Roman started most of them. He told people that they shouldn’t get close to Quinn, that she enjoyed the taste of human flesh a little too much. It helped that she always smelled strongly of blood, courtesy of her still-healing injury. And then there was Moon Face himself, walking around with the shape of her teeth still imprinted on his face, a living warning.
Roman kept the rumors coming after that, making sure that each was ghastlier than the one before. He said that Quinn didn’t know how to smile, that she’d been kept inside a closet until she was twelve years old and grew up without ever seeing another human face and it’d left her . . . wrong.
He said she could only mimic human emotions and she wore the hood low over her face to hide her empty facial expressions.
She could learn anyone’s secrets by staring into his or her eyes.
She could kill a grown man with her bare hands.
With her finger.
With a look.
Dorothy felt foolish, that she hadn’t thought of this earlier. Quinn Fox was a cannibal. It was one of the first things she’d ever learned about New Seattle.
Where I’m going, there are entire cities hidden underwater, and gangs that steal little old ladies on their way to the market, and a girl who lives off human flesh.
Ash had told her that, when she’d first met him in the clearing behind the church where she was supposed to be married. Only, then he’d been the handsome pilot with the gold eyes, smelling of campfire smoke and faraway places. She’d thought he’d been exaggerating. She’d never, in her wildest dreams, thought he’d been talking about her.
If Dorothy still had any lingering hope that she could return to Ash and his friends, it faded as the rumors about her grew stronger. She saw Ash once more but, by then, it was too late. She was already Quinn Fox, cannibal, leader of the Black Cirkus.
And he hated her.
4
Ash
The pea-green sky followed Ash and Chandra around to the back of the motel, where their boat was rocking on the black waves.
It hung above them ominously, as Ash tugged on the pull cord—once, twice, three times—and the motor growled to life.
It seemed to hold its breath as they climbed into the old boat and steered away from Mac’s motel and down the narrow Aurora waterway, squat buildings bordering them on either side.
Not an omen, Ash told himself again, looking away from the sky.
They rode past a half-dozen motels just like Mac’s. Dark, run-down places with boarded-up windows and armed guards at the doors. Ash made himself picture the faces behind all those windows. Broken, terrified faces. Most of them were underage. Most of them were working against their will.
But, hard as he tried, Ash couldn’t see them. Dorothy’s face kept creeping in instead. Dorothy scared and Dorothy laughing and Dorothy looking up at him, leaning in to kiss him . . .
He gave his head a hard shake, disgusted with himself. It should bother him more than it did. He shouldn’t have been able to just walk away from those girls back at Mac’s, just as he shouldn’t be able to sail past these places without stopping, without trying to help.
Sometimes he felt that his capacity for empathy was a glass jar, that it had already filled to the brim with worry for Dorothy, for himself and his friends, and if he tried to cram anything else in there the glass would break.
He didn’t like what it said about him, that he thought things like that. But he could feel the cracks forming already. So he kept his eyes ahead, and he held his breath until the motels were behind him.
They turned off the waterway and into a neighborhood that had once been called Queen Anne and was now, simply, West Aurora. Ash had just caught sight of the Space Needle in the distance, the massive, rusted saucer resting on top of the water, like a boat—
And then the ground trembled, sending a wall of steel-gray water arcing over him, momentarily hiding the structure from view.
Ash felt his stomach drop as water sloshed into their boat. Chandra grabbed his arm, her nails digging straight through the leather of his jacket and into his skin.
No, he thought. Not now.
And then the shaking stopped, abruptly, though the black and gray waves continued to swell.
Chandra loosened her grip. “Third one this week,” she said, gasping.
“Fourth,” Ash corrected. There’d been a quake in the middle of the night, small enough that it almost hadn’t woken him up.
Chandra shook her head. “Freaky.”
Ash swallowed but said nothing. Earthquakes were something they’d had to get used to over the years, ever since a massive earthquake hit the West Coast back in 2073, followed by an even larger quake in 2075. The 2075 quake caused a tsunami that’d left the city of Seattle underwater. The Cascadia Fault quake—or the mega-quake, as it was sometimes called—had been a 9.3 on the Richter scale, easily the most devastating earthquake the country had ever seen. Between the two quakes, the West Coast had been completely wiped out. Nearly forty thousand people had died.
The earthquakes had become more frequent since the mega-quake but, lately, it seemed that there was a new one every other day. They were always small, barely strong enough to send waves crashing up against the side of the schoolhouse where Ash and his friends all lived, or Dante’s, their favorite bar. But, still, they made his nerves jittery.
“We’ll be home soon,” Ash told Chandra, tugging on the pull cord, again.
Professor Zacharias Walker’s old workshop rose in the distance like a mirage. It consisted of a mismatched roof and siding made of old boards, tires, and pieces of tin. Ash watched the structure separate from the shadows and wished, as he often did, that he would find the Professor himself behind the rain-soaked windows.
Professor Walker had discovered time travel. He’d built two time machines—the Second Star and the Dark Star—and then he’d gone back in time and plucked Jonathan Asher, Chandrakala Samhita, and Willis Henry from various points in history and brought them to New Seattle in 2075, forming a team that he’d jokingly called the Chronology Protection Agency. They were supposed to travel through time together, uncovering the mysteries of the past.
And then the mega-quake destroyed the city. And, just a few months later, the Professor had taken the Dark Star and disappeared in time without telling any of them what year he was traveling to or why. Ash had spent months searching for him before discovering the Professor’s old journal and, finally, learning exactly where he’d gone—to an old military base called Fort Hunter, in 1980. There, he’d planned to study the underlying causes of the earthquakes that had destroyed Seattle and killed the Professor’s wife, Natasha.
Or he’d tried to. The Professor was killed not long after landing at Fort Hunter, executed by soldiers who suspected him of stealing valuable military secrets. Ash and his friends had tried to follow him back in time, but they’d failed. The trip had destroyed their only remaining time machine, the Second Star, and nearly cost both Ash and Zora their lives. If Ash pressed his hand to the skin on his abdomen, he could still feel a piece of metal lodged just below his ribs. It was all that he had left of his old time machine.
Worse than that, Ash had found some of the Professor’s notes back at Fort Hunter, and they seemed to indicate that two more massive earthquakes were coming. Only these earthquakes wouldn’t just destroy a single city. They had the potential to destroy what was left of the West Coast. Maybe the whole country.