gotten used to the skyline. It looked strange and futuristic and alien, as always. The only thing that felt familiar was the moon hanging above her, close enough that she almost thought she could reach up and pluck it out of the sky.
She lifted her face, staring up at that moon. Back when she’d been new to the Black Cirkus, she often came up to the roof to think. No one else in the gang would risk climbing so high. Other than Roman, of course.
A tear touched her cheek. She brushed it away with an angry flick of her hand, but another came after it, and another. Eventually she gave up and let them come. In all her life, she’d never felt as alone as she did right now. Even during those first terrible days back in 2076, when she’d crash-landed in the wrong time, she’d still had Roman. But, now, he was gone. He was gone, and Ash was gone, and the Chronology Protection Agency wanted nothing to do with her, and her gang had betrayed her.
A lump moved up Dorothy’s throat, making it hard to breathe.
She was without allies. Without hope. Without money.
For the first time in a long time, she found herself missing her mother.
“Stop it,” she told herself, opening her eyes again. She pressed her palms to her cheeks, sopping up her tears. She might not have allies or friends, but it wasn’t as though she didn’t know what to do. She’d been hopeless before, and she’d always found a way out, hadn’t she?
She just needed leverage.
There, she thought, I might just be in luck.
She pulled the Professor’s journal pages out from beneath her cloak and began thumbing through them. The air was heavy with damp. It wasn’t raining, yet, but it would be soon, and the thick pages stuck to her fingertips, the ink bleeding. She grimaced as she pulled them apart. She would need to get through them quickly or else they’d be ruined. And then they’d be no use to her at all.
Propping herself up, Dorothy began to read.
LOG ENTRY—AUGUST 8, 2074
10:50 HOURS
THE WORKSHOP
I’ve been over Nikola Tesla’s notes half a dozen times now, and I still find that I’m too nervous to actually put his theory to the test.
Time travel without a vessel, without access to an anil, without any exotic matter.
If Nikola is correct, if these things really are possible, it means that we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of this science.
But if he’s incorrect . . .
Well. Let’s just say that there are many, many ways this could go wrong.
For instance, if you’ll recall, only two people attempted to travel through an anil without a ship before me. One was killed, instantly, and the other had his skin ripped from his body.
Neither outcome is especially appealing.
And yet . . . there’s reason to believe that it should be possible to travel through time without a clunky machine and access to an anil. In fact, stories of time travel can be found as early as eighth century BCE.
Natasha once told me a story about a kid named Abimelech who travels sixty-six years into the future while gathering figs, all because God wanted to spare him the heartbreak of war.
And in the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, King Raivata was said to have left the earth to meet with God only to return hundreds of years later.
And the Japanese legend of Urashima Taro tells of a fisherman who goes to visit some underwater God. He experiences only a few days passing, but when he returns home it’s three hundred years later.
It’s occurring to me as I write this that none of these great voyagers ever returned from their journeys through time. Which is unnerving. But not as unnerving as the guy who had his skin ripped off.
I should back up a bit. Before I decide whether it makes any sense to test Nikola’s theory, perhaps it’s best that I lay out what it actually is.
In the 1890s and early 1900s, Nikola became obsessed with a theory that he might be able to conduct electricity long distance through the earth’s surface. He took a lot of money from a lot of people, lied to everyone about what he was doing, and moved from New York to Colorado Springs to experiment with this type of research far from public scrutiny. Around this time, he’s quoted as saying, “Progress in this field has given me fresh hope that I shall see the fulfillment