I looked up as Isaak said the word “paradox.” That was like a word I remembered from the old language—the word for contradiction. I knew what he meant, and it turned my stomach sour all over again.

“What is that supposed to mean?” the woman with the short brown hair—Syrin—asked. “That it doesn’t matter what we do? We’re all destined to die, and we’re supposed to just sit back and accept it?”

“Of course not,” Gitrin snapped. “Would you quiet down long enough to let the boy finish?”

Isaak took a deep breath. “When Gitrin and Nadin developed the time postern,” he said, “they were thinking they could use it to go back in time to change history. To undo the climate disaster. That won’t work—but there’s nothing to say you couldn’t still use it to travel forward.”

The courtyard fell silent. I stared up at Isaak, eyes widened.

“You think this would be possible?” Marin finally said.

“I don’t see why not. The planet’s habitable, but the population isn’t too big—our continent Cimmeria hasn’t even been terraformed yet. The technology you have here in Elytherios would be a huge help to our scientists. And besides”—he shrugged—“it is your planet, after all.”

“Why should we believe any of this?” a man’s voice called out. “How do we know this isn’t a geroi trick, trying to lure us out of the mountain and back into captivity? After all, this boy came here with the geroi’s blood.”

“Teros, be sensible,” Marin said. She gestured to Isaak’s father. “That one’s been here for weeks. He can’t even speak our language!”

“That’s what they’d want us to believe.”

Gitrin scoffed. “Friends, listen to yourselves—”

“That’s enough, Gitrin,” Eos broke in. “It’s a valid concern. It wouldn’t be safe for us to simply blindly evacuate our entire population when we don’t know what’s on the other side. We’d have to send an envoy ahead into what could potentially be an extremely dangerous situation. I refuse to agree to something that could harm any of our citizens. Not to mention that it would take hands and eyes away from the revivification project, which is our top prio—”

“I’ll go.”

My voice felt so quiet that I thought for sure no one would hear me, but Eos stopped mid-sentence and stared at me. “What?” he said.