He wanted to see her, even knowing what it meant. He had to see her one last time.
The boat drew closer. She was hidden beneath that hood, but her hair had blown loose. Long, white strands dancing in the darkness.
She pulled up next to him and cut the engine.
“I didn’t think you’d come.” Her voice was lower than he’d expected, practically a purr. She reached up, pushed those white strands of hair back under her hood with a flick of her hand.
Ash swallowed. He didn’t see the knife, but he knew she had it. “It doesn’t have to end like this.”
Her hand disappeared inside her coat. “Of course it does.”
57
Dorothy
NOVEMBER 11, 2077, NEW SEATTLE
Dorothy was about to open the door when it flew open on its own, slamming into the wall with a crack.
Zora stood before her, gun in hand.
“You bitch.” She shoved Dorothy against the wall and pressed the barrel of her gun to her forehead.
“What—” Dorothy tried to squirm away, but Zora had an arm angled across her collarbone, and she leaned into it, increasing the pressure on Dorothy’s chest.
Dimly, Dorothy registered the bodies of three men lying in the hallway behind her, unconscious.
The guards, she realized, with growing horror. Zora had taken them all out.
“What did you do to him?” Zora said, and Dorothy heard the hammer of her gun click into place. “Tell me or I swear to God I’ll shoot off the rest of your face!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dorothy said through the tightness in her throat.
Zora cocked her head, and now Dorothy could see that, beneath all that anger, she was barely holding herself together. She was breathing fast, and her eyes were wet and wide and desperately unhappy. Something was very badly wrong.
A chill went through Dorothy, and it had nothing to do with the gun still pressed to her forehead. “Zora,” she asked, more firmly now. “What happened?”
Doubt flickered across Zora’s face. She lowered the gun. “You really don’t know.”
She didn’t say it like it was a question and, before Dorothy could respond, she’d dug something out of her pocket and thrust it into Dorothy’s hands.
It was a note.
Outside the anil. Midnight.
Whatever Dorothy had braced herself for, it wasn’t this. Her eyes traveled over the words scrawled across the ripped sheet of paper, the way they looped and curved, angling slightly to the left.
This note—it was written in her handwriting.
Dorothy breathed and read the note again, trying to understand. It was her handwriting and yet she hadn’t written it.
And that wasn’t all. There—that splotch of ink over the word anil, it reminded her of the fountain pens in Avery’s study, so unlike the cheap plastic things people used now. As far as she knew, there was only one such pen left in the entire world, and it was down in the basement of this hotel, along with the rest of the things she and Roman had taken from the past.
She looked up at Zora, her mind spinning. “Where did you get this?”
A flash of fury lit Zora’s face. “You left it in Ash’s room an hour ago, Fox. I found it on his bed.”
But . . . but she didn’t. She hadn’t. She was about to say so when—
Oh God. Dorothy brought a trembling hand to her mouth, remembering. Back in the parking garage, hadn’t Eliza claimed to see her meeting with Ash on the docks outside the Dead Rabbit?
And then, again, she said she’d seen Dorothy helping Ash escape from Mac. Dorothy had done neither of those things, and so she’d assumed that Eliza was lying. It hadn’t even occurred to her to consider the alternative, and now she felt stupid for not seeing it.
She lived in a world where time travel was real.
It was possible she just hadn’t done those things yet.
Dorothy took a step closer to Zora, feeling as though her breath and her heartbeat were lodged in her throat together. “You asked me what I did to him? What do you think I did to him?”
Zora’s voice was steel as she said, “Let me show you.”
The anil looked iridescent in the distance, a soap bubble sitting atop the waves. And then it looked like a jagged crack through ice, its sharp edges spiderwebbing into the sky. It was a tunnel made of mist and smoke. A distant star. The beginning of a tornado.
Dorothy blinked and looked away, her heart speeding up. She tightened her grip around Zora’s waist. She felt her breath