“Right,” Elliot said, but then he paused, biting his lip. “But what if we are supposed to change it?”

“Explain,” I said.

“In the future,” Elliot said, “you and I travel back through time to leave that Cocoon. If we hadn’t, you and I would have been at the Academy when the attack happened. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

“So,” Elliot said, his brow furrowed, “if I’m understanding this right, we already fixed this.”

I stared at him a second, my thoughts in tangled knots. “Are you saying that me and you, in the future, made sure that we survived so we could save the Academy?”

Elliot nodded. “Have you thought about what the future looks like without the Academy? I mean, really thought about it?”

“I’ve been trying not to,” I said, grimacing as the tears I’d been holding back swelled in my throat again. I swallowed hard, wiping at my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” Elliot said. “But if we can figure this out, maybe we can save her.”

“Right,” I said, unconsciously squaring my shoulders in the way my mom had taught me. Successful people don’t slouch.

“Take a second and think about it,” Elliot said. “What happens without the Academy?”

“Butterflies happen,” I said automatically. “A lot of them, I’d imagine.”

“It will be a free-for-all,” Elliot said. “When news gets out, every time-traveling criminal with the ability to Glitch will be jumping into the past and doing who knows how much damage. That’s on top of whatever Mayhem is planning to do now that the Academy is gone.”

I felt the blood drain from my face to puddle somewhere by my toes, because what Elliot was saying was absolutely true. I’d been in such a fog over losing my mom that I hadn’t thought through what losing the Academy was going to mean for the world.

“That’s not even the half of it,” I said as my brain raced with horrible possibility after horrible possibility. “We have to do something.”

“That,” Elliot said, “is the biggest understatement I’ve ever heard.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Elliot

I lay in bed that night with my eyes wide open. The mountain was still in major lockdown since we didn’t know who we could trust, and the professors had set up a schedule to patrol the corridors twenty-four hours a day. Every hour or so I could hear one of them open our door to check that four boys were safe and sound in their bunks before continuing on down the hall. It was going to make everything that much harder.