“Okay,” she murmured.
Man, is she onto something, he thought as he went out the door.
Several hours later, stuffing his face with potato chips, Dak still hadn’t heard or seen from Sera. He was sitting on the couch flipping the TV back and forth between a fluff piece about the upcoming French royal wedding and news reports about twin hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, both category fives and too unpredictable to project where they might make landfall. Such things had grown almost tiresome to track, but there wasn’t anything else to do.
He knew Sera would work until she died of starvation if left to her own devices, so he whipped up a couple of ham sandwiches and took them out to her. She accepted the plate without so much as a thank-you and started wolfing the food down, her eyes still on the SQuare in front of her.
“The moon was awesome,” Dak said. “The chickens, too.”
“Uh-huh,” Sera said under her breath.
Hating what a waste the day had become, Dak slouched back to the house, wondering why he’d ever thought it a good idea to let Sera loose in such a place.
The shrill ring of the phone woke him up.
With groggy eyes, his mouth feeling like someone had stuffed a dirty sock in there, he looked over at the clock. In a panic, he shot to his feet. It was almost ten p.m.
Shrieking curses at no one in particular, he ran to the phone and answered it. Just as he expected, Sera’s uncle was ranting and raving on the other end, wondering where she was — it was nearly curfew, and officers could pop in for a random check any minute. Dak apologized profusely, saying he’d get her right away. He thought Sera knew better than to risk being out past ten. Plus, her uncle had a really annoying nasally voice when he was ticked off.
“Sera!” Dak yelled when he burst through the iron door — as much as he could burst through it when the thing weighed more than the limestone blocks used to construct the Great Pyramid of Giza. “Do you have any clue what time it is? Your uncle’s having a hissy fit! He says he won’t cover for you if the SQ come around asking why you’re out past curfew.”
She didn’t panic like he thought she would. Instead, she slowly stood up and turned to him. Somehow her face looked both exhausted and full of energy.
Dak almost wanted to take a step back. “Um . . . you okay, there?”
“The Infinity Ring is a time-travel device,” she said, as calm as he’d ever seen her. “And I figured out the missing piece. I know how to make it work.”
8. The Missing Piece
TIME TRAVEL. Dak didn’t know which was cooler: The idea that such a thing was possible, or the fact that his parents might have been the ones to figure it out. Although he didn’t know if he quite believed it, he couldn’t help being excited at the very idea.
He spent almost every minute of Sunday with Sera, and he only understood about twenty percent of what came out of her mouth. She was working in the lab, reprogramming the Infinity Ring as he sat and watched. Making it even more annoying, she started half of her sentences with phrases like, “It’s really simple if you think about it” or “Obviously” or “As you well know . . .”
And the words she used! “Space-time” and “relativity” and “cosmic strings” and “tachyons” and “quantum this” and “quantum that.” Dak had a splintering headache by noon and no amount of medicine would make it go away.
Adding insult to injury, Dak was anxious that Sera’s uncle might be knocking on their door at any second. It turned out the authorities had stopped in for a random check at Sera’s house the night before, and they’d written her up for the violation. She’d been scolded by her terrified uncle and grounded, but that didn’t stop her. No siree. She promised to stay in her room all day and read but instead she climbed out the window and ran to Dak’s house before he’d even had a chance to take advantage of his parents’ absence to eat a plate of cheese for breakfast.
And that still wasn’t the worst of it. Dak was all too aware he’d broken more of his mom and dad’s rules in one weekend than he had his entire life before that. And somehow he’d let Sera talk him into the ultimate sin against them.
She’d taken their most prized possession — ranking just slightly above Dak, no doubt — out of its protective glass case and had been playing with it for hours. She was messing around with a thing that probably had cost every spare penny they’d ever earned and could end up being the most valuable invention of all time. He winced every time she took a screwdriver to it. He nearly fainted when she used the soldering iron. He’d either believed her speeches about what she could do or he was the single stupidest person who’d ever lived. Either way, if this didn’t work, he was going to be grounded for the next three thousand years.
It was just past five o’clock, all of these thoughts going through Dak’s head on loop, when Sera put the device down on the desk and said one word:
“Done.”
Dak blinked a few times. “What do you mean, done? That’s the simplest word you’ve said all day, but it can’t possibly mean what I think it means.”
“I’m done, Dak.” She pointed at the Ring. “That little thing right there will warp space-time and take a person into the past. I’m not sure why I should make it any more complicated than that.”
Dak was finding her conclusion absolutely impossible to believe. He walked over and picked up the device. It was heavier than it looked, and cold to the touch. For the first time, Dak noticed a pencil-thin window that ran along the device’s entire length. Behind the window was an amber-colored liquid. Fuel of some kind, he guessed.
“It wasn’t even that hard,” Sera said. There was no hint of bragging in her voice. It wasn’t some lame attempt to fish for compliments. To her, it was just plain true.
Dak looked up at her. “So let me get this straight. My parents, who have PhDs from Amancio University and SQIT, have been working on this device for twenty years, and you figured it all out in a couple of days?”
Sera shrugged. “They helped. A little.”
Dak threw up his arms.
“Hey, careful with that!” Sera snapped. She snatched it away from him. “For the love of mincemeat. I’m just kidding, and you know it. They did most of the work — ninety-nine-point-nine percent of it. Maybe they just needed someone with fresh eyes to come in and seal the deal. Figure out the missing piece of the puzzle. Like I said, it was —”
“Yeah, I know,” Dak interrupted. “Easy. Piece of cake. Like . . . naming the presidents in order of how old they were when they got elected. Kid’s stuff. But how do you know for sure that it does work?”
“Because all the formulas are balanced. The mechanics of it make sense now. I’d go into more detail, but based on how riveted you were by my earlier explanations, I think I’ll spare you the pain. But I know it works. The same way you know that two plus two is four.”
“Thanks for keeping it at my level. Anyway, what do we do now, genius?”
A huge smile lit up her face. “We tell your parents all about it.”
He suddenly wanted to throw up and run to China.
Dak’s parents were due home around seven o’clock that evening. His grandma figured he was a big boy and could take care of himself between dinner and their arrival, so she packed up, gave him a creaky hug, and went home. Dak loved her to death, but she had barely moved out of her chair in the guest room since showing up, so he wasn’t quite sure why she was there in the first place. In case he needed a knitted sweater out of the blue?
The last half hour waiting for his mom and dad to walk through the front door was agonizing. He and Sera sat on the couch in the living room, the tick tick tick of the clock on the wall the only sound.
Dak’s hands were slick with sweat. There just wasn’t any way that this could go down without getting ugly. He tried to think about how he’d break the news, and nothing sounded right. Not a single historical anecdote seemed appropriate to soften the blow. Taking the keys alone was enough to make his dad turn beet red and get his mom shrieking like a diseased monkey.
Three minutes after seven the door opened.
His mom stepped inside, holding a small suitcase in one hand and a giant purse in the other. His dad followed with the rest of their luggage. He shut the door with an elbow, then both of them noticed Dak and Sera sitting before them in silence.
“Well howdy do!” his dad said, a little too loudly. Dak didn’t think anyone would ever need to know anything else about his father except that the man often said the words Well howdy do! That pretty much said it all.
“What are you two little munchkins up to?” his mom asked as she put her things down. “How nice of you to greet us — our own private welcoming committee! Where’s the band and the cocktails?” She snorted a laugh, something that sounded like a pig getting tickled.
And these two people were geniuses. Well, Dak thought, gotta love ’em.
“Now where are my hugs?” his mom said with a mock hurt face. “Don’t just sit there all day like two bumps on a pickle! Come over here.”
Dak stood up . . . and suddenly had an idea. There was only one way to tell this story and survive to see the next day: backward.
“Mom, Dad,” he said, hoping to make it clear that he had something serious to tell them.
Both of them had made it about halfway into the living room, but now they stopped and stared. They’d sensed it all right.
Dak smiled, trying to show what good news he had. “The Infinity Ring works now. She’s all ready to go.”
Dak’s mom and dad both had confused looks on their faces, as if they mostly thought he was kidding but weren’t completely sure.
“Come again?” his mom finally asked.
Dak stuck with telling the story backward — he wanted to leave that little tidbit about him stealing their keys until the very end. “It took all weekend, but Sera was able to fill in your missing piece, and now it works.”
Sera was fidgeting beside him, still on the couch, her knees bouncing. His parents shared a look that he couldn’t quite read.
Dak decided to keep going, thinking this just might work without an explosion of rage, groundings, unnecessary murders, stuff like that. “Look, we can fill in all the details later — but this is exciting, right? We need to get out there! Sera can explain, but the Infinity Ring is ready to be tested!”
“Who else knows about this?” Dak’s mom said. Her voice was flat and commanding — it actually scared Dak a little.
“What . . . what do you mean?” he asked. Sera stood beside him now, and he could tell she sensed the bad shift in the mood.
Dak’s mother put her hands on his shoulders. “This is important, son. Did you tell anyone what you were up to? Anyone at all? Your grandmother, maybe? Sera’s uncle?”
“No,” Dak said. He looked over at Sera, who shook her head. “Mom, what’s going on?”
Dak’s dad drew the curtains closed, his face pinched with worry. “This isn’t a game, Dak. What on earth were you thinking?”