"Enemies of Time."

So the bad guys had a nickname. "What makes them so bad?"

"It's hard to explain in such a short time, but mostly it's a power struggle we deal with constantly," Marshall said. "Something an average citizen like yourself would have no knowledge of, and would never understand what might happen if past events are altered. Or if future events are revealed."

They can go to the future? They can alter things?

"I think we've already established that I'm not an average citizen," I said.

"And you're not a highly trained special agent for the CIA, either," Marshall snapped.

If Chief Marshall was trying to convince me that the CIA were the good guys, he totally sucked at it. "Fine, if you're not going to tell me anything else about why I'm a crazy freak of nature, then I'm ready to go home."

"There's not much else to tell," Dad said, trying to use the good-cop tone with me. "Maybe if we knew more about you and if Dr. Melvin could-"

It was just like Adam had said. They would try to dig for as much information as they could get. This was one game I knew I could play well. I'd spent nearly a year time-traveling and covering it up. Making up stories. Of course, fooling 009 Holly was probably a little easier than fooling these dudes. But I had kept it from my dad in 2009, too.

"I'm done talking for tonight," I said.

"Fine," Marshall snapped.

Melvin handed me a tiny red pill and a gla.s.s of water. "This will make you sleepy," he said to me, like I was a child about to have a tooth pulled.

"What, no poisoned rag?" I asked bitterly.

"This location is only known to myself and Agent Meyer. Even Dr. Melvin requests to be kept in the dark. For his own safety," Marshall said.

Yeah, because he's an old, round doctor with a drawer full of lollipops. Not exactly someone who could strangle a man with his bare hands.

"Also, to anyone outside of this room, you are Jackson Meyer, a seventeen-year-old kid whose father is a CEO, understood?" Marshall said.

"Yeah, I get it."

I stared down at the red capsule and reminded myself that if they wanted to kill me, they would have done it already and probably would have used a more exciting method than swallowing a pill.

Thirty more seconds of this secret location was all I remembered. My mind faded into a state of black nothingness. And for the first time in weeks, I truly wanted to be back in my old home base. 2009. My true present day. Pretending to be this other me, maybe forever, totally sucked.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

OCTOBER 13, 2007, 9:00 A.M.

I woke up Sat.u.r.day morning safe and sound in my own bed. The only damage I had left over from the night before was a pounding headache. After showering and getting dressed, I grabbed my journal and started writing every detail I could recall from the day before. I'd been slacking on writing for the past few weeks, but things were a little different now.

Apparently I'm a genetic freak of nature. Not just weird time-traveling genes, but one that has somehow evolved so my method of time travel is so weird it even freaked out Dr. Melvin. Basically: half-jumps don't change anything, full jumps either change the past or send you to this alternate universe in the past. a.s.suming Adam's theory is correct. Or the future? a.s.suming what Marshall and Dr. Melvin said is correct. Great.

If Dad and Melvin knew about my messed-up brain and genetics, then why didn't they just tell me what might happen so I could have been prepared? Is it possible Dad knew about me in 2009 and didn't say anything? The so-called Enemies of Time knew in 2009, if they ended up in Holly's dorm room. And I find it very interesting that my father happens to work for people who fight evil time travelers and he also happens to have adopted a child who is a time traveler. Coincidence? Somehow I doubt it.

If I get some more information out of Dr. Melvin, then maybe there's a way for me to get back to 2009 and actually change things.

I left my room and wandered toward the kitchen. Jenni Stewart was sitting on the couch in the living room, with a laptop and a pile of papers spread out all over the coffee table.

"Is this your new office?" I asked her.

She continued to stare at the computer screen. "I've been a.s.signed to keep an eye on you, make sure there were no damaging side effects to whatever they drugged you with last night."

She was speaking with a heavy Southern accent today, something I hadn't noticed before. "What's with the accent? Or is this the real you?"

"You have to know me very well to find out which is the real me," she said. "I specialize in undercover operations."

That I believed. I'd seen her change gears so fast I could hardly keep up. "So, my dad's not home?"

"He'll be back later, I think," she said.

I plopped down beside her and leaned over to look at the computer screen. "Is that something supersecret you're working on?"

She rolled her eyes. "It's a ten-page paper on disease in African countries. For Anthropology 108."

"You're a college student?"

She shrugged. "Sometimes. It's a cover I can do fairly well."

"Probably not nearly as good as your bada.s.s secretary role," I said, and she cracked a smile. "Do you have evil time travelers in your anthropology cla.s.s or something?"

That was my attempt at casually opening up the dialogue for me to ask questions. But her fingers froze over the keyboard and she leaned back against the couch before turning her eyes on me. "I can't believe they told you about Tempest."

"What's Tempest?"

Her face twisted with confusion. "That's my division ... of the CIA ... your dad's, too. We're sort of the bottom layer. People know about us, they've heard the name Tempest, but unless you're in this division, you don't know what we do. Not even the agents with the highest level of clearance."

Maybe I wasn't supposed to tell her that I knew? Chief Marshall and Dad had no choice but to tell me. Obviously, I already knew about time travel. But how could I justify that to Jenni Stewart without telling her about me? "Um ... I saw one of them ... the Enemies of Time or whatever ... I saw one disappear."

"Wow," she said. "I'm still surprised they didn't use memory modification drugs or something. Security is beyond tight in this division."

The questions were flooding in because Jenni Stewart wasn't nearly as intimidating as Chief Marshall and I could actually concentrate on what I still needed to find out. "The dude with the red hair that you kicked in the face ... he vanished, didn't he?"

"Yeah. His name is Raymond and he's a pain in the a.s.s."

"What about the blond chick that pa.s.sed out? What did they do with her?" I asked.

Jenni shook her head. "I don't know. I imagine they'd try to get more information out of her, for the list."

"The list?"

"Marshall's list." She grabbed a cushion and put it behind her back, before stretching out her legs across the couch. "He drags information out of them about the future, like people the opposition might try to a.s.sa.s.sinate, so we can prevent it. It's mostly political figures or scientists. Sometimes it's just an event that we need to stop."

"It's so crazy that people can time-travel to the future," I said, but the more I thought about it, the more vague it seemed. What exactly was the future? To me it was any date beyond October 30, 2009. But if one of the other time travelers was born after me or before ... just thinking about time that way made my head spin.

"Marshall and Dr. Melvin think it's possible some of them can travel outside the span of their own lives, but of course-"

"You have no idea what years that involves," I finished. Her explanation of calling it the span of their own lives was much easier to understand than past, present, and future. "If time travelers have been around for centuries, like Marshall said, maybe they came from way in the past."

"It's hard to say. We just go where we're told," she said. "At least that's what I do, but then again, I'm new."

"So, that's what Tempest does ... follows Marshall's list." I sank farther into the couch, deep in thought. "But how do you fight off people who just pop in and out like that?"

She leaned forward a little and lowered her voice. "I've read every bit of Dr. Melvin's research. It's some crazy s.h.i.t. But basically, time travel doesn't work how you think it works."

I wasn't sure if she was going to provide me with new information or not. "What do you mean? Do you think they change stuff all the time?"

"It's unlikely," she said.

"Why?"

"Basically, before they jump for the first time-"

"The first time ever? How old are they?" I drilled.

"Melvin's data says most have jumped by seven or eight years old, but it's not controlled for a while, meaning they don't know what they're doing or where they're going. It differs, depending on the person. Some are better. Some are worse. Like anything else."

Wow. Seven or eight. I couldn't even imagine being a freak for that long. And were there little time-traveling Junior EOTs popping up in random places?

"Anyway," Jenni continued, "before that first jump, think about their life as one long, thick tree branch. When a jump happens, a piece of the branch splinters off and keeps growing in a different direction."

"And they can stay on the new piece of the branch ... they can live there, right?" That's what I had done. What I'm doing now. My jump from 2009 to 2007 had caused my branch to split off and grow a new arm. The other jumps didn't seem to do anything.

"Yeah, that's right," Jenni said. "It's kinda like a parallel universe."

Not this again. Adam still clung to this theory, and I hated it. It made the world seem less valuable. More lonely.

"Can they go back to another timeline once they've made a new one?" I asked.

"Some can," she said. "Most of the ones we run into can. But the one thing very few can do is jump forward or backward within the same branch or timeline."

"Which is why they can't mess with too much s.h.i.t in our world," I added. "Except if they can just jump to another timeline and then jump right back to our world, couldn't stuff be changed?"

"We don't know for sure, but we think there's some kind of physical repercussions for excessive time jumps."

Yep. There sure is. "Really ... I didn't know that."

"Yep, and we don't think they want to make these other timelines, but when they try to jump along the same one, it just happens."

"But why wouldn't they?" I said sarcastically. "More choice. Like having a summer house in Aspen and a time-share in Florida and an apartment in Manhattan."

She smiled. "Do you want to hear Melvin's craziest theory? I only know because I sort of ... hacked into his computer."

"Okay."

"He believes that if they keep making all these new stems off the same branch, they could eventually collide, which may cause the world to end ... or it may just cause the EOT's brain to explode."

"Wow ... that's a lot more than I can handle right now," I said, half joking, half serious.

"Yeah, I'm hoping for the brain-exploding option," she said.

"So, if they all have different levels of what they can do, there's really no way to predict or prepare?" I asked.

"Agent Training 101, don't make a.s.sumptions about anyone. Same basic rules apply to evil time travelers."

"It's possible one of them could just jump by accident as a little kid or whatever and then get stuck in some other timeline?" I asked.

"Yep."

I didn't ask any more questions. The last one was hard to swallow and I needed time to let it sink in. Maybe that's why 2009 still felt like home to me. Or maybe it was guilt that made me think about getting back. Guilt for leaving and guilt for any happiness I'd had in this timeline.

And I wanted to be face-to-face with those men in Holly's dorm. Find out who they were. I could picture the red-haired, shoe-print guy perfectly, but the other one, the taller dude, I couldn't remember what he looked like.

"Having a nice chat?"

Jenni and I both looked over and saw Dad leaning against the mantel. He stared straight at her, his eyebrows lifted. She tossed the couch cushion back in place and returned to her computer.

"Can I speak with you privately, Agent Stewart?" Dad asked.

Her face was immediately stricken with fear. "Yes, sir."

I almost felt bad for her, and would have if she hadn't been such a pain in the a.s.s the first time we met. I stared at her neglected computer resting on the coffee table.

The temptation was too hard to resist, but the second I hit a key to pull the last image onto the screen, she was right behind me, like some kind of ghost.

"I wouldn't touch that if I were you."

I jerked my hand back from the keyboard. "Sorry."

She stood in front of me, arms crossed, game face on. "How about we make a deal? You write a Spanish term paper for me and I'll teach you to kick some a.s.s like a real agent."

"Did my dad put you up to this?" I asked, and she nodded. "How many pages is this paper?"

"Ten."

I guess Dad was willing to keep his promise to teach me some stuff. "Single- or double-s.p.a.ced?"

"Double," she said with a grin.

"Deal."