Dorothy frowned down at the object. She’d never heard of a smoke bomb before, but she knew what smoke was, and she knew what a bomb was, and the thought of the two things together didn’t seem entirely pleasant.
“I’m going to throw the smoke bomb as a distraction. As soon as I do that, you need to run.”
“Where do you suggest I go?”
“The roof.” He said this as though it were obvious. Dorothy frowned, vaguely remembering discussing this with Willis just a few hours before. He’d told her he’d meet them on a helipad just above the east wing. Was that near the roof?
“Your friends will be up there.” Roman continued, “Trust me. I’ll stay here and deal with”—he flicked his hand toward the door—“that.”
Dorothy felt something in her chest go tight. “Why are you helping me?”
Roman looked irritated. “I’ve already told you—”
“You need me to bring you something,” Dorothy said, remembering their conversation back in the Dark Star. “Something only I can get.”
But that didn’t make sense. She didn’t have anything, and if she did, she certainly wouldn’t just give it to him.
What was she missing?
Roman touched a button on the side of the small black bomb, and a ribbon of hissing smoke drifted into the air.
“You better hurry. Don’t want them leaving without you.” He winked and then rolled the smoke bomb through the crack in the door, directly between the legs of the nearest soldier.
The soldiers all looked down, coughing as the stream of smoke quickly became a gray cloud, obscuring them all.
LOG ENTRY—SEPTEMBER 15, 2076
07:07 HOURS
WEST COAST ACADEMY OF ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY
I haven’t kept this log up-to-date.
I admit, it seemed pointless once the Chronology Protection Agency disbanded.
Did I ever mention that’s what we’d decided to call ourselves? Natasha was the one who came up with it. It’s based on an old quote from Stephen Hawking.
Not that any of that matters, anymore.
I suppose we haven’t officially disbanded, but I see no reason to continue. The West Coast Academy of Advanced Technology is almost entirely underwater. I managed to clear out a few of the topmost levels, and we’ve been squatting here for the past few weeks, but as for the board of trustees, and Dr. Helm . . .
They’re all dead.
NASA hasn’t fared much better. There was an earthquake in Washington last month, an 8.2. It hit the New Madrid fault line, which hasn’t seen an earthquake over 5.4 in a hundred years. From what I hear, the city is in ruins.
This is harder than I expected it to be. In these few sentences, I have already set my pen down several times, too distraught to continue. But I think Natasha would’ve wanted me to keep an account of what’s happening here. It’s what she would have done.
I’ll try to stick to the facts.
The Cascadia Fault mega-quake was a 9.3 on the Richter scale, the largest our country has ever seen.
And then the tsunami hit.
For those of you who don’t study seismology for fun, the earthquake itself is just an appetizer. When tectonic plates shift beneath the ocean floor, they displace a colossal amount of seawater, which then surges upward at an outstanding speed. Imagine a mountain of ocean striking a city that’s already been beaten and broken by the earthquake. That’s what the tsunami did. When the shaking stopped and the water receded, Seattle was past saving. The city that used to be here was gone.
At least, that’s how the United States government saw it. The destruction was so great that they’d never be able to rebuild, so they did the noble thing and kicked us out of the country. Moved their borders in and started calling us “the Western Territories.” Assholes.
That all happened a year ago.
There are people here who haven’t given up yet. They’re trying to rebuild, make the city into . . . something. I don’t know why they bother. Even if we were to construct a new city on top of all this water, the next earthquake will just knock it down again.
The West Coast is lost. All of America might be lost.
Sometimes I think of that day so long ago, when I first met Roman. He’d been sitting outside of Tent City, trying to build a program to predict earthquakes. I wonder what happened to that program. I assume he forgot about it once he started helping me with my own research. What a shame. That program would have been infinitely more helpful to our current reality than a time machine.
I suppose I could ask him about it. But he doesn’t come around much, anymore. I think I’ve disappointed him. Not that I can blame him for that. I’ve disappointed myself.
I should probably sign off for the night. It’s not good to keep the electricity on after curfew.
The lights attract vermin.
38
Ash
MARCH 17, 1980, FORT HUNTER COMPLEX
Zora tried the door. It was unlocked. She eased it open as Ash whipped his gun up to his shoulder and aimed, finger trembling near the trigger. They stepped into the hallway.
Empty.
Ash lowered his gun, frowning. There’d been a dozen or so soldiers standing out there just a few minutes ago. He turned to Zora, but she was already halfway down the hallway, hurrying toward a door marked STAIRCASE.
Cupping a hand over his mouth, Ash shouted, his voice just audible over the sirens, “Zora, wait!”
When she didn’t turn around, Ash swore and chased after her. The empty hallway bothered him. Too easy, he thought. His stolen gun thumped against his hip as he ran, though he kept one hand curled around the strap, waiting for the missing soldiers to appear, guns blazing, bullets flying. But no one showed.
They made it to the stairwell, and the metal door slammed shut behind them, cutting the sound of the alarm.
Ash cringed and rubbed his ear. The wailing still echoed through his head.
Zora was already racing up the stairs. She hadn’t slowed, hadn’t even turned to make sure Ash was still behind her. She hadn’t shouldered her gun, either, but carried it crossed in front of her chest, like a shield.
“Where are you going?” Ash asked, chasing after her. They needed to get back down to the Dark Star, find Dorothy, and figure out where they were supposed to meet Willis and Chandra. They didn’t have time for a detour.
Zora said, “The roof.”
A heaviness dropped through Ash’s gut. He didn’t want to go to the roof. He didn’t want to see anything that proved, definitively, that the Professor was dead.
It made it all too real.
“They’re lying,” Zora called over her shoulder, as though reading his mind. “Dad isn’t dead. He can’t be.”
Dad. Zora hadn’t used that word in months. Now she’d said it twice in one day.
Ash felt the hairs on his neck crawl with something he couldn’t name. He wanted to tell Zora to wait. To talk to him. Even if Gross had been lying about executing the Professor (and Ash didn’t know why he would do that), it made no sense for them to go to the roof.
What did she expect to find up there?
But they were pushing through another door before he could put those thoughts into words, and then light was spilling into the stairwell, and Ash was stumbling back, squinting.
Floodlights, he thought, thinking back to the east wing hangar and the hundreds of soldiers waiting to cart him away.
But he blinked and saw that it wasn’t floodlights. It was the moon hovering low in the sky, stretching pale silver fingers across the roof.
Ash shielded his eyes with one hand, squinting. This kind of light made it impossible to see. Everything was in shadow. He could just make out Zora standing in front of him, her body all silhouette, her chest rising and falling, rapidly.
“See?” she said, turning in a circle. “There’s nothing here. So they couldn’t have . . .”
Ash approached her slowly. “Zora.”
“If they really shot him, there
’d be a body, or blood, or . . . or . . .” Her voice was small and terrible. “I can’t lose him, too. Not after what happened to my mom.”
Ash didn’t know what to say. He had to remind himself to breathe.
Zora didn’t talk about her mother. Ever. Natasha died in the Cascadia Fault mega-quake, along with thirty-five thousand other people. After that, Zora changed. She stopped talking about her emotions—stopped, it seemed, feeling her emotions at all. It was almost like she thought that feeling anything meant she’d have to feel everything.
Ash had tried to talk to her about it, once. The second the word mother left his lips, Zora’s eyes had unfocused, and her fingers had gone slack. The gear she’d been holding had tumbled to the floor, but Zora hadn’t moved to pick it up.
It was like she’d gone catatonic. Like he’d broken something inside of her.
He never mentioned her mother again.
Now, Ash grabbed Zora by the shoulders. He expected her to pull away but, instead, she became very still. She’d always been a still sort of person, but now it felt unnatural, like the air before a storm hit, how the wind stopped moving, and all the leaves turned over, showing their underbellies to the wretched sky.
With effort, he said, “We can try again. We’ll come back before they execute him.” He patted the canister of exotic matter still tucked inside his jacket. “We have more EM now. We can come back as many times as it takes.”
Zora was nodding against his shoulder, but Ash could tell that she didn’t believe him, either. Time travel couldn’t bring someone back from the dead. The Professor had proven that when he’d tried to go back and save Zora’s mother.
Whatever happened here, it was unchangeable. It was over.
Which meant Ash’s prememory would eventually come true, no matter how hard he tried to fight it. In just four short weeks, he was going to die.
Something deep inside of him began to ache. He couldn’t put it into words, this knowledge that his death was close, that he wouldn’t be able to avoid it, even after months of telling himself he’d find a way. It was too big a feeling, something that couldn’t be contained by skin.
Zora pulled away, as though this thought had just occurred to her, too. She grabbed Ash’s arm.
“We’ll find a way,” she said furiously. “I’m not losing you, too. I promise you. We’ll . . . we’ll research. We’ll go through his journal. There has to be something . . .”
She brushed a tear away from her cheek with an angry twitch of her hand.
Ash took a breath, trying to be strong for her. “Don’t worry about that now. . . .”
He trailed off. He heard a motor sounding in the distance and, though he couldn’t say exactly when it started, he was suddenly aware that it was closer.
Zora tilted her head toward the sound. “What’s that?”
Ash’s eyes flitted to the horizon. He couldn’t see the source of the motor yet, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t close.
He looked around. This wasn’t a roof so much as a small landing area in the middle of the mountain—probably a helipad, if he had to wager a guess. Rocks rose all around them, blocking most of the woods below.
“We should go,” he said, heading for the door. He lowered his hand to the doorknob—
And then froze, frowning. There was a sound echoing inside the stairwell as well, muffled by the door. Ash pressed his ear to the cold metal.
“Ash!” Zora was peering over the side of the roof, her back to him. “Something’s coming.”
Ash’s palms had started to sweat, leaving the door handle slick against his hand. He could hear propeller blades cutting into the sky, a motor whirring. And, below that, something thudding up the stairs. Echoing off the concrete walls below.
It’s the alarm, he told himself. But it wasn’t. It was footsteps. Someone was running up the stairs.
Ash stumbled away from the door, hands reaching for his gun.
“Ash—”
“I got a bit of a situation here!” He turned and, at that moment, a ship appeared at the side of the roof.
Not just any ship. His ship. The Second Star. Her toothy grin looked dirty in the early-morning light, and a crack had spread across her windshield. But it was his ship, all right. He lowered his gun, squinting at the cockpit to see who was flying it. The massive shadow hovering behind the windshield could only be one person.
Ash stumbled backward as Willis set his ship down on the roof. The giant opened the front door and leaned outside, flashing Ash a salute. “Morning, Captain.”
Chandra climbed out of the cabin. She’d started speaking before she’d gotten the door all the way open, and Ash missed the first half of her sentence. “. . . was supposed to tell you that Willis and I couldn’t go across the gateroom with you, but we figured you could get into plenty of trouble or whatever all on your own and, like, you might need our help? So we went back through that creepy-ass tunnel, and wow are those guards easy to sneak past if you’re trying to get out of the base instead of inside of it, and then we got the Second Star and Willis was all like, ‘I bet I can fly it,’ which, hey he totally did. We weren’t sure you’d all make it up here, though. That’s convenient. Hey, where’s Dorothy? Did you find the Professor?”
“I think I just got whiplash,” Zora said. Her face had closed off, her feelings hidden again.
Ash cleared his throat. “Dorothy’s in the east wing hangar with the Dark Star, and we need to—”
The door to the stairs slammed open, cutting him off. Ash turned as figures spilled onto the roof, instantly surrounding them. Soldiers.
Their guns flashed in the dying sunlight. Their faces were hard with anger.
“On your knees!” one of the soldiers shouted. The others spread into a half circle around them, neatly, blocking them in. “And get your hands in the air!”
LOG ENTRY—SEPTEMBER 20, 2076
21:00 HOURS
WEST COAST ACADEMY OF ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY
If this is to be an accurate account of Seattle after the Cascadia Fault mega-quake, I suppose I should explain about the curfew.
For any of this to make sense, you have to understand that most of the people living in Tent City died during the Cascadia Fault mega-quake. The shelters were too flimsy, and the water got so high. Women, children, families—they were all wiped out.
There were a few survivors. A small group of kids hijacked a boat and moved into the old Fairmont hotel. Roman lives with them now. He says he knew them from before the earthquake, that they were friends of his, back in Tent City.
I don’t know what he sees in them. They’re angry kids. Violent. There have been rumors of muggings and theft and looting. The curfew was put in place to keep people safe from them.
Roman isn’t like that.
He stopped by the school last night. Zora must’ve told him I’ve been having a hard time moving on, because he came by with a box of these individually wrapped chocolate brownies we used to snack on while doing research, probably to try and cheer me up.
(I have to admit I’d forgotten how good those brownies were. I wonder where he found them—food in the city has become scarce.)
We talked for a while. I asked him about the program he’d been building years ago, the one that was supposed to predict earthquakes, but he said that someone nicked his computer before he could finish. Apparently lots of things got stolen in Tent City.
I explained my theory that he would’ve been better off continuing work on that project than helping me with my useless research. I tried to explain, at least. I’d had a drink or two by then, so I’m not sure I made myself clear.
In any case, Roman just gave me a very strange look.
“Are you joking?” he asked, and he motioned to the underwater city outside the window. “This isn’t over. We can go back. We can fix all of this.”
He went on to say that he knew I had issues with using time travel to alter the past, but that surely now I must see how important it was. We could kee
p thousands of people from dying. We could save the world.
I think I started laughing when he said that, which, in hindsight, was a poor choice. It’s just that I couldn’t help myself. My emotions have been so strange over the past year. So close to the surface.
And, of course, there was the fact that I’d been drinking.
I told Roman that I’d already tried. I’d gone back a hundred times. I’d tried to save Natasha in a hundred different ways, and it never worked. Never.
I don’t think I would have told him as much had I been sober. In any case, Roman was furious. The little punk overturned my desk.
“Why do you get to go back?” he’d yelled at me. “We all lost people we loved. Why do you get to save them?”
I sobered up pretty quickly after that. I pointed out that I never actually succeeded in saving anyone. I’d tried, and I’d failed. My grief had clouded my better judgment but, in the end, I’d only succeeded in proving my original hypothesis.
Time travel is not magic. It can’t be used to change the past or bring people back from the dead.
I’m not sure Roman really heard me. “The Black Cirkus is right about you,” he’d said. “You’re either completely pathetic, or you’re a selfish bastard! You have all this power, and you don’t even use it.”
Naturally, I was confused. “Who is the Black Cirkus?” I asked.
He wouldn’t answer, but I supposed he didn’t need to. I could already imagine the kids from Tent City calling themselves the Black Cirkus, thinking that ridiculous name would make people take them seriously. It was only a matter of time before they became an official gang instead of just a band of thugs. Ha. Just what this ruined city needs.
There’s no government in Seattle anymore. There’s no police force, no rule of law.
If this Black Cirkus wants to take over, all they’ll need are some guns.
Later, after I’d sobered up a bit, I couldn’t help remembering our trip to collect Willis, how enthralled Roman had seemed with circus life. How he’d asked Willis questions, related to him.
Roman, I’m certain, is the one who gave the Black Cirkus their name.
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