“Let me help you now,” Ash said, and, after a moment’s hesitation, he leaned forward and—slowly, slowly, his eyes holding Roman’s—he placed his own gun on the ground between them. “We shouldn’t be fighting each other. We should be fighting him.”
There was no trace of anger left on Roman’s face. His expression was anguish; it was pain.
Too much has happened, Ash thought, hopeless. They could never go back to what they were. But, still, he wanted to show Roman that he was no longer his enemy. That he didn’t blame him for what he’d had to do.
“I saw this moment,” Roman said. “I’ve always known this was going to happen like this.”
He lowered his gun and held out his hand.
As Ash reached for it, a gunshot cracked through the air.
49
Dorothy
The shot echoed through Dorothy’s head, seeming to ring in her ears long after it should’ve gone silent.
Time hitched. She almost thought it was a time-travel thing, how the world around her seemed to slow down so that she saw every moment of what happened next in vivid, excruciating slow motion.
The bullet hit Roman on the right side of his chest, jerking him backward. He swayed forward, landing on the ground cheek-first, plumes of dust and ashes billowing up around him. His gun skidded away from his body, fingers twitching.
The ashes obscuring his face cleared, and then he was staring at her, his eyes not quite focusing. He swallowed, with difficulty. Dorothy watched the slow rise and fall of his Adam’s apple beneath the skin at his throat. A single drop of blood oozed past his lips and down his chin to stain the ground below his face.
Mac raised his gun to his lips and blew the smoke from the barrel.
He aimed at Ash and fired again.
50
Ash
Two years ago, Ash had arrived in New Seattle an outsider. He’d been a farm boy and a soldier, fresh off flying fighter jets across the German sky during World War II. Time travel was a concept he didn’t think he’d ever fully grasp. He didn’t even have a high school diploma. Who was he to talk about theoretical physics?
It was a world he never should’ve been a part of, and he’d felt like an impostor from the moment he’d stepped off the time machine and seen the bright new city before him.
In those days, the Professor and his family had been living in university housing, an entire floor of rooms in an old redbrick building with creaky floorboards and drafty windows. Ash had hauled his army-green duffel onto a twin bed in one of those rooms, but he hadn’t been able to unpack. All his energy had been focused on trying to breathe like a normal person. Inhale first, then exhale.
And then he’d heard a creak of floorboards, followed by a voice. “Do you golf?”
Ash didn’t know what he’d expected to see standing in his doorway—if time travel were real, did that mean ghosts were, too? What about bigfoot?—but it had been Roman, his head cocked, that infuriating smile playing at the corner of his lips. He’d been holding a dirty golf ball in one hand, rolling it between his fingers.
“Golf?” Ash remembered saying, frowning. He’d never golfed before, and it struck him as a strange, sort of fussy sport. His old man had liked football and boxing. Golf was for rich people and snobs.
He’d snorted, but Roman either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He’d tossed him the ball and jerked his head down the hallway. “C’mon,” he’d said. “You’ll like it, I promise.”
He’d taken Ash to a door at the end of the hall, and up several flights of stairs to the roof. Ash hadn’t realized how high the university building towered over the city until they’d walked out onto that roof. The whole of Seattle lay before them, gleaming with white light as ferries moved across Elliott Bay, office lights blazed from skyscrapers, and bars and restaurants stayed lit for the evening. He could make out the distant, blue-tinted light of the Space Needle, and the dizzying glow of the waterfront. It looked strange and futuristic and alien, and the only thing that felt familiar was the moon hanging above them, close enough that Ash almost thought he could reach up and pluck it out of the sky.
Roman had handed him a rusted golf club and nodded at a bucket of balls