And Ash didn’t know where to begin looking for her.
He slid his foot out the door. “Mac’s bleeding pretty bad upstairs. If any of you are looking to make a run for it, now would be the time.”
None of the girls moved. They looked at each other and then back at Ash.
Mira cocked her head. “But where else would we go?”
When Ash couldn’t answer, she ushered Hope back inside and pushed the door closed.
3
Dorothy
NOVEMBER 5, 2077, NEW SEATTLE
Three weeks ago, Dorothy had kidnapped herself.
Well. Her past self.
Time was a circle. She’d learned that a year ago, and she was still learning and relearning it, even now. When she went back to the 1990s to steal art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, she knew she’d be successful because she’d already been successful; the heist had gone down in history as the most impressive of all time. It was dizzying to think about, but, sometimes, the things one did in the past didn’t really happen until the future, and things one didn’t think had happened at all were already happening in someone else’s past.
For instance, when Dorothy had first arrived in New Seattle, she’d heard about a mysterious girl named Quinn Fox. But it wasn’t until she fell backward in time that she realized she was Quinn Fox. She’d always been Quinn Fox.
But she still had work to do. Certain things had to be put into place in order for everything to happen the way it was supposed to. Roman needed to make sure Dorothy ended up with the exotic matter before she fell off Ash’s ship, for one thing. And that meant that she and Roman had needed to kidnap her past self and plant the idea to go back in time in the first place.
It had been . . . elaborate. But Dorothy had been fully prepared for the tediousness of setting up clues for her past self to follow, of feeding Roman lines and planting hints and weaving suspicion—
She hadn’t been prepared to see herself, though. That had come as something of a shock. She kept reliving the moment when it’d happened, the stuffy heat of the hotel room and the smell of mold and damp and something else, a lightly floral scent that had made her nose twitch, reminding her of her mother.
“What about our newest guest?” she’d asked Roman. The conversation had been staged, naturally. They’d needed Dorothy’s past self to think they were going to kill her so that she’d steal the Professor’s journal (which they’d conveniently left behind for her to discover) and jump out a window, thus delivering the journal to Ash and his friends. “Bring me whatever valuables you find, and get rid of the body. We need the room empty again by tonight.”
Dorothy could still remember how terrified she’d been when she’d first heard those words. Get rid of the body. Like she was merely a thing to be disposed of, a chore. She’d imagined a single gunshot in her back as she was running away, a sudden numbness, followed by a thick, heavy darkness. Standing there, saying the words herself, she’d felt blood pumping in her palms and a bitter taste hit the back of her throat. She wasn’t that girl any longer. She wouldn’t be helpless again.
So maybe that was why she’d looked, to prove to herself that she’d changed. She’d heard the soft rustle of fabric behind her and she’d turned on instinct, inadvertently catching a glimpse of her own face.
It had been her old face, unravaged by a fall from a time machine, or a year spent with a vicious gang. Her skin had been clear, her hair dark and chestnut brown. The first thought Dorothy had, seeing her past self, was no wonder she’d kept getting taken: she’d looked more like a doll than like a person, and she’d been so much younger than Dorothy could ever remember being. And innocent.
As soon as she thought it, the word got stuck in her head, like a bit of a song lyric that she couldn’t stop singing. Innocent, innocent . . . Had she ever been innocent? She’d been a thief and a con artist before she’d become Quinn Fox. She’d stolen money and hearts; she’d tricked men into believing she wanted them and then disappeared to leave them to tend to their wounds alone. Innocent was never a word she’d have used to describe herself, and she wouldn’t have believed it