working correctly. A lot of his theories about how energy and electricity move through the earth’s crust were based on faulty science, and he ended up pursuing this idea of “free energy” until all his funding ran out and his reputation was, basically, in ruins. It’s a shame, too, because he was one of the smartest people the world had ever seen. A true genius.
In any case, I bring Tesla up now because he spent a lot of time observing the electronic noise of lightning strikes, and this led him to conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy for free. He was super wrong, unfortunately, but the science itself wasn’t bad. He was just wrong about how the earth would react to the science.
The anil, on the other hand, reacts exactly how he expected it to.
I won’t bore you with the details. All you need to know is that Tesla was right; he just didn’t know what he was right about. Most scientists working today believe that there are actually a great many more anils all over the world, but they’re buried deep within the earth’s crust. The working theory is that the Puget Sound anil was only made visible by the movement of tectonic plates and that, given another couple hundred years and further erosion of the earth’s crust, more tunnels through time will appear. If that’s true, it’s possible that Tesla actually managed to connect his original experiments with some underground anil that he didn’t even know was there.
So, in effect, Tesla was the very first time traveler. He’s even quoted as saying that he’s seen the future. Once, after being struck by a jolt of electricity coming off his coil, he said, “I saw the Past, Present, and Future at the same time.”
If that’s true, if he did see the past, present, and future at the same time, then he, somehow, managed to travel through time without access to an anil, without any exotic matter, and without a vessel.
It’s imperative that I speak with him.
5
Dorothy
The Fairmont’s garage was dark when they landed, and empty. Roman and Dorothy gathered the stolen artwork from the back of the time machine and headed down the stairs in silence, stopping in front of a heavy, unmarked door deep in the Fairmont’s basement.
Roman dug an old key out from under his coat, and Dorothy heard the click of metal in a lock. The door creaked open, revealing a deeper, velvety darkness beyond.
Another click and the room was illuminated.
As always, Dorothy felt her breath catch. It was hard to know where to look first. There was the stack of scrolls gathering dust in the corner, stolen from the Library of Alexandria moments before the siege in 48 BCE. The missing panels from the Bayeux Tapestry hung from the wall before her, showing William the Conqueror’s Christmas Day coronation, in 1066. On a table below sat the long-lost crown jewels of King John.
Dorothy smiled as she looked at the jewels, remembering the week she and Roman had spent on the Wash in 1216. There’d been a lot of discussion throughout history about how the fool king had managed to lose his jewels, but it turned out that the luggage containing them had simply fallen off of the back of his carriage as he rode beneath the Sutton Bridge. Dorothy and Roman had waited for the king and his soldiers to gallop past, and then they’d taken the abandoned luggage for themselves. Roman had worn the magnificently jeweled crown the entire ride home.
“It’s already half past nine,” Roman said, interrupting the memory. “Are you ready for the broadcast?”
Ah yes. The broadcast.
Ironically, Ash was the one who’d given her the idea.
“The Black Cirkus wants to go back in time,” he’d told her once. “They seem to think that’s the key to fixing all our problems.”
He’d said this like it was an idiotic thing to think, but Dorothy had found herself disagreeing. Because, really, what sort of problems couldn’t be solved with time travel?
She’d started thinking about how she might go about changing some things. At the very least, the city needed power, access to medication and food. Too many people were hungry, and cold, and sick.
Dorothy had been a con artist before landing here. She’d never really been one for good deeds. But, for the first time in her life, she had all this power. And she knew how to fix this.