Twisted Fates Read online

  I should explain. Ever since you and I first traveled back in time, I’ve been haunted by memories of my own death. I know exactly how and approximately when it is going to happen.

  We will go to the future. Ash and I will fight, and I will be shot. I will bleed to death in the ashes of our ruined world. My last memory will be of that black, sunless sky.

  We planned to save the world together, you and I, and my one regret is that I will not be alive to see it happen. But you, Dorothy. You still have so much life ahead of you.

  Use it well.

  Roman

  Dorothy closed her eyes and now the tears finally fell. It wasn’t the breakdown she’d been picturing, though. This felt more like she was gathering her strength.

  She knew what she had to do.

  She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and pushed herself to her feet, curling her fingers around Roman’s dagger. She didn’t think he’d meant to leave the dagger for her, but she decided to take it all the same. She had an idea of how she might use it to save the world, like they’d planned.

  It was time.

  56

  Ash

  NOVEMBER 11, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  Ash stood in the small boat, easing his weight from leg to leg to keep his balance. Black water lapped at the sides, sending the boat rocking, but Ash moved, easily, with the motion. He’d grown used to the water over the years.

  Trees seemed to glow in the darkness around him. Ghost trees. Dead trees. Water pressed against their hollow, white trunks, moving with the wind.

  Ash counted ripples to pass the time while he waited. Seven. Twelve. Twenty-three. He lost track and was about to start again when her light appeared in the distant black. It was small, like the single headlight of a motorcycle, followed by the rumbling sound of an engine. He stood straighter. Part of him hadn’t expected her to come. But of course she would. She always did.

  Leave now, he told himself. There was still time. He felt sure that she wouldn’t come after him if he left before she got here. He knew how this night would end if he stayed. He’d seen this exact moment a dozen times. A hundred, if he counted dreams. But he stayed still, his hand clenching and unclenching at his side.

  He wanted to see her, even knowing what it meant. He had to see her one last time.

  The boat drew closer. She was hidden beneath that hood, but her hair had blown loose. Long, white strands dancing in the darkness.

  She pulled up next to him and cut the engine.

  “I didn’t think you’d come.” Her voice was lower than he’d expected, practically a purr. She reached up, pushed those white strands of hair back under her hood with a flick of her hand.

  Ash swallowed. He didn’t see the knife, but he knew she had it. “It doesn’t have to end like this.”

  Her hand disappeared inside her coat. “Of course it does.”

  57

  Dorothy

  NOVEMBER 11, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  Dorothy was about to open the door when it flew open on its own, slamming into the wall with a crack.

  Zora stood before her, gun in hand.

  “You bitch.” She shoved Dorothy against the wall and pressed the barrel of her gun to her forehead.

  “What—” Dorothy tried to squirm away, but Zora had an arm angled across her collarbone, and she leaned into it, increasing the pressure on Dorothy’s chest.

  Dimly, Dorothy registered the bodies of three men lying in the hallway behind her, unconscious.

  The guards, she realized, with growing horror. Zora had taken them all out.

  “What did you do to him?” Zora said, and Dorothy heard the hammer of her gun click into place. “Tell me or I swear to God I’ll shoot off the rest of your face!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dorothy said through the tightness in her throat.

  Zora cocked her head, and now Dorothy could see that, beneath all that anger, she was barely holding herself together. She was breathing fast, and her eyes were wet and wide and desperately unhappy. Something was very badly wrong.

  A chill went through Dorothy, and it had nothing to do with the gun still pressed to her forehead. “Zora,” she asked, more firmly now. “What happened?”

  Doubt flickered across Zora’s face. She lowered the gun. “You really don’t know.”

  She didn’t say it like it was a question and, before Dorothy could respond, she’d dug something out of her pocket and thrust it into Dorothy’s hands.

  It was a note.

  Outside the anil. Midnight.

  Whatever Dorothy had braced herself for, it wasn’t this. Her eyes traveled over the words scrawled across the ripped sheet of paper, the way they looped and curved, angling slightly to the left.

  This note—it was written in her handwriting.

  Dorothy breathed and read the note again, trying to understand. It was her handwriting and yet she hadn’t written it.

  And that wasn’t all. There—that splotch of ink over the word anil, it reminded her of the fountain pens in Avery’s study, so unlike the cheap plastic things people used now. As far as she knew, there was only one such pen left in the entire world, and it was down in the basement of this hotel, along with the rest of the things she and Roman had taken from the past.

  She looked up at Zora, her mind spinning. “Where did you get this?”

  A flash of fury lit Zora’s face. “You left it in Ash’s room an hour ago, Fox. I found it on his bed.”

  But . . . but she didn’t. She hadn’t. She was about to say so when—

  Oh God. Dorothy brought a trembling hand to her mouth, remembering. Back in the parking garage, hadn’t Eliza claimed to see her meeting with Ash on the docks outside the Dead Rabbit?

  And then, again, she said she’d seen Dorothy helping Ash escape from Mac. Dorothy had done neither of those things, and so she’d assumed that Eliza was lying. It hadn’t even occurred to her to consider the alternative, and now she felt stupid for not seeing it.

  She lived in a world where time travel was real.

  It was possible she just hadn’t done those things yet.

  Dorothy took a step closer to Zora, feeling as though her breath and her heartbeat were lodged in her throat together. “You asked me what I did to him? What do you think I did to him?”

  Zora’s voice was steel as she said, “Let me show you.”

  The anil looked iridescent in the distance, a soap bubble sitting atop the waves. And then it looked like a jagged crack through ice, its sharp edges spiderwebbing into the sky. It was a tunnel made of mist and smoke. A distant star. The beginning of a tornado.

  Dorothy blinked and looked away, her heart speeding up. She tightened her grip around Zora’s waist. She felt her breath coming faster.

  Zora cut the engine on the Jet Ski and came to a stop, sending a spray of water between them and the anil. When the water settled and the growl of her motor died down, she jerked her chin. “See for yourself.”

  An object sat in the water just before the time tunnel, rocking gently on the waves. Dimly, Dorothy registered that it was a boat. Ash’s boat. Something deep and red stained the water around it. Dorothy wouldn’t have seen it if they weren’t so close to the anil, the light of the time tunnel illuminating the blood.

  There’s so much of it, she thought, horror rising inside of her. Everywhere she looked, there was red. It coated the water like a veil.

  “He knew he was going to die like this,” Zora said, her voice strangely distant. “He’d seen it happen.”

  Dorothy thought of Roman’s note.

  I’ve been haunted by memories of my own death.

  A chill moved through her.

  “I didn’t do this,” she insisted. Her fingers curled into Zora’s shoulders, but Zora didn’t flinch. “Zora, I swear to you, I didn’t.”

  Zora stared at the anil. Her dark eyes absorbed the otherworldly light and shone like an animal’s.

  Finally, she spoke.

  “But you w
ill.”

  LOG ENTRY—AUGUST 6, 2074

  17:41 HOURS

  THE WORKSHOP

  I don’t know what I was expecting to find in Nikola’s notes, but this is beyond my wildest dreams.

  Apparently, Nikola never got over his brush with time travel. Remember how I wrote that he was once shocked by a jolt of electricity coming off one of his coils? He’s always claimed that, at that moment, he “saw the Past, Present, and Future at the same time.”

  After we talked about this, I was certain that what he saw was just a product of his brain short-circuiting. A near-death experience that he’s interpreted as time travel. Real time travel, as you know, requires three things:

  The presence of an anil

  Exotic matter

  A vessel

  Nikola had none of these things on him at the time that the jolt of electricity went through him so, despite my initial hopes, I had to eventually admit that he didn’t actually travel through time.

  Now, though, I wonder.

  Nikola’s greatest dream was to be able to prove that you could harness the electrical power of the earth and use it to create a kind of “free energy.” Now, over the years, that theory has been proven false. His theories about how the earth transmitted energy just weren’t true.

  But the strange thing is that those very theories are true inside of an anil.

  So what if he really was on to something? What if there’s a way to travel through time without an anil or exotic matter, or a vessel?

  Tesla’s notes include very detailed information on how to do just that. All I’ll have to do is inject a tiny bit of the exotic matter directly into my person.

  This sounds crazy . . . but someone has to test it.

  Here goes nothing.

  Part Four

  The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

  —Nikola Tesla

  58

  Dorothy

  JUNE 12, 1913, JUST OUTSIDE SEATTLE

  Dorothy hesitated outside the closed office door, unsure of how to proceed. This was her house—or, well, it would’ve been her house, if she’d gone through with the wedding. Now she supposed it was only Avery’s house.

  Should she just . . . knock? She didn’t want to interrupt anything. She didn’t know how genius worked, but it seemed entirely possible that the man inside this room was on the verge of some grand discovery and she was about to break his concentration. One knock could alter the entire future of the human race and, frankly, she’d done enough of that already.

  Holding her breath, she lowered her hand to the doorknob and let herself in.

  The man was hunched over Avery’s ornate, wooden writing desk, scribbling furiously. He didn’t look up as Dorothy swept across the room, stopping before the narrow table where Roman’s dagger sat on a stained and rumpled handkerchief.

  Staring down at the dagger, Dorothy felt her stomach turn over. Ash’s blood still coated the thick blade and stained the white cloth. It’d been days, and yet she hadn’t been able to bring herself to clean it. She could still remember the feel of that dagger against her palm, the sudden give of skin and bone as she thrust it into Ash’s chest.

  Fingers twitching, she picked it up.

  “Dear?”

  Dorothy’s eyes snapped back to the hunched-over man at the writing desk. He still hadn’t turned around, but now he lifted a hand, fingers held a few inches apart. “Do you know whether they’ve started making those little brownies yet? The fudgy chocolate ones with the nuts?”

  Dorothy hurriedly wrapped her mother’s handkerchief around Roman’s dagger. “Brownies?” she asked, distracted.

  “The Little—oh wait.” The man pinched his nose between two fingers, and said, almost to himself, “Little Debbie wasn’t founded until 1960, and then they only sold those awful oatmeal pies. One does forget these things.”

  “I could bring you coffee?” Dorothy offered. Avery made good coffee, thick and rich. It was one of the few things he did well. “Or tea?”

  “Coffee would be grand.” The man swiveled around in his chair. He had his back to the small desk lamp now, and it left his features bathed in shadow. Dorothy could only make out the bottom half of his nose, and his wide, bright smile.

  When he saw the dagger clutched in Dorothy’s hands, the smile faded. He scratched his chin. “Aw, yes. I suppose it’s time to deal with that.”

  Dorothy swallowed. “I’m sorry, did you want to—”

  “No, no, dear, you’ve proven yourself quite adept.” He smiled, again, but this time it was tinged with sadness.

  Dorothy began to turn toward the door.

  “Wait,” the man said, and Dorothy hesitated, dread creeping up her skin.

  The man cleared his throat. It seemed to take him a moment to work out what he wanted to say and, when he finally spoke, his words were hesitant.

  “Does my . . . does my daughter know that I’m still alive?”

  Dorothy closed her eyes. Her palms had grown clammy, and her heart was beating loud and fast in her ears. It embarrassed her, a little, that she was so nervous. She’d been expecting this question since she first brought the man here and, honestly, it came as something of a relief that he’d finally asked. But that didn’t make the answer any easier to give.

  “No, Professor Walker,” she said, looking up. “Zora thinks that you died at Fort Hunter in 1980.”

  Acknowledgments

  As always, there are so many people I want to thank! Twisted Fates has a fantastic team of people supporting it behind the scenes, so big thanks to everyone at HarperTeen for everything they did to bring this book out into the world. Thank you to my editors, Erica Sussman and Elizabeth Lynch, who have been championing this series from the beginning, and also to Louisa Currigan, and to Shannon Cox and Sabrina Abballe in marketing, Alison Donalty and Jenna Stempel-Lobell in design, Alexandra Rakaczki in copyediting and, finally, to Jean McGinley, Rachel Horowitz, Alpha Wong, Sheala Howley, and Kaitlin Loss in subrights for taking care of the Chronology Protection Agency abroad. Also, thank you to the entire Harper sales team for helping this book find its people!

  And, of course, a huge thanks to my husband, Ron Williams, who let me read him chapters while he was cooking, and who asked great questions and pointed out dumb mistakes, and still tells people that this is his favorite series ever.

  About the Author

  Photo by Caroline Donofrio

  DANIELLE ROLLINS is the author of Stolen Time, Burning, Breaking, and the Merciless series (under pseudonym Danielle Vega). She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their cat, Goose. Find her online at www.daniellerollins.com and on Twitter and Instagram @vegarollins.

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  Copyright

  HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  TWISTED FATES. Copyright © 2020 by Danielle Rollins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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sp; Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-267999-4

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-267997-0

  2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321

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