Stolen Time Read online

  “She’s all alone—”

  “Explain to me how that’s our problem.” This conversation felt wrong. What did Zora care about some girl? Why bother fighting when they had so many other things to worry about? “I didn’t invite her on board, Zor.”

  Zora rubbed her eyes. “I need a drink.”

  Ash lifted Dorothy’s discarded moonshine. “You’re in the right place.”

  She stood, glowering at him. “Make yourself scarce before she gets back. I really don’t think you should be doing any more of the talking.”

  “Hey!” Ash called, but Zora was already shouldering her way through the crowd, and she didn’t turn back around.

  A nasty little shiver ran down Ash’s neck as he turned back to his drink. Dorothy had him on edge, and it wasn’t just because he’d accidentally stolen her from the past. Ash hadn’t so much as spoken to a girl besides Zora and Chandra since the prememories started. He couldn’t even look at one without thinking of a rocking boat and a kiss that ended with a knife ripping through his body. He’d thought that avoiding girls would keep the prememory from happening, that the woman he loved couldn’t kill him if he never got around to falling in love with her. And then some bride from the 1900s had climbed onto his ship and inserted herself into his life without asking.

  And now he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  He raked a hand through his hair, trying to ignore the blood pumping in his ears. He wanted her gone. But that meant another trip back in time, another day wasted. The sand in his hourglass was already running low.

  Willis was staring when Ash looked up again, the tips of his blond mustache trembling.

  Ash’s stomach gave an unpleasant twitch. “Are you laughing?”

  “Sorry, Captain. I just never figured you for the type to take a bride.” Willis smoothed the edges of his mustache with two fingers. “Mazel tov, by the way.”

  Chandra snorted so violently that she smacked an elbow into her glass, sending the remains of her cocktail into her lap. Willis slid her a napkin.

  “Real funny,” Ash muttered, frowning.

  “Don’t be like that,” Chandra said. “He’s just talking.”

  “Talk about something else.”

  “Okay.” Chandra leaned across the table suddenly, her voice low and conspiratorial. “Did you hear that Quinn Fox files her teeth into points?”

  Now Ash’s teeth were clenched. “Not her.”

  Chandra closed her mouth, looking stricken. “So I suppose we should all sit here in silence?”

  “Would silence be so bad?” asked Ash, rubbing his eyes.

  “Tell him about your new crush, Chandie,” Willis said, flashing Ash a weary look. “That’s what we were talking about before you got here.”

  Chandra sighed theatrically and looked across the room. Ash took another drink, following her gaze to the short bartender wiping down glasses behind the bar.

  He started to choke. “Levi?” he coughed out, pounding his chest with a fist. The burning liquor carved a line down his throat. “You think Levi is cute?”

  They’d all known Levi for ages. His father owned the bar.

  “I already told her it was a bad idea,” Willis said, studying a fleck of dirt beneath his thumbnail. “You’re going to ruin the bar, Chandie.”

  “I will not!” Chandra said. She slumped back in the booth, pouting. She was the baby of the group by less than a year, and she seemed to think this meant she could get whatever she wanted with a trembling lower lip. “Couldn’t we go back to a time period where dating wasn’t so freaking hard,” she asked. “Did you know that in the nineteen nineties, single women would go to bars and wear beautiful dresses and pick up men?”

  “She found some old television show,” Willis explained, using the corner of a cocktail napkin to dab at his mustache. Chandra was obsessed with pop culture. She was originally from ancient India, and the Professor used to make her watch television to help with her English. It’d worked a little too well. Now she watched constantly, becoming fixated on a different decade in history every other week. Last week it was some anime series from the 2040s. Now, apparently, she was all about the 1990s.

  “That’s where these came from,” Willis added, tapping the rim of his cocktail glass. The liquid inside was violently pink.

  “It’s called a cosmopolitan,” Chandra said, pinching the stem of her glass with her fingertips. “Pretty, right?”

  Ash frowned. He hadn’t realized Dante owned pink liquor. “You’re only seventeen years old,” he said. “I’m not dropping you off eighty years in the past so you can drink and flirt with boys.”

  Chandra cocked her head to the side, studying him through her glasses. The lenses were Coke-bottle thick and left her dark eyes bugged. “So you’re the only one who gets to use time travel to pick up dates?”

  Willis’s mustache twitched. Chandra’s cheeks went pink.

  “Zora was right,” Ash muttered, standing. “I really should make myself scarce before your new friend gets back.”

  Chandra started to object, but Ash was already out of his seat and wading through the crowd, finishing his drink as he walked.

  He knew he was being an ass, but he couldn’t help it. He had no interest in following this particular line of conversation just now. Willis and Chandra knew he didn’t like talking about his love life, but Ash hadn’t told them about the prememory, so they figured he was just prickly about mushy stuff.

  Zora once asked him why he was keeping his best friends in the dark.

  “And they’re not just your friends,” she’d pointed out. “They’re your teammates. Dad brought you all back from the past to work together. They deserve to know what’s going on with you.”

  She was right, obviously, but Ash just muttered something about not wanting to worry them and changed the subject. That was true, sort of, but there was a more selfish reason, too. Ash didn’t want to spend his last weeks on earth dodging sympathetic glances, worrying that people were talking about him every time a conversation dried up when he entered the room. If the prememory was true, and he really had only a few weeks left to live, he wanted to enjoy every damn day.

  Ash finished the rest of his drink and set the empty glass down on the bar, nodding at Levi.

  Annoyingly, he found his thoughts returning to the bride. Had Zora found her and coaxed her back to the table? Did she believe her, yet, about the time travel? He couldn’t help glancing at the bathroom door as he waited for Levi to make his way to his side of the bar, picturing her splashing water on her face, studying her reflection.

  Had she looked out the window yet?

  7

  Dorothy

  Dorothy found the washroom and slipped inside, shutting the door firmly behind her. The noise of the tavern was instantly muffled. Exhaling, she switched on the faucet and gathered a handful of water to splash onto her face. She’d felt grimy since she got there. Everything she’d touched seemed layered with damp and mold.

  Water dripped from her face as she straightened, her eyes landing on the window beside the sink. The curtains were tightly drawn.

  Look outside, she thought. Just trust me.

  She bristled, thinking of the way Ash’s lip had curled as he teased her. It might have been charming if he hadn’t been being such a rat. The moths started flapping around her stomach again. Stupid moths.

  She wiped her face with the bottom of her shirt. Did he think she wouldn’t? That she’d be so terrified by all their nonsense that she’d tremble at the thought of looking out a window?

  She glanced at the bathroom door, imagining Ash back at the table with his friends, laughing about how gullible she’d been. Time travel. The nerve.

  Steeling herself, she yanked back the curtains.

  The ground seemed to tilt. She had to grab hold of the sink to keep her legs from going out beneath her.

  She exhaled, her voice almost a sigh. “Oh.”

  She saw light.

  This wasn’t the kin
d of light she was used to. It was stronger, brighter, and it took her a moment to realize this was because the setting sun was reflecting off glass skyscrapers and massive buildings with hundreds of windows—

  All half-submerged in steely gray water.

  She lifted a hand to her mouth, fingers trembling. The city seemed to be growing—weed-like—straight out of the water itself. She’d never seen anything like it before. She moved closer to the window, her breath ghosting the glass.

  Something must’ve happened, some horrible disaster, to leave the entire city underwater.

  But even as she thought this, she realized that the city was much more advanced than the one she’d just left behind. Buildings had been built closer together, and they towered over her head, seeming to stretch high up into the clouds. And there were so many of them! More buildings than Dorothy had ever seen in one place at the same time.

  The city had been made into something extraordinary. And then it had been destroyed.

  Well, not completely destroyed. Complicated-looking bridges crisscrossed the water in an elaborate grid. Ladders stretched past her, and, when she followed them up, she saw that they connected to a second level of rickety wooden passageways just over her head.

  While she was studying them, a man crawled out of a window in the building across the waterway, hurried over the bridge, and disappeared around a corner. Dorothy craned her neck to see where he was going, but he’d already gone.

  She released a small, breathless laugh. What had happened here? Why had that man used a window instead of walking through the front door? She glanced back at the water sloshing up against the walls as a thought occurred to her—were the bottom floors of the building still underwater? That seemed impossible, but why else would the people living here need all the bridges and the docks and the ladders?

  She pressed a hand to her chest. Her heart felt suddenly light and fluttery. This must be what a near-death experience feels like, she thought, giddy. Time slowed enough for her to notice small, seemingly insignificant details. A brightly colored wrapper floated past her. A ghostly pine tree grew straight out of the water. Its bark looked like it was covered in a layer of chalk.

  Dorothy fumbled with the window latch. Part of her knew she should go straight back to their table and beg Zora and Ash to tell her what was going on.

  But the other part was already pushing the window open.

  8

  Ash

  “Another round?” Levi pulled a bottle of clear liquid out from behind the hubcap that served as a bar before Ash could answer, and filled his glass. Ash started to take out his wallet, but the bartender wrinkled his nose. “You better be reaching for a gun, man. You know my dad won’t take your money.”

  Ash let his hand fall to his side. On the far end of the bar, a time-lapse version of Levi caught his eye and lifted a wrinkled hand in salute. Dante hadn’t let Ash pay for a drink since he’d gifted the old man a boxy television set that now hung on the wall above the bar, mutely playing the nightly news. Ash had nicked the television the last time he’d flown through the tail end of the twentieth century. Well-made tech was near impossible to come by since the earthquake.

  Levi slid the drink across the bar, sloshing clear liquid over the sides. Ash nodded in thanks. “Any noise tonight?”

  “Heard a few boats earlier. They didn’t get close, but it’s early yet. You know the Black Cirkus doesn’t get feisty until full dark.”

  The Black Cirkus was the local gang. They were either the hope of the new world or terrorist monsters, depending on who you asked. Ash tended to put his money on the latter.

  Ash frowned, lifting the sticky glass to his lips. “A few?” Hearing even one boat used to be cause for concern.

  Levi shrugged and pulled a dirty towel from his apron to wipe up the spilled liquor. “That’s not the worst of it. Guess who Pop saw walking around the Fairmont this afternoon?”

  Ash stifled a sigh. It seemed he would be unable to escape this topic of conversation tonight.

  “Quinn Fox,” Ash replied. The name tasted bitter on his tongue. He chased it with a sip of his drink. Dante’s hooch burned all the way down his throat and settled in his gut like a tire fire, but Ash was careful not to make a face. Levi was known to throw a patron out for cringing at the taste of his father’s terrible liquor.

  “In the daylight and everything,” Levi said, whistling through his teeth. “Did you hear that last week she killed a man with a spoon. She just . . .”

  Levi mimed jabbing a spoon through someone’s eye and made a disgusting splurt sound. Ash raised his eyebrows, trying hard not to grimace. He couldn’t say exactly why he disliked hearing about Quinn so much. He knew people found her intriguing, that they gossiped over why she never removed the hood that covered her face (disfiguring scar? lips stained with blood?) and how she rose so quickly up the ranks of the Black Cirkus. He knew they secretly enjoyed telling stories of whatever newest horror she’d committed, even as they were disgusted by them. He knew it was their way of coping, but he couldn’t join in.

  Ash only ever found Quinn disturbing. A symbol of just how far their city had fallen.

  “You know who they say she’s hanging with, don’t you?” Levi asked, watching Ash from the corner of his eye.

  Ash jerked his head up in a half nod. He knew.

  Dante suddenly raised a hand, motioning for the patrons to quiet. The old man was staring at the television behind the bar. The image on the screen skipped, then froze—then disappeared entirely.

  Two shadowy figures appeared in its place. They wore hoods that covered their faces and stood in front of a tattered American flag. One had a sketchy crow painted on the front of his coat. The other had a fox.

  “Speak of the devils,” murmured Ash.

  Levi’s eyebrows went up. “That’s her?”

  “That’s her,” Ash said, dread pooling in his stomach. The Black Cirkus’s nightly address had become famous, but he was never fully prepared to see the black-clad Cirkus Freaks on his television screen. “Do we have to watch this garbage?”

  “Are you kidding?” Levi asked. Even those who were staunchly against the Cirkus found the nightly address morbidly fascinating. He turned up the volume.

  “Friends,” Quinn said. As always, her voice was heavily distorted, more machine than human. “Do not attempt to adjust your television. Our broadcast hack has taken over every channel. It cannot be traced.

  “I am speaking to you at a moment of crisis. It has been over two years since the Cascadia Fault mega-quake devastated our once great city. Since that time, nearly thirty-five thousand people have died, our own government has turned their back on us, and violence and chaos rule our waters.”

  “Your violence,” Levi muttered. He reached below the bar, and Ash saw his fingers tighten around the baseball bat he kept hidden there. The nightly address was prerecorded. The Black Cirkus was likely roaming the city already, looking for new recruits—that’s what they called the people they kidnapped and forced to join their gang. They hadn’t broken into Dante’s Tavern yet, but it was only a matter of time.

  Ash looked down at his knuckles. He tried to tune the Cirkus out, but Quinn’s voice cut through his thoughts.

  “Those deaths could have been prevented,” Quinn said. “They can still be prevented.”

  Silence gathered in the bar as every face turned toward the television screen. Everyone remembered the earthquake. There wasn’t a man or woman alive who didn’t lose someone during that disaster.

  A photograph of the Professor’s face flashed onto the screen. Ash caught the edges of his mentor’s salt-and-pepper hair and subdued smile out of the corner of his eye. It was the same photograph the Black Cirkus had been showing for the last year.

  “This man has discovered the secrets of time travel,” Quinn droned on. “He is capable of going back in time and reversing our fate. He could return to a time before the earthquake destroyed our city. He could save thousands of lives. But
he refuses.

  “The Black Cirkus does not think it’s fair for one man to decide the fate of all of us. We believe that everyone should be allowed to change their pasts. Join the Black Cirkus, and we’ll use time travel to build a better present, a better future. Join the Black Cirkus, and we’ll create a better world.”

  The words hardened Ash’s spine. For years people had been too distracted by the Cirkus’s violent methods to take their message seriously, but they were starting to come around. Ash had overheard more than one conversation about how maybe the Black Cirkus had the right idea—maybe they should find the Professor and force him to fix their world.

  But those people didn’t know how dangerous time travel was, how volatile. How any change, no matter how small, could ripple through history, leaving even more devastation in its wake.

  The Professor’s photograph disappeared, and the image on the television screen froze. The two shadowy figures stared down at them. Hateful and haunting.

  “So that’s him, right?” Levi asked, squinting at the boy to Quinn’s right. “That’s—”

  “That’s him.” Ash chewed the inside of his cheek, studying the slight, dark boy with the crow painted on his chest. It didn’t matter that he had a hood pulled over his head, or that the angle of the lights left his face in shadow. Ash would always recognize Roman.

  He was momentarily transported to another booth in another bar. He’d just laughed so hard at some story Roman told that he’d spit beer across the table. He’d pretended he hadn’t seen Roman move a finger along the back of Zora’s hand, his touch lingering.

  He’d been the Crow even then. Watching everything. Collecting secrets like scraps of colored paper. Before he’d joined the Black Cirkus he’d been their friend. Their ally.

  And then he’d betrayed them all.

  LOG ENTRY—DECEMBER 3, 2073

  11:50 HOURS

  FACULTY HOUSING—WEST COAST ACADEMY OF ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

  The good news is that we’re all okay. Zora and Natasha are still a bit shaken, but no one’s hurt.