time travel. He’d built two time machines—the Second Star and the Dark Star—and then he’d gone back in time and plucked Jonathan Asher, Chandrakala Samhita, and Willis Henry from various points in history and brought them to New Seattle in 2075, forming a team that he’d jokingly called the Chronology Protection Agency. They were supposed to travel through time together, uncovering the mysteries of the past.
And then the mega-quake destroyed the city. And, just a few months later, the Professor had taken the Dark Star and disappeared in time without telling any of them what year he was traveling to or why. Ash had spent months searching for him before discovering the Professor’s old journal and, finally, learning exactly where he’d gone—to an old military base called Fort Hunter, in 1980. There, he’d planned to study the underlying causes of the earthquakes that had destroyed Seattle and killed the Professor’s wife, Natasha.
Or he’d tried to. The Professor was killed not long after landing at Fort Hunter, executed by soldiers who suspected him of stealing valuable military secrets. Ash and his friends had tried to follow him back in time, but they’d failed. The trip had destroyed their only remaining time machine, the Second Star, and nearly cost both Ash and Zora their lives. If Ash pressed his hand to the skin on his abdomen, he could still feel a piece of metal lodged just below his ribs. It was all that he had left of his old time machine.
Worse than that, Ash had found some of the Professor’s notes back at Fort Hunter, and they seemed to indicate that two more massive earthquakes were coming. Only these earthquakes wouldn’t just destroy a single city. They had the potential to destroy what was left of the West Coast. Maybe the whole country.
Light glimmered behind the workshop’s windows, telling Ash that Zora was still awake. She rarely left her father’s workshop anymore. She’d set up a cot in the back corner and had taken to washing herself with a rag and a pitcher of water instead of bathing. As far as Ash knew, she lived off cheese sandwiches and burnt coffee, and spent every waking moment going over her father’s notes, trying to piece together his research, looking for some way of stopping the earthquakes he’d predicted before they occurred.
Seeing her light, Ash felt a deep twist of something like disappointment mingled with desperate hope. It was a new emotion, painful and optimistic at the same time. He wished Zora would just give up already, while, at the same time, he prayed for a breakthrough.
Or maybe it wasn’t such a new emotion at all. Perhaps hope always made the disappointment that much worse.
The workshop door inched upward, water sloshing around the wood as it moved—and then ground to a stop, gears crunching. Ash grimaced, punching the button on the remote control again. When the door stayed frozen, he piloted the little motorboat closer, so he could work the manual chain pull.
The only electricity in New Seattle came from the relatively few solar panels still left in the city. There weren’t many that’d survived after the mega-quake, so they were incredibly valuable. Most of the people Ash knew had sold their panels years ago, in exchange for money or food, but the Professor had insisted they hold on to theirs. It’d helped that, until very recently, they’d been able to bring food back from the past.
Unfortunately, the panels had started to break down. They hadn’t been made to last forever, and Ash cringed to think of what would happen when they stopped working entirely. The city was barely inching along as it was.
He docked his boat inside the garage. Zora was cross-legged on the dock, frowning down at a stack of her father’s notes. The light he’d seen came from candles lined up along the walls, rather than the bulb hanging from the ceiling.
“Power’s been spotty all day.” She looked up, eyes flicking over Ash’s boat, where there were still only two—not three—passengers. She seemed to hesitate before asking, “No luck at Mac’s, then?”
“What do you think?” Ash didn’t look at her but jerked the motorboat’s engine off, perhaps a little too forcefully. Spitefully, he asked, “You?”
In answer, Zora merely balled up a piece of notebook paper and threw it at him. It missed, and they were both silent as they watched it sink below the black water.
“I hope that wasn’t important,” Willis said. He was sitting on a stool in the shadowy