Zora groaned and started to stir. Dorothy could hear voices in the distance now, then approaching footsteps. Someone would be down this way soon, and Zora would be found. In the meantime, Dorothy had work to do.

She retraced her steps back to the Fairmont, carefully, carefully, making sure to stick to the shadows, as always. Now, more than ever, she couldn’t allow herself to be caught.

She knew where Mac was taking Ash, and so it was no surprise when she caught up with the boat again outside the old Fairmont parking garage. She waited in the shadows until she was certain the Cirkus Freaks had gotten Ash up the stairs and into an empty hotel room. A few moments later, when she made her way up after them, there was no one else in the dank, dreary hallway.

She remembered the next few hours going like this: Mac would come up the stairs, and he would torture Ash until she and Roman came to call him away. Then—and only then—she could break into his room and set him free. That’s how this was supposed to happen, she knew. It’s what she’d seen.

And so Dorothy waited, staring at the peeling wallpaper. She couldn’t help thinking of blood. The blood Mac was going to beat out of Ash in just a few minutes. The blood she would spill when she killed him later tonight. The blood of all the people left in the city, thousands and thousands of people, all dead if she did nothing.

So much blood. Too much. Her future was soaked in it.

She thought, again, about pulling a con with her mother. How many hours had she spent just like this, waiting for a mark to walk down the street or into a restaurant, rehearsing lines in her head and knowing that, if she said even one word out of order, it could ruin everything.

No chance of that happening now, she thought idly. According to everything she knew of time travel, it didn’t matter what she did. The outcome would be the same.

She frowned, turning this over in her head. She’d never thought of it quite like that before. In a con, she had to control every variable of an interaction in order to get the desired outcome. But time travel wasn’t like that . . . it was the outcome that was certain, no matter what she did leading up to it. Right?

Thinking about this hurt her brain. With time travel, she’d found, it was easier to sort out the logic by doing and then analyze the facts of what she’d discovered later.

“No time like the present,” she muttered to herself. A glance around the corner showed no one coming. The hall was empty, quiet. She couldn’t even hear the distant rise and fall of voices, the thud of footsteps.