Dorothy stared down at her hands, blinking hard. She wouldn’t let herself cry. Not here, not in front of these people who hated her.
“We found his boat outside the anil,” Zora was saying. Her voice cracked as she added, “It was covered . . . there was blood, everywhere.”
There was a beat of silence. And then—
“You actually did it,” Chandra murmured. “You killed him.”
Dorothy lifted her eyes and found Chandra glaring back at her, arms folded across her chest. It was like a knife twisting through her chest. She couldn’t remember ever seeing Chandra angry before.
“I didn’t kill him,” Dorothy insisted. She looked from Chandra to Willis but found no sympathy in either of their faces. What would they do to her, if she couldn’t make them believe her? Her voice began to waver. “You—you have to believe me . . . I was as surprised to find that empty boat as Zora was!”
Willis’s eyes seemed to bore into her. “Ash used to see visions of his future,” he said, very slowly. “Prememories, they’re called. It’s a phenomenon that can sometimes happen when you pass through an anil. The brain short-circuits, forgetting that the future hasn’t happened yet. When you have a prememory, you can remember an experience from the future as easily as you might remember a real memory.”
Cold dread slithered down Dorothy’s spine. Her mouth felt suddenly dry.
She’d had a prememory before. When she first traveled through time with the Chronology Protection Agency, she’d had a series of short, dreamlike premonitions of her future. It had been unnerving, to say the least, when those premonitions had actually started coming true.
What had Ash seen? Had it been something bad about her? Had she done something terrible?
She wet her lips, her heart beating in her throat. “Are you trying to say that Ash saw his own death?”
The look in Willis’s eyes suggested that she might be better off not knowing. “He did,” he said, after a moment. “He had a recurring prememory, one that he saw nearly every time he entered an anil. In the prememory, he met a woman outside the anil, and she stabbed him. It was only recently that he learned that the woman from his prememory was Quinn Fox.” Willis nodded. “You.”
Dorothy’s dread was sudden and sickening. No wonder they were all so sure of her guilt.
She touched her cloak, nerves creeping up the back of her neck as she felt the paper in her inner pocket rustle. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard of someone seeing visions of their own death before it had happened. Roman had left her a note before he’d died. I’ve been haunted by memories of my own death, it read. So, it seemed, he’d been familiar with prememories, too.
She dropped her hand, refocusing her attention on Willis. “I was trapped in my room at the Fairmont until Zora showed up and took out the men guarding my door,” she said very carefully. “This note that Zora found, it asked Ash to meet at midnight, but I couldn’t have gotten there in time. Whatever Ash saw in his prememory, I couldn’t have done this.”
Willis studied her through slits of eyes, chewing his lip. There was a stretch of silence, and then Zora released a low sigh.
“I did find her at the hotel,” she said, resigned. “She’s telling the truth about that.”
“I’m telling the truth about all of it!” Dorothy insisted, though she was no longer holding on to hope that her words carried any weight here. Maybe there wasn’t a chance for any of them to be close again. Well fine, she could find a way to deal with that. But she had to make them trust her on this. If not for herself, then for Ash.
She pinched her nose between two fingers, chest tightening as she thought about Ash’s motorboat floating in the open sea, the waters stained red with his blood.
Her throat closed up.
“Look,” she said, when she could speak again. “We all seem to be in agreement on the fact that something terrible has happened. And I’ll be the first to admit that it appears that I must’ve . . . I don’t know, come back from the future and—and attacked him, for some reason. But I’m telling you all the truth when I say that I don’t know why I came back, or what, exactly, I did to him. I wouldn’t have, I would never . . .” The words kill him felt stuck in her throat.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried again. “A few hours ago, Mac put a bounty on Ash’s head. Right now, every Cirkus Freak in the city will be out looking for him. Perhaps whatever happened to him has something to do with that.”
“Why would Mac Murphy care about Ash?” Willis asked, frowning slightly. “He’s never bothered with us before.”
“That was before Ash and I broke into his brothel and shot him in the leg,” Chandra said.
Dorothy blinked, taken aback. “I’m sorry . . . you shot Mac Murphy in the leg?”
For the first time since Dorothy arrived, Chandra looked at her with something like her old warmth. “It was awesome,” she said, grinning. “Ash was all, where do you keep your girls, and then Mac said—”
“Off topic,” Zora murmured, cutting off Chandra. Turning to Dorothy, she asked, “Is that why Mac put a bounty on Ash’s head? Because of the thing at his brothel?”
“What?” Dorothy shook her head. “No, that’s not it at all. Mac needed someone to take the fall for—”
Dorothy stopped talking abruptly. Roman’s death felt like it had happened a lifetime ago, and yet the memory of it played in her mind like a movie waiting to be cued.
She saw Roman’s chest blossoming with blood. Roman falling to the ground, his eyes going distant. And Mac’s hand on the trigger. She had to close her eyes for a moment to stop tears from spilling on to her cheeks. Oh, Roman.
It was too much, all this
