Stolen Time Read online

They’re saying last week’s earthquake was a 6.9 on the Richter scale. That’s the largest we’ve seen in Seattle in something like fifty years, at least.

  I managed to make it out to the workshop this morning, and it looks like the Second Star is still in one piece. There were some overturned bookshelves, tools strewn around, but no major damage.

  No word on casualties yet. The city’s pretty torn up, though. A lot of trees and power lines have gone down, and a bunch of homes were ruined. WCAAT and the rest of the University District still have power, but we were lucky. I went downtown to donate blood, and all the buildings are dark. It was spooky.

  I wasn’t sure whether it made sense to continue my research in the midst of all this, but I had a conference call with Dr. Helm (the president of WCAAT) yesterday, and he seems to think we should keep going. The world needs hope! Science is our future! Et cetera. Dr. Helm has gotten in touch with NASA, and it looks like they’ll take over the day-to-day operation of my missions from here on out. Dr. Helm thinks this project has gotten too big for the school to manage on its own.

  “Working with NASA means real funding,” he told me. “You’ll be able to design an entire program for space-time travel with the most brilliant minds of our generation.”

  He’s right, of course, and I must admit that I’m glad the project hasn’t been canceled. But I think I’ll feel better about all of this if I hire someone from the tent city.

  I should explain about Tent City. The university put the tents up last week. Thousands of people lost their homes after the earthquake. The shelters filled up fast, but they didn’t have the bandwidth to take in everyone who was displaced, so the university set up emergency purple pop-up tents on campus. There are dozens of them now. I look out my office window and all I see is purple.

  I was walking through the tent city to get to a meeting in the main building the other day, and I saw this kid sitting outside one of the tents, messing around on his computer. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old, but he was already doing pattern recognition of tectonic-plate movement.

  I asked him if he’d considered using neutral net to evaluate the data and he looked at me like I was ten thousand years old.

  “I already did that,” he said. “And now I’m using GPU-accelerated Python to make it faster, but my program can’t exceed ten petaflops without better hardware.”

  I stopped to talk about his program for a while, I even tried to help him make it faster, but the kid is light-years ahead of me. He’s trying to figure out a way to predict fault activity before it shows up on a seismometer. It’s fascinating stuff. I told him that WCAAT has an entire department devoted to seismology and that he should consider applying after he graduated high school.

  But he just looked at me like I was crazy and said, “I’m not graduating after this.”

  I think it really hit me, then, how these earthquakes are ruining people’s lives. How are you supposed to play around in the past when the present is such a mess?

  I don’t know how to answer that yet. But I think I’ve found my assistant.

  I realize that NASA might not be thrilled that I’ve hired a fourteen-year-old high school dropout to assist on what might be the biggest scientific achievement since the moon landing, but Roman Estrada is a better coder than half the people in the WCAAT mathematics department, so they’re just going to have to deal.

  I have a good feeling about this kid.

  9

  Dorothy

  OCTOBER 14, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  Dorothy remembered Seattle smelling of smoke and horses. Now, when she drew in a breath, she tasted salt on the air. She was on a narrow waterway between two half-submerged buildings, their walls covered in graffiti. Rickety wooden bridges arced over her head, raining debris as people hurried across.

  Dorothy leaned back, shading her eyes against the setting sun. She could see the bottoms of people’s shoes through the wooden slats, worn bags swinging next to hips, the tips of fingers. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry. She wondered where they were going. Did the people here have jobs? School? Families to get home to? She watched them for a moment, transfixed, and then leaped backward as an arc of water crashed over her feet. An odd-looking boat zoomed down the waterway past her, motor growling like an animal.

  Her heartbeat sped up. Remarkable, she thought, despite her nerves. Nobody she knew would ever see anything like that boat. She wished she had another set of eyes on the back of her head. She kept turning in circles, desperate not to miss a thing.

  More boats appeared as she wandered down the docks. Some were small and fast, zipping down the narrow waterways so quickly that Dorothy got an ache in her neck trying to follow them. Others were large and slow, and made of bits of found objects—a few old tires, half a door, a chest of drawers without any drawers—all bound together with thick rope.

  She glanced over her shoulder, at the tavern window. She wouldn’t go far, she told herself. Just around the corner. Down the block, maybe. She’d be back before anyone noticed she was missing.

  The buildings huddled closer together as she moved deeper into the city. Light glimmered off steel and glass, so bright that Dorothy had to shield her eyes. Handmade signs hung from open windows, announcing hardware stores, groceries, and lunch specials. They reminded Dorothy of stories her mother had told of lawless frontier towns bustling with people who’d traveled to the edge of the country to make their fortunes. People bartered and haggled as she drifted past.

  “Twenty dollars for a carton of milk!” she heard a man say. “That’s absurd.”

  “You won’t find anything fresher this far west of the center,” the shop woman responded. The man grunted and handed over a crumpled wad of bills.

  The sun was dipping low on the horizon now, sending fingers of crushingly bright light glimmering over water and bouncing off windows. The city seemed edged in gold. Dorothy climbed to the highest level of bridges and shielded her eyes, trying to see how far the maze of buildings and bridges and waterways stretched into the distance. She couldn’t make out where they ended. Maybe they went forever.

  When she lowered her head again, her eyes fell on a repeating pattern of crude black tents drawn over the brick walls beside her, words scrawled between the pictures.

  The past is our right! Join the Black Cirkus!

  Paint had dripped from the words and into the water below, where it spread like a flower.

  Dorothy glanced down, wondering what lay beneath the waves. Weeds stretched up from the bottom, blossoming into ugly yellow flowers when they broke the surface. Ripples moved toward her, surely caused by one of the boats. She took a step closer to the edge of the dock and stretched out her neck, peering into the dark.

  She could make out the hulking shapes of lost objects littering the ground far underwater. The tops of mailboxes. A stone bench. Vehicles that bore only a passing resemblance to the automobile in Avery’s garage, weeds growing through their broken windshields. Street signs covered in algae.

  Dorothy lowered herself to her knees and stretched over the edge of the dock, transfixed. There was an entire world lost below the waves. How horrifying. How fascinating.

  She narrowed her eyes at something floating from one of the car windows. It was long and yellow—a plant, perhaps? Dorothy leaned forward. The water churned below her, making the object move. Shorter, thinner bits dangled from one end. She squinted. They almost looked like—

  A sour taste hit the back of her throat. Fingers. She was staring at the few remaining bones of a human arm, the skin long dissolved in the water. All at once, she remembered her conversation with Ash back at the church clearing:

  Believe me, you wouldn’t like it where I’m going.

  How do you know what I’d like?

  No one likes it.

  Dorothy balled a fist at her mouth to keep herself from screaming. She stumbled backward, nearly losing her balance in her hurry to get away from the side of the dock. There was a body down t
here. Perhaps even more than one.

  She turned in place, trying to remember how to get back to the tavern. She’d taken a left at the first bridge, and then a right, and then . . . blast. It was useless. She’d gone too far. She’d never find her way back on her own.

  Two girls were hurrying down the bridge just ahead of her, arguing. Dorothy sped up to try and catch them.

  “Five minutes isn’t a big deal,” said one of them.

  “Yeah?” the other snorted. “Tell it to my mom. She’s convinced the Fox is going to, like, eat me if I stay out a minute after dark.”

  The first girl lowered her voice. “Come on, you know Quinn Fox isn’t really a cannibal, right?”

  “Um . . . Brian said the rest of the Cirkus Freaks won’t even talk to her because her breath always smells like blood.”

  “Oh my God . . . that’s so gross.”

  Cannibal, Dorothy thought, and a thrill of fear moved through her as she remembered Ash’s story. Had he really been telling the truth?

  “Excuse me,” she called after them. The girls didn’t turn, but their shoulders seemed to stiffen. They linked arms and started walking faster. “Wait!” Dorothy tried again, but the girls were already scurrying down a ladder, sending her dirty looks as they climbed through a window and then slammed it shut.

  That wasn’t very friendly, Dorothy thought, frowning. She followed the winding, rickety docks through the growing dark, fear prickling up her spine. The city had been crowded with people just a few minutes ago, but, now, it seemed deserted. Dorothy listened for voices and heard only waves lapping against the sides of buildings and wind rustling the white tree branches.

  Then, a light appeared in the darkness, glimmering in and out of focus. Dorothy’s heart leaped. She heard voices now, laughing and talking. And then a series of sharp cracks broke through the night.

  She stiffened. She knew that sound. She’d often heard it late in the night, outside of the rougher bars she and her mother had sometimes frequented.

  Gunshots.

  The light grew closer. Dorothy saw the outline of a boat, but it was moving much faster than she’d ever seen a boat move before, practically floating above the water. She ducked into the shadows on instinct, pressing her body flat against the brick wall so she wouldn’t be seen. Every nerve in her body sparked.

  A small group of people stood on board the strange, motorized boat. They wore dark coats made of a puffy, shiny fabric, hoods rimmed in fur pulled low over their faces. There were weapons strapped to their backs—crossbows and axes and clubs. Dorothy couldn’t make sense of them. Their weapons were like something from a history book, but she’d never seen clothes like that before.

  A small figure stood near the front of the boat, one foot propped against the side. He held a lantern in one hand and a short, shiny gun in the other. The gun exploded again, and Dorothy flinched. The figure threw his head back and howled at the sky, waving the gun above him.

  He was just a boy, Dorothy realized. No older than she was.

  The boat made a rumbling noise as it grew closer, casting water in its wake. The spray hit Dorothy’s face, but she didn’t dare move, not even to wipe the wet from her cheeks. The hooded people didn’t seem to notice her huddling in the shadows. Dorothy watched their light grow smaller and smaller as the boat vanished deeper into the city, but she still didn’t move.

  Cold fear gripped her chest, and her knees had gone watery. She’d never seen anything like that boat, or those people. They were something from a story, not real life.

  Time travel, she thought, and an icy finger touched the base of her spine. For the first time since climbing out the window of the tavern she realized that this wasn’t a game. It wasn’t an adventure. She was a stranger in this dangerous world, and she had no idea what the rules were. She hugged her arms close to her chest. And she’d foolishly run away from the only people who’d wanted to help her.

  She hurried quickly down the walkways, looking for a landmark or a sign—anything to tell her she might be going back the way she came. But the city was a maze.

  A breeze picked at the curls on the back of her neck, making her shiver. In the growing dark, the white trees looked like cobwebs. In fact, this entire place gave the impression of something alive growing over the bones of a long-dead corpse.

  Dorothy turned a corner and saw a boy standing at the far end of the dock, facing away from her, his dark coat flapping in the wind.

  Her entire body seemed to sigh in relief. “Excuse me?”

  The boy turned. His eyes were a deep, vibrant blue against his dark skin, and his black hair swooped away from his forehead in a mess of waves. A white crow stretched across the front of his coat.

  Dorothy felt a flicker of something she couldn’t name. Not quite fear, not quite recognition. She moved backward without making the conscious decision to do so.

  But then the boy smiled, and it transformed his entire face. He looked like the romantic lead in a play. Dorothy had never been a particularly romantic person, but if she’d ever tried to imagine what sort of boy she’d want to fall in love with, he would’ve looked just like this, down to the tiny cleft creasing his chin. It was as though someone had plucked him straight out of a daydream.

  “Hello.” He took a step toward her, his heavy boots making the dock tremble. The corner of his lip twitched.

  “Perhaps you can help me,” Dorothy said. “I’m afraid I’ve lost my way.”

  “That’s strange.” The boy pulled a revolver out from under his coat. “I think you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

  Cold hit the back of Dorothy’s throat and trembled up the nerves in her teeth.

  “That’s a gun,” she said dumbly.

  “Why yes it is.” The boy spoke in a lighthearted way, almost like Dorothy had just complimented him on his fantastic coat. “It’s a snub-nosed S and W revolver, circa 1945, as a matter of fact. A dear friend lent it to me last year.”

  He cocked the hammer back with one finger.

  Too late, Dorothy realized she should have been running. She should have started running the moment she saw this boy. She stumbled backward but, before she could utter a word, someone grabbed her from behind, covering her mouth and nose with a cloth.

  She inhaled and felt instantly woozy. The dock spun beneath her feet. She clawed at the hand covering her face, but the strength was draining from her body. Her arm fell back to her side, useless.

  In the second before she fell unconscious, she felt that strange feeling again—not quite fear, not quite recognition.

  Déjà vu, she realized, eyes drooping. That’s what it was.

  She felt like she’d lived this moment already.

  10

  Ash

  Ash was about to wave down Levi to see about getting another drink, when Willis slid his elbows onto the bar next to him. The hubcap creaked, ominously, beneath his weight.

  “Captain,” he said, frowning. “We have a situation.”

  “Situation?” As always, Ash was amazed by how many muscles Willis seemed to need for an expression as simple as a frown. Eyebrows furrowed and jaw twitched and mustache quivered.

  A bar patron walked past, glanced at the massive teenager and swore under his breath, sloshing beer over the side of his glass.

  “Did you see the size of that guy?” he muttered to his friend before disappearing back into the crowd.

  Willis pretended not to notice this exchange, but Ash saw the way his fingers flattened against the bar, the muscles in his shoulders going tense. The Professor had found Willis working as a carnival strongman around the turn of the twentieth century. According to him, he’d been the largest, most intimidating man ever to live.

  Willis’s nostrils flared. Ash knew he hated the attention.

  “What kind of situation?” he asked.

  “Dorothy’s gone,” Willis said. “Zora went to bathroom to see if she was okay, but she wasn’t there. Looks like she went out the window.”
/>   Ash studied a ring of moisture on the bar. “Good riddance,” he muttered.

  But something more complicated twisted through him. Wandering around New Seattle after dark was a death sentence. He thought of Dorothy’s long, pale neck, her narrow shoulders. Manipulative or not, she was awfully breakable—and unarmed—at least as far as Ash knew. She seemed like the type to have a pistol shoved down her pants.

  Willis fixed Ash with a steady gaze, and Ash grunted.

  She deserves whatever she gets, he thought, pushing his concern aside. But he didn’t want it on his conscience one way or another. He flashed the sharp edge of a smile and lifted his mostly empty glass to his lips. “Let me guess, Zora wants me to be decent and go out looking for her?”

  Willis hesitated. Ash felt something cold slither down his spine and set the glass back on the bar. “What?”

  “There’s . . . something else,” Willis said. “You should probably come with me.”

  Willis led Ash out back, to the docks that curved behind the bar, connecting them to the wider grid of walkways that spiderwebbed through the entire city. The docks beneath Ash’s feet swayed, following the gentle rise and fall of the waves. Ash had lived here for two years. He would’ve thought he’d be past noticing the movement by now. But sometimes, when he stood very still, the rocking made him feel unsteady. Like a storm was bubbling up from below.

  As they walked, Willis explained, “When Zora realized that Dorothy had left, she sent me out here to see if I could find her.”

  Ash tapped his fingers against his leg and then realized what he was doing and curled his hand into a fist to stop them. “She just assumed I wouldn’t want to help?”

  Willis raised one heavy eyebrow, his way of saying that Zora had clearly assumed correctly. “Found this.”

  He stopped, jerking his chin at something just ahead of him. The dock swayed and, once again, Ash had the feeling of being unmoored. Of things breaking and sinking and crumbling.

  He squinted, and saw spray paint curled over the surface of the wood, the black still glistening and wet. At first, Ash thought it was just squiggles—run-of-the-mill vandalism wasn’t at all unusual in the city—but, as he walked around the edge of the dock, his eyes began turning the slashes and loops into words.