“But there’s always a crisis in time, Bendix.”

“Not like this. This isn’t a crisis in time—it’s a crisis of time. We’ve been pushing the frontiers of time forward for trillions upon trillions of years, and in a little over four days we’ll have reached the…End of Time.”

“And that’s bad, right?”

Bendix laughed. “Of course not! Time has to end somewhere. But there’s a problem with the very mechanism that controls the way we’ve been scooting around the here and now for most of eternity.”

“And that is?”

He looked left and right and lowered his voice. “Time travel has yet to be invented! And with the entire multiverse one giant hot ball of superheated gas contracting at incalculable speed into a point one trillion-trillionth the size of a neutron, it’s not likely to be.”

“Wait, wait,” I said, trying to get this latest piece of information into my head. “I know that the whole time travel thing makes very little logical sense, but you must have machines that enable you to move through time, right?”

“Of course—but we’ve got no idea how they work, who built them or when. We’ve been running the entire industry on something we call ‘retro-deficit-engineering.’ We use the technology now, safe in the assumption that it will be invented in the future. We did the same with the Gravitube in the fifties and the microchip ten years ago—neither of them actually gets invented for over ten thousand years, but it helps us more to have them now.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said slowly. “You’re using technology you don’t have—like me overspending on my credit card.”

“Right. And we’ve searched every single moment in case it was invented and we hadn’t noticed. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Rien.”

His shoulders slumped, and he ran his fingers through his hair.

“Listen, if Friday doesn’t retake his seat at the head of the ChronoGuard and use his astonishing skills to somehow save us, then everything that we’ve worked toward will be undone as soon as we hit Time Zero.”

“I think I get it. Then why is Friday not following his destined career?”

“I’ve no idea. We always had him down as dynamic and aggressively inquisitive when he was a child—what happened?”

I shrugged. “All kids are like that today. It’s a modern thing, caused by too much TV, video games and other instant-gratification bullshit. Either that—or kids are exactly the same and I’m getting crusty and intolerant in my old age. Listen, I’ll do what I can.”

Scintilla thanked me, and I joined Friday and Landen outside.

“I don’t want to work in the time industry, Mum. I’d only break some dumb rule and end up eradicated.”