The end of Dr. Elias Vance’s world was not a whimper, but a percussive, deafening bang. One moment, he was staring at a chromatograph readout, his heart pounding with the illicit thrill of a monumental breakthrough. He had synthesized a self-replicating enzyme, a discovery that would make him a god in the pantheon of biochemistry. He had, of course, bypassed a few tedious safety protocols and “borrowed” some proprietary data to get there, but history, he’d always believed, is written by the victors, not the ethics committee. The next moment, a cascade of alarms shrieked in harmony, and the volatile catalyst for his creation decided, with extreme prejudice, that it no longer wished to be contained. The reinforced glass of the reaction chamber bowed, turned milky white with a web of cracks, and then ceased to exist. Elias’s last sensation was a wave of incandescent heat and the sharp, sterile scent of ozone.
He awoke to the sensation of biting, damp cold and the smell of coal smoke, unwashed wool, and decay. His head was pounding, not with the sharp trauma of an explosion, but with the dull, throbbing rhythm of a fever. A rough, scratchy blanket was pulled up to his chin. He was lying on a lumpy straw mattress in a small, dark room. Heavy, leaded glass windows allowed only a sliver of gray, unforgiving light to penetrate the gloom. This was not a hospital.
Panic, cold and sharp, tried to seize him, but his body was too weak to respond. He tried to sit up, but a fit of wracking coughs sent him collapsing back into the mattress. A door creaked open, and a figure entered, silhouetted against the dim light of a hallway. The man was of middling height, with long, unkempt hair and clothes that seemed centuries out of date. He carried a small bowl from which a thin, unappetizing steam arose.
“You are awake,” the man said. His voice was sharp, impatient, laced with an accent Elias’s mind vaguely tagged as some form of British English. “Cease your caterwauling. If you are to die, do so quietly. I have work to attend.”
The man placed the bowl of thin gruel on a rickety stool beside the bed. As he turned, the light caught his face. It was a face Elias knew from a hundred portraits and biographies. The high, intelligent brow, the sharp, aquiline nose, the intense, almost mad eyes that seemed to be peering into a world beyond this one. It was, impossibly, the face of a young Isaac Newton.
The shock was a physical blow, more powerful than the lab explosion. Elias’s mind, a finely tuned instrument of logic and reason, rebelled. It was a hallucination, a coma-dream, the last, frantic firing of a dying brain. But the cold was real. The painful rasp in his lungs was real. The dismissive, brilliant glare of the father of modern physics was real.
A torrent of memories, not his own, flooded his consciousness. Liam. His name was Liam. An orphan from the London slums, who had made his way to Cambridge with a letter of introduction from a distant, charitable clergyman. He had a persistent lung ailment and a desperate hope of finding any sort of work that didn’t involve a short, brutal life on the docks. The memories were thin, full of hunger, fear, and a dull, unlettered ignorance. And his most recent memory? Being taken into the rooms of this strange, reclusive scholar at Trinity College, a man who needed someone to fetch his meals, clean his crucibles, and then leave him the hell alone.
He was in Cambridge. In the late 17th century. He, Dr. Elias Vance, a titan of 21st-century biochemistry, was trapped in the sickly, half-starved body of an illiterate apprentice to Isaac Newton. The sheer, cosmic absurdity of it was almost enough to make him laugh, but the sound that escaped his throat was another hacking cough.
Newton watched him with profound irritation. “The physician says it is a lung fever. He has prescribed a poultice of mustard and pig dung. I find the efficacy of such measures to be highly dubious.” He gestured to the bowl. “I have boiled the water for this gruel myself. It is a more logical preventative against the humours of a sickroom. Now eat. I have not taken you in to watch you expire.”
Elias’s mind snagged on one phrase: I have boiled the water. A simple, almost trivial act. But in an age that knew nothing of germ theory, an age that believed disease was spread by bad air or an imbalance of bodily fluids, it was an act of stunning, intuitive genius. He was witnessing the scientific method in its raw, embryonic form.
He forced himself to eat the gruel, the warm, bland sustenance a small comfort in his sea of terror. He was a scientist. He needed to observe, to gather data. He was weak, helpless, and in a body that felt like a cage. But his mind… his mind was still his own. It was a repository of three hundred years of scientific progress, a weapon of unimaginable power in this dark, ignorant age.
But a weapon is only as good as the hand that wields it. And right now, his hand was trembling too much to even hold the spoon steady. As he lay back, the fever beginning to drag him back into the depths, he looked at Newton, who had already forgotten him and was now staring intently at a prism, a single beam of light breaking into a rainbow on the far wall. Elias Vance was dead. Liam, the alchemist’s apprentice, was alive, for now. And he was trapped in the past, with a genius who stood on the very precipice of the modern world, a man who was unraveling the secrets of light, but who still searched for the Philosopher’s Stone in the dead of night. This was not a coma-dream. This was a new, terrifying reality, and his first experiment was simply to survive.