She took a deep, steadying breath and tightened her grip around the yoke. One down, she thought, trying to ignore the knot forming in her stomach. Two more to go.

She still had so many questions. Was she really the one Ash had been seeing in his prememory? Was she deluding herself, thinking there was a chance that someone else had been posing as her, trying to trick him?

Perhaps. But she couldn’t waste these last two meetings asking the same questions over and over again, hoping for a different answer. There were other questions she needed to get to the bottom of.

The Professor’s experiments through time without a vessel, for instance. Other than the Professor himself, Ash was the only one who’d managed to figure out the secret. Perhaps he could teach Dorothy what he’d learned.

She pressed down on the gas, and the sudden acceleration sent her rocketing backward so that her body felt glued to the chair behind her.

The time machine leaped forward, into the future—

NOVEMBER 7, 2077

Dorothy landed the Black Crow in the tangle of docks behind the Dead Rabbit and cut the engine. She hadn’t needed Chandra to tell her about this meeting. She’d seen Ash inside the Dead Rabbit herself. She remembered how he’d motioned for her to meet him.

She hadn’t. She’d followed Roman to his room and confronted him about what they’d seen when they’d traveled to the future. But, later, Eliza mentioned spotting the Ash and Dorothy on the docks. And there was that photograph of the two of them about to kiss . . . her cheeks burned just thinking about it.

She made her way around to the back of the bar and waited beside the back door, one hand tucked inside of her coat, fingers curled around the hilt of Roman’s dagger. The Dead Rabbit was known to have some unsavory clientele. There was no telling who else might be wandering around back here. She couldn’t be too careful.

Some time passed. Dorothy saw no one and, eventually, her grip on the dagger loosened. The air outside was cold and wet, and she shivered, letting go of the dagger altogether so that she could hug her arms around her body, holding in what remaining warmth she had left. The dock tilted beneath her, making her feel a little seasick. She would never get used to the way that this damned city was always moving, how nothing felt steady.

She was just starting to wonder if she’d gotten it wrong, if they hadn’t met after all, when the bar’s back door creaked open and Ash stepped outside.

“You’re already here,” he said, letting the door fall shut behind him.

“I thought you . . . wanted me to come,” Dorothy said, suddenly awkward. All this time out here and she couldn’t have come up with a better line? Her cheeks flushed.