He grins and shrugs. “I’m not going to ask you to crash the stock market or get me, like, Martin Luther King Jr.’s tie or anything like that. It’s going to be something small. I promise.”

“But you don’t know what it is yet?”

He shakes his head and sits up. “Probably something borderline illegal. Enough to piss off my parents but not, you know, actually screw up time. Don’t worry, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” He extends his hand. “So do we have ourselves a deal, Andre?”

“I’m not going to call you master or anything like that.” I shake his hand firmly—that’s what confident people do. “For now.”

“Ah, an alliance of convenience. I’m going to like you.”

In response, I roll my eyes. “So when do we start?”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “Are you free now?”

“I can make time.”

“See, you’re already doing well. Time-travel humor. That’s a key part of being one of us.”

He stands up and walks by me, leaving the living room, then turning down the hall, expecting me to follow. Part of me wants to be stubborn and not follow him. To remind him that he should ask people before just assuming.

But curiosity gets the better of me. There’s a whole world in front of me, a world I didn’t know was possible, and Blake is my ticket to knowing more about time travel.

And I want to know everything.

Part Two

Eleven

“There are three main rules that every time traveler needs to follow before they jump.”

Blake and I are in the study as he lectures me about the dos and don’ts of time travel. He’s walking around at a hurried, anxious pace that makes me feel sick, and he’s pulling random books off the shelves, checking them, and deciding whether to put them in a stack in front of me or put them back on the shelf.

“One—you can’t go forward, only backward.”

“And why can we only go backward?”

“It’s more of a societal rule than an actual physical one,” he says, clarifying. “We’re not supposed to take knowledge from the future and bring it back. Like, you can’t go forward, discover how to make…say, a worthy competitor to the iPhone because one exists in twenty years, and then bring it back and make it yourself. It’s frowned upon.”

“So, it’s not really a rule?”

“No, it’s a rule.” He slams a large book shut, and dust flies everywhere. “It’s the most important rule.”

“Then why are there two other rules?”

“Because…” He groans and puts the book down. “You’re annoying; you know that?”

“It’s a gift, really.”