Twisted Fates

by Danielle Rollins

  From the corner of her eye, Dorothy saw Roman’s hands tighten around the Black Crow’s yoke.

  He said, “Next time?”

  Cackling, Mac said, “Don’t worry, I’ll make it worth your while.” He winked at Dorothy and headed toward the parking garage’s back exit, crutches creaking. Neither she nor Roman had made a move to get out of the time machine.

  Dorothy had never considered leaving their current time period before. But now there was a wild, unhinged part of her that wanted to grab the wheel and fly them somewhere—anywhere—else.

  Paris in the 1920s. Rome at the height of its empire. Somewhere they could put an entire lifetime between themselves and the horrors of the world she’d just seen.

  “We could go,” she said, thinking out loud. “If that’s—”

  Roman cut her off firmly. “No. We can’t.” He kept his eyes trained on Mac’s retreating figure. It wasn’t until the parking garage door closed behind him that he tore his eyes away and added, his voice softening, “At least, I can’t leave here. This city, this time period, it’s my home. It’s the last place I . . .” He scrubbed a hand over his face, trailing off. “But, if you wanted to go to some other time, I could always drop you off.”

  Dorothy waited for him to elaborate—“the last place I” what?—but he stayed silent and, eventually, she shook her head, too. Neither of them would be running away. Roman was the only real friend she’d managed to make in over two centuries. She couldn’t just leave him here.

  And Ash is here, said a voice at the back of her head. She gritted her teeth, heat rising in her cheeks. As much as she hated to admit it, she couldn’t imagine putting a lifetime between her and Ash. Which meant that she and Roman would need to find a way to change the future they’d just seen. Somehow.

  “How does it happen?” she asked, dumbfounded. “Do you know?”

  “Not here,” Roman said. He looked, suddenly, very old. “I need a drink for this conversation.”

  LOG ENTRY—JUNE 30, 2074

  07:09 HOURS

  THE WORKSHOP

  There are car crashes every day and I’m going to stop one, if it’s the last thing I do.

  Today’s headline: Four confirmed dead after fiery crash on I-5.

  Warning the boy from yesterday didn’t work, so I’m going to take a new tactic. I’m going to delay the driver.

  According to the story I found, this crash is going to occur when a semi slows for traffic, thus causing another commercial vehicle following directly behind to slam into him. I’m not going to get too emotionally involved with the victims in this one in case . . . well, in case it doesn’t work out, but if I can keep this from happening, four lives will be saved.

  A witness claims to have seen the driver of the first truck at a roadside diner about an hour before the crash. My plan is to intercept him before he can leave the diner. If I can delay him for even five minutes, then the second driver will pull ahead of him on the road, and the crash will never happen.

  UPDATE—12:56 HOURS

  I successfully found the driver of the first vehicle and delayed him for approximately fifteen minutes past the original time he’d been determined to leave the diner. This should be a sufficient amount of time to allow the driver of the second car to pull ahead of him on the highway, preventing the crash entirely.

  UPDATE—15:46 HOURS

  The story just popped up on Seattle’s news site. The exact same story.

  Four dead. Fiery crash on I-5. Every word on the site is exactly the same. Nothing I did prevented anything.

  I can’t for the life of me figure out what I’m doing wrong.

  22

  Ash

  NOVEMBER 7, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  Ash hadn’t realized he was making his way back to the bar near the Fairmont until the buildings bordering the dock began to look familiar and the soles of his boots hit good, clean wood instead of damp and moldy boards. There were fewer trees out here, and more voices—louder, laughing voices—and then he saw the familiar black door at the end of the dock, and he knew where he was going.

  He still didn’t know the name of the place, but there was a small sign hanging above the door: a black rabbit, lying on its back. Morbid. He shoved the door open with his shoulder and went inside.

  It wasn’t as crowded as it’d been when he came through the other night. A group of kids wearing black hovered around a table in the back, talking loudly, but none of them looked up as he walked past. A girl with her hair tied back in a bandanna stood behind the bar. She was building a tower out of cardboard boxes of matches.

  “Nice,” Ash said, nodding at the matches. The tower was three stories high.

  The girl shrugged. “I’ve had a lot of practice,” she said. The little cardboard boxes of matches were something they had in bulk around here. The Center sent boxes and boxes of them, as though a book of matches might help solve problems like lack of heat and light and power.

  The girl flicked a pack of matches between her fingers. “What are you drinking?”

  “I’ll take a pint,” Ash said.

  She placed the beer in front of him, but when Ash went to reach for his wallet, she waved him away. “On the house.”

  Ash lifted his eyebrows. “Really?”

  The bartender leaned in closer, cupping a hand around her lips. “I recognize you. Jonathan Asher, right? You were the pilot who worked with that scientist guy back when he first discovered time travel.”

  Ash shifted in his seat. “That doesn’t usually get me free drinks around these parts.”

  “Yeah, well, I like to keep an open mind.” She nodded at the group of guys in black sitting in the back of the bar. They were talking over each other now, getting rowdy, drunk. “Unfortunately, they aren’t quite as evolved. Once they figure out who you are, they’re going to beat the crap out of you.” She shrugged. “You may as well have a drink first.”

  Ash started to stand. “Maybe I should—”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, sit down. I’m messing with you. They’re all too drunk to care who you are.”

  Ash wasn’t sure whether that was true, but he slowly lowered himself back down to his barstool, still feeling uneasy.

  “Besides, things are different now.” The girl turned back to her matchbook tower, and one of her sleeves pulled back to reveal a smudgy, black tattoo in the shape of a circus tent, the words the past is our right scrawled below it. “Now that Quinn and Roman can go back in time, everyone thinks this is all going to change. This morning on the docks, I heard someone say they were going to try to reverse the damage from the mega-quake during their next trip back in time.” She cocked an eyebrow and said, her voice almost challenging. “Even you have to admit that would be amazing.”

  Ash didn’t know what to say. It would be amazing; he just didn’t think it was possible.

  “I had a big house out in West Seattle before the mega-quake,” the girl said, almost to herself. “I was supposed to start college in the fall.” She gave her head a shake and added, with a small laugh, “Who knows? If they really do fix things, maybe I still can.”

  Ash raised his glass. “I hope it works out for you.”

  Ash figured it’d be easier to concentrate on the textbooks without his friends around distracting him, and he was surprised to find that he’d been right. There was a rhythm to the numbers that was immediately familiar, like an old song he didn’t realize he remembered all the lyrics to. Poring over them, he could almost imagine he was back in the Professor’s workshop at WCAAT in the days before the earthquake.

  Ash had always loved that workshop. It hadn’t looked like how he might imagine a professor’s study should look, all old leather and heavy wooden desks, but had more of an artist’s studio vibe. A massive drafting table stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by easels where the Professor would prop oversize notebooks filled with scribbled equations and sketches and theories. One entire wall was taken up by bookshelves, a vintage ladder standing befor
e them so the Professor could reach the highest shelves.

  Ash could still remember the smell of that place—the cigarettes the Professor swore he didn’t smoke and the charred scent of burnt coffee—him and Zora and Roman lying on their stomachs on the faded rugs that Natasha had thrown over the concrete floors to keep out the chill. The gentle rustle of turning pages and sunlight melting through the windows, the Professor’s footsteps pacing the floor between the three of them. He used to tell long, rambling stories about Stephen Hawking and Nikola Tesla, or lecture them on the different time traveler’s paradoxes. But if what you do when you go back in time actually influences what you do in the past, then the solution to the theory is far more interesting. . . . Roman glancing at Ash from across the room and rolling his eyes dramatically. Ash snickering, trying to cover it up with a cough.

  After all that, Ash would’ve expected that some of what the Professor had told him might’ve stuck. But the equations meant nothing to him. He’d read over them and his mind would snag on some small detail—didn’t the Professor say something about energy acting differently in an anil?—but the thought would be gone a moment later, drifting through his head like smoke.

  Ash couldn’t say how long he’d stayed there when the bartender appeared before him and slid a hand over his textbook. He looked up and saw that the blood had drained from her face.

  “Something wrong?” Ash asked.

  She shook her head. “I wasn’t going to say anything because you don’t look like you want any trouble,” she said, her voice low. “But you, uh, might want to be moving on.”

  Ash regarded her uneasily. “Yeah?”

  “Roman made us all promise we’d tell him if you came back.” The bartender’s eyes caught on something behind Ash’s head, and she swore, under her breath. “And, well, he just walked in.”

  23

  Dorothy

  The Dead Rabbit was a hole. Black walls and black barstools and dim lights made the place look smudgy and rotten, like wood that’d been left wet for too long. The floors were perpetually sticky, and the smell of smoke hung thick in the air, courtesy of the few people rich enough to afford cigarettes and rude enough to smoke indoors.

  Dorothy noticed all this in a detached way as she scanned the space for a place where she and Roman could talk in private. She had her hood pulled low, the stiff fabric covering her eyes and most of her face, so she could see only her own boots, and a few feet of dirty floor.

  A cheer went up from the back of the room, and Dorothy lifted the edge of her hood.

  “Blast,” she said, stiffening. Eliza and a few other Cirkus Freaks had already gathered at their regular table. They looked like they’d been drinking for a while and planned to continue for a good while longer.

  “We’ll get rid of them,” Roman said.

  “To toilet paper!” Ben was saying, toasting the others with a glass of Mac’s bourbon as Dorothy and Roman approached. “And sugar! And real liquor.”

  Eliza and Donovan both echoed, “To real liquor!” and clinked glasses, sending bourbon sloshing over the sides.

  Beneath her hood, Dorothy frowned. She’d been thinking of the dead, black world they’d just returned from, and it took her a moment to remember what they were celebrating. It came back to her quickly: wooden crates stacked on damp carpet, dozens of Cirkus Freaks watching as Eliza unloaded bourbon and peaches and bullets, courtesy of the very man who’d stared out into that black, dead world and smiled. She felt vaguely ill.

  “We need the table,” she said with a sigh, and lifted her hands and pushed back her hood, revealing her scarred face.

  Ben didn’t move but stared at her, huge-eyed. He didn’t seem to realize that he was still tipping the bourbon toward his mouth until he’d poured it all over himself.

  “Watch it,” Roman snapped, as Ben muttered, “Damn,” and slammed his glass back down on the table, grabbing for a stack of cocktail napkins. He apologized and started to stand, but Eliza put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him.

  “We just got here,” she said, and lifted her drink to her mouth. “We hoped to celebrate your great success and enjoy a little of Mac’s liquor.”

  Dorothy felt the corner of her lip curl. It had been a long time since any of the Freaks had disobeyed a direct order from her.

  And now Eliza was staring back at her, head cocked, like she was daring Dorothy to argue.

  “Celebration’s over,” Dorothy said in her best Quinn Fox voice. “Get back to work.”

  Eliza released a small chuckle and looked from Ben to Donovan, eyebrows raised in disbelief.

  Ben seemed less inclined to argue. “Quentin and Matt’s team are on duty tonight.” He was still sopping up the spilled bourbon now and sending vaguely disgusted glances at Dorothy’s face that he seemed to think she didn’t see. “We don’t have anywhere else we need to be.”

  “Are you saying there’s no work to be done in the Fairmont?” Roman asked, cool. “Nothing that could use your attention?”

  Ben’s ears turned red. Donovan was already standing.

  But Eliza stayed seated. Her eyebrow twitched as she added, “Mac’s men get a day off now and then.”

  “Is that what you want?” snapped Dorothy, her anger getting the better of her. “To work for Mac?”

  “Why the hell not?” Eliza said. “Being a Freak hasn’t gotten me anywhere.”

  “Mac doesn’t generally allow women in his employ to carry firearms,” Roman reminded her. “I’m not sure you’d enjoy the work he’d expect you to do.”

  “Better than this Robin Hood crap,” Eliza said, and pushed her chair back hard, its legs squeaking against the sticky floor.

  Dorothy heard her mutter something under her breath as she and the others made their way to the door.

  Dorothy bristled. A better leader would go after them, restore the peace, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. Her mind was occupied with other things just now. She was suddenly aware of each minute that passed, each second. She could feel that nightmare world she’d just seen creeping closer and closer, a wave that was going to crash over them.

  She dropped into a chair and reached for Eliza’s discarded drink, downing the remains of her bourbon in a single swallow. She wanted an explanation for where they’d just been. The Freaks she could deal with later.

  “So what was that?” she asked, voice hoarse.

  Roman looked toward the door. “The beginning of a mutiny, I think—”

  “You know I’m not talking about them.”

  He lifted Ben’s glass of bourbon to his mouth and then seemed to think better of drinking it and placed it back on the table instead. “That was our future,” he said.

  “It was the real future, then? Not some trick to freak out Mac?”

  Roman lifted his eyes. “How would I go about creating a trick future?”

  His sarcasm struck a nerve. “Don’t,” Dorothy warned. “Don’t you dare turn this into a joke. All this time you knew what was coming, and you never told me. Why?”

  She punctuated the question by slamming her hand against the table, causing the remaining bourbon to tremble and slosh against the glasses.

  Roman leaned back, his gaze trained on her. The bar’s dim lights caught his eyes, turning them a deep, stormy blue. “Why do you think?”

  Looking back at him, Dorothy felt the anger go out of her. It hadn’t been real anger, anyway, but a mask for everything else she was feeling and, now that it was gone, waves of fear and despair crashed over her in full force. She saw the Fairmont’s blackened brick and broken windows, the mouthlike hole in the middle of its walls.

  She curled her hand into a fist to keep it from shaking. “You told Mac that it wasn’t set, right? It’s not like the past. We can still do something.”

  “I don’t know.” Roman seemed to weigh his next words carefully before continuing. “I haven’t told you the whole truth about my trips into the future with the Professor. The Professor went into the future once, witho
ut me, and he found it like . . . well, he must’ve found it like that. Everything dead. He wouldn’t tell me exactly what he saw, just that there was still time to change it. He was very upset.”

  Roman looked down at his hands.

  “What happened next?” Dorothy urged when he didn’t continue.

  “Well, I wanted to know what he’d seen, so I took his journal and read about it. It sounded awful. I didn’t believe it. So I took the Second Star on my own. I guess you’d say I stole it after the Professor had gone to sleep. I wanted to know what our future was going to be, and I wanted to believe him, that it could be changed. But it’s been like that every time I’ve gone forward.”

  “You think he was lying?”

  “No.” Roman frowned. “No, I don’t think so. I think that whatever butterfly effect—”

  “Butterfly effect?” Dorothy interrupted.

  “In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is a phenomenon whereby a minute localized change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere.”

  “English, please.”

  “In the next five years, something is going to happen, probably something that seems small at the time. That small change will lead to bigger changes and bigger changes and so on, until—”

  “The world becomes what we just saw.”

  Roman nodded. “Exactly.”

  Dorothy was still for a moment, processing this. She remembered walking around this city for the first time, with Avery. She’d spent much of her childhood wandering the dusty little frontier towns of the Midwest, and Seattle, in contrast, had seemed glorious, a city of the future, with its ferryboats and electric lights and charming university. She could’ve wandered through the narrow, meandering downtown streets for hours, neck craned back and eyes wide, taking in the sights.

  She may not have wanted the life that came with becoming Mrs. Dr. Charles Avery, but oh how she’d loved this city.

  An ache gripped her heart. “So we do something,” she said, on an exhale. “We figure out this butterfly moment, or whatever it is, and we change it.”