Stolen Time Page 11

  “It’s fine.” Ash curled an arm over her head, pushing her face down as another bullet whizzed past them. He glanced over his shoulder, catching one last glimpse of the dark figures on the dock. “Just keep going.”

  LOG ENTRY—JUNE 4, 2074

  12:02 HOURS

  THE WORKSHOP

  I honestly never thought this would happen, but WCAAT and NASA have just approved the request, so it looks like we’re moving forward.

  I’m getting my team—and not just any team. Remember how Natasha suggested we go back in time and recruit the best possible applicants from all of history?

  WCAAT and NASA are actually letting me do that.

  The strongest man. The world’s most brilliant medical mind. The most talented pilot.

  I’m going to go back and find them all.

  Natasha and I spent the night discussing how, exactly, we’ll manage to do this. The thing is, taking people out of history—especially extraordinarily talented people—tends to muck things up. But, Natasha had an idea. She pulled up this old record of dead and missing pilots from WWII. The missing pilots were the ones she wanted me to pay attention to. You see, missing meant they’d just . . . disappeared. As in, no one ever saw them again. The US government assumed they’d been killed or captured.

  But maybe not. Maybe they were taken by a mad scientist from the future.

  I have to admit, this seems like the perfect method for recruitment. All I’ll have to do is look for those special, talented individuals. And, if they disappear, I’ll know that I already went back in time and found them.

  Finding the rest of our team will be an exciting step forward, but it’s not the only thing we’re working on.

  Roman and I have spent the past six months performing exploratory missions. This has mostly consisted of mapping the anil and coming up with some preliminary rules for how the time tunnel works. A little boring, true, but necessary. No one in history has been inside the anil before us and survived, so it was essential that we charted it.

  Now that that’s done, WCAAT and NASA have requested a more ambitious series of missions. Specifically, they want to know how we can use time travel to improve our current living conditions.

  In other words, they want me to go back in time and change things.

  Obviously, I’m not a fan of this idea. It completely ignores the scientific method. We don’t just change things and then cross our fingers and hope it’ll all work out for the best.

  We observe. Form a question. Hypothesize.

  And then we conduct a controlled experiment and come up with a conclusion based on the data.

  You’d think NASA would be on my side about this, but they seem more interested in their press releases than anything else these days.

  It’s not like I don’t understand where they’re coming from. I haven’t spent a lot of time writing about the state of our country right now, but things are pretty bleak. And it’s not just the storms. Technology isn’t exactly flourishing. We used to be the most advanced nation on the planet and now . . .

  It’s like the public has lost interest. They don’t trust “science” anymore. I think NASA was hoping the time-travel experiments would bring the country together, sort of like the moon landing in the 1960s.

  That’s not what happened. Instead, the public has rebelled. They want to know why we’re not using time travel to help people. To change things.

  There’ve even been protests. Signs.

  The past is our right!

  Stuff like that.

  The biggest protests have been in our very own tent city, right outside my workshop. Seattle isn’t recovering from that last earthquake as quickly as we thought it would. Parts of the city are still flooded, and huge areas still haven’t regained power. They’ve declared a state of emergency, but there’s only so much the government can do. WCAAT wants to use these experiments to show the city that we’re dedicated to helping. I can’t fault them for that. I understand why people want to fix things. I do. But changing the past could make everything worse. We haven’t even had this technology for a year yet. We can’t start messing around with the past until we have a better understanding of how it all works.

  In any case, I was explaining all of this to Roman last night. I expected him to take my side against the charlatans at NASA but, instead, we got into our first real fight.

  I won’t go into all the ugly details, but he did say one thing that struck me harder than I expected.

  He said, “You haven’t lost anything in the earthquakes. You still have your home, your family, your future. You have no idea how hard it’s been for the rest of us to get up in the morning, knowing all of that is gone.”

  I admit, I didn’t have a response to that. I can’t help remembering the software Roman was building the day I first met him, how he was trying to find a way to predict earthquakes before they devastated entire cities.

  Sometimes I forget that he’s only fifteen years old. In the past year, I’ve started thinking of him as a real scientist. A peer, even. I’d assumed it was the research that drew him to our work on time travel.

  It never occurred to me that he might have other reasons for doing this.

  15

  Dorothy

  OCTOBER 14, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  Fog clung to the surface of the water, leeching what little color remained of the city at night. Only the trees broke up the darkness, their trunks ghostly white and chalky. The moon must have been shining somewhere, because their bark appeared to be glowing.

  Dorothy shivered, still damp from her fall in the water. She brushed her locket with one finger to make sure it was still there. Ash had just given it back to her, and she kept expecting it to slip away again, to be lost forever. She doubted she’d ever see that filthy wedding dress again, and so this was the only thing she still had from her own time period, and she found herself feeling oddly sentimental about it.

  She shifted, feeling the heat of his body just behind her. They were still crowded in the tiny motorboat, so close that Dorothy could feel Ash’s arm graze her lower back whenever he shifted in place. Briny, milk-white fog hung low on the water, carrying a smell of fish, but when the wind turned, Dorothy could still catch hints of the smoky scent of his skin.

  She wanted to ask him about the white trees, but she held herself back. To be perfectly honest, she didn’t really understand the dynamic between them. He wasn’t a mark anymore—but he wasn’t a friend, either.

  And yet he’d come for her when she’d been kidnapped.

  But not for free, she reminded herself. Everything had a price. Ash hadn’t revealed his price yet, but she knew it was coming.

  They seemed to have made it outside of the city. There were fewer tall buildings and bridges, but sharp, solid objects still jutted up from the waves. Dorothy touched the side of one as they rumbled past, and it was hard and grainy beneath her fingers, covered in a layer of slimy moss.

  A rooftop, maybe? It was hard to tell in the night.

  Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. She turned and asked, “Why are the trees all white?”

  Ash pulled their boat up to a dock that appeared to run alongside the roof of a submerged building. It was hard for Dorothy to make out the details in the dark, but the roof looked slanted, with two cone-shaped turrets rising to either side.

  Ash cut the motor, but the growling sound echoed in the silence.

  “Because they’re dead,” he said as Willis brought a length of rope out from under his seat and began knotting it to the dock. “An earthquake hit the city two and a half years ago, and it caused a massive tsunami. That’s why Seattle’s underwater, in case you were wondering. Anyway, the salt water killed all the trees on impact, but they were big enough that they stayed standing. We call them ghost trees. Those trunks you see are just their corpses.”

  Dorothy hugged her arms close to her chest, fear prickling up her arms. Ghosts. Corpses. “Charming,” she choked out.

  Ash climbe
d out of the boat, shooting her a look. “Maybe not, but it’s home,” he said. “The people who survived spent the last couple of years trying to make this place livable again.”

  Home. Dorothy felt a hint of jealousy at how easily he’d said that word. She’d never stayed anywhere long enough for it to feel like home.

  She stood, and the whole world swayed. She groped for something to grab on to and Ash took her elbow, steadying her. His hands were softer than she’d expected, his fingertips rough with calluses. The moths in her belly stirred.

  Stupid moths, she thought. It took her a second to find her voice. “Thank you,” she murmured, shrugging him off.

  “Don’t mention it,” Ash grumbled.

  Willis pushed a window open, allowing a thin crack of light to seep out into the dark around them. The light illuminated a white Gothic-looking facade complete with a clock tower and three small windows. Only the top story of the building appeared to be above water. A stone bell tower rose over it, making Dorothy think of the cathedrals in Paris. In the darkness, it looked spooky.

  The two men climbed through first, and Dorothy followed after them, grunting as she landed on the floor. “Is this your house?”

  “It’s an abandoned building.” Ash fumbled with something Dorothy couldn’t see. There was a hiss, and the smell of sulfur, and then a match leaped to life between his fingers. He pulled an oil lamp off the wall.

  “Haven’t you got electricity?” she asked, eyeing the lamp suspiciously. “How is it possible that there’s no electricity in the future?”

  Future. The word sent nerves prickling over her skin. She still couldn’t quite believe it.

  “The earthquake knocked the power out in most of the city,” Willis explained gently. “Electricity is pretty hard to come by these days.”

  “It’s not impossible to find, just difficult,” Ash added. “Come on.”

  The dancing flame left deep shadows in the hollows of his cheeks. He lifted a massive hand, motioning farther down the hall. “Come on. We don’t use light near the windows.”

  They made their way down twisting hallways and past darkened rooms, and Dorothy tried not to linger for too long near the photographs hanging on the walls. They were in color. Actual, real blues and reds and greens, like in a painting. She wanted to pull them off the walls and examine every perfect detail, but she held herself back. Her fear had become giddy, a strange mixture of horror and excitement and adrenaline. She wanted to skip down the hallway and cower under a large piece of furniture, all at the same time.

  This must be what going mad feels like, she thought, and she had the strange urge to laugh again. Or, possibly, throw up.

  They finally stopped in a large kitchen filled with more stuff than Dorothy had ever witnessed in one place at the same time. It looked like some mad inventor’s laboratory, like something that had been dreamed instead of built. Books and maps and papers towered on top of every surface. A greasy pile of cogs and wires sat at one end of a long, beaten-wood table, beneath it a sheaf of newspaper that did nothing to contain the mess. Several layers of newspaper covered the floors, and moldy cardboard boxes towered up against the walls.

  There wasn’t an inch of space that wasn’t already blanketed in scribbled notes. Papers were piled on top of each other, being used as coasters for greasy gears and rusted cogs. Some had been half crumpled into little balls and then flattened out again, the notes rewritten in a darker, messier hand. A rusted sink and strangely shaped oven slouched along one wall, almost like an afterthought.

  Chandra was standing on an overturned bucket in the center of it all, rooting around inside a cabinet above the sink. “Jonathan Asher Jr., I know there’s a bag of potato chips somewhere in this kitchen. If you’ve hidden it again—”

  “Try behind the bread,” Ash said. He moved a stack of papers off a wooden chair and motioned for Dorothy to sit. She stayed standing, out of stubbornness.

  Chandra turned, shaking her head. “I already looked there and—” Her eyes shifted to Dorothy. “You found her! Thank God.” She hopped off the bucket. “I really didn’t want Quinn Fox to eat you.”

  For a second, Dorothy’s voice got caught in her throat. “Was that a possibility?”

  “Chandra,” Ash said. “Get your bag? She caught a slug on the arm.”

  Chandra blinked, eyes monstrous behind her thick glasses. “Slug?”

  “Bullet.”

  “Bullet? Why was there a bullet? What happened?” Then, rounding on Dorothy, “Did you get shot?”

  “Chandra?” Ash repeated, more harshly. “Your bag. And let Zora know we found her, will you?”

  Chandra nodded and hurried from the room, casting one last, anxious glance at Dorothy.

  “Zora was out looking for you, too,” Willis explained. He glanced at a chair sitting next to the door, but seemed to decide that the skinny legs wouldn’t hold his bulk and leaned against the wall instead. “We were all very worried. The city isn’t safe after dark.”

  Worried. The word struck Dorothy harder than she thought it would. Why were they worried? In her experience, people didn’t risk their lives saving strange women from gun-wielding maniacs for free. She didn’t want to think about what they expected from her in return.

  They gave you clothes, too, she reminded herself, and cringed as she added it to her mental tally. She’d never be able to repay all that.

  She bit the inside of her cheek, pushing the thought away. “Where are we?”

  “This building used to be part of the university,” Ash said. “Before the city was underwater.”

  Dorothy was still having a hard time processing the idea that all of Seattle was underwater, so she focused on the part that felt familiar.

  “The University of Washington?” she asked. Avery had taken her to see the university on their trip into the city a few weeks ago, but it had been grand then, all redbrick and climbing ivy. She frowned at the mold climbing the walls. This couldn’t be the same place. “Are you sure?”

  “It was the University of Washington up until about 2060,” Ash explained. “Then scientists started taking the study of time travel more seriously and it became the West Coast Academy of Advanced Technology. For about a decade it was the best place in the world to study theoretical physics.”

  Dorothy blinked, saying nothing. It was far too much information. All at once the weight of one hundred years of history seemed to spin out around her, making her dizzy.

  She sank into the chair Ash had offered without making the conscious decision to do so. “And all of you live here?”

  “We do.” Willis lit another match and lowered it to one of the burners on the stove. A red-orange flame leaped to life. “Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Dorothy murmured. Her heartbeat had gone fluttery. She wasn’t sure how tea was going to help, but she suddenly, desperately needed something warm in her hand. It was the sort of thing her mother would insist upon.

  Her heart gave a lurch. Her mother. If they really had traveled over a hundred years into the future, then her mother was long dead. Everyone she’d ever met was dead.

  “Oh God,” she murmured. Had it really been just this morning that getting away from her mother had been her dearest wish? The idea that she was dead, that Dorothy might never see her again . . .

  Ash cleared his throat. “I, uh, know it’s a lot to take,” he said. “But it gets easier after a few days. Trust me.”

  Trust? Dorothy almost felt like laughing, except that none of this was remotely funny. How was she supposed to trust a man she’d only just met? Loretta had taught her to trust no one but herself.

  The teakettle started to whistle. Willis moved it off the stovetop, taking a couple of chipped mugs down from a cupboard.

  Something suddenly occurred to her. “How would you know?” she asked Ash.

  Ash frowned. “How would I know what?”

  “You said that this gets easier, but how would you know that unless you did it you
rself?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “I did do it myself.”

  Willis handed Dorothy a cup of tea, and she took it without thinking, absently lifting the cup to her lips. “You’re from the past?”

  “Born in 1929. Left in 1945.”

  “1929,” Dorothy repeated. Sixteen years after she was supposed to be married. She released a small laugh. “You could be my grandson.”

  Ash’s eyes flicked to hers. “But I’m not.”

  The tips of his ears had gone pink again.

  Dorothy could feel a grin threatening. She’d been right. It was fun to tease him.

  She swallowed, barely noticing that the tea had scalded her tongue. “But you could be. How would either of us know for sure?” The grin spread wide across her lips. “Maybe you should call me Nana?”

  Ash’s ears went from pink to red. He said, through his teeth, “Look, princess, maybe you thought it was appropriate to stow away on a strange ship, but the rest of us got here the old-fashioned way.”

  “My name is Dorothy, not princess,” she said, grin vanishing. “And what does that mean? The old-fashioned way?”

  “There used to be rules about how we did this. We were all recruited.” Ash jerked his chin at something behind Dorothy’s head. “See for yourself.”

  Dorothy swiveled around in her chair, sending a bit of tea sloshing over the side of her cup. There were pictures tacked to the wall behind her. A black-and-white of Willis wearing a teeny leotard that showed off every one of his great, bulging muscles. A sketch of Chandra looking strangely like a boy, her black hair cut very short. A color photograph of Ash with a pair of goggles propped on his forehead and grease smeared across his cheek.

  That photograph was particularly jarring. Ash was smiling, happy. Much happier than Dorothy had seen him in real life. She itched to touch it, to run her finger along the edge of his smile. But she held herself back.

  Someone had taped a handwritten sign above them. Dorothy straightened the corner, squinting to read it in the dim light.

  The Chronology Protection Agency.