The two people who’d just dropped out of the sky began to move. They crawled to hands and knees, and then stood, dusting off pants and shaking out their jackets. The smoke around them began to fade, and the clouds overhead lightened and thinned. One of the people was a woman—

Dorothy, Ash realized dimly. What was she doing?

She knelt, offering a hand to the other person. Ash squinted. It was a man in a tweed jacket, his salt-and-pepper hair strangely familiar. . . .

Okay, Ash thought, grinning stupidly. This was definitely a dream. Because that wasn’t just any man, it was the Professor, and he happened to know that the Professor was dead. He’d died at Fort Hunter complex in 1980. He and Zora had seen the footage, and they’d stood on the bloodstained rooftop, so he knew it was true. The Professor was long gone.

So he couldn’t be standing outside just now.

Couldn’t be.

Ash’s eyes closed. He felt himself sink farther into his pillows, drowsiness washing over him in a wave. He hadn’t fully recovered from his stab wound, and he needed rest to heal. Rest, and some morphine, preferably. Why couldn’t Dorothy have taken him to a time period where they had better drugs?

Sleep, he thought groggily. Sleep sounded so good right now.

But something nagged at him.

All the other dreams he’d had while unconscious, they were of the past, of things that had actually happened. There was the time he met Dorothy in the clearing outside the church, and that first moment he saw Quinn Fox’s hair on a security camera and realized that she was going to be the one to kill him. But the only time Ash had ever seen the Professor and Dorothy together was at the Fort Hunter complex.

And . . . well, now that he thought about it, that was a pretty strange coincidence, seeing them together. When had it even happened? Dorothy had never mentioned going back to Fort Hunter with Roman. And what had she wanted with the Professor, anyway? As far as he knew, the two had never met in real life. She’d have told him if they had, wouldn’t she?

My daughter just left, Loretta had said. Ash had tried to get her to tell him more, but she’d refused. She’d stood, saying that he needed his rest, and then she’d left his room without another word. Ash hadn’t given it much more thought—Loretta had been right, he had needed his rest—but now he frowned.

What the hell?

Curiosity was enough to get him to pry his eyes open again. The last of his drowsiness had faded, and the scene outside his window wasn’t quite so swimmy and strange. He could clearly see the Professor and Dorothy walking across the grass. Talking to each other.

His heart began to beat a little faster.