Unmade bed. Dresser scattered with old photos. Armchair covered in dirty clothes. But no sign of who Roman had been speaking to.

“There’s no one here,” he said. But the light caught his dark eyes, making it seem as though something within them was flickering.

Staring back at him, Dorothy was reminded of a one-man band she and her mother had walked past while they were living in Chicago. The musician wore a mask, which he removed as Dorothy glanced back at him. Beneath, he wore another mask. Dorothy hadn’t looked back again after that, but whenever she thought of that moment she imagined that he wore another mask beneath the second, and another beneath that, and another, going on forever.

Roman was like that. Masks on masks on masks. She wondered if she’d ever see his true face.

She rocked back on her heels, disappointed. “I must’ve imagined it,” she said.

But, of course, she knew she hadn’t.

26

Ash

Ash took the long way home. Waves rippled around his boat, and the angry growl of the motor cut the night in half. The only things that broke up the darkness around him were the white-barked trees that grew up from the waters, standing like skeletal sentries in the dark. He barely saw them. His head was still too full of Dorothy and the Professor’s missing journal entries and the possibility of traveling through time without a vessel.

He didn’t even notice the schoolhouse until he was pulling up next to the dock that ran alongside it, one hand automatically reaching back to cut the motor. He tied his boat up and then hauled the window open, grunting again as he climbed inside and landed, hard, on the floor. There was a light on down the hall.

Ash followed it to the kitchen and found Zora at the table, her father’s notes and textbooks spread out before her, one foot propped against the lowest rung of her chair, knee hopping up and down.

“Zor,” he said.

“You’re back,” she breathed, standing so quickly she knocked her chair back a foot. “I’ve been waiting for hours.”

Had it been hours? “Yeah, I’m sorry about that.” He pushed the damp hair off his forehead, trying to think how he could explain his strange interaction with Dorothy. “Listen—”

“Sit down,” she said, yanking a second chair out from under the table. The wood scraped against the floorboards, the sound making Ash cringe.

“You trying to wake the whole place?”

“I don’t know.” Zora rubbed the spot of skin between her eyes and then released a strange half laugh. “God, maybe we should? Will you please just sit down?”

Ash sat, his frown deepening. “Zor,” he said carefully. “What is it?”

“I think I had a breakthrough.” She shook her head, as though she couldn’t quite believe it herself, and then leaned over the kitchen table, pulling a loose sheet of paper out from under a stack of smudged notebooks and old napkins covered in the Professor’s scribbles. “I haven’t asked Chandra to look through it yet because I don’t know if she’ll . . . I just need a second set of eyes on it first. Can you look at it? Please?”