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

She was without allies. Without hope. Without money.

For the first time in a long time, she found herself missing her mother.

“Stop it,” she told herself, opening her eyes again. She pressed her palms to her cheeks, sopping up her tears. She might not have allies or friends, but it wasn’t as though she didn’t know what to do. She’d been hopeless before, and she’d always found a way out, hadn’t she?

She just needed leverage.

There, she thought, I might just be in luck.

She pulled the Professor’s journal pages out from beneath her cloak and began thumbing through them. The air was heavy with damp. It wasn’t raining, yet, but it would be soon, and the thick pages stuck to her fingertips, the ink bleeding. She grimaced as she pulled them apart. She would need to get through them quickly or else they’d be ruined. And then they’d be no use to her at all.

Propping herself up, Dorothy began to read.

LOG ENTRY—AUGUST 8, 2074

10:50 HOURS

THE WORKSHOP

I’ve been over Nikola Tesla’s notes half a dozen times now, and I still find that I’m too nervous to actually put his theory to the test.

Time travel without a vessel, without access to an anil, without any exotic matter.

If Nikola is correct, if these things really are possible, it means that we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of this science.

But if he’s incorrect . . .

Well. Let’s just say that there are many, many ways this could go wrong.

For instance, if you’ll recall, only two people attempted to travel through an anil without a ship before me. One was killed, instantly, and the other had his skin ripped from his body.

Neither outcome is especially appealing.

And yet . . . there’s reason to believe that it should be possible to travel through time without a clunky machine and access to an anil. In fact, stories of time travel can be found as early as eighth century BCE.

Natasha once told me a story about a kid named Abimelech who travels sixty-six years into the future while gathering figs, all because God wanted to spare him the heartbreak of war.

And in the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, King Raivata was said to have left the earth to meet with God only to return hundreds of years later.

And the Japanese legend of Urashima Taro tells of a fisherman who goes to visit some underwater God. He experiences only a few days passing, but when he returns home it’s three hundred years later.

It’s occurring to me as I write this that none of these great voyagers ever returned from their journeys through time. Which is unnerving. But not as unnerving as the guy who had his skin ripped off.

I should back up a bit. Before I decide whether it makes any sense to test Nikola’s theory, perhaps it’s best that I lay out what it actually is.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, Nikola became obsessed with a theory that he might be able to conduct electricity long distance through the earth’s surface. He took a lot of money from a lot of people, lied to everyone about what he was doing, and moved from New York to Colorado Springs to experiment with this type of research far from public scrutiny. Around this time, he’s quoted as saying, “Progress in this field has given me fresh hope that I shall see the fulfillment of one of my fondest dreams; namely, the transmission of power from station to station without the employment of any connecting wires.”

Spoiler alert: he did not see the fulfillment of his fondest dream. He was super wrong about everything. He spent a year at his lab in Colorado Springs, ran through all his funding, went into debt, and ruined his reputation. At one point, he seemed to think he was communicating with other planets. When we first met, he assumed I was a martian (ha!).

Now, though, while we know that it’s not possible to transmit energy across vast distances using the power in the earth’s surface, as Nikola posited, we do know that it’s possible to transmit mass through time using an anil. Hence time travel. The research Nikola left for me seems to be a sort of mash-up of his research and mine. He argues that the earth’s crust is made up of millions of tiny anils, and that it should be possible for me to harness that energy from anywhere—not just inside of an anil. To stabilize the energy, he recommends injecting a very small amount of exotic matter directly into my person (he’s drawn a rough prototype for a tool that should help me accomplish this).

The science holds. And yet, I’m reluctant to test his theories. Nikola is well-known throughout history as being one of the most brilliant men to ever live. And yet his experiments in wireless energy ruined his reputation and sent him deeply into debt.

Am I really going to trust him with my life?

4

NOVEMBER 13, 2077

Black water swirled around her slowly moving boat. A cool breeze tickled the back of her neck, messing with her curls.

Dorothy stared into the darkness, watching for movement. She had Roman’s dagger in one hand, the weight of it a familiar burden at her side. In her chest, her heart rose and fell like hammer blows.

She was ready. She would never be ready.

The darkness broke open and there, in the near distance, she saw the anil undulating on a blanket of black waves. It was a sharp splinter in the night sky; a soap bubble bouncing gently on the waves; a deep, dark tunnel.

She tore her eyes away, and only then did she see the figure standing in the boat just before the tunnel, waiting for her. He didn’t move or wave to her but only stood, waiting for what he knew was about to come.

Dorothy shifted the dagger beneath the folds of her cloak, swallowing. He might know what she came here to do, but she had no intention of