. . . which means this must be the secondary wave, see?” Chandra said, squinting. She had the Professor’s old textbooks and a thick pile of his notes spread out on the table before her, and she was looking back and forth between two rows of scribbled digits, pencil tapping her chin. “So you can measure the interval time of the S-P to find the distance from the seismometer to the epicenter. Hey, that makes sense.”
“That makes sense?” Zora snorted. “Is your definition of that word different from mine?”
“Well, it’s just how he ended up with this digit here, see? No here. Look at where I’m pointing.”
Zora shot her a murderous look.
They were at Dante’s, a cramped, dirty bar with mismatched chairs and tables covered in sticky layers of Dante’s famous homemade hooch. Strings of half-busted café lights hung from the ceiling above them, but Ash couldn’t remember the last time they’d actually emitted anything like light. Instead, there were drippy candles lined up against the walls, their flickering flames doing very little to illuminate the vinyl booths and wobbly café tables.
It wasn’t much. But no one here stared at them. Ash blinked at the textbook sitting open before him. His brain felt slow and soupy, and he hadn’t been able to follow a word of what Chandra was saying. Willis seemed to have given up, too. He’d quietly closed his book ten minutes ago and was currently folding his cocktail napkin into an origami swan.
Only Zora was still trying to follow along, and it didn’t appear to be doing anyone any good. She dug her fingers through her hair. “I’m a mechanic,” she said, teeth gritted. “I could build a time machine out of the stuff lying around this bar.”
Chandra blinked at her, eyes monstrous behind her thick glasses.
“What I’m trying to say is I’m not an idiot.” Zora flipped the textbook closed, irritated. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does,” Chandra insisted. “You can learn it if you try.”
“I really can’t.”
“Okay.” Chandra closed her textbook, too. “Maybe it’s time for a break. Get another drink, take some of the pressure off?”
Zora dropped her head to the table, groaning loudly. Willis quietly placed the cocktail napkin swan next to her.
“Maybe we should try looking on the bright side,” Chandra said, sliding a glass of something thick and brown across the table. “New Seattle is going to have electricity again. Remember electricity? It powers televisions and computers and turns on lights and helps with fancy things like heat. We like electricity.”
She lifted her thick, brown drink to her mouth, slurping loudly. Ash frowned at her for a moment before deciding he didn’t actually want to know what the drink was, or how she’d convinced Levi to make it for her.
“We already have electricity,” Willis said. “And we didn’t have to sell ourselves to the Black Cirkus to get it.”
“Please tell me you aren’t talking about the Professor’s old solar panels, because they’ve been acting up for weeks.” Chandra’s eyes brightened. “We could finally watch the rest of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ve only seen the first four seasons.”
“Come on, Chandie, Buffy?”
Ash turned his glass with two fingers, watching the clear hooch slosh up along the sides. Back at the docks, he’d wanted to be here, surrounded by his friends, drinking Dante’s terrible liquor and going through these textbooks, finally feeling like they were accomplishing something.
But, now, he found himself longing for the docks shifting beneath his feet and the cold bite of wind on his cheeks, the sound of the crowd chanting around him. He looked around this bar, and all he could think about was how he’d brought Dorothy here, the way her eyes had gone wide when she’d first stepped into this room.
He wondered if she would’ve spoken to him, if she’d seen him standing on the docks just now.
And then he hated himself for wondering.
And then he hated himself a little more because, to be honest, he would’ve been perfectly satisfied if she’d walked past him without a word, as long as he got to see her face.
It was kind of ironic, if he thought about it. For the last year Quinn Fox’s face had haunted him. Or, rather, the darkness under her hood had haunted him. The absence of a face. He’d scowled and turned away whenever it flashed on his television screen.
Now, it was all he could think about.
He wanted to laugh. Or scream. He wanted to kiss her again. His lips burned with the wanting.