Zeke starts talking loudly to my brother, angling his body to block Archie’s view of Lee. I shoot him an appreciative look. I swear, if he and my brother weren’t such good friends, I’d fall in love with him in a hot second.

There are four empty seats. Dad heads toward the one closest to him, which would give him a direct line of sight to Charlie’s table. Can’t have that.

I leap forward, and my elbow kinda accidentally goes into his side. “Do you mind if I sit next to Cristela?” I pant. “There’s, uh, something I wanted to discuss with her.”

Dad raises an eyebrow, but he agreeably settles down next to Cristela’s mom, which puts his back to Charlie. Whew. Crisis averted for the time being.

Cristela turns to me with an expectant smile. “What did you want to talk about?”

Aw, crap. Now I need a topic of discussion. She seems nice enough, despite her poor choice in dates, but we’ve never really spoken.

“What’s your area of research?” I ask politely.

Her cheeks, her eyes, even her teeth—everything about her suddenly glows. I silently congratulate myself for a smart conversation choice and reach for my oversize purse, where I’ve stashed my camera. This face, this expression needs to be captured.

“Time travel,” Cristela chirps. “I know, I know. It’s out there, and I get teased constantly. But it has a foundation in actual science, you know. In fact, Einstein theorized that if mass is zero, then time travel is possible. Which means that even if we can’t push physical bodies through time, we might be able to send a consciousness. That is, a soul.” She leans forward. “This is my dream. That one day, I’ll make an earth-shattering discovery, and time travel will be possible.”

I freeze, my fingers on the zipper of my purse. I’d been prepared to tune her out, but her first words are like a dash of water to my sluggish brain. Time travel. Consciousness. A soul. A voice.

That’s what my older self is, isn’t she? A consciousness that has been sent back from the future for a few minutes at a time. Which means Cristela—or someone else—succeeds. Ten years from now, the mechanism that allows people to time travel will exist.

Hell, maybe I’ve got this all wrong. Maybe the Maker isn’t the nastiest person in the room. Maybe instead, it’s his cute, cheerful companion, the one who nobody would suspect in a million years.

They both could feasibly be Lalana’s secret admirer.

Swallowing hard, I consider my next move. The Voice’s words come back to me, that sentence she is so fond of repeating. One wrong move, one detail too many, and we could create ripples that will change the future in ways we never intended.