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

grateful that Mac, at least, wouldn’t be able to hurt Ash any more than he had already.

She counted to twenty in her head, and then the hotel room door swung open and the rest of the Cirkus Freaks spilled into the hall, grumbling about being hungry and wanting a drink as they stumbled toward the staircase. Dorothy watched them go, and then she blinked several times, quickly, like she was waking up.

Now, finally, was her time to act. Ash alone. She had to save him.

She slipped around the corner and knelt before his hotel room door once again. It had taken her most of the last year to figure out how to work these fancy, newfangled locks. They couldn’t be broken into using one of her hairpins, as nearly every other lock she encountered could. They were electronic, and so she’d needed something else.

She pulled a card out of her pocket. She’d had Roman configure it especially so that it opened every hotel room in the building. She swiped it through the key lock . . .

The green light blinked on.

She pushed the door open.

The smell of blood hit her first. It was overwhelming, so strong that she wanted to gag. Choking in a breath, she quickly crossed the room and knelt at Ash’s side. He didn’t look conscious.

“Ash . . . ,” she murmured, pushing the sweaty hair back from his forehead. “Come on now, time to wake up.”

Ash seemed to struggle to raise his heavy lids. “Dorothy?” he murmured, seeming confused.

Dorothy brought her hand to his cheek. “Hurry,” she said. “You don’t have a lot of time.”

Ash still didn’t open his eyes. There was blood crusted in his eyelashes, holding them shut. It hurt her to look at them.

“You aren’t here,” Ash murmured.

“You have to get out of here,” she said urgently, looking over her shoulder. She had no idea how much time they had. “Mac won’t be long and if you’re still here when he returns, he’ll kill you.”

“I don’t die today,” Ash muttered. “I know when I die.”

So do I, Dorothy thought. “Lucky you,” she said. “Now go.”

She didn’t wait for him to get up. She didn’t need to, she knew that he would. She knew everything that was going to happen next.

Ash was going to follow her and Roman into the future. She would try to kill Mac, and she would fail. Ash and Roman were going to fight, and then Roman was going to die.

Her heart gave a violent tug. She knew it was going to happen like this, because she’d seen it. There was no other way.

The outcome can’t be changed, she thought again. Maybe she was fooling herself, thinking there was some loophole to be exploited. Maybe she really was powerless.

She pulled Ash’s gun out of her cloak and placed it on the floor in front of him. And then she stood and slipped back out into the hallway, leaving the door wide open behind her.

Her heart was heavy and cold. It felt like a cruel kind of torture, to watch the same things happen over and over again. To know there was nothing she could do to stop them.

LOG ENTRY—OCTOBER 10, 2074

11:56 HOURS

THE WORKSHOP

I’ve spent the last few days thinking about my latest experiment. The heartbreaking death of Little Jeff the mouse.

The thing is, I just can’t figure out why he died. He was smaller than the potato I brought back, so it wasn’t that the exotic matter didn’t extend far enough beyond my physical body. It must have something to do with the biochemical makeup of the organisms. The mouse, unlike the potato, had a heartbeat.

So the question becomes: How can I protect the heartbeat?

When I built my time machine, I was able to integrate the exotic properties of the matter into the structure of the vessel itself, thus extending its protection. I did this by utilizing a technique I actually stole from Tesla.

You see, a Tesla coil consists of two parts: a primary coil and secondary coil, each with its own capacitator. (Capacitators are basically just batteries made to store electrical energy.) The two coils and capacitators are connected by a spark gap—a gap of air between two electrodes that generates the spark of electricity. An outside source hooked up to a transformer powers the whole system. Essentially, the Tesla coil is two open electric circuits connected to a spark gap.

The primary coil must be able to withstand the massive charge and huge surges of current, so it’s usually made out of copper, because copper is a very good conductor of electricity. I was careful to use copper plates in the structure of all my time machines for that very purpose.

When you have a time machine to play with, creating this kind of circuit is easy. Without one, it gets trickier. I would, essentially, need to use a piece of copper to connect the person with the electronic matter inside their body, to the person without any exotic matter inside their body. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a way to accomplish that that doesn’t, quite literally, involve knives and stabbing.

Which, obviously, won’t work.

19

Three visits down.

Dorothy sighed, deeply, as she climbed back into the Black Crow. It was cold in the time machine, and her breath ghosted in the night air, hanging before her lips like a silver cloud. The leather seats felt icy beneath her thin cloak, and her fingers were stiff and awkward with cold. She had to open and close her fists a few times before she began the process of flipping switches and checking dials, to get the blood in her hands moving.

She didn’t know how much time had passed since she’d come back. Had she spent a full twenty-four hours chasing after Ash, tiptoeing around in the past? Had it been longer?

Her eyes blinked closed as these thoughts circled her head. All she knew was that she was tired, tired down to her bones. Weight tugged at her, her entire body begging for sleep, and yet she forced