The door clicks. It flies open, and there’s the guard, running out. He jumps when he sees us waiting for him, and Chris and Trent easily force the rag over his mouth. He falls limp, and they drag his body inside while Adam wedges something in the door to stop it from closing.
We’re in.
21:46
The fire alarm blares, the red lights flashing through the haze of smoke. We enter a large space that looks like a chemistry classroom, with countertops and glass cabinets full of beakers, flasks, and brown bottles with red warning labels. A huge whiteboard on the wall is covered in precisely drawn equations—maybe Future-Adam’s writing? There are no windows, but a hallway leads off to other rooms.
Adam moves to the counters and inspects the equipment there, his face set in something like awe or wonder. He must love all this science stuff.
I scan the room for any sign of evidence, while Chris pops open a panel in the ceiling and helps Zoe out. She coughs from the smoke, but her eyes dance with excitement as she hops to the floor.
I nudge her with my elbow. “See, I knew you could do it.”
She dusts cobwebs off her blue hair and grins. “Piece of cake.”
“So we’re inside. Now what?” Trent asks.
“We need to hurry,” I say, checking my watch. There’s no telling if another guard will show up or if one of the guards will wake early. And we only have a little over two hours left in the future.
Adam puts down the beaker he’s been examining. “It’ll be faster if we split up to search.”
We each pick a room, and I’m hit with a blast of cool air as soon as I enter mine, which has row after row of tall, blinking electronic equipment. Probably not the room we’re looking for, but I spot a desk in the corner and riffle through it, just in case. Finding nothing, I check another room, but it’s just a small kitchen and break room.
Back in the hallway, I study the door at the end that no one picked, with a big orange sign that reads CAUTION: BIOHAZARD. I can’t imagine Future-Adam putting the evidence we need in a room like that. I’m not even sure it’s safe for us to go in there without some sort of protective suit.
“Found something,” Trent yells from another room. I rush inside with Chris and Zoe following at my heels. Trent’s standing in the middle of a room full of dusty, old metal filing cabinets. None of them are labeled, but it’s a good bet that Future-Adam stored the information about the old projects here.
“This has to be it,” Chris says.
“What are we looking for?” Zoe asks.
I head for the filing cabinet closest to me and pull open a drawer. “Anything labeled ‘Project Chronos.’”
For a few minutes we search in silence, and the entire time I feel like there’s a ticking clock hanging over us, nudging me to hurry. I quickly skim through the files, my eye catching a Project Lethe and a Project Athena, but I don’t see the one we need.
“Sorry. What’d I miss?” Adam asks as he slips through the doorway. He probably got distracted by more science stuff in another room. This is his lab in the future, so I can’t blame him for being curious about it. It’s another glimpse into his future life. We briefly explain, and he starts searching another filing cabinet.
“Here!” Chris says a minute later. “Project Chronos.”
We crowd around him as he pulls out four thick files and lays them on top of the cabinet. The first one is about the original group of people who went to the future and is dated two years before we signed up. There’s a ton of data about who they were—a mix of scientists and private security—but we flip through to the end, where we find brain scans, medical exams, and a report from Dr. Kapur about the mental state of the patients.
Chris reads a few lines:
Two of the subjects never returned from the future. The three subjects who did return suffered severe memory loss, confusion, and paranoia.
Adam points to something farther down on the page. “It says here the original team was in the future for seventy-two hours, and they thought that might be the cause of their future shock.”
We check the next file and find similar results, although the time in the future was reduced to twenty-four hours to see if that made a difference. Only one person went missing that time, but everyone else returned with the same problems as the first group. For the third group, they kept the length to twenty-four hours but only sent them ten years into the future instead of thirty, in case that was the problem.