“So, it’s don’t fight, or else?”

“Well, I guess. War could be the end of the world, right?”

“Then what we’re doing as Artifact Hunters and the SAIU is even more important,” Leo said. “For more than just king and country.”

And then there was the other aspect of the watch. The law of unintended consequences. Isaac told Kat about finding the book about the wraith. “I had never seen that book before, so it didn’t exist until I took the wraith back in time. Would the wraith come back to find itself?”

She tapped her chin. “I’ve been reading up. The wraith would be caught in a predestination paradox. In a time loop. It would come back to this very same place and time to have this very same set of experiences happen to it, over and over. And what it was before, the magister as you called it, that still exists, too, and we have to hope that the two never meet, as some think that could create a time implosion. But as the wraith, it catches up with itself, just to repeat its time loop forever.”

She finished, “Fortunately, we don’t have to participate again. That we realize.”

He scratched his forehead. “Okay. I don’t really understand, but all right. So, what about my parents? And the time stream?”

“That’s different. A time stream is neither a time nor a place. Time is like a river and there are eddies. Your parents are caught in an eddy. Unfortunately, it’s an eddy that’s unreachable, especially since we’re already downstream of them.”

“Can I go back to them?”

“Not without changing everything,” Kat said. “Getting yourself caught in a time loop maybe. Or worse.”

“So, there’s nothing . . .”

Kat pressed her lips together before saying, “I don’t think so. Sorry.”

“But,” said Amelie, peeking over the edge of the chair in which she sat reading, “I remember seeing something else in the Vault ledger about an artifact that might let you talk to them. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but . . . You should go look.”

Isaac spent a couple of hours scouring the ledger before he found it.

Item number K-127. This object looks to be a snow globe, but it is in fact a time warp (a suspension of time). On the bottom is the trigger. The user can set the trigger and identify the persons and time in the past the user wishes to visit and then enter and eventually leave the time warp.

This time warp is a charming place—a small cottage in the woods in winter. It’s a way to visit old friends or family who have passed on without changing the future or the past (as with a time machine).