Taylor stormed into the apartment, accusations tumbling through her mind. She didn’t yell at Joseph. Not yet.
Her father had been a minister. He hadn’t been the kind of preacher who held a crowd’s attention by raising his voice or pronouncing dooms of fiery torment. His voice always stayed calm, but he could pin you with a look. Taylor fixed one of those looks on Joseph.
“Project Misdirect,” she said, and held up her comlink so he could see the code displayed on it. “Aptly named, I suppose, since the whole purpose of the exercise was to misdirect me, wasn’t it?”
Sheridan and Joseph had both come to the door to let Taylor in, and they all stood in the entryway staring at one another.
Joseph didn’t answer Taylor. He just sighed and ran a hand through his shaggy blue hair. He looked tired, drained. And why wouldn’t he? He’d been busy. Taylor didn’t spare him any pity.
“You meant to keep me so focused on creating a rank virus, I wouldn’t check on what you were doing.”
“No,” Joseph said, thrusting his hands into his pockets. “I actually want to bring the rank program down. It will make our job easier.”
Sheridan’s gaze bounced between Joseph and Taylor. “What’s wrong?”
Taylor didn’t answer her sister. Instead she squeezed her comlink so hard, several buttons beeped in protest. “These are the protocols for creating a time vector protection field!”
Joseph’s expression hardened. His whole body seemed to go rigid. “How did you access that file? I didn’t give you permission to snoop around on my computer.”
“That isn’t the issue,” Taylor said, her hand still gripping her comlink. “The issue is that you’re planning on tampering with the past.”
Joseph narrowed his eyes. “I had a DNA block on that file. How did you get around it?”
Taylor ignored the question. “You’re doing something that’s illegal and dangerous.”
“Illegal?” Joseph let out a scoff. “By whose standards? There aren’t any laws about time travel.”
Sheridan broke into the conversation, taking a step so she stood between Joseph and Taylor. “What are you talking about? What’s a time vector protection field?”
Taylor wanted to wave Joseph’s program at her sister and say, “This!” But few people understood that sort of code. So Taylor explained it the long way—all the while slicing glares in Joseph’s direction. “Any time you strain someone out of the past, you risk changing history’s timestream to a point that you might not exist in the present. Even if you’re not a direct descendant of the person you strained, there’s no way to measure the effect one person has on a society. What would happen if you took the person who introduced Einstein’s parents to each other? Or Hitler’s?”
Taylor held up a hand to emphasize her words. “You might think you were doing the world a favor by preventing Hitler’s birth and saving tens of millions of people who died in World War Two, but by adding those people back into the timestream, you would change the world so much that none of us would exist in the same way. If World War Two hadn’t happened, how many men and women would have ended up marrying someone different? What mark would all of those new descendants leave on the world? One decision, right or wrong, could change everything.”
“Okay, I get that part,” Sheridan said.
“If you’re going to mess around with the timestream,” Taylor went on, “you have to find a way to keep yourself from being swept away in a rogue current. A time vector protection field protects people within its boundaries from changes in the timestream. Everything and everybody around you could change, but as long as you were in the perimeters of the field during the switch, you would remain unaffected.”
“Which is why,” Joseph said patiently, “it’s important for us to have that technology. As long as Traventon potentially has the power to change the past, any of us are at risk.” He took a step toward Taylor and held out his hand for her comlink. Probably to delete the information. “The next time you want to know what I’m working on, ask instead of splicing into my computer files.”
Taylor was not about to give him her comlink or let him get her off track. She scrolled through the code on her screen. “I’m impressed you came up with something this sophisticated in such a short time. Really. I would have thought this sort of thing took years to invent.”
“It did take years,” Joseph said. “The Time Strainer scientists created it to put around the Scicenter. While we were there, I stole the information from their computer. I thought Santa Fe might want to study it and see if they could modify it for larger spaces.” Joseph crossed his arms. “Now, are you going to tell me how you got through my computer’s safeguards, or do I have to confiscate your computer and figure it out myself? We’re both busy right now.”
Taylor let out an angry groan. “Don’t pretend you’re not up to something. I can tell from your data that you’re planning on using the Time Strainer to take someone from the past.” She held up the next set of code for Joseph to see. “Who put you up to this? Who do they want?”
Joseph didn’t answer, just clenched his jaw.
Sheridan looked from him to Taylor. “I thought the Time Strainer couldn’t work without a QGP. You destroyed the only working QGP—the one in the twenty-first century.”
Taylor paced over to Sheridan. “We destroyed the QGP two months after the date it strained us into the future. That means there’s still a two-month window in the past that could be used to take people who were within the QGP’s range.”
Taylor had first tried to destroy the QGP on the date she and Sheridan had been taken from Knoxville. It hadn’t worked. Apparently, the timestream was amenable to changes, but not paradoxes. Reilly had left the twenty-first century two months after Taylor and Sheridan had been taken. Destroying the QGP before the date of Reilly’s departure would have kept Reilly from being transported to the future, which in turn would have kept Taylor from being taken in the first place. And since she wouldn’t have been taken, she wouldn’t have destroyed the QGP, which meant Reilly would have left the twenty-first century and the paradox would have looped endlessly through time.
Taylor had settled on destroying the QGP right after Reilly left.
“It’s only two months,” Sheridan said, still confused. “The Time Strainer can’t pull people from a slot so small. It needs at least a year.”
“The scientists in Traventon need at least a year,” Taylor said. “Joseph, however, has been working on that too.” She showed her sister the algorithms written on her comlink screen. “With these program amendments we’re down to a slot of minutes—seconds maybe.” She turned to Joseph again. “Who are you planning to take?”
Joseph still didn’t answer, but Sheridan did. She was watching Joseph, reading the furrow of his brows as though he were a book. “It’s Echo, isn’t it?” she asked. “You want to save your brother.”
Joseph’s lips remained set in a tight, defiant line. His blue eyes darkened. Taylor could tell from Sheridan’s expression, not Joseph’s, that Sheridan’s guess was right. Sheridan reached out, took Joseph’s hand, and squeezed it. Her eyes brimmed with sympathy.
There was a crack in Joseph’s expression then, a flash of pain he couldn’t hide.
Taylor sighed, shut off her comlink, and slipped it back into her pocket. She had never been good at consoling people and hardly tried now. She was too relieved Joseph had been trying to save his brother, not change the past at the request of one of Santa Fe’s factions.
Taylor kept her voice soft, apologetic almost. “For the Time Strainer to work, it has to be able to contact a working QGP. The QGPs in Traventon aren’t functional now. They couldn’t have been functioning when Echo was alive.”
“I know,” Joseph said. “I had to try anyway. If I could find a way to save Echo . . .” He looked away, unable to finish the sentence.
Sheridan let out an “Oh” of concern and wrapped her arms around him. Joseph returned the hug, resting his cheek on her hair.
It was up to Taylor to point out the painful truth. “Even if you could find a way to save your brother, you shouldn’t do it. What would have happened to us if the real Echo had been time-strained out of Traventon before he told you to switch places with him? Or what if Echo’s unexplained disappearance made the Dakine suspicious that you or your father knew things you shouldn’t? They could have started watching you closely. Maybe they would have found out about the illegal laser disrupter you built.”
Joseph released Sheridan. “I know.” Taylor could tell he did know, but the steel in his eyes said he didn’t particularly care about the risk.
“It isn’t just our lives we have to think about,” Taylor said more forcefully. “If the events of the past are changed, either one of us could end up being used as a tool by the Dakine or by the Traventon government.”
“I know,” he said again, this time with resignation in his voice.
Taylor let it go then. Certainly, Joseph realized he couldn’t tamper with the past. All of these programs he’d been working on—they must have been an exercise in grief. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” Taylor turned to leave, then paused and turned back. “Oh, and I was able to download your data because your father thought I was Sheridan and let me in. Once I stole her ID badge, it was pitifully easy.”
Sheridan put one hand on her hip. “You stole my ID badge?”
Taylor headed toward the door. “You never even missed it.”
“My computer doesn’t start without a DNA scan,” Joseph called after her. “How did you get around that?”
“I didn’t have to,” Taylor said. “You left your computer logged on. Really, Joseph, you should get more sleep.”
She was out the door before he could respond to that.