where she was supposed to be married. Only, then he’d been the handsome pilot with the gold eyes, smelling of campfire smoke and faraway places. She’d thought he’d been exaggerating. She’d never, in her wildest dreams, thought he’d been talking about her.
If Dorothy still had any lingering hope that she could return to Ash and his friends, it faded as the rumors about her grew stronger. She saw Ash once more but, by then, it was too late. She was already Quinn Fox, cannibal, leader of the Black Cirkus.
And he hated her.
4
Ash
The pea-green sky followed Ash and Chandra around to the back of the motel, where their boat was rocking on the black waves.
It hung above them ominously, as Ash tugged on the pull cord—once, twice, three times—and the motor growled to life.
It seemed to hold its breath as they climbed into the old boat and steered away from Mac’s motel and down the narrow Aurora waterway, squat buildings bordering them on either side.
Not an omen, Ash told himself again, looking away from the sky.
They rode past a half-dozen motels just like Mac’s. Dark, run-down places with boarded-up windows and armed guards at the doors. Ash made himself picture the faces behind all those windows. Broken, terrified faces. Most of them were underage. Most of them were working against their will.
But, hard as he tried, Ash couldn’t see them. Dorothy’s face kept creeping in instead. Dorothy scared and Dorothy laughing and Dorothy looking up at him, leaning in to kiss him . . .
He gave his head a hard shake, disgusted with himself. It should bother him more than it did. He shouldn’t have been able to just walk away from those girls back at Mac’s, just as he shouldn’t be able to sail past these places without stopping, without trying to help.
Sometimes he felt that his capacity for empathy was a glass jar, that it had already filled to the brim with worry for Dorothy, for himself and his friends, and if he tried to cram anything else in there the glass would break.
He didn’t like what it said about him, that he thought things like that. But he could feel the cracks forming already. So he kept his eyes ahead, and he held his breath until the motels were behind him.
They turned off the waterway and into a neighborhood that had once been called Queen Anne and was now, simply, West Aurora. Ash had just caught sight of the Space Needle in the distance, the massive, rusted saucer resting on top of the water, like a boat—
And then the ground trembled, sending a wall of steel-gray water arcing over him, momentarily hiding the structure from view.
Ash felt his stomach drop as water sloshed into their boat. Chandra grabbed his arm, her nails digging straight through the leather of his jacket and into his skin.
No, he thought. Not now.
And then the shaking stopped, abruptly, though the black and gray waves continued to swell.
Chandra loosened her grip. “Third one this week,” she said, gasping.
“Fourth,” Ash corrected. There’d been a quake in the middle of the night, small enough that it almost hadn’t woken him up.
Chandra shook her head. “Freaky.”
Ash swallowed but said nothing. Earthquakes were something they’d had to get used to over the years, ever since a massive earthquake hit the West Coast back in 2073, followed by an even larger quake in 2075. The 2075 quake caused a tsunami that’d left the city of Seattle underwater. The Cascadia Fault quake—or the mega-quake, as it was sometimes called—had been a 9.3 on the Richter scale, easily the most devastating earthquake the country had ever seen. Between the two quakes, the West Coast had been completely wiped out. Nearly forty thousand people had died.
The earthquakes had become more frequent since the mega-quake but, lately, it seemed that there was a new one every other day. They were always small, barely strong enough to send waves crashing up against the side of the schoolhouse where Ash and his friends all lived, or Dante’s, their favorite bar. But, still, they made his nerves jittery.
“We’ll be home soon,” Ash told Chandra, tugging on the pull cord, again.
Professor Zacharias Walker’s old workshop rose in the distance like a mirage. It consisted of a mismatched roof and siding made of old boards, tires, and pieces of tin. Ash watched the structure separate from the shadows and wished, as he often did, that he would find the Professor himself behind the rain-soaked windows.