Dorothy wet her lips. She was interested in anything as long as it was food. “I’ll take both, thank you.”

The bartender nodded, wiping his hands on a white apron that hung from the waistband of his baggy shorts. He pulled a bottle of clear liquid out from behind the hubcap that served as the bar and filled a glass. Then he found a protein bar and a dusty bag of chips and tossed them onto the bar next to it.

“Thank you,” Dorothy murmured, dropping a few bills onto the counter. She took her drink and moved through the crowd, head ducked. She kept imagining that people were sending sideways glances her way, whispering to themselves. She had no way of telling whether the paranoia was in her head.

Finding a seat near the back of the bar, she took a sip of her drink. The hooch burned all the way down her throat and settled in her gut like a tire fire. She swallowed, grimacing, and tore into the protein bar, a brownish, lumpy substance that tasted salty and chocolaty and a little like sawdust. It was the least “food-like” food she’d ever eaten, but it managed to calm the rumbling in her belly, at least a little.

While she ate, she went over everything she knew.

Chandra said she’d been meeting with Ash in the past. She didn’t have a time machine, but she did have the Professor’s journal pages, and they happened to detail just how one might travel through time without a machine.

She tightened her fingers around her sticky glass, thinking. Was that what she’d done? Figured out how to travel through time without a vessel? It seemed unlikely. The Professor’s journal pages were helpful, but they weren’t exactly an instruction manual. And he’d made quite a point of talking about just how dangerous it was to even attempt such a thing. Dorothy still couldn’t get the phrase skin ripped from his body out of her head. She shuddered and put the rest of the protein bar down on the table, uneaten. She couldn’t imagine a less pleasant way to die.

The boy at the bar suddenly raised a hand, motioning for the patrons to quiet. He was staring at the television hanging over the bar. The image on the screen had skipped, and then froze.

Dorothy watched, dread pooling in her stomach as the image disappeared completely, replaced by two figures: Mac, and that strange, unfamiliar woman in black she’d seen on the docks that morning.

And now, she felt her anger flare. They were standing in her studio, the one she and Roman had built in the Fairmont’s basement. They were using the cameras that Dorothy had stolen from a defunct television station in 2044 and standing in front of the tattered American flag that Roman had hung from the ceiling.

How dare they?