Twisted Fates

by Danielle Rollins

  He was talking about the Chronology Protection Agency, a team of time travelers taken from throughout history and brought to New Seattle two years ago to work alongside the late, great Professor Zacharias Walker.

  Mac smiled, and gave a slow shake of his head. “I’ve had people out looking for you and your friends for the last month. You’re well hidden. That intentional?”

  “It is,” Ash said, a rough edge to his voice. “We got a little tired of people showing up on our doorstep asking us to take them back in time to see the dinosaurs.”

  “That so?” Mac chewed on his chapped lip, grinning slightly. “So you don’t take requests? Say, for local business owners. There would be payment involved.”

  Local business owners. The phrase turned Ash’s stomach. “We aren’t going to take you back in time, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I could make it worth your while.”

  “No, thanks,” Ash said.

  Mac’s eyes darted to the makeshift desk under the window. Ash followed his gaze to a small black Glock.

  “Go for it and I shoot.” Chandra slid a thumb over the gun’s hammer. “Where do you keep the rest of the girls?”

  Mac inched toward the desk. “If you think I’m going to—”

  Chandra fired, sending a bullet straight through the pimp’s thigh. He howled with pain, dropping to his knees. Blood leaked onto the floor.

  “I was aiming a bit higher than your leg,” Chandra said. “Should I try again?”

  “She’s not very good with that thing,” Ash said.

  Mac pushed his fist to his mouth and bit down on his knuckles. A tear oozed out of his eye and slithered down his cheek. He had his other hand pressed to the wound in his leg, blood gushing through his fingers.

  “They’re—they’re upstairs,” he gasped, cringing. “Room Three-C.”

  Ash glanced at Chandra, half expecting her to shoot again, but she only tucked the gun in the back of her jeans, scowling at Mac as she darted out of the room. The young dark-haired girl hesitated for a moment and then followed her.

  Ash tipped his chin to the pimp bleeding on the floor. “Pleasure doing business.”

  Mac’s moans followed him out into the hall; his ears were still ringing with them when he reached the stairs.

  Room 3C looked flooded from the outside. Water sloshed around the bottom of the door, and the wooden frame was rotted clean through. Ash lowered a hand to the doorknob and leaned against the wood with his shoulder, hoping the door would just collapse beneath him. But it held.

  “Damn,” he muttered, relaxing. The curtain to the side of the door flicked as one of the girls looked out.

  “Let me,” the small, dark-haired girl said. Her voice was deeper than Ash expected, making her seem much older than he’d originally guessed.

  The girl slipped past him and knocked softly. “Mira,” she said. “It’s me. Open up.”

  There was a beat, and then the door creaked open. A redheaded girl with a face full of freckles peered out. Her eyes flicked anxiously from Ash to Chandra.

  “Who are the people, Hope?” Her voice was a thin rasp.

  “I don’t know,” Hope said. Then, with an attempt at a grin: “They shot Mac.”

  “Did they?” Mira pushed the door open wider. Behind her, Ash could see a small dim room with low ceilings, lit by scattered, flickering candles. A few girls were spread out across a bare mattress, dressed in sweats and oversize flannel shirts, playing cards. Another sat in front of a cracked mirror, trying to curl her hair with her fingers.

  Mira considered Ash. “Are you our new pimp, then?”

  “What?” Ash felt the backs of his ears flare. “No. God no.”

  “You shot Mac.”

  “Actually, I shot Mac,” Chandra cut in. “Does that make me your new pimp?”

  “Neither of us is going to be your new pimp,” Ash said.

  Mira didn’t look convinced. “You shot Mac out of the goodness of your heart, then?” Her eyes traveled down Ash’s body, assessing him. “Nobody does something for nothing.”

  “We’re looking for someone. A girl. Small, with long, dark hair.” Ash nodded at Hope. “Like her.”

  The corner of Mira’s mouth twitched. “There are no other girls like her, my friend.”

  She started to push the door closed.

  “Wait.” Ash wedged his foot between the door and the frame, holding it open. He felt his heart beating in his throat. This couldn’t be it. “Please.”

  Mira’s eyes softened. “We have all lost someone. I’m sorry.”

  Ash exhaled unevenly, half his breath releasing in a ragged spurt. His disappointment felt physical, like something had been carved out of him.

  He’d been so sure she would be there.

  He remembered the lift of hope he’d felt when he heard the guy at the bar’s story. It had been nearly three weeks since Dorothy had disappeared. That was nineteen nights, each of them filled with hours and hours of darkness. Ash had spent every minute of that darkness staring at the ceiling above his bed, imagining ways he might’ve saved her.

  The hope that she might be here had worked as a salve for a while, numbing his pain, giving him something to plan for. It was much easier to storm into a brothel with a gun than it was to face the truth.

  And the truth was that Dorothy was gone. She’d been lost in time.

  And Ash didn’t know where to begin looking for her.

  He slid his foot out the door. “Mac’s bleeding pretty bad upstairs. If any of you are looking to make a run for it, now would be the time.”

  None of the girls moved. They looked at each other and then back at Ash.

  Mira cocked her head. “But where else would we go?”

  When Ash couldn’t answer, she ushered Hope back inside and pushed the door closed.

  3

  Dorothy

  NOVEMBER 5, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  Three weeks ago, Dorothy had kidnapped herself.

  Well. Her past self.

  Time was a circle. She’d learned that a year ago, and she was still learning and relearning it, even now. When she went back to the 1990s to steal art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, she knew she’d be successful because she’d already been successful; the heist had gone down in history as the most impressive of all time. It was dizzying to think about, but, sometimes, the things one did in the past didn’t really happen until the future, and things one didn’t think had happened at all were already happening in someone else’s past.

  For instance, when Dorothy had first arrived in New Seattle, she’d heard about a mysterious girl named Quinn Fox. But it wasn’t until she fell backward in time that she realized she was Quinn Fox. She’d always been Quinn Fox.

  But she still had work to do. Certain things had to be put into place in order for everything to happen the way it was supposed to. Roman needed to make sure Dorothy ended up with the exotic matter before she fell off Ash’s ship, for one thing. And that meant that she and Roman had needed to kidnap her past self and plant the idea to go back in time in the first place.

  It had been . . . elaborate. But Dorothy had been fully prepared for the tediousness of setting up clues for her past self to follow, of feeding Roman lines and planting hints and weaving suspicion—

  She hadn’t been prepared to see herself, though. That had come as something of a shock. She kept reliving the moment when it’d happened, the stuffy heat of the hotel room and the smell of mold and damp and something else, a lightly floral scent that had made her nose twitch, reminding her of her mother.

  “What about our newest guest?” she’d asked Roman. The conversation had been staged, naturally. They’d needed Dorothy’s past self to think they were going to kill her so that she’d steal the Professor’s journal (which they’d conveniently left behind for her to discover) and jump out a window, thus delivering the journal to Ash and his friends. “Bring me whatever valuables you find, and get rid of the body. We need the room empty again
by tonight.”

  Dorothy could still remember how terrified she’d been when she’d first heard those words. Get rid of the body. Like she was merely a thing to be disposed of, a chore. She’d imagined a single gunshot in her back as she was running away, a sudden numbness, followed by a thick, heavy darkness. Standing there, saying the words herself, she’d felt blood pumping in her palms and a bitter taste hit the back of her throat. She wasn’t that girl any longer. She wouldn’t be helpless again.

  So maybe that was why she’d looked, to prove to herself that she’d changed. She’d heard the soft rustle of fabric behind her and she’d turned on instinct, inadvertently catching a glimpse of her own face.

  It had been her old face, unravaged by a fall from a time machine, or a year spent with a vicious gang. Her skin had been clear, her hair dark and chestnut brown. The first thought Dorothy had, seeing her past self, was no wonder she’d kept getting taken: she’d looked more like a doll than like a person, and she’d been so much younger than Dorothy could ever remember being. And innocent.

  As soon as she thought it, the word got stuck in her head, like a bit of a song lyric that she couldn’t stop singing. Innocent, innocent . . . Had she ever been innocent? She’d been a thief and a con artist before she’d become Quinn Fox. She’d stolen money and hearts; she’d tricked men into believing she wanted them and then disappeared to leave them to tend to their wounds alone. Innocent was never a word she’d have used to describe herself, and she wouldn’t have believed it if the proof hadn’t been right there.

  She’d felt a jolt then, as she realized that—innocent or not—the girl she’d once been was gone. Quinn Fox had killed her.

  Now Dorothy tugged her hair loose, letting her white curls fall over her shoulders. She shrugged out of her stolen police uniform, exchanging it for her familiar dark cloak. She pulled the hood over her head so that it mostly hid her face, and tugged the sleeves down low over the harnesses that held her daggers.

  Lips were next. She found a small pot in her cloak pocket and unscrewed the lid, revealing a deep bloodred mixture. She dotted it on her lips without bothering to consult a mirror. It was better if it was messy.

  It wasn’t real blood—it was carmine mixed with oil, like prostitutes in her time used to wear—but it looked like blood, which was the entire point.

  Roman squinted at her, watching the transformation as he piloted the Black Crow over the choppy waters. They’d stopped outside the anil so they could switch places, him piloting the Black Crow while she changed in the passenger seat. He looked like he was holding something back.

  “What is it?” she asked, pressing her lips together to make the red bleed onto her skin. She could see from her reflection in the window that she looked pale, almost dead. “Don’t I look okay?”

  “You look great,” Roman said, and then paused, as though contemplating that. “No, I’m sorry, I meant that you look terrifying. I occasionally get those two mixed up.”

  Dorothy smiled. Terrifying. He meant it as a compliment. The two of them had worked hard to make her terrifying. Dorothy had seen a year into the future, but she’d never glimpsed Quinn Fox’s face, and so she and Roman had spent weeks coming up with her disguise before deciding on her whitened skin and dark cloak and red lips. It had been the first part of their plan to take over the Black Cirkus. It was like a riddle. How do you frighten frightening people?

  Easy. You become frightening yourself.

  Her earliest days with the Black Cirkus were fuzzy now. She’d been badly injured, her face a mess of blood and mangled flesh. She remembered the suspicious voices that had buzzed around her when Roman first led her down the halls of the Fairmont. He’d wrapped her in his cloak, warning her to keep her injury hidden from the others.

  “They can’t know that you’re hurt,” he’d said, and Dorothy had been dismayed to hear the nerves in his voice and to see that his normally vibrant eyes were dark with fear. “They don’t like weakness.”

  They. He was talking about the Cirkus Freaks, the notoriously vicious members of the gang that ruled the city. Dorothy could still remember the first time she’d seen them sailing over the waters of New Seattle in their motorboat, crossbows and axes strapped to their backs, howling as they aimed their guns into the sky.

  They’d been terrifying, certainly—but Roman had been the worst of them all. They’d called him the Crow, and he’d been like the king of the thieves, charming and calculating and frightened of no one.

  This Roman was nothing like that. He was good-looking, still, but skittish and thin, like a street dog used to scrambling for his food. His cloak didn’t have its signature crow sketched across it yet. And then there was the matter of that sad, scraggly beard he was trying to grow . . .

  Dorothy had grimaced looking at it. The beard would have to go.

  “I am not weak,” she’d said, her voice knife-edge sharp. “And neither are you. I’ve seen the future and, in it, you and I do not fear the Black Cirkus. We lead it.”

  The fear in Roman’s eyes had turned bright and glittering then. For the first time he reminded Dorothy of the Crow she’d known.

  He’d asked only, “How?”

  Grinning, she’d told him.

  She should’ve realized that night that becoming the notorious Quinn Fox would not be as simple as adopting a new name. There were things she would have to do to gain the Black Cirkus’s trust. Terrible things.

  “You’re too small,” Roman had often hissed at her, in those early days, when she still skittered through the Fairmont hallways with her head ducked, her shoulders clenched around her ears. “You look breakable.”

  She’d flinched at that word. Breakable. It reminded her of being kidnapped as a child by a drunken man in a bar. It made her feel helpless, and she’d sworn that she would never again feel helpless.

  Still, she’d had to admit that Roman had a point. She was so much smaller than anyone else in the Black Cirkus. The other Freaks looked at her like she was something to be devoured. Like she was a snack. Sometimes she imagined she heard them licking their lips as she walked past.

  It wasn’t just her size. Her injury was taking longer to heal than she’d expected. It looked garish, red and raw and painful. It bled constantly. Dorothy had spent most of her time huddled in bathrooms, changing bandages and cleaning her shredded skin so it wouldn’t get infected. At Roman’s suggestion, she’d taken to covering her carved-up face with a low hood, so the other Freaks wouldn’t know how badly injured—how vulnerable—she really was. But that only made them more suspicious of what she was hiding.

  Worse than that, it made them curious.

  There weren’t a lot of girls in the Black Cirkus. Being female, Dorothy already drew far too much attention. The Freaks whispered about what she looked like beneath her ever-present cloak. Dorothy could feel the weight of their stares whenever she walked down the hallway, and she knew it would be only a matter of time before their curiosity got the better of them.

  And then, one night, it did.

  She’d been late sneaking back into the Fairmont, and some boy—a newer Cirkus Freak who she didn’t recognize—had emerged from the shadows and grabbed her. For one dizzy moment, she’d thought it had been a mistake, that he’d been expecting someone else, perhaps, or simply bumped into her in his rush to get down the hall.

  But then she heard the sounds of his friends hidden around the corner, laughing and cheering him on, and she knew that it’d hadn’t been a mistake at all but an ambush.

  They’d been waiting for her.

  The boy was rough as he’d pinned her to the wall, one arm braced across her collarbone so that she couldn’t move, the other gripping her waist, fingers jabbing painfully into her skin.

  “Look at her wriggle,” he’d said, his breath sour and too, too close. “Didn’t I tell you she’d be fun?”

  Fun? He thought this was fun? Dorothy hadn’t been able to catch her breath. She knew that if she didn’t do something now, this wou
ld happen again and again and again. She was small and weak and fun. Everyone at the Fairmont would see her as an easy mark, someone to be taken advantage of. Her new reality would be running from boys like this, fighting off grabbing hands and stinking breath.

  And so she’d done the only thing she could think to do.

  She’d bitten him. On the face.

  She’d gotten a big chunk of his skin off, too, leaving behind a deep, ugly gash. The boy had dropped her and fallen to his knees, howling, as blood dripped from her chin.

  She hadn’t bothered to wipe the blood away but said only, “I don’t like to be touched.”

  The boy was called Moon Face after that, in reference to the crater left in his cheek. And the whispers about Quinn Fox officially began.

  Roman started most of them. He told people that they shouldn’t get close to Quinn, that she enjoyed the taste of human flesh a little too much. It helped that she always smelled strongly of blood, courtesy of her still-healing injury. And then there was Moon Face himself, walking around with the shape of her teeth still imprinted on his face, a living warning.

  Roman kept the rumors coming after that, making sure that each was ghastlier than the one before. He said that Quinn didn’t know how to smile, that she’d been kept inside a closet until she was twelve years old and grew up without ever seeing another human face and it’d left her . . . wrong.

  He said she could only mimic human emotions and she wore the hood low over her face to hide her empty facial expressions.

  She could learn anyone’s secrets by staring into his or her eyes.

  She could kill a grown man with her bare hands.

  With her finger.

  With a look.

  Dorothy felt foolish, that she hadn’t thought of this earlier. Quinn Fox was a cannibal. It was one of the first things she’d ever learned about New Seattle.

  Where I’m going, there are entire cities hidden underwater, and gangs that steal little old ladies on their way to the market, and a girl who lives off human flesh.