She stares into her coffee mug. “You have no idea how hard it is to be a single mom trying to pay the bills. Especially one who desperately needs health insurance for her kid. I couldn’t quit.” She sucks in a long breath. “But after what happened to you, not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d done something to stop it. That’s why I helped Adam bury the project—so Aether could never send people to the future again.”

I like her excuses and apologies about as much as Chris does, judging by the look on his face, but there’s nothing we can do about that now. “We know Adam lied about losing his memories, but what about the rest of us?”

“I’m not sure,” she says. “At the time, we believed you had all suffered from future shock. It’s hard to say if that was true or not, especially since you were all killed only hours later…”

“Is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from future shock?” Chris asks.

“Not that I know of. I’m sorry.”

“There has to be something,” Trent says.

“The only thing would be to stay here in the future, I suppose. Dr. Kapur thought that the act of traveling back to the present was what triggered it, although he couldn’t ever prove it.”

Chris shakes his head. “Staying here is not an option.”

I don’t know. Staying in the future doesn’t sound too bad. I could live out the rest of my life here and never kill the others or myself. Although staying here would mean giving up my dream of going to college, plus there’s that whole problem of having no identity here and the police being after me…I doubt they’d let me off lightly for beating up two cops. No, staying in the future isn’t an option.

“There’s one more thing you need to know,” Lynne says. “A few hours after you got back, I overheard Dr. Kapur arguing with Dr. Walters about sending younger kids to the future. He said something like, ‘It will work if we purge this round of test subjects and erase any evidence they were involved. Then we can start over with a new group.’ A day later, you were all dead.”

“So you think Dr. Kapur had us…purged?” I ask. A tiny spark of hope flickers in my chest at hearing this could all be a cover-up. That would mean I’m not really the killer after all. And now we have a real person at Aether to pinpoint this all on. A person we can focus on stopping.

Lynne nods. “That’s always been my suspicion, but I never found any other proof.”

“Dr. Walters never mentioned any of that,” Zoe says.

“Of course he didn’t,” Trent says. “He was in on it the whole time!”