Nate licked his thumb and rubbed at the top of the Device to clean it off.
“No, don’t!”
Nate felt a click as something shifted. There was a brief moment of nothing and then a flash of light.
Chapter
II
Max
PRESENT DAY
I WAS DREAMING. I KNEW I WAS DREAMING, BUT I COULDN’T STOP IT. I was in a VW Beetle and my brother, Kyle, was driving and our friend Petra was in the back seat. We were caught in a stampede of Parasaurolophus and were pushed over a cliff. Then we were falling toward something that had no bottom, and that’s when I woke up.
“Max!” My sister, Emma, came down the basement stairs, pausing at the bottom. She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a University of Texas T-shirt, hair in a clip, and looked more composed than anyone should that early in the morning. “You okay? You were dreaming.”
“I know,” I told her, blinking and suppressing a groan. I’d fallen asleep sitting cross-legged on the rug on the concrete floor of my grandfather’s workshop, leaning back against a file cabinet. Assorted folders and books surrounded me.
“Here.” Emma held out a mug. “Coffee. It’ll stunt your growth. With half-and-half and two teaspoons of sugar. Just the way you like it.”
“Good. Thanks.” I stood and gestured toward a stack of books. “Don’t knock that over.”
Emma, Kyle, and I were staying with Grandpa Pierson in the Victorian mansion on the family ranch while Mom was on a paleontology dig in Mongolia. At the moment, though, we were sort of on our own, since Grandpa was in the hospital in Austin and Mrs. Castillo, his nurse, cook, assistant, and all-around manager, was there with him.
I took the coffee as I stepped around the stack I’d warned Emma about. Then, as we sat in the red leather chairs facing the desk, she asked, “What were you dreaming about?”
For a moment after I told her, she just looked at me over the top of her mug. “In the past week, you were nearly eaten by a T. rex—twice—and you’re telling me the thing that scared you so much that you have nightmares about it was the car accident?”
We—Emma, Kyle, Petra, and I—had spent the past week or so about seventy million years ago in Late Cretaceous Texas, after Emma had been kidnapped by this guy named Isambard Campbell, an ex-colleague of our great-great-grandfather “Mad Jack” Pierson. Campbell apparently wanted to get his hands on our great-great-grandpa’s Chronal Engine, the time machine that still occupied a corner of the workshop.
I shrugged. “It happened.” But in real life the car had fallen into a river, not a bottomless pit. “Besides, what’s more likely? Being in a car accident or getting eaten by a T. rex?”
“In our family?” Emma rolled her eyes, then gestured with her mug. “What’s all this?” She looked around, taking in the open file drawers and the collection of watchmaker’s tools, the Recall Device, and odd components lying on the desk blotter. “I’d’ve thought you’d want to sleep in a real bed, first day back from the Cretaceous and all.”
We’d gotten back to the ranch yesterday afternoon. We’d actually been gone only about an hour in our time, which meant that no one had really noticed we were missing. We had had to drop Kyle off at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Bastrop—he’d been mauled by a Nanotyrannus. (We told the people at the hospital that it had been a black bear outside the state park—which, granted, was a little unusual for central Texas, but they seemed to have bought it.)
So, last night, I’d had my first hot shower in days and a dinner of leftover fried chicken. Afterward, when Emma had gone up to her room to sleep in what she called “regal comfort” (by which she mostly meant “air-conditioned”), I’d come down here to the also-air-conditioned basement workshop/library to try to sort out more of the family history and how the Chronal Engine actually worked.
“Research,” I told Emma. I took a sip of the coffee, then made a face. Even with the half-and-half and two sugars, the stuff always smelled better than it tasted. I took another sip and gestured at the leather case sitting next to a Recall Device on the desk. “The time-space crystal things.”
“Chronally resonant crystals” was their technical name. These were apparently the key to the Recall Devices, which used them to sync up somehow with the Chronal Engine so that the bearer could travel through time. They were kind of fragile, though, and didn’t always work. And I was having trouble figuring out how the things actually fit into a Recall Device.
“Did you learn anything?”
“Not really.” I yawned.
My sister stood. “Come on. I told Petra to come over.” She led the way out the French doors to the patio.
When we sat down on the rattan chairs, Petra was already striding up the walkway from the house on the property she shared with her mother, Mrs. Castillo. Petra was my age—a year younger than Kyle and Emma—going into eighth grade, and kind of outdoorsy, which had been useful back in the Age of Dinosaurs. She knew her way around a bow and arrow and could also field dress and butcher game animals of varying sizes. About my height, she had black hair and dark green eyes. She wore hiking boots, brown shorts, and a denim shirt with epaulets. On one leg was a discreet brace for a sprained ankle, and she had a cut over her eye.
She also seemed to have a soft spot for things that were small and cute, like the down-covered baby dromaeosaur chick that rested on one of the epaulets like a pirate’s parrot. She’d found Aki in the Cretaceous, and the creature had apparently imprinted, much like a baby duck bonding with its mother.
I wasn’t sure it was a good idea in terms of the space-time continuum to bring Aki back with us, but just leaving him behind to get eaten by a predator or accidentally stomped on by a giant sauropod seemed cruel. Also, it would be a while before he got big and his sickle claw grew out and he tried to disembowel us.
“Still planning on teaching him to hunt?” Emma asked as Petra came into earshot. Petra had this idea of training Aki like falconers do with, well, falcons. I supposed it was possible—he wouldn’t grow up to be too much bigger than a golden eagle, and I’d seen this YouTube video of some girl in Mongolia who had trained one of those.
Petra scratched the dromaeosaur under the chin. “I think I’ll wait until he gets his real feathers.” She grinned. “I let him down by the henhouse. He went after the chicks. I had to rescue him from the rooster.”
As Emma snorted into her mug, we were all startled by a booming sound from down the hill near the garage, which housed Grandpa’s bass boat and Hummer. It also used to be home to the VW Beetle we’d left in the river back in the Cretaceous. Aki spread his feathered arms and hissed.
“Please tell me that was thunder,” Emma said.
“It was thunder,” I answered as a pair of figures emerged from around one of the live oaks that shaded the patio.
“Is that any way to greet your big brother?” the closer of the two demanded.
“Kyle!” Emma shouted, and sprang forward to grip her twin in a fierce hug. Then she stepped back. “Why aren’t you in the hospital? Where are your bandages? And I swear you’re an inch taller.”
“Bigger, too,” Petra noted.
I didn’t reply. But they were both right. Carrying a black backpack, and wearing a tank top and shiny black basketball shorts, he did look like he’d spent more time lifting weights.
Kyle grinned and gestured at the figure next to him. “I’ve been living with Uncle Nate for the past six months. Seeing the sights.” He flexed his biceps. “Working out.”
“You know about the Chronal Engine?” Emma asked our uncle. “I mean, duh, you know, but how long have you known that it works?”
“A while,” Uncle Nate answered, adjusting his glasses.
“And Kyle’s been with you in London for six months?” I asked, just as surprised as Emma.
Our uncle, who was a couple of years younger than Mom, was some kind of physicist and spent a lot of time in Europe, so we didn’t see him much.
He stepped forward to hug Emma and me.
After we introduced him to Petra, we all sat down in the outdoor seating area.
“So what happened?” I asked calmly, although I was a little weirded out that Kyle was now six months older. He’d always been kind of annoying about being the oldest (older than Emma by about ten minutes), so this was definitely not going to help. Okay, I was a lot weirded out.
Uncle Nate held up a Recall Device. “I checked your brother out of the hospital a few minutes after you guys left and took him back with me.”
“Why?” I asked, leaning forward, still digesting the news that Uncle Nate not only knew about Recall Devices but had been using one. I wondered if our mom knew.
“A couple reasons,” Uncle Nate answered, looking directly at me. “First, there were things he needed to know. Second, there were the preventive rabies shots. Third, I need you to return to the Cretaceous, find me, and help me get back here. To 1985, actually.”
There was a moment of silence.
“You, meaning me?” I swallowed. “And me, meaning you?”
“You”—Kyle pointed—“meaning you and Petra. And him, but younger him.”
Now Petra looked startled. “Not you or Emma?”
Kyle shook his head.
“I can’t tell you a lot,” Uncle Nate said, holding up his hand. “I don’t think you’ll change the past by knowing what you’re going to do or have done, but the solutions to the multidimensional temporal-spatial equations are slightly ambiguous, so that’s still a possibility. The less you know, the better.”
“Equations?” Petra asked.
“Uncle Nate does time travel research,” Kyle said.
“Is there anyone in your family who doesn’t?” she replied.
“Uncle Nate has a PhD in physics, though,” I said. From what I had been able to glean, back in the day, Mad Jack Pierson had been self-taught and an excellent engineer as well as theoretician but had had issues with just about everyone who wasn’t him. A century later, Uncle Nate worked at Princeton and CERN. If nothing else, he had credentials. “Can you tell us why you want us to go?”
Uncle Nate nodded. “Thirty years ago, when I was your age, I inadvertently went back to the Cretaceous . . . and you and Petra . . . appeared there as well. With the little dromaeosaur, too, I might add. I probably shouldn’t tell you anything else.” Then he hesitated. “But Kyle has supplies that should be adequate.”
Kyle tossed the backpack at my feet. I unzipped the main body to find a pair of canteens with a packet of water purification tablets, a half-dozen energy bars, a couple of hunting knives, matches in a resealable plastic bag, a polyester first-aid pouch, and a flint and steel. In an outside pocket was a compass.
“You’ll want to pack a change of clothing, too,” Uncle Nate said.
It wasn’t a lot. It was insanely little, in fact, to be taking to a place where the small predators were the size of grizzly bears. “Can I take an elephant gun this time?”
Uncle Nate shook his head. “No. For one thing, you don’t know how to use an elephant gun. For another, Petra can take her compound bow.”
It was not all that reassuring. Although, honestly, the bow had been enough last time. Barely. “Where are Emma and Kyle going to be?”
“They’re coming with me,” Uncle Nate said, “to Mad Jack Pierson’s time, just before he completes his work on the Chronal Engine.”
“We are?” Emma said, staring first at Kyle, then at our uncle. “Why?”
“What happens if we decide not to go back?” Petra put in before Kyle or Uncle Nate could answer. “Do we change the future? In the past?”
“You could,” my uncle replied, “if you stick by that decision and don’t unmake it.” He didn’t look that concerned, though. “But if you do, the entire argument is moot.”
“But you’re here, so regardless, we’ve succeeded in bringing you back.” I leaned back, steepling my fingers, trying to appear confident.
“Maybe,” Uncle Nate answered. “As I said, the equations are slightly ambiguous. But I do think there has to be room for free will, so not everything is written in stone. Maybe not anything.” He stood. “Look, I know this is a lot to ask, so I’ll give you guys a few minutes to talk it over.” With that, he went inside to the workshop.
I let out a breath and leaned back in my chair, staring while the French doors closed behind him. Then, nodding at Petra, I asked, “What do you think?”
She ran a finger down Aki’s back before replying. “We take the Recall Device, go back, find him, and then come back here. Easy-peasy.”
Emma turned to our brother. “And why would we want to go back to the twentieth century?”
Kyle squirmed under her stare. “We have to talk to Mad Jack. And Samuel.”
“Samuel?” I blurted. Samuel was Mad Jack Pierson’s son and our great-grandfather, whom we had met when we were trying to find Emma. He’d been there looking for Mad Jack. “So he found his father?”
“I guess,” Kyle answered, still looking uncomfortable. I couldn’t tell if he knew and didn’t want to say or if he didn’t know and didn’t want to admit it.
The last time we’d seen Samuel, he had taken off on a river launch—a steamboat—that had once belonged to his father. The problem, and I don’t think we told him, was that when we’d arrived in the Cretaceous, we’d found a burned-out river launch identical to his but that seemed to be from a different time. We still didn’t know how—or when—it had gotten there.
“Um, Max, you haven’t said what you think,” Petra said.
I hesitated. I didn’t like the idea. But. “I think I have to go. And go prepared.” I glanced toward the French doors and leaned forward. Before he’d moved to England, Uncle Nate had always been, well, normal and aboveboard with us. And he gave great Christmas and birthday presents. If he said this was something we needed to do, then I guess it was. “I think we’re tied up in this, but I don’t think you are.” Petra was a friend, and kind of awesome in every way, but this wasn’t her problem. I had a sudden feeling of déjà vu, like before our last adventure. “You don’t have to go.”
She lifted Aki off her shoulder and onto her index finger. The dromaeosaur chick squeaked. “It’ll be fun.”
We didn’t tell Uncle Nate that, exactly, in part because I wasn’t sure if Petra was serious or not. But when he came out of the workshop, he was holding the Recall Device from the desk.
“I installed the crystals,” he said, then tossed the sphere to me.
I had a brief flash of panic but managed to catch the thing without breaking it or looking too ridiculous. I’d never claimed to have great hand-eye coordination. I ignored Kyle’s snort.
Fifteen minutes later, after we grabbed Petra’s bow and arrows and a change of clothing each, we were back on the patio. I hoisted the backpack over both shoulders and attached a hunting knife to my belt.
“And remember,” Uncle Nate said, wagging his finger, “play nice.”
“We’ll be back in time for dinner,” I replied as I pressed the button on the Recall Device.
I wasn’t sure, but just before the flash of light, I thought I heard Uncle Nate say, “Not for your next one, you won’t.”
Chapter
III
Nate
AN INSTANT LATER, NATE WAS IN OPEN AIR, an expanse of water about three feet below.
Both he and Brady yelled as they splashed down. At the same time, to their right, the bass boat, complete with its trailer, crashed into the surface, swamping them with its impact wave.
Nate kicked up, holding his glasses in place with one hand and clutching the Recall Device with the other. “It works!” he shouted to his brother when Brady emerged beside him. “I can’t believe it! The Chronal Engine actually works!” Treading water, Nate spun in a circle, trying to get a feel for where they were, catching a glimpse of a tree-lined shore, maybe fifty yards off.
“Get us out of here!” Brady yelled.
Nate peered closely at the object in his hand, the water on his glass
es blurring his vision. The Recall Device had dials and markings that made it look like a slide rule version of the clouds on Jupiter. From what his father had said, you were supposed to use it to set destination times and dates and places. Once activated, it communicated with the Chronal Engine, which actually did the transmitting to convey the traveler. Like a client terminal and a mainframe. But Nate had no idea how to actually operate the Device. It was a lot more complicated than a VCR or microwave oven. “We could end up in a volcano!”
Brady shook his hair out of his face and frowned. “Yeah, maybe. Let’s get out of the water and then figure it out.”
That was when Nate noticed the bow of the boat was tilting down, the trailer dragging it under by the winch cable.
He swam to the front of the boat and tried to unlock the catch, but there wasn’t enough slack.
“Here,” Brady said as he reached around and released the catch-piece tab that blocked the crank.
Before Nate could move, the handle began spinning and rammed into the hand that held the Recall Device.
“No!” Nate exclaimed as the Device shot from his grip and into the water. He grabbed for it but couldn’t reach it before it sank out of sight.
“Get it!” Brady yelled unhelpfully from the other side of the trailer, which was now sinking as the cable unwound.
In a panic, Nate dived down to look. He couldn’t see anything through the sting of the water and the silt, though, and his ears felt the pressure of the depth before he felt bottom.
When he surfaced, he saw Brady release the cable winch, and the boat bobbed free. Then Brady turned to Nate. “Find it!”
Although Nate couldn’t see the bottom, or how deep the water really was, it seemed they were in the middle of a swampy, irregularly shaped lagoon, part of a larger lake, not that far from shore. Around them, what looked like cypresses and ferns lined the banks. It couldn’t be that deep, he figured.
“Where were you when you dropped it?” Brady asked, right before disappearing under the water.
Borrowed Time Page 2