“You have to get out of here,” she said urgently, looking over her shoulder. She had no idea how much time they had. “Mac won’t be long and if you’re still here when he returns, he’ll kill you.”

“I don’t die today,” Ash muttered. “I know when I die.”

So do I, Dorothy thought. “Lucky you,” she said. “Now go.”

She didn’t wait for him to get up. She didn’t need to, she knew that he would. She knew everything that was going to happen next.

Ash was going to follow her and Roman into the future. She would try to kill Mac, and she would fail. Ash and Roman were going to fight, and then Roman was going to die.

Her heart gave a violent tug. She knew it was going to happen like this, because she’d seen it. There was no other way.

The outcome can’t be changed, she thought again. Maybe she was fooling herself, thinking there was some loophole to be exploited. Maybe she really was powerless.

She pulled Ash’s gun out of her cloak and placed it on the floor in front of him. And then she stood and slipped back out into the hallway, leaving the door wide open behind her.

Her heart was heavy and cold. It felt like a cruel kind of torture, to watch the same things happen over and over again. To know there was nothing she could do to stop them.

LOG ENTRY—OCTOBER 10, 2074

11:56 HOURS

THE WORKSHOP

I’ve spent the last few days thinking about my latest experiment. The heartbreaking death of Little Jeff the mouse.

The thing is, I just can’t figure out why he died. He was smaller than the potato I brought back, so it wasn’t that the exotic matter didn’t extend far enough beyond my physical body. It must have something to do with the biochemical makeup of the organisms. The mouse, unlike the potato, had a heartbeat.

So the question becomes: How can I protect the heartbeat?

When I built my time machine, I was able to integrate the exotic properties of the matter into the structure of the vessel itself, thus extending its protection. I did this by utilizing a technique I actually stole from Tesla.

You see, a Tesla coil consists of two parts: a primary coil and secondary coil, each with its own capacitator. (Capacitators are basically just batteries made to store electrical energy.) The two coils and capacitators are connected by a spark gap—a gap of air between two electrodes that generates the spark of electricity. An outside source hooked up to a transformer powers the whole system. Essentially, the Tesla coil is two open electric circuits connected to a spark gap.