He barely registered her voice. He heard a kind of roaring in his ears, something louder than the motorboat’s tinny engine and the crashing water and all the other sounds that made up the night around them. His hands had started to tremble, and something, some pressure, was building inside of his chest, making him ache.
He couldn’t let this happen. He had to do something. Zora said that a smaller ship wouldn’t cause as much damage to the anil. If that were true, then no ship shouldn’t cause any damage, right?
If there was a way to travel through time without a time machine, without EM . . .
The Black Crow was halfway into the anil when Ash dove out of the rowboat. The second he hit the water, he could feel the pull of the time tunnel sucking him toward it, like water into a drain. He couldn’t swim, couldn’t fight against it.
All he could do was be still and let it take him.
No man had ever survived moving through an anil without a vessel before. Those who’d tried had their skin ripped from their bones, their internal organs liquefied. But Ash wasn’t afraid. He’d seen his own death, and so he knew he didn’t die here.
The last thing he heard before he disappeared in time was the sound of Zora screaming.
31
Dorothy
JULY 10, 2074, NEW SEATTLE
Dorothy felt her breath catch as she stared up at the hospital looming above them. It was dark here, past midnight, and every light in the building above them was blazing. The parking lot was filled with cars, and people crowded the sidewalk, unloading stretchers from ambulances and barking orders at one another.
She swallowed. She’d been to the hospital with Avery a few times, back in 1913. The tiny, two-story Providence Medical Center had seemed massive to her then, the doctors who’d filled the halls impossibly impressive in their stark white jackets and scrub caps.
Those old doctors were nothing like the people before her now. It was like comparing a fighter jet to a rickety bicycle. Where the doctors from her time were neat and orderly, mostly older men with gray hair and spectacles, these were young and fast and . . . sleek. Their scrubs had a metallic sheen, and their equipment was more advanced than anything Dorothy had seen before.
And wouldn’t it be? This was 2074, the most advanced the world would get before the mega-quake took it all away. It was right that Dorothy felt intimidated.
She looked over at Roman and saw that he had one hand pressed to his front shirt pocket, fingers anxiously tapping his chest.
She frowned. “Everything all right?”
Roman dropped his hand, like he was worried about giving something away. “Yes, of course,” he said, but there was a rough edge to his voice that betrayed much darker emotions.
Dorothy swallowed, uneasy. She didn’t know whether she should push Roman or let him keep his secrets. Every question she could think to ask was a version of one she’d already tried.
“All right, then,” she said instead. “Let’s get this over with.”
Roman had planned this con on his own.
“I wouldn’t even call it a con,” he’d told her. “The hospitals were a mess in the years after that first earthquake; there were too many patients, too many injured, not enough doctors. A child could’ve snuck inside.”
“I hope your plan is a bit more advanced,” she’d said.
A roll of his eyes. “We’ll go in through the morgue. No one’s going to look twice at two emergency responders returning with bodies. It’ll get us through the door, at least, and that’s the hardest part. After that, we just need to work quickly.”
“B-bodies?” Dorothy had asked, her voice thick.
Roman had only grinned at her. “Body bags,” he’d corrected. “And don’t worry, they’ll be empty.”
Empty though the body bags may be, they were still heavy. They weren’t actually bags but hard, plastic cases attached to stretchers. Dorothy gritted her teeth as she pushed hers before her, careful to hold it steady as the wheels crunched over gravel and concrete.
They crossed the parking lot in silence, carefully avoiding eye contact with the other medical professionals swarming around them. Roman had procured the body bags, and uniforms, which were the same odd metallic scrubs that the other hospital workers were wearing. They didn’t have an ambulance, and Dorothy had been concerned that this would look suspicious. Now she could see that it had been foolish of her to worry. There