ago. Time seemed to still as he crossed the room and took her face in his hands.
Those hands. Dorothy’s eyes fluttered. They were just like she remembered, his skin rough and warm and smelling, slightly, of smoke. Heat flared through her.
She tilted her head back as he leaned down to kiss her.
Part Two
My mind misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars shall bitterly begin.
Romeo and Juliet, Act 1 Scene 4
14
Ash
Ash remembered an early morning flight during his first month at the academy. Flat, gray sky and hard winds and the smell of ozone burning through the air. The plane had felt like a toy, its engine a metal scream that rattled his teeth and crawled into his bones.
And then the engine sputtered; Ash was falling.
It hadn’t felt like he’d expected it to. Terror and panic and terror again. No, there’d been only a sudden stillness and the vague awareness of sun bleeding through the clouds. Ash had closed his eyes and breathed.
The engine roared back to life a second later, an animal reawakening. The fear hit then, white hot and raging. Ash’s hands didn’t stop shaking until after he’d landed. His soul kept shaking long after.
Ash had never been in love before but he’d been told that it felt the same. Like falling.
Dorothy released a short gasp of breath when he took her face in his hands. He kissed her and, for a second, he forgot all about black water and dead trees and white hair. He forgot the feeling of cold steel sliding through his skin, and heartbreak ripping through his chest.
Instead, there was this: Dorothy’s lips, warm against his own. Her fingers touching the back of his neck and then snaking up through his hair. Her chest pressing into his.
He was falling again and, just like before, there was no terror or panic. Only stillness, and sunlight in the clouds.
It ended, abruptly, with a knock.
“Dorothy?” Roman’s voice came from the other side of the bathroom door, muffled by wood. “Dorothy, are you in there?”
Ash opened his eyes, and the rest of the world rushed back in.
“He can’t find you here,” Dorothy said, her eyelids still lowered, her voice low.
Ash curled a hand around hers. He didn’t want to think about what it meant that Roman had come looking for her, that he knew her real name.
“Come with me,” he whispered, urgent. He wasn’t leaving her again.
Dorothy eyes opened. “I—”
“Please.” He could hear the desperation in his voice. It made his cheeks burn, but he didn’t look away. “I was wrong, before, when you asked if you could stay. You belong with us, Dorothy. Come back with me.”
Another knock. “Dorothy?”
The doorknob rattled.
“I—” Dorothy’s eyes moved to the door, her expression complicated. “I can’t.”
The words hit him like a slap. He glanced at the door. Was she staying behind for him, for Roman?
It was too much to consider, and so he pushed the thought away. “I’ll come back,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Soon.”
And then he crossed the bathroom and threw open the small window, dropping into the black water below.
15
Dorothy
Dorothy stood, breathless, one finger hovering near her mouth. She could taste Ash’s lips on hers. She could feel the warmth of his hands wrapped around her waist.
He’d asked her to go with him. He’d seen what she’d become and, still, somehow, he’d wanted her.
Why hadn’t she gone with him?
She closed her eyes and, though her head was full of Ash, he wasn’t what her mind lingered on just now. Instead, she thought of his time machine, the Second Star. She thought of Zora and Willis and Chandra, and the feeling she’d had when she was sitting among them.
Belonging. Never in her life had she felt that, not before and not since. She’d thought she’d found a place there, with Ash and his friends. She’d been so sure that she’d finally found a home.
But even as her mind lingered on Ash and the Second Star, other, fresher memories rushed in:
The people crowded inside of the Fairmont’s ballroom, cheering for her.
Roman’s voice, strong and sure, as he told them of their plan to save the city.
The feeling of power she got when the things she’d read about in history books became real.
Tomorrow, she was going to change the world. Why did Ash want her now? When it was too late?
Dazed, Dorothy opened the door.
Roman stood in the hallway, elegant in his black tuxedo and white tie. It was the same tuxedo Clark Gable had worn in the 1936 film Cain