“Charmed, as always, Miss Fox,” Mac said, grinning horribly.
“Likewise,” Dorothy said. She was careful not to yank her hand away too quickly.
Roman pulled at the knot of his bow tie so that the silky fabric came loose around his neck. He seemed nervous, or at least uncomfortable. “Mac has something he’d like to discuss with us.”
“Does he?” Dorothy turned back to Mac. “Mira gave us the impression that you’d be sending your goons over to break our legs if we couldn’t pay your bribe.”
“Don’t be silly, girl.” Mac flicked his hand, and Dorothy bristled. Girl. “What’s a few dollars here and there? I value our relationship too much to let a little thing like that get in the way.”
Something prickled, uncomfortably, in Dorothy, though she kept her expression impassive. She didn’t like to think that she had a relationship with Mac at all.
“Then why are you here?” she asked.
And now Mac’s gaze seemed hungry. “You’re having cash-flow problems, sweetheart,” he said, and Dorothy opened her mouth to respond, but he lifted a hand, stopping her. “Don’t bother lying. I know it’s not just me you’re in debt to. I hear you owe Graham Harvey and Chadwick Brunner a few hundred dollars each, too.” Mac paused, studying his fingernails.
Roman glanced at Dorothy, eyebrow twitching. Dorothy suspected the Black Cirkus was strong enough to hold the hotel by force, if it came to that, but they’d never had to test that before. It would be foolish to start now, when there was so much else at stake.
Eyeing Mac, she asked carefully, “What do you want?”
Mac flashed his teeth at her, attempting a smile. “I’d like to fund your little expedition.”
“Why?” asked Roman, blunt.
“Call it my good deed for the year. I’ll cancel your debts to me, and I can help you pay off Chadwick and Graham, maybe even throw a little extra your way to cover whatever else you need to keep going.” Mac balanced on one crutch, digging a half-empty pack of matches out of his pocket. “Your Cirkus Freaks eat, don’t they? And it can’t be cheap to keep that time machine running.”
He pulled the cigarette from behind his ear and stuck it between his teeth, smiling thinly. When neither Dorothy nor Roman answered, he shook his head, lighting a match. “Look, I know what you used to bring in looting little old ladies on the docks. How you’ve kept this enterprise going for over a year is beyond me. Chadwick and Graham have already been whispering in my ear about running you out of your hotel, and, personally, I think that would be a damn shame.” He said this with a hand pressed to his heart, a sympathetic expression twisting his toad-like face. “You need a backer, darling. Someone with deep pockets and a little additional security to help you keep the rats from crawling all over you.”
Mac brought the match to his cigarette, nostrils flaring. Dorothy had to work hard to keep the grimace from her face. She hated the smell of smoke.
He was right, unfortunately. The Cirkus had barely been keeping their heads above water for a while now. It would be a relief to have some more money coming in. Getting it from Mac meant that Dorothy wouldn’t have to sully her new reputation by stealing it, and she wouldn’t disappoint her Freaks by letting them go hungry.
But forming any kind of official partnership with Mac felt . . . dirty.
“What would you expect in return?” she asked.
“In return? Are you kidding? You kids are aiming to fix my city.” Mac shook the flame out with a jerk of his hand. “What else could a man want?”
Roman lifted his eyebrows, quiet as Mac took a deep drag from his cigarette. Roman knew how to let a silence stretch and grow in a way that made people intensely uncomfortable. Often, they wound up saying things they shouldn’t be saying.
Watching him, Mac smiled. “All right, all right. You got me. There is one thing.” Mac studied the red tip of his cigarette. His expression was blandly curious, like he’d never seen a lit cigarette before. Shrugging, he asked, “You ever been to the future?”
Dorothy frowned. She hadn’t been any farther into the future than she was now. It had always taken on a deeply dreamlike property in her mind, the possible and impossible blending until she couldn’t tell the two apart. Sometimes she found herself forgetting that her time machine was capable of moving in two directions.
“The future isn’t like the past,” Roman said, interrupting her thoughts. “It hasn’t happened yet, so it’s not fixed. Many different versions of the future exist side by side, and you never actually know which one you’ll visit.”
“So you’ve been?” asked Mac. “To when? A few days from now? A year?”
“I took a few trips forward when I worked with the Professor,” said Roman. “But the future changes so frequently that it’s impossible to say whether it will remotely resemble what we saw.”
Mac released a sigh as he leaned forward, cigarette ash flaking from between blackened fingers. “Come on now, how much could things really change?”
“More than you might think,” Roman said. He spoke casually enough, but there was tension in the corner of his lips, like he was holding something back.
Dorothy frowned. How odd. He’d always talked about his visits to the future easily enough with her.
Mac dropped his cigarette onto the tile floor, crushing it out with the tip of one of his crutches. “You know what my family was before the earthquake?” His eyes rested on Dorothy’s, waiting for an answer. When none came, he said, “You follow my family tree back as far as it’ll go and you’ll find Mafia, pimps, criminals, grifters. I may not come from fancy folk, but we’ve survived wars and recessions and every natural disaster you can name, and we did that by being smart.” He tapped his temple with one finger. “My granddaddy used to compare us to cockroaches. Nuclear holocaust could hit tomorrow, and we’d find a way to make it out alive.”
The comparison to cockroaches was a little more self-aware than Dorothy expected of Mac, but she didn’t point that out.
“I’m not going to beat around the bush with you two,” he continued. “I’m on board with your little missions back in time, saving the city and all that. But I want to see my future. I’ve got to be smart about this, you see. I’ve got a few . . . business ventures in the works, and I want to get a sense of how everything’s gonna turn out.” He scratched his chin, frowning. “Does that sound like something you two might be able to help me out with?”
Business ventures. Dorothy could imagine what he meant by that. She stared back at Mac and waited for the usual revulsion to rise, but it didn’t.
A few trips into the future—that was nothing.
“Think about it,” Mac said, interrupting her thoughts. He turned, awkwardly, on his crutches and began hobbling down the hall. “We’ll talk again, soon.”
Dorothy opened her mouth to speak when she thought Mac was out of earshot, but Roman lifted a hand, stopping her. He was silent until Mac had rounded the corner at the end of the hallway, and then he entered the bathroom and closed the door with a soft click.
“What—” Dorothy started, but Roman moved past her, his gaze sweeping over the chipped sinks, the small, dark windows, the graffiti-covered stalls. There was something jerky and restless in his movements, like he was only just holding back his anger.
Dorothy frowned. “Are you all right?”
“Is he gone?” Roman asked. His voice was casual enough, but several degrees colder than it had been a moment ago. He lifted his eyebrows, unsmiling. “Or have you hidden him in some stall?”
“Who?” Dorothy asked, and Roman cut his eyes at her, nostrils flared.
“Don’t bother,” he spat, and Dorothy felt anger ripple through her.
How bitter he sounded, as though he had any right to judge who she spent time in bathrooms with. How many times had she seen him leave the bar at the end of a long night, arm in arm with some pretty girl? And she’d always known well enough to mind her damn business, thank you very much.
She drew her
shoulders back, meeting his gaze. “Were you following me?”
A short, hard laugh. “Don’t be absurd.”
“Then what—”
Roman made a noise in the back of his throat, interrupting her. “I saw him standing in the crowd. The nerve of him, coming into my hotel—”
“You were following Ash?”
“And imagine my surprise when I found him with you.”
Dorothy felt herself begin to waver. She still didn’t think she had anything to apologize for, but she could see how, to Roman, this might look like a betrayal. Not that she’d been hiding in the bathroom with someone, but that she’d been hiding in a bathroom with Ash.
“You’re acting like you caught us with our clothes around our ankles,” Dorothy said. “We talked, that’s all.”
Roman cut his eyes at her. “Did he ask you to leave with him?”
So that’s what was bothering him, the thought that she might choose them over him.
“Yes,” she answered, wary. Roman made a sound of disgust and she added, “And I told him no. Obviously.”
There was a moment of tense silence. And then Roman’s shoulders drooped, the anger seeming to drain out of him.
“You don’t know them like I do,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “You weren’t here during the mega-quake. Everyone thought the Professor was some sort of genius. But, when the earthquakes hit, he was content to let the people of this city die rather than do something to try to help them.”
“I know all that,” Dorothy said.
“You don’t know all of it.” Roman looked up, imploring. “Did you know that, after his wife died, the Professor went back again and again to try to save her? He did that for months, but when I asked him to—”
He shook his head, mouth snapping shut.
This interested Dorothy. In her year of knowing Roman, he’d never spoken to her about his life before the earthquakes. It was as though his life had started the day the Professor recruited him to be his assistant.
“Asked him to what?” Dorothy asked, taking a step toward him.
Roman ignored her. “I know you don’t think Ash and the others are bad people, but they stood by the Professor; they defended him. The only reason Ash came here tonight is to stop us from going back. They still think that this, all of this, is theirs.”
“You don’t have to worry about that. He left.”
“Did he?” Roman asked, his tone brittle.
Dorothy studied him. It was strange, but there’d been a second—not even a full second, but a fraction of one—when something suspiciously like disappointment had snapped across Roman’s face. And then the irritation was back, and anyone else might’ve doubted that the hurt had been there at all. But Dorothy knew what she’d seen.
“Roman—” she started, reaching for him.
He swallowed, audibly, and turned away from her. “If you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time I head to bed.” He was being careful now, weighing each word he spoke, like he worried they might betray him. “Tomorrow’s a big day.”
And then he slipped down the hall, and was gone.
16
Ash
Ash sank deep, deeper. The water had the effect of a cold shower, calming his skin, clearing his thoughts. He saw only black, felt only the reverberating echo of his heart beating in his chest.
Dorothy was Quinn. Quinn was Dorothy.
In less than a week, Dorothy was going to kill him.
Dread built in his chest, crowding out these terrible thoughts. There’d always been some part of him that’d expected to have a choice, when the time came. He’d already accepted that he would fall in love with Quinn Fox, and he knew she would eventually kill him. But he’d still been waiting for something . . . for a moment, perhaps, when he could make the decision to walk into this future willingly.
But this . . . this was no choice. Or, if it was, it was one he’d made long before he’d fully known what he was choosing. He’d already fallen for Dorothy. He couldn’t change that now. The future felt like a vise slowly closing around him.
With the questions still pounding in his head and his lungs burning, he kicked to the surface and swam back to the docks.
Zora was waiting by the Fairmont’s back entrance, their agreed-upon meeting spot should they get separated. She was on her tiptoes, one hand shielding her eyes, and seemed to visibly relax when Ash appeared.
“There you are.” She snatched his arm, dragging him around the corner. “I thought—”
She broke off with a rough shake of her head. She didn’t have to tell him what she thought.
They walked down the dock in silence, Zora steering Ash to the garage, where the boat was parked, instead of back to the party. Ash didn’t know why they were leaving and didn’t think to ask. His head was still full of Dorothy: Dorothy here, Dorothy alive, Dorothy’s lips pressed to his.
Zora, watching him, asked, “Are you okay?”
He exhaled through his teeth. “You saw her?”
“Oh, I saw her, all right.” Zora’s voice was venom. “Our little con artist was standing beside Roman dressed up like a murderous ghost. I guess that explains how the Black Cirkus is able to travel through time, at least.” She glanced at Ash, sideways. “She had the exotic matter when she fell, remember?”
Ash felt this knowledge in his gut a second before it made its way to his head. Of course. He should’ve put that together, but he’d been too distracted by everything else—Dorothy was alive. Dorothy was Quinn. Dorothy was going to kill him—and hadn’t had a chance to think it all through. Dorothy had betrayed them.
Zora stopped walking, abruptly. There was a restless energy in her, her eyes flicking from his face to the water and back again. “So?” she asked. “What now?”
Ash frowned. “What do you mean?”
Zora, voice cracking, said, “Are you in love with her?”
Ash swallowed and looked away.
“Damn it.” Zora stared at him. “We said we would stop this. We came here to figure out how to keep you from falling in love with Quinn, not so that you could make puppy dog eyes at her!”
“I know—”
“I actually thought it was possible, back when you didn’t know her. But now.” Her eyes were wide and bright, but she wasn’t crying. She wouldn’t, not Zora. “It’s Dorothy.”
Ash said, again, “I know.”
“I was the one who told you to go after her. Back in Fort Hunter, I told you that if you fell for her instead of this girl with the white hair . . . Do you remember?”
Ash remembered. “That’s not why this happened. None of this is your fault.”
“You don’t understand.” She began to pace, that restlessness taking her over. “I was so sure it would change things. That you could just fall in love with someone else.” She released a short, fierce laugh. “Easy, right? Just pick another girl and everything would be okay. But that’s what made this happen. If you hadn’t fallen for Dorothy, things could’ve been different. Maybe . . .”
She trailed off, staring out over the black waves, her brows furrowed.
“None of this is your fault, Zora,” Ash said again. He wasn’t sure what else to say.
Zora didn’t appear to be listening. “I never understood before, how impossible this was. All this time I just thought you could make a different decision, change your future. But that decision is what brought you here. It’s like . . . it’s like fate.” Her eyes flicked back to him. “How do you stop a memory?”
Ash looked up at the Fairmont, eyes skimming over the lit-up glass. How do you stop a memory?
Maybe this moment right now was always the only one that’d mattered, this choice the only one he’d ever be given. Dorothy was waiting behind one of those windows. Finally, finally, he knew where she was. He knew she would kill him. He knew how and when.
He supposed he could choose to walk away. But that felt impossible, like choosing not to inhale.
And so he said simply, “You don’t.”
“Oh my God, finally. Do you have any idea what time it is?”
That was Chandra. Ash and Zora had just gotten back to the schoolhouse and found her sitting at the kitchen table, still dressed in her Renaissance-woman costume, though her makeup was smudged and she’d removed her wig, leaving her black hair flattened and sweaty against her scalp.
On the way back to the schoolhouse, Zora explained that there’d been an incident at the Fairmont: she and Chandra has been recognized by a Cirkus Freak and had left in a hurry before the entire Black Cirkus could chase them out. Zora had sent Chandra and Willis home in the motorboat while she’d stayed behind to find Ash.
Now, Willis was leaning against the wall, holding Chandra’s powder-white wig in his massive hands. He’d been gently finger-combing the curls back into place, but his eyes lifted when Zora and Ash walked into the room.
“We thought you’d both left us to join the Black Cirkus,” Chandra said.
“We did not think that,” Willis said. “But we were starting to get worried. It’s late.”
“Sorry,” Ash muttered, pulling out a chair. He felt them both watching him, waiting for an explanation.
A muscle in his jaw clenched. They knew about Dorothy, too. He dropped his head in his hands so he wouldn’t have to meet their eyes.
After a moment, Chandra cleared her throat. “What do you mean we didn’t think they’d join the Cirkus? You said you expected Zora to defect for the brownies alone.”
Willis sniffed. “They were very good brownies. Or, at least I dimly recall that they were good. I haven’t had one in a very long time.”
“Come on . . . I already told you I’m sorry I didn’t bring you any, will you get over it?”
With a grunt Ash reached into his pocket and pulled out two mushy chocolate brownies still in their cellophane wrappers, which he dropped onto the kitchen table.
“They got a little wet,” he muttered. “But they’re still chocolate.”
Willis’s eyes lit up. He put down Chandra’s wig and picked up a brownie, carefully unwrapping the cellophane.
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