them here, not until Ash took a step closer, his eyes moving to hers.
A feeling somewhere between excitement and terror flared through her.
Oh no, oh no, not here.
Ash seemed to understand that it would be a mistake to address her here, and so he turned back to Roman, hands held out before him, as though in surrender.
“Roman,” he said, taking another step into the clearing. “I didn’t—”
Dorothy would never know what he was about to say. Before he could finish, Roman had leaped forward, his expression twisted into a look of deepest loathing. He crashed into Ash with a grunt and the two of them went tumbling to the ground.
34
Ash
Ash flew backward, his head smacking into the ground with a wet thud. He’d been so surprised by the attack that he hadn’t been able to prepare himself for the fall. His arms and legs cartwheeled, cartoonishly, doing nothing to brace his body for the sudden impact with the ground.
He blinked, stunned. For a moment, all he could see was mud and gray sky.
And then, Roman was leaning over him. “Old friend,” he murmured. He fisted his hands around the front of Ash’s jacket, pushing him deeper into the mud. “How the hell did you get here?”
Ash didn’t answer but grabbed Roman by the shoulders and shoved him off. Roman tumbled back into the dirt, a grim smile on his lips. Ash was vaguely aware of a slight, white shape standing in the shadows just behind him. Dorothy.
He waited a beat, hoping she’d jump in and explain about their meeting behind the Dead Rabbit, and how she’d tipped him off on the possibility of traveling through time without any EM. But she only looked at him with a puzzled expression on her face, and said nothing.
“I followed you,” Ash said, not sure how else to put it. He’d reached the hospital quickly—it was closer to the shore where he’d washed up than he’d remembered—but he’d been too intimidated by the swarm of medical personnel gathered outside to try going through the front. Instead, he crept around back, reasoning that, in most cases, a back entrance was far easier to break into.
He hadn’t been able to put the theory to the test, though. The back door flew open before he got there, and Dorothy and Roman had come stumbling out, running. Ash hadn’t known what to do. So he’d gone after them.
Darting past cars and ducking through the rain until, finally, they’d reached Tent City and found a younger Roman kneeling in the clearing, holding his dying sister in his arms.
Ash had felt numb, watching them. The Roman kneeling in the clearing had been younger than he’d been when Ash had known him, but not so much younger. A year, perhaps. And yet Roman had never mentioned a sister. Not once.
“Why didn’t you tell me about her?” Ash asked Roman now.
A snort of a laugh and Roman said, “And what, exactly, would you have done about it, Asher?” He spat the name, as though it’d left a foul taste in his mouth. “Would you have tried to help? Or would you have been like the Professor, telling me we don’t use time travel to change the past with one breath, and then going back to save the people he loved with the next?”
Something heavy settled over Ash’s shoulders. He knew exactly what Roman was talking about. After his wife died, the Professor went back in time over and over again, trying to save her. The Professor had always maintained that time travel shouldn’t be used to change the past, that they didn’t yet know the effects that might have on the world around them. But, when it came to the woman he loved, he hadn’t cared.
Ash had always wondered why Roman had betrayed them. Of course he’d wondered. Roman had been one of them, after all. He’d been Ash’s best friend. The Professor had thought of him as a son. But, beneath the wonder, there’d been anger, and the anger had a way of rising up to obscure it. It was so much easier to believe that Roman had left because he was selfish, because something about him was wrong. Never had Ash considered that he’d wanted to save someone, too.
Ash found his eyes drawn back to the clearing where Roman’s dead sister had lain. She was gone now, and so was the younger Roman, probably frightened by the fighting, but Ash could still see the flattened bit of ground where they’d