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  I dedicate this adventure, again, to nine-year-old Ahmir Khalib Thompson, and to him following his dreams where they may take him.

  —Questlove

  Dedicated to all the little kids who dream big. Even the sky isn’t the limit.

  —S. A. Cosby

  1

  “You ready?” rahim asked.

  Kasia nodded.

  “Why wouldn’t I be ready?” she said. “It’s just the eighth grade. This is nothing more than another social setting with a specific set of rules and traditions that dictate certain etiquette-based gestures and responses.”

  Rahim let out a sigh.

  “Don’t … don’t say stuff like that,” Rahim said. He pulled a sleek black cell phone out of his pocket and checked the time. It was 8:45 a.m. They were standing at the base of the steps that led to the front doors of the Leon Sullivan Middle School. Rahim watched as large groups of kids in their various cliques entered the school flanked by their friends. He scanned the crowds for Harris, his only other friend besides Kasia, but he didn’t see him.

  “Stuff like what?” Kasia asked as she adjusted her backpack. Rahim was going to remind her to go one-strap instead of two-straps—two-straps looked a little desperate to him—but she had figured it out on her own.

  “Stuff that makes people feel like you’re speaking a different language,” Rahim said.

  “Do I have to remind you I built a time machine out of a cell phone? I’m smart. I’m not hiding that for anybody.” Kasia pushed her glasses up on her nose.

  “Accidentally built a time machine that almost had me stranded in 1997,” Rahim said while playfully nudging her with his elbow. They laughed about it now, but the entire situation that introduced them to the reality of time travel had been terrifying, mind-blowing, and confusing. Rahim looked at the cell phone in his hand. It was smooth as glass and black as midnight in a mineshaft. The one Kasia had built for him for his birthday last winter had looked like a brick. Harris had even teased him about it. Rahim remembered he’d been embarrassed by it, then he felt bad being embarrassed. Kasia had built it for him because his parents—well, mainly his dad—hadn’t wanted him to have a phone. Or a laptop or any other piece of technology. His dad thought they made learning too easy. Rahim tried to put up a fight, but his dad wouldn’t budge. And Rahim kind of admired him for that, even if it made him angry. “Yes, Professor Reynolds,” he would say in a sarcastic tone—even though his dad really was a professor.

  If he’d only known how that phone would change both their lives.

  Kasia rolled her eyes.

  “Whatever, the point is I talk how I talk and I say what I wanna say.”

  “Okay, I’m just trying to help. You been homeschooled forever. This is your first year in a regular school. It’s really different. You got bullies, mean girls, mean boys, all these different crews, the cool kids, the band kids, the nerdy kids, and then the kids like me who don’t fit in any group. I know you’re a genius, but once you go through those doors, you’re just fresh meat!” Rahim said.

  “I don’t understand how you still are afraid of anyone in this school when you routinely go back in time to help our future selves maintain the space-time continuum.”

  “I’m afraid when I do that, too. Only difference is that back in time, no one is stuffing me in my locker. Nobody knows how weird I am when they send us on a mission.”

  A group of girls and one boy walked past him decked out in T-shirts emblazoned with the faces of the latest K-pop group. Rahim mainly listened to old-school hip-hop, but he had to admit some of the beats from those K-pop groups were kinda dope. He’d only shared that with Kasia, though. He thought Harris would never speak to him again if he admitted that.

  “Speaking of the awesome twosome, have you heard from them?” Kasia said. “The last communication was after we fixed that falling water tower in New York in 1986. They gave us the plans for new phones, but I haven’t seen any messages yet.”

  “Nah,” Rahim said. “Aren’t you the one who said time moves differently for them? For us, what feels like two months might only feel like a couple of hours for them. Maybe they just went to lunch. Tell you the truth, I don’t mind the break.” Rahim looked down at the phone again. The screen saver was a moving graphic of the Liberty Bell overlaid with an image of an ornate clock face. The clock said 8:50 a.m. Rahim touched the screen. The Liberty Bell graphic disappeared, and a text message box appeared. There were no new messages on the screen. At the top left corner of the screen, there was a horizontal bar graph. The bar was currently in the green, which meant there were currently no issues with the time stream. If the bar went into the yellow, their future selves would send an alert and begin a new mission. Since their adventure last winter in the space-time continuum, he and Kasia had been contacted three times.

  “I don’t mind it, either,” Kasia said. She was lying. Anything that took her further away from science and technology bothered her. “Sometimes I think it’s weird that our future selves are in charge of this whole help-with-the-time-stream thing. Why isn’t it the government or the military? And we still haven’t found Dr. Jackson. We don’t really know who took her, and our future selves won’t tell us anything.”

  “Because…,” Rahim said.

  “I know, I know,” Kasia said. “Because if we know too much future information, it might disrupt the time stream and then we’ll have dodo birds in the middle of Market Street. But I sometimes wish that someone else would contact us. It would make it more official. If it’s just our future selves and us, that’s lots of pressure for two people, even if they are four people.”

  “For real for real? I try not to think about it. The whole time-traveling thing is complicated enough. Like it literally makes my head hurt sometimes,” Rahim said. He put the new phone, which Kasia had built with the schematics given to them by their future selves, back in his pocket. But he couldn’t put away the memory of what had happened. After Kasia had built the original phone for him, she had hacked into what she had thought was a government communication satellite to get him free service. It had actually been an experimental set of satellites that she had used to turn his phone into a teleporting time-travel device that had sent him back to 1997, where he’d met his favorite band and met his father as a kid and he and Kasia had also been contacted by future versions of themselves and those future versions had recruited them to help keep the time stream from disintegrating and before they got things nailed down there were all kinds of bad things—temporal vortexes, dinosaurs running through the streets, cavemen at the Lincoln Financial Field, and generally the end of time as we know it. It took away his breath to say it even if he was just thinking it. Who else had been through an adventure like that? Maybe Kasia was right: Why exactly was he afraid of bullies like Man Man and his funky crew?

  As if on cue, he heard a voice. “Hey, Tomato Head! I hope you ain’t attached to those sneakers. I’m gonna have to get them off of you! See you at lunch!” It was Man Man, yelling from the top of the steps. His two sidekicks, Lavell and Tron, laughed way too hard at Man Man’s joke. Was it even a joke to call someone else Tomato Head? It looked like Man Man had grown a whole foot over the summer break. The three of them dapped each other up and headed into the school. Rahim shook his head. He knew Man Man didn’t even like his sneakers. They weren’t the most fashionable pair in the world, just normal Converse. His sister called them Chuck Taylors and teased him for wearing them, but they were really comfortable and they made running easy. Man Man was the type of person who would just take them because he could.

  Oh, Rahim thought. Now I remember why I’m scared of them.

  * * *

  Rahim and Kasia stopped at Rahim’s locker so he could put his backpack away. Kasia pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket.

  “Says here my locker is 594. Your locker is, let’s see, 148. So, that means…” She cocked her head to the right and closed her eyes. “My locker is right there.” Rahim followed her finger as she pointed down the hall.

  “But, K,” Rahim said, “those are the four hundreds.”

  “I know, my locker is around the corner. Should be a top locker halfway down the row.”

  “How do you know that?” Rahim said.

  “I did the math. Duh,” Kasia said.

  “I can walk over there with you to make sure,” Rahim said.

  “I don’t need you to walk me,” Kasia said. “I did the math.” And with that she took off down the hall.

  Rahim felt someone bump into him from behind. He turned around and saw Harris standing there.

  “That your girl, the genius?” Harri
s asked.

  “Yeah, that’s Kasia,” Rahim said.

  “Where’s she going?”

  “Her locker.”

  “She know how to get there?”

  “Yeah,” Rahim said. “She did the math.” Harris gave him a quizzical look, then shrugged.

  “Hey, so who did you get for homeroom?” Harris asked.

  “Mr. Tanner.”

  “That’s not too bad. He’s really chilled out since he got lost in the Poconos.”

  “Yeah, getting chased up a tree for three days by a bear will make you look at things differently,” Rahim said. Harris laughed.

  “You coming to chess club after school? I saw Timmy Mayhew, and he said Mr. Driscoll got a Star Wars set and a Marvel set with Captain America as the king,” Harris said.

  “Iron Man should be the king. But nah, I can’t come today. I’m starting trumpet lessons.” For the second time Harris gave him a quizzical look. “My pops. I told him I wanted to be a rapper. After he couldn’t talk me out of it over the summer, he insisted I take music lessons so I can get into a music conservatory like my sister. He says if I really wanna be serious about hip-hop, then I need a degree in real music so I have something to fall back on.”

  “But … I mean, no offense, but you’re not really…” Harris let the sentence trail off.

  “Good at instruments? Yeah, I know. I’m pretty decent at writing rhymes if Kasia makes me the beats.”

  “Yeah, I liked that one song you did, about history or something? You haven’t dropped anything new in a while. I keep checking your SoundCloud,” Harris said.

  “Yeah, we moved it to Jam City, but we haven’t done anything new in a minute,” Rahim said.

  I been busy, Rahim thought. You know—going back to the past and fixing things with my future self so the time stream doesn’t collapse in on itself and destroy the universe. Kinda interferes with my lyrical output.

  “Hey, give me something off the dome, then—I mean, unless you ain’t got it like that anymore,” Harris said with a grin. Rahim shook his head. He took a quick look around. The hallway was full of kids trying to get to class, open their lockers, or show off their new clothes on the first day of school.

  “Okay … how about this?” Rahim said.

  First day of school, new vibes, new tools

  Steppin’ in fresh with the kicks that rule,

  Gotta flex with the Dunks, can’t forget the Yeezys,

  More lit than Ramsay, keep it real easy.

  It’s all part of the plan, see,

  Drip on point, no cap, that’s key.

  Fit too fire, got ’em all on notice,

  With the latest threads, I’m the main focus.

  Back then, they say “Fresh to death,”

  But now it’s all about who’s got the best,

  They used to say,

  “Drip too hard, don’t slip,”

  Now I’m walkin’ in snatched, can’t trip.

  Haters do the math, but they can’t keep pace.

  Four plus four? Yeah, you know I ate.

  “Dang, I guess you do still got it. That was off the top of your head for real?” Harris asked.

  “Yeah. Everybody wearing their first-day-of-school stuff, so, you know,” Rahim said.

  “I do know, but I don’t know how you do it, man. Well, let me get going, I got Mrs. Callis. She locks the door three minutes before first bell,” Harris said.

  “Okay, I’ll holla at you at lunch,” Rahim said.

  “Bet,” Harris said as they high-fived.

  Rahim put in a pair of wireless earbuds as he made his way to class. In addition to being a time machine and a temporal-communication device, the phone also had several music-streaming apps. That was one of Kasia’s recent tweaks to the operating system—listening to music, she said, could calm Rahim down, whether he was traveling through time or just dealing with the first day of school.

  He pulled out the phone and touched the screen. He pulled up his early 2000s hip-hop playlist and selected a song by the Clipse. He loved old-school hip-hop, but his taste had begun to gradually change. Four the Hard Way was still his favorite group of all time, but he was trying to get better as a lyricist, so he was listening to a wider array of artists. He was really impressed by André 3000, Casual, Saafir, Crucial Conflict, E-40—rappers who used different flows and intricate wordplay.

  He had also spent part of his past summer looking at a map of the country and figuring out which classic acts came from where. It seemed like every city or state had its stars, artists who established a scene, whether it had been back in Queens in the mid-eighties or in Houston in the late eighties. Learning about them helped him to understand something more about the places on the map. That’s how he got to Virginia and to the Clipse.

  He knew that digging back through the history of hip-hop put him out of step with a lot of kids his own age, but he was getting more and more comfortable with not following the in crowd. Plus, it was a kind of time traveling.

  Rahim was just about to go into Mr. Tanner’s classroom when he saw a flyer on a bulletin board just outside the door. In big, bold letters it proclaimed there was going to be a talent show at the end of the month.

  Welcome Back from Summer! Do you have a talent? Want to share it? Sign up now for the Fall LSMS Talent Show! All proceeds from the sale of tickets will go to the purchase of new laptops for the school.

  As he took his seat, Rahim prayed Kasia hadn’t seen that flyer. Like he told Harris, she was a genius at making beats for him to rap over. They liked posting them online. But performing in her room in the attic of her house or posting a song was a long, long way from doing it live onstage where people could actually boo you to your face. He could already hear her in his head: What’s the use of being really talented if only me and you and Harris know it? Geez, Rahim, you literally have traveled back in time and saved the world. You can’t get on a stage and perform verse that you wrote?

  Mr. Tanner welcomed the class and went to the board. He didn’t look like someone who had been chased by a bear, until one kid came in late and closed the door too hard, which made Mr. Tanner flinch a little. “Welcome back, guys!” he said. “I hope you all had a great summer! Who wants to share what they did over their vacation?”

  A kid named Shawn at the back of the room shot his hand up and spoke before he was called on. “Worked at my mom’s restaurant.” There were a few giggles as Mr. Tanner nodded. Restaurant? Everyone knew Shawn’s mom sold dinners out the back of her van. Rahim looked over his shoulder and saw Shawn drop his head. Rahim didn’t know him that well, but he felt bad for him.

  “Well, I’m sure you learned a lot. When I was younger, I worked in the food business. It’s lots of skills all at once—some economics, some time management, even some science. Anyone else want to share?” Mr. Tanner asked.

  As kids took turns with their what-I-did-last-summer stories—one girl had spent a month in Florida with family, one boy had built a racing bike, another boy had stayed at home and helped take care of his sister’s baby—Rahim felt his phone vibrate. He took it out and looked at the screen. There was an image on it that resembled an hourglass. The Rahim from the future had told them it was the symbol for their organization, the people present-day Rahim and Kasia would one day work with to maintain the time stream.

  The Aevum Organization.

  Their future selves didn’t tell them much about what Aevum did besides send kids on dangerous missions back in time, but Kasia said it was obvious they were doing important work.

  “Don’t you see all the equipment they have? That’s some serious hardware. You don’t get that kind of tech to play around,” she’d said a few weeks ago.

  Rahim knew he wasn’t as smart as Kasia, but he did have what he thought was a good idea. If they kept fixing the time stream by going back into the past, then maybe one day their future selves wouldn’t be time-traveling police tasked with fixing things.

  Kasia had dismissed that with a shake of her head.

  “That would be the grandfather paradox,” Kasia had said. “Like you can’t go back in time and get rid of your own grandfather because then you never existed to go back in time in the first place. If them sending us back fixed everything, then they never would have needed to send us back.”