We travel back as far as we can,” Kara continued. “Right to the beginning. Even if the Countess can track us from here, there’s no way that trail will hold up before the planet exists. We should be safe there while we figure out what to do.”
Right to the what, now? “I hate to bring this up,” Owen said, “but how exactly are we going to survive without a planet? Don’t we need air or even a place to stand? Space isn’t that great for survival, I’ve heard.”
“As long as we’re moving through time, we’ll be fine,” she said, fiddling with the symbols on the bracelet. “The device has protective qualities that keep us alive. Just make sure you don’t let go, or you’ll drop back into normal time.” She winced. “And if that’s in deep space . . . just hold tight, okay?”
“Good tip,” Owen said, grabbing her hand. She smiled sadly, then hit a button on the bracelet, and the entire world jolted.
Plants grew downward into the ground. Dinosaurs tromped backward through the jungle, sometimes even walking right through the spot where they were standing. Owen was so shocked, he almost dropped Kara’s hand, but she squeezed his tightly. Apparently time travel made you insubstantial? That was convenient for them.
For a moment Owen wondered if that was something the author of Kara’s books had put into place, or whether real time travel actually made you ghostlike. That moment passed when he realized there wasn’t any such thing as “real” time travel, so that was sort of a silly question.
“Now that we’re a bit farther away, I’m going to speed us up,” Kara said. She pushed a symbol on the bracelet, and the world began flying by much faster, with flashes of animals going by too quickly to see, and day and night mixing into each other.
“How did you learn to use that thing?” Owen asked her, watching with awe the various changes in the world around them. The dinosaurs began to disappear, leaving just enormous insects and plants.
“My older self showed me,” she said, and Owen noticed she wasn’t watching the show in front of them but was instead just staring off into space. “It’s not that hard, actually. The TSA made them pretty user-friendly.”
“Except they’re not around to make them anymore,” Owen pointed out. “And wait, if your older self showed you how to use it, then how did she learn it?”
“Because I grow up and show myself,” Kara said. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but try not to think about it too much. Remember, paradoxes don’t affect me.” She squeezed his hand again. “Just part of my charm.”
He smiled at that, and realized that in spite of only knowing her for a few hours, that’s not how it felt for some reason. It was almost like he’d known her for longer. Maybe not a year, like she claimed, but certainly for days at least.
That made sense, too, if they’d had to do all three challenges to get the exit code for the readers. Owen briefly wondered what he’d found out about Kara in that time. Had she shared what this terrible future thing she was going to do was? Or anything about this whole “immune to paradoxes” thing, which still made no sense? Paradoxes weren’t like the TSA agents, police that punished you for breaking a rule. They were impossibilities of logic, a broken series of events that shouldn’t and couldn’t actually happen in the way that they did. How could an impossibility not affect Kara?
Yet here they were, using a TSA time bracelet that shouldn’t exist, that Kara’s older self had taught her younger self to use, only so she could grow up and teach her younger self again. It was a circle in time with no beginning.
“You’re thinking about it,” Kara said. “I can hear your teeth grinding.”
“Fair enough,” he told her, trying to unclench his teeth but failing. The world around them was entirely devoid of animals now, and the land seemed to have shifted. Mountains that had existed in prehistoric times were now flat plains, and oceans had moved in where there had been jungle a few minutes before. Either they were moving even faster through time, or the planet was going through some massive changes.
Kara glanced at her bracelet. “We just passed the first form of life on Earth,” she said, then turned her head up to the sky. “And no UFOs to be seen. Guess that means the planet wasn’t seeded by alien civilizations.”
Owen’s eyes widened. “Is that . . . something people were worried about?”
She grinned at him, and it seemed more genuine this time. “I love how gullible you are. It just brings me joy.”
The rocky ground melted into magma in places, and large meteorites lifted off the planet to rocket into space. Soon the entire planet began to dissolve into huge chunks of rock, and Kara squeezed Owen’s hand. “Almost there. Watch. This should be fun.”
The Earth completely fell apart now as a backward explosion created several larger Earth-sized planets, which flew off in different directions. A large wave of cosmic energy erupted through them in reverse, and the bracelet on Kara’s wrist glowed an odd color as it passed. Never had Owen been so thankful that a no-longer-existing TSA had added a protective element to the time bracelets, and that the bracelet still existed thanks to Kara’s paradox immunity, however that worked.
Some of the newly formed, previously-part-of-Earth rocks fell into orbit around the sun, while some headed off in a direction behind them. “That way’s the big bang, I’d guess,” she said, pointing in the direction some of the chunks of Earth had headed.
“Really?” Owen asked, suddenly realizing how amazing that would be. “Can we go see it?” Sure, it’d be the fictional big bang, but still!
“Too dangerous,” Kara told him. “It’s not just matter that exploded into existence. Time did too. And the closer we get to it, the more likely we’ll be sucked back in like a black hole. I’d rather not be compressed down with the rest of the universe into an infinitely tiny space, if you don’t mind.”
He sighed. “I do mind a little, but okay. If that’s the case, shouldn’t we slow down?”
She nodded, fiddling with the bracelet. Then she said, “ . . . Huh.”
For some reason, that one word brought the world crashing back down around Owen. “ ‘Huh’? Good huh, or bad huh?”
“Not a great one,” Kara said, glancing up at him with concern. “I think something might be wrong with the bracelet. It’s not letting us slow down.”
Those weren’t the words he wanted to hear. “That does sound like something very, very wrong. You can fix it, though, right?”
She frowned, still pushing symbols. “Um, not exactly. My older selves never explained how to fix them. It’s not like you need to know how to repair a TV to watch a show on it, you know?”
“Except this isn’t TV, this is time travel !”
“I do appreciate that point, believe me,” Kara said, pushing more buttons, then looking up. “Um, I think we’re actually going faster now. This might be a problem.”
All around them, stars began sliding backward in the same direction as the bits of Earth had gone, faster and faster. In the opposite direction, a line of black, starless nothing drew closer.
“Might be a problem?!” Owen shouted. “We’re going to reach the beginning of everything, which you just said we wouldn’t survive! How is that not a huge problem?”
Kara nodded. “You’re right. Let’s say probably will be a problem. I think it might have been that cosmic energy wave that passed by us. Could have been too much for the bracelet?”
Owen began to hyperventilate, his hand sweating in hers as she kept pushing buttons. Was he really going to die before anything ever existed? Why couldn’t a dinosaur have eaten him instead?
Wait! Could the readers fix the time bracelet? Was that something they could just declare had happened? If so, would they? Please, he begged. Fix this or we’re going to become one with everything!
UM, HOW WOULD WE FIX A TIME BRACELET? LET’S JUST GIVE UP AND START OVER BY GOING TO THE FUTURE INSTEAD.
LET’S SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN KARA CAN’T FIX IT.