feel the weight of it pressing down on him, like a warning of things to come.
He tensed, thinking, Seven days.
Professor Walker had once told him that you could premember something up to a year into the future. It was the “up to a year” part that Ash had been focusing on, recently. Because he’d first seen the prememory of his own death 358 days ago.
Which meant that, at best, he had seven days left to live. Less than that, probably.
Help me find Dorothy, and I’ll go without a fight.
Chandra fidgeted as the guards patted Ash down. It would be easier to ignore the stormy sky if they were standing anywhere other than the docks on the Aurora waterway, which was the seediest part of New Seattle. The city had always had a sex trade, but the earthquake had brought it out into the open, made it seem almost legitimate. Now the motels along what used to be the Aurora highway proudly advertised what they sold.
The misty rain had plastered Chandra’s hair to the back of her neck and sent droplets rolling down her dark skin. She kept her eyes trained on the guards, lips pressed together to keep them from trembling. The two men looked more like hunks of granite than like people. The lines of their faces were sharp and hard, their eyes near black in the strange, green light. Rain glimmered off the assault rifles hanging from their backs.
Gnarled fingers dug into Ash’s pockets and fumbled with the lining of his jacket, searching for weapons.
He let his eyes linger on their rifles for a moment before moving them back to the sky.
“Tornado sky,” his mother would’ve called it.
He could picture her now, standing on their front porch, tapping one of his dad’s Camels out of its pack. She’d stick the cigarette between her teeth, lighting it in her cupped hand as she watched the sky through slits of eyes.
“Storm’ll blow in soon,” she’d warn, shaking the match out.
But she wouldn’t go inside. Real Nebraskans didn’t run from tornadoes, not until the clouds turned black and formed a wall that touched from sky to ground. Not until the rain fell sideways, and the wind came through strong enough to blow you back a step.
Ash held that image of his mother in his head now: unafraid as she stared down the tornado sky. It wasn’t bravery that kept her on the porch while the storm rolled closer. It was pure, animal stubbornness. Somewhere deep in her blood, she thought she could scare the storm away, keep it from taking what was hers. That same blood ran through his veins, for better or worse.
But Dorothy was never yours, said a voice at the back of his head. And you don’t even know if she survived.
Ash flinched, like the voice was a gnat buzzing at his ear. One of the guards glanced at him, frowning. Ash gritted his teeth, keeping his eyes focused on the horizon, until the guard grunted and continued his search.
It was true, Dorothy hadn’t been his. But she’d been lost during his mission. He’d agreed to take her back in time, to the year 1980, to search for Professor Zacharias Walker, his old mentor. He’d known how dangerous it would be to travel through the anil with such a meager supply of exotic matter, and he’d done it anyway. And then, when the EM began to fail, Dorothy had risked her life to change the exotic matter in the Second Star midflight, saving them all.
And then the ship had crashed. And Dorothy had vanished into the anil.
I don’t think she died, Zora had told Ash in the days immediately following the crash. She had the EM on her. . . . Maybe she only missed us by a few months.
It wasn’t an entirely foolish thing to hope for. The anil was volatile, with winds that rose above 100 knots, and storms constantly flickering around the cloudy tunnel walls, but the exotic matter Dorothy had been holding might’ve created a kind of protective bubble around her, keeping the anil’s inclement weather at bay. Ash had never heard of a human being surviving the anil without a time machine, but he had to believe it was possible. He simply couldn’t bear the alternative.
They’d lost contact with Dorothy only seconds before crashing back in 2077. If she’d survived, she could already be here, somewhere, in this godforsaken city. Ash just had to find her before someone else did.