Black water, he thought, kicking. Dead trees . . .
“Ash, you’ve been sleeping for a really long time. You need to wake up.”
A kiss . . . a knife . . .
Pain slammed into him, and Ash jerked. He felt the sticky warmth of blood on his fingers and the cold bite of metal slipping between his ribs. He woke up gasping.
“Quinn,” he choked out, trying to sit, “it’s—”
“No, you don’t,” said another, deeper voice. Something pressed down on his shoulders and he realized that it wasn’t water but two hands trying to hold him down.
The fight drained out of him all at once. Ash allowed himself to be pushed back into what felt like his bed. Someone had propped a ridiculous number of pillows behind him and tucked a blanket so tightly around his body that he felt as though he were wearing a straitjacket.
He had to blink a few times before the rest of his room took shape. Rough plaster walls and beat-up wooden floors. Willis and Chandra were leaning over him.
Ash didn’t have the energy to ask how they’d gotten home. The pillows were soft beneath his head. It would be so nice to sleep again. He shifted in place, and pain moved through his lower ribs.
Suddenly, he was wide-awake. That was real pain, not premembered pain. He lowered his hand to his belly and felt thick bandages beneath his fingers.
He tried to speak, but his tongue was dry, and too big for his mouth. “She . . . stabbed me.”
“What was that now?” Willis asked, leaning closer.
“The girl . . . white hair,” Ash managed. Willis frowned.
“Do you mean the bandages?” Chandra asked. “Those are from the crash. The Second Star exploded before we could get out of the anil, and a piece of the ship got lodged right below your ribs.”
“You were bleeding pretty badly,” Willis added. “We weren’t sure you were going to make it.”
“Yeah, and we were, like, stranded outside the anil without a boat or anything, and Willis was freaking brilliant. He grabbed part of the ship that had, like, exploded, and then he somehow managed to get both you and Zora on top of it—even though I thought it was way too small—and then, you won’t believe it, he pulled the thing through the water like a freaking horse or . . . is there a horse that swims? Like a dolphin, maybe—”
“Zora?” Ash choked out, cutting Chandra off.
“Zora’s fine,” Willis said. “Or, she will be fine. She was pretty banged up but our Chandie pulled her through.”
“Best doctor in the history of the world,” Chandra said, with a shy smile. “I keep telling you all, but it’s like you don’t listen.”
“Atta girl,” Ash said. He looked down at his hands, surprised to find burns blackening his skin. The sight of them unnerved him. He didn’t remember getting burned. Didn’t remember anything about the crash.
He curled his hands into fists. The burns made it feel like they belonged to someone else. “Where’s Dorothy?”
A heavy silence was all that answered back. Ash closed his eyes. He had the vague feeling of a little kid hiding beneath the blankets on his bed, thinking that the monsters wouldn’t come for him if they couldn’t see him. He was old enough to know that trick didn’t work.
With effort, he asked, “What happened?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Willis said. “One moment, everything was fine. I had her tether in my hands, and I was walking her through the job. She didn’t even seem scared.
“And then there was a sound. Like a crash. I lost contact with her, but the rope was still taut, so I knew she was out there. I figured her headset got knocked off in the storm, and I gave her a few minutes to fix it but she never came back online, so I started to reel her in. . . .”
Willis said all of this like a soldier giving his report to a superior officer. It was soothing, somehow. Ash could almost pretend it’d happened to someone else. That it didn’t affect him.
“The tether . . . snapped.” Willis’s voice cracked, breaking the illusion. “She was gone.”
Ash squeezed his hands until the burns on his knuckles flared. He was the reason she’d been lost.
He suddenly felt very tired. His ribs hurt, and the burns on his hands stung, but these things were just distractions. Eventually they’d fade, and he’d have to think about the thing that was really killing him. Dorothy was gone. Forever.
He asked, “The EM?”
“Dorothy had it when she . . .” Chandra cleared her throat, unwilling or unable to finish her sentence. “It’s gone, too.”
Ash nodded, relaxing his hands.
They were right back where they started. They’d failed, utterly and completely. This had all been for nothing.
Suddenly and intensely, Ash wanted to sleep. The exhaustion seeped into his muscles and pulled at his bones. His eyes drooped but, before they closed, he thought he saw something odd behind Chandra’s left ear. He blinked, trying to focus.
A lock of her hair had turned white.
OCTOBER 17, 2077, NEW SEATTLE
Ash knew Zora was beside him before he was fully awake. He drifted in and out of sleep, listening to her shift in the chair next to his bed.
“I know you aren’t sleeping.” Her voice sounded weak.
Ash opened his eyes. “How could you tell?”
“You stopped snoring.” Zora’s skin was ashen, and dark circles colored the area below her eyes. Her chest had been wrapped in thick, cotton bandages that made her tank top bunch.
She caught him staring and shrugged. “Looks worse than it is.”
Ash swallowed. He didn’t believe her, but he could smell engine grease and burnt coffee clinging to her skin, so at least she was well enough to make it to the workshop. Chandra wouldn’t have let her fumble around with wrenches and gears if she was about to die.
“Besides, you look like shit,” Zora said without smiling. “We make a good pair.”
She took his hand and squeezed. The burns on Ash’s knuckles stung, but he didn’t let go. He tilted his head back, staring at the ceiling. A crack ran through the plaster.
He thought about Dorothy. And, when that hurt too much, he thought about the Professor, instead. It hurt just as bad, but at least it was a hurt he was prepared for.
“I’m really sorry about your dad,” he said, voice cracking.
The skin around Zora’s eyes tightened, just a little. “Yeah. Me, too.”
For a while, they were both quiet. Ash thought he heard Willis and Chandra out in the kitchen. Willis said something in his low, deep voice, and Chandra laughed.
Zora cleared her throat. “I read the rest of his journal. Cover to cover.”
Ash felt his eyebrow go up, curious despite himself. “Did he write anything useful?”
“Yeah, actually. There was a lot of stuff about Roman and about . . .” She paused to take a deep breath, eyelashes briefly flicking closed. “And about my mom. That was really hard to get through, but I found something interesting near the end. Apparently, when my dad first met Roman, Roman was working on some sort of computer software that was supposed to predict earthquakes before they happened. Roman never finished, though, so Dad went back in time and took his computer. I think he wanted to finish the program himself, to see if he could predict the next big earthquake before it messed everything up more. Before anyone else’s mother died.”
Ash remembered the Professor walking out of the room labeled Environmental Modification, and the list of numbers scrawled across the Dark Star’s windshield in the Professor’s handwriting. The numbers that had looked like predictions of earthquakes to come.
He told Zora what he’d seen.
Zora frowned as he spoke, turning this over. “That makes sense with what he wrote in his final entry. Remember how he said the state of the world hung in the balance? He must’ve been thinking about those two earthquakes to come, the 10.5 and the 13.8. Those wouldn’t just destroy the West Coast. They could potentially destroy the world.”
Ash pushed himse
lf up to his elbows. “But why go back to 1980? What does Fort Hunter have to do with any of that?”
“They used weather-modification techniques to extend the monsoon season during the Vietnam War back in the seventies. In 1980, the program was probably at its peak . . . maybe Dad thought he could look at their research?”
“That Lieutenant Gross guy said he’d stolen information on a weapon of mass destruction,” Ash said.
“Environmental modification would’ve been considered a weapon of mass destruction, so that fits. Dad must’ve taken whatever they had on changing the environment in the hopes that he could modify our current environment enough to keep the earthquakes from happening.”
“But he failed,” Ash pointed out. He felt suddenly and overwhelmingly tired.
The Professor had rescued him from a life of war. He’d shown him things he never would’ve imagined. He taught him to fly a time machine. And then he’d died, for nothing.
And then Dorothy had snuck into his life and made him feel like he could change his future. And she’d died for nothing, too.
And now it was his turn to die.
It was too much to think about.
Zora said quietly, “My father didn’t fail.”
This answer startled Ash. Ordinarily she was the pessimistic one. Or maybe pessimistic wasn’t the right word. Realistic was closer. Or hesitant. Or cautious.
But, now, she stared at Ash with eyes like lit coals.
“He died before he could do anything with that research,” Ash said. “These earthquakes are going to happen.”
“Maybe,” Zora said. “Or maybe not.”
Groaning, she leaned over, one hand pressed over the bandages at her chest as she dug something out from beneath the bed. Without a word she straightened, dropping it on Ash’s lap.
It was a small black laptop.
Ash exhaled through his teeth. “Is that . . . ?”
“Roman’s laptop,” Zora said. “I found it in Dad’s office, beneath a pile of junk. And before you ask, yes, the program is still there. I ran it before coming here, and it spit out the same information you saw written on the Dark Star windshield. A bunch of dates and some seriously terrifying-looking magnitudes.”
Ash was shaking his head. “But what are we supposed to do with it?”
Zora shrugged. “My parents went back in time to find the smartest, most talented people in all of history.”
“Your parents went back in time to find a pilot, a circus strongman, and a girl who was expelled from medical school.”
Zora’s look was withering. “You were all trained by NASA, and I’m the only daughter of the greatest scientific mind the world has ever seen. And, besides, there’s still all of my dad’s research to go through, and now Roman’s program. I think Dad left this computer here for a reason. I think he wanted us to do something with it. Which means there’s still a chance to change things.”
She held Ash’s gaze in a way that made him think she wasn’t just talking about the earthquakes.
She was talking about the prememories, and his impending, early death.
Ash nodded. “We’ll try.”
Satisfied, Zora pushed herself to her feet, her face twisting in a grimace, and hobbled to the door.
She paused before stepping into the hall, one hand resting on the doorframe.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think Dorothy died. I think she’s still out there, somewhere.”
Ash closed his eyes. Hoping hurt almost more than not hoping had. Hoping meant there was still more to lose.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Maybe.”
“There’s a lot that we don’t understand about the structure of the time tunnels. Flying through one stopped me from bleeding out, and we’re not entirely sure why. And Dorothy had the EM on her, didn’t she? It might’ve kept her safe. Maybe she only missed us by a few months.”
Zora pushed a braid behind her ear. Ash frowned, staring at it. The braid was white.
“What’s that,” he asked, pointing.
“Oh.” Zora shrugged. “It was like that when I woke up. Chandra has one, too. And so do you, right here.”
She leaned forward, touching a lock of hair below Ash’s ear.
“I think it has something to do with the energy in the anil, and how it interacts with melatonin, but I need to do a little more research to be sure. Strange, right?”
Ash’s hands had started to shake. Something was taking shape in the back of his mind, but he didn’t understand. Not yet.
Black water and white hair.
“Strange,” he echoed.
LOG ENTRY—OCTOBER 23, 2076
04:07 HOURS
THE WORKSHOP
I can’t stop thinking about what Roman said to me.
You might be the only one capable of traveling through time now, but that won’t always be the case.
Roman knows almost as much as I do about time travel. He helped me build the Dark Star. He has access to all my notes—to this very journal. He’s been back in time with me more than any of the rest of the team combined. If anyone other than myself were capable of traveling back in time, it would be him.
But he doesn’t have any exotic matter.
A human being absolutely cannot go through an anil without exotic matter. There’s no other way to stabilize the tunnel. He’d be killed, instantly.
I double-checked the EM in the Second Star after he’d gone, thinking he may have stolen it. But it was still there, what little there was, exactly as it should have been. And, of course, I have the EM from the Dark Star with me now, so there was no way for him to take that, either. Those two canisters are the only two stores of exotic matter that exist in the world.
I need to get back to the school. I need to see what Roman has on this computer, to see if I can finish the work he started three years ago and predict the next earthquake before it’s too late to do anything about it.
I know this, and yet I can’t make myself leave the workshop. I can’t stop replaying our last argument.
Something changed in the past few days. Something happened since he saw me last, something that convinced him he didn’t need me anymore.
So what was it?
Part Four
It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
49
Dorothy
OCTOBER 22, 2076, NEW SEATTLE
Damp wood pressed into her cheek. Crisp air nipped the back of her neck.
Dorothy groaned, which sent pain pumping through the left side of her skull. It felt like someone had taken a knife and sliced clean through her face, from the corner of her mouth, up past her eye, and over her eyebrow. She lifted a hand to the pain, felt something sticky beneath her fingers.
She forced her eyes open.
No. She forced her eye open. Something was holding her other lid shut. Blood, she realized, tiptoeing fingers around tender edges of ragged skin. She must have a bad cut on her face. It had bled heavily, but the blood seemed to have stopped and dried into a sticky paste on her cheek. That’s why she couldn’t open her eye.
This all came to her in strangely detached clarity, like it was happening to someone else.
She lowered her hand to the wood beneath her cheek. Water crept over the sides, inching toward her fingers. I’m on a dock, she realized. She turned her head, and a pair of black boots appeared in her line of vision.
“You’re lucky I pulled you out,” said a voice. “There are very bad people roaming around here after dark. They’d have let you drown.”
“Roman?” Her voice was a beast with dirty claws, crawling up the inside of her throat. She swallowed, cringing. “Is that you?”
The boots moved closer. Dorothy turned her head. Pain beat against her cheek, turning her eyesight foggy, but she could still make out Roman’s dark hair and cleft chin. He held Ash’s old pistol in one hand, but it was resting at his side, not pointin
g at her.
“Have we met?” he asked.
Dorothy’s good eyelid flickered closed again. The cut on her face actually hurt very badly. She was having a hard time thinking through the pain. Roman seemed to be playing some sort of trick on her. Pretending they didn’t know one another.
It was sort of funny, she supposed. She started to giggle—
Something jostled her shoulder. “Focus, girl. How do you know my name?”
The trick didn’t seem so funny the second time. Dorothy’s laughter became a hacking, painful cough. She tried to open her eyes—eye—again, but the cut on her face really hurt. It was going to get infected if she didn’t clean it soon. She didn’t want to touch it, but she didn’t like the feel of the wind brushing against the raw skin, so she cupped a hand over the injury. She used the other hand to push herself to her knees.
Roman took a quick step backward, lifting his pistol. “Easy.”
“What do you think I’m going to do? Bleed on you?” Dorothy blinked and Roman’s face came into stronger focus. A scraggly, black beard covered his chin and cheeks. It was a sad sort of beard, the kind that only grew in patches.
Hold on. How had he grown a beard so quickly? When she’d last seen him, he’d been clean-shaven.
Are you trying to say that you’ve seen the future?
Perhaps. Perhaps I’ve even seen yours.
With effort, she asked, “What day is it?”
Roman frowned. “October twenty-second.”
Understanding hit her all at once.
She asked carefully, “What year?”
Roman paused, and then said, “2076.”
“2076,” she repeated. When Roman told her he’d seen her future, she’d assumed he’d traveled ahead and seen what was to come. But she’d been wrong. He knew her future because she’d landed a full year too early. Her future had been his past.
If there was a feeling beyond fear and hopelessness, that’s what hit her now. No one in this time knew who she was. Ash and Zora and Willis and Chandra wouldn’t meet her for another year. She was nothing to them now. Just some stranger. She had no friends, no family, no money.
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