Stolen Time Read online

I could tell he was nervous about bringing this up. Our arguments have only increased over the last few weeks. I’ve been trying to talk Roman into moving into our spare room, but he insists on living in Tent City. He says he likes it there, but I don’t see how that could be possible. There’ve been more riots, more protests. No one knows how to help the people of Tent City anymore. The state has run out of money, and there’s no chance of finding them new homes.

  Most of the city pretends the tents aren’t even there.

  Anyway, I digress.

  We found Willis in a trailer behind the main tent. If it weren’t for his size, I doubt I would’ve recognized him. The photographs I saw showed a snarling beast man, but Willis wasn’t like that at all. He was sitting on an overturned barrel, playing a game of solitaire with dog-eared playing cards, and he looked . . . lonely, for lack of a better word. When we showed up, he just seemed glad to have someone to talk to.

  I’m not sure he believed my story about time travel, and the future, but he agreed to come with us anyway.

  “I don’t care for circus life,” he explained, as we made our way back to the Dark Star. “Everyone treats you like a freak, and the tents are cold at night. You get tired of people walking past and gawking at you.”

  I couldn’t be sure I heard correctly, but I’m fairly certain that Roman said, “I know exactly what that’s like.”

  Is that what living in Tent City feels like?

  And, if he hates it so much, why won’t he let us help him?

  26

  Ash

  MARCH 17, 1980, FORT HUNTER COMPLEX

  Ash peered down the service-road tunnel—empty. Whoever had been on the other end of Private Arnold’s walkie-talkie had either bought the lie that everything was fine and dandy, or he wasn’t in any hurry to come check things out.

  “Willis?” Ash said. “Blueprints?”

  Willis pulled the tablet out of the waistband of his jeans (where he’d stowed it so the soldiers wouldn’t catch a glimpse of the newfangled tech) and tapped the screen, sending blue light dancing over the grimy brick walls.

  “According to the Professor’s journal, he was looking for something here, in the east wing.” Willis tilted the screen toward Ash, motioning to a long hallway that ran down the side of the map. “The most direct route is down this service road, but it means walking through the gateroom, which is the most populated portion of the complex. That would have been fine had we arrived at two in the morning, as planned, but now—”

  “Now it’ll be busy.” Ash chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Is there another route we can take? One that avoids people?”

  “We could try weaving through the complex and entering from another door. Here, perhaps.” Willis motioned to a door on the other side of the wing. “But that could take hours, and I’m not sure it’ll make much of a difference. There will be cameras between here and there. Lots of them.”

  Zora turned to Willis. “Can you find where they keep the security monitors on that thing?”

  “Sure . . . looks like there’s a control room two floors up, down the north hall.” Willis nodded into the darkness. “There’s a stairway about twenty-five yards that way.”

  “Ash and I will head there to see if we can find a way to get the camera feed to loop. That’ll take care of the cameras, but the rest of you will need to find a way across the gateroom and into the east wing without being seen. We’ll catch up with you there.”

  Ash frowned. She said all of this as though it were a plan they’d already agreed upon, but it wasn’t. They were all supposed to go to the east wing together.

  He opened his mouth to argue, but Willis beat him to it. “I’m not sure that will be possible.”

  “Have faith, Willis. I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Zora said, clapping him on the shoulder. And then, abruptly, she broke into a run, stolen gun thudding at her hip.

  Ash stared after her, his mind momentarily blank. Then, when he realized she wasn’t planning on waiting for him, he swore and started after her. “Um, okay, see you all in the east wing.”

  He managed a single step down the tunnel before Dorothy caught his arm. Her grip was light, but Ash felt the heat of it burn through his skin.

  “Should we really be splitting up?” she asked, voice tinged with fear.

  His pulse sped up.

  No, he wanted to say. We shouldn’t.

  But Zora was already halfway down the hall, the sound of her boots echoing hollowly off the walls. He didn’t know what was wrong, but he couldn’t let her run off alone.

  He removed Dorothy’s hand from his arm gently. “I’ve gotta go after her.”

  Dorothy’s expression changed, but Ash couldn’t say exactly how. For a split second it was as though a curtain had been pulled back and, beneath it, Ash thought he saw . . . concern. She was worried for him.

  Ash couldn’t remember the last time someone outside of his team had worried about him. There’d been a couple of girls during the war, but he hadn’t been with any of them long enough for real feelings to develop. Sure, they’d made promises to wait for each other, and declared their devotion, but it’d all felt superficial. Like playacting.

  This was different. Hesitant. Ash had the feeling of two predators circling each other, waiting for the other to blink.

  “I’ll be careful,” he said.

  Dorothy merely nodded and looked away.

  But as he ran down the tunnel, Ash couldn’t shake the feeling that something between them had shifted.

  Ash caught up with Zora faster than he’d expected to. She wasn’t running anymore, but walking with intention, her expression grim.

  “What the hell?” Ash said. “I thought the plan was to stick together.”

  Zora’s eyes slid toward him. Unbelievably, she looked frightened. “Plans change.”

  “You really think you can get the camera feed to loop?”

  Zora shrugged, not answering. Ash studied her profile in the dim light. He’d never known Zora to be reckless. But he’d never known her to be afraid, either. He didn’t know which one bothered him more, but it occurred to him that if Zora was scared, he should be, too.

  “You saw something,” he said, thinking of how her eyes had narrowed on the row of soldiers standing guard at the complex entrance.

  Zora was chewing on her lower lip. She said, her voice unrecognizable, “Roman.”

  Ash didn’t understand. “Roman what?”

  “He was standing with the other soldiers guarding the front entrance.” Her lips twisted. “Like he was one of them.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “He doesn’t have any exotic matter. Even if that time machine he built actually works, physically, he can’t travel back in time.”

  “But it was him, Ash. I’d bet my life on it.”

  Ash swallowed. Putting aside, for the moment, the question of how Roman got back here, there was still why. With all of history spread out before him, why would Roman come to 1980? Why break into a military fortress in the middle of the woods?

  But, of course, Ash already knew the answer to that. He thought of Quinn Fox’s inhuman voice.

  This man has discovered the secrets of time travel. . . . He could save thousands of lives. But he refuses.

  The Black Cirkus had been looking for the Professor, too. And Roman read the same journal entry they had.

  Something cold spread through Ash as the puzzle pieces started slotting into place. Over the last year, he and Zora had come up with dozens of reasons why the Professor hadn’t returned. He could’ve gotten distracted by some experiment, or maybe he was in hiding, or perhaps he had some master plan to save the world.

  Or the Black Cirkus could’ve found him first.

  Ash glanced at Zora and saw that she’d already worked this out on her own. “We need to get to the control room,” she said. She was holding her gun so tightly her knuckles had turned white. “If Roman’s here, w
e need to find him before he finds my father.”

  They made their way down the tunnel and up two flights of stairs in silence. Ash paused once they reached the end of the hall, lifting a hand to indicate that Zora should stay back. He peered around the corner.

  Dim yellow light shone from the control room. The door was ajar and, through it, Ash could see a single soldier studying a wall of boxy televisions, all displaying grainy images of black-and-white hallways.

  The soldier wore bulky headphones that covered his whole ears, and didn’t seem to hear them approach. Zora pulled the gun from her shoulder.

  Ash moved quickly, sliding one hand around the soldier’s mouth and using the other to grab his arm and twist it behind his back. The soldier stood and stumbled away from his chair, his headphones clattering to the floor.

  Zora moved into view, raising the gun. “Evening, sir.”

  The soldier tried to say something. Ash tightened his grip around his mouth.

  “Tab. Nice,” he said, nodding at the pink soda can on the man’s desk. He knelt, one hand still gripping the soldier’s arm, and then removed his hand from the guy’s mouth so he could rip an extension cord from the outlet in the wall. “I’ve always wanted to try that stuff.”

  “What are you doing here?” the soldier spat. “What do you want?”

  Ash began knotting the cord around the man’s bound hands. “Nothing of yours, so don’t bother getting all heroic. I’m just going to ask you to sit here for a few minutes while we take a look at your system.”

  Ash forced the soldier back into his chair and then tied the cord behind his back, finishing with a square-lashing knot that Willis himself wouldn’t have been able to pull apart.

  “My commanding officer will be here any minute,” the soldier continued. Ash groaned and looked around. There was a wad of napkins on the desk, probably left over from whatever this guy had eaten for breakfast. “When he gets here, he’ll—”

  Ash stuffed the napkins into the soldier’s mouth. “Sorry to do this, but we won’t be able to concentrate with you over here flapping your lips. Sit tight.” He swiped the can of Tab off the soldier’s desk and took a swig. “Not bad. Tastes like carbonated sugar.”

  Zora rolled her eyes. “Start looking.”

  They stared at the security screens in silence for a moment, studying the flickering black-and-white images. There were a dozen of them, stacked in four rows of three, and the images themselves showed hundreds, maybe even thousands of people moving down hallways and around corridors.

  Ash didn’t see how they were going to find anyone in this mess. His eyes moved to the white labels at the bottoms of each screen. NORAD Alternate Command Center, one read. And another, Global Strategic Warning/Space Surveillance Systems Center.

  His heartbeat ratcheted up a notch. He’d always known that the Professor must’ve gone back in time for a reason, to study something important, or prevent something terrible from happening. But now, staring at these security monitors, he realized how serious that reason might be. NORAD monitored incoming ballistic missiles and attacks on North America. And space surveillance was . . . what? Aliens?

  Ash held his breath as he scanned the monitors for the east wing. What was in the east wing?

  “So,” Zora murmured, eyes never leaving the screens. “Dorothy’s pretty.”

  Ash considered her from the corner of his eye. He knew what she was doing. Zora didn’t know how to handle her own emotions, so, when things got tense, she made other people talk about theirs so she could pretend to be composed and above it all in comparison.

  People tend not to notice that you’re freaking out when they’re droning on about themselves, she’d told him once.

  He knew all this, and yet he still found his fist tightening around the soda can. “You really want to talk about this now?”

  Zora had been gazing at the television screens, but now her eyes fixed on his face. She looked quickly away again, but not before Ash saw a flash of something raw and hollow. He felt a sudden flare of guilt.

  He had a lot riding on finding the Professor. So much, in fact, that he sometimes forgot the man was Zora’s father. That he was the only family she had left. Offering her this distraction was an act of mercy.

  So he sighed theatrically and said, “Pretty? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Please.” A small smile flickered over Zora’s lips, the only thanks he’d get for offering up his personal life in sacrifice to the greater good. “I saw the way you were looking at her.”

  “I look at her like she’s a girl. End of story.”

  “No, you look at her like she’s a girl.” Zora wiggled her shoulders in a way that made Ash decidedly uncomfortable.

  He smacked her in the arm. “So she’s pretty. Lots of things are pretty. Sunsets are pretty.”

  “It’s not just that. It’s the way you talk to her, baiting her with all that sweetheart crap. Teasing her. I’ve never seen you act like that around a girl.” She shot Ash a sidelong glance. “You like her.”

  Ash grunted. “It ain’t like that.”

  “She likes you, too.”

  “Yeah, like a snake likes a mouse.”

  “Come on, Ash, don’t be an idiot. You have to have noticed. She flirts with you. She finds dumb reasons to touch you. She says things she knows will piss you off, just to get a reaction. She likes you.”

  Ash flushed, remembering the moment in the tunnel, the emotion he could’ve sworn he saw on Dorothy’s face before she told him to be careful.

  He considered that Dorothy might not be trying to manipulate him at all. That Zora was right. That she liked him.

  Did he like her?

  “You could think about this more strategically, you know,” Zora said.

  “Is your mouth still moving?”

  “I’m serious. We know Dorothy isn’t the girl from your vision. Aside from the obvious fact that she hasn’t given herself an albino makeover, you weren’t ever supposed to meet her. Bringing her to the future could’ve altered things.” Zora glanced up again, studying him. “Maybe, if you fall for Dorothy instead of this girl with the white hair you could prevent the whole . . .”

  Zora groaned, letting her tongue roll out of her mouth as she mimed getting stabbed.

  “That was Oscar-worthy, really. You missed your calling.”

  Zora shrugged and went back to the television. “I’m still young.”

  Ash tried to stay focused on the screens, but his eyesight had blurred. For the past year, he’d avoided any girl who’d dared look his way. He told himself it’d make things easier. That his best chance of keeping the future from catching up with him would be to cut himself off. And if that happened to be a lonely existence, well, at least he still got to exist.

  But Zora had a point. Dorothy wasn’t supposed to be here.

  Ash cleared his throat, pushing the thought away, for now. Zora was leaning forward, squinting at one of the many figures on the screen.

  Ash’s pulse jumped in his chest. Here we go.

  She exhaled. “Ash . . .”

  If she said something else, Ash didn’t hear it. The man on the screen was too tall to be Roman. He had dark skin and short black hair sprinkled with quite a bit more white than Ash had seen in it before. He wore a familiar long black trench coat flapping open over a faded T-shirt and jeans.

  Zora pressed her palm to the fuzzy, black-and-white image of the man on the screen and whispered, her voice cracking, “Dad?”

  27

  Dorothy

  Dorothy pinched her lower lip, trying very hard not to frown. She, Willis, and Chandra had spent the few minutes since Zora and Ash had disappeared down the tunnel trying to come up with a plan to get across the very crowded gateroom.

  So far, Chandra was the only one with an idea. Dorothy wanted to be supportive, but the whole thing sounded . . .

  Well, it sounded ludicrous.

  Dorothy said, as politely as she could muster, “Come again?”

  C
handra went back into the detainment room and knelt beside the unconscious soldier, struggling to unbutton his shirt one-handed. She seemed to keep forgetting that one of her arms was imprisoned inside a sling, which resulted in strange contortions of her body as she tried to use her fingers.

  “Damn,” she muttered, watching one of the soldier’s buttons pop off and shoot across the floor. “Look, it’ll be easy. You just have to put on this dude’s clothes, pretend to be a soldier, and walk across the room like you belong. Simple. I’d do it myself, but I’m short and . . . roundish, and this guy is very much tall and not. And Willis can’t do it because. Well. Duh.”

  Now Dorothy did frown. “Duh?”

  “It means ‘obviously,’ but there’s a negative connotation.” Willis glanced down at the soldier. “He is a rather dainty little man.”

  “Thank you, Captain Literal,” Chandra muttered. “Anyway, Dorothy can lead the two of us across the gateroom like we’re her prisoners. See? Easy.”

  Another button popped off of the soldier’s shirt. Willis lurched forward, trapping it beneath a boot. “I don’t know, Chandra,” he said. “It seems . . . goofy.”

  Chandra tugged one of the soldier’s arms out of his shirt. “Dressing as the enemy was a common movie trope in the eighties. They did it in Star Wars, remember? ‘Aren’t you a little short for a Stormtrooper?’ You loved that scene.”

  Willis frowned. It was an expression that seemed to involve every muscle in his stonelike face. His brows were deeply furrowed, his jaw clenched. Even his mustache looked sad. “Yes, but this isn’t a movie. People are going to notice us.”

  “And I don’t see how that uniform is going to make me look like a man,” Dorothy added. “My hair—”

  “There are lady soldiers now,” Chandra said. “Wait, 1980s . . . are there lady soldiers?”

  “I believe there are a few,” Willis said.

  “Anyway, you don’t have to look like a man, you just have to walk us across the gateroom without getting shot.”

  “Is there a high possibility of us being shot?” Dorothy asked, her throat strangely constricted.