Set apart from “normal” citizens for our own protection and theirs, our gated, walled, and closely guarded campus complex sprawled across an entire island in the middle of the ocean. I had no idea which ocean, because where exactly we were situated on the globe was a secret I wasn’t allowed in on. Although I had some educated guesses.

Government funding for the Glitch Initiative continued to pour in daily, and the grounds showed it. Elegant fountains dotted the property, looped and connected by polished concrete walkways edged with well-manicured landscaping that gave a historic university feel to an otherwise state-of-the-art facility. Behind the classic building facades of brick and stone was some of the most intricate technology known to man, all developed to help facilitate the continuation of the Glitch Initiative. Everyone had seen what the future looked like if time travelers were allowed to muck about in history unregulated and unchecked.

Well, I amended, they hadn’t exactly seen it, since enough of the original time travelers had had the conscience and forethought to realize what was happening and fix things before everything went too haywire. According to the legend, the founder of the Academy had taken a complete set of World History books back in time and hidden them in some remote mountain cave. So when things went off the rails, so to speak, all he’d have to do was go back to those history books tucked safely in the past, and check to see if the current history matched. If it didn’t, a mission was dispatched to fix it and stop the Butterfly from doing their damage. Thankfully, we now had more high-tech ways of keeping the proper timeline documented so that a Butterfly couldn’t change things without our knowledge. Mom had tried to explain how that worked once, but it had given me a splitting headache, so she’d stopped. What mattered was that the general public didn’t have a problem pouring millions of dollars into training and overseeing Glitchers as long as it kept the future intact. Well, no one was complaining outside the Academy at least. Inside, I knew I couldn’t be the only one who sometimes felt like the lush green lawns and immaculate buildings were just well-disguised cages. But, as I’d been reminded on multiple occasions by my mom, the security of the future was more important than satisfying a twelve-year-old girl’s wanderlust.