Stolen Time Read online

  “Dope,” he muttered under his breath. He said a silent prayer of thanks that Zora hadn’t witnessed that particular exchange.

  Did you find yourself a little bride?, he imagined his best friend asking in that condescending tone she reserved especially for him. And she’d probably make kissing noises.

  As a general rule, he didn’t flirt, so at least that explained why he was so bad at it. He knew how to flirt—he lived with three rather attractive people, after all—but he’d lost his taste for it, the way someone might lose their taste for steak after nearly choking to death on a hunk of meat. It was hard to enjoy something when he knew it could kill him.

  Black water, he thought, remembering his vision. Dead trees . . .

  Ash double-checked the EM readings, to keep his mind off the girl and the vision and the fact that a drop of sweat was now creeping down his neck. The EM gauge had dropped to 45 percent after the crash, which was . . . well, it wasn’t great. Still not suicidal, but definitely entering maiming territory.

  He’d been on his way to 1908, to see some dumb old clock get built on a sidewalk outside a jewelry store. The clock in question—the Hoeslich clock—didn’t seem particularly special, but the Professor had once said it was cool how people used to build clocks in public spaces and pointed out this clock in particular, which was all the encouragement Ash had needed. He’d spent the last year following the thinnest leads possible, but, as he’d already exhausted all the obvious places the Professor might’ve gone, he was starting to get desperate.

  Unfortunately, he’d crash-landed several years too late. The EM was too volatile to attempt another trip now, so his only choice was to head back to the workshop and hope things stabilized enough to check the clock the next morning.

  Which meant losing another day in his rapidly dwindling supply of days.

  Ash tensed his shoulders and then released them again slowly, imagining each individual muscle going slack. His leather jacket shifted and settled with the familiar movement, like a second skin. It was a trick for stress relief he’d picked up during his first week at flight academy, back when the other guys joked that he’d treated the fighter jets like they might bite. He curled his fingers into fists and released them one by one, trying to ready himself for another unstable trip.

  “You don’t die today,” he said out loud, and the words calmed him, some. The only good thing about knowing how and when he was going to die was that it freed him up to do whatever he wanted in the meantime, knowing it couldn’t actually kill him. It was fairly lame as far as silver linings go, but still. It was something.

  Ash pushed the throttle to 2,000 RPMs. The Second Star lurched . . . the engine made a wheezing noise. Ash held his breath, waiting for something to go boom.

  After a tense moment, his ship began to rumble, and he took to the sky.

  The Puget Sound anil’s upper edge curved above the sea like the outline of a great reflective bubble. It looked like a glimmer of light dancing over the waves, a glare from the sun, or a trick of the eyes. Only when he was directly in front of it could he see that it was a tunnel.

  No, not really a tunnel, Ash thought. A chasm. A nothingness. You couldn’t look right at the anil without your mind skipping around, trying to make sense of the thing that clearly did not make sense. Sometimes it looked like a swirling mess of mist and smoke. Sometimes it looked like a sheet of solid ice. Sometimes it looked exactly like what it was—a crack in time.

  He aimed the nose of his ship toward the anil. Everything in the cockpit began to shake. Ash’s leftover sandwich trembled off the edge of the passenger seat and fell to the floor in a mess of lettuce and mayo. Candy wrappers whirled around him in an invisible wind. Thick sheets of water crashed toward the ship’s windshield and then dissolved into a swirling mist.

  Then, the Second Star leaped into light speed, shooting him into the future.

  Before he’d started traveling through time, the closest Ash had ever come to experiencing a tornado crashing through a hurricane while hail and rain hurtled from the sky was when he’d once tried to maneuver an F6F Hellcat through a hot zone. It’d been 1945, his first combat mission, and the clouds had been thick as soup. He took a wrong turn somewhere and, all of a sudden, the sky filled with bullets. He’d spent twenty terrifying minutes dodging enemy fire, hands gripping his yoke so tightly he thought he’d never be able to pry them off again. It seemed to take forever to reach safe air.

  Flying into an anil made that day look easy.

  Lightning flickered from the curved edges of the tunnel, and winds howled outside the ship’s thin walls. Ash struggled to hold the yoke steady. When he first became a pilot, his instructors all warned him never to fly in winds over 47 knots. Winds in an anil often rose above 100, but, when it was working properly, the EM formed a sort of protective bubble around the ship and its occupants, keeping the inclement weather from tearing their fragile human bodies apart.

  The dial on the EM gauge began to spin.

  “Hold on, Star,” Ash muttered. He didn’t dare take his hands off the yoke. Thunder rumbled behind him, and icy sleet thrashed around the edges of the EM’s bubble of safety. Lightning arced past his windshield—much closer than should’ve been possible had the EM been at full capacity. Ash flew the ship closer to the stormy, misty sides of the tunnel, where visibility was poor but the winds weren’t quite as strong.

  Prememories flashed through his head. Like always, they came on so suddenly that he could do little to prepare himself for what he saw.

  A rowboat surrounded by black water . . . Ghost trees glowing white in the darkness . . . A woman with a hood covering her head . . . White hair fluttering in the wind . . . A kiss . . . A knife . . .

  His eyelids flickered, but Ash forced them back open, gasping. He premembered the feel of cold steel between his ribs, followed by pain like he’d never experienced before. Sweat lined his forehead. He groped for the spot where he felt the knife slide into his body, but his fingers found only fabric and hard, warm skin. No wound. No blood. None of that had happened.

  Yet.

  Ash doubled over, stomach churning. The pain faded, but the prememories remained, playing on an endless loop at the back of his head. A rocking boat, and a girl with white hair kissing him, and then killing him. They were always the same. Always terrible.

  The Professor had explained prememories best.

  In an anil, all of time exists at once, he’d said in that slow, quiet voice of his. This confuses our fragile human brains, creating pathways in our memories where they shouldn’t exist yet. As a result, you’ll find yourself remembering things from days—sometimes up to a year—into the future, just as easily as you remember what you ate for breakfast this morning.

  Up to a year. Ash had started premembering the girl with the white hair and the dagger eleven months ago, and the prememories had only gotten stronger over the last few weeks. The Professor said that might happen as the event you’re premembering draws closer. If that was true, it meant that Ash had less than four weeks left to live.

  He blinked, refocusing on what was going on outside his windshield. The sleet had turned to hard rain, and the wind had calmed a bit, allowing Ash to fly the Second Star back to the center of the tunnel. Time had landmarks, same as anything else, and Ash recognized the familiar swirling pattern that marked the year 2077. His exit.

  He tightened his grip on the yoke and pulled the ship straight, toward a curl in the mist that was lighter than the smoky walls around it. It felt a bit like driving through the fog at night. Ash couldn’t always find the exact minute and hour he was looking for, but he had a knack for breaking down the months and days.

  Lightning flashed in the black, and the air around Ash grew thicker, wetter, until the Second Star was completely submerged in water.

  Home at last. Ash rubbed his eyelids with two fingers, unsurprised to see that his hands were shaking. The prememories had rattled him this time, more than usual. He could still feel the phantom ac
he of the dagger. A warning of things to come.

  He’d seen his own death a dozen times. Maybe more. He should be used to it by now.

  “Pull yourself together, soldier,” he muttered. He hadn’t been a soldier in nearly two years, but the word still rolled off his tongue more easily than his own name.

  He flicked on his headlights, and twin beams of light cut through the darkness of the water. He angled the nose of the ship upward and the Second Star bobbed to the surface. He glanced behind, eyes peeled for shadows passing across the water.

  The waves stayed still. But that didn’t mean he was alone.

  OCTOBER 14, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  The Professor’s workshop was half garage, half boathouse. The oddly shaped structure rose straight out of the water, the siding made of found bits of tin and plastic, the roof cobbled together from old tires and pieces of plywood. The workshop still had real glass windows and a door that functioned via remote control, a luxury Ash and Zora—the Professor’s only daughter—allowed themselves even though powering it cost a small fortune. Ash hit the control, and the door rumbled away from the wall, leaving ripples in the water around it. There was enough room in the station for two or three ships at least as large as the Second Star, but the only other vehicle inside was Ash’s motorboat. He flew the Second Star up next to it and pressed the remote to close the door behind him.

  The time machine’s headlights illuminated walls covered in hooks holding dirty tools, spare parts, and dozens—maybe hundreds—of designs, schematics, and maps of the world at various points in history. The maps weren’t legible anymore. The moisture in the air had warped the paper and made the ink bleed, but Ash didn’t take them down. He’d been to some of those places: the Fairmont hotel lobby to watch the moon landing in 1969; the Cubs World Series–winning game in 1908; the White House lawn for the inauguration of the first female president, in 2021. Zora said the maps hurt to look at, but Ash liked remembering.

  He began his postflight check, hitting switches and turning knobs until the Second Star lowered down to the water and the engine sputtered off. The green safety light clicked on, telling Ash he was good to exit. He unlatched his seat belt and pushed the door open, a headache already pounding at his temples.

  “Evening.”

  The voice came from the shadowy end of the dock, where the Second Star’s headlights didn’t reach. Ash’s hand twitched at his side, half moving for the navy-issued snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver he no longer carried. But then his eyes adjusted to the dark, and he could just make out the shape of a very tall girl sitting in a plastic patio chair, her long legs crossed in front of her. She was polishing a greasy bit of engine with a spare cloth.

  Ash relaxed and lowered himself to the dock, leaving the door to the cockpit open. “What are you doing here, Zora?”

  “Wanted to see whether you’d make it back alive.” She said this with no inflection, as though she were disappointed that he’d managed the feat.

  “Here I am. Alive, and still dead sexy.” Ash tried for a smile. Despite much evidence to the contrary, he liked to think it was a winning sort of smile. Zora didn’t look up from her engine.

  Ash stopped smiling. “You mad?”

  Zora spit on the cloth and worked it deeper into the crevices of a gear. She never yelled. Didn’t have to. In the past two years, her silences had gone from unnerving to brutal. They took up space and energy. They made Ash think of a great hulking animal sitting in the corner of a room, and he wasn’t supposed to look at it or even acknowledge that it was there.

  “Come on,” Ash urged. “Use your words.”

  Zora placed the engine in her lap and straightened, finally looking Ash in the eye. “You never listen to my words.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  “Like when I said, ‘Ash, please stop flying that piece-of-junk ship.’”

  “It’s my piece-of-junk ship—”

  “And ‘Ash, I’ll never talk to you again if you keep risking your life in that ship.’”

  “You’re talking real good now—”

  “And, Ash, I swear, if you die, too . . .” Zora trailed off. She was quiet for a moment, and then she picked up the piece of engine and threw it—not at Ash, but not exactly away from him, either.

  It skidded across the dock and toppled into the water with a soft splash, leaving a trail of grease behind it.

  Ash was just about to point out, again, that it was his damn ship, and he could die on it if he wanted to, but that one word stopped him.

  Too, Zora had said. If you die, too.

  He closed his mouth. Zora swore under her breath and lowered her head to her hands.

  Zora liked to pretend she didn’t have emotions. If she were in charge of these things, her insides would hum along just like the motors she loved to take apart and put back together. It was why they never talked about the real reasons she didn’t want Ash going back in time. She’d already lost too many people.

  Zora stood and released the Second Star’s hood, bending over the engine. “You flooded it again.”

  Ash had known Zora for long enough to hear that she was really saying, We can talk about your damn feelings as long as we do it while fixing this engine.

  Ash wasn’t particularly good at fixing things, but he knew how to make himself useful. He pulled a wrench off the wall and crouched beneath the hood, next to Zora. “It’s not my fault. The throttle keeps sticking.”

  “If you didn’t jerk it around so much, it wouldn’t stick.” Zora took the wrench out of his hands and worked in silence for a moment, Ash watching over her shoulder. He absently touched the spot below his ribs where the dagger had pierced his skin. It didn’t hurt anymore, but his nerves hummed with premembered pain.

  “Is that where she stabs you?” Zora asked, cranking the wrench to the left.

  Ash nodded. He’d told Zora everything he could premember, from the girl with the white hair to the rocking boat to the stabbing itself, but she couldn’t figure out a way to keep it from happening any better than he could. He patted his side. “Right about here, yeah.”

  “Is your kissing really that bad?”

  “Want to find out?”

  “Ha ha,” Zora said, humorless. She lifted her eyes without moving her head. “Anything new?”

  Ash opened his mouth and then closed it again. There wasn’t anything new, but there was stuff he hadn’t told her. Emotional stuff. Like how, when he first saw the girl with the white hair, he’d felt happy. He’d missed her. And how, when she pulled the dagger on him, he hadn’t just felt scared. He felt heartsick. Like the sun had gone out.

  That was the feeling that haunted him, more than the stab wound. He wasn’t just going to kiss this girl. He was going to fall in love with her. And she was going to betray him.

  This was where his avoidance of flirting, and girls in general, came in. He knew he was going to fall in love, that the girl he fell for was going to kill him, and that both of these things were going to happen in the next four weeks. It made dating anyone seem a little like Russian roulette.

  He cleared his throat. “Nothing new. But they’re getting stronger.”

  Zora cleaned the grease away from a bolt. Ash could see that she was working hard to keep her expression calm, like they really were just talking about fixing an engine. But it took her three tries to twist that bolt back into place, and, when she wiped her hands on the back of her jeans, they were shaking.

  “We can search his office again.” She didn’t meet Ash’s eyes when she said this, probably because she knew it was hopeless. “My father was a slob. There might be something in his notes, something we overlooked—”

  “Overlooked?” Ash raised an eyebrow. Zora had spent nearly every day since her father disappeared in that office. If there were something to find, she’d have found it by now.

  “It makes more sense than flying that broken-down time machine back to 1908 because, once, my father mentioned a clock he kind of thought was pretty!”


  She was right, of course. The Professor hadn’t left any sign of where or when he might be. He’d simply left.

  Twelve months ago he’d packed a duffel bag in the dead of night and disappeared in his other time machine, the Dark Star, along with a second container of EM—this one full. Ash waited a few months for him to come back on his own, and then, thinking he was being smart, he took the Second Star back to the morning when the Professor first skipped town, figuring he’d catch the old man before he left, warn him that something was going to go wrong, and stop this whole mess before it started.

  Technically, they weren’t supposed to go back in time to change things. But the prememories had started by then, and Ash was desperate. He wasn’t ready to die.

  It hadn’t mattered, anyway. Ash’s ship had broken down in the water on his way to the garage. By the time he patched the bird up and got on his way, the Professor was long gone. He tried again the next day and the same thing happened. And again. And again.

  It took Ash an embarrassingly long time to figure out that he was never going to make it to the Professor before he left because, if the Professor hadn’t left, Ash wouldn’t have gone back in time.

  It was a paradox—a causal loop. A person couldn’t go back in time to change something that would prevent him from going back in time. For instance, if he went back in time to prevent someone else from leaving—and he succeeded—it would stand to reason that the person wouldn’t actually leave. So he’d never have to go back in time to prevent them from leaving. Paradox.

  Thinking about the logic of it made Ash’s head hurt, like a riddle he understood in theory but couldn’t explain to anyone else. Besides, Ash hadn’t ever really expected to find the Professor on his own; he just had to do something. Doing nothing meant obsessing over his impending death.

  Black water and white hair and a dagger in his ribs.

  He scrubbed a hand over his chin, suddenly exhausted. He didn’t even know whether it was possible to stop a prememory—it was a memory, after all, which meant that it already happened, even if Ash hadn’t lived through it yet. But he knew that if anyone could stop it, it was the Professor. If the old man was gone for good, so was any chance Ash had of living past the age of eighteen.