Roman lifted his eyes. “How would I go about creating a trick future?”

His sarcasm struck a nerve. “Don’t,” Dorothy warned. “Don’t you dare turn this into a joke. All this time you knew what was coming, and you never told me. Why?”

She punctuated the question by slamming her hand against the table, causing the remaining bourbon to tremble and slosh against the glasses.

Roman leaned back, his gaze trained on her. The bar’s dim lights caught his eyes, turning them a deep, stormy blue. “Why do you think?”

Looking back at him, Dorothy felt the anger go out of her. It hadn’t been real anger, anyway, but a mask for everything else she was feeling and, now that it was gone, waves of fear and despair crashed over her in full force. She saw the Fairmont’s blackened brick and broken windows, the mouthlike hole in the middle of its walls.

She curled her hand into a fist to keep it from shaking. “You told Mac that it wasn’t set, right? It’s not like the past. We can still do something.”

“I don’t know.” Roman seemed to weigh his next words carefully before continuing. “I haven’t told you the whole truth about my trips into the future with the Professor. The Professor went into the future once, without me, and he found it like . . . well, he must’ve found it like that. Everything dead. He wouldn’t tell me exactly what he saw, just that there was still time to change it. He was very upset.”

Roman looked down at his hands.

“What happened next?” Dorothy urged when he didn’t continue.

“Well, I wanted to know what he’d seen, so I took his journal and read about it. It sounded awful. I didn’t believe it. So I took the Second Star on my own. I guess you’d say I stole it after the Professor had gone to sleep. I wanted to know what our future was going to be, and I wanted to believe him, that it could be changed. But it’s been like that every time I’ve gone forward.”

“You think he was lying?”

“No.” Roman frowned. “No, I don’t think so. I think that whatever butterfly effect—”

“Butterfly effect?” Dorothy interrupted.

“In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is a phenomenon whereby a minute localized change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere.”

“English, please.”

“In the next five years, something is going to happen, probably something that seems small at the time. That small change will lead to bigger changes and bigger changes and so on, until—”

“The world becomes what we just saw.”

Roman nodded. “Exactly.”

Dorothy was still for a moment, processing this. She remembered walking around this city for the first time, with Avery. She’d spent much of her childhood wandering the dusty little frontier towns of the Midwest, and Seattle, in contrast, had seemed glorious, a city of the future, with its ferryboats and electric lights and charming university. She could’ve wandered through the narrow, meandering downtown streets for hours, neck craned back and eyes wide, taking in the sights.