“Don’t be a ninny.” Dorothy tried for a smile. “It’ll be fine.”
He didn’t look convinced. “I’ll be in your ear the whole time.” He tapped the headset he’d strapped over her curls. “I’ll walk you through everything.”
Dorothy swallowed, tasting acid at the back of her throat. She’d heard everything he said but the words seemed to evaporate the moment they reached her ears. She touched the contraption he’d made her wear. Headset.
Lightning knifed through the sky outside her window. Thunder roared.
“Ready?” asked Willis.
Dorothy jerked her head up and down in an approximation of a nod. She supposed she had to be.
Willis took a step away from the busted window and cold air gusted into the ship, blowing the hair away from Dorothy’s face and forcing her back a few steps. He unlatched the window and pushed it open. Steeling herself, Dorothy lurched forward, propping one hand to either side of the window to hold herself steady.
Don’t look, she told herself. But she was already turning, her eyes finding the back of Ash’s head where he sat in the cockpit. She studied the place on his neck where soft, blond hair met sunburned skin. But he didn’t turn around to watch her go.
She shoved the EM down the back of her trousers, tightened her fingers around the window, and crawled out the ship.
44
Ash
Ash looked up a second after Dorothy climbed out the window, then looked quickly away again.
He wanted to tell her to stop. He wanted to tell her he’d changed his mind. But he couldn’t do either of those things, so he stayed quiet until she was gone.
Lightning flashed outside, and there was another shuddering slam against the walls.
Their conversation gnawed at him. He’d thought telling her they couldn’t be together would feel noble, or at least brave. He was doing it for her, after all, so he wouldn’t hurt her. Wasn’t that supposed to feel good?
Well, it didn’t. Ash couldn’t quite put a name to the feeling crashing through him, but it was dangerously close to cowardice or shame or some terrible mixture of the two. He’d seemed to hurt her, anyway, no matter how hard he’d tried not to.
Wind pressed hard on the ship’s windows, making the glass creak so badly that Ash braced himself for a shatter. A small object flew past his face, pinging off the time machine’s walls and then zipping, bullet-like, across the cockpit again.
He couldn’t believe Dorothy was climbing into this. The ship was rocketing around the anil like a pinball in a machine.
He felt suddenly restless. He wanted to climb out after her. To help her. But he could only sit and steer and ask favors of a God he no longer believed in.
Don’t let her die.
45
Dorothy
It was cold in the anil. Dorothy’s fingers went instantly numb, and the moisture on her lips froze into a thin veneer of ice. Her limbs felt clumsy and stiff.
“Dorothy? Do you copy?” Willis’s voice spoke directly into her ear. Copy? She frowned, and the ice coating her lips cracked.
“Copy?” she repeated, confused.
“Great! You’re coming in loud and clear,” Willis said. “Can you look to your left and tell me what you see?”
Dorothy inhaled so much icy air that her lungs burned with cold. Wind tugged at her back, threatening to peel her away from the Second Star. She turned her head, pressing her cheek into the side of the ship.
A ladder hung beside her, its lower rungs just a few inches from the top of her head.
“There’s a ladder,” she forced out.
“Good,” came Willis’s soothing voice. “Now, reach up and grab that lower rung.”
Cold fear seeped through her. Grabbing the rung meant removing one of her hands from the side of the ship. But the wind was so strong. It picked at her pants and shirt, making the fabric flap wildly around her body. If she made one wrong move it’d blow her off into the tunnel like a piece of tissue paper.
She tightened her grip, shaking her head. “The wind . . .”
“The harness will keep you from falling.”
A voice in Dorothy’s head screamed, Don’t! He’s wrong! You’ll die! She was quite comfortable listening to that voice, actually. But another, equally insistent voice kept breaking through it. This voice sounded like her mother.
Our world has no place for cowards.
The fingers of her left hand relaxed, just a little. She removed them from the side of the ship and reached over her head, grasping for the ladder rung at the same time that she inched to the side. The wind pulled at her body, lifting her legs away from the ship and sucking her backward. The breath left her chest—
Then there was cold metal beneath her fingers. She curled her hand around the ladder rung, muscles screaming as she dragged her body closer.
“All right.” She held tight to the ladder. “I’ve done it.”
“Good. Now climb.”
The climb was brutal. Dorothy would no sooner release one hand from the ladder before the wind was picking at her again, trying to pluck her off the side of her silly little ship like a child might pluck an ant off a log. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the cold had made her arms and legs stiff and hard to maneuver. Her fingers were so frozen she could hardly manage to curl them around the icy ladder rungs. Harsh winds bit into her eyes, causing tears to stream down her face, blurring her vision. She didn’t dare lift a hand to wipe them away.
“Dorothy?”
“Nearly there,” she grunted, hauling herself up one final rung. She lifted her head—and gasped.
Seeing the anil through the Second Star’s dirty glass windows was nothing compared to seeing it like this, up close, with nothing separating them except for the tears still pooling in her eyes.
The tunnel walls were made of smoke and cloud and mist. At first they looked gray and purple, but the longer Dorothy stared at them the more color seemed to be woven in the whorls and tendrils. A flash of orange. A curl of red. Pinpricks of light flashed deep within the smoke and, for a moment, they made Dorothy think of stars. Dozens, and then hundreds, and then an entire galaxy waiting beyond the mist and smoke. A breeze blew a cloud across the walls and the stars all winked out at once, like they’d never been there in the first place. A deep rumbling echoed from somewhere inside the tunnel.
Dorothy had never been religious, but she imagined this must be what people felt when they prayed. She was suddenly deeply grateful for the chance to see it.
“Dorothy?”
Dorothy blinked. She didn’t know how long she’d been staring at those mesmerizing walls. She shifted her eyes back to the ship.
“I’m here,” she gasped.
“You should have reached the control panel by now. Do you see it? It’ll look like a crack in the metal of the ship, almost like a door.”
Dorothy studied the side of the ship until she saw the crack Willis was talking about. “Yes.”
“You’ll need to wedge your fingers into the crack to open it.”
Dorothy did as she was told, and tugged. The door creaked open a half inch. Dorothy stuck her hand all the way into the opening and pulled—
The wind caught the edges of the door and jerked it backward, sending it shuddering into the side of the ship. The Second Star gave a frightening lurch and then shot toward the opposite side of the anil.
Dorothy flattened herself against the ship, clenching her eyes shut so she wouldn’t see what was happening. She had the sensation of being spun like a top. The world around her became a dizzying blur of colors and lights. An acid taste climbed her throat, making her feel that she might be sick.
And then it stopped. The ship stopped spinning and the wind calmed. Dorothy didn’t lift her head right away. She kept her check pressed to the cool metal and breathed.
“Dorothy? Dorothy are you there?” Willis sounded frantic. “Are you okay?”
Dorothy exhaled. “I’m here. I’m okay—”
A chunk
of ice the size of a tennis ball separated from the cloudy walls and slammed into the ship, hitting inches from Dorothy’s hand. Another followed, and then another.
“It’s hailing,” Dorothy said, flinching as a shard of ice pricked her ankle.
“I need you to listen to me. The anil is about to collapse. You need to install the EM and get the hell out of there. Now.”
“What do I do?”
“Look at the control panel. Can you locate the existing container of EM?”
Dorothy inched toward the control panel. The winds were still blowing the panel door back so that it was pressed firmly against the side of the ship, but Dorothy trembled to think of what might happen if the wind turned. She imagined the door snapping shut on her hands, cutting her fingers off at the knuckles. Fear rose in her throat. She let her eyes travel over the odd, brightly colored wires and greasy bits of metal before—
There! She located the EM in the far corner. A crack splintered down the side of the canister, and the material inside was charred and black. Dorothy didn’t need to be an expert in time travel to know that was a bad sign.
“I found it,” she said.
“Good,” came Willis’s voice. “Now, there will be a wire attached to one end. A thick, blue one.”
Dorothy crept closer. She located the wire. “Got it.”
“It should be attached to the EM by a three-pronged—”
A shard of hail the size of a golf ball slammed into Dorothy’s arm. She heard a sickening crack and her fingers lost their hold on the ship.
46
Ash
The dashboard was on fire.
Ash didn’t know how it had started. He’d been too busy squinting through the nightmarish scene unfolding outside his windshield—hail the size of fists, lightning so close he could smell the sizzle of ozone—desperately trying to catch a glimpse of Dorothy’s leg, or a lock of her hair, or anything that might indicate that she was okay.
A flame unfurled from beneath the wind gauge, singeing his finger. He jerked back, and the Star began to plummet. . . .
Ash grasped for the yoke and pulled the ship level again, tears gathering in his eyes as red-hot curls of fire licked the backs of his knuckles. But he wouldn’t let go, not even when the heat made his skin crack and blacken. They were too close. He chanced a look outside, at the roiling dark of the tunnel walls. They were flying past the 2040s now. . . .
“How’s she doing?” he shouted, gritting his teeth against the burn. Willis had been leaning out the window, both hands clutching the tether attached to Dorothy’s waist. He pulled back inside at the sound of Ash’s voice.
“She was doing great out there, Captain, but I—” Wind punched into the side of the ship, blowing straight through Willis’s words. The Second Star trembled violently, and Ash heard a great thunk that sounded an awful lot like a very large man being tossed to the floor. “Willis!” Ash swerved to avoid an arc of lightning. Willis didn’t answer.
Ash moved his eyes up to the mirror. For a long moment, no one stared back at him. Then Willis pushed himself to his feet, still holding Dorothy’s tether.
“I’m here, Captain,” he groaned, wrapping the thick rope around his hand a third time. He lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth and, despite the screaming wind, Ash heard the words, “. . . Dorothy . . . read? Come in . . .”
“What’s happening?” Ash shouted.
“I lost contact,” Willis called back. He was staring down at the tether wrapped around his hand, a deep frown creasing the skin between his eyebrows. “Ash—”
“Pull her in!” Ash’s heart was beating too quickly. He pictured Dorothy clinging to the side of his ship, her hands gripping slick metal, her body blowing in the violent wind.
He tightened his grip around the yoke. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw flames dancing closer to his fingers, but he didn’t even feel them. They could make it without the EM. Only another decade to go. “Do it now!”
“That’s the—”
The windshield exploded inward with no warning, filling the air with glass like sand, tiny and razor-sharp. Ash felt it on his face and hands, and he closed his eyes on instinct. Someone was screaming—hell, it could’ve been him.
He blinked, trying to force his eyes open again, but the wind was too strong. He thought he saw 2074 fly past. 2075 . . .
He opened his eyes a little wider. Wind and glass gusted around him. The smoky tunnel walls had formed a familiar orange crest. 2076. Almost there. He aimed the Star’s nose for the darker curve just beyond.
He shouted, “Pull Dorothy in!”
“Captain, I—”
A jagged piece of metal flew off the wall, slicing into Ash’s arm as it hurtled past. A hole appeared in the floor of the cockpit, the haunting black and gray of the anil swirling below. Ash yanked the yoke to the side and it came off in his hands. He fell backward, head cracking into the seat. They were flying through the tunnel walls now. Everything was smoke and fire and mist. . . .
Ash opened his mouth to tell the others to hold on tight when—
Black water and dead trees. A kiss . . . a knife . . .
He felt the steel point of the dagger slide into his body, cutting through muscle and skin, making his nerve endings scream. He groped for his belly, and his hands came away bloody.
Real blood. A real wound.
The Star slammed into something, shuddering. A roar filled Ash’s ears. More screaming, he thought. Or maybe it was the wind. He kept his hands pressed against his wound, trying to stop the bleeding. The world blinked in and out of focus.
Of course it does, someone said.
And then the darkness took him.
47
Dorothy
“Dorothy? Dorothy, do you read?”
Willis’s voice sounded very small and far away. Dazed, Dorothy lifted a hand to her head and found that the headset was no longer propped over her ears. It’d been knocked askew, and now it was tangled in her curls.
She blinked, groaning. Her other arm was pinned beneath her, somehow tangled in the ladder rungs. She was fairly sure it was the only reason she hadn’t blown off the ship.
“I’m coming, Willis,” she murmured. She groped around for something to grab hold of and felt nothing and more nothing before her fingers finally brushed against the control panel door. It flapped against the side of the ship like a fish on dry land, attached by a single remaining hinge.
Dorothy curled her hand around the door and pulled—
The door broke away with a snap and came hurtling toward her. She felt a slash across her face and then pain like she’d never experienced before—white-hot and burning. She grasped for something to hold on to but felt only air—
And then she was flying backward, the tunnel walls billowing toward her. Smoky tendrils curled around her arms and legs, like a hand grasping. She tried to scream, but the smoke filled her mouth and seeped into her lungs. She blinked, and her eyesight turned bloody.
Distantly, she heard something snap. With her one good eye, she watched the tether break away from the Second Star and come whipping toward her.
LOG ENTRY—OCTOBER 23, 2076
02:13 HOURS
THE DARK STAR
I’ve only just returned. I had to check my earlier entries to jog my memory, but it seems that Roman and I met on December 3, 2073, right around noon. I didn’t want anyone else to steal his computer before I got the chance, so I traveled to the very next morning, in the early hours, while he and everyone else in Tent City slept. There’s no real security in Tent City, no locks or guards, and so I was able to sneak in unnoticed.
The computer was relatively easy to locate. Roman kept it just beside his bed. I slipped it out from beneath his fingers without waking him, but something fell to the floor as I was tucking the computer into my bag. It was a small white scrap of paper.
I knelt to pick it up and saw that it wasn’t a scrap of paper at all but a photograph. An actual, printed photograph of a young gi
rl with Roman’s dark hair and blue eyes. A sister, perhaps? The photograph looked like the sort of thing schools printed out for parents, as a keepsake. But a quick look around the tent revealed that there were no parents. No sister. No one but Roman and his computer.
I would’ve left the computer behind at that moment. I’m not a monster.
But Roman said someone nicked it.
If I don’t steal it now, someone else will just steal it later.
So I took it.
Roman was waiting inside my workshop when I brought the Dark Star back. He had a gun, Ash’s gun, from the look of it, and he aimed it at my chest as I climbed down from the ship.
“When were you?” he demanded. I remembered wondering if there had always been so much rage in his voice, or if it had crept in recently. If I hadn’t noticed him changing.
I told him what I’d done, how I’d gone back to retrieve his computer, so that we might predict future earthquakes before they occurred.
I expected him to be angry. I hadn’t expected that he wouldn’t believe me.
“You’re a liar!” he’d said. I assumed he would shout and yell and throw things, as he’d done in my workshop the last time we fought. But his voice was calm and collected. “You went back to see your wife again. To save her.”
I tried to deny it. I even tried to grab the computer, so I could show him, but he shoved me when I went to reach for it. He actually shoved me.
“The past is our right,” he’d said, repeating the Black Cirkus’s horrible slogan. “You might be the only one capable of traveling through time now, but that won’t always be the case.”
And then he’d left me there alone, without once firing his gun.
48
Ash
OCTOBER 16, 2077, NEW SEATTLE
“Ash . . . Ash. . . .”
The voice swam toward him from somewhere deep down in the black. Ash needed to find it. He swam hard, but the current was strong. It dragged at his feet and pressed down on his shoulders.
Stolen Time Page 27