“Wing flaps,” she murmured to herself, fingers flying over the control panel. And the carburetor needed to be moved into position, the throttle opened. She checked the EM gauge and saw that the dial was trained on full. They’d been going back in time nearly every day for weeks and, still, the store hadn’t been depleted. How strange.
She sat back in her seat, eyes still on the gauge. The time machine had been Roman’s doing, built using the blueprints he’d stolen from Professor Zacharias Walker, the father of time travel. But a time machine would blow apart the second it entered an anil if it didn’t have any exotic matter—or EM—to stabilize the volatile winds of the tunnel. And Dorothy had provided the EM.
She felt a flush of pride as the memory rose in her mind, strange as always:
My name is Quinn Fox. . . . I have something you need.
Those were the words that had sealed her fate one year and two weeks ago. Just moments before, she’d been on board another time machine, begging a pilot with gold eyes to let her stay in New Seattle, with him, instead of returning her to her old life back in 1913.
And then a storm ripped her away and blew her through walls of time and smoke. She’d landed on the docks at Roman’s feet a year before she would meet that gold-eyed pilot, Ash, and well over a hundred years after her mother, along with everyone she’d ever known, had died.
Dorothy could still feel the chill of the dock that she’d woken up on, and she could remember the fear that’d beat beneath her chest when she realized how alone she truly was. She’d really had only two choices:
She could offer Roman the one thing of value she’d had on her, the exotic matter that would allow him to travel through time. Working with Roman meant joining the Black Cirkus, a notoriously vicious local gang. It meant becoming someone ruthless herself.
But her other choice was to try and navigate the horrors of New Seattle on her own.
Dorothy hadn’t been in the future for long, but even she knew that bad things happened to a girl who showed up in a strange place without family or friends or allies. In the end, it had been no choice at all.
And if she sometimes found herself thinking about the pilot with the gold eyes and wondering what might’ve happened if she’d only gone to him and explained who she was and when she’d come from . . .
Well. All she had to do was remind herself of the first time she and Ash had met, back in a churchyard in 1913. She could instantly recall the look of disdain he’d gotten in those eyes, the sound of his voice when he told her that, no, he wouldn’t be able to help her.
It was that no she couldn’t stop thinking about. She couldn’t bear to hear it again, not after everything that had happened between them.
And so, over time, she’d gotten better at brushing the other, fonder memories aside.
She’d made her choice. There was no going back now.
2
Ash
NOVEMBER 5, 2077, NEW SEATTLE
Back in New Seattle, near twilight. The sky was a thin, watery green, the same color as the pea soup Ash used to get in his rations back in the war. He could almost feel the weight of it pressing down on him, like a warning of things to come.
He tensed, thinking, Seven days.
Professor Walker had once told him that you could premember something up to a year into the future. It was the “up to a year” part that Ash had been focusing on, recently. Because he’d first seen the prememory of his own death 358 days ago.
Which meant that, at best, he had seven days left to live. Less than that, probably.
Help me find Dorothy, and I’ll go without a fight.
Chandra fidgeted as the guards patted Ash down. It would be easier to ignore the stormy sky if they were standing anywhere other than the docks on the Aurora waterway, which was the seediest part of New Seattle. The city had always had a sex trade, but the earthquake had brought it out into the open, made it seem almost legitimate. Now the motels along what used to be the Aurora highway proudly advertised what they sold.
The misty rain had plastered Chandra’s hair to the back of her neck and sent droplets rolling down her dark skin. She kept her eyes trained on the guards, lips pressed together to keep them from trembling. The two men looked more like hunks of granite than like people. The lines of their faces were sharp and hard, their eyes near black in the strange, green light. Rain glimmered off the assault rifles hanging from their backs.
Gnarled fingers dug into Ash’s pockets and fumbled with the lining of his jacket, searching for weapons.
He let his eyes linger on their rifles for a moment before moving them back to the sky.
“Tornado sky,” his mother would’ve called it.
He could picture her now, standing on their front porch, tapping one of his dad’s Camels out of its pack. She’d stick the cigarette between her teeth, lighting it in her cupped hand as she watched the sky through slits of eyes.
“Storm’ll blow in soon,” she’d warn, shaking the match out.
But she wouldn’t go inside. Real Nebraskans didn’t run from tornadoes, not until the clouds turned black and formed a wall that touched from sky to ground. Not until the rain fell sideways, and the wind came through strong enough to blow you back a step.
Ash held that image of his mother in his head now: unafraid as she stared down the tornado sky. It wasn’t bravery that kept her on the porch while the storm rolled closer. It was pure, animal stubbornness. Somewhere deep in her blood, she thought she could scare the storm away, keep it from taking what was hers. That same blood ran through his veins, for better or worse.
But Dorothy was never yours, said a voice at the back of his head. And you don’t even know if she survived.
Ash flinched, like the voice was a gnat buzzing at his ear. One of the guards glanced at him, frowning. Ash gritted his teeth, keeping his eyes focused on the horizon, until the guard grunted and continued his search.
It was true, Dorothy hadn’t been his. But she’d been lost during his mission. He’d agreed to take her back in time, to the year 1980, to search for Professor Zacharias Walker, his old mentor. He’d known how dangerous it would be to travel through the anil with such a meager supply of exotic matter, and he’d done it anyway. And then, when the EM began to fail, Dorothy had risked her life to change the exotic matter in the Second Star midflight, saving them all.
And then the ship had crashed. And Dorothy had vanished into the anil.
I don’t think she died, Zora had told Ash in the days immediately following the crash. She had the EM on her. . . . Maybe she only missed us by a few months.
It wasn’t an entirely foolish thing to hope for. The anil was volatile, with winds that rose above 100 knots, and storms constantly flickering around the cloudy tunnel walls, but the exotic matter Dorothy had been holding might’ve created a kind of protective bubble around her, keeping the anil’s inclement weather at bay. Ash had never heard of a human being surviving the anil without a time machine, but he had to believe it was possible. He simply couldn’t bear the alternative.
They’d lost contact with Dorothy only seconds before crashing back in 2077. If she’d survived, she could already be here, somewhere, in this godforsaken city. Ash just had to find her before someone else did.
“He’s clean,” said the guard, dropping his hands.