Twisted Fates

by Danielle Rollins

  Ash had told her that, when she’d first met him in the clearing behind the church where she was supposed to be married. Only, then he’d been the handsome pilot with the gold eyes, smelling of campfire smoke and faraway places. She’d thought he’d been exaggerating. She’d never, in her wildest dreams, thought he’d been talking about her.

  If Dorothy still had any lingering hope that she could return to Ash and his friends, it faded as the rumors about her grew stronger. She saw Ash once more but, by then, it was too late. She was already Quinn Fox, cannibal, leader of the Black Cirkus.

  And he hated her.

  4

  Ash

  The pea-green sky followed Ash and Chandra around to the back of the motel, where their boat was rocking on the black waves.

  It hung above them ominously, as Ash tugged on the pull cord—once, twice, three times—and the motor growled to life.

  It seemed to hold its breath as they climbed into the old boat and steered away from Mac’s motel and down the narrow Aurora waterway, squat buildings bordering them on either side.

  Not an omen, Ash told himself again, looking away from the sky.

  They rode past a half-dozen motels just like Mac’s. Dark, run-down places with boarded-up windows and armed guards at the doors. Ash made himself picture the faces behind all those windows. Broken, terrified faces. Most of them were underage. Most of them were working against their will.

  But, hard as he tried, Ash couldn’t see them. Dorothy’s face kept creeping in instead. Dorothy scared and Dorothy laughing and Dorothy looking up at him, leaning in to kiss him . . .

  He gave his head a hard shake, disgusted with himself. It should bother him more than it did. He shouldn’t have been able to just walk away from those girls back at Mac’s, just as he shouldn’t be able to sail past these places without stopping, without trying to help.

  Sometimes he felt that his capacity for empathy was a glass jar, that it had already filled to the brim with worry for Dorothy, for himself and his friends, and if he tried to cram anything else in there the glass would break.

  He didn’t like what it said about him, that he thought things like that. But he could feel the cracks forming already. So he kept his eyes ahead, and he held his breath until the motels were behind him.

  They turned off the waterway and into a neighborhood that had once been called Queen Anne and was now, simply, West Aurora. Ash had just caught sight of the Space Needle in the distance, the massive, rusted saucer resting on top of the water, like a boat—

  And then the ground trembled, sending a wall of steel-gray water arcing over him, momentarily hiding the structure from view.

  Ash felt his stomach drop as water sloshed into their boat. Chandra grabbed his arm, her nails digging straight through the leather of his jacket and into his skin.

  No, he thought. Not now.

  And then the shaking stopped, abruptly, though the black and gray waves continued to swell.

  Chandra loosened her grip. “Third one this week,” she said, gasping.

  “Fourth,” Ash corrected. There’d been a quake in the middle of the night, small enough that it almost hadn’t woken him up.

  Chandra shook her head. “Freaky.”

  Ash swallowed but said nothing. Earthquakes were something they’d had to get used to over the years, ever since a massive earthquake hit the West Coast back in 2073, followed by an even larger quake in 2075. The 2075 quake caused a tsunami that’d left the city of Seattle underwater. The Cascadia Fault quake—or the mega-quake, as it was sometimes called—had been a 9.3 on the Richter scale, easily the most devastating earthquake the country had ever seen. Between the two quakes, the West Coast had been completely wiped out. Nearly forty thousand people had died.

  The earthquakes had become more frequent since the mega-quake but, lately, it seemed that there was a new one every other day. They were always small, barely strong enough to send waves crashing up against the side of the schoolhouse where Ash and his friends all lived, or Dante’s, their favorite bar. But, still, they made his nerves jittery.

  “We’ll be home soon,” Ash told Chandra, tugging on the pull cord, again.

  Professor Zacharias Walker’s old workshop rose in the distance like a mirage. It consisted of a mismatched roof and siding made of old boards, tires, and pieces of tin. Ash watched the structure separate from the shadows and wished, as he often did, that he would find the Professor himself behind the rain-soaked windows.

  Professor Walker had discovered time travel. He’d built two time machines—the Second Star and the Dark Star—and then he’d gone back in time and plucked Jonathan Asher, Chandrakala Samhita, and Willis Henry from various points in history and brought them to New Seattle in 2075, forming a team that he’d jokingly called the Chronology Protection Agency. They were supposed to travel through time together, uncovering the mysteries of the past.

  And then the mega-quake destroyed the city. And, just a few months later, the Professor had taken the Dark Star and disappeared in time without telling any of them what year he was traveling to or why. Ash had spent months searching for him before discovering the Professor’s old journal and, finally, learning exactly where he’d gone—to an old military base called Fort Hunter, in 1980. There, he’d planned to study the underlying causes of the earthquakes that had destroyed Seattle and killed the Professor’s wife, Natasha.

  Or he’d tried to. The Professor was killed not long after landing at Fort Hunter, executed by soldiers who suspected him of stealing valuable military secrets. Ash and his friends had tried to follow him back in time, but they’d failed. The trip had destroyed their only remaining time machine, the Second Star, and nearly cost both Ash and Zora their lives. If Ash pressed his hand to the skin on his abdomen, he could still feel a piece of metal lodged just below his ribs. It was all that he had left of his old time machine.

  Worse than that, Ash had found some of the Professor’s notes back at Fort Hunter, and they seemed to indicate that two more massive earthquakes were coming. Only these earthquakes wouldn’t just destroy a single city. They had the potential to destroy what was left of the West Coast. Maybe the whole country.

  Light glimmered behind the workshop’s windows, telling Ash that Zora was still awake. She rarely left her father’s workshop anymore. She’d set up a cot in the back corner and had taken to washing herself with a rag and a pitcher of water instead of bathing. As far as Ash knew, she lived off cheese sandwiches and burnt coffee, and spent every waking moment going over her father’s notes, trying to piece together his research, looking for some way of stopping the earthquakes he’d predicted before they occurred.

  Seeing her light, Ash felt a deep twist of something like disappointment mingled with desperate hope. It was a new emotion, painful and optimistic at the same time. He wished Zora would just give up already, while, at the same time, he prayed for a breakthrough.

  Or maybe it wasn’t such a new emotion at all. Perhaps hope always made the disappointment that much worse.

  The workshop door inched upward, water sloshing around the wood as it moved—and then ground to a stop, gears crunching. Ash grimaced, punching the button on the remote control again. When the door stayed frozen, he piloted the little motorboat closer, so he could work the manual chain pull.

  The only electricity in New Seattle came from the relatively few solar panels still left in the city. There weren’t many that’d survived after the mega-quake, so they were incredibly valuable. Most of the people Ash knew had sold their panels years ago, in exchange for money or food, but the Professor had insisted they hold on to theirs. It’d helped that, until very recently, they’d been able to bring food back from the past.

  Unfortunately, the panels had started to break down. They hadn’t been made to last forever, and Ash cringed to think of what would happen when they stopped working entirely. The city was barely inching along as it was.

  He docked his boat inside the garage. Zora was cross-legged on the dock,
frowning down at a stack of her father’s notes. The light he’d seen came from candles lined up along the walls, rather than the bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  “Power’s been spotty all day.” She looked up, eyes flicking over Ash’s boat, where there were still only two—not three—passengers. She seemed to hesitate before asking, “No luck at Mac’s, then?”

  “What do you think?” Ash didn’t look at her but jerked the motorboat’s engine off, perhaps a little too forcefully. Spitefully, he asked, “You?”

  In answer, Zora merely balled up a piece of notebook paper and threw it at him. It missed, and they were both silent as they watched it sink below the black water.

  “I hope that wasn’t important,” Willis said. He was sitting on a stool in the shadowy corner just behind Zora, his pale skin and hair seeming to blend with his surroundings despite his massive size. He was whittling something. The hunk of wood looked like a toothpick in his monstrous hands.

  “It was just a grocery list from two years ago.” Zora shoved her black braids off her forehead. “Eggs, milk, and Toaster Strudel. God knows why he kept it.”

  “Toaster Strudel? Oh my God, remember before the earthquake when you could just go to the grocery store and buy Toaster Strudel?” Chandra crawled out of the boat, grunting as she sent it rocking beneath her. There were a few black-market stores and shops around, but they stuck to the necessities: drinkable water, fish, protein bars. If they wanted anything else, they had to seek out an official Center-sanctioned trading post, and they were expensive.

  “I used to love those limited-edition maple brown sugar ones,” Chandra continued. “God, they were so good. I’d sneak out and eat them after everyone else went to sleep.”

  Willis looked up, eyes narrowing. “That’s why we were always running out.”

  “Don’t look at me like you didn’t steal extra cans of LaCroix from the kitchen and hide them under your bed.” Chandra leaned over the side of the dock, staring forlornly at the spot where the shopping list had vanished. “You should really keep that stuff. It’s history. Memorabilia from before the flood. Could be valuable someday.”

  Ash squatted next to Zora and stared down at the pile of mildewed paper that represented their last hope of saving this drowned and desperate city.

  It didn’t exactly instill confidence. Printouts from Roman’s laptop lay stacked on top of old notebooks, all of it mixed up with lists and drawings from the Professor’s office, pages torn out of his journal. It looked like Zora had been jotting things down, too. Ash recognized the slant of her handwriting on a scrap near the top of the heap and tilted his head to read what she’d written.

  What the actual hell does any of this mean?!

  He grimaced. That was disappointing. “No closer to understanding the math part, then?”

  “Let’s see, did I earn a degree in theoretical physics since I last saw you? No, I did not.” Zora groaned and pressed her fingers over her eyelids. “What I’d give for one single textbook, but no. Old grocery lists I have in spades. But actual books?”

  Ash knew he wasn’t expected to respond to that. Zora had been complaining about their lack of books for weeks now. The Professor used to have shelves and shelves of old textbooks hanging around before the earthquake, but Zora hadn’t been able to locate any of them with the rest of his notes. She’d never studied physics or calculus in school, and since their crappy, dial-up Internet had stopped working for good last week, she had no way of boning up on the subject now.

  Unfortunately, that meant that most of her father’s notes read like gibberish. Chandra had tried to help her out with some of the simpler equations but, as she liked to explain, medical science wasn’t the same as time-traveler science.

  “Call me if someone needs their kidney removed,” she’d told Zora. “Otherwise . . .” And she’d shrugged, making a face at the nonsense equations.

  “What kind of scientist keeps stacks of trash in his office, anyway?” Zora muttered, grabbing a few crumpled sheets of paper. “Receipts and old lists and doodles of tap-dancing ladybugs . . .”

  Zora rubbed her eyes with two fingers, leaving dirt smudged across her nose. “I was crazy to think I could do this without him. The world is doomed. We’re doomed. I should just . . . give up.”

  “Give up,” Ash muttered, almost to himself and, all at once, he could feel the weight of the day settling over him.

  Motel room windows, and Mac’s leering smile, and Mira’s cocked head.

  But where else would we go?

  He raked a hand over his face. Seven days. At most, he only had seven days left in this wretched, cursed place.

  Oh, how he wished for more.

  Rage tore through him—not there one moment, everywhere the next—and it mingled with the disappointment and the frustration and that damned hope, which he couldn’t get rid of, even now. He stood and began knotting the boat up to the dock, his motions jerky and rough. It felt good to take out his aggression on something, even if it was just a rope.

  He noticed, in a detached sort of way, that the others had gone quiet. He looked up and saw Willis hunched over his whittling, knife gone still, and Zora staring down at one of her father’s papers without reading it. Only Chandra was gaping at him openly. She’d never been good at subtle.

  “What?” He didn’t mean it to sound as harsh as it did, and he hated himself a little for it.

  Zora sniffed. “You seem a little off.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Chandra snorted.

  “We could all use a break,” Willis said, placing his whittling on a small table beside him. Now that it wasn’t hidden inside his massive hands, Ash could see a man’s head and shoulders taking shape in the wood. “Dante’s?”

  Zora stretched her arms over her head, yawning. “I’d be down for a drink.”

  “And a shower,” Chandra said, wrinkling her nose.

  Zora shot her a look, and Chandra shrugged.

  “When was the last time you washed yourself in the bathroom instead of out of that pitcher?”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Willis said quietly.

  Ash was still holding the rope. He’d knotted it so tightly that individual fibers were beginning to unravel. There were rope burns on his palms.

  The idea of going to Dante’s, of sitting in their regular booth and drinking hooch and forcing himself to laugh at Willis’s jokes or Chandra’s sad attempts at flirting caused a dull ache to spread through his skull. He cringed and tried to rub away the pain.

  “Ash?” It was Chandra, concern threading through her voice. “Are you okay? I know that you were hoping . . .”

  Ash felt his muscles go stiff and shook his head. “I need some air,” he said, zipping his jacket up to his chin.

  Chandra’s face fell.

  “Come drink with us, Captain,” Willis said. “It’ll be fun.”

  “I’ll just go around the block.” Ash crossed to the door on the other side of the workshop. “I’ll meet you all at Dante’s or wherever. Later, though.”

  Willis started to say something else, but Zora lifted a hand, interrupting him.

  “Let him go.” Her voice was low, and she didn’t look Ash in the eye. So, she was pissed. Zora tended to respond to people having emotions that she didn’t approve of by getting pissed at them. It was a personality quirk that Ash wasn’t interested in dealing with just now.

  He pushed the workshop door open and stepped out onto the docks. Bitterly cold air bit at his cheeks and whipped his jacket against his body.

  He thought of Dorothy’s dark hair. Dorothy’s eyes.

  He needed some time alone.

  He needed to think.

  LOG ENTRY—JUNE 14, 2074

  11:47 HOURS

  THE WORKSHOP

  Today marks the first time that I’ve stepped foot inside my workshop all week. I used to be in and out at least once a day but, lately, ironic though it may seem, I haven’t been able to find the time.

 
There are daily training sessions with NASA and my new team of explorers, meetings with WCAAT, not to mention press conferences to inform the public of what we’re up to. Most of today was taken up by a photo shoot. A photo shoot, of all things.

  It’s disappointing, to say the least. I’m a scientist, after all, and I’d like to be left to do my work. But the success of my past experiments has made me into a minor celebrity, of sorts, which was never my intention. I find myself longing for the days when no one knew who I was, when time travel was just a puzzle I couldn’t stop thinking about.

  You know, in those early days, a time machine wasn’t even part of my plan. It’s actually rather inconvenient to have to worry about an entire ship whenever you want to blip back in time, not to mention the time tunnel itself, and the exotic matter, of which there’s a rather limited supply. I may have discovered how to travel through time much sooner, in fact, but I wasted years trying to figure out how to work around these problems, and those early attempts were all massive, messy failures.

  And yet I can’t help looking through my old notes now, wondering if I missed something. Perhaps time travel without a vessel, without an anil or exotic matter is possible. . . .

  All this has me thinking about Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist.

  Tesla spent a lot of time and money attempting to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires—in other words, the coil.

  You know the coil. It was that big copper ball that shot off sparks of electricity. Basically, it made Tesla look like some sort of crazy mad scientist, and, unfortunately, he never actually got it working correctly. A lot of his theories about how energy and electricity move through the earth’s crust were based on faulty science, and he ended up pursuing this idea of “free energy” until all his funding ran out and his reputation was, basically, in ruins. It’s a shame, too, because he was one of the smartest people the world had ever seen. A true genius.

  In any case, I bring Tesla up now because he spent a lot of time observing the electronic noise of lightning strikes, and this led him to conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy for free. He was super wrong, unfortunately, but the science itself wasn’t bad. He was just wrong about how the earth would react to the science.