Stolen Time Read online

  “What’s a Chronology Protection Agency?” she asked.

  “It was supposed to be a joke,” Ash said, scratching his nose. “Some mathematician guy once said that, if time travel were real, we’d need to have a chronology protection law to stop people from going back in time and killing their parents.”

  Dorothy felt her eyes go wide. “Could you do that?”

  “We don’t actually know. Part of the Professor’s research involved going back in time to see how changes to the past might affect the world now.”

  Something tugged at the back of Dorothy’s brain. She said, “The Professor?”

  “Professor Zacharias Walker,” Ash explained. “He’s sort of the father of time travel. He built the first time machine and discovered that you can stabilize an anil using exotic matter.”

  Professor Zacharias Walker. A shiver moved up Dorothy’s arms. She’d seen that name before. It was scrawled inside the very journal that was currently stuffed down her pants.

  “Cool, right?” Chandra interrupted, bustling back into the kitchen with a black medical bag tucked under one arm. She dropped the bag onto the already messy table, sending a greasy-looking gear rolling to the ground. “Arm, please.”

  Dorothy held out her injured arm, while Chandra shuffled around inside her bag, pulling out a roll of gauze, a bottle of ointment, and some cotton balls. “Why would this . . . Professor person go back through time to find a bunch of kids?”

  Ash started to answer, then stopped himself. He pressed his lips together, thinking for a moment before trying again.

  “We were supposed to be part of a mission,” he said carefully. “Well, a series of missions, back through time. We were a team, like I told you before. The Professor’s always been a little, well . . .” Ash cleared his throat. “Eccentric.”

  “He means crazy.” Chandra popped open a bottle of ointment and began wetting one of the cotton balls.

  “Whimsical,” Willis added, mustache twitching as he sipped his tea.

  “Whatever,” Ash said. “The point is, the Professor thought it was a waste to have the most brilliant minds in all of history at his fingertips and not actually use them. So instead of hiring people from his own time, he took a time machine back to find the best of the best. You know, the greatest pilot, and the strongest man, and the most brilliant medical mind—”

  “That’s me,” Chandra chirped. “Now hold tight, because this is going to sting like a mother.”

  She pressed the cotton ball to Dorothy’s arm, and the bullet wound flared. Dorothy swore and tried to jerk away, but Chandra held tight to her wrist.

  “Do you want your arm to get infected, turn green, and fall off?” she asked.

  “N-no,” Dorothy stuttered. The pain had made her eyes water.

  “Good. Then hold still.”

  Dorothy clenched her teeth and nodded, looking back at the wall of pictures to distract herself from the pain. There was one last photograph, but it’d been ripped across the face so that she could see only the man’s shoulders and the edge of his collar.

  Below, it read, Roman Estrada.

  “Roman,” she breathed, momentarily forgetting the pain in her arm. She thought of the dark-haired boy with the wicked smile. When you followed the white rabbit down the rabbit hole, you fell into a world where time is a circle instead of a line. Her mouth felt suddenly dry. “He was part of this?”

  “Yeah, he was.” Ash’s voice sounded thicker than it had a moment ago, and there was something complicated happening behind his eyes. “Roman was the Professor’s first hire, but they got into this huge fight about a year ago. That’s when Roman left to join the Cirkus.”

  Dorothy frowned, watching the emotion flick across Ash’s face. There’s something he’s not telling me, she thought. But that made sense. They’d only just met, after all. Only a fool would blurt out all his secrets.

  She sat up a little straighter. At least this explained why Roman had this Professor person’s journal. He must’ve stolen it.

  “What’s the Cirkus?” she asked.

  “The Black Cirkus,” Chandra said. “They’re the bad guys.”

  Dorothy remembered the images she’d seen painted on the walls back in the city. Repeating black circus tents. The past is our right!

  “What do they want?” she asked.

  “They want to go back in time,” said Ash. “They seem to think that’s the key to fixing all our problems.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Ash shot her a withering look and said only, “No.”

  Dorothy bit her lip to keep it from curling. Ash threw out that no like it was obvious, but really, what sort of problems couldn’t you fix with time travel? She was inclined to dislike these Cirkus people because of how they’d kidnapped and tried to kill her, but it sounded like they had the right idea.

  Ash continued. “Time travel is . . . complicated. Mostly, if you go back and try to change something, you end up screwing things up even more.”

  “So you don’t do anything?” Dorothy asked, disappointed. “Isn’t that dull?”

  “Yes,” muttered Chandra.

  “We’re looking for the Professor.” Ash shot Chandra a look that she pretended not to see. “We go back in time to places we think he might have visited. He took the Dark Star—”

  “Dark Star?” asked Dorothy.

  “It’s another time machine.”

  “Like yours?”

  “Better than mine. The Professor took it about a year ago and disappeared. He could be anywhere, in any time. The Black Cirkus is . . . problematic, but the Professor will know how to handle them. We just have to find him and bring him back.”

  Dorothy studied Ash’s face, wondering if he knew about the Professor’s journal. If it was this important to find him, they could probably use any help they could get. She could feel the slim, leather book shift beneath the waistband of her pants, soaking wet but otherwise intact. She only hoped it was still legible.

  She didn’t have to tell him she had it. But her mental tally flashed through her head, reminding her that she owed them. Chandra had already patched her up—twice—and they’d given her clothes and tea. . . .

  She found herself glancing over at Willis. We were all very worried, he’d said. Like she was their friend.

  Dorothy chewed her lip. She didn’t have friends. They’d never stayed anywhere long enough for her to make one, and, anyway, her mother thought they were unnecessary. Loretta only ever trusted her daughter, and the people she could pay. Her circle of confidants had been small.

  Dorothy’s had been even smaller—she only trusted herself. These people weren’t friends, but she didn’t want to be in their debt, either. Handing over the journal would make them even.

  Resigned, she tugged the book loose of its hiding place, dangling it between two fingers, like a dirty sock. “Would this help?”

  16

  Ash

  Ash stared at the tiny black book, blood pumping in his ears.

  Where did she get it? It was only the first of about a dozen questions racing through his head, but the others were mostly variations on the same theme.

  Like, How did she find it? and When? and What the actual hell?

  Then, Dorothy said, “I found this back at the hotel,” and Ash felt like an idiot.

  Of course.

  Roman had ransacked the Professor’s office the night he’d left to join the Black Cirkus. At first, it’d looked like he’d just torn stuff up. Bookshelves were overturned, boxes ripped open, books scattered across the floor. He must’ve stolen the journal then.

  Ash thought of the time machine hidden in the depths of the Fairmont’s garage, looking like a carbon copy of the Dark Star. There was one mystery solved. The time machine’s blueprints were in the journal.

  He cleared his throat. “Where’s Zora?” he asked, surprised by how normal his voice sounded.

  Chandra said, “She was tying up her Jet Ski when I—”

  “Get h
er.”

  Chandra grumbled something about saying please, and then Ash heard her footsteps in the hall. He didn’t watch her go—didn’t dare move his eyes from the journal in Dorothy’s hand. They’d spent months sorting through scraps and scribbles, desperate, hoping for a forgotten note dashed off on a fast-food napkin, a date doodled into the corner of a notebook.

  And now—this. Something that could lead them straight to the Professor himself. It seemed too good to be true. Ash half expected it to disappear.

  And then—it did disappear.

  Ash blinked. “The hell? Where’d it go?”

  “Someplace safe,” said Dorothy, stretching her fingers. “I want a bit more information before I hand it over.”

  He exhaled very slowly. “You have no idea how valuable that is.”

  Her eyes flashed. “So tell me.”

  Ash didn’t like the look on her face. It was a look that said she already knew exactly how valuable the journal was, that she’d known long before she took it out and waved it in front of his nose. She meant to use it as leverage.

  The muscles in his shoulders knotted together. It was difficult for him to pinpoint how he felt just then. Excited about the journal, frustrated with Dorothy.

  And—underneath all of that—light-headed, like he might actually faint if he didn’t remind himself to breathe at regular intervals.

  He thought, without meaning to, I might not die after all.

  It was a raw, deeply personal thing to hope for, and he was embarrassed for thinking it in front of Dorothy. Which was ridiculous. Dorothy didn’t know what he was thinking.

  “Okay.” He ran a hand through his hair and found that it was still damp with sweat and engine grease. Already, he knew that he couldn’t tell her the real reason he needed to find the Professor. The thought of admitting to her that the woman he loved was going to kill him bothered him for reasons he didn’t care to look at too closely. But he could tell her something.

  “The thing about time travel is that so much of what we know is theoretical,” he said. “Scientists spent centuries studying concepts and coming up with ideas, but they were never tested, because they couldn’t be. Until the Professor came along.”

  Dorothy frowned. “Is this what the Chronology Protection Agency was for? You all were supposed to go back in time and do experiments and things?”

  “Yes. But, before we came along, the Professor spent years performing experiments of his own, all of which he documented in that little book you found. One of the things he discovered was that time is infinitely more complex than anyone ever imagined. People always thought of it like a river that only moves in one direction—forward. But it’s much more like a . . . well, a pond for lack of a better metaphor.”

  “Time is a circle, not a line,” Dorothy murmured, almost to herself.

  Ash blinked, surprised by this. Time travel was difficult to explain, and even more difficult to understand. It took most people a while to catch on.

  His opinion of Dorothy shifted to include this new information. She was smarter than he’d given her credit for being. Possibly much smarter.

  “That’s it exactly,” he said, studying her. “Time is moving all around us, all at once. The Chronology Protection Agency was supposed to figure out what happens when you go back in time and start changing things. But, before we could begin our mission, there was this massive earthquake.”

  “That’s what flooded the city?” Dorothy asked.

  “There were actually a bunch of earthquakes,” Chandra cut in. “There was a 4.7 in 2071 and a 6.9 in 2073.”

  “Chandra’s right,” Ash said. “There were a few earthquakes leading up to it, but the Cascadia Fault quake, also sometimes referred to as the mega-quake, was the big one. It was a 9.3 on the Richter scale, easily the most devastating earthquake in US history. It completely wiped out the West Coast, taking something like thirty-five thousand people with it. It was so bad that the United States couldn’t figure out how to fix the city afterward, so they decided to move the borders of the country.”

  Dorothy’s eyebrows went up. “I’m sorry . . . move the borders? What does that mean?”

  “It means that, officially, the United States starts near the Rocky Mountains and ends at the Mississippi River.”

  Dorothy was just about to ask what had happened to the East Coast when a larger question occurred to her. “We’re not in America anymore?”

  Ash shook his head. “This area is called the Western Territories now. It’s a no-man’s-land.”

  Dorothy chewed her lip, and Ash thought he saw a flicker of fear move across her features. It surprised him. She hadn’t seemed capable of fear.

  After a moment, she said, “That’s terrible, but I don’t understand what it has to do with time travel.”

  Ash hesitated, remembering. Before the Cascadia Fault quake, they’d all gone back to July 20, 1969, to watch Apollo 11 land on the moon. It hadn’t been their best trip—they didn’t have a place to watch the footage, so they’d gathered in a crowded hotel lobby. It’d been too hot, and the footage was fuzzy, the reception terrible. But it had also been awesome in the truest sense of the word. Invoking of awe.

  And then, only a few hours later, they’d exited the anil to find their world changed. Water covering the city. Destruction in every direction.

  A lump formed in Ash’s throat. He paused, trying to find a way to explain.

  “The earthquake doesn’t have anything to do with time travel,” said Zora, interrupting his thoughts. Ash hadn’t noticed her hovering at the door to the kitchen, but now she pulled up a chair next to him and sat down, shrugging off her jacket. Her face was perfectly impassive, like she was wearing a mask, but Ash found himself studying it a little more carefully than usual, looking for some hint that she was thinking about the day her life had changed forever.

  Zora seemed to intentionally avoid his eyes as she continued. “My father had a difficult time continuing his research after the earthquake. I mean, everyone had a hard time; we all . . . we all lost people we loved. But he just couldn’t move on. He was supposed to be studying time travel, but he couldn’t stop researching crustal deformation and fault slip rates.”

  “That’s earthquake stuff,” Chandra added. “He was obsessed.”

  Ash watched Zora, waiting to see if she’d say anything else. But she only stared ahead, eyes focused on nothing in particular, her expression stony.

  There was more to the story, of course. But it wasn’t Ash’s story to tell, so he cleared his throat, moving on. “And then he disappeared, about a year ago. He took the other time machine and vanished. We think he went back in time to do something, but he didn’t tell us where he was going—or when he was going.”

  “So this journal . . .” Dorothy stopped twisting her necklace at her neck, and the chain unraveled, causing the locket to twitch at her collarbone like a dead fish. Ash hadn’t seen her pull the journal out of its hiding place, but it was suddenly in her hand. “You think he wrote down where and when he went?”

  “The Professor kept meticulous notes,” he said, watching her quick fingers flip through the pages. “If he were going somewhere, he would’ve explained why. We just have to read the final entry.”

  Dorothy paused to read something. She looked up again, and Ash felt a sudden jolt, but he told himself it was more about the journal than the intensity of Dorothy’s green eyes.

  She said, “I’ll give it to you under one condition.”

  The adrenaline hit Ash then. He wanted to rip the journal out of Dorothy’s hands, but he held himself back.

  Did that mean there was something there?

  “I could just take it from you,” he said. But even as the words left his lips, he felt a flicker of doubt. Could he?

  As though reading his mind, Dorothy’s mouth curved into a small, private smile. “You could try.”

  “Fine. What’s your condition?”

  “I want a favor.”

  Ash’s firs
t impulse was to refuse. He didn’t want to owe Dorothy anything, wasn’t sure he trusted her to be reasonable with her request. But then his eyes landed on the soft leather cover of the Professor’s journal, and he felt something inside of him shift.

  Who was he kidding? He would have given her anything she asked for if it meant reading the Professor’s final thoughts.

  Heart hammering, he asked, “What kind of favor?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I’m not agreeing to a favor unless you tell me—”

  “Ash,” Zora said, her hand suddenly on his arm. Ash stopped talking, ashamed of himself. Whatever he was feeling about reading the Professor’s journal, he knew Zora must be feeling it times a hundred.

  He lifted his eyes to hers. Of course, they would do anything.

  “One favor,” he said to Dorothy.

  Something like triumph passed over Dorothy’s face. She placed the journal on the kitchen table.

  Holding his breath, Ash picked it up, and turned to the last entry.

  LOG ENTRY—OCTOBER 23, 2076

  04:43 HOURS

  THE WORKSHOP

  It’s only been a few hours since my last entry, but I had to get this down.

  I—I can hardly keep my hand steady enough to write, I’m shaking so badly.

  These numbers can’t be right. But they are right. I’ve run the calculations three times now. I know they’re right.

  And if they’re right, that means . . .

  Oh God. I can’t make myself write it out. I need more data first. It would be irresponsible to posit this theory without the appropriate amount of research to back it up. I need to gather more information and . . . and develop a testable prediction and . . .

  I can’t do any of that here. The electricity is spotty, and half my books and notes are underwater. And I’ll need access to some very specific information. Information I won’t be able to find here—now.

  This is a little out there, but stay with me. I read about an old army complex called Fort Hunter in a book Natasha gave me years ago, Top Ten Secret Military Bases in the United States.

  I have the book in front of me now. The bases have all been shut down, so the book is able to go into incredible detail, telling you everything from how to get inside to what kind of research they were involved in to whether anyone ever successfully broke in.