CHAPTER TEN

The Amazing Velés is dead.

I sit on a wooden crate outside the wagon. Juliette’s weeping rips through the thin canvas covering, puncturing my heart over and over. This is wrong. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Dr. Wells told me that Juliette spent the summer traveling with the Amazing Velés, but now the magician is dead. What’s she going to do now? What am I going to do?

I whirl around at the sound of footsteps approaching the canvas flap. Instead of Juliette, though, it’s Mr. Velés, looking pale and worn and ten years older than this morning. He sits down heavily on a crate beside me and takes in a long drag from his pipe.

“I’m sorry.” The words cascade from my mouth. “This is my fault. I should have—”

The old man holds up a hand to stop me. “No. There’s no one to blame but Viggo himself. He acted recklessly, performing that trick on stage without properly checking all of his equipment.”

“What do you mean?” My body tenses.

“The lock stuck. The key went in but the tumbler wouldn’t turn. That’s why he couldn’t get out.” His voice cracks.

I feel ill. It was supposed to have been Juliette in there struggling to free herself from that tank. I bury my head in my hands. Knowing everything I’d known about TUB and their plans, I shouldn’t have let Viggo do the trick. I should have stopped him.

But I’d failed. TUB may not have gotten exactly what they wanted, but they’d still managed to mess everything up. What good had I done here, anyway? What had Dr. Wells expected me to do?

“Do you know where the tank came from?” I ask quietly.

Mr. Velés rises to his feet. “No, but if I ever find out where he got a box with such shoddy craftsmanship… with a faulty lock…” He looks away, letting the rest of the sentence hang in midair.

When I wake with the glare of an LED light shining in my eyes, I think I’m back in the future somehow, except for some reason my sensory deprivation bed has malfunctioned, so instead of emerging peacefully from sleep to a gradual increase in lighting, my bed is shaking and someone’s hissing, “Get up, son!”

My eyes shoot open.

I’m not in my bed. Not even close. I’m lying in a bedroll on the ground outside Juliette’s wagon with Dr. Wells crouching over me, an anachronistic flashlight in hand. Suddenly, it all comes back to me—I parked myself here partially because I didn’t want to sleep in the same wagon as Viggo’s dead body, but mostly because it was the only thing I could think of to do to protect Juliette from the TUB agent, wherever he’s lurking.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Dr. Wells says.

I roll out of my blankets, shivering against the biting wind that whips through the fairgrounds like a restless ghost. Maybe it’s Viggo, come back to haunt me. He ought to be haunting the underhanded TUB agent who provided him with the murder-in-a-box.

Once we’re out of earshot of the wagons, Dr. Wells speaks up. “Did you have anything to do with that tragedy up there on the stage today?”

Coming from anyone else, I’d have denied it immediately, but Dr. Wells is here from the future, too. There’s no use lying to a man with a time machine.

“Indirectly,” I say, wondering how to explain the twisted history of how I came to be here, in this late 19th century Midwestern town, trying to protect the great-great-grandmother of a woman I’d once spent two days with in the year 2112. How it’s my fault that TUB is trying to snuff Elise out of existence in the first place.

Dr. Wells nods. The darkness hides his expression. “Am I correct in thinking that I know you at some point in my future?”

“Yes.”

“And… did I send you here?”

“Afraid so.”

Dr. Wells falls silent, and I can tell that he, too, is trying to puzzle out how much foreknowledge he ought to have about his own future, how much information is safe for me to reveal.

“Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing here?” I ask.

“I’m looking for a way back.”

“A way back?”

“Yes, to the future. I’m on a search for the inventor of time travel.”

“You mean… you didn’t invent it?”

“No, no. I’ve been standing on the shoulders of one far greater than me,” Dr. Wells says, his voice distant and almost sad. “Using his work to shape and direct my own.”

“Well, who invented it then?”

He laughs. “I don’t know.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

Dr. Wells leans against a fence railing. He looks up and sighs. “The stars really are beautiful here, aren’t they? I never see them in the city.”

I wait, silent, for the old man to gather his thoughts.

Finally, he continues. “When I was younger, I was fascinated with the concept of time travel. Obsessed, one might say. As I grew, I studied physics and mathematics, all with the goal in mind of someday making my own time traveling device.”

I lean against the fence and stare up at the stars. One thing the old man is right about: they are beautiful here.

“I studied everything I could get my hands on—books, journals, anything that might point me in the direction of solving that mystery,” Dr. Wells continues. “Though I didn’t have any luck until one day a friend at a used book store called me up and asked if I was interested in a very old journal that seemed to be all about the particulars of time travel. Of course, I told him yes and picked it up the very next day. It was a small book, leather cover, with no indication of authorship.”

My heart skips. What are the chances that it’s the same book Juliette found? There must be some connecting thread, a line between points A and B that would lead the scientist here.

“And that’s when I found it,” Dr. Wells says. “Calculations, diagrams, figures… everything I’d need to make my dreams a reality, all on those pages. There were essentially two elements: a box that would serve as the initial boost to propel the traveler through time, and a small, handheld device that would tether him to his original era and, when he was done with his travels, pull him back to it. The problem, however, was that the final page of the journal, where the precise figures for the second device should have been written, had been torn out.”

“So, you came back here to read the journal before it was damaged?”

“Precisely.”

“But if you don’t find it, you’re stuck here.”

“Yes, well.” Dr. Wells shrugs. “After spending a decade trying to solve the riddle on my own, I figured, well, I have a time machine. Why not use it?”

I’m so taken aback, I can only stare. The Dr. Wells I met briefly in the year 2012 had been known for his rules and for sticking to them religiously. He’d never have been so reckless as this. What could have happened—what would happen in this man’s future—to change that?

“The bookseller said he’d purchased it in a lot of books from an estate,” Dr. Wells continues, “which I traced backward, year by year, until I discovered it had once been in the possession of the Amazing Velés. So here I am. And perhaps, since you are in the magician’s employ and you realize the importance of my task, you might help me find what I’m searching for. Tell me, have you seen anything like this?”

Sure enough, the journal he pulls out of his jacket pocket, though much older and worn now, its pages warped and water-stained, is the exact same one that is currently tucked away in Juliette’s wagon.