July 3rd dawned hot and still. Clara woke to the Union Army stirring—the “decisive day” had arrived. Jude and Flynn were already hunched over their grandfather’s notes.

“The note from ‘M,'” Jude said without preamble. “The handwriting is familiar. I’ve seen it before.”

“Later,” Clara urged. “We have to find the machine parts before the fighting moves south to Cemetery Ridge. It’s a risk we have to take.”

A single cannon boomed, then another. The bombardment had begun.

General Chamberlain arrived an hour later, face drawn. “My regiment is moving to the center,” he said. He had arranged for Mrs. Weikert, a local who knew the terrain, to guide them to the crash site. “Godspeed,” he told them. “I’ll find you when this is over—if I can.”

Clara watched him walk toward the guns. In her history, he became a hero and a governor. Here, he was just a man walking into a storm of lead.

The walk to the woods took an hour under a sky thundering with the “biggest bombardment of the war.” Amidst the underbrush, they found the debris. After twenty minutes of searching, Flynn emerged from a thicket holding a battered copper cylinder.

“The temporal stabilizer!” Jude grabbed it. “Without this, any window we open would collapse.”

They salvaged what they could—gears, wires, and crystals—though the field generator was still missing. “I can work with this,” Jude said, cautiously optimistic. “I need a day to assess it.”

Suddenly, a primal roar rose from the south.

“Pickett’s Charge,” Mrs. Weikert whispered. “The infantry assault has begun.”

From the tree line, the fields were a nightmare. Clara had read the statistics, but the reality was soul-crushing: neat gray lines of men shattering under artillery, smoke choking the air, and the terrible screams of twelve thousand soldiers marching into a “High Water Mark” that looked more like a mass grave.

By evening, the guns fell silent. The siblings huddled in the hayloft above a barn-turned-hospital. Chamberlain appeared at the top of the ladder, looking like a ghost, his uniform blackened by powder.

“It’s over,” he rasped. “Lee is broken. But I lost thirty-three men today.”

After a heavy silence, Jude asked to see the General’s diary. He compared it to the assassination warning.

“Look at the capital T,” Jude pointed out. “Your hand has a small hook at the top. The letter doesn’t. And the pressure is lighter. It’s a forgery.”

“But why forge a warning about an assassination that hasn’t happened?” Clara asked.

“To distract us,” Jude realized. “We’ve been so focused on Lincoln that we haven’t asked how the Confederates knew we were here, or who ‘M’ is. Someone wanted us looking the wrong way.”

Chamberlain’s eyes grew grave. “I’ll have my scouts look for agents. You finish that machine. But be careful—whoever did this is watching you.”

As the General left, the siblings settled into the hay. Outside, the farm was finally quiet, but Clara stayed awake, staring at the rafters.

Whoever you are, she thought, we’re going to find you.