“Come back with me.” Ash hadn’t realized what he was going to say until the words were already out of his mouth. “Please, you don’t belong here.”

“I wish I could.” She pressed a hand to his chest, frowning. “But that’s not why I came. There’s something I need to ask you.”

“Can it wait?” he murmured into her hair. She still smelled the same, like soap and lilies. How was that possible?

“It’s important. I need you to think back. Did the Professor ever mention Nikola Tesla?”

The words were so strange that Ash frowned and leaned away from her, caught off guard. “What?”

“The Professor was doing experiments with Nikola Tesla.” Dorothy cast an anxious glance at the door behind Ash and then shifted her gaze back to his face. “Did he ever say anything about that to you? Anything at all?”

“I don’t think so.” Ash frowned. “What—”

Dorothy cut him off. “They would’ve had to do with traveling through time without a vessel. Does that sound familiar?”

It didn’t. Ash scratched the back of his neck. “It isn’t possible to travel through time without a vessel. A few people tried, back before the Professor built his time machines, but the anil is too volatile, and they were all badly injured.”

“Yes, but the Professor went on experimenting with it, to see whether he could find a way.” Dorothy fiddled with the locket hanging from her neck, her fingers anxious. “Think. Maybe he wrote something in that journal of his? Have you read the whole thing?”

Ash was already shaking his head when he remembered the ragged edges he’d found poking out of the binding. “Wait a minute,” he said, almost to himself. “There were entries missing. I don’t know where they went, but—”

He was interrupted by the sound of wood creaking, a footstep on the other side of the door, and he shifted into the shadows, his skin humming. A second later the back door swung open and the bartender walked onto the docks. She brought a cigarette to her lips, withdrawing a pack of matches from her coat pocket.

Ash turned to Dorothy—one hand lifting to point down a narrow dock that twisted back toward Dante’s—and froze, heart pounding.

She was already gone.

LOG ENTRY—JULY 12, 2174

09:45 HOURS

NEW SEATTLE

I’ve made a huge mistake.

I—I don’t know what I was thinking, really. I wanted to see it again, I suppose, to see what, if anything has changed.

But I never expected this.

I should explain. This morning, I once again took the Dark Star forward, into the future. But, instead of going just a few days ahead, this time I went one hundred years ahead.

I suppose I wanted to see how our world was going to turn out.

I exited the anil, and the world I saw before me was changed beyond my wildest nightmares.

I’ve been here for only a few hours, so my findings are rudimentary, at best. Everything is black. Ashes cover the ground and block out the sun. It’s nearly ten o’clock in the morning, but it’s still as dark as night. There’s no vegetation, no animals, no people. I flew past WCAAT and found little more than a pile of rubble frozen in ice.