Dorothy blinked and looked away, her heart speeding up. She tightened her grip around Zora’s waist. She felt her breath coming faster.

Zora cut the engine on the Jet Ski and came to a stop, sending a spray of water between them and the anil. When the water settled and the growl of her motor died down, she jerked her chin. “See for yourself.”

An object sat in the water just before the time tunnel, rocking gently on the waves. Dimly, Dorothy registered that it was a boat. Ash’s boat. Something deep and red stained the water around it. Dorothy wouldn’t have seen it if they weren’t so close to the anil, the light of the time tunnel illuminating the blood.

There’s so much of it, she thought, horror rising inside of her. Everywhere she looked, there was red. It coated the water like a veil.

“He knew he was going to die like this,” Zora said, her voice strangely distant. “He’d seen it happen.”

Dorothy thought of Roman’s note.

I’ve been haunted by memories of my own death.

A chill moved through her.

“I didn’t do this,” she insisted. Her fingers curled into Zora’s shoulders, but Zora didn’t flinch. “Zora, I swear to you, I didn’t.”

Zora stared at the anil. Her dark eyes absorbed the otherworldly light and shone like an animal’s.

Finally, she spoke.

“But you will.”

LOG ENTRY—AUGUST 6, 2074

17:41 HOURS

THE WORKSHOP

I don’t know what I was expecting to find in Nikola’s notes, but this is beyond my wildest dreams.

Apparently, Nikola never got over his brush with time travel. Remember how I wrote that he was once shocked by a jolt of electricity coming off one of his coils? He’s always claimed that, at that moment, he “saw the Past, Present, and Future at the same time.”

After we talked about this, I was certain that what he saw was just a product of his brain short-circuiting. A near-death experience that he’s interpreted as time travel. Real time travel, as you know, requires three things:

The presence of an anil

Exotic matter

A vessel

Nikola had none of these things on him at the time that the jolt of electricity went through him so, despite my initial hopes, I had to eventually admit that he didn’t actually travel through time.

Now, though, I wonder.

Nikola’s greatest dream was to be able to prove that you could harness the electrical power of the earth and use it to create a kind of “free energy.” Now, over the years, that theory has been proven false. His theories about how the earth transmitted energy just weren’t true.

But the strange thing is that those very theories are true inside of an anil.

So what if he really was on to something? What if there’s a way to travel through time without an anil or exotic matter, or a vessel?

Tesla’s notes include very detailed information on how to do just that. All I’ll have to do is inject a tiny bit of the exotic matter directly into my person.