Light glimmered behind the workshop’s windows, telling Ash that Zora was still awake. She rarely left her father’s workshop anymore. She’d set up a cot in the back corner and had taken to washing herself with a rag and a pitcher of water instead of bathing. As far as Ash knew, she lived off cheese sandwiches and burnt coffee, and spent every waking moment going over her father’s notes, trying to piece together his research, looking for some way of stopping the earthquakes he’d predicted before they occurred.
Seeing her light, Ash felt a deep twist of something like disappointment mingled with desperate hope. It was a new emotion, painful and optimistic at the same time. He wished Zora would just give up already, while, at the same time, he prayed for a breakthrough.
Or maybe it wasn’t such a new emotion at all. Perhaps hope always made the disappointment that much worse.
The workshop door inched upward, water sloshing around the wood as it moved—and then ground to a stop, gears crunching. Ash grimaced, punching the button on the remote control again. When the door stayed frozen, he piloted the little motorboat closer, so he could work the manual chain pull.
The only electricity in New Seattle came from the relatively few solar panels still left in the city. There weren’t many that’d survived after the mega-quake, so they were incredibly valuable. Most of the people Ash knew had sold their panels years ago, in exchange for money or food, but the Professor had insisted they hold on to theirs. It’d helped that, until very recently, they’d been able to bring food back from the past.
Unfortunately, the panels had started to break down. They hadn’t been made to last forever, and Ash cringed to think of what would happen when they stopped working entirely. The city was barely inching along as it was.
He docked his boat inside the garage. Zora was cross-legged on the dock, frowning down at a stack of her father’s notes. The light he’d seen came from candles lined up along the walls, rather than the bulb hanging from the ceiling.
“Power’s been spotty all day.” She looked up, eyes flicking over Ash’s boat, where there were still only two—not three—passengers. She seemed to hesitate before asking, “No luck at Mac’s, then?”
“What do you think?” Ash didn’t look at her but jerked the motorboat’s engine off, perhaps a little too forcefully. Spitefully, he asked, “You?”
In answer, Zora merely balled up a piece of notebook paper and threw it at him. It missed, and they were both silent as they watched it sink below the black water.
“I hope that wasn’t important,” Willis said. He was sitting on a stool in the shadowy corner just behind Zora, his pale skin and hair seeming to blend with his surroundings despite his massive size. He was whittling something. The hunk of wood looked like a toothpick in his monstrous hands.
“It was just a grocery list from two years ago.” Zora shoved her black braids off her forehead. “Eggs, milk, and Toaster Strudel. God knows why he kept it.”
“Toaster Strudel? Oh my God, remember before the earthquake when you could just go to the grocery store and buy Toaster Strudel?” Chandra crawled out of the boat, grunting as she sent it rocking beneath her. There were a few black-market stores and shops around, but they stuck to the necessities: drinkable water, fish, protein bars. If they wanted anything else, they had to seek out an official Center-sanctioned trading post, and they were expensive.
“I used to love those limited-edition maple brown sugar ones,” Chandra continued. “God, they were so good. I’d sneak out and eat them after everyone else went to sleep.”
Willis looked up, eyes narrowing. “That’s why we were always running out.”
“Don’t look at me like you didn’t steal extra cans of LaCroix from the kitchen and hide them under your bed.” Chandra leaned over the side of the dock, staring forlornly at the spot where the shopping list had vanished. “You should really keep that stuff. It’s history. Memorabilia from before the flood. Could be valuable someday.”
Ash squatted next to Zora and stared down at the pile of mildewed paper that represented their last hope of saving this drowned and desperate city.
It didn’t exactly instill confidence. Printouts from Roman’s laptop lay stacked on top of old notebooks, all of it mixed up with lists and drawings from the Professor’s office, pages torn out of his journal. It looked like Zora had been jotting things down, too. Ash recognized the slant of her handwriting on a scrap near the top of the heap and tilted his head to read what she’d written.
What the actual hell does any of this mean?!
He grimaced. That was disappointing. “No closer to understanding the math part, then?”
“Let’s see, did I earn a degree in theoretical physics since I last saw you? No, I did not.” Zora groaned and pressed her fingers over her eyelids. “What I’d give for one single textbook, but no. Old grocery lists I have in spades. But actual books?”
Ash knew he wasn’t expected to respond to that. Zora had been complaining about their lack of books for weeks now. The Professor used to have shelves and shelves of old textbooks hanging around before the earthquake, but Zora hadn’t been able to locate any of them with the rest of his notes. She’d never studied physics or calculus in school, and since their crappy, dial-up Internet had stopped working for good last week, she had no way of boning up on the subject now.
Unfortunately, that meant that most of her father’s notes read like gibberish. Chandra had tried to help her out with some of the simpler equations but, as she liked to explain, medical science wasn’t the same as time-traveler science.
“Call me if someone needs their kidney removed,” she’d told Zora. “Otherwise . . .” And she’d shrugged, making a face at the nonsense equations.
“What kind of scientist keeps stacks of trash in his office, anyway?” Zora muttered, grabbing a few crumpled sheets of paper. “Receipts and old lists and doodles of tap-dancing ladybugs . . .”
Zora rubbed her eyes with two fingers, leaving dirt smudged across her nose. “I was crazy to think I could do this without him. The world is doomed. We’re doomed. I should just . . . give up.”
“Give up,” Ash muttered, almost to himself and, all at once, he could feel the weight of the day settling over him.
Motel room windows, and Mac’s leering smile, and Mira’s cocked head.
But where else would we go?
He raked a hand over his face. Seven days. At most, he only had seven days left in this wretched, cursed place.
Oh, how he wished for more.
Rage tore through him—not there one moment, everywhere the next—and it mingled with the disappointment and the frustration and that damned hope, which he couldn’t get rid of, even now. He stood and began knotting the boat up to the dock, his motions jerky and rough. It felt good to take out his aggression on something, even if it was just a rope.
He noticed, in a detached sort of way, that the others had gone quiet. He looked up and saw Willis hunched over his whittling, knife gone still, and Zora staring down at one of her father’s papers without reading it. Only Chandra was gaping at him openly. She’d never been good at subtle.
“What?” He didn’t mean it to sound as harsh as it did, and he hated himself a little for it.