CHAPTER THREE: May 3, 2134

The Place in Time Travel Agency of my era is a storefront again. I’ve discovered throughout time that these phases come and go, and after decades of doing everything via computer, it seems the folks of my time were ready for the personal touch of in-real-life shopping again. When clients step in off the street, a full-size android travel agent smiles from behind its shining blue face, ready to help them book their vacation to wherever they might want to go, from the Mariana Trench to the moon. And sometimes farther.

This run-of-the-mill travel agency in one of the bustling city’s business districts is the perfect cover for PITTA, which operates out of the back room. There, the real agency looks more like a museum than a shop. We’ve got all sorts of artifacts, as well as holographic projections that swirl around on pedestals, showcasing our trips through time.

A holograph of the 1893 World’s Fair Ferris Wheel spins before my eyes, and my heart hitches in my throat. In my attempt to make things right, it seems I’ve only made things more complicated. Up until this point, we’ve assumed that only two organizations had time machines: TUB and PITTA. But if TUB’s was destroyed before its agents had a chance go to Jump back to the Fair that day, then where did that traveler come from? Surely if there were a third organization with time travel technology, we’d have heard about it by now, wouldn’t we?

The answer hits me like an airtrain to the chest. What if the traveler was from PITTA itself?

“Greenley.” Clarke frowns down at me as though I just did something incredibly distasteful. He’s a big man, taller than me, who often likes to use his physical presence to intimidate people.

I square my shoulders. “Morning, Mr. Clarke. Is there a problem?”

“I’d say there is. Taylor tells me that your Wormhole was missing from its lockbox this morning.” He jerks his head toward the desk of our head technician, a man who reminds me of some kind of bird. He has broad shoulders and a beak-like nose and always carries a ragged-edged copy of his magnum opus—a DeLorean Box maintenance book—in his pocket like ruffled feathers. Taylor, obviously hearing his name, glances over with a shrug of half-hearted apology.

“That’s because I still had it out from my last Retrieval yesterday,” I say, pulling it out of my pocket. “It took longer than I expected, so I didn’t have time to drop it back off here before Nell closed up shop.”

Clarke’s frown deepens, and I have a sudden urge to punch his face. As far as he knows, I follow the Rules to a tee, but the guy is always looking for a reason to reprimand me and threaten to take away my Jump privileges. I take a deep breath, but just as the urge is passing, he speaks again.

“It’s your responsibility as a Retriever to ensure that the Wormhole makes it back here in a timely manner, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I say through clenched teeth.

He glares at me, probably irritated that I didn’t full-grovel or make him any empty promises about how I’d try better next time like Taylor or any other of his lackeys would’ve done. If I didn’t love this job so much—no, if I didn’t need this job and its access to the DeLorean Box so much—I’d have given the jerk a piece of my mind long ago. PITTA deserves better than him.

He plucks the Wormhole Device from my hand. “This is a priceless piece of equipment you’re carrying around, you know.”

Somehow, I manage to keep my mouth shut as he sets the Wormhole into the lockbox on the wall and taps the lock button with a dramatic flourish. “I’m sure even the esteemed Dr. Wells will agree that we can’t tolerate such recklessness here. Don’t let it happen again.”

I watch, resignedly, as the glass door slides shut to lock the Wormhole inside until my next Retrieval.

With a final look of pure disgust, he disappears into the lair of his office.

I glance around the waiting room at the other employees there. A couple Object Retrievers are chatting near the coffee rehydrator. Another Retriever, Alwyn, is sitting at the sofa, flipping through a digital dossier, obviously preparing for her next assignment. The person I really need, though, is sitting at the desk, swiping at the air in front of her to scroll through something on her personal vision device implant, her eyes glossy with boredom. On her desk rest a set of silvery PITTA-issued PVD glasses, which contain all sorts of essential information about the company—including the Jump log database—but which are coded to only work for authorized personnel.

“Hey, Nell,” I say, leaning against her desk and putting on my best smile, the one that usually gets me my fair share of positive attention from women.

Not so with Nell. Despite being around my age, single, and not unattractive, she keeps to herself for the most part, never joining in when groups of Techs go out for drinks after work or when Retrievers book themselves a trip to the Stone Age for some epic rock-climbing. Then again, she’s not really part of either of those groups. She’s just a secretary, the only one we’ve got.

Nell sighs as her gaze slides away from whatever she’s reading and onto my face. She brushes a strand of choppy, burgundy hair from her icy blue eyes. “What do you want, Dodge?”

“I need some information.”

“Above your pay grade, I assume, since you’re coming to me for it.”

I smile. “You know me so well. You think you can help me out?”

“Depends.” She leaves the response hanging in the air.

“Will you?” I ask. “I’ll owe you one.”

“You already owe me one.”

It’s true. She already caught me once in the lab after hours a few months ago, when I’d Jumped back to visit Cass. I told her I was visiting a girl in the past and let her draw her own conclusions. Fortunately, the stony-faced secretary must have something resembling a heart, because although she’s usually the one to lock up each night, she hasn’t said a word about all those evenings over the past year where I’ve stayed late, nor about how the Jump log never registers any extra trips for me on those nights—something which she’s definitely smart enough to realize.

“Well, I’ll owe you another one then,” I say, trying to keep my voice light as if it’s no big deal.

She leans back in her seat, which bobs a bit as it hovers off the ground, and crosses her arms over her chest. Then she leans in over the desk and I mirror her movement. “Take me with you.”

“What? On a Jump? But the Rules—”

She cocks her head with a look that clearly says, Seriously? You think I’m stupid?

“You mean on one of my… other Jumps,” I whisper. “But why?”

She taps the silver rims of the PVD glasses, obviously trying to look disinterested and bored again, but this time I can tell it’s an act. She’s watching everything that’s going on around the room, listening to all the conversations at once.

“Why do you want to come with me?” I ask her again. “I’ve told you, I’m just going to see some girl in the past. It’s not that exciting.”

“Not that exciting?” she counters, obviously fighting to keep her voice low. “You want to talk about what’s not exciting? How about this: I’m employed by a time travel agency. A company that sends people on vacations through time. And the most traveling I’ve done in the five years I’ve been here has been from my desk to the basement storage room and back.”

“I don’t understand. Have you told Clarke that you’re interested in Jumping?”

“Gee, Dodge, I never thought of that.” The biting sarcasm is accompanied by an eyeroll. “He says he doesn’t have a spot open. Hasn’t for the past five years.”

“That can’t be true,” I say. “He only hired me three years ago.”

Nell raises her brows in a silent look of disdain.

“Oh,” I say.

Yeah. Apparently she’d realized that, too.

“Oh, I know all about your connections.” She rises from her hovering chair, snatches up the PVD glasses, along with an armful of data cubes, and breezes past toward the storage rooms. I follow her, my heart beating wildly as we pass the other workstations.

“You know about my connections?” I hiss. Everyone knows that secretaries have a way of knowing things, but at Dr. Wells’ insistence, I’d gone out of my way to ensure that no one knew that my father was a former TUB agent and the subject of a failed undercover Retrieval back in 2012. I’d also made sure no one—not even my boss—knew that my sister is a direct ancestor of that same PITTA agent who’d tried to Retrieve him way back then.

“Yes,” Nell says, spinning around once we’re safely in the storage room, out of sight and earshot of the others in the office. “I know that you’re some great-great-grandchild of Clarke’s predecessor, Dr. Wells, and that the only reason you got this job was because the long-deceased founder himself showed up one day and insisted Clarke make it happen. It’s nepotism, plain and simple.”

Considering my sister’s great-grandchild is actually Dr. Wells’ mother, that would make him my great-great-grand-nephew, but it wouldn’t take a world-renowned physicist to take a look at that fact and see that someone had broken PITTA’s Rules of Time Travel. A couple of them, actually. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.

Nell’s staring at me expectantly. I grit my teeth. What choice do I have? Dad could hack into PITTA’s system with barely a thought, but my own computer skills have never caught up to his and I don’t dare ask him for help on this one. One of the technicians might be able to give it a shot, but I can’t risk word getting back to Clarke. I need Nell.

“All right,” I say. “You can come with me.”

“On your next secret little Jump. You promise?”

“Yes, on my next secret little Jump. I promise.”

She studies me as if she’s not sure whether to believe me or not. Finally, she puts on the PVD glasses and presses a button. “Fine. What do you need?”

“I need some help finding information about specific Jumps to 1893. There might have been more than one.” I tell her the date I remember from my parents’ story, the date they Extracted forward to the future: June 22.

Nell stares past me, her eyes flitting back and forth with intense concentration. “You’re kidding, right? The summer of the Columbian Exposition? We’ve sent over a hundred travelers back then over the years.”

“What about a few weeks prior to that?” I say, recalling Mum’s comment about how the same traveler had been following them for some time. “It would have been a Jump to Michigan.”

Nell’s brow quirks.

Before she can say anything, I remember something else. “They had future technology, too. A watch with some sort of recording device or transmitter.”

At this, Nell’s gaze meets mine. “A recording device in a watch?”

“Yeah. We would’ve had to approve that, right?”

“Dodge,” Nell says, swiping whatever she was looking at away from her PVDs. “I don’t know what you’re getting yourself into here, but there’s no way we would have approved that sort of exception. And there’s no records coming up for a Jump like you’re describing, which, frankly, doesn’t surprise me. Clients who want to go to the World’s Fair go to the World’s Fair, not to Michigan.”

“Okay, so it’s not a client. Who else might have jumped during those dates?” Could it have been an inside job? Someone within the ranks of PITTA itself? Another Retriever?

Nell’s looking right past me again, searching PITTA’s internal records via her PVD. She frowns, shakes her head. “That’s really weird.”

“What is?”

“There’s one file here that may be a match, but it’s locked.”

“Above your pay grade, I assume?”

She shoots me a withering look. “I’m doing this for you, remember.”

“Right. Sorry. So, what does that mean that it’s locked?”

“I don’t know. It’s never happened to me before. I ought to have access to everything.”

“Now what?”

“Now you’d better be quiet because I’m trying to find another way in.”

I try to comply. I really do. But after a few more moments of watching her eyes flicker back and forth, I can’t take it anymore. I have to say something.

“Can’t you tell me anything about it? Who created it? When? How do you know it might be a match?”

“I can tell you a few things about it,” she snaps, “but if you give me another couple seconds of silence, I might be able to tell you more. Or you can keep jabbering like that, and I’ll keep it all to myself.”

I tap my fingers against my leg, trying to keep my impatience as silent and undisruptive as possible. Finally, Nell blinks a few times and her gaze shifts out again.

“I got in.”

“That’s great. And?”

“And the Jump fits all your criteria—a Jump to some little town in Michigan on May 15, 1893, but there’s a lot of information that’s blocked. They’re required fields, but it just won’t let me access it.”

“What sort of fields?”

“The traveler’s identity and date of origin, for starters.”

“So, it could have been any time in the past hundred years? Since PITTA began?”

“No. All the old books and records from the archives were transferred into PVD format sometime within the last decade. Either whoever entered it into the system at that point had some reason to block it—which doesn’t make much sense, since anyone wanting to hide it would have simply omitted the record—or the Jump was more recent than that.”

“The last decade?” My stomach sinks. That didn’t narrow it down much.

“From what I can tell anyway.” Nell shrugs. “Oh. This may be interesting, though.”

“What?”

“There’s no Extraction deadline assigned.”

“But every client’s given an Extraction deadline. It’s part of Rule #1. Travelers must return to their original era as scheduled.”

“Exactly,” Nell says. “Which means this wasn’t a client. Chances are, your mystery traveler was—or is—someone who works for PITTA.”