a damn shame.” He said this with a hand pressed to his heart, a sympathetic expression twisting his toad-like face. “You need a backer, darling. Someone with deep pockets and a little additional security to help you keep the rats from crawling all over you.”
Mac brought the match to his cigarette, nostrils flaring. Dorothy had to work hard to keep the grimace from her face. She hated the smell of smoke.
He was right, unfortunately. The Cirkus had barely been keeping their heads above water for a while now. It would be a relief to have some more money coming in. Getting it from Mac meant that Dorothy wouldn’t have to sully her new reputation by stealing it, and she wouldn’t disappoint her Freaks by letting them go hungry.
But forming any kind of official partnership with Mac felt . . . dirty.
“What would you expect in return?” she asked.
“In return? Are you kidding? You kids are aiming to fix my city.” Mac shook the flame out with a jerk of his hand. “What else could a man want?”
Roman lifted his eyebrows, quiet as Mac took a deep drag from his cigarette. Roman knew how to let a silence stretch and grow in a way that made people intensely uncomfortable. Often, they wound up saying things they shouldn’t be saying.
Watching him, Mac smiled. “All right, all right. You got me. There is one thing.” Mac studied the red tip of his cigarette. His expression was blandly curious, like he’d never seen a lit cigarette before. Shrugging, he asked, “You ever been to the future?”
Dorothy frowned. She hadn’t been any farther into the future than she was now. It had always taken on a deeply dreamlike property in her mind, the possible and impossible blending until she couldn’t tell the two apart. Sometimes she found herself forgetting that her time machine was capable of moving in two directions.
“The future isn’t like the past,” Roman said, interrupting her thoughts. “It hasn’t happened yet, so it’s not fixed. Many different versions of the future exist side by side, and you never actually know which one you’ll visit.”
“So you’ve been?” asked Mac. “To when? A few days from now? A year?”
“I took a few trips forward when I worked with the Professor,” said Roman. “But the future changes so frequently that it’s impossible to say whether it will remotely resemble what we saw.”
Mac released a sigh as he leaned forward, cigarette ash flaking from between blackened fingers. “Come on now, how much could things really change?”
“More than you might think,” Roman said. He spoke casually enough, but there was tension in the corner of his lips, like he was holding something back.
Dorothy frowned. How odd. He’d always talked about his visits to the future easily enough with her.
Mac dropped his cigarette onto the tile floor, crushing it out with the tip of one of his crutches. “You know what my family was before the earthquake?” His eyes rested on Dorothy’s, waiting for an answer. When none came, he said, “You follow my family tree back as far as it’ll go and you’ll find Mafia, pimps, criminals, grifters. I may not come from fancy folk, but we’ve survived wars and recessions and every natural disaster you can name, and we did that by being smart.” He tapped his temple with one finger. “My granddaddy used to compare us to cockroaches. Nuclear holocaust could hit tomorrow, and we’d find a way to make it out alive.”
The comparison to cockroaches was a little more self-aware than Dorothy expected of Mac, but she didn’t point that out.
“I’m not going to beat around the bush with you two,” he continued. “I’m on board with your little missions back in time, saving the city and all that. But I want to see my future. I’ve got to be smart about this, you see. I’ve got a few . . . business ventures in the works, and I want to get a sense of how everything’s gonna turn out.” He scratched his chin, frowning. “Does that sound like something you two might be able to help me out with?”
Business ventures. Dorothy could imagine what he meant by that. She stared back at Mac and waited for the usual revulsion to rise, but it didn’t.
A few trips into the future—that was nothing.
“Think about it,” Mac said, interrupting her thoughts. He turned, awkwardly, on his crutches and began hobbling down the hall. “We’ll talk again, soon.”
Dorothy opened her mouth to speak when she thought Mac