and Manet, along with an ancient Chinese gu vase and a bronze eagle finial that had sat atop a framed Napoleonic flag (the flag stayed stubbornly attached to the wall, no matter how hard they tried to remove it).
Finally, Roman checked his watch. “It’s been seventy-nine minutes.”
“Fine,” Dorothy said, stowing the final painting away in her bag. “Let’s go.”
His eyes narrowed. “And the guards?”
“The police will be here in six hours. I’m sure they’ll let them out.”
“You’re terrible,” Roman said. But he smiled in an amused sort of way that let Dorothy know he approved.
“Come on,” she said, hitching her duffel farther up her shoulder as she started for the museum doors.
The Black Crow waited for them in a nearby park, its bullet-shaped body and finned tail hidden by tree branches, tall grass, and the night’s long shadows. Roman loaded the stolen artwork into the cargo hold while Dorothy climbed into the cockpit and began their preflight check. Roman had spent the last year teaching her to fly the time machine. She couldn’t handle the ship quite as well as he could yet, but she was getting better every day.
“Wing flaps,” she murmured to herself, fingers flying over the control panel. And the carburetor needed to be moved into position, the throttle opened. She checked the EM gauge and saw that the dial was trained on full. They’d been going back in time nearly every day for weeks and, still, the store hadn’t been depleted. How strange.
She sat back in her seat, eyes still on the gauge. The time machine had been Roman’s doing, built using the blueprints he’d stolen from Professor Zacharias Walker, the father of time travel. But a time machine would blow apart the second it entered an anil if it didn’t have any exotic matter—or EM—to stabilize the volatile winds of the tunnel. And Dorothy had provided the EM.
She felt a flush of pride as the memory rose in her mind, strange as always:
My name is Quinn Fox. . . . I have something you need.
Those were the words that had sealed her fate one year and two weeks ago. Just moments before, she’d been on board another time machine, begging a pilot with gold eyes to let her stay in New Seattle, with him, instead of returning her to her old life back in 1913.
And then a storm ripped her away and blew her through walls of time and smoke. She’d landed on the docks at Roman’s feet a year before she would meet that gold-eyed pilot, Ash, and well over a hundred years after her mother, along with everyone she’d ever known, had died.
Dorothy could still feel the chill of the dock that she’d woken up on, and she could remember the fear that’d beat beneath her chest when she realized how alone she truly was. She’d really had only two choices:
She could offer Roman the one thing of value she’d had on her, the exotic matter that would allow him to travel through time. Working with Roman meant joining the Black Cirkus, a notoriously vicious local gang. It meant becoming someone ruthless herself.
But her other choice was to try and navigate the horrors of New Seattle on her own.
Dorothy hadn’t been in the future for long, but even she knew that bad things happened to a girl who showed up in a strange place without family or friends or allies. In the end, it had been no choice at all.
And if she sometimes found herself thinking about the pilot with the gold eyes and wondering what might’ve happened if she’d only gone to him and explained who she was and when she’d come from . . .
Well. All she had to do was remind herself of the first time she and Ash had met, back in a churchyard in 1913. She could instantly recall the look of disdain he’d gotten in those eyes, the sound of his voice when he told her that, no, he wouldn’t be able to help her.
It was that no she couldn’t stop thinking about. She couldn’t bear to hear it again, not after everything that had happened between them.
And so, over time, she’d gotten better at brushing the other, fonder memories aside.
She’d made her choice. There was no going back now.
2
Ash
NOVEMBER 5, 2077, NEW SEATTLE
Back in New Seattle, near twilight. The sky was a thin, watery green, the same color as the pea soup Ash used to get in his rations back in the war. He could almost