They turned off the waterway and into a neighborhood that had once been called Queen Anne and was now, simply, West Aurora. Ash had just caught sight of the Space Needle in the distance, the massive, rusted saucer resting on top of the water, like a boat—

And then the ground trembled, sending a wall of steel-gray water arcing over him, momentarily hiding the structure from view.

Ash felt his stomach drop as water sloshed into their boat. Chandra grabbed his arm, her nails digging straight through the leather of his jacket and into his skin.

No, he thought. Not now.

And then the shaking stopped, abruptly, though the black and gray waves continued to swell.

Chandra loosened her grip. “Third one this week,” she said, gasping.

“Fourth,” Ash corrected. There’d been a quake in the middle of the night, small enough that it almost hadn’t woken him up.

Chandra shook her head. “Freaky.”

Ash swallowed but said nothing. Earthquakes were something they’d had to get used to over the years, ever since a massive earthquake hit the West Coast back in 2073, followed by an even larger quake in 2075. The 2075 quake caused a tsunami that’d left the city of Seattle underwater. The Cascadia Fault quake—or the mega-quake, as it was sometimes called—had been a 9.3 on the Richter scale, easily the most devastating earthquake the country had ever seen. Between the two quakes, the West Coast had been completely wiped out. Nearly forty thousand people had died.

The earthquakes had become more frequent since the mega-quake but, lately, it seemed that there was a new one every other day. They were always small, barely strong enough to send waves crashing up against the side of the schoolhouse where Ash and his friends all lived, or Dante’s, their favorite bar. But, still, they made his nerves jittery.

“We’ll be home soon,” Ash told Chandra, tugging on the pull cord, again.

Professor Zacharias Walker’s old workshop rose in the distance like a mirage. It consisted of a mismatched roof and siding made of old boards, tires, and pieces of tin. Ash watched the structure separate from the shadows and wished, as he often did, that he would find the Professor himself behind the rain-soaked windows.

Professor Walker had discovered time travel. He’d built two time machines—the Second Star and the Dark Star—and then he’d gone back in time and plucked Jonathan Asher, Chandrakala Samhita, and Willis Henry from various points in history and brought them to New Seattle in 2075, forming a team that he’d jokingly called the Chronology Protection Agency. They were supposed to travel through time together, uncovering the mysteries of the past.

And then the mega-quake destroyed the city. And, just a few months later, the Professor had taken the Dark Star and disappeared in time without telling any of them what year he was traveling to or why. Ash had spent months searching for him before discovering the Professor’s old journal and, finally, learning exactly where he’d gone—to an old military base called Fort Hunter, in 1980. There, he’d planned to study the underlying causes of the earthquakes that had destroyed Seattle and killed the Professor’s wife, Natasha.