Ash tipped his chin to the pimp bleeding on the floor. “Pleasure doing business.”
Mac’s moans followed him out into the hall; his ears were still ringing with them when he reached the stairs.
Room 3C looked flooded from the outside. Water sloshed around the bottom of the door, and the wooden frame was rotted clean through. Ash lowered a hand to the doorknob and leaned against the wood with his shoulder, hoping the door would just collapse beneath him. But it held.
“Damn,” he muttered, relaxing. The curtain to the side of the door flicked as one of the girls looked out.
“Let me,” the small, dark-haired girl said. Her voice was deeper than Ash expected, making her seem much older than he’d originally guessed.
The girl slipped past him and knocked softly. “Mira,” she said. “It’s me. Open up.”
There was a beat, and then the door creaked open. A redheaded girl with a face full of freckles peered out. Her eyes flicked anxiously from Ash to Chandra.
“Who are the people, Hope?” Her voice was a thin rasp.
“I don’t know,” Hope said. Then, with an attempt at a grin: “They shot Mac.”
“Did they?” Mira pushed the door open wider. Behind her, Ash could see a small dim room with low ceilings, lit by scattered, flickering candles. A few girls were spread out across a bare mattress, dressed in sweats and oversize flannel shirts, playing cards. Another sat in front of a cracked mirror, trying to curl her hair with her fingers.
Mira considered Ash. “Are you our new pimp, then?”
“What?” Ash felt the backs of his ears flare. “No. God no.”
“You shot Mac.”
“Actually, I shot Mac,” Chandra cut in. “Does that make me your new pimp?”
“Neither of us is going to be your new pimp,” Ash said.
Mira didn’t look convinced. “You shot Mac out of the goodness of your heart, then?” Her eyes traveled down Ash’s body, assessing him. “Nobody does something for nothing.”
“We’re looking for someone. A girl. Small, with long, dark hair.” Ash nodded at Hope. “Like her.”
The corner of Mira’s mouth twitched. “There are no other girls like her, my friend.”
She started to push the door closed.
“Wait.” Ash wedged his foot between the door and the frame, holding it open. He felt his heart beating in his throat. This couldn’t be it. “Please.”
Mira’s eyes softened. “We have all lost someone. I’m sorry.”
Ash exhaled unevenly, half his breath releasing in a ragged spurt. His disappointment felt physical, like something had been carved out of him.
He’d been so sure she would be there.
He remembered the lift of hope he’d felt when he heard the guy at the bar’s story. It had been nearly three weeks since Dorothy had disappeared. That was nineteen nights, each of them filled with hours and hours of darkness. Ash had spent every minute of that darkness staring at the ceiling above his bed, imagining ways he might’ve saved her.
The hope that she might be here had worked as a salve for a while, numbing his pain, giving him something to plan for. It was much easier to storm into a brothel with a gun than it was to face the truth.
And the truth was that Dorothy was gone. She’d been lost in time.
And Ash didn’t know where to begin looking for her.
He slid his foot out the door. “Mac’s bleeding pretty bad upstairs. If any of you are looking to make a run for it, now would be the time.”
None of the girls moved. They looked at each other and then back at Ash.
Mira cocked her head. “But where else would we go?”
When Ash couldn’t answer, she ushered Hope back inside and pushed the door closed.
3
Dorothy
NOVEMBER 5, 2077, NEW SEATTLE
Three weeks ago, Dorothy had kidnapped herself.
Well. Her past self.
Time was a circle. She’d learned that a year ago, and she was still learning and relearning it, even now. When she went back to the 1990s to steal art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, she knew she’d be successful because she’d already been successful; the heist had gone down in history as the most impressive of all time. It was dizzying to think about, but, sometimes, the things one did in the past didn’t really happen until the future, and things one didn’t think had happened at all were already happening in someone else’s past.
For instance, when Dorothy had first arrived in New Seattle, she’d heard about a mysterious girl named Quinn Fox. But it wasn’t until she fell backward in time that she realized she was Quinn Fox. She’d always been Quinn Fox.
But she still had work to do. Certain things had to be put into place in order for everything to happen the way it was supposed to. Roman needed to make sure Dorothy ended up with the exotic matter before she fell off Ash’s ship, for one thing. And that meant that she and Roman had needed to kidnap her past self and plant the idea to go back in time in the first place.
It had been . . . elaborate. But Dorothy had been fully prepared for the tediousness of setting up clues for her past self to follow, of feeding Roman lines and planting hints and weaving suspicion—
She hadn’t been prepared to see herself, though. That had come as something of a shock. She kept reliving the moment when it’d happened, the stuffy heat of the hotel room and the smell of mold and damp and something else, a lightly floral scent that had made her nose twitch, reminding her of her mother.
“What about our newest guest?” she’d asked Roman. The conversation had been staged, naturally. They’d needed Dorothy’s past self to think they were going to kill her so that she’d steal the Professor’s journal (which they’d conveniently left behind for her to discover) and jump out a window, thus delivering the journal to Ash and his friends. “Bring me whatever valuables you find, and get rid of the body. We need the room empty again by tonight.”
Dorothy could still remember how terrified she’d been when she’d first heard those words. Get rid of the body. Like she was merely a thing to be disposed of, a chore. She’d imagined a single gunshot in her back as she was running away, a sudden numbness, followed by a thick, heavy darkness. Standing there, saying the words herself, she’d felt blood pumping in her palms and a bitter taste hit the back of her throat. She wasn’t that girl any longer. She wouldn’t be helpless again.
So maybe that was why she’d looked, to prove to herself that she’d changed. She’d heard the soft rustle of fabric behind her and she’d turned on instinct, inadvertently catching a glimpse of her own face.
It had been her old face, unravaged by a fall from a time machine, or a year spent with a vicious gang. Her skin had been clear, her hair dark and chestnut brown. The first thought Dorothy had, seeing her past self, was no wonder she’d kept getting taken: she’d looked more like a doll than like a person, and she’d been so much younger than Dorothy could ever remember being. And innocent.
As soon as she thought it, the word got stuck in her head, like a bit of a song lyric that she couldn’t stop singing. Innocent, innocent . . . Had she ever been innocent? She’d been a thief and a con artist before she’d become Quinn Fox. She’d stolen money and hearts; she’d tricked men into believing she wanted them and then disappeared to leave them to tend to their wounds alone. Innocent was never a word she’d have used to describe herself, and she wouldn’t have believed it if the proof hadn’t been right there.