Stolen Time Read online

  Dedication

  For all the scientists in my life, but particularly Bill Rollins, Thomas Van de Castle, and Ron Williams, for helping me look like I know what I’m talking about

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  1. Dorothy

  2. Ash

  3. Dorothy

  4. Ash

  5. Dorothy

  6. Ash

  7. Dorothy

  8. Ash

  9. Dorothy

  10. Ash

  11. Dorothy

  12. Ash

  13. Dorothy

  14. Ash

  15. Dorothy

  16. Ash

  17. Dorothy

  18. Ash

  19. Dorothy

  Part Two

  20. Ash

  21. Dorothy

  22. Ash

  23. Dorothy

  24. Ash

  25. Dorothy

  26. Ash

  27. Dorothy

  28. Ash

  29. Dorothy

  30. Ash

  Part Three

  31. Dorothy

  32. Ash

  33. Dorothy

  34. Ash

  35. Dorothy

  36. Ash

  37. Dorothy

  38. Ash

  39. Dorothy

  40. Ash

  41. Dorothy

  42. Ash

  43. Dorothy

  44. Ash

  45. Dorothy

  46. Ash

  47. Dorothy

  48. Ash

  Part Four

  49. Dorothy

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Books by Danielle Rollins

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Rapid space-travel, or travel back in time, can’t be ruled out, according to our present understanding. They would cause great logical problems, so let’s hope there’s a Chronology Protection Law, to prevent people going back and killing our parents.

  —Stephen Hawking

  1

  Dorothy

  JUNE 7, 1913, JUST OUTSIDE OF SEATTLE

  The comb gleamed in the midmorning light. It was exquisite. Tortoiseshell, with a mother-of-pearl inlay and teeth that had the too-bright look of real gold. Far superior to the rest of the cheap costume jewelry scattered across the hairdresser’s table.

  Dorothy pretended to be interested in a loose thread at her sleeve so she wouldn’t stare. It might fetch fifty, if she could find the right buyer.

  She squirmed, her patience thinning. If she had time to find the right buyer. It was already past nine. The clock didn’t seem to be on her side today.

  She shifted her eyes from the comb to the full-length mirror leaning against the wall in front of her. Bars of light glinted in through the chapel window, bouncing off the glass and turning the air in the dressing room bright and dusty. Silk dresses and delicate ribbons fluttered on their hangers. Thunder rumbled in the distance, which was odd. This part of the country rarely stormed.

  It was one of the things Dorothy hated most about the West Coast. How it was always gray but never stormed.

  The hairdresser hesitated, catching Dorothy’s eye in the mirror. “How do you like it, miss?”

  Dorothy tilted her head. Her brown curls had been beaten into submission, making a ladylike bun at the nape of her neck. She looked tamed. Which, she supposed, was the entire point.

  “Lovely,” she lied. The old woman broke into a smile, her face disappearing in a mess of wrinkles and creases. Dorothy hadn’t expected her to look so pleased. It sent guilt squirming through her.

  She feigned a cough. “Would you mind fetching me a glass of water, please?”

  “Not at all, dear, not at all.” The hairdresser set down her brush and shuffled to the back of the room, where a crystal pitcher sat on a small table.

  As soon as the woman’s back was turned, Dorothy slipped the gold comb up her sleeve. The movement was so quick and natural that anyone watching would’ve been too distracted by the row of delicate pearl buttons edging the lace at Dorothy’s wrist to notice a thing.

  Dorothy dropped her arm to her side, a private smile flitting across her face, guilt forgotten. It was unseemly to be so proud, but she couldn’t help it. Her sleight of hand had been perfect. As it should be. She’d practiced enough.

  A floorboard groaned behind her, and a new voice said, “Leave us for a moment, will you, Marie?”

  Dorothy’s smile vanished, and every muscle in her body tightened, like they were attached to slowly turning screws. The hairdresser—Marie—startled, sending a trickle of water over the side of the glass.

  “Oh! Miss Loretta. Forgive me, I didn’t see you come in.” Marie smiled and nodded as a petite, impeccably dressed older woman stepped into the room. Dorothy pressed her teeth together so tightly her jaw began to ache. Suddenly, the comb seemed to bulge beneath her sleeve.

  Loretta wore a black gown overlaid with a delicate web of gold lace. The high neckline and long sleeves gave her the appearance of a very elegant spider. It was a look more suited to a funeral than a wedding.

  Loretta kept her expression polite, but the air around her seemed to thicken, like she had her own gravity. Marie placed the glass of water down and scurried into the hallway. Terrified, no doubt. Most people were terrified of Dorothy’s mother.

  Dorothy studied her mother’s ruined hand out of the corner of her eye, trying not to be obvious. The hand was much smaller than it should be, with withered, wasted fingers curling in on each other like claws. Loretta grew her fingernails too long and allowed the edges to yellow. It was as though she wanted to enhance the look of decay. Like she wanted people to turn away from her deformity. Even Dorothy had a hard time with the small, wasted hand, and Loretta was her mother. She should be used to it by now.

  Dorothy cocked her head and lowered her eyelids. Nerves crawled over her skin, under all the lace and frill of her dress. She curled her lips into a coy smile, ignoring them. She’d had a lot of practice ignoring her feelings during her sixteen years alive. She’d almost forgotten what they were for.

  Beauty disarms, she thought. It’d been her mother’s first lesson. She’d been prodded and poked since she was nine years old, her corset cinched tighter, her cheeks pinched until they were rosy red.

  “Mother,” she cooed, patting her curls. “Doesn’t my hair look divine?”

  Loretta assessed her daughter coolly, and Dorothy felt her smile tremble. It was foolish to try these tricks on her mother, but she was desperate to avoid a fight. Today was going to be difficult enough already.

  “I thought you were thirsty.” Loretta picked up the water glass with her good hand, withered fingers trembling. Someone else might think the muscles were failing. They might offer to help.

  Dorothy knew better. She reached for the glass without hesitation, her spine going rigid. She’d been expecting it, but she still didn’t feel the birdlike fingers of her mother’s ruined hand slip down her sleeve and pull the expensive comb free of its hiding place.

  The hand was Loretta’s secret weapon, so grotesque that people had a hard time looking directly at it, so small and quick that no one ever felt it reach into their jacket or down their pocketbook. It was the second lesson Loretta ever taught her daughter. Weakness could be powerful. People underestimated broken things.

  Loretta tossed the comb back onto the table, one thin eyebrow arching high on her forehead. Dorothy fixed her face in a look of shock.

  “However did that get there?” she asked, taking a sip of water.

  “Shall I search the rest of you to make certa
in nothing else has crawled inside your gown?”

  She said this in a flat voice that sent an unpleasant shudder down Dorothy’s spine. Dorothy currently had a set of very expensive lockpicks tucked below the silk sash at her waist, nicked from her mother’s underwear drawer before they left for the chapel. She could afford to lose the comb, but Dorothy needed those picks.

  Luckily, Loretta didn’t follow through on the threat. She lifted Dorothy’s veil from its stand beside the mirror. It was a long, filmy thing, with a tiny row of silk flowers sewn across the crown. Dorothy had spent most of the morning pretending it didn’t exist.

  “What were you thinking?” Loretta spoke in the low, careful voice she used only when she was truly furious. “Stealing a thing like that, and minutes before your own wedding? Stand please.”

  Dorothy stood. Her skirts fell gracefully around her ankles, pooling at her feet. She hadn’t put on her shoes yet, and, without them, she felt a bit like a girl playing dress-up in her mother’s wedding gown. Which was silly. Her mother had never let her play.

  “What would we have done if you’d been seen?” Loretta continued, lowering the veil to her daughter’s head and jamming pins into place.

  “I wasn’t seen,” Dorothy said. The sharp metal stabbed her scalp, but she didn’t flinch. “I’m never seen.”

  “I saw you.”

  Dorothy pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t argue. There was no way her mother had actually seen her take that comb. She may have guessed, but she didn’t see anything.

  “You put everything we’ve worked for at risk. And all for some silly trinket.” Loretta pulled the silk sash at Dorothy’s waist tight. Dorothy felt the lockpicks shift in their hiding place.

  That “trinket” would have paid for her train ticket out of town. She could’ve been well away from this dreadful place before the ceremony even started.

  Dorothy swallowed, pushing aside her disappointment. There would be other trinkets. Other chances.

  “This is ghastly,” she muttered, flicking a silk flower on her veil. “Why do people get married in these?”

  “That veil belonged to Charles’s mother.” Loretta slid another pin into her daughter’s hair, fastening the veil firmly into place. She was referring to Dr. Charles Avery. Dorothy’s fiancé. The word still made her feel ill. Girls like her weren’t supposed to marry.

  Dorothy and her mother were confidence women. This time last year, they’d been running a marriage scheme. It had been easy enough money. Loretta would simply take out a classified in the local paper, claiming to be a lonely young woman seeking the correspondence of a single man with a view toward marriage. Then, when the letters began trickling in, they’d mail the poor sap Dorothy’s photograph and he’d be caught like a worm on a hook.

  After a few months of increasingly steamy letters and promises of true love, they’d reel him in, asking for money to buy medicine for a cough or to see the doctor about a twisted ankle. Then it was a check for the landlady, or a few hundred for a train ticket so they might finally meet.

  They always ran the scheme on a few men at once, making sure to cut them loose before suspicion set in. Then Avery started writing, and everything changed.

  Avery was rich, the newly appointed surgeon-in-chief at Seattle’s Providence Medical Center. And he’d proposed the instant he saw Dorothy’s photograph—likely wanting a trophy of a wife to go with his fancy new title. Loretta said it would be their biggest con yet. A wedding. A marriage. She said it would change their lives. They could have everything they’d ever wanted.

  Dorothy twisted the engagement ring on her finger. She’d spent her entire life learning the art of the con. It wasn’t all smiling in the mirror and tilting her head. She’d practiced her finger work until her hands had cramped, and taught herself to pick a lock with a few twists of her wrist and whatever she’d found lying around. She could read a lie in the curve of a mouth. She could slip a wedding ring off a man’s finger while he freshened her drink. And now she was going to be sold to someone who’d spend the rest of her life telling her what to do and where to go. Just as her mother had always done. It was as though the two of them had conspired to make certain Dorothy never made a single choice of her own.

  “You look lovely,” Loretta said, examining Dorothy with a shrewd eye. She adjusted the veil so the silk flowers framed her daughter’s face. “The perfect bride.”

  Dorothy stood up straighter, and the lockpicks shifted, poking through the back of her dress. She had no intention of being a bride, no matter how perfectly she looked the part. If her mother thought she was going to go through with this, she was a fool.

  “Still missing something.” Loretta took a small object out of her pocket. It glinted gold in the dim light.

  “Grandmother’s locket,” Dorothy murmured as Loretta looped the fine chain around her neck. For a moment, she forgot about her escape plans. The locket was a thing of awe, like something out of a fairy tale. Loretta had unlatched it from her mother’s neck right before the cruel woman tossed her out of the house and left her to wander the streets, pregnant and penniless. No matter how hungry Loretta had gotten, she’d never pawned it.

  Dorothy touched the locket lightly with her fingertips. The gold was pale and very old. There’d been an image sketched onto the front, but it had long since worn away. “Why are you giving it to me now?”

  “So you’ll remember.” Loretta squeezed her daughter’s shoulders. Her dark eyes had gone narrow.

  Dorothy didn’t have to ask what she was supposed to remember. The locket told the story well. How mothers were sometimes cruel. How love couldn’t be relied upon. How a girl could only trust the things she could steal.

  But maybe not, something inside of her whispered. Maybe there’s something more.

  Her fingers went still against the cool metal. She’d never been able to name this feeling, but it nagged at her sometimes, leaving her strangely hollow. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted, exactly. Just more.

  More than men and dresses and money. More than her mother’s life. More than this.

  It was foolish, really. A shameful wish. Who was she to think that there was more than this?

  “It’s almost time.” Loretta straightened the sash on Dorothy’s gown again. She pulled the ends together in a bow. “I should find my seat.”

  Dorothy’s palms had started to sweat. “The next time we speak, I shall be a married woman,” she said, hoping with every breath in her that this wasn’t true.

  Loretta slipped into the hallway without another word, pulling the door shut. A lock slammed into place, making Dorothy jump. For a long moment she just stood there.

  She’d expected her mother to lock her in. Loretta Densmore was not the type of woman to take risks, especially when it came to her valuable possessions. It made sense that she’d keep her daughter—her most valuable possession—safely stowed away until the rest of her wedding party came to fetch her. Loretta was pragmatic. She wouldn’t leave something this important up to chance.

  Dorothy fumbled for the lockpicks hidden beneath her sash, but her fingers found only lace and silk, and the hard fabric edge of her corset.

  “No,” she said, her search growing frantic. No no no. She dug her fingernails into the lace until she heard something rip. They were just here. She replayed the last few moments with her mother. How Loretta had smiled into the mirror. How she’d straightened the sash on Dorothy’s gown.

  Dorothy’s fingers went still. Her mother must’ve slipped that dreadful little hand beneath the sash and stolen her escape plan. She inhaled, and the breath felt like a blade sliding between her ribs. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  Dorothy caught sight of her reflection in the mirror—the painted eyes and lips and pinned curls. Her gown had been custom-made; the lace hand-embroidered by the yard and as delicate as a spiderweb, affixed with freshwater pearls that caught the light when she moved. She’d spent her entire life learning to bend the truth and stretch a lie.
But her own beauty was the biggest lie of all. She’d never asked for it. Never wanted it. It had nothing to do with the woman she yearned to be. So far, all it had brought her was pain.

  Disgust twisted Dorothy’s mouth, transforming her face into something ever so slightly ugly. She yanked the veil out of her hair. Pins tangled in her curls and pinged against the floor. Her hair flopped over her forehead, frizzed and ruined.

  Dorothy smiled. For the first time all morning she felt like her outside matched her inside. Then, her eyes moved to the hairpins on the floor, and she froze.

  Hairpins.

  She dropped to her knees and grasped one, holding it up to the light. It was long and thin and pointed. She tried to bend it between her fingers. Strong, too. Probably real silver.

  Her lips twitched. These would do nicely.

  2

  Ash

  OCTOBER 14, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  Wing flaps up. Carburetor in the cold position. Throttle fully open.

  Ash tapped the EM gauge, and the dial spun and then settled, twitching, on the half-capacity mark.

  “Damn,” he muttered, settling himself back in the pilot’s seat. His nerves ratcheted up a notch. Half capacity meant there wasn’t enough EM—exotic matter—for a safe flight. The ship he was sitting in could explode the minute he got her into the sky. He increased the airspeed indicator to 75 knots, ignoring the blood pulsing in his palms.

  He was often told he could be stubborn. Back in the army, his commanding officer had once said, Son, you make mules look easygoing. His childhood Sunday school teacher had commented, Persistence isn’t always a virtue.

  But Zora—who knew him better than anyone—had put it best when she’d said, Will you give it up already? You’re going to die. She’d started muttering stuff under her breath whenever he walked past. Dangerous. Idiot. Suicide mission.

  It wasn’t a suicide mission. Ash had already seen how he was going to die, and it wasn’t like this. But Zora might be right about the other stuff. The trips were too dangerous, and Ash supposed he might be an idiot for attempting them. But the alternative was worse. He thought of black water and white hair and gave his head a hard shake.