our right scrawled below it. “Now that Quinn and Roman can go back in time, everyone thinks this is all going to change. This morning on the docks, I heard someone say they were going to try to reverse the damage from the mega-quake during their next trip back in time.” She cocked an eyebrow and said, her voice almost challenging. “Even you have to admit that would be amazing.”
Ash didn’t know what to say. It would be amazing; he just didn’t think it was possible.
“I had a big house out in West Seattle before the mega-quake,” the girl said, almost to herself. “I was supposed to start college in the fall.” She gave her head a shake and added, with a small laugh, “Who knows? If they really do fix things, maybe I still can.”
Ash raised his glass. “I hope it works out for you.”
Ash figured it’d be easier to concentrate on the textbooks without his friends around distracting him, and he was surprised to find that he’d been right. There was a rhythm to the numbers that was immediately familiar, like an old song he didn’t realize he remembered all the lyrics to. Poring over them, he could almost imagine he was back in the Professor’s workshop at WCAAT in the days before the earthquake.
Ash had always loved that workshop. It hadn’t looked like how he might imagine a professor’s study should look, all old leather and heavy wooden desks, but had more of an artist’s studio vibe. A massive drafting table stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by easels where the Professor would prop oversize notebooks filled with scribbled equations and sketches and theories. One entire wall was taken up by bookshelves, a vintage ladder standing before them so the Professor could reach the highest shelves.
Ash could still remember the smell of that place—the cigarettes the Professor swore he didn’t smoke and the charred scent of burnt coffee—him and Zora and Roman lying on their stomachs on the faded rugs that Natasha had thrown over the concrete floors to keep out the chill. The gentle rustle of turning pages and sunlight melting through the windows, the Professor’s footsteps pacing the floor between the three of them. He used to tell long, rambling stories about Stephen Hawking and Nikola Tesla, or lecture them on the different time traveler’s paradoxes. But if what you do when you go back in time actually influences what you do in the past, then the solution to the theory is far more interesting. . . . Roman glancing at Ash from across the room and rolling his eyes dramatically. Ash snickering, trying to cover it up with a cough.
After all that, Ash would’ve expected that some of what the Professor had told him might’ve stuck. But the equations meant nothing to him. He’d read over them and his mind would snag on some small detail—didn’t the Professor say something about energy acting differently in an anil?—but the thought would be gone a moment later, drifting through his head like smoke.
Ash couldn’t say how long he’d stayed there when the bartender appeared before him and slid a hand over his textbook. He looked up and saw that the blood had drained from her face.
“Something wrong?” Ash asked.
She shook her head. “I wasn’t going to say anything because you don’t look like you want any trouble,” she said, her voice low. “But you, uh, might want to be moving on.”
Ash regarded her uneasily. “Yeah?”
“Roman made us all promise we’d tell him if you came back.” The bartender’s eyes caught on something behind Ash’s head, and she swore, under her breath. “And, well, he just walked in.”
23
Dorothy
The Dead Rabbit was a hole. Black walls and black barstools and dim lights made the place look smudgy and rotten, like wood that’d been left wet for too long. The floors were perpetually sticky, and the smell of smoke hung thick in the air, courtesy of the few people rich enough to afford cigarettes and rude enough to smoke indoors.
Dorothy noticed all this in a detached way as she scanned the space for a place where she and Roman could talk in private. She had her hood pulled low, the stiff fabric covering her eyes and most of her face, so she could see only her own boots, and a few feet of dirty floor.
A cheer went up from the back of the room, and Dorothy lifted the edge of her hood.