I shrugged. “You’re right,” I said. “This letter is missing so much key information it isn’t even funny. I have no idea what my future self was thinking writing it. If it was possible to give her a swift kick in the shins, I would. Trust me.”

“Can I volunteer for that job?” he asked, and for the first time his voice didn’t have that angry edge to it. “And you didn’t just write it. You managed to deliver it to the past. To us. Which means that in the future, you’re already a criminal.”

“In a weird way, that actually makes me feel better,” I said. “Like, the future version of myself isn’t asking me to do something she hasn’t already done?”

“Weird is like the biggest understatement of all time,” he said, shoving his hands into his hair. We sat there another moment, both of us wrestling with the baffling implications of receiving a Cocoon. And not just a Cocoon, but one that made it clear that Elliot and I were supposed to prevent something bad from happening. I thought of all the people in my life that I cared about. Mom, of course, and then Mrs. Ellsworth, who had taken care of me just as much if not more than my own mother for the better part of my life. Professor Brown and Professor Green, along with a handful of other people on the faculty who had taken a special interest in me, and then the list kind of sputtered to a stop. Friends weren’t very easy to make at the Academy, where the structure of the curriculum pitted us against one another practically from kindergarten. I’d had an exceptionally hard time of it. Between all the extra tutoring and study sessions I’d been receiving since practically day one, and the fact that I was the commander in chief’s daughter, well, there wasn’t a whole lot of time for that. I didn’t live in the dorms with everyone else, and the only meal I ate in the dining hall was lunch, and I usually used that time to cram for a class. There were other kids in my cadet class who I talked to, but would I consider any of them friends? Probably not. If I was honest with myself, though, something I tried to be, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted. I’d have loved friends, or even just one. Someone I could tell something like this to, someone I knew would have my back no matter what.