“I wanted to.” The Professor frowned, deep lines appearing around his mouth. “Jonathan, you have to believe that all I wanted to do was go back to New Seattle and save you from that future. But there was more work to be done. Now that I knew what caused the earthquakes, I couldn’t use time travel any longer, not until I’d figured out how to mitigate the damage I was doing every time I went through the anil. I was able to pinpoint that the size of the earthquake correlated directly to the amount of disruption the anil experienced at the time of travel.”

Ash frowned, the Professor’s words spinning around in his head. “Sir? I don’t think that I understand. . . .”

“To put it in layman’s terms, a larger ship created a great deal of disruption, while a smaller ship created less.” The Professor held open his hands. “And no ship . . .”

“Means . . . no disruption?” Ash guessed.

“Exactly.” The Professor clapped his hands together, the sudden sound making Ash jump. “I got the idea from my research with Nikola Tesla. Tesla, you see, had long theorized that time travel without a vessel was possible. And not just without a vessel, but without direct access to the anil itself. It involves using the earth’s energy to access the power of the anil wherever you stand in time and space.”

The Professor pushed his glasses up his nose with a flick of his hand. “To be perfectly honest, I thought he was mad! I thought it was impossible. But if it worked, it would mean that there was a way to travel through time that wouldn’t upset the earth’s tectonic plates, a way to stop the earthquakes once and for all. But it’s tricky science. I’d only just finished the prototype when your friend arrived.” The Professor’s eyes shifted to the door on the other side of the room, almost like he expected to see Dorothy standing there. “She told me I was needed here. So, I came.”

Ash stared down at his palms. He didn’t know what to say. It made sense, all of it, and it killed him to know that they could have found the Professor weeks ago, if only they’d looked harder, if only they’d trusted that he was still alive.

He closed his eyes and saw the Fort Hunter rooftop, Zora’s devastated face as she realized that her father wasn’t there. He felt like he might be sick.

“I—I thought you were dead,” he admitted, his voice thick. “Zora, too. We all did.”

The Professor slid his glasses back up his nose. His eyes, behind the lenses, looked deeply pained. Ash waited for him to ask about his daughter, but he didn’t.