him in the pilot’s seat of the Second Star, skin flashing blue and purple in the light off the anil, gold eyes crinkled.
He didn’t make sense in this small, dark space, surrounded by these people.
Roman asked, “He was here?”
“Not here, down at the Dead Rabbit,” said Eliza. “Donnie says he left about half an hour ago.”
“Did he speak with anyone?”
Donovan shrugged. “Not that I saw.”
Roman glanced at Dorothy, frowning distantly. She knew he expected her to do something, or say something, but everything she thought to do or say seemed . . . insufficient, somehow. Her pulse fluttered.
It had been a year since Ash had kissed her. For her, at least, it had been a year. She’d seen him since then, but only once, and she’d been Quinn then. She’d cut his cheek with a dagger, but that hadn’t exactly been romantic. And now he was here. Or he’d been here.
“I’m headed to bed,” she said. She felt suddenly and abruptly exhausted.
Or, perhaps, she just wanted to be alone.
To Roman, she added, “You should sleep, too. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
Dorothy’s room was on the fifth floor of the Fairmont, but it looked exactly like the one she’d been kept in when she was kidnapped the year before. Two beds, each covered in a white quilt. Wooden furniture. White curtains. Blue chair. She hadn’t bothered trying to personalize it, like Roman and the other Freaks had done with their rooms. Maybe it was all those years of traveling across the country with her mother, but she’d grown used to living out of suitcases, staying in nondescript hotel rooms, ready to move at the drop of a hat. She felt most at home in rooms where it looked like no one lived at all.
The only item in the room that was actually hers was the small, silver locket hanging from her mirror. Her grandmother’s locket, the one thing she still had from her own time period. She touched it with one finger, like she always did when she came into the room.
She’d sometimes wondered when or where she’d originally come up with the name Quinn Fox. A year ago, she’d said it was her name because she knew that a girl named Quinn Fox had landed in New Seattle around that time. But if time were a coil, then somewhere along the line back and back, she must’ve thought up the name herself.
The only clue she had came from the locket. There was an animal of some sort carved on the front, but the years had worn it down until it was no longer recognizable. Dorothy’s first thought was that it was a dog, or a cat, but now she believed that it was a fox. Her mother’s grandmother’s maiden name had been Renard, which was French for fox. So that fit.
But where had Quinn come from? Dorothy turned the locket over, studying the name engraved on the back. Like the fox, it’d been worn until only a few lines, and a curve remained. It could read “Colette” or “Corinne” as easily as “Quinn” and Dorothy would never know for sure. Her grandmother’s name had been Mary, and it clearly didn’t say that. So it hadn’t belonged to her, originally, but to someone else.
Dorothy sighed and turned away. If the locket hadn’t belonged to her grandmother that meant there was some other woman who had passed it down, a great-grandmother or a distant aunt whose name—or a twisted version of whose name—Dorothy now used as her own. It was so strange to think that there was an entire line of family she would never know, a family whose legacy she carried on, hundreds and hundreds of years later.
Would they be proud of how far she’d come? She’d never worried about that before. She’d been so concerned with survival that it had been impossible to think about whether she was dutifully carrying on her family’s legacy.
Now, she wondered.
She removed her cloak and draped it over the back of her faded, blue chair. Beneath, she wore thin, black trousers, a slim-fitting shirt, and knee-high leather boots. They were simple clothes, but even simple clothes were hard to come by in New Seattle, especially if they were new. Most people had to scour the thrift stores downtown, hoping to find things in their size with few holes, unworried about whether they matched or had any semblance of style.
Dorothy could’ve brought something back from the past, obviously, but she’d wanted something from this time period, something