He snatched it from my hands. For a moment, I wanted to rip it away from his grasp—my birthright. Something no plivos had a right to hold. But Isaak wasn’t a plivos, he was something else entirely. And I needed answers more just now.

“It was exactly like this,” he said. “But it was old, like the key. It looked like if you buried this in the ground and forgot about it for a couple millennia.”

I swallowed. “The time postern.”

Ceilos gaped at me. “That’s impossible!”

“Excuse me?” Isaak said. “Are you telling me I traveled through time?”

“You must have,” I said, my heart starting to pound faster. “Ordinarily, posternkeys are programmed with three sets of coordinates—dimensional data. But the key they took from you, it had four.”

“Four dimensions?”

I tugged my earlobe. “The fourth dimension is time.”

Isaak slumped forward, his head between his knees. “I think I’m going to throw up,” he said.

I barely heard him. My mind was reeling. I needed to tell the geroi. Surely this would change everything. This was the answer. We could save Iamos. It didn’t matter, now, whether colonization on Hamos or Simos was viable. We wouldn’t need that anymore.

“Nadin, wait,” Ceilos said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Be sensible. If that posternkey really had four sets of coordinates, wouldn’t the geroi have noticed?”

“It was encrypted. It didn’t show the true coordinates until it recognized my DNA signature.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! Why would it only show you the data?”

“I don’t know.” I rubbed my temple with my right hand. “Maybe Gitrin programmed it that way. I was the one who worked on it with her the most. Maybe she’s trying to tell me something.”

“But why, Nadin?”

Isaak cleared his throat. His face was a sickly pale color, making him look more alien than ever. “Would you guys mind explaining some of this to me?” he asked. “Did I time travel or not?”

“Yes,” I said.

“No,” Ceilos said over the top of me. “The time postern is just a theory. It doesn’t exist.”

“Yet,” I snapped. “But it must exist at some future date, otherwise Isaak would not be here. That proves that Gitrin’s theory works. We can save Iamos.” More than that—it proved we did save Iamos. Thousands of years from now, the planet was still habitable, and people still lived on it. That meant we survived. Iamos survives. I felt almost giddy with the thought.

Ceilos grabbed my arm, pulled me aside. “How do you know this isn’t a trick? Maybe this boy,” he whispered, his voice barely audible, “is with the Liberator.”