BEFORE FORT COULD RESPOND, HE saw that Jia and Rachel were there as well and looked just as shocked as he felt. Simon stood in front of them both, with a wheeled construction cart abandoned just behind them. Apparently he really had carted them here.
Just behind Simon, Fort’s portal to the Carmarthen Academy stood open, which meant Ellora must have actually reversed time on the wall.
“What was that?” Jia demanded, her voice sounding like she was on the edge of panic. “What did I just see?”
Simon cleared his throat. “Oh, uh, I actually forget which of you I sent where. Were you the attack on Chicago? That was the disease outbreaks, if I remember right. Smallpox, measles, that kind of thing?”
“No, that was me,” Rachel said quietly, her eyes wild. “I … I’ve never seen anything so horrible.”
“I saw Destruction-magic users, in Hong Kong,” Jia said. “They were floating through the streets, setting fire to everything as they went. People were screaming, running. I saw … I saw …” She went silent for a moment, holding her arms tightly around herself. “That can’t be the future. It can’t !”
Ellora and Simon looked at each other. “It will be, if we don’t stop it,” Ellora said. “That’s why we need your help.”
“How far in the future?” Fort asked, trying to get the image of the tidal wave crashing against the soldiers out of his head. “How long do we have before all of that happens?”
Ellora looked uncomfortable. “That can wait for now—”
“No, they should know,” Simon said. “Everything you three just saw? It all takes place right around two years from now. Three, for the reprisal in Hong Kong.”
Fort fell back a step, completely in shock. Only two years? So soon? But how could that even be possible?
The soldiers on the beach had been grown men and women, and they’d been using magic. Discovery Day was only thirteen years ago, so two years from now, the oldest magic users could only be fifteen or sixteen, tops.
Jia and Rachel looked just as thrown. “How can that be?” Jia asked softly.
Ellora glared at Simon, who just shrugged. “Things are going to change dramatically in the next year,” Ellora said finally. “If what you just saw was a fire, the spark that lights it goes off by this time tomorrow.”
Fort just stared at her. That had to mean …
“London getting destroyed is the spark, yes,” Simon said, answering Fort’s thoughts. “Now you see why we’re so desperate to stop it. Other than, you know, it’s a city of almost ten million. That’s sort of important to us too. Now, are you going to come with us, or would you rather waste more time here with obvious questions?”
“But how can adults use magic?” Fort said. Simon groaned loudly, but Fort didn’t care. “It’s just not possible.”
Ellora gave him a long look before responding, making him feel oddly guilty for some reason. “Come with us back to the Carmarthen Academy. We’ll explain everything there.”
“What Ellora is avoiding saying is that your Dr. Ambrose is the one who figures out why adults can’t use magic and fixes that,” Simon said, then jumped as Ellora punched him. “Hey, ouch! What was that for?”
“Enough!” she hissed. “We’re not getting into all of that right now!”
“You don’t think they of all people should know?” Simon said, looking hurt and rubbing his shoulder.
Dr. Ambrose? She was the one who’d be responsible for giving adults magic? But how? Yes, she had access to most of the books of magic, and a whole school of magic users, the most anywhere in the world, from what Fort knew. But no adults at the school could use magic. What was going to change?
“Wait, hold on,” Rachel said, sounding like she was in a daze. “How did Dr. Ambrose figure this out? Only people born on Discovery Day or after can use magic. That’s not just something a vaccine can fix.”
“That’s what we all thought,” Simon said. “But thanks to Dr. Ambrose’s research on—”
And then he paused in mid-sentence, his entire body freezing, glowing with black light.
“I told you, enough,” Ellora said, her eyes blazing with black light as she glared at her schoolmate. Fort immediately readied a spell to use against her, not that it’d do much good, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jia and Rachel do the same thing, but Ellora held up her hands in surrender as she turned back to them. “Sorry about that. It doesn’t matter how it happens. What matters is that we stop it. And that’s why we’ve come to you.”
“You really think you can stop … everything we saw?” Rachel asked, her hands shaking so hard she crossed her arms to hide it. “It looked like a war zone.”
Ellora winced but, again, seemed to be hiding something. “We can stop it, or at least postpone it, if we save London. And to do that, we need you three. Without each of you, our plan fails, simple as that.”
Something beeped, and Ellora glanced down at her watch, then made a face. “We’ve run out of time,” she said, unfreezing Simon, who seemed unfazed by his freezing. “We’ve got about two minutes before all of your TDA soldiers show back up, so I need you to come with us now.”
Fort glanced between his two friends, who looked as shaken as he felt. Jia especially had a haunted look in her eye—he hadn’t seen her this unsettled since the Dracsi caverns. Whatever she’d seen must have really upset her.
If it’d been anything like the tsunami on the beach, he shouldn’t be surprised.
But if they went with Ellora and Simon, if he went, and Colonel Charles found out … what then? Would the colonel really go through with his threat and make Fort forget he’d ever found his father? The thought of spending the rest of his life thinking his father was lost to the D.C. attack was almost the worst thing he could think of, other than not ever having found his father to begin with.
“We could go,” Rachel whispered to Fort, apparently reading his mind. “If you stay, you’ll have followed orders, so no punishment.”
“We need all three of you,” Ellora said, shaking her head. “With just one or two, we’ll never save London. Without Forsythe, everything you saw will come to pass.”
Jia seemed to shudder at this, and Rachel gave him a sad look. “It’s your call, New Kid,” Rachel said quietly. “I don’t know that we can trust these two, but there’s no way I’m letting that future happen, no matter what Colonel Charles threatens me with. But things are different for you.” She paused. “Maybe we could all tell him we were kidnapped? I mean, considering they already froze Jia and me, they easily could have. And the colonel might believe that if we’re gone before he returns.”
“What about the security cameras?” Fort asked, remembering Colonel Charles telling him about footage of Fort letting Sierra and Damian go, back at the original school. “He’d have proof we were lying.”
“We froze those when we arrived,” Simon said, his annoyance evident in his voice. “Hurry up, please!”
“We need a decision,” Ellora said, sounding anxious as well. “They’ll return in under a minute now.” She nodded at Simon, who ran over to the portal and passed through it. Ellora quickly moved to follow, but she paused at the entrance, waiting for them.
“I have to go,” Jia said suddenly, and walked to the portal without looking at the other two. “Whether or not Fort comes, I can’t … I have to stop that future. I have to.”
Rachel stared after her in confusion for a moment, but turned back to Fort. “I’m with her, even more than usual,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
For a moment, all Fort could think about was his life before Dr. Opps had arrived: going to school every day, sometimes getting into fights, feeling nothing but numb, an emptiness inside that felt as deep and cold as the ocean. His aunt couldn’t afford to take care of him, and he’d had no idea his father was out there somewhere. All he’d had was the feeling that it was his fault his dad had been captured.
And that could be his life again, if he disobeyed Colonel Charles.
But what did that compare to the future they’d seen? If even one person got hurt or died in a battle, could he live with himself? Not to mention a whole city full of people in London was in danger.
When it came down to it, there really wasn’t any choice. He had no idea how he could be useful, with just his Teleport and Heal Minor Wounds spells, but if Ellora had seen a need for him, then he couldn’t stay behind.
“I’m in,” he said, barely recognizing his own voice. He quickly ran over to the portal, trying to ignore the consequences for now. Rachel might be right: If they could just get out before the soldiers reappeared, they could say that the Time students had taken them by force.
Maybe Colonel Charles would even believe it.
They all passed through the portal, Rachel slapping him on the back supportively as she went. As they stepped onto the dark, damp grass in front of the Carmarthen Academy, Fort turned around to close the teleportation circle behind him …
And a lightning bolt passed right over his shoulder, striking the lawn.
“Close it!” Rachel shouted, but it was already too late. As Fort shut the portal down, he saw the TDA soldiers had already started reappearing. Only it wasn’t a soldier who’d fired.
It was Colonel Charles. The colonel now stared at them through the portal, his Lightning rod still glowing from use, looking almost dumbfounded from rage. “Fitzgerald!” he shouted. “I order you to—”
But the rest was lost as the portal closed.