They were still yards away from the anil when the Black Crow began to hover.

“No,” said Ash, his voice hushed. Everything inside of him seemed to tense.

The time machine moved forward, into position.

Ash felt his blood boil beneath his skin.

No.

He saw Dorothy’s face the way it’d looked during their last meeting, behind the Dead Rabbit. Hair wet and plastered to her skin, fingers anxiously fumbling with her locket.

It isn’t possible to travel through time without a vessel. . . .

Yes, but the Professor went on experimenting with it, to see whether he could find a way.

Ash stood, the motorboat rocking beneath him.

“Ash!” Zora shouted. “Sit down!”

He barely registered her voice. He heard a kind of roaring in his ears, something louder than the motorboat’s tinny engine and the crashing water and all the other sounds that made up the night around them. His hands had started to tremble, and something, some pressure, was building inside of his chest, making him ache.

He couldn’t let this happen. He had to do something. Zora said that a smaller ship wouldn’t cause as much damage to the anil. If that were true, then no ship shouldn’t cause any damage, right?

If there was a way to travel through time without a time machine, without EM . . .

The Black Crow was halfway into the anil when Ash dove out of the rowboat. The second he hit the water, he could feel the pull of the time tunnel sucking him toward it, like water into a drain. He couldn’t swim, couldn’t fight against it.

All he could do was be still and let it take him.

No man had ever survived moving through an anil without a vessel before. Those who’d tried had their skin ripped from their bones, their internal organs liquefied. But Ash wasn’t afraid. He’d seen his own death, and so he knew he didn’t die here.

The last thing he heard before he disappeared in time was the sound of Zora screaming.

31

Dorothy

JULY 10, 2074, NEW SEATTLE

Dorothy felt her breath catch as she stared up at the hospital looming above them. It was dark here, past midnight, and every light in the building above them was blazing. The parking lot was filled with cars, and people crowded the sidewalk, unloading stretchers from ambulances and barking orders at one another.

She swallowed. She’d been to the hospital with Avery a few times, back in 1913. The tiny, two-story Providence Medical Center had seemed massive to her then, the doctors who’d filled the halls impossibly impressive in their stark white jackets and scrub caps.

Those old doctors were nothing like the people before her now. It was like comparing a fighter jet to a rickety bicycle. Where the doctors from her time were neat and orderly, mostly older men with gray hair and spectacles, these were young and fast and . . . sleek. Their scrubs had a metallic sheen, and their equipment was more advanced than anything Dorothy had seen before.