Twisted Fates

by Danielle Rollins

  46

  Ash

  Mac stood between Roman and Dorothy, backlit by the Black Crow’s headlights. Ash had a clear shot. He pulled his gun free and dropped to one knee, eye squinting shut to take aim.

  He exhaled, releasing the tension in his shoulders at the same time that he eased his finger over the trigger.

  Here goes nothing.

  And then Dorothy shifted to the side, moving half in front of Mac as she whipped something loose of her cloak. The two moments happened back-to-back, practically overlapping. Ash pulled the trigger, and then Dorothy moved. He didn’t have time to stop the shot, but he pulled his arm up at the last second, and his bullet missed her by a breath.

  It missed Mac, too, and bounced off the time machine, harmless.

  Ash whipped back around the wall, his heartbeat cannon fire. Damn.

  He could picture the three of them on the other side of the wall, their weapons out, scanning the darkness for the intruder. He closed his eyes and exhaled, silently, through his mouth.

  Then, from the other side of the wall: the soft shuffle of a boot.

  Roman’s voice. “Ash?”

  Ash’s breath frosted the air in front of him. He didn’t want to fight Roman, but things were different now, weren’t they? They both wanted to take down Mac. And, anyway, he wouldn’t be found hiding here like a child, either.

  He had just stepped out from behind the wall when Roman tackled him.

  47

  Dorothy

  Mac was gone.

  Dorothy turned in place, her mind racing. She didn’t know when it had happened. A fraction of a second had passed since Ash had fired at them but, sometime between the moment he’d stepped out from behind the wall and the moment Roman had gone to find him, Mac had just . . .

  Vanished.

  She tightened her grip on her daggers.

  Where did that bastard go?

  There weren’t many places on the docks where he could’ve hidden. The time machine was still here, its doors yawning open, and Dorothy could see that the cockpit was empty. Its headlight illuminated a wide swath of floor, but left the rest of the docks dark as pitch.

  Dorothy squinted into the shadows. Her palms were sweating, and her breath had become a low rasp. She inched forward, peering around the side of the time machine.

  And then a hand flashed out of the darkness and clamped around her chest, drawing her back.

  “I’ve found the best place to watch the show,” Mac murmured, his hot breath tickling her ear. He brought the barrel of his gun to her cheek, the cold metal soft as a kiss.

  “Let go of me.” Dorothy got her arm free and twisted, but Mac’s hold on her wasn’t as strong as she’d thought it would be. It broke the moment she pulled away, sending her stumbling back into the time machine.

  Mac snickered, and Dorothy spun toward the sound, daggers raised. They were just outside the glow of the headlight, and the contrast of light to dark was so strong that it hid Mac entirely. Even standing a foot away, staring at the place where his face should be, Dorothy couldn’t separate the lines of his jaw and nose from the shadows.

  She dragged her dagger blades over one another, the sound echoing through the air around them. “Afraid to step into the light?”

  “Are you in such a rush to kill me, little Fox? I thought we might talk a while first.”

  “I’m done talking to you.”

  “Fine, then. You can listen. You’ve chosen the losing team.” Mac clucked his tongue. “But, hey, I’m not such a bad guy. There’s still time to change your mind.”

  Dorothy fixed him with a cool stare. “Is that so?”

  “Do you really think you can win this game?” His nose separated from the darkness first, and then his big, thick lips. “I’ve already bribed the rest of your gang. They were cheap, too. Eliza turned her back on you for a new pair of boots. Donovan was more expensive; he wanted a knife.”

  Dorothy felt a sharp twist in her gut. “You’re lying.”

  “Bennett was the cheapest,” Mac continued, grinning. “All he’d wanted was a peach. One lousy peach.” Mac laughed, shaking his head. “They must’ve hated you. And, once those two idiots take each other out, you’ll be all alone, again. And what am I supposed to do with you then?”

  Dorothy tilted her dagger, letting her blade catch the light. “Come closer and tell me.”

  She could see his eyes now. They were flat and black, like a shark’s, and they slid past her, coming to rest on the scene unfolding on the other side of the room.

  A smile twitched at the corner of his lips. “I mean it. They’re going to kill each other. And then you and me will have a very different conversation.”

  Kill each other?

  Dorothy hesitated, and a rushing sound filled her ears.

  Hands still tight on her daggers, she turned—

  48

  Ash

  Ash slammed into the ground, his fingers twitching, his mouth filling with dust and dirt. Jagged, black rocks scraped into his cheeks, and remnants of shattered glass bit into his skin.

  He coughed, hard, and tried to push himself back up, but Roman was on his back, one arm braced against his neck and the base of his skull.

  There was a click that could’ve been a thumb sliding over the hammer of a gun—that was probably a thumb sliding over the hammer of a gun—and cold metal pressed up against the back of Ash’s neck.

  Ash closed his eyes. Everything inside of him went still.

  A second passed, and then another. Roman swore under his breath. But he didn’t fire.

  Ash was sweating, shaking, trying to think. There was a rushing sound in his ears, and blood in his eyes.

  Why wasn’t he firing?

  The answer came to him in a flash of image: a boy on his knees in a muddy clearing, surrounded on all sides by black tents. A little girl lying in his arms, limbs rigid, eyes vacant and staring . . .

  Ash felt like he was still standing at the edge of that clearing, mud beneath his boots and rain pounding at his shoulders as he watched Roman’s little sister die on the ground before him.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about her?” he asked, his voice thick. It was the same question he’d asked Roman back at the clearing in 2074, and he found that he couldn’t let it go. “Did you really think I wouldn’t have understood?”

  Roman was breathing hard. Through clenched teeth, he said, “Don’t you dare talk to me about Cassia.”

  “You were my best friend,” Ash continued. And now another memory was invading his mind, crowding out the images of Cassia’s death:

  It was the morning after Roman’s betrayal. Ash had woken to find his gun stolen, and a crumpled piece of notebook paper in its place. Scrawled across it were the words So long, old friend, written in Roman’s familiar, slanted hand.

  Ash had kept the note with him that entire day, clenched in one hand as he watched the still, black waters, waiting for Roman to return. He would’ve forgiven him. He would’ve forgiven Roman almost anything, back then. But Roman had never come back.

  Now, Roman clenched his eyes shut. His hand, still holding the gun, was trembling. “Don’t.”

  How long had he been holding on to this pain? Ash wondered. It had been two years since Cassia died, a year since Roman had defected to the Black Cirkus. And all that time he’d spent plotting and planning, trying to find a way back to her.

  “I would’ve helped you,” Ash said, and meant it. He would’ve done whatever Roman had asked of him and needed no explanation, just as he would’ve for Chandra or Willis or Zora. “If you had told me what you wanted to do, I would’ve helped you. We could have tried to save her together.”

  “You’re lying.” Roman’s voice sounded strangled. “You wouldn’t have.”

  “Let me help you now,” Ash said, and, after a moment’s hesitation, he leaned forward and—slowly, slowly, his eyes holding Roman’s—he placed his own gun on the ground between them. “We shouldn’t be fighting each other. We
should be fighting him.”

  There was no trace of anger left on Roman’s face. His expression was anguish; it was pain.

  Too much has happened, Ash thought, hopeless. They could never go back to what they were. But, still, he wanted to show Roman that he was no longer his enemy. That he didn’t blame him for what he’d had to do.

  “I saw this moment,” Roman said. “I’ve always known this was going to happen like this.”

  He lowered his gun and held out his hand.

  As Ash reached for it, a gunshot cracked through the air.

  49

  Dorothy

  The shot echoed through Dorothy’s head, seeming to ring in her ears long after it should’ve gone silent.

  Time hitched. She almost thought it was a time-travel thing, how the world around her seemed to slow down so that she saw every moment of what happened next in vivid, excruciating slow motion.

  The bullet hit Roman on the right side of his chest, jerking him backward. He swayed forward, landing on the ground cheek-first, plumes of dust and ashes billowing up around him. His gun skidded away from his body, fingers twitching.

  The ashes obscuring his face cleared, and then he was staring at her, his eyes not quite focusing. He swallowed, with difficulty. Dorothy watched the slow rise and fall of his Adam’s apple beneath the skin at his throat. A single drop of blood oozed past his lips and down his chin to stain the ground below his face.

  Mac raised his gun to his lips and blew the smoke from the barrel.

  He aimed at Ash and fired again.

  50

  Ash

  Two years ago, Ash had arrived in New Seattle an outsider. He’d been a farm boy and a soldier, fresh off flying fighter jets across the German sky during World War II. Time travel was a concept he didn’t think he’d ever fully grasp. He didn’t even have a high school diploma. Who was he to talk about theoretical physics?

  It was a world he never should’ve been a part of, and he’d felt like an impostor from the moment he’d stepped off the time machine and seen the bright new city before him.

  In those days, the Professor and his family had been living in university housing, an entire floor of rooms in an old redbrick building with creaky floorboards and drafty windows. Ash had hauled his army-green duffel onto a twin bed in one of those rooms, but he hadn’t been able to unpack. All his energy had been focused on trying to breathe like a normal person. Inhale first, then exhale.

  And then he’d heard a creak of floorboards, followed by a voice. “Do you golf?”

  Ash didn’t know what he’d expected to see standing in his doorway—if time travel were real, did that mean ghosts were, too? What about bigfoot?—but it had been Roman, his head cocked, that infuriating smile playing at the corner of his lips. He’d been holding a dirty golf ball in one hand, rolling it between his fingers.

  “Golf?” Ash remembered saying, frowning. He’d never golfed before, and it struck him as a strange, sort of fussy sport. His old man had liked football and boxing. Golf was for rich people and snobs.

  He’d snorted, but Roman either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He’d tossed him the ball and jerked his head down the hallway. “C’mon,” he’d said. “You’ll like it, I promise.”

  He’d taken Ash to a door at the end of the hall, and up several flights of stairs to the roof. Ash hadn’t realized how high the university building towered over the city until they’d walked out onto that roof. The whole of Seattle lay before them, gleaming with white light as ferries moved across Elliott Bay, office lights blazed from skyscrapers, and bars and restaurants stayed lit for the evening. He could make out the distant, blue-tinted light of the Space Needle, and the dizzying glow of the waterfront. It looked strange and futuristic and alien, and the only thing that felt familiar was the moon hanging above them, close enough that Ash almost thought he could reach up and pluck it out of the sky.

  Roman had handed him a rusted golf club and nodded at a bucket of balls sitting beside the edge of the roof. “Aim for the Needle,” he’d said.

  They’d spent the next few hours smacking golf balls off the roof, aiming at the tiny, blue prick of light in the distance that Ash knew was the Space Needle. They hadn’t spoken more than that, but Ash still remembered how grateful he’d been to Roman, that night, for giving him some sense of ease in this strange, new world.

  They’d been friends before they were enemies. It was so easy to forget that, after everything that had happened.

  Ash clenched his eyes shut a moment before the bullet hit him and threw himself backward off the building. He fell past the broken docks and crashed into the ice, hitting the hard, frozen surface of the water with a crack that moved through his whole body.

  He blinked up at the sky and, for a moment, he saw nothing but swirling black darkness.

  Then, he heard footsteps. Mac’s voice called to him from the darkness, “Go ahead and run, boy. I don’t think you’re going to find anything to help you out there.”

  And then, cackling, he walked away.

  Ash tried to stand, and collapsed, gasping. He was injured, and his first thought was of Mac’s gun, the bullet that had been speeding toward him a moment before he disappeared and wound up here. He clutched his side, gasping, but when he looked down he didn’t see blood oozing out from below his ribs but something else.

  It was a milky, iridescent liquid. And then Ash blinked and it wasn’t liquid at all but a solid, steel spike protruding from his ribs. And then it was purple electricity prickling over his skin. And then something goopy and thick and a deep, bloody red.

  Ash grimaced as he pressed his hand to his wound. He needed to get back to his time, to Zora.

  There was a noise above him, and he looked up in time to see the Black Crow zoom overhead and disappear into the distance. Staring after it, Ash thought of Dorothy and felt a pang deep within his chest. He knew he should be worried for himself just now. He was badly injured and alone here in this strange time. But, still, he couldn’t help thinking about her. Was she okay? Would she be safe with Mac?

  He sighed and gave his head a hard shake. He supposed none of that mattered right now. He had to find a way home.

  He thought he could make out the anil in the distance. It was a pinprick of light, like a distant star. It wasn’t far, and the water beneath him was frozen solid. He was pretty sure he could walk there.

  He stood and, limping a bit, started toward the tunnel that would take him home.

  LOG ENTRY—JANUARY 7, 1943

  13:44 HOURS

  THE NEW YORKER HOTEL

  Nikola asked me to visit him one last time before his death. And so here I am.

  He was still alive when I entered his hotel room, but only just. I think he was happy to see me. He opened his eyes when I walked in and said, his voice weak, “I was hoping it would be you, my friend.”

  I felt pretty terrible just then. Perhaps I should have visited more often over the years. But when I attempted to apologize, Nikola only shook his head and gestured to a stack of trunks in the corner of his hotel room and told me that they were for me.

  “I only meant that I wanted you to have them before the leeches at the FBI came sniffing around,” he told me. “Hopefully they will help you with your research into time travel.”

  I was quite blown away by this. Of course I’ve heard rumors that several of Nikola’s trunks went missing after his death, but it never occurred to me that I’d been the one to take them. I immediately went over to the stacks of trunks and opened the first one, anxious to see what Nikola thought I might find useful.

  The trunk was filled to the brim with notes written in Nikola’s small, cramped handwriting. And when I read the first few pages, I couldn’t believe what they contained.

  Time travel. Nikola was looking into time travel.

  “Won’t someone notice these missing?” I asked Nikola, as I eagerly looked through the pages of notes.

  He only shrugged and told me, “I don’t think so. Th
ey all think I’m working on a death ray.”

  I think that was supposed to be a joke. Apparently Nikola doesn’t realize that, for centuries, the world believed he really did have some supersecret plans for a death ray. He’d explained how that was all a lie, intended to throw the press and Edison off his trail. For the last twenty years, his primary focus has been time travel.

  There are twenty trunks filled with time-travel research, in total. It’ll take me years to read through them all.

  I can’t wait to see what he’s discovered.

  51

  Dorothy

  NOVEMBER 10, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  Dorothy didn’t remember making her way back to the Black Crow or climbing into the pilot’s seat. But, suddenly, there she was. The leather was cool beneath her legs. The dashboard gleamed before her.

  Mac climbed into the seat beside her, gun aimed at her face. “You can fly this thing, right?”

  Dorothy swallowed, her eyes moving over the dashboard.

  She had to check that the wing flaps were . . . yes, they were up. And now the carburetor needed to be put in position. She pushed the throttle to 3,000 RPMs, her eyes flicking to the EM gauge. Full capacity. Good.

  Her heartbeat felt like gunfire inside of her chest. She could do this.

  And then she looked up, and saw Roman’s body lying in the ashes, illuminated by the time machine’s headlights. Something caught in her throat. She fumbled with her seat belt.

  “We can’t just leave him there,” she said, grasping for the door.

  Mac grabbed her shoulder, pinning her back in place. He lifted his gun, almost lazily, so that it pointed between her eyes. “The only reason you’re not lying on the ground next to him is that I need someone to fly this piece of shit.” He pressed the cold barrel of his gun into her skin. “You got that?”