“Don’t forget to join hands to make sure it works,” Rahim said.

  Professor Reynold looked down at the phone, then looked at Rahim.

  “Son, what are you doing?” Professor Reynolds asked.

  “The right thing, Dad. I already hit SEND. We’ll be right behind you. I promise,” Rahim said.

  His father began to speak, but before he could say anything he was enveloped in an aura of bluish-white light along with Mrs. Reynolds and the Collinses.

  Then they were gone.

  21

  “What are you doing?!” Kasia yelled.

  Rahim put the upgraded phone in his pocket and walked over to where she was standing.

  “You heard them. I really believe our future selves are lying, Kasia. I know that you at least suspect it. We have to rescue Kenta and Rashad and stop Aevum, whatever it is. If we don’t do it, no one else will.”

  “So you want to use the phone to go to the future and rescue them,” Kasia said.

  “No. Well, yes and no. Did you hear what Kenta said about the house? I think she was giving us a message.”

  “What kind of message?” Kasia said.

  Rahim looked around the kitchen.

  “Can you have Iago do some kind of scan? Check to see if there is like … I don’t know … some computer stuff in the house? Like the whole house?”

  “What are you thinking, Rahim?” Kasia said as she touched the temple of her glasses. She was intrigued now.

  “Remember when Kenta said she had built a ship that could travel through the multidimensional whatchamacallit?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think this house is that ship. I think that was the clue she was trying to give us.”

  Iago flew down from the ceiling and started soaring through the house. “That would also mean she managed to figure out the problem of folding space. Or maybe she created a destabilizing force field strong enough to form a wormhole.” Kasia followed Iago through the house, and Rahim followed her following Iago. They went through the kitchen, back to the living room, up the stairs and down them, and finally stopped just outside the living room.

  Kasia took off her glasses.

  “You were right. I’m getting readings of computer activity everywhere. The whole house is a ship. We just need to figure out how to—”

  Suddenly the house began to shake and rumble like a train was driving past it.

  The left lens of Kasia’s glasses lit up.

  “Good job, Iago! Come on!” Kasia said as she ran into the living room. Rahim saw her plop down in one of two recliners that were sitting there.

  “Sit in the other one!” Kasia said excitedly.

  Rahim sat in the other chair.

  “How does Iago know it’s a ship?” Rahim asked.

  “He accessed the onboard computer. Iago: Engage flight controls,” Kasia said.

  The house shook even more violently. Rahim thought he heard the sound of gigantic gears locking in place and another noise that reminded him of a huge box fan starting up.

  Then he saw the walls of the house begin to move.

  “Kasia…,” he said, but Kasia, who’d retrieved her glasses, was staring straight ahead through her left lens.

  “It’s reconfiguring itself to fly!”

  “It’s what?” Rahim said, and now he had to shout. The whole house was filled with a thumping, chest-rattling sound like bass at a concert.

  “To FLY!” Kasia shouted.

  “Can you pilot it?” Rahim shouted back.

  “No! But Iago can. He is teaching himself to do it—I mean, he just taught himself how to do it!” Kasia said.

  Then, without warning, the floor in front of them started to open like someone was fanning out a deck of cards. Two half-circular openings appeared in front of the two recliners. A console rose out of the floor and locked in place in front of Kasia and Rahim.

  The console had a keyboard, but each key was like a touch screen. How you applied pressure to it mattered—which direction, how hard. There were also monitors with a 3D effect.

  Kasia leaned forward and touched a key. A menu came up that seemed to float in front of her face. She touched a few more keys until she found what she was looking for.

  “Got it! She has an operating system here that tracks her and Rashad by their communication devices,” Kasia said.

  “You mean their phones?!” Rahim said.

  “Yeah, their phones!” Kasia said. “Okay, here … we … GO!” she yelled.

  Rahim watched through the front window as the soil in the front yard began to roll and separate. His eyes went wide when what looked like a shiny black metallic arch rose up out of the ground. It climbed higher and higher as it enveloped the front side of the house, blocking out the night sky. He turned his head to the right, and through the kitchen window he saw the same kind of metallic arch enveloping that side of the house.

  That was when he realized they weren’t arches at all.

  “It’s like a bowl on its side! It looks like it’s eating the house!” Rahim yelled.

  “It’s a shield! It’s gonna protect the ship!” Kasia yelled back as her hands flew over the keyboard.

  That didn’t make Rahim feel any better. For a moment he thought about whether they were making a mistake. Flying in a giant interdimensional space-age sphere might not have been the brightest idea. But then he thought of the looks on Kenta’s and Rashad’s faces and how his future self had snapped at him, and he pushed his doubts aside.

  They were going to rescue Kenta and Rashad. They would find out exactly what was going on with their adult selves, and with their future. He wanted to know the truth, no matter what it turned out to be. He was afraid, sure. He had time traveled, but he had never flown in a plane before, let alone a … well, he didn’t know what to call this craft. A house plane? But he had learned something about fear over his many years of feeling it every time he saw Man Man, every time he worried about disappointing his parents, especially his dad. What he knew now was that you couldn’t allow fear to stop you from moving, from doing. It wasn’t that fear wasn’t real. It was very real, so real that you had to know how to handle it and how to keep it from controlling what you did. Rahim didn’t think he was tough. In fact, he knew he wasn’t. Still, he knew right from wrong, and that made him all the more certain that his future self was up to no good. And he was going to do something about it.

  “HOLD ON!” Kasia said.

  “I’m holding!” Rahim yelled.

  The shields had totally enveloped the house now. The outside world had disappeared. The house stopped shaking. Everything went quiet. He could hear his breath and Kasia’s breath.

  “I guess that we’re stabl—”

  But before he could finish the statement, the house and its sphere shot straight up into the black sky. Rahim felt himself pushed back in the recliner by strong invisible hands. They flew straight up for what seemed like forever. On the screen in front of him, a 3D hologram showed the rapidly receding Earth and the soft golden light of the sun at the same time. He realized this ship had a 360-degree view. As they kept rising, he saw … space. The vastness of it was too much to understand.

  On the screen he saw something familiar and scary. In front of them, floating, was a whirlpool of light and colors. On another screen he saw a reading that said DIMENSIONAL DOORWAY 58%. The number rose as the whirlpool expanded.

  “It’s a vortex!” Rahim whispered. Last winter when he’d gotten trapped in the past, he had come home along a winding route, and all that time jumping had created time vortexes. They had popped up all over the place, from Philly to Egypt to Antarctica, not to mention all along time. Those had been untamed. They had allowed those dodo birds to come out of the past and run past his house, and had put dinosaurs in downtown. Kasia had theorized that if they kept popping up, they would destroy the universe. The only solution, she had said, was to reverse things and try to get time back to what it was before he had left. Rahim had tried and, for the most part, succeeded. The vortexes had disappeared.

  This was different. In trying to save her world, Kenta had harnessed the very thing that threatened to destroy Rahim and Kasia’s world. She had turned something catastrophic into something useful, turned a weapon into a tool. On top of that, she had figured out how to travel through time and space without an advanced, upgraded cell phone.

  He had to admit that he kind of admired her. Even the first time that she had trapped him and Kasia in the attic, he had thought that there was something comforting about Kenta. He didn’t know quite how to explain it. She was very similar to Kasia but also very different. They were both crazy smart, but sometimes Kasia could be a little rude. She didn’t mean to be. It was just how she talked, straightforwardly, without much tolerance for other people’s self-doubt or insecurity or, for that matter, anything other than respect. Kenta wasn’t like that. She had a calm presence.

  “We’re going through!” Kasia said.

  Rahim looked at the screen. There were all kinds of numbers and graphics lit up in green on the screen. Oxygen, solar-radiation levels all in the green. He’d noticed once they left the Earth’s orbit they hadn’t floated, even though they were now in a zero-gravity environment. Man, she thought of everything, he thought.

  On the screen, the entire 360-degree view was overcome by the rainbowlike colors coming out of the vortex. The ship plunged through them. For a brief moment he was disoriented because he couldn’t tell which way was up or where they were. Even Kasia looked a little concerned.

  But then as quickly as they entered the vortex, it seemed like they were coming out the other side. The colors began to dissipate. The dark, endless black sky of outer space reappeared. And he saw a tiny blue marble that started to expand as they got closer. It was Earth.

  “I think this thing has a cloaking system,” Kasia said. He realized that she was talking at a normal volume again. They didn’t need to yell anymore. They were moving toward Earth as gently as a leaf falling from a tree. Kasia pushed some buttons on the keyboard.

  “I think I cloaked us. I wonder if that’s what they did in Hawaii. Cloaked the house as it landed,” Kasia said.

  “They must have done more than that. It’s not just about hiding the landing. Wouldn’t people have been more than a little interested in a house appearing overnight?”

  “Mind wipe?” Kasia offered.

  “I guess. So, you with me on this?” Rahim asked.

  “You didn’t give me much of a choice. This ship is cool, though,” she said.

  “When you really think about it, you see that Kenta and Rashad are telling us the truth,” Rahim said. “Don’t you?”

  “I mean … yeah. I do. But I just don’t like thinking about us being bad guys in the future. I like that we’re still part of our story, but it doesn’t seem like one with a good ending. They—we—didn’t look happy. Not happy at all.”

  “Yeah,” Rahim said. He wondered, not for the first time, about the Future Rahim he saw on the screen. How could that version be so different from him? And if it wasn’t so different, did that mean that he had the seeds of that bad guy inside?

  “Okay, I’m getting a reading,” Kasia said. “Guess where they are.”

  “I don’t want to guess. I just want to go home.”

  “Luckily you can do both.”

  “Philadelphia?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay,” Rahim said. “That’s where they are. But when are they?”

  Kasia studied the screen, tapped a few keys. “Oh geez,” she said. “Oh wow.”

  “None of that sounds good. Tell me.”

  “It’s 2048,” Kasia said. “Rahim—we’re old.”

  22

  “I wonder … where can we land this thing?” Kasia said. Reentering the Earth’s atmosphere was not as easy as the drift toward the planet. There had been intense heat and noise, and then there was gravity, and they were falling at a higher speed than Rahim could imagine. It was on the list of the top-five most terrifying things Rahim had ever done, and it wasn’t number five. Now they were safely cloaked again, floating above Philadelphia like a huge invisible beach ball.

  This was a very different Philadelphia than he knew.

  Looking at the screen, what he saw reminded him of every scary futuristic movie or anime he’d ever seen. The sky was dark and filled with smoke. The streets looked abandoned. Rahim didn’t hardly recognize any of the landmarks or parks or buildings downtown. They floated over a partially burned-down warehouse near what he thought was once Market Street.

  “If we stay cloaked, can we land there?” Rahim asked.

  Kasia stared at her screen. She didn’t answer for a little while. He had to repeat the question.

  “We can, I think,” she said. “But, Rahim, what happened here? This doesn’t look like home.”

  “Aevum happened,” Rahim said glumly.

  Kasia moved her fingers over the keyboard.

  “I … I think you’re right,” she said quietly.

  The craft glided over the warehouse and slowly descended to the ground. When it finally touched down, the whole house shook. Kasia tapped her temple. “According to the info I’m getting from Iago, we have to leave the shield up to protect the house. We can exit through a hatchway through the kitchen.”

  “Okay. He got any ideas how we find Kenta and Rashad?” Rahim asked.

  Kasia held up the upgraded phone.

  “There’s an IP signal that will lead us to them. I just gotta backtrack it like Kenta did with us earlier.”

  “Okay. You ready to do this?” Rahim asked.

  Kasia made a kind of clucking noise. “You know,” she said. “It’s funny. Up to now, this has all felt like this crazy adventure. It’s been a way to experience things I wouldn’t otherwise. It’s been a way to learn. But now, it all feels different. It’s scary. Rahim, what if we grew up to be really bad people? I know I already said it once, but the idea is starting to really mess with me.”

  Rahim went over to her and playfully punched her arm. He had the same fears. He had been thinking of them since the mansion, maybe even before that. But he wasn’t going to let Kasia get down. “Listen, K,” he said. “If all this bouncing around time and space has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is for sure. Maybe we will grow up to be immoral people. Or maybe something happened to make us that way, and we’re here right now to change it. I’m not as smart as you are. Maybe no one is. But I think we can figure it out.”

  Kasia perked up and smiled.

  “You’re right. About not being as smart as me, I mean, and maybe the other thing. Let’s go get Kenta and Rashad. And let’s go help … ourselves.”

  They exited through the hatch that opened in the shield at the rear of the kitchen. When they stepped out of the craft and into the remains of the warehouse, Rahim immediately picked up on a terrible odor. It smelled like that time he left his gym shoes in his locker over Christmas break, if he had also put old eggs into them. He wrinkled his nose.

  “What is that smell?” he said.

  Kasia took a deep breath.

  “If I had to guess, it’s sulfur and methane. It’s terrible,” she said. She held the phone aloft and turned around in a slow circle.

  “The signal is coming in,” she said. “Let’s go north.”

  They took off down the street, following the signal. Rahim noticed that almost all the buildings were boarded up or torn down. He wasn’t even sure what part of Philly he was in right now. Center City? Germantown? Fishtown? They came to an intersection under a blown-out traffic light.

  Without warning, a flock of flightless birds the size of small dogs ran by them, clucking and squawking with deep voices. Dodo birds.

  “Are you kidding me?” Rahim said.

  “Why do I feel like that’s a bad sign?” Kasia said.

  “Because it’s never a good one. Where are all the cars? Where are all the people?”

  “This is spooky,” Kasia said.

  They kept walking and turned down an alley between two sets of row houses. They were passing the porch of one of the houses when Rahim noticed someone peeping at them through a window.

  “Hey! Hey, you!” Rahim yelled.

  The person pulled their curtain back and opened the window a crack.

  “What are you doing out on the street? Are you crazy? The Aevum is gonna lock you away in one of them special homes,” the person said. He was an older Black man with a shock of white hair. He wore glasses, though they seemed to be stuck to his face without a temple or ear piece.

  “What do you mean, special homes?” Kasia said.

  “Shhh,” he said, waving at them. “You know. The ones where they make kids build more avatars for Aevum. More robots to do their bidding. Why am I even talking to you two? You’re just gonna get us all in trouble.” The man stopped talking. He took off his glasses to wipe his face. When he put them back on, he started talking directly to Rahim. “Hey,” he said. “I can’t believe this. I don’t know how to tell you. You look just like a kid I used to know. But it can’t be … no, it can’t be!” The man started to wail.

  Rahim didn’t know what to do. “Man,” he said. “Man, calm down. It’s okay.”

  The man wailed even harder.

  “Nobody’s called me that in a long, long time,” he said. “‘Man Man.’ I almost forgot. It’s impossible for you to know that. Everyone who knows that name is old like me. You’re just a kid. Get out of here!!” Suddenly the wailing stopped and the old man slammed the window down and shut the curtain.

  “Is that really Man Man?” Kasia asked.

  “He looks so old. It can’t be him. I mean, can it? I sort of recognized him when his glasses were off, maybe.” The fear Rahim had felt earlier came back times ten. “Whatever. I don’t know and I can’t care. Let’s get out of this neighborhood and find Kenta and Rashad so we can get out of this future Philly completely.”

  They went down the street a little farther, and then turned onto a side street. The sky was dark, like a storm was approaching. Now they were in a slightly different part of town. There were vehicles on the street, but they looked more like tanks than cars, heavy monstrous things that rolled slowly and menacingly down the road.