Dorothy chewed her lower lip, considering. Was that money still there? she wondered. It seemed soulless to steal from the dead. But what other options did she have? Starving wouldn’t be much fun.

“Blast,” she muttered, and turned left instead of right, veering toward Roman’s old room. He would understand, she told herself, trying to tamp down her guilt. Roman no longer needed to eat. He would think it was sentimental nonsense to let money go to waste.

Down the hall Dorothy went, and then up another staircase, to Roman’s old room. Unlike Dorothy, Roman had taken the trouble to decorate. There were pictures on the walls: sketches torn from old books—Roman particularly loved Rembrandt and da Vinci—knickknacks scattered across the dressers. Pausing, Dorothy saw a photograph of Roman’s little sister, Cassia, tucked into the frame of his mirror. Strange how she’d never noticed the photograph before.

She knelt in front of his bedside table and began shuffling around, pushing aside books and papers. Nothing there. Blast.

She tried his desk next and found more of the same: notebooks, journals, textbooks. No cash. She dug her teeth into her lower lip and was about to slam the drawer shut in frustration when her fingers brushed against something silky and thick.

A prickle of familiarity went through her. This wasn’t cheap, like the other notebook paper in Roman’s desk. It felt like it had been torn from a very nice journal. Heart thudding, Dorothy slid it out, her eyes quickly scanning the handwriting.

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.

Dorothy felt every muscle in her body go still. Her heart hammered steadily inside of her chest. She knew this handwriting well. She’d never met the man who Roman and Ash referred to as merely “the Professor,” but she knew all about him. He’d invented time travel, and then he’d disappeared, leaving behind a journal of cryptic notes on the theory of time travel, experiments into the past and future, and a lot of questions about where he’d gone and why.

Several weeks ago (or, a year and several weeks, depending on how she calculated time) Dorothy had stumbled across his journal in some of Roman’s things. She’d read the entire thing in one sitting, desperate to learn more about how and why time travel was possible. It had been like getting lost in the very best kind of novel, except that it had all been real.

Staring down at the pages she held now, she felt a prickle of excitement move through her. She’d had no idea that parts of the journal had been missing.

Somewhere in the hotel, faint as a sigh, there was a noise: a shoe scuffing against the floor, a whisper, something.