born with type 1 diabetes. What you just saw . . . her blood sugar plummeted unexpectedly, sending her into shock. We’d run out of insulin the week before and, with the hospitals overrun from the earthquake, there was no one we could go to for help. She went into a diabetic coma, and . . .” Roman looked at Dorothy and away. “Well. You saw what happened.”
“She died,” Dorothy said, and Roman closed his eyes.
“She did,” he added, voice quiet. “It’s why I can’t leave this city. It’s the last place she was ever alive. It’d feel like I’d left her.”
“And you thought you could still save her. That’s why we came back to this day, isn’t it? It wasn’t really about bringing medical equipment to the city at all?”
“It’s not the only reason.” Roman leaned back. The fluorescent lights caught his eyes, turning them a deep, stormy blue. “Back at Fort Hunter, you asked me why I betrayed them. Ash and the others.”
“You said we hadn’t been acquainted long enough for that story.”
“You remember.” A ghost of a smile flitted across his lips. “I know what Ash thinks of me, what he probably told you, but I only left the team because of what happened to Cassia. I wanted to go back in time and try to save her life, but the Professor said it wasn’t possible. He wouldn’t even try. I thought he was being selfish. But the old fool was right.” Roman laughed, humorlessly, and shook his head. “But that’s not the only reason I wanted to come back here.”
Dorothy was confused. “What other reason could there be?”
“You asked me about the butterfly effect before, when you saw what our future was going to become. You asked me why I didn’t want to figure out which moment changed the course of human history. Remember?”
“I remember.”
Roman looked up at her, miserable. “The moment Cassia died was the moment I first started thinking about defecting to the Black Cirkus. I didn’t actually leave until years later, but . . . if she hadn’t died, I’d have stayed with the Chronology Protection Agency, and everything would’ve been different. The Professor never would’ve gotten lost in the past, we would’ve found a way to stop the earthquakes. Everything that happened, everything that’s going to happen, all of it’s my fault.”
The silence between them stretched. It felt charged. Dorothy knew that, no matter what she said, she was making a choice.
She thought of black skies and burned cities and no sun.
“It’s not too late,” she said finally. “Let’s try again.”
They returned at twilight, three hours before Cassia was going to die. They snuck through the hospital’s gold-tinted halls while the sun dipped low in the horizon. They gathered the insulin in silence and then crept out the back door and through the shadow-darkened streets. They hid the medication in Roman’s tent while he and his sister were out. They couldn’t stay near the tent because that put them at risk of being seen, and so they hid in the trees and watched the clearing.
Dorothy felt her heartbeat thrum in her palms, her breath shallow and quick. She was sure it had worked. It had to have worked.
Three hours passed, and then the scene played out exactly as it had before: A younger Roman stumbled out of the tent, holding his sister. She looked like a broken bird in his arms, her head lolling back, her neck long and pale.
He collapsed in the clearing. Her eyes stared, unblinking, at the sky.
“Thieves,” the older Roman whispered, still crouching beside Dorothy. “I’d forgotten.”
“Forgotten what?”
“That day, thieves snuck into our tent and stole some of our food. I thought they’d only taken the canned goods I’d been planning for dinner. They must’ve taken the medicine, too.”
His face was stony as he stared ahead, watching his sister die. Dorothy touched his shoulder, her heart heavy.
“Come on,” she said softly.
They returned a half hour before his sister’s death. Any earlier, and they risked the thieves stealing the medication again. They crept through the halls. Stole the insulin. Made their way to the back staircase.
A burly security guard heading out for a cigarette break intercepted them mere feet from the heavy, double doors that led to the back parking lot. He detained them in a back room, and they only managed to escape when Dorothy found a stray bobby pin on the floor and used it to pick the lock. By the time they made it to the