is honoured and marked as a coming man. Some time later, while attending a New Year's Eve ball at the palace of the Prince of New Castile, a prince of the blood and the Commander of the Society of Time, Don Miguel meets Lady Kristina, the daughter of the Swedish ambassador. At her prompting, the two leave the party to explore the city of Londres for themselves. While walking down one of the city's streets, however, they encounter an unusually dressed woman who is assaulted by men who intend to rape her, but turns out be more than able to take care of herself, proceeding to immobilise a number of her assailants before Don Miguel is able to knock her unconscious (the reader can easily recognise that she is adept at some kind of martial art, but in Don Miguel's world these are unknown in the West). Taking the woman to the Society's headquarters, he attempts to return to the prince's palace in search of Father Ramón, the society's Jesuit master-theoretician, but is stopped by a panicked mob clogging the streets. There he learns of the burning of the palace and the deaths of all of the assembled dignitaries – including the entire Royal Family – at the hands of dozens of female warriors (transported, it turns out, from an alternate timeline in which a Mongol King rules all of Asia and Europe and which senior members of the Society of Time secretly contacted). After encountering Father Ramón, the two return to Society Headquarters, where they use a special cross-temporal Mass to contact an earlier version of Father Ramón and prevent the massacre from taking place. However, though seeming to end well, the episode leaves Don Miguel with a mounting feeling of anxiety, having found out that his superiors engage in dangerous experiments and thus realizing that his entire reality hangs by an extremely thin thread. Needing a vacation, Don Miguel travels to remote California, a backwater rarely visited by Europeans. In this history, there had been no California Gold Rush; the gold mines in California are owned by the Imperial government and employ local Native American laborers. While relaxing at a hacienda near a local mine, his host, a Native American engineer named Two Dogs, shows him a steel bit from a rock drill discovered in a recently started mine. Fearing a violation of the treaty between the Empire