She pulled the Professor’s journal pages out from beneath her cloak and began thumbing through them. The air was heavy with damp. It wasn’t raining, yet, but it would be soon, and the thick pages stuck to her fingertips, the ink bleeding. She grimaced as she pulled them apart. She would need to get through them quickly or else they’d be ruined. And then they’d be no use to her at all.

Propping herself up, Dorothy began to read.

LOG ENTRY—AUGUST 8, 2074

10:50 HOURS

THE WORKSHOP

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.

Time travel without a vessel, without access to an anil, without any exotic matter.

If Nikola is correct, if these things really are possible, it means that we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of this science.

But if he’s incorrect . . .

Well. Let’s just say that there are many, many ways this could go wrong.

For instance, if you’ll recall, only two people attempted to travel through an anil without a ship before me. One was killed, instantly, and the other had his skin ripped from his body.

Neither outcome is especially appealing.

And yet . . . there’s reason to believe that it should be possible to travel through time without a clunky machine and access to an anil. In fact, stories of time travel can be found as early as eighth century BCE.

Natasha once told me a story about a kid named Abimelech who travels sixty-six years into the future while gathering figs, all because God wanted to spare him the heartbreak of war.

And in the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, King Raivata was said to have left the earth to meet with God only to return hundreds of years later.

And the Japanese legend of Urashima Taro tells of a fisherman who goes to visit some underwater God. He experiences only a few days passing, but when he returns home it’s three hundred years later.

It’s occurring to me as I write this that none of these great voyagers ever returned from their journeys through time. Which is unnerving. But not as unnerving as the guy who had his skin ripped off.

I should back up a bit. Before I decide whether it makes any sense to test Nikola’s theory, perhaps it’s best that I lay out what it actually is.