Dorothy swallowed. She did not have a plan. She had the beginnings of an idea for half a plan, at best. But she didn’t want to disappoint Willis after he’d helped her.
“I’m . . . working on it,” she said.
Willis was watching her, arms crossed. After a minute, he nodded and said, “Well, then. I’ll leave you to it.”
It was the kind of thing you said before leaving the room to go spend a little more time with your secret boyfriend. Dorothy waited for him to leave but, instead, Willis licked his lips, cleared his throat.
“Is there something else?” she asked.
He nodded, seeming to come to some decision, and drew himself up to his full height.
Dorothy took a step backward without making the conscious decision to do so, her stomach curdling with fear. In the entire time she’d known Willis, she’d never known him to be frightening before. At least she’d never known him to try to frighten her. He’d always had the air of a gentle giant, someone who was large but who never used his size to intimidate.
But, now . . .
He took up the entire doorway, his head practically scraping the ceiling, and he looked at Dorothy with no kindness in his eyes. His mouth was a straight, hard slash in a face like granite and his arms . . . had his arms always been that large? They were the size of dogs. It was as though Willis had two pit bulls strapped to his torso.
For a moment, Dorothy couldn’t catch her breath.
“I’m helping you because I think you’re here to figure out a way to save Ash’s life,” Willis said. “If I find out that’s not the case, if at any point it seems like you’re the reason Ash is dead after all . . . well, then we’ll be having a very different conversation.”
“U-understood,” Dorothy managed to choke out.
Willis stared at her for a beat longer, and then he threw open the door and was gone.
LOG ENTRY—SEPTEMBER 14, 2074
12:21 HOURS
THE WORKSHOP
You’ll notice that it’s been a few days since I last updated. That’s my fault, recovery’s taken a bit longer than I expected. But I can sit upright now, and I seem to have regained the full use of my hands, so I can’t complain.
Needless to say, my last experiment was not quite the wild success I’d been hoping it would be. I was able to implant the exotic matter inside of my person and align myself with the anil, and I did feel a sort of . . . pull, for lack of a better word, as though something was dragging me forward . . .
Unfortunately, that’s where everything went terribly wrong. Moments after I felt that telltale pull below my navel my skin began to prickle. The sensation was odd, at first, but not entirely painful. Unpleasant, certainly. It felt as though all my nerves were firing at once. I admit, I’d wondered whether this was some sort of unpleasant side effect to the exotic matter, and so I did not react to the sensation right away but attempted to hold my ground, so to speak. That was a big mistake.
It couldn’t have been more than two or three minutes before the unpleasant prickling became a full-out burning. I began to lose the feeling in my extremities, my fingers and toes went numb, and I no longer had control over my hands. It was terrifying.
Most terrifying of all, perhaps, was the fact that I didn’t know exactly how to stop it. I was not inside the anil, but “aligned with it” according to Tesla’s instructions, which I’d interpreted to mean inside the Cascadia subduction zone. I was getting desperate. My hands were shaking, and my skin felt like it was going to burn off, so I did the only thing I could think to do. I got the hell out of the subduction zone. Luckily, my symptoms stopped progressing immediately, and I was able to get myself back to the workshop without further harm coming to my person. My hands and feet were still badly injured, but after a few weeks rest they seem mostly back to normal.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had little to do except think.
How did my experiment go so badly wrong? The only thing I can come up with is that I didn’t manage to inject the exotic matter into my person just right. When I was first building the Second Star, it was crucial to work the EM into the vessel in such a way that it fused with the overall structure of the machine. That must be true when it comes to injecting the EM into your person, too. When I injected the EM, I must have done so in the wrong place. The exotic matter didn’t entirely fuse with my body and, thus, failed to protect me from the energy of the anil.
It seems that I must go back to square one.
8
Dorothy spent the remainder of her evening curled up on the lumpy twin bed. She’d found an old notebook and a stubby pencil in one of the dresser drawers, and she was using them to scribble down everything she could remember of the days between seeing Ash at the Fairmont ball, and finding his blood-spattered boat outside the anil.
There’d been all those trips into the past . . . the meetings she and Roman had taken with Mac Murphy . . . broadcasts to the city . . .
Once she’d written down everything she could think of, she sat back, frowning. She’d been busy these last few weeks. She couldn’t have found time for secret rendezvous with Ash, even if she’d wanted to.
Sure you could, said a voice in her head. You did.
She gnawed on the end of her pen, her gaze returning to the Professor’s journal pages, scattered across the bed around her.
Willis wanted her to come up with a plan. But, so far, the only idea she had involved stealing something priceless and well guarded from a vicious gang of thieves and attempting to perform a deadly scientific experiment that only one—possibly two—people
