Mrs. Petrova was seventy if she was a day, with steel-gray hair pulled back tight enough to look painful and eyes that missed nothing. She stood in the doorway of the Brooklyn Heights boarding house like a guardian statue, blocking entry until proper tribute was paid.
"Anton sent you," she said. Not a question.
"Yes ma'am."
"Anton doesn't exist."
"No ma'am."
She studied me for a long moment. I stood still and let her look. Whatever test this was, I suspected the worst thing I could do was try to pass it too hard.
"One eighty a week," she said finally. "Cash. No guests after ten. No drugs, no prostitutes, no screaming. Breakfast included but only if you're up by seven. Questions?"
"None."
"Good." She stepped aside. "Third floor. Room at the end. Bathroom's shared, second door on the right. You break anything, you buy it."
The room was small but clean. Single bed, narrow desk, window overlooking the street. A radiator that clinked and hissed but actually produced heat. Four walls and a door with a lock that worked.
Better than the alley. Better than I had any right to expect.
I counted out a week's rent from my dwindling cash. One hundred and eighty left Mrs. Petrova's weathered hand. Another twenty went to food — actual groceries from a corner store, things that would keep without refrigeration. That left me eighty dollars to last until... until whatever came next.
The math wasn't encouraging. But the math was a problem for tomorrow.
Right now I needed to understand this city.
I spent the next two days walking. Not aimlessly — deliberately, methodically, building a mental map to match the fragments in my Memory Palace. The show had given me street names and neighborhood vibes, the broad strokes of New York geography filtered through cinematographers' choices. What it hadn't given me was ground truth.
The criminal territories were wrong.
I noticed it on the second morning, crossing through a block in Red Hook that should have belonged to a specific operation — one I knew from Season 2, one that would matter when Sherlock started pulling threads. But the tags on the walls were different. The corners were manned by faces that didn't match any memory I could access.
The Memory Palace churned, trying to reconcile what I was seeing with what I knew. It failed. The warehouse in my head offered fragments of Season 2 Red Hook, three years in the future, but nothing about what these streets looked like right now.
My meta-knowledge was a map. But maps got outdated. Borders shifted. People moved, died, changed allegiances.
I marked the discrepancy mentally and kept walking.
By sunset I had a list of differences. Small things, mostly — a restaurant that should exist but didn't, a particular corner where the businesses were wrong, a face in passing that triggered recognition even though the context was scrambled.This wasn't the show. This was the world the show had filmed. The camera only captured what it pointed at.
I sat on a bench in Columbus Park as darkness fell, watching pigeons fight over bread crumbs, and tried to figure out what that meant.
If my knowledge was imperfect — and it was, clearly, it was — then I couldn't rely on it absolutely. I couldn't assume every Season 3 plot point would land exactly where the writers intended. Maybe Sherlock would still arrive in three weeks. Maybe Joan Watson would still become his partner. Maybe Jamie Moriarty would still be Irene Adler would still be the woman who shattered his heart.
But maybe not. Maybe my presence had already started changing things in ways I couldn't see. Butterfly effects rippling outward from a dead body that shouldn't have walked away from a Brooklyn alley.
The thought was terrifying. And liberating. If I couldn't trust my foreknowledge completely, then I was free to improvise. To make choices that weren't constrained by trying to preserve a timeline that might already be fracturing.
Tomorrow would be day three. Dmitri would call, or he wouldn't. My identity would materialize, or it wouldn't. The countdown to Sherlock would continue regardless.
I walked back to the boarding house as streetlights flickered on overhead. Mrs. Petrova was in the kitchen when I passed, the smell of something hearty drifting through the crack beneath the door. She didn't acknowledge me. I didn't expect her to.
The third-floor hallway was quiet. My room was exactly as I'd left it — small, clean, anonymous. I sat on the bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to organize my thoughts.
The Memory Palace responded before I consciously summoned it.
The warehouse again. But different now — slightly less chaotic, the shelves maybe beginning to sort themselves. I walked past rows of television memories, fragments of dialogue and character moments, and found a section that was new.
Real memories. Today's observations. The wrong tags on the Red Hook walls, the missing restaurant, the face I'd seen and couldn't place. Filed not by season or episode but by location and time, my own experiences starting to occupy space alongside the borrowed knowledge.
Interesting. The Palace wasn't just storage — it was a system. And systems could be trained, optimized, made to serve purposes they hadn't originally been designed for.
I reached for the Season 1 shelf and pulled down everything I had about the pilot episode. The murder case. The victim and the killer and the witnesses. The red herrings and the solution and the moment when Sherlock first demonstrated his deductive genius.
The details were fuzzy. Watching a show casually wasn't the same as studying it. I knew the shape of events but not every specific. Character names slipped away when I tried to grasp them. Plot points that had seemed clear on viewing dissolved into vague impressions under scrutiny.
My perfect memory was perfect for what I'd actually paid attention to. Everything else was noise.
I withdrew from the Palace and opened my eyes. The ceiling was still there. The radiator was still hissing. Outside, New York was still humming its endless song of traffic and voices and sirens in the distance.
Seventeen days until Sherlock. Seventy-two hours until Dmitri delivered my identity. Eighty dollars in my pocket and a head full of imperfect prophecy.
It wasn't enough. It wasn't close to enough. But it was what I had.
My phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.
Tomorrow. 2pm. Same door.
Dmitri was early. That meant either the work was easier than expected or I'd given him something more valuable than I realized.
I typed back: I'll be there.
Three dots appeared, disappeared. Then: Bring something else. Something that proves you weren't lying about Grayson.
The test wasn't over. It was just beginning.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the water stain on the ceiling. Tomorrow I'd have to produce evidence I'd extrapolated from fragments and guesswork. I'd have to convince a professional criminal that my impossible knowledge was reliable enough to bet on.
And if I failed — if Dmitri decided I was a con artist or a cop or just someone not worth the risk — I'd be back to nothing. No identity. No resources. No way to position myself before the game started.
The Memory Palace churned, offering fragments of Grayson's future. A minor character. A single-episode antagonist. Someone Sherlock would encounter and discard without a second thought. But in that fragment were details — business patterns, associate names, the kind of operational rhythms that criminal enterprises developed.
I couldn't access his present. But I knew his future. And from his future, I could extrapolate backward.
Tomorrow I would lie. I would lie convincingly, specifically, with enough detail to sound like someone who'd done their homework instead of someone who'd stolen answers from a test that hadn't been written yet.
And if I was lucky — if the universe that had killed me once was willing to give me one small break — the lie would become truth just long enough for me to build something real on top of it.
My eyes closed. The Palace waited, dark and patient, full of knowledge I was only beginning to understand.
Seventeen days.
I'd survived worse odds. Probably. I couldn't actually remember surviving anything — those memories belonged to the body in the alley, the one that hadn't walked away.
This body remembered nothing. This mind remembered everything. And somewhere between the two, Cash Dalton was starting to exist.
The radiator hissed. The city hummed. The countdown continued.
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