Claire understood with a sick, crystalline certainty: she had not taken a picture. She had activated a device. And every second she stayed in this frozen world, the camera subtracted a second from somewhere else—from Anna's future, from the clouds' rain, from the motion of the earth itself.

And Claire? Claire could still move.

To unfreeze time, she would have to trade something of equal beauty for every moment she had stolen.

Claire pressed the shutter.

She checked the camera's LCD. The filename had changed.