Dark Stars by Danielle Rollins (best affordable ebook reader txt) 📕

fabulous.” Dorothy had to work hard to keep her voice light. “I only came back to tell you that we save the city. Electricity for all, new medications, an end to disease. We’re being hailed as heroes. Parties every night, that sort of thing.”

Roman lifted an eyebrow. “And do I finally meet a nice girl and settle down?”

“Indeed you do. Eliza, would you believe it? It’s all anyone can talk about.”

“God, I hope you’re joking about that,” Roman said, grimacing.

“You don’t think Eliza’s pretty?”

“She’s pretty all right just . . . prickly. I think she’d sooner arm wrestle me than kiss me.”

“Aw, young romance.”

They’d reached Roman’s floor. He poked his head out of the stairwell and, seeing that it was empty, ushered her down the hall and into his room.

As soon as Dorothy stepped inside, she felt a rush of déjà vu. There were Roman’s books, haphazardly stacked on top of his dresser just as they’d been this morning, when she’d come in here looking for cash. There were his spare boots, kicked off and forgotten in the corner, and there was the dirty shirt he’d tossed over the back of his desk chair.

She felt a strange twist in her gut, looking at that shirt. He wouldn’t put it away before he’d died.

“What are you here to do, really?” Roman asked, closing the door firmly behind him.

Dorothy blinked, looking away from the abandoned shirt. She didn’t want to give Roman any more reason to worry about the next six days, so she decided not to mention his death or Mac Murphy’s takeover of the Black Cirkus, or Regan and her terrible bag of toys.

“Ash is . . . missing,” she said, instead. “Everyone is certain that I’ve killed him. Including Ash himself, apparently. I came back to see if I could figure out what really happened. And stop it, if possible.”

It was an abridged version of the truth, but it was still the truth, more or less. It would have to do.

Roman leaned against the door, head tilted, a funny look on his face. “You’re here trying to stop Ash from disappearing? You don’t honestly expect me to help you with that.”

“Oh, stop,” Dorothy snapped, frustration rising inside of her. With everything that’s going on, this was what he wanted to focus on? “Your little vendetta against Ash is played out. You don’t know this yet, but you’re going to forgive him, like, tomorrow, so can we please just get on with it?”

Roman, to his credit, looked chastened. “Was I this annoying when I went back in time to see you?”

“Are you joking?” Dorothy huffed. “All that time is a circle nonsense. I wanted to murder you.”

“Touché,” he murmured, studying his hands. After a moment, he sighed and looked back up at her. “So, if I’m to understand you right, you’ve come back in time to figure out if you really did kill Ash, correct?”

“I actually have a theory that someone disguised as me might’ve killed him,” Dorothy admitted. But, as the words left her mouth, she had to admit that they sounded . . . unlikely.

Roman only lifted an eyebrow. After a moment, he said, “When you came up here before, in the past, you were hoping to convince me to do something to change the future. Do you remember?”

Dorothy was quiet a moment. Of course she remembered. Before Roman and Ash had been murdered, Roman had taken her into the future and shown her a bleak, terrifying vision: their city, abandoned and destroyed. Buildings had toppled, and all the people who lived here had either died or disappeared. She still felt sick, thinking about it.

She hadn’t given that terrible vision of the future much thought over the last few days. She’d been too busy trying to save Ash, trying to save herself. It bothered her now, that she’d forgotten everything that had happened so easily.

“You asked me if I had any idea what might have happened to lead to that,” Roman continued. “And I told you that I didn’t.”

“I remember,” Dorothy said, frowning.

Roman, sheepish, said, “That’s not entirely true.”

Dorothy felt a chill down the back of her neck. Part of her wanted to tell Roman to leave it. She didn’t think she was strong enough to take anything else just now. She could deal with the future when she’d saved Ash and stopped Mac and convinced her friends to trust her, again.

But she’d always been curious, and she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “You know why our world falls apart?”

Roman gazed back at her. “Before I started researching time travel with the Professor, I was working on a computer program,” he said. “It was supposed to help predict upcoming earthquakes. My research was ultimately inconclusive, but the data seemed to indicate that there was a relationship between travel through an anil and the movement of tectonic plates.”

“I don’t understand,” Dorothy said, blinking at him. She had a sudden memory, Zora and Ash and the others gathered together in the schoolhouse where they all used to live, trying to explain earthquakes to her. “Tectonic plates? That’s something to do with earthquakes, isn’t it?”

Roman didn’t seem to register her interruption. “I’d been paying particular attention to the earthquakes we’ve experienced over the last year. They’ve become more frequent. Can you think of any reason why that might be happening?” He paused and looked up, as though waiting for Dorothy to catch on. When she said nothing, he added, “Dorothy, the earthquakes are caused by time travel.”

Dorothy felt the edge of her lip twitch. It was a tick, smiling to cover her nerves. “That’s not possible.”

“I keep going over the data and it remains, stubbornly, consistent. The dates and the times and the Richter scale numbers, they all add up to one clear conclusion.” Roman released a short, bitter laugh. “It’s honestly amazing to me that no one else has put it together.”

“Roman, you hear what you’re saying, don’t you?” The smile had dropped from Dorothy’s mouth. She licked her lips. “If the earthquakes were caused by time travel, that