Her eyes went wide as she realized that her opportunity to change history was about to be taken away. Her fingernails and teeth dug into the arm I had wrapped around her neck, but it didn’t matter; I had her. The thump of Booth’s boots was getting louder, and I knew I had mere seconds to get this done. If he came up the stairs and saw a woman and a twelve-year-old girl brawling like a couple of ultimate fighters in big frilly dresses, it might be enough to deter him from his plan and forever change history. I reached for my belt with the arm that wasn’t getting gnawed on and grabbed my Chaos Cuffs. It took a second or two of fumbling, but I got them on her wrists just as the handsome face of John Wilkes Booth made it up the stairs. A heartbeat later and we’d disappeared, leaving him free to commit one of the most heart-wrenching crimes in history.

Chapter Two

Regan

My eyes snapped open inside the narrow white simulation room, and I immediately became aware of how bone-numbingly cold I was. Large computer monitors lined the walls around me, and I could see the frozen image of the woman and me mid-struggle with Booth’s surprised face staring right at us. I almost groaned out loud in exasperation, but I swallowed it at the last second. The commander’s daughter wasn’t allowed to whine like that.

“So I failed?” I asked. “Again?”

“That’s right, cadet,” said Professor Brown with a sympathetic smile as she leaned down to remove the probes on my arms and legs so I could sit up.

“By how much?” I asked, glaring at the screen.

She consulted the slim black tablet she held for a moment and then sighed. “One second.”

“Tell me you’re kidding,” I said.

“I’m afraid not,” she said. “In that second, Booth saw you disappear in front of his eyes, and it was enough for him to call off the plan. As you may recall, he’d already gotten cold feet once in his attempted kidnapping of Lincoln, so it didn’t take much to spook him that night.”

“Well, that stinks,” I said.

“One way of putting it,” said Professor Treebaun as he looked up from his tablet for the first time. “Although it seems a bit tame considering that if this was a real mission, you’d have just irrevocably ruined the unity of the United States of America.”