Twisted Fates

by Danielle Rollins

  Roman was like that. Masks on masks on masks. She wondered if she’d ever see his true face.

  She rocked back on her heels, disappointed. “I must’ve imagined it,” she said.

  But, of course, she knew she hadn’t.

  26

  Ash

  Ash took the long way home. Waves rippled around his boat, and the angry growl of the motor cut the night in half. The only things that broke up the darkness around him were the white-barked trees that grew up from the waters, standing like skeletal sentries in the dark. He barely saw them. His head was still too full of Dorothy and the Professor’s missing journal entries and the possibility of traveling through time without a vessel.

  He didn’t even notice the schoolhouse until he was pulling up next to the dock that ran alongside it, one hand automatically reaching back to cut the motor. He tied his boat up and then hauled the window open, grunting again as he climbed inside and landed, hard, on the floor. There was a light on down the hall.

  Ash followed it to the kitchen and found Zora at the table, her father’s notes and textbooks spread out before her, one foot propped against the lowest rung of her chair, knee hopping up and down.

  “Zor,” he said.

  “You’re back,” she breathed, standing so quickly she knocked her chair back a foot. “I’ve been waiting for hours.”

  Had it been hours? “Yeah, I’m sorry about that.” He pushed the damp hair off his forehead, trying to think how he could explain his strange interaction with Dorothy. “Listen—”

  “Sit down,” she said, yanking a second chair out from under the table. The wood scraped against the floorboards, the sound making Ash cringe.

  “You trying to wake the whole place?”

  “I don’t know.” Zora rubbed the spot of skin between her eyes and then released a strange half laugh. “God, maybe we should? Will you please just sit down?”

  Ash sat, his frown deepening. “Zor,” he said carefully. “What is it?”

  “I think I had a breakthrough.” She shook her head, as though she couldn’t quite believe it herself, and then leaned over the kitchen table, pulling a loose sheet of paper out from under a stack of smudged notebooks and old napkins covered in the Professor’s scribbles. “I haven’t asked Chandra to look through it yet because I don’t know if she’ll . . . I just need a second set of eyes on it first. Can you look at it? Please?”

  Ash squinted down at the squiggles and scribbles. They could’ve been written in ancient Greek for how well he understood them, but he frowned, thoughtfully, and scratched his chin. He could feel Zora at his shoulder, practically vibrating as she waited for him to say something.

  Finally, he said, “Can you just tell me what I’m supposed to be seeing here?”

  “Oh, right. Okay, so you see this number here?” She pointed to a scribbled line of digits that looked like a phone number.

  Ash nodded.

  “This was recorded after my father’s first trips back in time. And these, see how these figures keep going up? They’re moving in relation to the frequency and length of the trips my father has taken. It never occurred to me to try to match them all up before, but look here.” There was a pause, while Zora waited for Ash to see what she saw. “They fit, perfectly. See?”

  Ash frowned. “Zora, I’m going to need you to just tell me what you’re trying to say.”

  “Seattle’s on the Cascadia Fault, right?” Zora layered her hands one on top of the other, so that her knuckles were aligned. “It looks like this. Every time we go back in time, there’s a tremor.”

  She moved her hands so that her knuckles bunched together. “The tremors do this to the fault line, right? So the more it happens, the more the energy builds up and the fault line gets all cranky and then—”

  She snapped her hands into a fist. “Earthquake.”

  Ash felt a sinking in his gut.

  Zora said, in a rush, “I started thinking about it when we watched the Black Crow go through the anil. Remember how the earth trembled? Like there was going to be a quake?”

  “There are tremors all the time now,” Ash said.

  “Exactly,” said Zora. “Because the Black Cirkus has been using the anil more frequently. And if you look back at the earthquakes that were largest, historically, they all match up with the patterns of my father’s travels. I never put it together, before, because it’s not like we go back in time and then suddenly—bam—there’s an earthquake. But each trip through time brings us closer to the next earthquake. See?”

  She pointed and, this time, the lines of notes and numbers made a little more sense. Ash recognized the dates when they’d gone back in time, the magnitude numbers used to quantify the scale of an earthquake. His head started pounding, a deep, steady throb that made his eyesight go bloody.

  “That can’t be right,” he said. “The Professor would’ve noticed.”

  “Dad was always inside the time machine when we went back, so he wouldn’t have noticed the tremors. And it’s like I said, this sort of energy takes time to build up. By the time the earthquakes finally occurred, they seemed random, but . . . but they’re not.” A breath, and then, “The earthquakes are caused by time travel. They’re caused by us.”

  27

  Dorothy

  Dorothy let herself into her room, feeling twitchy and cold. Her head was so full of Roman’s lies, and Mac’s bribes, and the dead, bleak future she’d just seen that she doubted she’d ever be able to drift to sleep. She found herself wishing that she’d taken a few more swigs of the bourbon Mac had brought them, if only to quiet the worries running through her head.

  She hesitated at the door, wondering if there was any left at the bar, half considering going back to fetch it.

  In the end, she only closed the hotel room door behind her, deciding against it. It would be dawn soon, and then she and Roman would need to climb back into the time machine for their second mission. There was barely time for sleep.

  She removed her cloak and wet boots and pulled her white hair away from her face.

  And then she touched the small, silver locket hanging from her mirror, like she always did when she got to her room, sending it swaying.

  28

  Ash

  NOVEMBER 8, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  It was near morning, and Ash’s eyes glazed as he read through the Professor’s notes again.

  If x is equal to y at the time of a storm, then the formula for calculating the stabilization of the anil (or S) would become:

  S = P0 + ρxy

  He swore under his breath, rubbing the skin between his eyes. He could pick out words and phrases that felt familiar, but the second he tried to make sense of them, everything crumbled.

  Zora was a lot smarter than he was, though. A hell of a lot smarter. If she thought these notes meant time travel was causing the earthquakes . . .

  His head started pounding, a deep, steady throb that made his eyesight go bloody. It would mean they were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people—that they could be responsible for the deaths of millions more if they didn’t figure out a way to stop the Black Cirkus before they traveled through time again.

  There was a creak on the floorboards behind him. Ash whirled around, fingers twitching at his waist, itching to reach for the gun he’d tucked into the back of his jeans.

  But it was just Zora. She leaned against the doorframe, eyes going soft as she considered him.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  Ash faltered. “You know more than me about all this.”

  “Yeah, but I’m looking for a second opinion.” She took a step closer to the desk. “So?”

  Ash was quiet. The numbers swam before him, but even he could see that they added up to something, telling a story he didn’t want to believe.

  He lifted his eyes to Zora. “You sure about this equation?”

  “As sure as I’ve been about anything.” Zora sighed and dropped into the chair next to him, swiping
a hand over her forehead. “You know, if my dad were here, he’d do a whole line of experiments to prove exactly this. Come up with a question, form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, et cetera.”

  “There isn’t time for that,” Ash broke in, eyes moving to the window on the other side of the room. The sky outside had grown light around the edges, a ghost haze hovering on the surface of the still, black water. “Just . . . dumb it down for me, will you? What, exactly, are you saying will happen if the Black Cirkus travels through time again?”

  Zora thought for a few seconds and then she swept some cogs and gears into a pile on the center of the kitchen table. “Think of it like this. Every time you go back in time, it’s like you’re stacking one cog on top of another, right?” She demonstrated. “And the more you do it, the more unsteady the tower gets.”

  She added a few more cogs. The tower started to wobble. “See that there? How the tower wobbles? That’s like the tremors we experience. But you never know which cog is going to cause the tower to fall. It depends on the shape of the cog, whether you gave the tower enough time to stabilize before you placed it on top—”

  “Whether someone knocks into the table?” Ash asked.

  “It’s not a perfect metaphor,” Zora said. “All I’m saying is that every single trip we take through time brings us closer to the earthquake that could destroy the world. The next time the Black Cirkus goes into the anil . . .”

  She placed another cog on the tower, and the entire thing toppled.

  Ash released a ragged sigh. “You think the Black Cirkus’s next trip back in time could cause a massive earthquake?”

  “Not just a massive earthquake—the massive earthquake.” Zora squeezed the bridge of her nose. “And I don’t actually know. My father’s calculations for when the earthquake would hit the city were based on a far less frequent use of the Puget Sound anil. But he was also using metrics from the Dark Star, and the Black Crow is a smaller ship, so it’s possible that it hasn’t been doing quite as much damage.”

  “The size of the ship matters?” Ash asked.

  Zora nodded. “Think of a smaller ship like a smaller cog on the tower. The smaller the cog, the less likely it’ll cause the tower to fall over, right? But every cog, no matter the size, makes the tower less stable. It’s the same with the anil. It’s still dangerous, but there’s no way of knowing how dangerous. . . .”

  “They leave at dawn,” Ash said.

  Zora fumbled with the watch at her wrist. “That’s not for— Oh, shit.”

  Ash was already pulling his jacket off the back of his chair. “If we go now, we might still be able to stop them.”

  29

  Dorothy

  NOVEMBER 8, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  It was early, and the Fairmont garage was cool and dark, only the thinnest glimmer of silver light making its way through the dirty glass. Dorothy stood beside a window, fingers twisting in the folds of her coat.

  She closed her eyes, breathing as nausea rolled through her. She imagined she could hear the sounds of the crowd past the roar of wind and waves crashing into the concrete walls. She could picture them clapping and stomping their feet as they waited for her and Roman to fly over their heads, and the image was so clear that she could almost feel the vibration spreading through the concrete floor of the garage and trembling up her legs.

  It left her on edge. She and Roman were supposed to be going back in time for medical equipment to help the city’s sick and downtrodden. But what was the point of saving this city if it was only going to be destroyed again?

  “You look like death,” Roman said, coming up behind her. “Didn’t you sleep?”

  Dorothy looked at him, taking in the green cast to his skin, the firm press of his lips. “Did you?”

  “Well enough,” Roman said, voice falsely cheerful.

  Lie, Dorothy thought, bitter. When had they started lying to each other?

  She fixed a stiff smile on her face. “Well then, so did I.”

  Another lie. She hadn’t slept at all. She’d sat at the edge of her bed, watching the window and waiting for morning. And, all the while, a cold dread built inside of her.

  Butterfly effect, Roman had said. One single moment had the power to change the course of humanity. Why weren’t they trying to figure out what it was? Even if it was a fool’s mission, it seemed to her that they should at least try.

  She felt numb as she followed Roman into the Black Crow and settled into the passenger seat beside him, fingers moving woodenly over her seat belt.

  She thought of the Fairmont’s black walls and broken windows.

  “The Black Crow is moving into position for departure,” Roman said. Dorothy curled her hands into fists.

  A moment later, the time machine rumbled to life below them.

  30

  Ash

  Ash crouched at the front of the rickety motorboat, his heart beating in his throat. He leaned forward, as though he could make the boat travel faster through sheer force of will. Sheets of water crashed over him, soaking his shirt, slapping into his face.

  He had eyes only for the swirling tunnel in the distance. The anil.

  The Black Crow was already there, a blight on the landscape; a dark, black smudge in the early-morning light. Ash gritted his teeth.

  He turned and shouted over his shoulder, “Can’t this thing go any faster?”

  “It’s a boat, not a plane,” Zora called back. “Now will you sit?”

  Ash turned his back to her, ignoring this. His throat felt raw, and nerves thrummed through him, seeming to make his whole body vibrate. He pressed the heels of his hands into the side of the boat.

  “Come on,” he murmured. He hadn’t prayed in years, but he felt like doing it now, like offering up this fierce hope to anyone who might be listening.

  They were still yards away from the anil when the Black Crow began to hover.

  “No,” said Ash, his voice hushed. Everything inside of him seemed to tense.

  The time machine moved forward, into position.

  Ash felt his blood boil beneath his skin.

  No.

  He saw Dorothy’s face the way it’d looked during their last meeting, behind the Dead Rabbit. Hair wet and plastered to her skin, fingers anxiously fumbling with her locket.

  It isn’t possible to travel through time without a vessel. . . .

  Yes, but the Professor went on experimenting with it, to see whether he could find a way.

  Ash stood, the motorboat rocking beneath him.

  “Ash!” Zora shouted. “Sit down!”

  He barely registered her voice. He heard a kind of roaring in his ears, something louder than the motorboat’s tinny engine and the crashing water and all the other sounds that made up the night around them. His hands had started to tremble, and something, some pressure, was building inside of his chest, making him ache.

  He couldn’t let this happen. He had to do something. Zora said that a smaller ship wouldn’t cause as much damage to the anil. If that were true, then no ship shouldn’t cause any damage, right?

  If there was a way to travel through time without a time machine, without EM . . .

  The Black Crow was halfway into the anil when Ash dove out of the rowboat. The second he hit the water, he could feel the pull of the time tunnel sucking him toward it, like water into a drain. He couldn’t swim, couldn’t fight against it.

  All he could do was be still and let it take him.

  No man had ever survived moving through an anil without a vessel before. Those who’d tried had their skin ripped from their bones, their internal organs liquefied. But Ash wasn’t afraid. He’d seen his own death, and so he knew he didn’t die here.

  The last thing he heard before he disappeared in time was the sound of Zora screaming.

  31

  Dorothy

  JULY 10, 2074, NEW SEATTLE

  Dorothy felt her breath catch as she stared up at the hospital looming above them. It was dark here, past mid
night, and every light in the building above them was blazing. The parking lot was filled with cars, and people crowded the sidewalk, unloading stretchers from ambulances and barking orders at one another.

  She swallowed. She’d been to the hospital with Avery a few times, back in 1913. The tiny, two-story Providence Medical Center had seemed massive to her then, the doctors who’d filled the halls impossibly impressive in their stark white jackets and scrub caps.

  Those old doctors were nothing like the people before her now. It was like comparing a fighter jet to a rickety bicycle. Where the doctors from her time were neat and orderly, mostly older men with gray hair and spectacles, these were young and fast and . . . sleek. Their scrubs had a metallic sheen, and their equipment was more advanced than anything Dorothy had seen before.

  And wouldn’t it be? This was 2074, the most advanced the world would get before the mega-quake took it all away. It was right that Dorothy felt intimidated.

  She looked over at Roman and saw that he had one hand pressed to his front shirt pocket, fingers anxiously tapping his chest.

  She frowned. “Everything all right?”

  Roman dropped his hand, like he was worried about giving something away. “Yes, of course,” he said, but there was a rough edge to his voice that betrayed much darker emotions.

  Dorothy swallowed, uneasy. She didn’t know whether she should push Roman or let him keep his secrets. Every question she could think to ask was a version of one she’d already tried.

  “All right, then,” she said instead. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Roman had planned this con on his own.

  “I wouldn’t even call it a con,” he’d told her. “The hospitals were a mess in the years after that first earthquake; there were too many patients, too many injured, not enough doctors. A child could’ve snuck inside.”

  “I hope your plan is a bit more advanced,” she’d said.