Zora took a bottle of Dante’s moonshine from the fridge, slamming the door a little too aggressively.
“What crawled up your butt?” Chandra asked.
“Don’t start with me,” Zora said, scowling. She swigged moonshine straight out of the bottle.
“I don’t see why everyone’s in such a bad mood. It was a great party. Good snacks, good dancing, good company.” Chandra wiggled her eyebrows at Ash.
Good company. She was talking about Dorothy, he knew. He glared at her.
“Too soon?” Chandra asked, all innocence.
Now Zora was staring at her, her face incredulous. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said, “What the hell, Chandra?”
Chandra shrugged, unapologetic. “I refuse to be upset that Dorothy’s alive. I like Dorothy. And, yeah, okay, she’s working for the enemy now, which isn’t awesome, but it’s better than if she’d gotten lost somewhere in time and Ash fell in love with a soulless monster we didn’t even know.” Turning to Ash, blinking. “Well? Isn’t it?”
Ash hesitated. Nodded.
Chandra chewer her lower lip. “I’m . . . well, I’m a little surprised that she didn’t . . . you know . . .”
Willis said, blunt, “She didn’t want to come back with you?”
“No.” Ash fell back into his chair, suddenly exhausted. “She didn’t.”
“Oh. Well that makes sense, she has the big mission tomorrow morning, right?” But Chandra didn’t look convinced. She hesitated, glancing at Willis. “Now might be a good time to tell them about the other thing.”
Ash felt a flicker of interest. “The other thing?”
Willis took a small bite of brownie. “I was going to make you wait until tomorrow, as punishment for not letting me come to the party. But the brownie has put me in a better mood.”
Zora set the moonshine down. “You were going to make us wait for what?”
“It turns out I was right about the Fairmont walls. Easy to climb, and some fool on the fourth floor left his window open.” Willis took another bite of brownie, giving his head a slow shake.
He was enjoying this, Ash could tell.
“After that, it was a relatively simple matter to find out which room belonged to Roman. I ran into a young Cirkus Freak in the hallway, and you’d be amazed at how helpful he was.” He licked chocolate off his fingers. “Given a little incentive, that is.”
“What did you want from Roman’s room?” Ash was leaning forward in his seat now, drumming his fingers against his knee.
“The Professor’s textbooks went missing around the time Roman left, didn’t they?” Willis said. “We always thought they were lost in the earthquake, but seeing as Roman stole a bunch of other stuff from the Professor’s office, I didn’t think it was that much of a stretch to assume he’d steal these, too.”
With a flourish, Willis stepped aside, revealing a small stack of moldy-looking textbooks.
There was a beat of silence.
“They won’t turn you into a genius overnight,” Willis said to Zora apologetically. “But I thought they might help you with some of the math in your dad’s journal.”
Zora pressed her hands together. She looked like she might cry. “Willis . . . ,” she said in a strangled voice. And then, as though she no longer trusted herself to speak, she crossed the kitchen and took his giant face in her hands, planting a kiss right on his mouth.
Willis’s face went red.
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat. “That was completely unnecessary.”
LOG ENTRY—JUNE 21, 2074
13:40 HOURS
THE WORKSHOP
According to Greek myth, a woman named Cassandra was gifted with the ability to see the future when the god Apollo caught sight of her and determined her to be of extraordinary beauty.
When Cassandra rebuffed Apollo’s advances, he cursed her with something particularly cruel in punishment: Cassandra would be able to see the future, but no one would believe what she saw.
I feel a bit of camaraderie with Cassandra just now, and so I feel it only fitting to name this mission in her honor.
I give you:
Mission: Cassandra 1
Objective: Attempt to alter the future.
For my first experiment, I think it wise to start small. I want to look into the idea of personal choice as it relates to predestination. Or, put colloquially, I’d like to determine whether I can change my own choices.
I believe that proving or disproving this will be relatively easy. I will simply travel one day into the future and observe myself as I make my way through my day-to-day life. I’ll keep careful notes of what I do and where I go, and then I will return to my present timeline. I will have twenty-four hours to change just one thing from what I previously observed.
Just one choice.
I’ll update on my return.
UPDATE—
JUNE 22, 2074
14:51 HOURS
I’m writing this from the “future”—one day in the future, to be exact. I traveled twenty-four hours forward, and landed the Second Star a few blocks away from the workshop so that present me wouldn’t see future me arrive.
That’s already a contradiction. Because the present me that exists in the future would already know that I’m here, wouldn’t he? Because I already went back?
That line of thinking is making my brain hurt, so back to the task at hand. I stayed out of sight and observed what “I” did over the last hour so that I might intentionally make a different choice when faced with the same options tomorrow (that is this) morning. This is what I discovered:
07:00 hours—Woke up and ate normal breakfast of black coffee, one orange, and a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar. Have small argument with Natasha, who’s annoyed that I’ve been working so diligently over the winter holiday.
07:30 hours—Get Zora up for school and make her breakfast.
08:30 hours—Drive Zora to school. A car accident on I-5 caused major delays, which resulted in us being twenty-five minutes late for Zora’s first class. I promise her a milkshake if she “forgets” to tell that piece of information to her mother.
09:45 hours—Return to the workshop, where I spend the next several hours going over my notes from the previous day. I admit that this is a little strange to watch. The “notes” I’m going over are the notes that I’m writing right now. I’m watching myself go over the same notes in the future, even as I move my hand to write them. Extraordinary.
14:23 hours—Break for lunch. Natasha has informed me that there’s leftover roast chicken in the fridge, but I leave the workshop to get a burrito from the taco truck down the street instead. Shh.
. . . And that brings us to where we are now. I have to admit, it’s excruciatingly boring to watch myself live an entire day. It’s occurring to me that I’m not a very interesting person.
In any case, I have enough data now to continue with my experiment, and so it’s time to go home.
Or, rather, to my past home. Present home? It’s impossible to keep all of this straight.
UPDATE—
JUNE 21, 2074
15:06 HOURS
Okay! I’ve returned to the present timeline with my notes, and I’m ready to proceed with the current experiment. My mission was to change one small part of the day that I just witnessed my future self living.
I’ve seen that I chose to eat a burrito for lunch. Tomorrow, though, I’m going to change my mind and have pizza instead. Will I be successful? Only time will tell.
UPDATE—
JUNE 22, 2074
14:51 HOURS
Here we go! I’m back in the future, trying to live my life as though I don’t know that my past self is hiding outside of the window directly behind my head, watching my every move and recording it in the very notebook I’m currently writing in. My plan was to choose something different for lunch: pizza instead of a burrito.
I imagine that whoever is reading this is at the edge of their seat with a
nticipation, so I won’t make you wait much longer. I successfully ate a slice of pizza.
I referred to the journal as soon as I ate the slice of pizza, half expecting to see that the entry had changed. But there, in black in white, in my own damn handwriting, was the word burrito.
Cassandra 1 was a success. Humans have free will. We are indeed capable of changing the future.
17
Dorothy
NOVEMBER 7, 2077, NEW SEATTLE
Dorothy was not prepared for the crowd that awaited them on the docks the next morning. She saw them from the air as she and Roman flew toward the anil, and they had a magnetic hold on her gaze. Hundreds of people, standing shoulder to shoulder, cheering and holding signs, faces upturned to watch the time machine fly overhead.
Her heart leaped in her throat. She could hear their voices through the thick glass of the windows. If she squinted, she could read their signs:
The past is our right!
A flare of pride.
She had done that.
And then she wasn’t just scanning the crowd, she was searching it, looking for dirty-blond hair and wind-chapped skin and a familiar, beat-up leather jacket. Heat flickered through her as she realized what she was doing, who she was looking for. Was he there now? she wondered. She thought he might be. She imagined she could feel his presence radiating below her. She lifted a hand to her face, finger grazing her lips.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Roman said, and Dorothy tensed, wondering if he’d guessed that she’d been thinking of Ash. She’d often thought Roman capable of reading minds, but, when she glanced at him, she saw that his eyes were trained on the window and the crowd beyond it.
“Incredible, isn’t it?” he said, sounding awed.
“It is,” Dorothy said. “I didn’t realize there were this many people in the city.”
“New Seattleites can be difficult to impress,” Roman said. “We only show up for something truly spectacular.”
He looked at her, smiling fully now. He hadn’t mentioned what had happened the night before, and so she didn’t, either. But, this morning, she’d found a cup of coffee waiting for her outside of her hotel room door, and she’d suspected it had been his way of apologizing for his outburst.
She studied him for a moment longer, wondering if she should say more.
She’d never actually told Roman what had happened between her and Ash but, of course, he’d figured it out. In order for everything to work out as it had in her past, Roman had needed to go back in time to 1980, help Ash and his friends escape from Fort Hunter, and make sure that Dorothy ended up with the exotic matter before she fell off the Second Star. All of it had been planned, perfectly, to make sure she would land at Roman’s feet in 2076. Dorothy knew there wasn’t a chance of anything going wrong. She’d already lived through it, and it would’ve created a paradox if things hadn’t gone exactly as she remembered. So she wasn’t worried.
But Roman had been living through it all for the first time. And, when he’d come back from the past, he’d seemed . . .
Changed.
“You never told me you’d fallen in love with him,” he said to her, once, and Dorothy had been so shocked to hear him say it that she hadn’t thought to deny it.
“I-I’m not anymore,” she’d said, instead. Roman had held her gaze for a moment longer, and she’d half expected him to tell her to prove it, to choose.
But he’d done neither of those things, and Dorothy found herself remembering a conversation they’d had long ago. She’d asked Roman why he’d betrayed Ash and the Professor and everyone else, and he’d responded, “I’m afraid we haven’t been acquainted long enough for that story. . . . Maybe one day, I’ll let you in on all my secrets.”
That had been a year ago now. Roman knew all of Dorothy’s secrets and, yet, his were elusive as ever. Dorothy knew that Roman didn’t display emotions easily. Always, his feelings were buried beneath a sly smile or a sharp joke so that she was constantly wondering what he really thought, why he guarded himself so closely.
She stared at him for a moment longer, the question already on her tongue. What happened to you? What haven’t you told me?
But darkness fell over the ship before she could ask it, and they were inside the anil and it seemed, once again, like an opportunity had passed.
NOVEMBER 29, 2073, SEATTLE
When they exited the anil, they were in a strange, new world.
Well, strange to Dorothy, at least. This Seattle hadn’t been flooded. The trees were monstrous and leafy green, not white and dead. Buildings towered into the sky, nearly blocking out the sun, and they huddled so close together that Dorothy had a hard time imagining how cars made their way between them—
That is, until they descended below the cloud cover, flying the Black Crow low enough for Dorothy to actually see the cars zooming down narrow streets, before disappearing farther into the concrete jungle.
Extraordinary, she thought, leaning close to the window as they flew over it all, their time machine hidden by the day’s heavy fog. Electronic billboards flashed dizzily in the gray, and the huge concrete arc that Dorothy had seen in New Seattle—highway, it was called—was now loaded with cars and trucks and motorcycles.
In just two short years it will all be destroyed.
Something sour hit Dorothy’s throat. She leaned back in her seat, looking away from the window. Many people wouldn’t even have to wait two years. The first earthquake would hit the next day. She’d heard about this earthquake before but, for the first time, it felt real.
People were going to die. Half the city would lose their homes and have to move into tents. The power in entire neighborhoods would be knocked out and never recovered; hospitals would be overrun; children would go without food and water.
She felt suddenly sick.
Roman glanced at her sideways, seeming to read her thoughts. “It was four years ago.”
His voice was strange, and Dorothy bristled, thinking he meant to scold her for getting emotional over something that had already happened, something they couldn’t change. “I know that—”
“No,” Roman cut her off. “I meant that it really wasn’t that long ago, when you think about it.”
There was a brief silence, and then Roman said, “Black Crow preparing for landing.” He switched a button on the control panel and pulled down the yoke.
They began to descend.
18
Ash
NOVEMBER 7, 2077, NEW SEATTLE
A tremor moved through the city as the Black Crow disappeared into the anil.
Ash tightened his hands around his coat, shivering in the early morning fog. He and Zora had gathered on the docks to watch, along with a few hundred others, some holding soggy signs, the paint bleeding in the damp. Some were even chanting.
“The past is our right! The past is our right!”
Ash felt fidgety, all too aware of the eyes in the crowd. He saw a man standing a few feet away, staring, head cocked like he was trying to work out how he knew him. Ash turned away, pulling his collar up to hide his face.
He’d been hoping for some sign of Dorothy, but she hadn’t left the time machine, hadn’t even stuck a hand out the window to wave at her adoring fans.
This feeling—the sudden hope followed by crushing disappointment—was so great that his hands curled into fists. He glanced at Zora and saw that her eyes were glued to the swirling mess of colors churning in the middle of the sea. The skin between her brows creased as she reached for his arm.
“Does it always do that?” she asked.
Ash focused on releasing the tension in his hands. “Do what?”
“That tremor—”
Before he could answer, the anil lit up. It was no single color, but all colors, shifting and unknowable. The ground below them began to shake.
The Black Crow was returning.
19
Dorothy
NOVEMBER 29, 2073, SEATTLE
Dorothy hadn’
t spent a month planning this con. It’d been easy. All they’d needed were a few props.
Roman landed the Black Crow in a thick copse of trees near the edge of town, next to the white-and-blue SolarBeam delivery van he’d procured on an earlier trip back in time.
“Damn thing took forever to find,” he’d complained bitterly. “I had to hack into old Craigslist ads going back over two years before I found someone looking to unload one. Craigslist, Dorothy. The user interface alone made me want to kill myself.”
Dorothy had rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Do you know what this is?”
Roman’s face had darkened. “Don’t.”
“It’s the world’s smallest violin playing just for you.”
After the van, everything else was relatively easy. Uniforms were ordered from a wholesale retailer with same-day delivery, and they’d picked up the clipboards while they were in the 1990s, from a place called Target, which had delighted Dorothy endlessly (they sold bananas and arm chairs and trousers all in the same place!). And then it was simply a matter of storing their finds in a safe place until they needed them.
Now, Dorothy unbuttoned her cloak and tossed it in the back seat, revealing her SolarBeam uniform: navy-blue polo shirt, dark trousers, and silver windbreaker. She hid her hair beneath a head scarf, and then slid a SolarBeam baseball cap on top, lowering an eye patch over her ruined eye.
“They’re going to think you’re a pirate,” Roman said, tucking his own polo into his trousers.
Dorothy checked her appearance. The scarf hid her white hair, but Roman was right, the eye patch was a problem. It made her memorable. Memorable was bad.
“Next time, we should try pulling off the glim dropper.” She pushed her door open and a blast of chilly, November air swept over her, raising the hair on her arms.
Roman’s eyebrows went up. “Excuse me?”
“It’s like the fiddle game, only it involves a man—or woman, in our case—looking for her glass eye. My mother and I never tried it because it requires a one-eyed person to pull it off.” She adjusted her eye patch. “Now, that wouldn’t be an issue.”
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