lights caught his eyes, turning them a deep, stormy blue. “Why do you think?”
Looking back at him, Dorothy felt the anger go out of her. It hadn’t been real anger, anyway, but a mask for everything else she was feeling and, now that it was gone, waves of fear and despair crashed over her in full force. She saw the Fairmont’s blackened brick and broken windows, the mouthlike hole in the middle of its walls.
She curled her hand into a fist to keep it from shaking. “You told Mac that it wasn’t set, right? It’s not like the past. We can still do something.”
“I don’t know.” Roman seemed to weigh his next words carefully before continuing. “I haven’t told you the whole truth about my trips into the future with the Professor. The Professor went into the future once, without me, and he found it like . . . well, he must’ve found it like that. Everything dead. He wouldn’t tell me exactly what he saw, just that there was still time to change it. He was very upset.”
Roman looked down at his hands.
“What happened next?” Dorothy urged when he didn’t continue.
“Well, I wanted to know what he’d seen, so I took his journal and read about it. It sounded awful. I didn’t believe it. So I took the Second Star on my own. I guess you’d say I stole it after the Professor had gone to sleep. I wanted to know what our future was going to be, and I wanted to believe him, that it could be changed. But it’s been like that every time I’ve gone forward.”
“You think he was lying?”
“No.” Roman frowned. “No, I don’t think so. I think that whatever butterfly effect—”
“Butterfly effect?” Dorothy interrupted.
“In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is a phenomenon whereby a minute localized change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere.”
“English, please.”
“In the next five years, something is going to happen, probably something that seems small at the time. That small change will lead to bigger changes and bigger changes and so on, until—”
“The world becomes what we just saw.”
Roman nodded. “Exactly.”
Dorothy was still for a moment, processing this. She remembered walking around this city for the first time, with Avery. She’d spent much of her childhood wandering the dusty little frontier towns of the Midwest, and Seattle, in contrast, had seemed glorious, a city of the future, with its ferryboats and electric lights and charming university. She could’ve wandered through the narrow, meandering downtown streets for hours, neck craned back and eyes wide, taking in the sights.
She may not have wanted the life that came with becoming Mrs. Dr. Charles Avery, but oh how she’d loved this city.
An ache gripped her heart. “So we do something,” she said, on an exhale. “We figure out this butterfly moment, or whatever it is, and we change it.”
Roman lifted an eyebrow. “You think it’s that easy? To find one moment, one second in years and years of seconds? And even if you did find it, what then? How would you know that whatever choice you were making was the right one?”
Dorothy couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You propose we do nothing?”
He couldn’t be saying that, surely, and yet he didn’t argue.
Dorothy had to work to keep her voice steady. “For the last year we’ve been planning to save this city. What was all of that for if you’re just going to stand by and let it be destroyed?”
“We have a few years left.” Roman still wouldn’t look at her. “And, because of what we did this morning, those years will include heat and electricity—”
“What does any of that matter if we’re all going to die?” Dorothy leaned forward. “I thought you’d left the Professor for this, so that you could change our past and give this city a chance—”
But that wasn’t exactly true, was it? Dorothy didn’t actually know why he’d left the Professor. He’d never told her.
I’m afraid we haven’t been acquainted long enough for that story.
She looked up at his face and saw that he looked younger than he usually did, his face softened by fear. It made it easier for her to imagine him as he must’ve looked when he’d worked with the Professor. She pictured him sneaking out in the dead of night to steal the old man’s time machine. Traveling into the future again and again. Staring out at that desolate, black landscape, hoping it might change.
Something twisted in her chest. She couldn’t imagine how