Roman dug an old key out from under his coat, and Dorothy heard the click of metal in a lock. The door creaked open, revealing a deeper, velvety darkness beyond.

Another click and the room was illuminated.

As always, Dorothy felt her breath catch. It was hard to know where to look first. There was the stack of scrolls gathering dust in the corner, stolen from the Library of Alexandria moments before the siege in 48 BCE. The missing panels from the Bayeux Tapestry hung from the wall before her, showing William the Conqueror’s Christmas Day coronation, in 1066. On a table below sat the long-lost crown jewels of King John.

Dorothy smiled as she looked at the jewels, remembering the week she and Roman had spent on the Wash in 1216. There’d been a lot of discussion throughout history about how the fool king had managed to lose his jewels, but it turned out that the luggage containing them had simply fallen off of the back of his carriage as he rode beneath the Sutton Bridge. Dorothy and Roman had waited for the king and his soldiers to gallop past, and then they’d taken the abandoned luggage for themselves. Roman had worn the magnificently jeweled crown the entire ride home.

“It’s already half past nine,” Roman said, interrupting the memory. “Are you ready for the broadcast?”

Ah yes. The broadcast.

Ironically, Ash was the one who’d given her the idea.

“The Black Cirkus wants to go back in time,” he’d told her once. “They seem to think that’s the key to fixing all our problems.”

He’d said this like it was an idiotic thing to think, but Dorothy had found herself disagreeing. Because, really, what sort of problems couldn’t be solved with time travel?

She’d started thinking about how she might go about changing some things. At the very least, the city needed power, access to medication and food. Too many people were hungry, and cold, and sick.

Dorothy had been a con artist before landing here. She’d never really been one for good deeds. But, for the first time in her life, she had all this power. And she knew how to fix this.

The problem was that the people of New Seattle disliked the Black Cirkus. They remembered them as the violent gang of thugs and thieves who’d taken over the city in the days just after the mega-quake. But Dorothy knew they could be so much more and so, several months ago, she’d told Roman her plan.

“Let’s speak to the people directly. We can have a . . . a broadcast.” She’d stumbled over the word broadcast, which she’d only just learned. “The people in this city don’t realize what’s being kept from them. They don’t know that time travel is still possible. Let me bring them to our side.”

They’d built a makeshift studio in the corner of the Fairmont basement, with real cameras and spotlights, which Dorothy and Roman had stolen from a defunct television station in 2044, and a backdrop made from a tattered American flag that Roman had insisted made them look like rebels.