Advanced Temporal Disruption

Timed Midterm

Instructions:

• Time Allotted: 130 minutes
• No Breaks Allowed.
• No Outside Devices Allowed.
• Any Student Caught Time Traveling During an Exam Will Be Expelled.
• Questions Disappear Once Answered.
• Students May Not Read Ahead.
• Answer the Questions in the Order in Which They Are Presented.
• The Essay Sections of the Test Require Actual Writing.
• Proctors Are On-Site Just to Remove the Testing Device Once the Student Has Completed the Exam.

Reminders:

• Any Student Who Participates in an Unauthorized Use of Time Travel Will Be Expelled and Not Allowed Near Any Time Travel Program Existing Now or in the Future or in the Past.
• Any Student Who Uses Time Travel for Personal Gain (including but not limited to improving GPA) Will Be Expelled.
• Any Student Tampering with Time Travel Equipment or Devices Will Be Expelled.
• Any Student Caught Cheating Will Be Expelled.
• Cheating Is Defined in Time Travel Behavioral Code Book in Sections 34785.55A Through 89662.99Z.

Test Includes:

• 15 True or False Statements
• 35 Multiple Choice Questions
• 10 Short Essay Questions
• 5 Short Essay Research Questions
• 5 Essay Questions (Student must respond to no fewer than three to pass. A response underneath the required minimum word count will be considered No Response)

Excerpt:

Multiple Choice

18. You have been assigned the termination of a minor historical figure. You:

a. Research heavily and plan your action for maximum local-time impact.

b. Research heavily and avoid taking action during times that would cause major local-time impact.

c. Seek clarification from your handler about whether or not to cause major local-time impact.

d. None of the Above.

19. You have been assigned the termination of a major historical figure. You:

a. Trust the research you have been given and take the suggested place and moment, following suggested guidelines.

b. Assume Time Travelers before you have attempted a termination of the same figure and failed. You do your best to research their failures before making your plan.

c. Assume Time Travelers before you have attempted a termination of the same figure and failed. You trust those failures are already included in the research. You travel to the suggested place and moment, and follow the suggested guidelines.

d. None of the Above

Excerpt:

Essay Questions

2. The correct answer for Multiple Choice Question #18 is D: None of the Above. Given that answer, outline the steps you would take from the moment of assignment to action in the field. Remember to take timeline disruption into account in your response.

As a reminder: Question #18 posits that you have been assigned the termination of a minor historical figure.

Minimum 500 words

4. The correct answer for Multiple Choice Question #19 is D: None of the Above. Given that answer, outline the steps you would take from the moment of assignment to action in the field.

As a reminder: Question #19 posits that you have been assigned the termination of a major historical figure.

Minimum 2000 words

• • • •

Jacey Watkins’s fingers were shaking as she stared at the five remaining questions on her Advanced Temporal Disruption Midterm. She was already exhausted from responding to ten “short” essay questions.

Now she hit the “long” essay questions and as she read them, her heart sank.

She hadn’t expected the damn midterm be so hard.

Six students were left in the room, including her. Everyone was bent over the creaky device that had greeted them on the individual half-desks that looked like they had come from 1960. That she could recognize the date desks arrived in classrooms was a tribute to her education at the Holcomb Time Travel Academy so far.

The academy was the best in the entire country, and in the top ten worldwide. Only time travel academies in Budapest and Australia were ranked higher in historical detail—something that had interested her when she applied.

She hadn’t realized just how twisty the physics and mathematics of time travel classes would be. Nor had she realized how much timeline disruption considerations would mess with her brain.

Still, she had done the best she could in the class so far, and she had managed to regurgitate most of what she learned in the true/false and multiple choice sections. The answers to the short essays came almost verbatim from her notes—which she had memorized—and the research questions hadn’t seemed hard. (Which worried her.)

The device that she had to take the test on was antiquated and finicky. It had a keyboard—an actual keyboard, not a holoboard. She had to be careful to hit the correct keys, which also slowed her down.

And the device caused other problems. Jacey had missed an entire true-or-false question because it hooked up to the question ahead of it, and vanished off her screen when she answered the previous question.

She couldn’t tell the proctors either, because calling them over would effectively end her exam. One poor kid had done just that after the first few questions, saying something about an unanswered question disappearing from the board, and instead of answering him, they confiscated his device. He tried to argue, but they wouldn’t listen. They ushered him out quickly, so that he wouldn’t disrupt the rest of the class.

But he had.

Of course he had. This midterm was a third of the grade, and there would be no makeup tests. Professor Stephenson was exceptionally draconian that way.

Just like this room. It was stuffy and smelled of chalk. There was a blackboard behind the two proctors—both graduate students who looked like they would rather be anywhere else. They weren’t allowed to use any personal devices while they monitored the exam. They also weren’t allowed to look at the devices they had taken from the students after the students finished.

There was antiquated wireless bandwidth in this room, designed in that old-fashioned way for two reasons. The first was pretty simple: Using ancient tech made it that much harder for scientifically minded students to cheat. The second was practical: This classroom was normally used for freshmen who needed to experience historical reality before they headed back to some unspecified past.

Historical reality was cool for the first day or so. After that, it was one of the uglier aspects of any time travel course.

Sitting in this combination chair desk, made entirely of wood, was screwing up her back, which should have been the least of her worries. She still had questions to answer, and not a lot of time left.

It didn’t help that a part of her—a very large part of her—had picked this moment to freak out. She had known going in that this class would be hard, but she figured she could handle it. But the math wasn’t favoring her right now. If she missed too many questions and didn’t finish these essays, she would fail.

And anyone who failed the midterm had no real way to make up the points. Professor Stephenson did not give extra credit. She didn’t give points to people who participated in class. Unlike most professors, she didn’t even give a point for attendance.

She only counted the midterm, the presentation, and the final. The midterm was tough, the final was rumored to be nearly impossible, and the presentation was an adventure in torture—or so some of the upperclassmen had said.

No wonder most students failed this class the first time around.

Jacey stared at the remaining five questions. Question two looked hard, but she could write a short answer. And, at least, there was the temporal disruption clue.

Question five also allowed for a short answer, but she didn’t even understand the question. She had a hunch she understood questions three and one, and that scared her, because whenever she felt like she understood something in this class, she learned that she had understood it superficially.

But she was never one of the students that Professor Stephenson had dealt with contemptuously. All Professor Stephenson had said to Jacey when she dared answer in class was a bland Good enough.

Jacey wasn’t sure what Good enough meant or how it would translate to grades. Did it mean that she was mediocre? C-worthy? Did it mean that she would barely pass? Did it mean that she understood everything and didn’t have to worry about that topic anymore?

She had no idea.

And she suffered through each class, no matter what was going on in her life. Attendance in person was required, unlike some of the large freshman seminars that had a video component. Mandatory attendance usually factored in a day or two for illness, but not in Professor Stephenson’s class.

Professor Stephenson explained it up front: When you are traveling in time, you do not get a personal day because you’re feeling a bit off. You don’t get mental health days. You don’t get to shut down because you’re not feeling up to the work. The tougher you become about yourself and your schedule, the better off you will be.

Jacey took that to heart. She took everything about this class to heart. She recorded her notes as well as wrote everything down. (One of the many rules of this program was that potential time travelers had to learn how to take notes. Penmanship was a required one-credit class. Writing was essential in the past and could not be ignored in the future—just in case there was some kind of technological breakdown. Therefore, penmanship had to be learned [and learned well].)

Jacey paid more attention to this class than she had to her first Physics of Time Travel class, the one that everyone had said was stupidly hard. It had been, but not as intimidating as this class.

None of the other prerequisites for this class had been this kind of stupidly hard either. She had loved Historical Research, Advanced Historical Research, and all of Time Travel Theory courses that she had taken so far. The other two classes, Temporal Disruption I and Temporal Disruption II, had messed with her brain, but hadn’t been so tough that she wasn’t sure she understood it.

Advanced Temporal Disruption messed with her brain and made her feel like she was the dumbest person in class. She wasn’t—or, at least, she hadn’t been when the class started.

Now, maybe she was. Because only fifteen of the thirty-five students who had signed up had made it to the midterm exam. Most had flamed out, unable to handle Professor Stephenson. Others thought the workload untenable. A few, according to rumor, anyway, dropped out of school entirely.

Jacey had to suck it up to deal with Professor Stephenson. She was the most unpleasant professor it had been Jacey’s misfortune to study under.

If someone got a question wrong, Professor Stephenson would go after them until they either figured out the answer or burst into tears.

She would wait impatiently while they sobbed, tapping her foot or sighing heavily. Some students couldn’t stop sobbing and they would leave the classroom.

Others sobbed, choked, and then the crying subsided. Once it did, Professor Stephenson would launch into a tiny lecture.

There’ll be no one to guide you down the garden path if you’re traveling in time, she’d say. You might want to rethink your career choice.

Maybe some had. Jacey hadn’t. She was as committed as ever. The study was fascinating, but hard.

And this test was extremely difficult.

Question one required only 250 words, but she could go longer if she needed to. Question three was a gimme, but she didn’t understand question five.

Question two seemed like it would be hard to answer in 500 words. She would have to go long. She decided she would answer one and three, and see how much time she had left. If it was only a few minutes, she would have to go for question two. Otherwise, she was going to tackle question four.

She had tried to answer a different version of question four in class and gotten the dreaded Good enough answer. But right now, Good enough was better than nothing.

She answered question one first, and had to pad her answer to hit 250 words. That worried her, but not enough to reread her response.

Answering questions one and three had taken ten of her forty minutes, which meant she had to write exceptionally fast to answer question four.

Which she did.

She had missed a few steps when she tried to answer it in class, but she remembered those steps now, and she put them in her outline—and she put them as early as she could so she wouldn’t miss them again.

So . . . if she had received an assignment to terminate a major historical figure, she would:

1. Clarify the assignment.

This was one of the steps she had missed in class. She had to make sure that the individual named was indeed the historical figure and not some minor historical figure with the exact same name. Make no assumptions. Assumptions had terrible consequences. (That was something she had missed in class.)

2. She would do months-worth of research because she had all the time in the world.

In class she had mentioned that she would do as much research as she could before starting the assignment and had gotten a Good enough response. But then, in an unusual move, Professor Stephenson had explained further. Jacey didn’t have to leave on the suggested start date, because no matter what she did, the timing of her trip was not dependent on the date in the modern era. (That was, and still felt like, an embarrassing well duh.)

3. She would examine all of the research material provided.

4. She did not have to follow the suggestions in the assignment.

She simply had to make sure the historical figure was wiped out of the timeline before he (and it was usually a he) did whatever it was that made him a major historical figure.

5. She would examine the timeline—as best she could—to make sure that her actions would not cause a severe timeline disruption.

(Thank you for the reminder, question two)

6. She would leave the time period as soon as she completed her mission.

7. She would return to her time and not explore the changes caused by her action, unless required by the person who had given her the assignment.

8. She would wait for her next assignment and “forget” she had ever participated in this one.

She wrote those points as quickly as she could. She wrote the bullet points first and then explained them. She had a feeling that eight points weren’t enough, but they would get her to 2,000 words in the time she had left, so she was going to have to make do with that.

She knew she was missing something, probably something important, something that would impact her grade as much as losing that true/false question to the stupid device malfunction, but she was so stressed, she couldn’t figure out what it was she was leaving out.

She reread what she could in the question four essay, tweaked it a bit, and knew she wasn’t going to come up with two more points.

With five minutes to spare, she raised her hand and Bales, one of the proctors, responded. He had been the resident assistant in her dorm during her freshman year and when he picked up the device, he smiled at her.

He inclined his head toward the door, and mouthed, Relax. Not because he knew she had this—he didn’t—but because he knew she couldn’t do anything else about it.

She was done, and that little device held a portion of her future.

She stood. Her hands were still shaking. Her arms were sore from resting on the uncomfortable desk, and her back hurt so badly that she was going to have to do some stretching exercises when she returned to the dorm.

She made her way out of the classroom, going around the back so that she wouldn’t go near the proctors. There were still three students left, typing madly, the panic clear on their faces.

She had a hunch they weren’t going to finish, and oh, were they going to be upset if that was the case.

Finishing was half the battle, at least that was what she had been telling herself.

She let herself out the door and into the hallway. The hallway was much cooler than that classroom. Other classroom doors lined the walls ahead of her, but they were closed and the interiors—visible through tiny square windows built into the doors—were dark.

She headed toward the staircase leading to the ground level, grabbing the thick wooden railing, and wincing as she felt a splinter go deeper into her hand.

The Class Survivors, as they called themselves, had promised to meet in Gareth’s Pizza Parlor, a 1970s-type hangout that was two blocks off campus. Technically, anything said at Gareth’s was not subject to the recording and tracking that everyone assumed was being done on campus.

Of course no one had proved it. But everyone was nervous about everything at Holcomb Time Travel Academy.

She picked her way down the stairs. Their centers were worn down from thousands of feet—or maybe it had been designed that way for historical accuracy.

Right now, she was peeved at historical accuracy. It made her head hurt. Her shoulders ached, and she was so tired.

At least this midterm had been her last before the one-week break. Next year, she wouldn’t get a break if she took classes in the fall semester. She would have to live through an actual time travel to a Thanksgiving dinner, held somewhen in the past. After American Thanksgiving had been invented by . . . oh, God. The name escaped her. Some leader or other during some war or other.

Her brain was shutting down. She needed food and caffeine and maybe, just maybe, she would allow herself to have a beer.

She shoved her way out the double doors and stopped on the sidewalk.

A cold wind had come up since she went inside. It blew dried leaves across the sidewalk and smelled faintly of snow. Winter was supposed to come early this year, and, frankly, she welcomed it. Her wardrobe—her real wardrobe—was better suited to cold temperatures than hot ones.

When she had applied for short-term time travels, she had asked for cold climates, because she just couldn’t imagine heading back to somewhere with deadly heat and no air conditioning. She had classmates who were in training now for those assignments, and that meant studying in actual deserts, without any modern protections at all.

She couldn’t think of a better definition of hell.

Usually that thought made her smile, but on this day it didn’t.

Beer. Pizza. The food of Gods or at least students for centuries.

The campus was mostly empty. Students tended to flee when they had completed their final midterm. There was still one day left of classes this week, but all that meant was that a good three-quarters of the students were already gone.

She always found the empty campus creepy. This place had wide sidewalks and comfortable places to sit. Built-in amphitheaters and large terraces in front of buildings of all different styles, all designed to accommodate camaraderie and lots of discussion.

On days like this, cold and gray with a growing wind, it felt like the entire community had been abandoned long ago. The decay on the buildings—the mold along one side of the Historical Reality Building: Post-Modern Italy, the cracks along the façade of the Physics Building, the scum at the edge of the pond in front of the Historical Reality Building: Unspecified Medieval Europe—added to the feeling.

She hurried past all of those buildings, heading toward Gareth’s Pizza. Ahead, a high speed train went by on its elevated track, reminding her what century she was in. Some private vehicles, all silver and sleek, were nose-in along the only available personal parking.

People milled around, although not everyone was a student. Most seemed older, probably professors, finishing up their grades—a task, one of her profs freshman year had said, that seemed to go back to time immemorial. And then he had laughed, because he had started his class that fall with a speech about the way that phrases like “time immemorial” meant nothing once time travel was invented.

There were stairs that led to the Sandimus Street, one of the thoroughfares that surrounded campus. Most of the streets had themes, usually some historical period that was easy to replicate, just so that the businesses could appeal to students.

Few businesses were as successful as Gareth’s, maybe because Gareth’s got the atmosphere right and the food was good.

She could smell the garlic, tomato sauce, and the baking crust as she approached. Her stomach growled.

The building was an unassuming single story structure that had initially been made of wood. Some more wood had been added at some point, looking like it had been glued on, and then there had been an ill-advised white stucco phase in an attempt to mimic some kind of Italian architecture.

The stucco had been removed as quickly as it had been slapped over the wood, but remnants remained—and melted—along the sides of the building, mixing between the gravel in the flower beds, the evergreen shrubs, and the dead bushes that no one had bothered to remove.

Jacey stepped over some broken glass and onto the cracked sidewalk. Her hands had stopped shaking but she was still on edge, going over and over the exam in her head, trying to figure out what else she had missed.

The big wooden door slammed open, narrowly missing her, and some students came out, huddled in thick jackets. They were laughing and talking about where they planned to go for the week. The smell of alcohol and pizza wafted out behind them, making her stomach growl again.

She slipped inside without having to touch the door, and then stood for a second as her eyes adjusted to the darkness of the interior. The overhead lights were always thin here, and the lighting toward the back was minimal.

There were lights on the tables, but they only illuminated the patrons, not the rest of the place.

Even Gareth’s was emptier than it should have been in the middle of the afternoon—five full booths with pizzas in the center; four people huddled over a slice at the bar, looking morose; and a couple of servers, standing near the open kitchen window, talking to two of the bakers.

Her group was at a table beneath a television set from maybe the early twenty-first century, playing a football game that had definitely come from that time period.

The table had the remains of three pizzas, their pans piled on top of each other, dishes pushed to the side. Two full pitchers of beer leached foam over the edge, and no one cleaned it up.

Six people were still there, but there were four more empty seats, which meant that a few folks had already left.

She hurried to the table and grabbed one of the empty chairs near the wall.

“There’s no pizza here,” she said, looking at the stacked pans.

“I’m up for ordering more,” Clyde said. He was square-jawed and handsome in a 1940s movie star way. Sometimes he accented that with hair gel and a thin mustache, although today, it was all gone.

His dark blond hair was mussed and there were deep shadows under his eyes.

“Anyone else?” Jacey asked. “Or should I just get a slice?”

“Pepperoni,” Nevin said—or at least that was what she thought he said. He’d clearly had a lot to drink. His blue shirt was half unbuttoned, revealing a thatch of black hair on his chest, and his dark brown eyes were glazed.

She took that muttered maybe-pepperoni word as a yes, and flagged down one of the servers. It had taken her half of her freshman year to get used to ordering food from actual people, so that she had the practice under her belt when she did travel into the past.

She still found it deeply inconvenient.

She ordered a pizza and a foul fizzy drink that replicated something called a Diet Coke. She’d developed a taste for it, however, rather liking the chemical flavor it left on her tongue.

Maybe that was why she’d be good at going into the past. She wasn’t that fussy about food that she should have found disgusting.

“Took you long enough to get here,” said Carly, who was on her second go-around in Advanced Timeline Disruption. Half the rumors that Jacey had heard about the difficulty level of the class had come from Carly, and in the beginning, Jacey had thought that it had just been some form of sour grapes.

It hadn’t been.

But that didn’t stop Carly from jabbing at her.

“That midterm was hard,” Jacey said. “I was being cautious.”

“I was cautious and it didn’t take me that long,” Carly said.

Jacey felt a stab of anger. She had done her best and she was tired. She didn’t need Carly’s criticisms right now.

“Some of us haven’t had the benefit of trying twice,” Jacey said.

Carly’s cheeks flushed. The jab apparently hit its mark.

“Not yet, anyway,” Carly said, and spun out of her chair. She walked fast to the bathrooms in the back.

“She’s in a bad mood,” Jacey said.

“Aren’t you?” Tito asked. He had kept his mustache from a Spanish Civil War reenactment he had to do for his Historical Reality: Rise of Fascism class. His black hair was growing out, though, revealing light brown roots.

“I don’t know,” Jacey said. “I’m too shaken up to know what I’m feeling.”

“I’m feeling grumpy,” said Angie. Her face was mottled, and her eyes red. Maybe she had been crying too, although Jacey couldn’t tell. She had learned, in the past six weeks, that Angie cried easily but the crying seemed to be part of a process—Angie would cry first, then straighten her spine, and get on with whatever she was facing.

“I’m thinking of dropping out,” Nevin said. He’d said that before, but this time, he sounded serious—or as serious as someone could be when they’d had too much beer.

He was tilting in his chair. Only one hand braced on the nearby wall kept him from sliding under the table.

“Again?” Carly asked. She had returned to the table with a handful of peppermint candies wrapped in some kind of clear plastic. “What’s causing it this time?”

The question verged on mean, but Nevin didn’t seem to notice.

He pushed himself into a sitting position and focused his bleary red eyes on Carly.

“Terminate,” he said. “They made me think about terminate.”

He stood up, swaying a little. He clutched the back of his chair to steady himself.

“I’m going home,” he announced and staggered out of the restaurant.

Everyone watched him go. Then Carly said, “He didn’t pay again, did he?”

“You think he forgot or is this drinking thing an act to get us to buy him food?” Mary W. asked. She no longer needed the W after her name, but the group had kept it there because Professor Stephenson had assigned it when it turned out there were four Marys in class.

“Maybe both,” Clyde said.

“No matter what it is, I guess I’m on my own for pepperoni,” Jacey said.

“I’ll have some,” Clyde said.

“Me too,” Tito said. “I think I’m just going to eat my way through the next three days.”

“What’s the next three days?” Mary W. asked.

“We get our grades in three days, or have you forgotten?” Carly said.

“Time means nothing to me,” Mary W. said.

In the early days of this class, that would have gotten a laugh, but it didn’t now.

“The word terminate bother anyone else?” Angie asked. Her voice was wobbly, and her nose had grown red. Jacey hoped Angie wouldn’t start crying again. It was always unpleasant when Angie started crying.

“Why would it bother us?” Jacey asked. She wanted to nip this entire topic in the bud. “It’s all over the readings and the exercises. It’s not like we haven’t discussed it before.”

“We haven’t, though, not really,” Angie said. “I mean it’s kinda there, but we are just heading into that stuff, right?”

She looked at Carly for confirmation. Carly was unwrapping one of those candies. The rest were in a pile next to a puddle of something or other—maybe beer.

“You’re asking me?” Carly said.

“You’re the only one who has had the class before,” Angie said.

“I don’t know what other classes you’ve taken,” Carly said. “Or what lectures you listened to.”

“We all knew what we signed up for,” Tito said. “They told us we can change the world, and we knew that might include what they’re calling termination.”

Maybe Jacey did want a beer, particularly for this conversation. She supposed it had to happen at some point, but she wasn’t ready for it.

Besides, if she was going to have a deep philosophical discussion, she wouldn’t have it with these people. Maybe with the group from her first Physics of Time Travel class.

The hints in that class about alternate timelines and the effect of chaos theory on changes caused by time travel had intrigued her. And her classmates there had been interested and interesting.

She had hoped to get into Advanced Physics of Time Travel next semester, even though she’d been told that was a class for researchers, not for actual travelers in time.

The prof of her first physics class had hinted that too many alternate timelines caused them to collapse inward and destroy all the work that the time travelers had done.

He made it sound like history reverted to its original timeline, but one of her later professors had scoffed at the idea.

Those were the kinds of things she wanted to discuss with actual smart people, not this group, which—if the classroom discussions were any indication—occasionally had trouble grasping what timeline disruption actually meant.

“Not every trip to the past involves a termination,” Mary W. said, repeating what they had all learned as freshmen. “You have to be superspecial to qualify for that level of time travel.”

The most senior level. Something most of the people in the Academy would never qualify for. Yet they were being quizzed on it.

“Termination is such a bloodless word,” Angie said. “We all know what it means.”

This conversation wasn’t going to end any time soon. Jacey sighed. Now, she wished she hadn’t come here or ordered the pizza.

“Do we?” Jacey asked because she was hungry and she was feeling pissy.

“It means we’re going to kill someone.” Angie’s voice wobbled again. “We had to imagine the steps we would take to kill someone.”

“Well, that’s about as blunt as it gets,” Clyde said.

“But that’s not true,” Jacey said. “We’re usually not killing anyone. Termination means we take them out of the timeline.”

“Yeah, usually with one of those old-fashioned rifles,” Angie said.

Carly unwrapped another candy. Her mouth was already bulging with two of them, but she crammed the third in anyway.

“None of you have had Professor Warthe’s Ethics of Time Travel yet, have you?” she asked. It was a bit hard to understand her because she kept moving the candies from one side of her mouth to the other. “He spends four weeks on this topic. It’s what made me stay at the Academy. I was thinking of dropping out after failing this class.”

That had Jacey’s attention. She hadn’t realized that Carly had been thinking of dropping out. Carly had seemed bulletproof, like nothing about the classes bothered her.

“What did he say?” Tito asked. He was leaning forward.

Carly sighed. “You realize you’re asking me to explain four weeks of lectures in a single answer.”

“I’m asking you what made the difference for you,” Tito said.

“Okay,” Carly said. She put the rest of the candies in the pocket of her sweater, then played with a piece of that strange plastic wrap. It crinkled as she spoke. “He said nothing about time travel is simple.”

“That’s a ‘well duh,’” Clyde said. He moved to one side as the server showed up with Jacey’s pizza.

Jacey cleared a spot on the table for it, and grabbed a plate that looked clean enough. She was so hungry she could eat the plate. The pizza’s cheese was still bubbling. The pepperoni had curled, making little cup shapes that held a ridiculous amount of grease.

“I mean it,” Carly said. “The answers are weird and tough. Like, so let’s pick some twentieth-century boogeyman like the profs always do. If you, say, get rid of that Hitler guy by making sure his parents never meet, are you terminating him?”

“He won’t exist,” Tito said, “so yes.”

“But you’re not doing something we think is reprehensible,” Carly said. “You’re just stopping two people from getting to know each other.”

“Timeline snapback,” Mary W. said. “At least I think that’s what it’s called. They’ll meet later. If you do something simple like that, it usually doesn’t work.”

“Or does it?” Carly asked. “Because it took one sperm and one egg to make a monster. The female cycle guarantees that particular egg will be gone even as little as six months later. So it would be a different egg meeting a different sperm, even though the couple is the same.”

“And if they name the kid Adolf?” Tito asked.

“It won’t matter. He won’t be the same kid genetically. I mean, you’re not the same as your siblings,” Carly said.

The men were looking at her, as if trying to understand what, exactly, she was talking about. Apparently, they hadn’t been through any of the biology classes yet.

“That simple change, though, creates a question,” Carly said. “And here it is: Did you ‘terminate’ one of the boogeymen of the twentieth century?”

“Well,” Clyde said slowly, “using the terminology of the Academy, yes, you would have.”

“Exactly,” Carly said.

Jacey served herself a piece of pizza. The cheese stretched, and she had to use her forefinger to separate the cheese strings from the entire pie. The cheese was hot and burned into her skin.

She was pretending not to be involved in this conversation, but she was listening. And she wasn’t sure she was believing anything she heard.

“You’re still an assassin.” The voice belonged to Nevin. He was standing—or rather, swaying—near the table.

“I thought you left,” Tito said. He didn’t sound happy that Nevin had returned.

“Left my wallet when I paid,” Nevin said.

“You didn’t pay,” Mary W said. “If you don’t have your wallet, you lost it somewhere else.”

Wallets and purses were another thing to get used to. Jacey hated both of them, because they made paying so very hard. She had to remember that her wallet contained her payment cards, which the Academy gave out to students at the start of the term.

Most places around the Academy only took payment cards or cash, which was a real eye-opener. It was annoying. She had lost or forgotten her wallet more than once.

“I’m sure it’s here,” Nevin said. He wasn’t slurring his words as badly as he had.

He leaned over and grabbed things on the table, lifting napkins, sliding plates, shoving glasses aside. He reached for Jacey’s pizza, and she moved it out of his way. She had no idea where his hands had been, and the very idea of that disgusted her.

He ran a hand through his hair, making it all stick up. “Okay, that’s not going to be any fun,” he said. “I don’t even know where I was today.”

“The midterm,” Carly said. “Then here.”

“Maybe I forgot it at home,” Nevin said.

“Maybe,” Carly said. Her tone said, Get the hell out of here.

“Hey, Nevs,” Clyde said. “What did you mean when you said that you were forced to think about the word terminate?”

Nevin rocked back on his heels, nearly lost his balance, and put his hand on the back of a nearby booth. The woman in the booth slid away from him, as if she expected him to reach for her.

“I said that?” he asked.

“About the exam,” Clyde said.

“Hm,” Nevin said. “I guess today is the day I don’t remember nothing.”

He pushed himself upright, then started to totter away from them. Then he stopped, lifted a hand with the forefinger pointing, almost like an exclamation point, and turned around.

“I don’t know what I meant,” he said, “but I have been thinking about it. They’re turning us into assassins. On purpose. In defense of the timeline.”

Then he leaned forward, brushing close to the woman in the booth again. She was watching him now.

“You know,” Nevin said, “that’s the other thing they don’t explain. Which timeline?”

His voice had become strident. Half the people in Gareth’s turned toward him.

He didn’t seem to notice.

He pivoted again, had to grab a different booth for balance, and then staggered forward.

“You guys see my wallet,” he said loudly, “you save it for me, okay?”

Then he continued out the door, without waiting for a response.

“That was fun,” Clyde said, meaning the opposite.

Jacey took a bite of pizza. She had been too mesmerized to do it earlier. The pepperoni was crisp, but the crust was slightly burned. Still, it didn’t matter. She needed food.

“What does he mean ‘which timeline’?” Angie asked. “I thought there was only one timeline.”

“One main timeline,” Mary W said. “They said that a lot freshman year.”

“But which one is it?” Angie said. “In that Physics class, they said we would create hundreds of timelines in our lifetime if we traveled in the past. So how do we know which one is the main one?”

Her words hung over the group. Jacey continued to eat her piece of pizza, not saying anything. What was there to say?

They were all tired, they’d all had a tough exam, and they had been drinking. Ruminating like this was a luxury, not a necessity.

Unless you were Nevin. Who was beginning to sound like he might not return at all.

Although maybe that had just been the alcohol talking.

She sipped her Diet Coke thing and grabbed another slice of pizza.

“You’re being quiet,” Carly said to her.

“Eating.” Jacey deliberately spoke with her mouth full.

“You’re still being quiet,” Carly said. “What’re you thinking?”

Jacey sighed. She didn’t want to talk.

She chewed, swallowed, and chased the food down with more fake Diet Coke. Then she let out a burp that made Tito slide back on his chair.

“Impressive,” Clyde said with a grin.

Jacey hadn’t burped like that to impress. She had done so to make them stop paying attention to her, but it didn’t work. Now they were all staring at her with something like admiration.

“Carbonation,” she said to Clyde.

“You’re dodging me,” Carly said. “You’re thinking something.”

“Why do you care?” Jacey asked.

“Because you’re always interesting,” Carly said. She wasn’t saying it as a compliment. She seemed to mean something else by it.

Jacey ripped the crust off her piece of pizza. She made it into a meticulous job, doing it slowly.

“These conversations are dumb,” she said. “You knew what you were getting into. Everyone wants to change the timeline. Everyone wants to be a big hero. And then you find out that maybe you have to shoot a shitty human being dead or you have to poison some vicious murderer guy, and whoa! You’re surprised. Only you’re supposed to research a job when you get it.”

“After you got it,” Tito said.

“You should have some basic knowledge of the time period,” Jacey said. “You probably know who the target is.”

“Unless they’re—what did Professor Stephenson call it?—a minor historical figure,” Mary W. said.

“So quit the job. Walk away,” Jacey said. “And if it all bothers you now—”

As she said that, she looked directly at Angie, whose bottom lip was trembling.

“—then drop out like Nevin is threatening to do. Or change your major to ethics or philosophy. Or do the science crap, in biology, like Carly was talking about, or maybe figure out why too many changes causes timelines to collapse.”

“Wait! What?” Clyde asked. “What’s this about timelines?”

Jacey waved her hand to shut him up, dripping red sauce in the center of the table.

“That’s not important,” she said. “What’s important is that you gotta figure out what you want to do here. And in your future.”

That phrase was something all of the professors said. Time travel could get confusing. People had to pay attention to their own lives, lived from one point to the next, even if they were going backwards in time.

The future was the future from this moment in human history.

Your future was the next moment (or moments) in your life, even if you were in, say, 1875.

Past future was the future for the regular (non-time traveling) folk in 1875.

It could get extremely confusing.

And her head hurt. Maybe she should have some beer after all. It would probably help her sleep.

“So,” Angie said, “it doesn’t bother you to kill people?”

“You know,” Mary W. said, “that was in our college applications.”

“And I got asked it in the interview,” Tito said.

“Me, too,” Clyde said.

“It’s standard,” Carly said. “But at that point it was theoretical. I bet all of you said some version of Not if they’re a bad person. Am I right?”

She was right about Jacey. But now Carly had her wondering. Did the time traveler path (upper level) include lessons in killing? Like the military did, maybe. (As if she would know. She had never been near the military.)

It was so weird, though. She was sitting here, listening, feeling her headache get worse, and she was slowly realizing she wasn’t bothered by the word terminate at all. Or the fact that she would be the one to do the dirty work.

“Found it!”

The shout caught everyone’s attention in the restaurant. Nevin was leaning in the door, holding up his wallet. He was grinning and swaying, still clearly drunk.

He staggered back inside, waved the wallet at the group at the table, said, “The cash is still in it too!”

He tossed all of his cash on the table in triumph.

“Bet you haven’t seen money like that before!” he said loudly.

“Oh, I have,” Carly said, pulling the money toward herself, and placing it on top of one of Gareth’s ridiculous paper invoices. “And that should pretty much cover us for the entire amount.”

“Hey, no!” Nevin said. “I’m not paying for your pizza.”

“Why not?” Clyde asked. “We’ve paid for yours all semester.”

“Jeez,” Nevin said sinking into a chair. “I’ve been robbed after all.”

And then he reached for a beer, clearly thinking it would make the pain go away.

• • • •

The first Monday after Fall Break, only nine people showed up to Professor Stephenson’s Advanced Temporal Dislocation class. Angie was not one of them. Neither was Nevin—or the kid who had his device taken away near the beginning of the midterm.

Jacey sat in her usual chair toward the back, but it felt silly to be back there. The room was built for forty students and had never been full for this class.

Now it looked ridiculously empty, with everyone scattered along the rows. Professor Stephenson didn’t seem to mind.

She hadn’t even looked at the class yet. She was a tall, thin woman who favored loose black clothing that made her look even taller and thinner.

She stood in the bottom of what looked like half a bowl. Behind her was a blackboard that she never used, and in front of her was some kind of projector that had been made for presentations in the early twenty-first century. Jacey knew enough to figure that someone needed one of those laptop computers from the period to make the projector work, but she hadn’t seen anyone do it yet.

Jacey was tired. She had traveled during Fall Break, although she hadn’t gone home. She had driven to her grandmother’s and then driven back. Jacey had actually rented a real personal vehicle because she didn’t want to risk talking to anyone on public transport. She wanted time to think, and driving—actual physical driving—gave her a chance to do that.

Her grandmother had lived near the great time-travel hub of Dixon, Illinois. Dixon had been in the middle of nowhere when the time-travel industry started. The flat land, the easy access to several great universities, and the unwillingness of the small-town residents to ask questions had been the perfect place to found an industry that reveled in secrecy.

Jacey’s grandmother had lived there her entire life, and her grave was on a little rise in a cemetery just outside of town.

Jacey had never met the woman, but had come to the gravesite ever since she had been in high school. It was the perfect place to think.

Besides, she had a hunch that her grandmother had been a kindred spirit. Her marriage to Jacey’s grandfather had been, in his words, “mercifully short,” and had produced two children, one of whom had been Jacey’s father.

He had hated his mother, and had felt that the world was a better place after she had died. But his stories about her—that she wasn’t always home when she was supposed to be, that sometimes she seemed older when he saw her after only a few hours away, that she was secretive and seemed to know more about history than anyone he had ever met—led the entire family to believe that she worked for one of the many time-travel conglomerates that had risen around Dixon.

It was that idea, and the fact that someone not her grandfather had sprung for an actual grave in a choice spot on a hill overlooking the city, someone who invested enough to put a sculpture of a slender woman with a stunningly beautiful face on top of the headstone, someone who had placed one word beneath the statue—Beloved—that intrigued Jacey from the start.

At some point, she would research her own grandmother. Until then, she was the only family member who visited.

She sat graveside, staring at the birth and death dates, and wondered what kind of living happened in between them.

This time, she had asked a quiet question of the beautiful woman on top of the stone: Did you consider yourself an assassin? Is that why you grew increasingly hard?

Of course Jacey got no answers, not from the grave itself. But the gravesite had calmed her.

It was one of those timeless places, at least in the United States. Cemeteries had existed even before the country’s founding. The cemetery had housed the city’s finest for hundreds of years. It had also been full when her grandmother had been buried there. No one new was supposed to get a spot.

More proof, according to Jacey’s father, that his mother had traveled in time. She had probably bought the spot when she went back to kill a senator or something.

At Christmas, Jacey had tried to tell her father that time travel didn’t work that way, especially for the travelers, but he didn’t want to listen. He barely talked to her anymore, saying that she was emulating a person she had never met, and that was wrong.

But he emulated dozens of different historical figures and he had never met them. Jacey had only pointed that out to him once, but once had probably been one time too many.

Her family didn’t want her here at the Academy. They hadn’t funded her education. And she really hadn’t talked to them since she started taking classes there.

During the break, she had had a big decision to make. She had only gotten an eighty-five on her midterm in this class, which meant that she had to do extremely well on the presentation and the final to pass.

That grade really had been a crystalizing moment, and she could understand why some of her classmates had not come back to class—and might not have returned to campus at all.

Time travel wasn’t easy. It required the thinking that military leaders had to do in war—that it was worth sacrificing this area to gain in that area.

Such thinking—such experience—came with great power. One person really could change a timeline. But it also came with a strange anonymity.

She knew the names of generals and military leaders from all of her favorite moments in history.

Aside from the founders of time travel, she did not know the name of a single traveler—and she never would.

“Miss Cullen! Are you going to continue to woolgather or do you have an answer to the question?”

Professor Stephenson’s nasal voice pierced through Jacey’s thoughts. She hadn’t even realized that the class had started, let alone that she had been asked a question.

She was even more tired than she thought.

“I’m sorry, Professor,” she said. “Could you repeat the question?”

“Did you do the reading and research for today’s class?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jacey almost felt like she should stand up to take the questions.

“Then answer a question for me. Would you terminate John Wilkes Booth?”

Jacey’s mouth went dry. John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, whom some still considered to be the greatest president of the United States.

Jacey made herself swallow. “I assume the job is designed so that Abraham Lincoln would live out his presidential term?”

Professor Stephenson had walked to Jacey’s side of the room, but hadn’t come up the stairs. She was holding a pencil in her hand, and had another stuck in the graying bun at the top of her head. She would have looked absent minded, if it weren’t for her very sharp blue eyes.

“I did not tell you the goal of the termination,” Professor Stephenson said, “and I will not. Sometimes, you must determine that on your own.”

Jacey nodded. She had done the single chapter of reading on the man, but nothing more.

“Well, then,” said Jacey, “since he died shortly after the assassination, I’m going to assume they didn’t want him to get to that end date. It would have the bonus of preventing Lincoln’s death.”

“Why do you consider that to be relevant?” Professor Stephenson asked. “I asked you if you would terminate him?”

“I think it is relevant,” Jacey said. “I’d need to know what the goal was so I could plan the job.”

“Hm,” Professor Stephenson said. “Anyone else want to weigh in?”

No one raised a hand. People tended not to volunteer in this class, and Jacey had a hunch that the lack of volunteers would continue now that the class was smaller.

“All right, then,” Professor Stephenson said, “you’re still on the hot seat, Miss Cullen. Would you terminate John Wilkes Booth?”

Jacey bit her lip and thought about it.

Everyone knew that Booth had assassinated Lincoln. But Booth had also been part of the most famous acting family in America at that point. He had performed all over the country, and the Booths had become some of the best known Shakespeareans in the world.

His brother Edwin’s contribution to theater was still studied, or so the research book had said.

And Jacey didn’t know what the relationship between Edwin and John Wilkes had been, nor did she know if John Wilkes had any children. She did know that he hadn’t married, but she didn’t know much else.

“No, ma’am,” she said after a moment. “I don’t have enough information to do the job.”

Professor Stephenson’s eyebrows rose. The response clearly intrigued her.

“Even though Booth is one of American’s villains,” she said crisply, “you would not take the assignment to end his life?”

Jacey’s heart was pounding and her mouth had gone dry. Fortunately, her hands were clasped on her lap or everyone would have seen them shaking.

“That’s correct, ma’am,” she said.

“Hmph.” Professor Stephenson turned away, toward Clyde’s side of the room. He was frowning at Jacey and shaking his head slightly.

But before she completed the pivot, Professor Stephenson stopped and pivoted again, until she was facing Jacey.

“You wouldn’t take the assignment,” Professor Stephenson said, as if she was trying to clarify this in her head. “Because you value life?”

Jacey answered before she even had time to think about it.

“Because I value specificity,” she said.

The edges of Professor Stephenson’s mouth edged upward, and then her expression returned to its normal glower. She nodded once, then turned back toward Clyde’s side of the room.

Clyde was still staring at Jacey, as if he couldn’t believe she had said that. He opened his hands slightly as if to say What the ever-loving fuck?

Professor Stephenson caught the move. She focused on him.

“Mr. Auella,” she said, “would you take the assignment?”

“Of course I would,” he said with a little too much enthusiasm. “I mean you said it. He’s one of America’s villains.”

Professor Stephenson nodded, then faced the class. “And yet,” she said, “we know of him. Do we know why we know of him? If he’s one of America’s villains, shouldn’t some time traveler have ended him by now?”

No one volunteered. Jacey’s heart was still beating too quickly. She didn’t want to be on the hot seat again.

“Why hasn’t anyone?” Professor Stephenson asked.

“Because the time period is protected,” Mary W. said. Her voice sounded thin. That might have been because she was sitting way up in the back or it might have been because she clearly was feeling tentative about her answer.

“That’s a myth,” Professor Stephenson said. “Haven’t your other professors informed you of that?”

“I—um—didn’t have—um—no,” Mary said, her cheeks flushed. She looked down.

“Physics of Time Travel, people.” Professor Stephenson clapped her hands. “Why hasn’t anyone offed John Wilkes Booth yet?”

Tito cleared his throat. The sound echoed in the large space.

“Mr. Pluma,” Professor Stephenson said. “Do you have an opinion?”

“A guess, ma’am,” he said. “I think that’s all we can have.”

She stared at him. So did everyone else. Jacey had to turn in her chair so that she could see Tito’s face. His teeth were tugging on his lower lip.

She doubted he even knew he was doing that.

“Do you care to share your guess with the class?” Professor Stephenson’s sarcasm was cutting. It used to make Jacey flinch. But she had trained herself to sit still during any harsh remark from Professor Stephenson so that she wouldn’t react at all when Professor Stephenson treated her badly.

Tito cleared his throat again. “Um, well, physics of time travel,” he said. “We go back, and one of us offs John Wilkes Booth. That creates an alternate timeline. So if we weren’t privy to the mission, we stay in this timeline, where this Booth guy never died.”

“And the others?” Professor Stephenson asked.

“What others?” Tito asked.

“You said ‘we go back’ and ‘one of us’ offs—colorful word, that—Booth. What happens to the others who went back?”

“That’s—ah—Advanced Physics of Time Travel,” Tito said, his voice wobbled. “And I’m taking that next semester.”

Professor Stephenson rolled her eyes. “Has anyone taken Advanced Physics of Time Travel yet?”

No one raised their hand. Everyone stared at her. Jacey hadn’t taken the class, but even if she had, she wasn’t sure she would have raised her hand.

When Professor Stephenson was in this mood, tangling with her was not advised.

“Miss Cullen,” she said, making Jacey jump.

“I haven’t taken the class either,” Jacey said quickly.

“I presumed as much when you did not raise your hand,” Professor Stephenson said.

Jacey’s cheeks flushed.

“I want to ask you a different question,” Professor Stephenson said.

“Okay,” Jacey said quickly. She wanted to get past that awkward moment.

“Let’s pretend that you have been given the assignment to ‘off’—” Professor Stephenson nodded toward Tito “—Mr. Booth.”

“Okay,” Jacey said, and immediately wished she hadn’t. It was verging on a nervous tic.

“Let’s say that the company making the assignment doesn’t care at all about the history of theater or great actors or renown Shakespeareans.”

Jacey started to say Okay but caught herself.

“Let’s say that to this company, the entire Booth family was fair game. Their research says that aside from the—well, rather sizeable—impact on American theater and, of course, the even more sizeable impact of Mr. Booth’s assassination of Mr. Lincoln, the entire Booth family of the mid-nineteenth century made no impact on history that this company cares about. Would you take the assignment then?”

There was a trap built into the question, but Jacey had no idea what it was. She didn’t like the assumption of no impact outside of two rather large things and she thought this imaginary company was being quite cavalier with human history.

But she had already given Professor Stephenson an unexpected answer earlier. Jacey wasn’t sure she wanted to do that again.

“I might,” she said slowly. “I’d have to do my own research.”

Professor Stephenson stared at her for a moment, and Jacey had the sense that somehow she had disappointed her professor. But she wasn’t sure how.

She had not located the trap.

Professor Stephenson sighed, and then walked back to the podium. She pulled out a clear plastic folder with paper inside. She opened the folder, pulled out the paper, and then looked up at the class.

The disappointment was back. Or maybe it was determination. Jacey couldn’t tell. Then Professor Stephenson peeled off six sheets, stuck them back in the folder, and clutched the remaining sheets.

“This,” she said, as she handed out the paper to the various students, “will not count toward your grade. However, it is good practice for something that will count toward your grade. I suggest you do it with the same attention to detail that you gave the midterm.”

Tito was frowning over his sheet. Clyde had already folded his and put it in a book.

Professor Stephenson gave Jacey her copy last.

Jacey took the thin page, slightly irritated at the old-fashioned delivery method. Why did professors here have to use outdated technology all of the time? Couldn’t the students get a break on occasion and get their homework the way that schools usually did it?

She swallowed the irritation and looked down.

Advanced Temporal Disruption

Research Paper

Due at the beginning of the next class

You have accepted the assignment to terminate John Wilkes Booth. The termination must occur before Booth attends Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration in 1865.

Four others had this job before you. They failed. You are the fifth hire.

Below, list three ways you would attempt the termination.

List the risks of each method. Examine, if you can, any temporal disruptions that might result.

• • • •

By the time she looked up, three hands were already in the air, people wanting to ask clarification questions.

Jacey folded the paper and listened to the questions. None of them surprised her. She wanted the class to end so she could get started. She had forty-seven hours to complete this. Even before someone asked if they could use a time stretch, which was, essentially, a short time travel loop to gain more time, Jacey knew that the answer would be no.

They had to do the research in Real Time.

The questions finally ended, along with the class. And even though Jacey had chosen a chair deeper in the bowl than six of the other students, she was out the door ahead of them, already planning how she would accomplish this.

It required scheduling as well as creativity.

She hoped she was up to the task.

• • • •

Sixteen cups of coffee, one crash of her ancient writing computer, and lots of discarded notes later, Jacey finished the paper.

She barely had enough time to make it to class, and she certainly didn’t have enough time to reread her work.

Sometime in the middle of the first near all-nighter, she realized she had been going about the assignment all wrong.

She didn’t have time to do minute research on those tiny moments in Booth’s life that might have put him on a different path.

She had to assume that the previous four failed attempts at terminating Booth happened because the travelers went after the adult man. It would probably have been easy to try to shoot him while he was on a stage or arrange an accident with his horse or poison him after a triumphant show with his brothers Edwin and Junius at the Winter Garden theater in New York.

Booth had been a slippery and incautious man who had lived in a dangerous time. He had had the devil’s own luck, even at times when he shouldn’t have.

Most time travelers would probably have tried to take advantage of that.

But she couldn’t lose track of the conversation she had had after the midterm. Nevin’s presence haunted her, just like that discussion of the word termination haunted her.

She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to shoot a man in the head, the way that Booth had shot Lincoln. She couldn’t comfortably knife someone in his sleep. She really didn’t want to cause collateral damage to the other Booths or anyone who happened to be near John Wilkes on the day she went after him.

But she didn’t condone harming children, and she certainly didn’t want to get too close to a healthy young actor who drank too much and was known for a propensity for violence.

And then she remembered that this was not a graded assignment. It was some kind of practice.

So she felt free to stop thinking about what the professor wanted and to think about what Jacey might actually do.

She handed in the paper. Professor Stephenson hadn’t shown up. A teaching assistant took eight papers. Mary W. hadn’t arrived by the time Jacey left.

Class was canceled with an admonition written on the horrid chalkboard: Get some sleep.

So Jacey did.

• • • •

Only eight students showed up to the final class of the week. Mary W. did not attend. Jacey assumed Mary W. had dropped out. Maybe imagining herself in the 1860s, trying to terminate a dangerous man, had been too much for her.

Carly climbed over a few seats to sit near Tito. He glared at her.

“I’m not talking about it,” he said, and then he moved to a different row.

Jacey didn’t know if Tito meant he wasn’t going to talk about that assignment or if they had been having some other discussion. She hadn’t socialized with anyone from this class since the midterm.

Professor Stephenson was on time, which was, by her own definition, late.

She passed out seven papers, but held one back. That one happened to be Jacey’s.

Jacey stared at it, seeing only the black marks on the page. She didn’t even see a red mark on the top, like the other papers had.

“How do you know if someone shot him the night before the inauguration?” Tito demanded, without raising his hand. “I can’t believe that’s possible. It took me hours to find out exactly where that man had been living and traveling. It was a lot of work.”

“Mr. Pluma,” Professor Stephenson said as she set Jacey’s paper on the podium. “You did not do a lot of work. None of you did a lot of work. You couldn’t do a lot of work in the forty-seven hours I gave you. You did a preliminary investigation.”

Jacey kept staring at her paper. She couldn’t read it from this distance. Why hadn’t it come back to her?

“Most travelers do months of intense research before heading out on their assignment. The kind of preliminary work you did was the kind you might have to do if someone wants you to take a job quickly. Of course,” Professor Stephenson moved into her most didactic mode, “you would have to ask yourself—and maybe them—what’s the point of having a job done quickly when all of time is available?”

“You said I would have flunked this,” Tito said. “I did the work you assigned.”

“Your paper is barely different from three others in this room. The four of you did not pay attention to the assignment.” Professor Stephenson rolled up Jacey’s assignment and held it like a baton. “I told you. Other travelers failed at this mission. That meant there were four obvious ways to terminate Booth before the inauguration. You four found those obvious ways and did not deviate from them. That’s a failure.”

“It’s the work,” Tito said. He was getting angry.

“It is not,” Professor Stephenson said. “The imaginary company that wanted to hire you would hire you to think outside that annoyingly proverbial box. You did not. I told you there was a box. You had to figure out what it was on your own. Four of you did not.”

Jacey watched her paper move up and down as Professor Stephenson gestured.

“The rest of you had at least one item on your list that would qualify as outside the box,” Professor Stephenson said. “Your grade reflects that.”

Clyde sighed and leaned back in his chair.

“You will get a similar assignment in the next few weeks, and it will count toward your grade. You need to read the assignment carefully and remember this one.” Professor Stephenson returned to the podium. She took the clear folder with the paper inside, and shoved it on one of the podium shelves. When she had finished that, she was no longer holding Jacey’s paper.

Jacey raised her hand. She didn’t want to be rude, but—

“Ah, yes, Miss Cullen,” Professor Stephenson said. “See me after class.”

And that was that.

• • • •

Professor Stephenson’s office was on the top floor of the Theory Building. The name of the building had always amused Jacey, because she found it ridiculous that people would say things like You’ll find it in Theory. She always mentally added a comma. You’ll find it, in theory.

Irrelevant jokes like that eased her nerves. She had no idea why Professor Stephenson wanted to see her in person. It also bothered Jacey that she hadn’t gotten her paper back.

The Theory Building had a wide atrium at the center that opened to a skylight six stories up. Every other level ringed around that atrium, so that anyone coming out of a classroom or office could look down and see the plants and chairs and whoever was milling about down below.

The light was wonderful here. On cloudy days, the atrium was lit from sunlamps placed underneath the overhang from the ring.

Coming in here usually made her mood rise. Usually that wasn’t hard. But on this day, her nerves were getting the better of her.

She took the elevator up. Most of the features of this building were designed to replicate the mid-twenty-first century. The elevators here were fast, unlike the ones in, say, The Historical Reality Building: Mid-twentieth Century.

She wasn’t sure if she was grateful for the speed or not.

Professor Stephenson’s office was to the right. The entry was marked by two large schefflera plants. They were as well tended as the plants in the atrium.

The door beyond them was open. Jacey knocked and then walked in, just like instructed.

Professor Stephenson was leaning on her desk, a book in hand. She had a pair of glasses crammed into the bun on the top of her head, and another pair hanging from a chain around her neck.

She looked up as Jacey came inside.

“Sit,” Professor Stephenson said, gesturing toward a gray chair that looked surprisingly comfortable.

Behind it, there was a matching loveseat and several bookshelves. Computers of varying vintages littered a table on the other side of the room. This office had no window, but there was a blank wall across from the professor’s desk. That suggested either a holographic program that would mimic windows (there were several such programs all over campus) or the fact that the professor used that wall to watch vids and other images from the past.

Jacey sank into the chair. It had a thick cushion that held her up a little. She still had to tilt her head to look in Professor Stephenson’s sharp blue eyes.

Professor Stephenson set the book down but kept a hand on it.

“I’m sure you’re wondering about the paper,” she said, without a single trace of sarcasm. In fact, Jacey had never heard Professor Stephenson use such a calm and gentle tone before.

“Yes, ma’am,” Jacey said and swallowed compulsively. Oh, she hated being that nervous.

“You found three points where you could theoretically terminate John Wilkes Booth without resorting to violence.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jacey said. She had done as much research as she could in the limited amount of time given and she wasn’t sure her methods would work.

Booth was the ninth child of ten, so if she had decided to get in the way of his parents’ introduction to each other, nine other children—including Edwin Booth—would not have come into the world.

So, she had to delay the conception of the ninth child, as per the comments of Carly. A different egg would meet a different sperm, and a different biological child would be created.

Jacey’s first choice was to have Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, a well-known British actor, get a different performing job or extend an acting tour. Her second was to remove Booth’s mother, Mary Ann Holmes, from the family farmhouse each time Junius was due home in 1837.

The final method seemed less sure, but Jacey included it. She would somehow delay Junius Booth’s departure from England seventeen years before Booth was born, which would probably have messed with the biology of all of the Booth children.

Jacey had worried that her methods lacked the kind of detail Professor Stephenson wanted, but Jacey didn’t have the time to learn, say, shipping schedules from England to America in 1821.

“It would seem to me,” Professor Stephenson said, “it would be easier to grab a pistol and shoot Booth in his boarding house the night before the inauguration.”

“I’m sure that was tried,” Jacey said primly.

Professor Stephenson smiled. “You would be right. Two travelers tried that and were thwarted. One lost his life. The other went to jail, which was not a pleasant experience in 1865.”

Jacey folded her hands and placed them on her lap to keep them from shaking.

“Are you averse to violence?” Professor Stephenson asked.

“Um, ah, personally?” Jacey asked. She forced herself to remain emotionless. “It’s part of life. It happens. We’re studying it all the time.”

“I asked the question incorrectly,” Professor Stephenson said. “Are you averse to using violence to achieve a worthy time-travel end?”

“In theory, no,” Jacey said.

“In practice.” Professor Stephenson seemed like a different person. In class, she would have asked that question with a slightly angry edge. Here, she seemed to want to know the answer.

“Um, if I have to, I mean, that’s what we’re training for, right?” Jacey asked.

Professor Stephenson tilted her head slightly. “Do you believe that?”

“It’s what gets talked about,” Jacey said. “You know, terminate and stuff like that. And there are all kinds of classes in weaponry throughout the ages. I mean, I’m supposed to learn poisons and how to shoot all kinds of guns.”

“You are,” Professor Stephenson said in that same patient voice. “Did you ever think that the weaponry was for your survival in dangerous times?”

Jacey felt cold. “No,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. But the poison, that’s—”

“If you know how to make poison, and if you can identify various kinds of poison, you know how to avoid it,” Professor Stephenson said.

“And use it,” Jacey said. She hoped she didn’t sound too judgmental.

Professor Stephenson smiled. “Often travelers who need to poison someone use a modern untraceable poison that they’ve brought with them.”

“Oh,” Jacey said.

Professor Stephenson let go of the book and braced her hands on the desk. She looked more comfortable than Jacey had ever seen her.

“We are not sanctioned assassins,” Professor Stephenson said. “In fact, if you look at the program we developed here, we’re sending people back to avoid whatever it was that happened, not to shoot someone and change it. Sometimes that is necessary, though, and it doesn’t really help the time traveler to think of what they had done. We have to pull them out of the field and work with them to deal with the death, even though—as one of your classmates said—the ‘bad person,’ which was their phrase, is still alive in another timeline.”

“Small comfort,” Jacey said.

“Exactly,” Professor Stephenson said. “But most people who come to the Academy lack imagination. They go for the easy answer, which is usually wrong, or they make assumptions that come from the entertainments they watch, which are mostly about going back in time to kill someone to alter the timeline, as if there’s only one.”

Jacey was frowning. She wasn’t sure where this was going.

“Students like that,” Professor Stephenson said, “will never get into an actual timeline disruption situation. If they are ever hired, they will go back to research something small that isn’t available in the records, such as what exact date did people start using actual matches in Duluth, Georgia.”

Jacey felt her frown grow deeper. Professor Stephenson clearly noticed and smiled at her.

“Then there are the students who think that we’re going to force them to become assassins. Those students drop out. I don’t know if you examined the information you were sent when you applied at the Academy, but we keep a tight lid on when students can drop a class and get a refund. We do not refund semester fees or fees from past years if a student drops out entirely. We expect students to drop, and we want to make sure we’re compensated.”

And then she shrugged, grinning just a little. The grin seemed like the old Professor Stephenson—the one who showed up in class.

“Of course, the students who use time travel to go back to avoid paying fees in the first place often find themselves arrested,” she said. “Illegal use of time travel has a lot more penalties than you’re taught in your basic Beginning Time Travel Law class.”

She seemed to be pleased about that. Jacey felt uncomfortable with it. Jacey would never consider using time travel to benefit herself, but she knew classmates who had discussed it.

They could get into so much trouble. She wondered if it was her responsibility to warn them.

“I teach this class,” Professor Stephenson said, “not because I enjoy talking about timeline disruption. I really don’t. I make it as difficult as possible for people who are unserious to remain in the class.”

Jacey nodded. That explained Professor Stephenson’s attitude toward the students.

“I often go years without a student thinking through what they’re talking about. It’s rare for a student to think outside the box. It’s even rarer for the student to be willing to do it on all three answers in a paper like this one.”

Jacey swallowed. She wasn’t sure if nodding was the right thing to do or not.

“You,” Professor Stephenson said, leaning forward just a bit, “are a breath of fresh air. I was trying to encourage you without telling you what I wanted.”

“That’s why you didn’t discuss my paper in class,” Jacey said.

“Precisely,” Professor Stephenson said. “We don’t want others to try to game the system.”

“What do you mean?” Jacey asked. “You mean the tests? That system?”

Professor Stephenson stood up and walked around her desk. She shuffled a few papers away from an array of buttons on the desktop.

Then she paused.

“The system I’m talking about,” she said, “is the actual time-travel network. If you want a real education in time travel that would allow you to work at something bigger than matches in Duluth, then you need to prove you’re worthy of even being asked.”

Jacey felt the ground shifting beneath her. She had thought that maybe she was going to get into trouble here, but that wasn’t what was happening.

Still, she concentrated as hard as she could because she didn’t want to mishear any of this.

“I’ll be honest,” Professor Stephenson said, “we’ve all had our eyes on you for a long time. Your questions in class showed an aptitude for imagination and independent thinking.”

That was why Professor Stephenson would always sound disappointed when she said Good enough in response to one of Jacey’s answers. It meant Jacey wasn’t there yet—wherever there was.

“It wasn’t until this paper, though, that we had confirmation that you will bring the right attitude to any time-travel job you get.”

Jacey swallowed. “What’s the right attitude?”

“You’re going to find a way to solve whatever you’re facing without calling attention to yourself and without massive timeline disruption. You will—if you maintain these attitudes—achieve whatever goal you’re given, and you will do it with finesse. I cannot tell you how much we value that.”

“Okay.” Jacey bit her lower lip, caught herself, and made herself stop.

“We would like to offer you a full scholarship to the full training program,” Professor Stephenson said. “You would move to a different part of campus and complete a program of study that you cannot tell your friends about.”

Jacey clutched her hands together so tightly that they hurt. “Who is ‘we’?” she asked.

Professor Stephenson actually laughed. “You know, you are the first person to ask me that question in more than a decade. You’re smart and cautious, Jacey. I like that.”

It wasn’t an answer, and Jacey was about to say so, when Professor Stephenson continued.

“‘We’ is the Academy. The real Academy, the one that was founded a century ago when it became clear that we would never put time travel back into the bottle. We had to find a way to attract worthy students. You are worthy, Miss Cullen.”

Jacey twisted her hands. She had to ignore the flattery and concentrate even more.

“And then what?” she asked. “I graduate and go to work for some corporation? Try to change the world according to their agenda?”

Professor Stephenson’s smile faded. “Are you turning this down?”

Jacey took a deep breath. “No. I’m just asking.”

“Why did you come here in the first place?” Professor Stephenson asked. “Was there a moment in the past you believed needed changing? Or are you on another mission?”

Jacey thought back to that bench near her grandmother’s grave. How could she explain that? That sense of defiance and that peace. Was time travel the family business? Jacey had always assumed so, even though no one in her immediate family time traveled.

And she found it endlessly fascinating—all the disruption, all the learning, all the possibilities. It was for her.

“Do I have to travel?” she asked. “I mean, do I actually have to go back?”

Professor Stephenson frowned at her. “I thought you wanted to.”

“I don’t know,” Jacey said. “I like the way the Academy is set up. I could do research or work in the physics department or—”

“The real Academy is the same,” Professor Stephenson said. “If you’re interested, I will show you the introductory holo. But the clock is ticking.”

“Why?” Jacey asked. “I thought we have all the time in the world.”

Professor Stephenson smiled. “Some opportunities have actual time limits on them. This is one of them.”

“It’s a big decision, isn’t it?” Jacey asked. “How come I have to make it fast?”

“It’s not a big decision,” Professor Stephenson said, with that edge back in her voice. “We’re just opening the doors so you can enter the Academy you thought you were attending.”

It was one of those life-changing moments—a test, really. Rather than the midterm or the upcoming final. Jacey had to ask herself—just like her classmates had asked themselves before dropping the class—one question: Did she really want to work in this field?

“Do I make the decision before or after you show me the holo?” she asked.

“Before,” Professor Stephenson said.

It was secret. People killed for secrets. But they killed for a variety of other things too, including the notion that one person’s death would change the world.

“Okay,” Jacey said, as she stood up and faced the blank wall. “I’m ready to watch.”

“Good,” Professor Stephenson said. “Welcome to your future.”

She didn’t add, I hope you will like it. Maybe that was implied. Or maybe like wasn’t a concept that fit into the new Academy.

Jacey didn’t care. She was ready to take this step, and she wasn’t even sure it scared her.

It was, after all, what she had been preparing for.

She just hadn’t realized it until now.