There are framed photos all around the room of a pretty blond who looks a lot like Lynne. At her graduation. At her wedding. In doctor’s scrubs giving a thumbs-up. With her husband and two kids at Disneyland.

One larger frame catches my eye, and I move closer to get a better look. It’s a collage, with a bunch of photos of the girl when she was younger, ranging from baby photos to prom photos. In some of the earlier ones she’s in a hospital bed, like she was sick a lot, but she’s always smiling.

“My daughter,” Lynne says behind me. She’s returned with a tray full of steaming mugs and sets it down on the table. “She’s a pediatrician now.”

We each take a mug, and after one sip I already feel a lot warmer. I don’t drink much coffee, but I’m so tired I can barely think. We’ve all been awake for way too long, and we’re running on nothing but fumes and adrenaline at this point. But there’s no time to sleep—so coffee it is.

“We need your help,” Adam says, right when I say, “We have some questions.”

“Of course.” Lynne looks back and forth between us. “What can I do to help?”

I look at Adam and he nods, letting me go ahead. I briefly tell her everything we’ve learned about our deaths and about future shock. I leave out any mention of me being the killer and hope she gets the hint not to bring it up.

“Future shock…” She bows her head. “It was horrible, what happened to those other people, but Aether wouldn’t stop the program. From the brief hints we got from the other test subjects, we knew the aperture was working. The accelerator was sending people thirty years in the future and bringing them back. We just needed to find a way to keep them sane. We decreased the time to ten years instead of thirty, but that didn’t remove all of the problems. That’s when Dr. Kapur suggested we use teenagers.”

“So you knew when you recruited us that we might go crazy?” Chris asks, leaning forward, fists clenched like he’s about to jump out of his seat and attack her.

“Dr. Kapur promised us that none of you would suffer from future shock. He showed us studies of teenage brains…” She sighs and stares at her hands folded in her lap. “I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t my call. And we all thought you were going ten years forward, not thirty. I had no idea you went so far ahead until Adam told me many years later.”

“If you didn’t like it, why didn’t you quit?” Chris asks. “Or expose what they were doing?”