Stolen Time

by Danielle Rollins

  She’d spent sixteen years being told she was only worth what she could steal, that her only value came from her pretty face and flirtatious smile. She’d always wanted something more. She’d always wanted to be more.

  She lifted a finger to her lips. This was more.

  Men lie, her mother warned.

  You aren’t one of them, added Roman.

  Dorothy pushed their voices aside. She didn’t want to listen to anyone else anymore. She knew exactly what she wanted.

  LOG ENTRY—OCTOBER 22, 2076

  01:14 HOURS

  WEST COAST ACADEMY OF ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

  Nicked, he’d said.

  The last time we spoke, Roman’s exact words were, “Someone nicked my computer before I had a chance to finish the program.”

  I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.

  I must’ve been the one who nicked it. I must’ve gone back and stolen the damn thing.

  I knew he’d never finish the program. Even with his computer he wouldn’t have had the time, not with how hard we worked over the last few years. So I went back, and I took the computer so I could do it myself.

  I’d told myself no more time travel. But this is different. This is for the greater good.

  This could be the key to everything.

  I’m leaving tonight.

  42

  Ash

  THE PUGET SOUND ANIL

  Ash focused on the path directly in front of his ship, letting the rest of the anil grow hazy and dark around the edges. Years passed him by, the changes in the quality of the smoke the only signs guiding his way.

  1989 . . . 1992 . . .

  Dorothy crawled into the cockpit and settled herself in the seat beside him.

  “How’s she doing?” Ash asked.

  “Chandra was able to remove the bullet. She’s stable.” Dorothy shifted so that she was facing him. Ash caught the movement from the corner of his eye.

  She wasn’t touching him, but there was something about the expression on her face that made his skin prickle.

  He kept his eyes trained on the windshield. “Is she awake?”

  “Yes. She and Chandra are talking a little.” She touched the locket at her neck with one finger, an unconscious gesture. Ash realized she often did this when she was thinking, and it scared him, a little, that he already found things like this familiar.

  Ash leaned forward, pulling the EM out from inside his jacket. “Hold on to this for me?”

  Dorothy frowned, turning the canister over in her hands. It was a glass cylinder filled with liquid sunlight. Then a shadow passed overhead, and the substance turned the color and texture of steel. “What is it?” she breathed.

  “Exotic matter. Pretty, right?”

  She nodded, her eyes going unfocused as she stared at what was now a swirling blue mist. “I saw you take this out of the Dark Star,” she murmured, and then her eyes focused again, flicking to the Second Star’s control panel. “Wait a minute . . . isn’t this supposed to be inside the ship somehow?”

  “Yeah, well the Second Star doesn’t have an internal control panel, like the Dark Star does, so you can’t change the EM midflight.”

  “Is that safe?”

  Ash’s eyes flicked to the EM gauge. The dial still twitched near the 15 percent mark, taunting him. The new EM would only protect them if it were correctly installed inside the time machine. Sitting in Dorothy’s lap, it was useless.

  “I hope so,” he said.

  There was a moment of silence, and then Dorothy sighed and removed a small brass pocket watch from her pocket. “I should probably give this back to you.”

  Ash glanced at it, but it was a moment before he recognized the thick gold chain and the familiar grooves around the edges of the face. His hands flew to the pocket where the watch generally lived. “Hey!”

  “It’s a little old-fashioned, isn’t it?” Dorothy asked, turning the watch over in her fingers. The metal chain spilled from her palm. “The men in my time all have watches like this.”

  “It was my pop’s,” Ash said, as she placed the watch in his hand. Earlier, he might’ve been annoyed that she’d stolen a precious family heirloom. Now, he found it weirdly endearing, the way a person’s faults could sometimes become endearing. “He was, well, I guess he would have been alive around the same time as you.”

  “I have to admit, I was expecting something much more exciting and expensive from a time traveler.” Dorothy’s lip twitched, like she was teasing him. It was a different sort of teasing than when they’d first met. Then, it’d felt like she wanted something from him. Now, it seemed more like she wanted to make him laugh.

  “Pick a richer time traveler next time.”

  “Do you know any?”

  Ash laughed out loud, the sound surprising him. He shouldn’t feel this way so soon after Zora had been shot, but the knowledge that she was safe, at least for a little while, had left him light-headed and giddy.

  That and the smell of Dorothy’s hair, so close.

  He cleared his throat. “You’re one to talk,” he said, nodding at Dorothy’s locket. “You steal that off some nice little old lady’s throat?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. But she wasn’t nice, and I wasn’t the one who stole it.”

  Ash waited, hoping the silence would get her to offer up the whole story, but she didn’t take the bait. He took a second to squint at the engraving. “That a cat?”

  “A dog, I think. It was like this when I got it.”

  “Right.” Ash swallowed and shifted his gaze back to the windshield. He dropped a hand into his jacket pocket, fingers closing around his old man’s watch.

  The watch was its own kind of time machine. All Ash had to do was hold it in his palm and he’d be transported to a cornfield in 1945, the Asher family farm a dusty gray against the setting sun. The day he got this watch, he’d been standing at the edge of a dirt road, duffel bag at his feet, watching the speck of black in the distance rumble closer. That speck would turn into a bus, eventually. And that bus would take him to the flight camp over a thousand miles away, the farthest he’d ever been from home.

  Before the bus could reach them, Ash’s pop had placed his old watch in Ash’s hand.

  “Don’t die,” Jonathan Asher Sr. had said, closing his own hand around his son’s. “Promise me.”

  Ash let go of the watch and pulled his hand from his pocket. Maybe that’s what he’d been looking for when he asked Dorothy about her locket. A story. Some small sign of who she’d been before she found him in the woods and climbed into his ship.

  He cast her a swift glance. “You religious?”

  Dorothy began braiding her hair over one shoulder. Her fingers were quick, like she’d done this many times before. “I never saw the point. You?”

  “I was Catholic.”

  “Was?”

  Ash shrugged. He’d never lost his faith, exactly, but he’d gradually replaced it with science. The Professor’s workshop had felt like church to him, the Dark Star and Second Star his altars.

  “There’s this passage in the Bible,” he said, after a moment. “I don’t remember it exactly, but it basically says that God knows the time of your death before you’re even born. That it’s fated.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  Ash swallowed.

  Did he believe it?

  He thought of white hair and black water. A knife sliding into his gut. He’d tried so hard to believe there was still a way to keep all of that from happening. But that hope had died when they’d lost the Professor, when he caught a glimpse of Quinn Fox’s white hair.

  He couldn’t explain it, but he felt like he knew that future was coming for him, no matter what he did to try to stop it. He could see it approaching like a bus on a dusty road. Just a speck in the distance now, but crawling closer with every moment that passed.

  “It’s kind of like time travel, isn’t it?” Dorothy said, interrupting his thoughts. “If God knows the day
that you die, then he must know everything that’s going to happen. It would mean our futures were set, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

  Black water. Dead trees. Ash nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  Dorothy laughed, but the sound was bitter. “What would be the point of any of this then? If our futures were already written, why bother living at all?”

  “Aren’t you curious about how this all ends?”

  “Not if I can’t change it.” Dorothy’s fingers went still, leaving several inches of perfect brown spirals at the end of her braid. Ash glanced at them. He wondered if he could pull the curls straight, or if they’d be like springs, bouncing back into shape as soon as he let go.

  Dorothy licked her lips. “Are you taking me back? To 1913, I mean?”

  Ash shifted his eyes from her hair to her face, and then away again. It hurt to look at her. It seemed like she was waiting for him to say something, but he couldn’t speak. Pain flickered below his ribs, but it was the memory of pain, not the real thing.

  “I could belong here.” There was no seduction in her words. They fell out of her mouth in a rush, tripping off each other like puppies. “You said I wouldn’t like it, but I do. I really do.”

  Tell her, Ash thought. But how was he supposed to tell the girl he’d only just kissed that he couldn’t be with her because he was destined to fall in love with someone else? Someone horrible.

  Lightning flicked in the distance. The dial on the wind reader twitched. Ash kept his attention on those small things until he could stand it no longer. And then, he looked at her.

  She looked like hell. Her hair was a mess, with curls frizzing around her face and falling loose of her braid. Grease and sweat covered her face. Her shirt had ripped along the collar, showing faint smudges of dirt along her neck.

  She looked real. She looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen her.

  “I could stay here,” she said. “I could be one of you . . . I could be with you.”

  Black water, Ash thought. Dead trees.

  Zora said that falling for Dorothy would stop his horrible future from coming true. But this wasn’t a curse that could be broken. It wasn’t a prophecy that might not be fulfilled.

  It was an actual, honest-to-God memory, and memories are fixed things that you can’t change after the fact. Ash didn’t understand before, but he thought he understood now. If he was remembering something that happened in the future, it was because that thing happened. He wasn’t going to stop it by finding the Professor, and he certainly wasn’t going to stop it by kissing pretty girls from the past.

  Which meant he had to find a way to face it like a man. Like his father would have. A man wouldn’t drag someone else down with him just because he was scared of the fall.

  Dorothy’s hand was on his arm, her fingers featherlight. “Ash—”

  “I can’t—” He’d been planning on telling her about the prememory. He wanted to tell her, but he lost his nerve halfway through. He shook his head, shrugging off her hand. “I just can’t.”

  43

  Dorothy

  Dorothy stumbled back to her seat, careful to keep her head lowered so no one would look at her. She felt like she’d been hit. Her cheeks flared with humiliation, as painful as if Ash had actually slapped her. She lifted a hand to her face, fingers trembling. She almost wished that were what happened. Physical pain seemed so much easier to endure than this . . . this burning.

  What had she done?

  She couldn’t even pretend she hadn’t been warned. Her mother had taught her the dangers of placing her trust in other people since she was old enough to walk, but she’d done it anyway. Why?

  Because they’d been nice to her. Because she’d wanted to be part of a team.

  And because she’d been lonely. She might not have wanted to admit that was part of it, but she couldn’t ignore it now. She’d been alone in this strange new world and desperate for a family to replace Loretta. She was ashamed of it now.

  She sunk into her seat, looking out the window. The cloudy sides of the anil flew past in billowing blues and grays and purples. They were beautiful. Probably the most beautiful thing she’d see in this lifetime. But she found she couldn’t focus on them.

  She clutched the locket at her neck, closing her eyes against the gathering tears. God, she’d been a fool.

  Not true, whispered an insistent voice in her head. She wasn’t a fool. She knew exactly what she wanted. Perhaps she couldn’t have it here, with these people. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t have it.

  There were other people. Other futures. She didn’t believe in destiny. She could still change things.

  She tightened her grip around the locket, ignoring the cut of steel against her fingers.

  You’re an outsider. Roman had said. You aren’t on the team, and you never will be. You haven’t proven yourself.

  Dorothy pressed her palms under her eyes to stop the angry flow of tears. This time, she had a harder time pushing his voice away.

  A howling started outside the ship. It sounded far off at first, like a dog baying at the moon. Dorothy managed to ignore it for a while. But then it grew louder. It became a fire-engine siren, racing closer. She covered her ears with her hands.

  Something slammed into the ship, making everything tremble.

  Chandra knelt on the floor, holding Zora down by the shoulders. She jerked her head up. “Ash!”

  “Storm’s getting worse,” Ash shouted back.

  Rain began to fall. It started light, barely pricking at the windows. Over the course of a few minutes it grew steadily heavier, until it was hammering into the glass, making the walls of the Second Star shake.

  “I can’t keep her steady,” Ash said. “It’s getting—”

  A window burst—filling the air inside the ship with wind and glass. Chandra screamed, throwing herself over Zora to shield her wound from the debris. Zora released a hacking cough. Her face had taken on an ashy, gray cast. Despite her restraints, Dorothy felt herself being sucked toward the window, pulled outside by the force of the storm. She wrapped both hands around her belt, gasping as the wind hit her.

  Slowly, like he was walking through mud, Willis lumbered across the ship. He pressed against the broken window with his massive body, blocking the wind. For a moment, there was quiet.

  “Change . . . the EM,” Zora moaned from the floor. She tried to sit, but Chandra held down on her shoulders.

  “You’ve been shot,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

  “We can’t risk exiting the anil,” Ash called back to them. “The tunnel’s too unstable. The entire ship could break apart.”

  Zora sucked down a deep breath, her eyes fluttering closed. “I know how to change the EM midflight. I’ve . . . done it before.”

  “Not with a bullet wound to the chest, you haven’t.”

  “The anil . . . will keep me stable.”

  Chandra closed her eyes. She appeared to be counting to ten to calm herself down. After a moment, she said, “Let me be very clear. If you do this, you will die.”

  The ship dropped. Dorothy felt the fall in her stomach, like something twisting and pulling at her gut. Willis lost his balance and dropped down to one knee. Wind whirled through the ship again, tugging at their hair. Chandra’s doctor’s bag slid across the floor and slammed into the far wall. A few tiny vials spilled out and were immediately whipped into the air, twirling in the window.

  Willis pushed himself back up to his feet, and positioned his body in front of the window, again. “Sorry,” he murmured.

  Zora groaned, one hand going to the bandaged wound at her chest. “If I don’t do this, we’ll all die.”

  “I can install the EM,” Willis said. “I’ve done it before.”

  Zora turned her head without lifting it from the floor, studying him. “You’re too big. The ship won’t hold.”

  The sides of the ship creaked. Dorothy lifted a hand to touch the buckling aluminum. She ha
d the feeling of being inside a paper bag that someone was slowly crumpling.

  You haven’t proven yourself, she thought.

  She said, without thinking, “I’m not big.”

  Every set of eyes turned toward her.

  “You don’t know how,” Zora said.

  Dorothy sat up straighter. Reckless, her mother would have called her. Foolhardy. The knowledge that she wouldn’t have approved made her all the more determined. “Willis can tell me how.”

  Willis frowned, appearing to turn this idea over in his head. “It’s not terribly complicated if you know which wires go where. And she has steady hands.”

  “You can’t be considering this!” Ash shouted. But he was flying the ship. There was nothing he could do to stop her.

  They’re a team. Roman had said. You’re an outsider, and you always will be.

  Maybe not, Dorothy thought. If all she had to do was prove herself, then this should do it. She didn’t see how they could think of her as an outsider after she’d saved all their lives.

  She made her way over to the window where Willis was standing. Outside, a flash of lightning set the anil ablaze. Zilch lightning, she thought, as the tunnel walls lit up with shades of orange and red, a hellscape of fire and smoke. Dorothy felt tension move through her shoulders, tightening her muscles, but at least she didn’t flinch. A small victory.

  She should be nervous, she realized. But she wasn’t. She felt an eerie sort of calm. This was right. It was what she was meant to be doing.

  “There’s a harness in my bag, right there.” Zora tried to lift her arm, but it trembled and fell back to the floor. Her eyes fluttered closed. Chandra unwound the stethoscope from her neck and leaned over Zora’s body, pressing the diaphragm to her chest.

  “That one there,” she said, nodding at a bag near Dorothy’s feet. Dorothy knelt and dug around inside the bag until she located the thick harness. She handed it to Willis, who began knotting it around her waist.

  “You don’t have to do this.” Willis pulled her tether taut, testing the knot connecting the thick rope to the harness at her waist. It didn’t give, and he nodded, satisfied. “We can find another way.”