Okay. I need... okay. I need a hospital. Or a therapist. Or both. Or I've actually died and this is the world's most elaborate colonial-themed afterlife."
Evan just watched her quietly.
She looked up suddenly, wide-eyed. "Wait. You-you're not like... dead, are you? Am I talking to a ghost? Is this some weird Victorian purgatory thing? Because that would track."
"No," he said slowly, "you're very much alive. Though I'm increasingly uncertain of your... faculties."
"Fantastic," Zin muttered, starting to spiral. "I time-traveled without consent. I didn't even bring snacks. What is this, a BBC drama or a nervous breakdown?"
Evan tilted his head, watching her with a mix of concern and suspicion. "You need shelter. I'll escort you to the village. You can explain this... episode to someone there."
Zin froze.
"No," she said quickly. "No, I'm not going anywhere with you."
He blinked. "Pardon?"
"You just galloped at me like a possessed cavalryman and now you want to escort me? That sounds like the beginning of every murder podcast I've ever listened to."
"I am offering you help."
"Yeah, well, I'm British. We instinctively decline help, even when we're dying."
A silence passed between them. His jaw tightened.
"As you wish," he said coolly, stepping back toward his horse. "Stay on the path. Or don't. But you'll find little safety out here."
He mounted with the kind of practiced ease that annoyed her purely on principle.
"Try not to lie in the road next time," he added. "It's a poor survival strategy."
"Thanks for the tip, Mr. Trot-By," she called after him, arms crossed tightly.
He didn't respond. Just turned the horse and trotted away without another word, the sound of hooves growing fainter until it disappeared altogether into the woods.
Zin stood there, stunned, wet leaves stuck to her jeans and her heart pounding against her ribs.
She stared at the empty path.
"...Right," she whispered to herself. "Brilliant."
Then she turned slowly in place, doing a full, panicked 360° as it finally hit her.
She was alone.
In the woods.
In the wrong century.
"Oh god," Zin whispered, blinking hard. "I've gone full time-travel. And I didn't even pack a charger."
She sank onto a fallen log with a shaky exhale.
Somewhere in the depths of her bag, the strange heirloom pulsed once-softly. Almost like it was listening.
The town came into view like a painting came to life-quaint, curated, and impossibly still. Hughes Village, according to the wooden placard nailed to a crooked post, looked like it had been plucked out of a children's book and pressed into reality with too much care.
Thatched roofs. Brick chimneys. Horses tied to hitching posts. Women in bonnets walking in pairs with baskets swinging from their arms. Men in suspenders hauling crates. There were flower boxes in every window, and cobblestone streets so clean it felt like the dirt had been politely told to stay away.
Zin stopped dead just past the hedge-lined bend, blinking at it all like it might disappear if she squinted hard enough.
"Good God," she whispered. "I've time-traveled into an Instagram influencer's filtered fantasy. All this needs is a pumpkin spice candle and a matching cottagecore edit."
She tugged at the hem of her hoodie, trying to hide the fact that she was wearing denim in a world that clearly believed ankles were scandalous. It didn't help. The moment she stepped into the main road, everything halted.
People froze mid-step. A woman dropped her basket of apples. A dog barked once, then whimpered and backed away. Zin became suddenly, intensely aware of the sound of her own footsteps.
Then came the high-pitched shriek from a small boy, pointing straight at her sneakers like they'd offended his lineage.
"WITCH!"
Zin blinked at him. "Oh, come on," she muttered. "They're just Converse. They're not cursed."
But the damage was done. People began whispering. Crossing themselves. A few backed away into doorways. One elderly man clutched his chest like her exposed ankles had personally attacked him.
"Okay," she said under her breath. "Smile. Be charming. Pretend you're lost on a school trip. Or filming a very elaborate period drama."
She didn't get far before a woman-older, with graying hair tucked into a tidy scarf and eyes sharp enough to gut fish-stepped forward from a stoop. Her posture was no-nonsense, but her tone, when she spoke, was unexpectedly kind.
"You're not from here," the woman said.
Zin opened her mouth. Closed it. "Astute."
"You're alone?"
"Regrettably."
"Come," the woman said, already turning. "You'll need a place to rest before the council gets hold of you."
Zin didn't ask what "the council" meant. She was too tired to care. Her legs felt like cooked spaghetti. Her brain was making a slow-mo buzzing noise that might've been exhaustion or the start of a breakdown.
The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Alder and led her to a modest cottage tucked just beyond the town square. Flowers lined the windowsills. The door creaked just right. Inside smelled of lavender, fresh bread, and something woodsy.
"Sit. Eat," Mrs. Alder said, pointing to a bowl of stew already waiting on the table. "You look like you've outrun the devil."
Zin gave a weak smile. "Feels about right."
She didn't remember much after that. The stew was hot and savory, the bread soft. Her body gave up somewhere between "Thank you" and collapsing face-first into a feather pillow that smelled of herbs.
Later, in the dark, under heavy quilts and silence broken only by a distant owl, Zin curled onto her side. Her hand brushed the inside of her hoodie pocket-where the strange, humming heirloom still sat like a heart that didn't belong to her.
She gripped it tightly and whispered to no one, "Dad... what the hell did you get me into?"
Down the winding lane near the edge of the Parish estate, Evan Parish stood beside the stable, hands tucked behind his back, eyes fixed on the hills beyond the village.
He hadn't spoken a word since returning.
His horse was already groomed and fed, the saddle removed, the reins hung. But Evan hadn't moved. Not really. He just stood there, where the sky still bore the echo of the lightning strike that had split the ridge apart.
That girl.
Whoever she was.
With mud on her boots and the kind of voice that didn't belong in any town this side of Pittsburgh—much less Hughes.
She'd said the year wrong. Or rather, she said it right… for her. 2025.
And she said it like she meant it.
Not like she was confused or sick in the head—but like someone remembering a calendar they hadn't looked at in a while.
Evan's jaw worked as he stared into the twilight. He didn't believe in fate. He didn't believe in stories, either. And yet, here he was—unsettled by a stranger with wild eyes and nonsense on her tongue.
But something about it stuck. Not her name—she hadn't given one. But the way she looked at him like he was the anachronism.
Like he was out of place.
He wasn't one to chase ghosts. But if she was telling the truth—if she'd really come from the future, or believed she had—then he needed to know why.
Because the last time someone talked about time unraveling in Hughes… things had gone terribly wrong.
And Evan Parish had sworn he'd never let it happen again.
Even if it meant doing the one thing he hated most:
Believing the unbelievable.