Eternity

by Matt De La Peña

  “Come on,” Riq said to Sera in a soft voice. He pointed down the hall, toward the back door of the lecture hall. They hurried over to it and Riq pulled it open slowly and quietly.

  One Dak and two Seras turned to look at them, but their presence wasn’t causing that much of a stir. They huddled in the door and listened to the teacher.

  “. . . and tomorrow we’ll look at the challenge of zero gravity,” he was saying. “Tonight, I want you to read the first three chapters in your physics textbook.”

  Sera heard some of the people in the class moan. She realized it was just the Daks.

  “Hey,” the teacher said. “Nobody said this was going to be easy. Those self-righteous Hystorians messed up our timeline. We lost the Earth in a war with them. But we’ve set our sights on a much grander utopia now. And thanks to your brothers and sisters, we’re close. We’re so close, I can feel myself floating across the lunar surface.”

  Sera looked around the class as a buzz spread through all the students. Were they really setting their sights on space?

  “That old man back in the cell we were in,” Dak whispered, elbowing Sera, “didn’t he say something about some lady taking over the ‘heavens’?”

  “Oh, man,” Riq whispered. “He did.”

  “Is it possible he knows something?” Sera asked.

  “I don’t know how,” Riq whispered. “But we should at least go back and talk to him. It sounds like these clones are getting close to something big.”

  Sera ushered them back out into the hallway. “They’re not clones,” she said.

  Dak gave her a dirty look. “What else would they be?”

  “Time is a river,” Sera said. “Remember? And the Infinity Ring let us move up and down the river whenever we wanted.”

  “Go on,” Riq said.

  “But sometimes rivers branch off. A single river splits into two or three.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dak asked.

  “I’m talking about alternate timelines. Parallel dimensions.” Sera was so excited by the theoretical science, she almost tripped over her own words. “Weren’t you listening? Those duplicates of yours mentioned this timeline. They didn’t want to be sent home. They were surprised when you mentioned cloning.”

  “But how . . . ?” Riq began.

  “I think Tilda’s device isn’t just a time-travel device,” Sera said. “I think it’s a dimensional-travel device. She needed a time-traveling army with our DNA, so she recruited versions of us from alternate realities. She fed them lies about what the Hystorians had done here. Told them they could save the world if they worked for her!”

  Someone suddenly snatched Sera’s arm from behind, barking, “Where are your ID bracelets?”

  Sera spun around and found herself eye to eye with Mason, the security guard who’d been chasing them.

  “Her dog ate them,” Dak said.

  “There are no dogs on the entire island,” Mason shouted.

  Dak cleared his throat. “I mean . . . her pet guinea pig?”

  “Enough nonsense,” Mason said. “I don’t care what Tilda saw in you. We’re sending you back to your own timeline. Plenty more where you came from.”

  “Now!” Riq shouted.

  Sera ripped her arm out of Mason’s grip and took off after Riq and Dak, back down the long hall.

  “Get back here!” Mason shouted, racing after them.

  They took a sharp turn and ran right out the front doors of the school and down the small staircase, onto the lawn.

  Sera watched Dak accidentally slam right into another Dak who was coming back from lunch.

  “Dude,” the duplicate said, looking down at the sack lunch he’d dropped.

  “Dude yourself,” the real Dak answered.

  And then something unexpected happened. The duplicate vanished into thin air.

  “Whoa,” Dak said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Riq said. “Come on, Dak.”

  Dak nodded and took Riq’s arm.

  Sera was still staring at the school, though. High above the doors, there was a line written in Latin that made her heart skip a beat: IN STATU QUO RES ERANT ANTE BELLEM.

  “Riq,” she said, pointing to it, “what does that say in English?”

  Mason and two other guards were descending the steps now and closing fast.

  “The state in which things were before the war,” Riq told her. “Now grab on. We’ve got an old man to go speak to.”

  Sera grabbed on to Riq’s other arm, and Riq tilted his head toward the bright blue sky and closed his eyes and started shaking.

  The three guards were all blowing their whistles and waving for them to stop.

  But Sera was stuck on that saying on the wall: In statu quo res erant ante bellum. The initials of two words made up SQ. And the initials of the last two words made up AB. Her stomach dropped out. She’d never really stopped to think about what either set of initials stood for. But there it was, clear as day.

  In statu quo res erant ante bellum.

  Or as Riq had just translated it: “The state in which things were before the war.” Tilda’s people weren’t ready to admit defeat.

  Sera didn’t have time to break it down any further, though, because everything around her was now spinning furiously. And in a few seconds, she was enveloped in the darkness.

  20

  War of the Worlds

  RIQ WAS appalled by what he found back in Anatolia. His guards had taken it upon themselves to torture an inmate — when they knew full well that Riq believed torture was barbaric.

  He, Dak, and Sera had come out of their warp just outside of the town prison he was in charge of, and while the rapid-fire warping seemed to be difficult on Dak and Sera, it hardly fazed Riq. Maybe his body had adjusted after all the warping he’d done over the past six weeks. Or maybe it had something to do with his skin absorbing the tachyon fluid. Whatever the case, while Dak and Sera sat there half dazed, trying to shake out the cobwebs, Riq hit the ground running.

  Literally.

  Before his shoes even made contact with the dirt, he was already hurrying toward the prison cell, eager to speak with the old man who he now believed might know something about Tilda and her so-called AB Pacifists. But when he got to the end of the long hall, he found the prison cell completely empty. “Guards!” he shouted.

  No one seemed to be around.

  Riq knew something was happening. Something big. Tilda was close to pulling off the ultimate Break, which would change the course of history forever.

  He slammed the heel of his hand against one of the bars. Yes, he’d made a new life in ancient Greece, but his heart would always be in the future. Sometimes, he felt like he cared about it more now than ever.

  He sprinted from the jail over to his living quarters. “Guards!” he shouted as he pushed his way through the front doors. “Guards! I need to speak with you immediately!”

  Still no answer.

  And Sera’s dog didn’t come running when he whistled.

  Where was everybody?

  Riq was staring at his bedroom wall, trying to think, when he heard one of his horses whinnying in the distance. He headed straight for the field behind the house, and sure enough, there were all six of his guards.

  And his missing prisoners, too.

  They were all standing around, watching his most powerful horse drag the old man — who was wearing nothing but an undershirt and undershorts — all around the dusty field.

  He couldn’t believe they were torturing a man old enough to be their grandfather.

  “Stop right this minute!” Riq shouted.

  His guards spun around. So did the prisoners, and Riq saw that their hands were tied behind their backs. “Hephaestion!” his most loyal guard, Draco, called back. “You’ve returned early!”

&
nbsp; “What in the name of Alexander the Great are you doing to this man?” Riq demanded.

  “What’s going on?” Dak called out as he and Sera approached from down the hill.

  “Hephaestion,” the second guard said. “This man cast away the animal you left in our care.”

  “Are you talking about my dog?” Sera shouted. She and Dak jogged the rest of the way, joining the guards and prisoners. “What happened to her?”

  Riq lunged for the horse as it passed by in its circle, physically stopping it from dragging the old man. He untied the man’s bloody wrists and feet and helped him up, saying, “This is an absolute travesty, sir. Are you okay?”

  The old man’s skin was all scratched up and covered in mud, and he was clearly dazed. Still, he managed to nod.

  “Someone, get this man some water!” Riq shouted. “And his clothes! Now!”

  One of the guards took off toward the prison quarters. Two of the other guards hurried over to the horse and led it away. The old man’s ankles were badly swollen where the rope had chafed the skin.

  Riq cringed and turned to Draco. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “It’s true what they said,” Draco pleaded. “Believe me, Hephaestion. I took the dog with me while I did my rounds, and when we got to the prison cell, the old man put a spell on her. And as the gods are my witness, the dog vanished into thin air.”

  “It’s true,” one of the guards holding the rope said.

  “He’s an evil sorcerer,” another guard said.

  “She couldn’t have just disappeared,” Sera said. “She has to be somewhere.”

  “I saw it with my own eyes,” Draco said.

  Riq saw how upset Sera was, which made him feel even worse. It was his idea to leave the dog in the first place. “I assure you, Sera,” he said, “we will find her.”

  She looked at the ground.

  “One second, she was by my side,” Draco said, “and then she was gone. I decided it was necessary to punish the old man until he brought back the dog using his witchcraft. I didn’t want to disappoint you, sir.”

  One of the guards came running back with the old man’s clothes and a cup of water. Riq helped the man dress and gave him the water. He dismissed all of his guards, ordering them to return the rest of the prisoners back to their cell. Then he had the old man, Dak, and Sera follow him back to his living quarters.

  They sat in the chairs where only hours ago Riq had crowned Abdalonymus the king of Sidon. “What did you do to the girl’s dog?” he asked, staring right into the old man’s droopy eyes.

  “Not a thing,” the man answered. “But I’ll tell you this. An animal does not vanish into thin air unless someone is altering the natural course of things.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Dak said.

  The old man shook his head. He looked furious. “It’s all part of her evil plan,” he said, repeating the same words he’d been shouting from the minute he’d been taken into custody.

  But Riq viewed them differently now.

  “Whose plan?” Sera said. “Tilda?”

  The man turned to her. “The woman with flaming red hair. The woman from the future.”

  It felt like someone had just punched Riq right in the gut. He was speaking about Tilda, of course, and had been all along. Why hadn’t he listened to the old man earlier? “Where’d you meet her?” Riq asked him. “And what did she want?”

  The old man touched his fingers around an especially large cut on his forehead. “She claimed that because of decisions made by those in power, the Earth was beginning to fall apart. If we agreed to join her group, going on a few select missions, she promised us a new kingdom in a place where the Earth’s destruction couldn’t touch us.” The old man pointed up at the ceiling.

  “Space,” Riq said.

  “Wait a second,” Dak said. Riq could tell by the look on his face he was starting to put it together, too. “Guess why Fake Sera took me all the way back to ancient China!”

  “They were the first to invent gunpowder!” Sera said.

  “Right,” Dak said. “She injected the man who actually invented gunpowder with some kind of memory-­erasing drug and then took the chemicals he had combined to make gunpowder to a group of punks wearing golden robes. She wanted them to have gunpowder first.”

  “And your double took me back to the trial of Galileo,” Sera said. “He had me defend Galileo’s belief that the Earth revolved around the sun. The heliocentric theory. And guess who rigged the trial in my favor?”

  “Someone from the AB,” Dak said.

  “Bingo.” Sera looked at Riq. “One of the cardinals who ruled on the case was wearing a gold-trimmed robe.”

  “After China,” Dak said, hopping up out of his chair, “your evil twin took me to Aunt Effie’s farm in Massachusetts. What was happening there, you ask? Robert Goddard was testing the first liquid-fuel rocket . . . which led directly to modern-day space-travel technology.”

  “Don’t you see what Tilda’s doing?” Riq asked. The hair was standing up on the back of his neck.

  Sera shot up out of her seat, too. “She may have conceded the Earth after we fixed all the Breaks,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean she’s given up. Now she’s trying to colonize space.”

  “She’s trying to colonize the moon,” the old man corrected her. “And when she does, she told us she was going to initiate a war of the worlds.”

  Riq held up his hand to put the brakes on everyone’s excitement. “You understand what you two’ve done, right?” he asked.

  They all looked at him.

  “You’ve unknowingly altered history,” Riq said, “in Tilda’s favor.”

  Riq watched Dak’s and Sera’s faces deflate, but the old man’s expression didn’t change at all. Riq studied him for a few long seconds before saying, “I’m curious — why didn’t you follow Tilda when she promised you a new home in space? Sounds like a pretty good pitch to me.”

  The man’s scratched-up face broke into a smile. “I was there when you three arrived in Greece. I saw the way Aristotle trusted you. I may have been born into a family of simple fishermen, but I always knew I was meant for something extraordinary, even as I got on in age. When I was approached by your woman with the flaming red hair, I realized what it was. I had to trek the twelve days it took to get here to issue my warning.” He settled his gaze on Riq. “Thank you for finally listening. I was beginning to fear you didn’t speak Greek at all.”

  21

  A Pebble between the Eyes

  DAK MAY have wet his pants a little when he saw it.

  He definitely screamed. Like, shrieked.

  “Dak, outside!” Riq shouted.

  But Dak was paralyzed with fear. They’d landed back in the present, in front of his house, only it no longer resembled the present he’d left only a short time ago. His barn had collapsed, and the forest was half scorched by fire, and there was a strange siren sound in the distance. But inside the house was worst of all. It looked ransacked, and his parents were nowhere to be found. Sera had dug up Dak’s old digital encyclopedia, and they were looking up what historians had recorded about their actions in China and Rome and Massachusetts when suddenly they heard a deep growl behind their backs.

  The three of them spun around and found a massive Smilodon cat sizing them up. Sera and Riq turned and ran, but Dak froze.

  The ancient cat slobbered and growled at Dak again.

  He and Sera had messed things up bad.

  He was as scared as he’d ever felt in his life, but he was also fascinated. This giant cat was from the Pleistocene epoch, which ended over ten thousand years ago. But it started long before that, meaning the cat bearing down on him could be from two million years ago.

  “Dak, run!” Sera screamed.

  When a huge paw took a swipe at him, that’s exactl
y what Dak did. He turned and ran, following Sera and Riq out of the house. “There’s a ladder out back!” Dak shouted.

  They raced around the side of the house and flew up the ladder to the top of the house. They huddled together on the slanted roof, the Smilodon cat roaring at them from below.

  “What do we do?” Sera said.

  “Nothing,” Riq said. “Except wait.”

  Dak scoffed. “Doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere soon.”

  “Let’s at least pull out Dak’s encyclopedia,” Sera said. “Obviously, it’s even worse than we thought. I guess you weren’t lying about that pterosaur, Dak.”

  “Or hallucinating,” Dak said, staring down at the enraged animal. It seemed content to pace for now, but if it decided to leap, they might still be in big trouble. Dak shifted his attention to his barn. Or what was left of his barn. The whole thing had collapsed somehow. His hammock was lying on the ground, useless. It didn’t seem like a good sign that his parents were gone and a Smilodon cat had moved in.

  “The old man was telling the truth,” Riq said. “It says here that after successfully disproving the geocentric theory, Galileo became a celebrity — and a party animal. He never produced any more ideas.”

  “That’s terrible!” Sera said. “He was supposed to publish a book in 1638. One of the most important books in the history of physics.”

  “There’s nothing about that here,” Riq said. “And get this: Gunpowder was invented by the Pacifists. It took the rest of the world another half century to figure it out.”

  “So what now?” Dak said.

  “We have to go back and fix your mistakes,” Riq said. “And to be as efficient as possible, we’re going to have to separate.”

  The three of them had warped from Anatolia to the present to see how the new Breaks — which Dak and Sera had helped create — were affecting present-day life. But Dak had never expected this. He saw that his mom’s campaign signs had been pulled up and trampled.