was chaos in the parking lot, so many people rushing into the hospital that it was impossible to see where they were all coming from. She and Roman blended in easily.
They reached the sidewalk that wrapped around the hospital’s main entrance, and the uneven ground beneath the wheels of her stretcher became smooth pavement. Her heart thrummed anxiously. She glanced at Roman, but he kept his eyes trained ahead, jaw tensed in concentration.
The front doors whooshed open, releasing a blast of cool air. Dorothy smelled the sharp, antiseptic smell of the hospital; she heard phones ringing in the distance and the mechanical sound of someone speaking over an intercom. She had to remind herself not to look shocked.
A young man with a clipboard stood just inside the doors. He appeared to be checking people’s credentials.
His eyes passed over them, disinterested, and landed back on his clipboard. “Where are you headed?”
Dorothy’s palms grew clammy. “We—”
“We have two DOAs,” Roman said, nodding at the body bags. “This is just a drop.”
The man flicked a hand, already moving to the people who’d come in behind them. “Morgue’s in the basement.”
And that was it. They were in.
Dorothy sped up a little so that she was walking beside Roman now. She tried, again, to catch his eye and, again, he wouldn’t look at her. She noticed that there was sweat glistening on his forehead and a crease wrinkling the skin between his eyes: nerves. But why was he so nervous? They were in. The hard part was over.
They entered an elevator, Dorothy giving a little start as it began to drop. She’d been inside an elevator before, but she was never fully prepared for the surreal sensation of the floor moving beneath her. She braced a hand against the wall, her stomach turning over. She much preferred stairs.
They descended deep into the building, stopping at the basement. The doors opened onto an empty hall. Lights flickered—somewhat ominously, Dorothy thought—and the walls were painted a sickly green. It gave her the feeling of being underwater.
Roman nodded at a sign: MEDICAL STORAGE, MORGUE.
“Here we are,” he murmured, moving ahead.
Dorothy swallowed, tasting something bitter at the back of her throat. Glancing at the storage rooms, she saw shelves stuffed with bandages and gauze and glinting glass bottles. Their plan was to sneak inside those rooms and load up the empty body bags with as many supplies as they could manage, and then bring them back to New Seattle.
Roman pushed his stretcher past the storage room with a soft grunt.
Dorothy hesitated. He was supposed to go into the storage room and start loading up medication, but he kept moving, pushing his stretcher farther down the hall.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I have to find something first,” he said. “Don’t worry, we’ll go back.”
Something clenched in Dorothy’s chest. He sounded anxious. She’d never heard Roman sound like that before.
The wheels of his stretcher squeaked over the hospital’s linoleum floors. Roman was halfway down the hall now, but he didn’t slow down, and he didn’t turn.
Swallowing, Dorothy followed him.
32
Ash
JULY 10, 2074, NEW SEATTLE
Something coarse and sharp pressed into Ash’s cheek. Rain pelted the back of his neck.
Ash’s back arched as he coughed up a lungful of seawater. Everything in his body ached, and the ground seemed to shift and move beneath him.
He forced his eyes open, but the rain obscured his eyesight so that, for a moment, all he saw was gray and black. He could feel water lapping at his feet, the cold seeping into his boots.
The last thing he remembered was leaping out of the motorboat and Zora’s screaming. He’d thought that the anil was pulling him in, that he might somehow follow the Black Crow into the time tunnel, but he must’ve been mistaken. The tide must’ve dragged him back to shore.
Well that was a failed experiment, he thought, pushing himself off the ground. He blinked through the rain, hoping that Zora wasn’t too far, that she might be able to take him home. He lifted his head—
And froze.
The Seattle cityscape spread out before him, dark and glittering. It wasn’t the hulking black outline of New Seattle’s remaining skyscrapers that Ash was familiar with but the dazzling, lit-up skyline of the city before the flood. The roads were dry, and buildings rose high into the air, every window golden and glowing. The old highway curved through it all and, on it, Ash could just make out the twinkling of headlights as cars and trucks and motorcycles roared past.