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

Roman steadied Dorothy with a look. She swallowed, hard. “No, I suppose not.”

“No,” Roman agreed. “And, after a while, he’s not going to be satisfied with tagging along with Ash every time he wants to travel through time. Eventually, he’s going to cut Ash open and dig the remaining EM out of his body so he can take it for himself. Ash is only safe as long as he’s gone. And the future is only safe if he never comes back.”

“Stop.” Dorothy pressed her hands to her ears, wanting to block out everything Roman was saying. “You can’t be serious. You can’t actually believe that this is the only way to save the world.” She felt the taste of something bitter fill her mouth as the reality of what he was proposing settled over her.

She couldn’t have killed Ash. She didn’t believe it.

“If you look at the bigger picture, all of this starts to makes sense,” Roman said gently.

“No.” Something deep inside of her started to ache. “There must be something else we can do. This can’t be the only way. It can’t be.”

Roman was leaning against the far wall of his hotel room, arms crossed over his chest. He pinned her in place with a look and said, very calmly, “I thought that’s why you were here? To figure out why you killed Ash?”

“I’m here to figure out how not to kill him!” Dorothy snapped.

All at once this was too much for her. She felt energy coursing through her veins, nervous, jittery energy that made her want to move, to do something. She stood and started to pace the length of the small room.

Roman, from his position beside the wall, said, “You know as well as I do that’s not how time travel works.”

Dorothy huffed, and only paced faster.

She didn’t want to accept this. Not any of it. Roman couldn’t actually be suggesting that the only way to save the world was for Ash to die. It was cruel . . . it was ridiculous. She had a time machine, didn’t she? She could simply take Ash and disappear back in time. They could go somewhere fun. 1960s London or 2050s Seoul, somewhere filled with food and fashion and parties . . .

But, even as this plan was taking shape in her head, she thought of the horrible future she’d seen.

New Seattle in ruins. An entire city reduced to ashes and ice.

Could she really live with herself, knowing she had let that happen? That she’d let all those people die even though she’d known how to stop it?

She stopped pacing. She kept telling herself that she wasn’t a monster, but walking away, leaving an entire city to its fate when she knew how to fix things, that was monstrous.

There had to be another way. There had to be . . .

“Look,” Roman said, in a slightly kinder tone of voice. “You said yourself that he’s seen his death, right? He’s had a prememory?”

“Yes,” Dorothy said. She felt a sudden sinking in her gut.

“Well if he’s seen his death that means it’s already happened. A prememory is a memory. There’s no way to change it.”

Time is a circle, Dorothy thought. She suddenly wanted to scream.

“I don’t believe that,” she said, turning on Roman. “The future isn’t fixed, yet. You said it yourself—”

“Some things are fixed, no matter whether you want to believe in them or not,” Roman told her.

“You’re only saying that because of your stupid vendetta,” Dorothy shot back, suddenly furious. “If it were anyone else . . .”

In her anger, she couldn’t think of how to finish that thought, so she only shook her head, leaving the rest of the sentence hanging. She needed to be alone. She needed to think.

She headed for the door—

“Before you go,” Roman asked, stopping her just as her fingers were wrapping around the doorknob. “Do you mind telling me exactly how long I have left?”

Dorothy looked up. His voice had been painfully casual, but Dorothy wasn’t fooled. Roman was at his most vulnerable when he was pretending he didn’t have a care in the world. This must be killing him.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked.

“I’ve been seeing visions of my own death for the last year, little Fox.” Roman stared down at his own hand, studying his cuticles with a soft smile on his face. “I may as well know when it’s going to happen.”

Dorothy swallowed. She didn’t know how to talk about her best friend’s death without breaking down, but she could try, if that’s what he needed.

Her mouth was dry. “It’s been four days for me,” she said. “For you it happens in two.”

Roman’s face shadowed. He turned his back to her. She got the feeling that he wanted to be alone, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to leave.

“See,” Roman said, after a moment. “I told you there are some things you can’t change.”

The halls were dark, but Dorothy knew that didn’t mean she was alone. She climbed down the stairs to the Fairmont’s main floor, eyes peeled for movement. All the while, Roman’s words echoed in her head.

Some things are fixed, no matter whether you want to believe in them or not.

Not this, she told herself, gritting her teeth. She wouldn’t be the one to kill Ash, no matter what it meant. She would find another way.

The floors in this part of the hotel were perpetually damp, slicked with the sludgy water people carried in from the docks on the soles of their boots. The furniture was all black with mold.

Dorothy hoped she might manage to sneak back outside and to her time machine. But, almost as soon as she stepped into the main hall, she heard voices.

“This the woman you were telling me about?”

Dorothy froze, her skin creeping. That was Mac.

She hid behind a bit of moldy wallpaper and ducked her head around to see what was going on.

A group of Cirkus Freaks had gathered a few feet away, near the very door that she’d been planning to slip