Anne awakes from her sleep to someone pounding at her bedroom door. She vaguely remembers strange dreams with guns and magic and Italians. The person pounding turns out to be Gwen, the other woman with whom she runs a dressmaking shop in Charles Town. Gwen has been crying and throws herself into Anne's arms. "They say Gavin's been shot! In Lexington! By the Redcoats!" Anne assures her that Gavin can't be dead, he wouldn't die like that. But she goes to borrow a horse from her neighbor to ride out to Lexington.
Her neighbor, Dame Strauss, is asleep at her workbench having completed the work on her latest mechanical computator overnight. This one is named "Thielo" after her dead husband, and it's cube of gears and metal that probably weighs a ton. She awakens to the knocking and finds Anne asking to borrow her horse. She also sees a man coming bellowing about her nephew, Stephan, who apparently has done something terrible to the man's daughter. Stephan was sent from the old country to help his aunt after her husband died - wouldn't do to have a woman living alone.
Stephan awakens upstairs and hearing the commotion goes out the window, down a tree, and takes the horse. As he goes past Anne yells at him that she needs the horse, so he swings her up behind. The man with the daughter runs after then for a while, but they out-distance him. Anne tells Stephan they're going to Lexington, and that seems as good a place as any to him.
Alexandra takes the bit of peace to crank up Thielo and talk to it (using the levers on the front). It provides helpful advice. She wonders how Benjamin Franklin is doing with Max, an earlier model that she sent to him... he wrote her praising the machine, so hopefully there is fruitful work ahead there. Thielo is much more useful and complex than Max.
In Lexington, Anne and Stephan find Gavin dying, laid on a table in the pub. He's been shot with a musket ball in the chest, and there's no way to save him. Gavin alone remembers the last world, and understands this one only faintly. "Angelina? Esteban?" He figures out their names and tells Stephan to look after Anne. His last words are "Anne, there's something about you and Gwen..." but then he dies.