Twisted Fates

by Danielle Rollins

  Dorothy paused, eyes flicking to the darkness beyond the spotlights. She thought she’d heard a door open. Footsteps. And was that Roman’s voice, murmuring to someone she couldn’t see?

  Her hands felt suddenly clammy. “Th-this is only the beginning,” she continued, faltering. The broadcast was live; she couldn’t just stop. “Those of you who lived through the devastation of the earthquakes will remember that the hospitals were looted back in 2074, and important medications were stolen. Many people died, not because of the earthquake itself, but because of lack of access to medication and medical attention. Many people are dying, still.

  “Tomorrow, at dawn, we will go back in time again. We will return to the day the hospitals were looted, and take the medication before it can be stolen. And then we will bring it back here. For you.”

  A small burst of static, and the broadcast was over.

  “Marvelous, as always,” Roman said, but his voice sounded stilted.

  Dorothy shielded her eyes, squinting past the spotlights. “Is someone else here?”

  She could make out black shapes moving behind the recording equipment, the squeak of shoes on concrete.

  No, not shoes—crutches.

  And, then, the sound of soft, slow clapping.

  “Bravo,” Mac called out, hobbling into the light. He was wearing the same ill-fitting suit he’d had on the night before, though it was quite a bit dirtier now than it’d been then. The bandage at his thigh was fresh and no longer bloodstained.

  “You were watching?” Dorothy asked, standing. She didn’t like the idea of Mac in the darkness just beyond her spotlights, watching her when she didn’t know he was there. There wasn’t a single other person in this city who’d have come to the Fairmont without invitation.

  “The whole city was watching,” Mac said. “The two of you are heroes.” He said the word heroes lightly enough, but there was something unpleasant threaded through his voice. Dorothy suppressed a shudder.

  “But I didn’t come here tonight just to catch the show.” Mac readjusted the crutches beneath his arms. “I got something to show you. Come on.”

  He started hobbling toward the door.

  Dorothy glanced at Roman, frowning, and Roman shook his head. He didn’t know what Mac was up to, either. That didn’t bode well.

  “Well, come on,” Mac said, hesitating at the door. “It’s a gift. It ain’t going to bite you.”

  Dorothy chewed her lower lip. Gifts were manipulative. They nearly always came with strings attached.

  And there was the matter of his offer. She and Roman hadn’t had a chance to discuss it yet. Foolishly, she hadn’t expected Mac to show up again so soon.

  You would’ve, said a voice inside her head. The voice sounded alarmingly like her mother, Loretta.

  In your old life, you wouldn’t have given a mark time to think and second-guess. You’d have struck while his greed was fresh.

  Which, Dorothy had to admit, was true. Back when she’d made her living as a con artist, she’d been careful never to leave a mark to his own devices for too long, lest he talk himself out of whatever it was that she was trying to get him to do.

  But she could see no way out of seeing what Mac had brought them, and so it was with some reluctance that she and Roman followed him out of the basement and up the stairs, to the Fairmont’s main halls.

  There, she spotted a group of Freaks gathered around the bay windows that served as the hotel’s main entrance, studying something that she couldn’t see and murmuring excitedly. Dorothy hesitated, uneasy. If Mac had presented this gift to her and Roman alone, she might still have found some way of refusing it. But, now, they had an audience.

  A growing audience, she noticed, as more members of their gang emerged from hotel rooms and hallways to see what had caused the commotion. Mac had planned this intentionally.

  Her eyes darted over to him, wary. “What is that?”

  Mac, balanced on his crutches, twisted around to face her.

  “Like I said, it’s a gift.” He smiled, thin and sharp.

  It was a big gift.

  A few of the Freaks fell silent as Dorothy approached, leaving her to wonder whether they’d been whispering about her, perhaps pointing out that she rarely brought them gifts. She felt her lip twitch and tried to keep her face impassive as they parted, revealing nearly a dozen wooden crates piled onto the damp carpet.

  Eliza was kneeling before an open crate while Bennet hovered over her, one end of a crowbar wedged beneath the crate’s lid. The rest of the Freaks were huddled tightly around them, and it seemed to Dorothy that they were holding their breath, waiting to hear what she and Roman might say.

  Roman turned to her, one eyebrow cocked, and Dorothy knew that he, too, wanted to see what Mac had brought them. If she were to take the gift back now they’d all hate her more than they did already.

  “Well, go on then,” Dorothy said, and the tension seemed to leak out of the air. Ben popped the lid off the crate. Eliza reached inside.

  “Holy . . . ,” she murmured, removing a tin can without a label. “Is this . . . food?”

  An excited murmur went through the crowd of Freaks. Food was scarce in New Seattle. It was one of the reasons the fruit at their masquerade had gone over so well. Actual food like Dorothy remembered from her time period—fruit and bread and milk—was a luxury only the very rich could afford. It had taken her and Roman hours to gather enough from the past for their party guests and, once they’d brought it all back to the Fairmont, they’d needed to keep the room where it was being stored under armed guard to keep their own gang from looting, the rest of the Freaks muttering, annoyed, that they might’ve liked some fruit for themselves.

  “I think that one is canned peaches.” Mac nodded at the can in Eliza’s hands, clearly delighted. “But you might need to open it to find out.”

  Excited now, Eliza began digging through the crate in earnest. There was more food. A lot of it was dried goods: bags of grain and flour, beans and rice. But there were also tins of soup and vegetables. Sugar. Eggs.

  Liquor.

  “Bourbon?” Ben said, hooting as he leaned over Eliza and pulled a bottle filled with brown liquid out of the crate. “I haven’t seen this since before the earthquakes.”

  “We could have brought back bourbon, if you’d asked,” Dorothy said, sour. They could have brought back canned peaches and sugar and eggs, too, but they hadn’t. There never seemed to be enough time, space, or money for such luxuries.

  “Now, you don’t have to,” Mac said, scratching his chin. “It frees you up to bring back more important things, doesn’t it? We have food here.”

  Dorothy pressed her lips together, considering how to respond. She felt like she was playing a game of chess and Mac had just moved a pawn forward and easily knocked her queen to the side, smiling at her as he did so. She felt foolish, a little girl playing a grown-up’s game.

  Donovan and Ben were fighting about the bourbon now, talking over each other as each of them tried to remember how it tasted.

  “It’s smoky, isn’t it?” Donovan was saying, turning the bottle so that amber liquid sloshed up the sides of the glass.

  Ben shook his head. “No, no that’s Scotch.”

  Dorothy bristled, tuning out their argument. How easy would it have been for her to purchase a bottle of bourbon during one of their trips back in time? It had never seemed important—they had alcohol here, after all, crappy though it was—but now that she could see how much it was doing for morale, she realized her misstep. Perhaps such a luxury hadn’t been necessary, but it would’ve been smart. Mac had seen that, so why hadn’t she?

  She glanced at Mac, lips pursed. And now he’d been the one to provide it for them, and who knows how much he’d spent to get it shipped from the Center. A lot, surely. There was a reason no one had good liquor this far west.

  “This is too much,” Roman said. He met Dorothy’s gaze and held it for a moment. “We couldn’t possibly accept.”
>
  Donovan and Ben stopped fighting over the bottle, their faces falling. Ben opened his mouth, but then Dorothy turned her dark eyes on him, her expression severe, and he stayed silent, looking like a scolded child. She saw Donovan and Eliza exchange looks from the corner of her eye. This would not go over well.

  “Don’t be silly.” Mac released a short laugh. “It’s a gift.”

  Gift, gift, gift, Dorothy thought. Funny how every time Mac said that word it sounded more like bribe.

  “We wouldn’t know how to repay you,” Dorothy said. It was as close as she dared come to rejecting his offer outright, but Mac’s lips drew back over clamped teeth, and Dorothy knew he understood her meaning.

  No, our answer is no.

  Then, from behind them, a sharp gasp.

  Mac’s smile grew triumphant. Dorothy felt suddenly cold. She knew, even before she turned around, that something had changed.

  Eliza was holding a long, narrow package. Like the food, the package wasn’t labeled or marked in any way, but she’d opened one end and dumped its contents out to find—

  Bullets. They lay on Eliza’s open palm, shiny as beetles. Staring at them, Dorothy felt something inside of her coil tight.

  Guns were easy to find in New Seattle.

  Bullets were trickier.

  “Figured you could use ’em to hold the Fairmont,” Mac said, eyes glinting. “In case Graham or Chadwick give you any more trouble.”

  Nothing in his words hinted at a threat, but Dorothy heard it anyway:

  Look how easily I’m able to get bullets, he seemed to be saying. Look how I’m able to put them into the hands of your people, people whose loyalty can so easily be bought, people who don’t even like you. . . .

  And now Dorothy was seeing Mac’s gift in an entirely new light. He hadn’t meant to win her and Roman over at all. He’d meant to win over the Cirkus Freaks.

  The hair on the back of Dorothy’s neck stood up. Without the Black Cirkus, she and Roman were just two people. They didn’t have any particular power or strength. The only thing that set them apart from everyone else in this wretched city was their time machine—and that could be taken.

  She swallowed, hard. For the first time, she realized what a precarious position she was in.

  She glanced at Roman. His expression was impassive as ever, but he’d lowered his hand to hers and he didn’t seem to notice that his fingers had clamped vise-tight around her wrist. Dorothy cringed slightly, as her skin crushed against bone.

  “How far into the future do you wish to go?” he said, voice hushed so the other Freaks wouldn’t overhear.

  Mac’s eyes flashed. “Let’s start with something easy. How about five years from now?”

  For an instant, Roman seemed to forget to keep his facial features so carefully arranged, and Dorothy saw a brief glimmer of the anguish he must feel inside.

  A moment later, his face looked so perfectly at ease that it was hard for Dorothy to remember it was a lie. Dorothy felt a cool dread crystallize inside of her.

  “Very well,” Roman said.

  He paused for a moment and then added, “Although, I should warn you . . . you’re not going to like what you find there.”

  MAY 2, 2082, NEW SEATTLE

  They exited the anil into a world of perfect dark. There were no stars to illuminate the ghostly white tree trunks, no distant oil lamps flickering through the black like fireflies, no far-off buzz of electricity, no moon. It was as though someone had painted the outsides of the Black Crow’s windows black, leaving only the faint green of the control panel.

  Dorothy could just make out the silhouette of Roman’s face in the eerie glow. His lips were drawn in a tight line, the muscles in his jaw tense.

  “I thought we were going to land in the afternoon,” she said, and Roman looked at her, and then away.

  “Local time is 3:02 p.m.,” he said.

  Then, hesitating, he added, “The sun’s been blocked by volcanic ash.”

  “What?” Dorothy was quiet as the horror of this washed over her. There was no sun? Her hands grew clammy.

  How could all this happen in just five years?

  It felt like surfacing from deep water to find the world on fire. For just an instant, she wanted to turn around, go home, pretend she’d never seen this.

  Mac’s voice came from behind them. “This ship still has light, doesn’t it?”

  Roman said nothing but flipped on the time machine’s headlights. A steady, white beam cut through the darkness like a knife, splitting the world in two.

  Bits of black dust hung in the air before the ship’s headlights, giving the world the appearance of a television set that couldn’t quite focus. Through the dust, Dorothy saw that the sky above their time machine was dark as oil, and starless, mirrored in the waters below so that she couldn’t tell where one bled into the other. She scanned the horizon for a city. But there was no city. Instead, a single jagged structure rose from the waters, covered in layers of craggy black rock and ash.

  Dorothy’s eyes narrowed as she stared at the structure, something tugging on her memory. It seemed to have been a building once, but it didn’t look like one anymore. The Black Crow’s headlights bounced off the bits of broken glass still clinging to its windowsills, brick walls covered in thick layers of ash. It didn’t have a roof, and a huge gaping hole had opened up in the middle of its walls, looking for all the world like an open mouth.

  Still, though, there was something familiar about the columns out front, the position of the windows . . .

  Oh God. Dorothy pressed her mouth so firmly closed that she could feel the imprints of her teeth against the backs of her lips. She suddenly realized what she was looking at.

  It was the Fairmont. In just five years, it would go from the most sought-after hotel in the city, to this ruin of burnt bricks and broken glass.

  “Check out your castle, princess,” Mac said, chuckling beneath his breath. “Doesn’t look so impressive now, does it?” He leaned forward in his seat and tapped his window with one finger. Dorothy had the impression of a child shaking a snow globe.

  This world will not change if you shake it, she wanted to snarl.

  “I guess it seems a little silly that we were all fighting over that.” Mac’s lip curled as he turned to her, grinning. Disgusted, Dorothy looked away.

  Mac might think of the Fairmont as nothing more than a prize. But she’d lived in that old hotel for a year now, and it was the closest thing to a home that she’d ever known.

  She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw her hands over her eyes and demand that Roman turn off the headlights. She wanted to unsee everything that lay before her, even as she knew it was impossible.

  She would remember this forever. She would see the imprint of it on her eyelids every night as she tried to fall asleep. The blackened, broken-down Fairmont would be the last image that haunted her on her dying day.

  “Remember,” Roman said. “This is just one possible future. It’s not definite.”

  “What the hell happened to make it look like this?” asked Mac.

  “We . . . don’t know for sure.” Roman seemed to weigh his words carefully before adding, “Before I left the Chronology Protection Agency, the Professor was theorizing that another earthquake could hit the city in the next five to ten years. Possibly more than one earthquake. He thought that the movement of tectonic plates might be so great that they would set off a wave of volcanic activity.”

  Dorothy turned to him, frowning. “An earthquake can cause a volcano to erupt?”

  “Yes,” said Roman. “The Professor predicted the eruption of Glacier Peak, Mount Baker, and Mount Rainier for sure, but those might not be the only ones to blow. There’s also the Yellowstone Caldera, the supervolcano. Maybe even the Aira Caldera, in Japan.”

  Mac laughed, the sound low and bitter. “Explain to me how the hell we’re going to avoid all of that?”

  Roman stared out the window. “It’s just one possibility,” h
e said again.

  Mac shook his head, peering into the black for another long, searching moment.

  “I’ve seen enough,” he said. “Take me back.”

  Roman flew them across the barren landscape and back into the anil. The tunnel of stars and purple clouds and black sky spun around them, and then Roman piloted the time machine through the tunnel walls, and the air around them thickened, growing heavy and wet. Water pounded against the windshield, making the glass creak—

  NOVEMBER 7, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  —and then, a second later, they were surfacing, and New Seattle’s familiar skyline lay before them. Milk-white fog hung over the surface of the sound. Choppy waves rose to greet them, slamming over the Black Crow’s windshield as they hovered above the water. The city looked like nothing in the distance. Like darkness layered over more darkness. It was only when a far-off boat wove through the buildings that she could see the shape of the skyscrapers cutting into the night, the glimmer of light off windows.

  Roman lifted his head and sniffed the air. Dorothy smelled it, too: brine and salt and the sweet, dank scent of mold. It was the smell of New Seattle, and it crept in through the time machine’s thick windows the second they exited the anil.

  Home sweet home, she thought, numb.

  Roman flew the Black Crow to the Fairmont garage and, landing, cut the engine. Dorothy’s eyes moved, restlessly, over the clouded windows and rusted pipes. It seemed strange, she thought, that this place should look so normal after everything she’d seen.

  Behind them, Mac gave a deep, satisfied sigh. “Well. That was certainly illuminating.”

  Dorothy let her eyes close for a fraction of a second.

  “I’m glad you . . . enjoyed it,” said Roman, voice cool.

  “Although we shouldn’t go so far next time.” Mac threw open the back door. He maneuvered his crutches out of the time machine first and then, grunting, hauled the rest of his body out, too. “Maybe just two years. I want to know exactly when this big earthquake is supposed to hit.”