“Come on,” Brint said tightly, throwing a worried glance at Mari. “We don’t have any time to mess around.”
He grabbed Dak by the arm and escorted him roughly up the aisle that rounded the room. Mari and Sera were right behind them — Dak noticed that Mari had retrieved the SQuare, and was hurriedly placing it back into her satchel. Brint came to a panel in the wall and pushed. The whole thing pivoted open. The four of them slipped through into a hidden room that was only about eight feet across and completely empty. Dak turned to see Riq follow them inside, then Brint shut the panel.
“Language is going to be your biggest barrier,” Mari said. “We need to get that taken care of before we can send you off. We just have to hope our defenses hold until we can get you to the insertion team.”
Dak tried not to show how terrified he was. “What’s going on anyway? Who was that woman?”
“We call her the Lady in Red,” Brint answered. “Her name is Tilda. You’ll never meet a viler, more hateful woman. I don’t think she cares one whit about anything except amassing power and moving up the ranks. She won’t be happy until she’s the leader of the SQ. And she’s convinced that wiping out the Hystorians is the best way to make that happen.”
“Riq, quickly,” Mari ordered. “Tell them about the devices.”
The teenager seemed to have lost some of his arrogance from before. Nothing like an invasion from an evil red-haired lady to shake you up a bit, Dak mused.
Riq pulled out several small objects from a plastic cylinder he’d had in his shirt pocket. He held up a couple of them — one looked like a headphone bud, and the other a tooth.
“What the heck are those?” Dak asked.
“While your parents spent their whole lives playing around with time travel,” the young man answered, “mine worked on language-translation equipment. And this is so beyond what the rest of the world knows, you won’t even believe it works.”
He stepped forward and leaned toward Dak, holding out the earpiece. Dak instinctively took a step backward.
“Hey, quit being a baby,” Riq said. “Come here!”
Dak had to push down his rising anger. “Fine.”
He let Riq reach up and put the tiny device in his ear, shoving it down until it almost hurt. Then he put a second one in Dak’s other ear.
“All right, this is the part you won’t like,” Riq said.
Another explosion rocked the building, sending all of them teetering for a few seconds as the room shook. When the place stilled again, Dak glared at Riq warily.
“Don’t worry,” the teenager said. “It’ll only hurt for a few seconds.”
Dak was determined not to show any more fear. “Okay, what do I do?”
“Open your mouth. Open wide.”
Dak shot a questioning glance at Sera, who looked on impatiently, then did as he was told. Riq leaned forward and stuck his fingers in Dak’s mouth. Dak gagged — it was maybe the least pleasant part of a very unpleasant day. There was an uncomfortable click that he couldn’t tell if he’d heard or felt. Then a burst of pain shot through his body, and he jumped back from Riq — who was actually smiling.
But the pain went away quickly, just as had been promised.
“So what is —”
Riq cut him off. “No time to explain. You’ll find out soon enough, when you’re able to talk to people in different languages. It’ll take some time to get used to, but you’ll be fine after some practice.”
Riq did the same thing to Sera, who stood still and didn’t complain a lick. When Riq was finished, he stepped back and nodded to Mari.
A thunderous boom sounded, and this time Dak and the others fell to the floor. They scrambled to their feet as muffled shouts rang out from the other side of the secret panel.
“The SQ is in the HOC!” Mari yelled.
“We can’t waste another second!” Brint shouted at Dak and Sera. “Get the Ring ready! You have to go now — hurry, before they storm in here and take it!”
Mari seized Brint by the arm. “Brint, we have to wait for the insertion team. They’re just kids!”
“There’s no time. For all we know, our team is dead.”
Dak swallowed, the reality of it all hitting him hard and heavy now. “Where do we go?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Brint answered. “Just away from here. I’ll come with you.”
Mari clearly didn’t like it. “Riq can go, too. You’ll need all the help you can get.”
“Now hold on —” Riq said.
“But —” Dak began.
“No more buts! We do not have a choice!”
The woman pulled the satchel off of her shoulder and handed it to Sera. “Guard that with your life. You can’t do anything if you lose the SQuare! If for some reason you do, you’ll have to travel back here and get a new one. But that might get messy — there’s no telling what you’d be coming back to.”
Dak nodded, then moved to stand close to Sera. Riq joined them, looking utterly put out. There were sounds of gunfire now in the other room. Gunfire, and screams.
“You know how to do it, right?” Dak asked Sera, his voice tinged with hysteria.
She simply nodded. He felt a pang of loss again when he handed over the Infinity Ring, as if he were throwing away his parents in some way.
Sera immediately set to work on the programming function of the Ring. Her face was a mask of concentration.
More shots rang out on the other side of the wall. A woman screamed, a sound of pain and terror. Dak felt utterly useless, knowing that if he tried to help Sera he’d only get in the way, slow her down. So he braced himself and waited for the next terrible thing to happen.
It only took about ten seconds.
The secret panel tore from its hinges and flew through the air, windmilling until it smacked into Brint. He cried out and crumpled to the ground as Mari dove for cover. Dak looked back at the now-open passage to the HOC. Two men in soldier’s gear stood there with guns raised, a red beam blazing out from each of their scopes.
“Get on the ground!” one of them yelled. “Now!”
Dak dropped, bringing his arms up to cover his head — like that’d do any good if one of these thugs decided to shoot a bullet in his direction. Sera cowered in the corner, working on the Infinity Ring nestled in her lap, hidden from plain view. Riq crouched right next to her.
“How dare you come onto our property like this!” Mari shouted. “We’ll report this to every media —”
She wasn’t able to finish before one of the men struck her with the butt of his weapon. She cried out and fell next to Brint, who lay still where he’d dropped.
A rage roared inside Dak — a fury that he never knew was possible all those years he’d spent reading in his room. That already seemed a lifetime ago. He charged the soldier who’d hurt Mari. Screaming at the top of his lungs, he dove and tackled the man, knocking him off balance. The second man was on Dak in an instant, dragging him by the hair across the floor while he kicked out with his feet and wailed from the pain.
The man dumped him into a heap. “One more move or remark that I don’t like, and someone gets shot. Do you understand me? Now where’s the Ring?” Dak saw in horror that the soldier had finally noticed that Sera was not just sitting there, but busy working on something. “Hey! What’re you doing?”
Sera looked back at him, her face lit with fear. “Nothing. I’m just scared.”
“You think I’m stupid? Hand it over!” the man yelled. “I won’t ask again.”
Sera had turned her attention back to the device. “Okay, just one second.”
“Now, you little brat!”
He moved toward Sera, and Dak scrambled to get in front of him. He landed in Sera’s lap just as Riq reached over and placed his hand on her shoulder. There was a click and a beep. The
world collapsed into light and sound and they were sucked away from Hystorian headquarters.
SERA RELISHED the escape. The ordeal through the wormhole lasted just a few seconds, the same mind-jolt of movement and streaking turns of light and darkness, the same feeling that her atoms were about to shake loose. And then it was over without transition, that instant shift to stillness and normalcy as if nothing had happened at all. She looked around her.
She was at the foot of a giant pyramid, its huge blocks of yellow stone angling away toward the sky so that she couldn’t even see its apex far above. The ground was dry and dusty, the air around them sweltering hot. She sat in the same position as she had in the hidden room outside the operations center, and the Infinity Ring rested in her sweaty hands. Dak was still sprawled across her lap but quickly scooted away to lie on the ground to her right, his head resting against a block at the bottom of the pyramid.
And Riq was standing just over her shoulder, peering up at the huge structure with such a blank expression that he could have been a wax statue.
“It’s . . .” she started to say. “Do you think they’re okay?”
His dazed eyes finally met hers. “Brint and Mari can take care of themselves. And I’d rather not let them down, so we’ve got a lot to do. No time to mess around.”
Dak had sat up straight with his back against the stone. “Great. They sent the most annoying person in that whole operations room with us. Just great.”
“Dak,” Riq retorted, “be glad you’re a little kid or I’d break your nose about five times to make myself feel better. You think I want to be here?”
Dak glared but kept quiet.
“Sorry,” the older boy muttered. He walked away, went over to sit on a rock that jutted from the sand. “I just wasn’t ready for this. There are people back there . . . I may never see again.”
Sera sighed. The shock of everything had almost overwhelmed the fact that they were sitting at the foot of an actual Egyptian pyramid. And the blocks of stone looked much newer than she would’ve imagined, which meant they’d come far into the past, just as she’d hoped. She wanted to be as distant from the SQ as possible, both in time and geography. She looked at the imposing structure, knowing she should be more impressed, but her eagerness to get on with things outweighed all else.
She stood up and slapped the dust from her pants. She grabbed the Infinity Ring in one hand and took the satchel from Dak, then held both items out in front of her.
“Hey, look at me,” she said. “We need to start using these things the way they were meant to be used. If we do what the Hystorians asked, then maybe when we go back the SQ will never have attacked, and we’ll all be living fat and happy.”
“Wait a second,” Dak replied, seeming deep in thought. “If we change history, then maybe we change our future lives, and if there’s no need for Breaks to be corrected, then maybe we never build a time-travel device and the Breaks that didn’t need fixing never get fixed and . . .” He stopped, his expression having changed to complete confusion.
Sera knew what he was getting at. “Better not to even go there. Time paradoxes are way too complicated, and we don’t know for sure how they work. That’s why we can’t risk going back to our own time.”
“We can’t go home again, huh?” Riq asked.
“Not until we’ve done everything Brint’s asked of us. What if we go back home and the Infinity Ring blinks out of existence before we’ve fixed all the Breaks?”
“You could make another one,” Dak said. “Couldn’t you?”
“You’re assuming I wouldn’t blink out of existence, too.”
“That could happen?” Riq asked. He looked deeply troubled by the idea.
“The whole point is that I don’t know! Look.” She put the Ring in the satchel and handed it to Dak, then took a stick from the ground, using it to draw a line in the sand. “Time is like a river, right? That’s what time stream means. The current is flowing in one direction — toward the future — and we’re all being pulled along for the ride. The Ring, of course, lets us move upstream or downstream at will.”
“Oh, goody,” said Riq. “A metaphor. They didn’t tell me you were a poet, too.”
“Here’s a poem,” said Dak. “Roses are red, violets are blue. Please just shut up, why don’t you?”
“I’ve got the speaking stick.” Sera raised the stick. “And it doubles as a hitting stick, so both of you be quiet.”
“Time. River. Got it,” said Dak.
“Now imagine the Breaks as great big boulders that have been plopped into the time stream. The stream keeps flowing, but it has to veer a little bit from its natural course, working its way around the boulders. It’s not a completely different river — it still gets where it was going, for the most part — but there are subtle changes all along its length. Ripples. Remnants.”
“And as we remove the boulders,” Riq added, “the river goes back to normal.”
“Right, but we can’t say for sure what ‘normal’ looks like. As long as we’re moving from place to place with the Infinity Ring, we’re anomalies, and we’re immune to the changes we’re causing. But when we return to our proper time . . . who knows.”
“So, we won’t be affected?” Dak asked. “Our memories will stay intact? And the Ring, too?”
“That’s the theory, Dak. I’m sorry, but this is all uncharted territory here. All I know for sure is that the second we start changing things, the time line will be in flux and we won’t be able to take anything for granted. All we can do is make the changes the Hystorians tell us to and hope for the best. Otherwise we might go back to discover the planet is a chunk of dead rock floating through space.”
Riq moved closer and eyed the satchel in Dak’s hands. “Okay, fine. So how in the world do we know what to do? They didn’t tell me anything about the Breaks, their locations, nothing. I started my training in The Art of Memory, but hadn’t gotten too far.”
“Then it’s a good thing two out of three of us are smart,” Dak said, stepping up beside Riq. “We’ll figure it out. You just be a good boy and translate.”
Riq laughed, which made Dak’s face grow red. “How many languages do you know, by the way? I forgot.”
“One,” Dak said in a deadpan voice.
“Ah, okay. When I need help with English, I’ll come to you.”
“And when I need help on how to look stupider, I’ll come to you.”
Riq pointed a finger at Dak’s ear. “Just remember, as impressive as that device is, it won’t help you with reading and writing. You’re basically illiterate now. Just sayin’.”
Sera cleared her throat. Dak was usually so quick to trust strangers. She wondered if Riq reminded Dak a little too much of himself. “You guys finished?” she asked. They each gave the other a dirty look, but then nodded at her. “For the love of mincemeat. Dak, you can’t be dumb and learn tons of languages. And, Riq, you better be nice to my best friend — he knows more about history than your bosses. I guarantee it.” She waited a moment to make sure she’d put their argument to rest, then took a deep breath. “Dak, there’s something else. I’ve been thinking about your parents, and I think they’re anomalies, too.”
Dak got serious, fast. “What does that mean?”
“They warped out with us, but they didn’t warp back in. That means they were lost in transit. Without the Ring to steer them, they’ll be completely unanchored, hopping through the time stream like skipping stones. But I don’t think their movements will be entirely random. As untethered anomalies, they should theoretically be drawn to other anomalies in the time stream.”
“Theoretically?” Dak echoed. “I’m getting so tired of that word!”
“What I mean to say is that I think they’ll be drawn to the Breaks. Which means, as big a place as time is, there’s a very real chance we’l
l encounter them in the course of our mission.”
Dak took a moment to consider what she’d said. Then he held out the satchel. “Let’s get on with it, then.”
Sera couldn’t have agreed more. She sat down, pulled the SQuare out of the satchel, and turned it on. Dak and Riq crowded around her to see what appeared on the screen. There were just two sentences, white letters on a black background, with an input box below them:
You have one chance to type password.
Fail, and device will explode.
“YOU’RE KIDDING me,” Sera said. “All of that talking, and they forgot to give us the password?”
Dak had felt a little quiver in his gut, too. Here they were in ancient Egypt — he took yet another look at the Great Pyramid of Giza, still in disbelief that he was standing at the foot of something he’d dreamed about seeing for years — with nothing to guide them on what to do next except a SQuare device that was locked to them. But, man, the air smelled clean and fresh, like it hadn’t been tainted by a few thousand years of humans doing what they do. Everything looked sharper, too. He couldn’t help feeling optimistic.
“We’ll just have to take a guess,” Dak said. “Maybe it’s Hystorian.”
Riq scoffed. “Yeah, why don’t you go ahead and type that in. Give it a whirl. If it blows up, oh well!”
Dak would’ve loved to punch the guy right in the stomach — if only there wouldn’t be consequences, like, for example, getting beaten up in retaliation. “I didn’t mean to just go ahead and do it, moron. I was throwing out ideas — maybe you should try to actually contribute something.”
“I’m about to smack the both of you,” Sera said evenly, and her hardened face showed she meant it. “You two haven’t even known each other long enough to be enemies. Cut it out.”
“Seems plenty long enough to me,” Dak grumbled.
“I mean it,” Sera snapped. She returned her attention to the screen. “The more I think about it, the harder it is to believe they would’ve sent us away with this if we couldn’t find a way to figure out the password. We just need to think about it for a while. Once we agree on something, all we can do is try it.”