“I put us on a new time stream,” I say, my stomach hollowing. “These last few days, I’ve been investigating the Voice, and I enlisted Bandit’s help. Neither of these things was supposed to happen. That’s why I didn’t go to the tux shop like I was supposed to.”

“You have to get us back on track!” Dad surges forward. He wasn’t this frantic when his company was the target of a hostile takeover. He didn’t agitate this much when he discovered Mom had left us for good. “We don’t know what will push Archie over the edge. In every iteration of the future, there was always one devastating event that made Archie lose touch with humanity. This one is occurring way earlier than the others…” He stops. Swallows. “If we lose him now, we’ll never get him back.”

His hands tremble. “Everything I’ve worked for these last six years will be for nothing. The sacrifices we’ve made as a family—for naught. That’s why I pushed him to form connections with legitimate scientists, in hopes that it would shield him from Charlie’s influence. That’s why I held you at a distance. In the original timeline, Archie felt like you were the favorite child and hated me for it. We thought that if I favored him, it might prevent his slide into darkness.”

I blink, hardly able to comprehend his words. Is he saying that his coldness, the distance he imposed between us…was all the result of a mission to save the world?

“That’s why you stopped talking to me?” I whisper. My heart pounds, a time machine in its own right. Because all of a sudden, it’s reverted to the frantic hop-skip pattern of the little girl who only wanted her father’s attention. “It wasn’t because you stopped…caring about me?”

“Oh, Alice,” Dad says, tears in his eyes. “If you only knew how much it destroyed me to push you away. I love you, honey. I’ll never stop. But I hope you understand that I had no choice. I had to do everything in my power to keep Archie from inventing that virus.”

Of course. It makes sense that the future would’ve approached not just Bandit and me but also Dad. They would’ve used every arsenal available to them. They would’ve tried every avenue of reaching my brother.

“You have to fix this, Alice.” Dad straightens, morphing back into the hard man he’s been these last six years, the one who’s single-mindedly focused on one goal. “You can’t let him be humiliated in front of the entire school. Go—now. Our entire future depends on it. Go, go, go!”