Alice Payne Arrives

In 1788, Alice Payne supports herself through highway robbery, aided by an automaton and a talent for unsettling wealthy travellers. Elsewhere in history, Major Prudence Zuniga is exhausted by attempts to change the past in order to rescue the future. Rival factions have made time itself into a battlefield, and repeated interventions have failed to produce the outcome she wants. Alice appears to offer something their struggle has been missing. Bringing a woman from the eighteenth century into that conflict, however, means involving someone with her own loyalties and reasons to act. The encounter draws a practiced thief into an unfamiliar war where consequences can spread far beyond the moment that produces them.