I wonder if that means he’s joined them.
39
Dorothy
MARCH 17, 1980, FORT HUNTER COMPLEX
Dorothy threw the control room door open and raced down the hall.
The alarm screamed in her ear, a low wail that reminded her of howling wind.
She held her breath as she plowed through the gray smoke, dodging the swinging elbows of confused soldiers, stumbling around heavy boots. A man grabbed for her, but the smoke made it easy to hide. Dorothy saw him lunge past, hands grasping nothing but air.
She veered right at the fork without considering why she knew to go that direction. She was somehow certain there’d be a staircase at the end of the hallway. She rounded the corner, and her eyes fell on a steel door—
Her breath caught. There it was. Almost like it had been waiting for her.
She raced down the hallway and tugged the door open with a grunt. A concrete staircase spiraled in front of her. She knew without knowing how she knew that it would lead to the roof.
This wasn’t just déjà vu. It was something else. Something stronger.
It felt like an omen.
Time flowed around her like water and, for a moment, it was as though the past and the present and the future existed together, at the same time.
She was still running down the hall, but she was also standing with Roman in the Dark Star, hands raised as he pointed his gun at her chest.
There’s something else that I need. . . . Believe it or not, you’re the only person alive who can get it for me.
Then Dorothy’s thoughts hitched, and she was just running again.
No, she thought, desperate, and pushed herself faster. Each step she took shuddered through her, rattling her bones and making her knees ache. Roman was wrong on this point, at least. He might need something from her, but she didn’t have anything to give him.
And, besides, the future wasn’t a set thing. Hadn’t she just proven that? She’d had a vision of one thing and lived another. She’d rewritten the script, and maybe the change had been small, but it still meant something.
The future wasn’t something that just existed, regardless of the decisions she made now. She had a choice.
And her choice was this: She was going to go back to 2077 with the Chronology Protection Agency. She was going to be part of a team.
Roman was on his own.
Her legs were already feeling weak beneath her, quivering with each step she took up the stairs. She dragged a hand over her forehead, and her sleeve came away damp with sweat. Her chest was starting to feel tight. Every breath was work.
Voices echoed down the stairwell, growing louder the higher she climbed. Shouting. Gunshots. Dorothy froze. Nerves prickled up her skin and, for the first time, she considered that Roman might’ve led her into a trap. Those voices didn’t sound like her friends. They sounded like soldiers.
Then, “Everybody on the ship!”
Ash. Dorothy steeled herself and kept moving. Please don’t leave.
It was funny, just the day before, all she’d wanted was a ride, the chance to run farther away, to disappear in history. Now, all she wanted was to be on the Second Star.
She pushed through the last door and stumbled outside. Sunlight hit her full in the face. She shielded her eyes, squinting into the glow.
40
Ash
The soldiers didn’t wait to open fire.
The air filled with bullets. Ash felt their heat cutting through the sky, so close. He had his own gun off his shoulder in an instant. Finger on the trigger, eyes squinting through the sight.
“Everybody on the ship!” he shouted. He aimed for a leg—these men were innocent after all—and fired.
A soldier fell to his knees, swearing, and three more surged forward. Ash struggled to find the still place inside of himself that usually only came to him when he was flying. He couldn’t get to it. This was chaos. He aimed again. Fired again. Another soldier fell.
“Zora!” Ash chanced a look to his left. Chandra had climbed back inside the Second Star and was hovering near the door in the back cabin, a look of grim horror on her face. Zora crouched beside her, using the time machine door as cover. It was too thin. One bullet punched into the metal. A second tore a hole straight through it.
“I think it’s time to leave!” Zora called back. She peered around the edge of the door and cracked off a shot—she seemed to be trying to scare the soldiers more than hit them—and then swore and pulled back as a bullet whizzed past her face, coming within a hairbreadth of her nose. “Get us in the air!”
Ash’s palms had started to sweat. They couldn’t leave yet. They still had to change out the EM—
And they didn’t have Dorothy.
The thought of her waiting for him back in the Dark Star sent something raw and guilt-stricken twisting through his gut. He shouldn’t have left her there, alone. God, he hoped she was okay.
He glanced at the cockpit. Willis was already climbing out and lumbering toward them. He wasn’t armed, but Ash saw how the soldiers all stumbled back a few steps as they took him in, eyes bulging like cartoon characters.
“Here!” Ash tossed Willis his gun—the giant caught it easily, frowning like he didn’t know what it was for. A soldier raised his own gun to shoot, and Willis knocked him back with one hand, sending him stumbling into the others like a bowling ball into a row of pins.
Ash crashed into the cockpit, and that stillness he’d been searching for a second ago fell over him in a curtain. He started flipping switches, taking comfort in the familiar motions, even as a bullet flew into the passenger seat window, cracking glass. Ash didn’t look away from the ship’s control panel. This he knew how to do.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the roof door swing open and closed.
Damn, he thought, his stomach dropping. Reinforcements.
“Everybody in!” he shouted. He wasn’t sure how, but they’d have to find a way back to the hangar after they got clear of the soldiers firing at them.
Then, once they were out of the woods, they could find a place to land for a bit while Zora installed the EM he’d taken from the Dark Star.
Something prickled in Ash, uncomfortable. If he took the EM from the Dark Star, the Professor wouldn’t be able to come back to 2077.
The Professor’s dead, he reminded himself. He won’t be able to use it, anyway.
Willis slammed the butt of his gun into a soldier’s temple—the man dropped like a rock—and leaped into the cabin. Zora was about to crawl into the ship after him, but a bullet pinged off the metal an inch from her hand. Swearing, she jerked back.
“Get her airborne!” she shouted, firing. “I’m—”
A voice rose above the gunfire. It sounded like it called, “Wait!”
Ash frowned, glancing at the window. All he saw were soldiers. He pulled back on the throttle and the Star lurched off the ground.
Zora tried, again, to lunge for the cabin. Again, a bullet pinged off the metal, blocking her way.
The voice shouted, “Wait! Please!”
Ash dropped the stick and the Star crashed back to the roof with a thud that made the whole ship shudder. He twisted around in his seat, squinting through the cracks spiderwebbing across his window.
One of the soldiers was smaller than the others. He didn’t have a gun that Ash could see, and he was pushing through the armed men, against them, head ducked like he didn’t want anyone looking at him too closely.
Ash recognized the dark curls escaping from the sides of the small soldier’s hat. Dorothy.
A feeling roared up inside of him, a happiness so similar to how he’d felt in his prememory, when he’d first seen the girl with the white hair, that he flinched, like he’d been hit.
But the feeling remained, pulsing beneath his breastbone like a second heartbeat. He couldn’t deny what it was. Not love, not yet. But something like the beginning of it.
He swallowed, confused and embarrassed. What w
as happening? He’d seen Quinn Fox’s white hair. He knew Dorothy wasn’t the one he was supposed to be falling in love with.
“Zor!” he shouted, and jerked his chin at Dorothy. Zora cracked off a few shots at the men surrounding her, clearing the way.
Gasping, Dorothy leaped for the ship. Willis grabbed her by the arm to haul her on board.
She looked up, finding Ash in the cockpit. “I thought you’d leave . . .”
Ash felt something complicated twist inside his chest. Relief at seeing that his girl—and he was already thinking of her as his girl—was safe. Disappointment that she didn’t trust him to find her. He cleared his throat and turned back around, trying to keep his voice even.
“Another second and we would’ve missed you,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you to stay put?”
“Yes, well, I’ve never been good with orders.” Dorothy smiled, and he smiled back, unable to help himself.
Zora was climbing in behind her, still shooting one-handed as she reached to pull the door closed. Fingers tightening around the throttle, Ash pulled back on his ship, coaxing it into the sky. The Second Star popped off the ground, easy.
Atta girl, he thought.
Zora shouted, “Get us out of here, Ash. We’ve got—”
Another gunshot. This one was louder.
And then Zora was stumbling backward, dropping to one knee. Ash had a second to think that was weird, because Zora wasn’t clumsy. Then she clutched at her chest as blood appeared beneath her fingers, blossoming across her shirt like a flower. “Zora!” Ash shouted. He released his hold on the yoke without realizing what he was doing. The Star was hovering mere feet above the roof, and it started to dip—
“Jonathan Asher, you get this ship in the air!” Chandra dropped beside Zora, two fingers going for her neck, looking for a pulse. Willis pulled the cabin door closed. His face was monstrous.
Zora closed her eyes.
Ash’s throat felt thick, but he grabbed the yoke and pulled back before the Star could crash into the roof. “Is she—?”
“Do your job and let me do mine!” Chandra shouted.
Ash wanted to tell her to go to hell. He wanted to climb back into the cabin and hold Zora’s head in his lap. He’d never seen her look helpless before. Not once.
Shaken, Ash turned back around.
“Second Star preparing for takeoff,” he muttered, like an afterthought.
The ship lurched forward, bullets pinging off its wings.
The outside world raced past his windshield, but Ash didn’t see it. He didn’t know where he was taking them. Just away.
He was vaguely aware of the mountainous Fort Hunter disappearing behind him, the bullets chasing them becoming fewer, and then none.
He reached for the state of perfect calm flying usually brought to him, but he was like a child reaching for fireflies and grasping only air. His mind raced, playing and replaying the few seconds before they left the roof: Zora climbing into the cabin. The gun shot. Blood appearing on her chest. And him, acting too slowly. Doing too little.
He didn’t chance another look back at the cabin until they were clear of Fort Hunter. When he did, he saw Zora’s eyelids fluttering, her breath reedy and thin. Chandra crouched over her body, face pinched in concentration, and Dorothy was beside her, arms filled with bloody towels. Willis was a shadow behind them, praying. Ash had never seen him do that before.
He turned back around, blinking, and finally saw the world around him. Trees. Water. Fields of nothing but grass. The danger had passed.
“I’m going to land,” he said, searching for a place clear enough to put the ship down. He needed to install the fresh canister of EM, and he could only do that with his ship on the ground. At least he’d have something to occupy his hands while Chandra patched Zora up.
“No!” Chandra didn’t look up from Zora’s body. “You have to keep flying.”
“You can’t fix her in the air.” Ash knew he sounded like a crazy person, but he didn’t care. Chandra was a genius. That’s why the Professor went back a thousand years to find her. She could fix anyone. “We need to land, find supplies or . . . or medication . . . whatever you need.”
“I need a clean operating table, and an ultrasound machine, and more gauze—”
“A hospital, then.”
Ash looked at the mirror hanging from the windshield. Zora’s chest rose and fell heavily. Her body began to shake. Chandra’s hands went still, and she lifted her face, finding Ash’s eyes in the reflection.
“Time,” she said desperately. “That’s what I need. I have to get the bullet out of her chest before she crashes, but she’s losing too much blood. By the time I dig it out, she’ll be . . .”
Ash swallowed and tore his eyes away from Chandra’s. Gone. That’s what she’d been about to say. By the time she digs the bullet out of her chest, Zora will be gone. It was like some horrible riddle, one without any real answer. How many time travelers does it take to make time stand still?
Ash tightened his fingers around the stick.
A thought came to him, out of nowhere: In an anil, all of time exists at once. It felt like another riddle: If all of time existed, did any time exist?
He checked the EM readings: 15 percent. It wasn’t safe to take the Second Star into an anil with the EM readings so low. He needed to land, to install the new EM. But, if he did that, Zora would die.
Ash suddenly felt short of breath. He wasn’t the right person to work this out. They needed Roman, whose mind was slippery, always looking for loopholes. Or Zora, and her infallible logic. But they only had him. His hunch. He hoped it would be enough.
“Hold on,” he shouted. He increased the throttle to 2,000 knots, and the calm he’d been grasping for settled over him like a blanket draped across his shoulders. “I’ve got an idea.”
41
Dorothy
Avery’s hospital had a viewing area off the main operating theater where medical students would gather to watch the doctors perform miracles. Avery had invited Dorothy to attend once, insisting that she take a seat on the hard wooden benches to see him do what he did best. Thinking, perhaps, that she’d be impressed.
Dorothy was not impressed. The way her fiancé had spoken about his own abilities made it seem like he was more God than man. He’d never mentioned the team of other nurses and surgeons who surrounded him at all times, handing him equipment and mopping his brow.
He’d saved a life that day and, yes, Dorothy had to admit that was moving. But she couldn’t help feeling disgusted at how he’d insisted he’d done it alone.
Chandra was his opposite. There was no team, no army of people to help her bring Zora back to life. There was only her and her talented hands, which seemed to manage the extraordinary feat of being in six places at once. She was taking Zora’s pulse, and holding a cloth to her gushing wound. And then she was pressing a stethoscope to the girl’s chest, and grasping for a pair of forceps. There was blood in the creases of her knuckles, and dried beneath her fingernails. There hadn’t been time for gloves.
“Cloth,” Chandra said. Dorothy took the bloody cloth from her hands and handed her a fresh one. She noticed that Chandra’s forehead was damp with sweat. Without thinking, she leaned forward, as she’d seen Avery’s nurses do, and dried it.
“Her pulse is weak,” Chandra muttered. “And she’s bleeding right here, by her right ventricle. I don’t think I can make it stop—”
Zora’s back arched. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head. She started coughing up blood.
Dorothy’s heart seized. Please don’t—
It had only been a day. Two days, maybe, and already these people felt like they might be friends. Zora had been so nice to her, had taken her into their group and given her a place to belong. Dorothy had never had that before. Zora didn’t deserve to die, especially not here, like this, when she’d been trying to save her.
Darkness overtook the ship. Everything became very still and quiet. Except for the ai
r. The air hummed like it was alive.
Dorothy looked up and saw roiling black clouds pressing against the shattered windows. Lightning flashed, turning the clouds purple. They’d entered the anil.
She looked at Ash. From her position on the floor of the time machine, she could see only the back of his neck, and the tense muscles along his arms.
What was he thinking? The trip through the anil had nearly killed them last time. She remembered how he’d doubled over, his skin going green. They couldn’t go through that again. Not with Zora—
“Dorothy.”
Dorothy jerked at the sound of her name. She heard a moan and heavy breathing and leaned over Zora, fresh cloth in hand. “What is it? What happened?
“She stopped seizing,” Chandra said.
Dorothy stared at Zora’s closed eyelids. They’d gone still. Please don’t be dead, she thought. Out loud, she said, “What does that mean?”
Chandra looked shocked. “It means she’s stable. She’s not bleeding anymore. I . . .” Chandra shook her head, a nervous laugh escaping her lips. “I can remove the bullet now.”
“How’s she doing?” Ash shouted from the cockpit. He didn’t turn to look at them but kept his eyes trained ahead, piloting his ship through a darkness so thick Dorothy couldn’t make sense of it.
He’d known, she realized. Somehow he’d known that flying into the anil would save Zora’s life. And he’d done it without a second thought, even after the last trip had nearly taken his own.
Dorothy thought of her mother, only trusting the people she’d paid. And Avery, who could save a life in a room full of people and see only his own hands.
All her life, Dorothy been taught to rely only on herself. She’d been told that trust was a luxury that people like her couldn’t afford.
But it wasn’t true. It had simply been a consequence of the life her mother had chosen.
For the first time since it’d happened, Dorothy thought of their kiss back in the Dark Star. The warmth of Ash’s lips pressed to her own. His heart beating against her chest.
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