“No,” Roman agreed. “And, after a while, he’s not going to be satisfied with tagging along with Ash every time he wants to travel through time. Eventually, he’s going to cut Ash open and dig the remaining EM out of his body so he can take it for himself. Ash is only safe as long as he’s gone. And the future is only safe if he never comes back.”

“Stop.” Dorothy pressed her hands to her ears, wanting to block out everything Roman was saying. “You can’t be serious. You can’t actually believe that this is the only way to save the world.” She felt the taste of something bitter fill her mouth as the reality of what he was proposing settled over her.

She couldn’t have killed Ash. She didn’t believe it.

“If you look at the bigger picture, all of this starts to makes sense,” Roman said gently.

“No.” Something deep inside of her started to ache. “There must be something else we can do. This can’t be the only way. It can’t be.”

Roman was leaning against the far wall of his hotel room, arms crossed over his chest. He pinned her in place with a look and said, very calmly, “I thought that’s why you were here? To figure out why you killed Ash?”

“I’m here to figure out how not to kill him!” Dorothy snapped.

All at once this was too much for her. She felt energy coursing through her veins, nervous, jittery energy that made her want to move, to do something. She stood and started to pace the length of the small room.

Roman, from his position beside the wall, said, “You know as well as I do that’s not how time travel works.”

Dorothy huffed, and only paced faster.

She didn’t want to accept this. Not any of it. Roman couldn’t actually be suggesting that the only way to save the world was for Ash to die. It was cruel . . . it was ridiculous. She had a time machine, didn’t she? She could simply take Ash and disappear back in time. They could go somewhere fun. 1960s London or 2050s Seoul, somewhere filled with food and fashion and parties . . .

But, even as this plan was taking shape in her head, she thought of the horrible future she’d seen.

New Seattle in ruins. An entire city reduced to ashes and ice.

Could she really live with herself, knowing she had let that happen? That she’d let all those people die even though she’d known how to stop it?

She stopped pacing. She kept telling herself that she wasn’t a monster, but walking away, leaving an entire city to its fate when she knew how to fix things, that was monstrous.

There had to be another way. There had to be . . .