“Found something,” Trent yells from another room. I rush inside with Chris and Zoe following at my heels. Trent’s standing in the middle of a room full of dusty, old metal filing cabinets. None of them are labeled, but it’s a good bet that Future-Adam stored the information about the old projects here.

“This has to be it,” Chris says.

“What are we looking for?” Zoe asks.

I head for the filing cabinet closest to me and pull open a drawer. “Anything labeled ‘Project Chronos.’”

For a few minutes we search in silence, and the entire time I feel like there’s a ticking clock hanging over us, nudging me to hurry. I quickly skim through the files, my eye catching a Project Lethe and a Project Athena, but I don’t see the one we need.

“Sorry. What’d I miss?” Adam asks as he slips through the doorway. He probably got distracted by more science stuff in another room. This is his lab in the future, so I can’t blame him for being curious about it. It’s another glimpse into his future life. We briefly explain, and he starts searching another filing cabinet.

“Here!” Chris says a minute later. “Project Chronos.”

We crowd around him as he pulls out four thick files and lays them on top of the cabinet. The first one is about the original group of people who went to the future and is dated two years before we signed up. There’s a ton of data about who they were—a mix of scientists and private security—but we flip through to the end, where we find brain scans, medical exams, and a report from Dr. Kapur about the mental state of the patients.

Chris reads a few lines:

Two of the subjects never returned from the future. The three subjects who did return suffered severe memory loss, confusion, and paranoia.

Adam points to something farther down on the page. “It says here the original team was in the future for seventy-two hours, and they thought that might be the cause of their future shock.”

We check the next file and find similar results, although the time in the future was reduced to twenty-four hours to see if that made a difference. Only one person went missing that time, but everyone else returned with the same problems as the first group. For the third group, they kept the length to twenty-four hours but only sent them ten years into the future instead of thirty, in case that was the problem.

I skim over Chris’s shoulder as he reads Dr. Kapur’s report out loud: