Dark Stars by Danielle Rollins (most read books of all time .txt) 📗

into a duffel, which she hurriedly looped over one shoulder, eyes scanning the room for anything else she might need. Her heart gave a strange little twitch as she realized there was nothing. She’d spent a year in this hotel, and she’d been starting to think of it as a sort of home, and yet she was able to pack her entire life into a duffel bag and leave it all behind. The thought made her sadder than she cared to admit.

“Enough,” she said out loud, giving her head a shake. Now wasn’t the time to get sentimental. She had no way of knowing how long she had before a Cirkus Freak—or worse, Mac himself—wandered back down these halls. She had to move.

She removed the money from her duffel and quickly counted the bills. It wasn’t much, she was afraid, and it wouldn’t last long. There was enough to feed her for a week. Maybe. She would need to get used to skipping breakfast.

And after that? She supposed she could pick pockets, run a few short cons, lift a pocket watch or whatever other valuables people in this time still had. The thought caused a bitter smile to cross her face. She’d thought those days were behind her. Old habits certainly died hard.

She shoved the money back into her bag and slipped into the hall, easing her door shut behind her without a sound. There was still no one here, she saw, a relieved breath escaping from between her teeth. She’d been lucky, but she’d be a fool to press that luck any further. She started for the staircase . . .

And now she paused, an idea occurring to her.

Roman used to keep cash stashed away in his bedside table. For a rainy day, he’d always told her, ironically, with a glance at the perpetually overcast sky. In New Seattle, every day was rainy—both figuratively and literally.

Dorothy chewed her lower lip, considering. Was that money still there? she wondered. It seemed soulless to steal from the dead. But what other options did she have? Starving wouldn’t be much fun.

“Blast,” she muttered, and turned left instead of right, veering toward Roman’s old room. He would understand, she told herself, trying to tamp down her guilt. Roman no longer needed to eat. He would think it was sentimental nonsense to let money go to waste.

Down the hall Dorothy went, and then up another staircase, to Roman’s old room. Unlike Dorothy, Roman had taken the trouble to decorate. There were pictures on the walls: sketches torn from old books—Roman particularly loved Rembrandt and da Vinci—knickknacks scattered across the dressers. Pausing, Dorothy saw a photograph of Roman’s little sister, Cassia, tucked into the frame of his mirror. Strange how she’d never noticed the photograph before.

She knelt in front of his bedside table and began shuffling around, pushing aside books and papers. Nothing there. Blast.

She tried his desk next and found more of the same: notebooks, journals, textbooks. No cash. She dug her teeth into her lower lip and was about to slam the drawer shut in frustration when her fingers brushed against something silky and thick.

A prickle of familiarity went through her. This wasn’t cheap, like the other notebook paper in Roman’s desk. It felt like it had been torn from a very nice journal. Heart thudding, Dorothy slid it out, her eyes quickly scanning the handwriting.

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.

Dorothy felt every muscle in her body go still. Her heart hammered steadily inside of her chest. She knew this handwriting well. She’d never met the man who Roman and Ash referred to as merely “the Professor,” but she knew all about him. He’d invented time travel, and then he’d disappeared, leaving behind a journal of cryptic notes on the theory of time travel, experiments into the past and future, and a lot of questions about where he’d gone and why.

Several weeks ago (or, a year and several weeks, depending on how she calculated time) Dorothy had stumbled across his journal in some of Roman’s things. She’d read the entire thing in one sitting, desperate to learn more about how and why time travel was possible. It had been like getting lost in the very best kind of novel, except that it had all been real.

Staring down at the pages she held now, she felt a prickle of excitement move through her. She’d had no idea that parts of the journal had been missing.

Somewhere in the hotel, faint as a sigh, there was a noise: a shoe scuffing against the floor, a whisper, something.

Dorothy was instantly alert. She stood, head cocked toward the door. The sound didn’t come again, but it thundered through her memory, seeming much louder than it had been in real life. Slipping the journal pages into her cloak, she inched toward the door, rolling her feet from ball to heel so as not to make any noise on the creaky floorboards. She pressed her ear to the door, holding her breath.

Nothing.

Her heartbeat began to slow, but she knew she wasn’t the only one in New Seattle who knew how to move around without being heard. She lowered a hand to the doorknob, fingers curling around the cool brass.

She’d gotten to be a fair fighter over the last year. She was small and slight, but Roman had taught her how to use an opponent’s weight and mass against them. And then there was the dagger hidden in her cloak—she could be deadly with that. If there was only one person waiting for her on the other side of this door, she stood a good chance of getting away. If there were two people or even three, she figured she could still fight her way through them, as long as she took them off guard.

More than that, and . . .

Well, Dorothy thought, swallowing. It wouldn’t do her any good to think about that just now.