Page 26

Frowning, I put my hand on it. The screen lights up with numbers the same time the energy burns through my fingers—fast this time. The shock comes quicker. Within a minute, my hand sinks through the surface. I jerk it back, surprised. The first few times I’d tried going through, I’d felt the energy building, but never so rapidly and not always accompanied by the shock that preceded the ability to travel. When I look up at Dr. Cooper, he’s using his other hand to scribble numbers on a notepad.

I turn to stare at Ben. “But he doesn’t feel the energy like me. How did he travel?”

Dr. Cooper holds the mirror out to Ben. “Do you mind?” he asks. Frowning, Ben places his hand on the small square. Ben’s hand doesn’t sink through like mine had, but more numbers run along the screen, which Dr. Cooper records with a “hmmm.”

“The amount of traveling energy you produce is quite low,” he says after a moment, ignoring his partner’s irritated fidgeting. “As I mentioned before, when I recorded the spike here at The Villa when you presumably traveled, it was relatively low for this sort of occurrence. I have to make many guesses in such an untested field, since the only traveler I’ve been able to study is our operative, and really, we’ve had such a short time. Besides that, keeping history as unchanged as possible is obviously of considerable importance. It’s the sole purpose the task force was put together for.”

“Coop,” Burke says with a sigh. “Can we move on? We’ll hold the seminar on mirror traveling and how it works another time, okay?”

“They’ll be unlikely to give us the answers we need if they don’t understand what we’re asking,” Cooper responds patiently, but the tightness in his mouth says that Burke’s need-to-know attitude is wearing on him. Burke rolls his eyes but doesn’t stop Cooper when he continues. “We’ve discovered that some mirrors have a propensity for carrying over energy from a previous jump—and considering the number of travels made from this mirror specifically, I theorize that the mirror spontaneously opened for Mr. Mitchell as a way of expelling its unused energy.”

“Where is Simon Gibbons?” Burke jumps in before Dr. Cooper can expound more and frowns at Ben and me in turn.

“We never met your operative, and believe me, we weren’t that hard to find.” Ben glares right back at the more intimidating of the two men. “I never strayed far from The Villa. Clara and I only left to go to San Francisco to get her a wardrobe, and everyone at The Villa knew we’d gone. It should’ve been easy to find us.”

Dr. Cooper and Burke share a look, Burke’s frown turning into tight-lipped disapproval, but I can’t say at who. From the moment I walked in, he’s acted suspicious of Ben and me and our foray into the past, like he doesn’t believe it was really an accident.

“Perhaps he stayed behind because someone else traveled,” I say. I glance at Ben before going on. “Someone followed me through—I’m pretty sure he tried to use the mirror in my apartment the day I moved in, and Ben and I saw him with President McKinley in San Francisco the night before we left.”

Dr. Cooper shakes his head. “We keep a strict eye on the energy spikes time-traveling creates. It’s imperative that those with the traveling ability don’t traipse at will through history, bumbling around and making mistakes.” Burke grunts in agreement before Dr. Cooper continues. “Even your accidental travel will require extensive debriefing so we can ascertain how large of an effect you both made on history. Beyond those accidents, we can’t allow anyone to travel without authorization and specific mission guidelines, and doing so without authorization and the proper preparation carries heavy penalties.”

“Trust me, Dr. Cooper, we both traveled by accident. Cross our hearts,” Ben says in a dry voice, his irritation at the veiled accusations showing through.

“Can you describe the man you claim was from the future?” Burke asks.

“He was wearing a wristwatch that I’d guess—just at a glance, you know—was manufactured in the 1930s at the earliest, instead of a pocket watch, which would’ve been more common at the time.” Condescension drips off Ben’s tone as he responds, and Burke presses his lips together, narrowing his eyes at Ben. “So yeah, he was definitely from the future. I doubt that little slip in historical accuracy wasn’t either of your faults, right…?”

Had the seriousness of the situation not been clear to me, I might have laughed at Ben’s dig. Dr. Cooper’s historical knowledge, for all his rambling on the subject of time-traveling, is clearly amateur, especially compared to Ben’s.

Dr. Cooper reddens with embarrassment, but I don’t miss the excitement that jumps into his expression at Ben’s expertise. It’s easy to guess the possibilities that must be running through his mind at the thought of Ben working for the task force.

“Our history expert is sometimes pressed for time when preparing for these missions,” Burke says defensively. “Can you tell us what he looked like?”

I jump in to give a description before the rivalry between Ben and Burke can devolve into something worse, mentioning that the security office at The Villa would likely have surveillance video of him leaving the lobby the day I saw him.

Burke fishes something out of his pocket, leaning forward to hold out a picture to me. “Is this him?”

I nod. “Yep.”

Dr. Cooper mutters under his breath. “That’s Simon Gibbons.”

“He could already be back,” I say. “We locked up the mirror in storage at The Villa so I didn’t have someone wandering around my condo. He could have slipped out without anyone knowing.” Finding out that the man who followed me is some kind of operative doesn’t surprise me. That’s definitely the vibe I got from him.

Dr. Cooper shakes his head. “We monitor the energy. We’d know.”

Burke yanks out a phone. After punching in a number, he snaps into it, “Gibbons is rogue. I need a full work-up on what he could be up to.”

“I’ve already researched what he could have done,” Ben says as Burke hangs up. “Nothing, as far as I could tell. McKinley was still assassinated—which I assumed saving him would be his goal for some reason. No other major shifts in history that I could tell, and around that time period? I would know.”

“Gibbons is trained to make small, almost unnoticeable changes to accomplish our means,” Burke says. “Saving McKinley would be too big, and not only that, he obviously wasn’t authorized. Like Coop said, we don’t allow just anyone to time-travel, only when it’s necessary, as in to save someone who’s gone back without the proper protocol.”

Ben narrows his eyes but doesn’t reply. “Like I would’ve gone if I had a choice,” he says under his breath.

I’m going to call him on that later. Being trapped definitely played a part in his hindsight, but if he hadn’t known he would be stuck two years ago, and he had been warned, wouldn’t the guy with a PhD in the Gilded Age and a delight in history I find adorable be tempted by the opportunity to study it firsthand?

“We’re going to need your help,” Dr. Cooper says, his voice taking on a soothing rhythm as he too tries to calm the brewing disagreement between Burke and Ben. “Someone needs to go and collect Gibbons.”

Burke crosses his arms. “These two? They’re not even trained.”