* * *

  Now he was standing on his stoop about to walk to school. He and Kasia still walked together, they just didn’t talk as much. The talent show had been moved to the weekend, but they weren’t going to work together anymore.

  He saw Kasia come out the house and wave to her parents and Kenta.

  He came down off his step and started walking beside her.

  “You haven’t heard from our future selves, have you?” Rahim asked.

  Kasia shook her head.

  “You and Dash and Jaleen and Tomas still doing that dance routine?” Rahim said.

  Kasia nodded. “I’m not dancing, though,” she said. “I’m making the music for them. Behind the scenes, as always.”

  They walked a little farther and came to the crosswalk. While they waited for the WALK sign, Kasia suddenly turned and spoke.

  “I miss Iago,” she said. “I miss the version of him I built.”

  “Kasia, it isn’t your fault. It’s part of this whole time-travel deal.”

  She kept talking like he hadn’t said anything. “I’m rebuilding him. I couldn’t get him out of deep sleep. So I’m going to start over.”

  Rahim put his hands in his pockets and leaned against a streetlamp. “Kasia, I don’t think that’s a good idea. What about that … what is it, dimensional degradation? Does Kenta know that you’re rebuilding him?”

  “No. And you better not tell her. Or anyone,” Kasia said.

  Rahim let out a sigh. “Are you sure it’s not dangero—?”

  Now he was sure she hadn’t heard him, because she talked right through his words. “I’ve done some calculations. The number of alternate dimensions is infinite. Even if dimensional degradation is real, the effect would be diluted,” Kasia said. She stood. “Let’s go,” she said. “Don’t want to be late to school.”

  * * *

  Rahim got his books out of his locker. He watched Man Man and his crew come down the hallway. Normally he would have gone in another direction, but he held his spot, and they turned around when they saw him. He shook his head. At least those androids had been good for something.

  He saw Kasia and her new pack of friends walking to class together. He was happy for her. The jealousy he’d previously felt had gone away. She really did seem to enjoy their company. Maybe they’d take her mind off rebuilding Iago.

  “Hey, man,” Harris said.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Right here. I’m trying not to sneak up on you. Don’t want you to do me like you did Man Man,” Harris said.

  “Hey, man. You going to chess club today?”

  “You know it. Gotta get ready for the contest. You coming by? I thought you and Kasia were practicing for the talent show,” Harris said.

  “I think we’re good. And I’m not taking music lessons anymore, so I got time if you wanna get beat,” Rahim said.

  “Oooh, somebody talking junk. Bet, I’ll see you then. I gotta make it to homeroom,” Harris said.

  “Yeah, me, too,” Rahim said.

  But as soon as he turned to go up the hall, he heard his name. “Rahim Reynolds, report to the office, please. Rahim Reynolds, report to the office, please,” the overhead speaker said in a tinny voice.

  “Man, what you do? We just got to school,” Harris said.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t done anything,” Rahim said.

  “All right, well, good luck, man,” Harris said.

  * * *

  When he got to the office, he was greeted by Agent Brown, Agent Green, and Dr. Jackson.

  “Hello, Rahim. We need to talk,” Dr. Jackson said.

  “Your principal let us use her office after we informed her that we were here on official government business.”

  “Um … okay,” Rahim said.

  Agent Brown reached into his pocket and pulled out the phone Rahim’s future self had given him. He placed it on the principal’s desk in front of Dr. Jackson.

  “Uh … why did y’all bring that here?” Rahim asked.

  Dr. Jackson steepled her thin fingers. It was so strange seeing her so much older than she had been back in 1978. She might not be young and energetic anymore, and Nat was no longer around—he had passed away a few years before—but she was still the smartest person in the room.

  “Rahim, ever since we met all those years ago in Hawaii, I’ve been working on two parallel ideas: time travel and teleportation, and how to stop dimensional degradation. We have made great strides. We have even had brief contact with alternate dimensions. The consensus that we have come to is that Aevum is the central hub of all the space-time waves that are wreaking havoc across the entire universe.” Dr. Jackson paused, and Agent Green handed her an inhaler. “Thank you,” she said. “Now, we have tried to use this phone to go to where Aevum originated. In other words, our future. However, none of us can get it to work. It seems as though it is specifically created for you, that it works only with you as its operator. The mechanism may be something like a DNA lock or an even-more-exotic specification. Whatever it is, we’re locked out. And that’s a problem, because someone needs to go to our future and try to figure out Aevum’s next move. We need to block the destruction of other universes and dimensions.”

  “So it’s a rescue mission where what I’m rescuing is … the future?” Rahim said.

  “Well, not the only one,” Agent Brown said. “A sentient AI would have some real-world applications here in our time as well. We just need you to travel to the future, gather some intel for us, and come back. It’s no more dangerous than anything you’ve done before.”

  When he was done talking, Dr. Jackson gave him a strange look. It was the same way Rahim’s mother looked at him when she knew he’d taken an extra slice of cake before dinner. There was some rule that Agent Brown had broken.

  Dr. Jackson turned to face Rahim.

  “Will you do it, Rahim? We can’t force you, but we are asking. We need your help,” Dr. Jackson said.

  Rahim looked at the phone. He turned it over in his hands. He thought of all the terrible things that had happened since he’d first gone down the rabbit hole of time travel. He thought of Kenta and Rashad and all the other Kentas and Rashads out there across the universe or universes. He thought of his parents, and how they must have been scared that he would never come home. Mostly he thought of Kasia and how much pain time traveling had brought her.

  “You know, Dr. Jackson, I don’t think I will,” he said. He got up and walked out of the office.

  * * *

  Later, after school had let out and he’d gone to chess club—he played with the Star Wars set, where Darth Vader was the black king and Luke Skywalker was the white king—Rahim sat on his front step waiting for Kasia to come join him.

  Kasia came out of her house and sat next to him on the stoop. Cars and trucks rumbled down the street in front of them. The trucks reminded Rahim of the vehicles they had seen in the future. They made his stomach hurt.

  “What’s up?” Kasia asked.

  Rahim took a deep breath.

  “I don’t think you should rebuild Iago.”

  “Rahim, not this again,” Kasia said. Rahim scratched his head.

  “Yes, this again. I talked to Dr. Jackson today. They wanted me to go to the future again and get more information on Aevum. I think they think they can control it. But they can’t. Maybe no one can.”

  “Of course someone can. I can.”

  “Kasia, do you remember what Kimo said about tourists coming to the islands? We were doing the same thing when we were time traveling. Visiting places and messing them up and not caring about what happened after that. Maybe that wasn’t what we set out to do, but it was what we were doing.”

  “Rahim, I’m not talking about this no more. Everything is gonna be okay. Trust me,” Kasia said.

  Rahim bit his bottom lip. “Kasia, listen. After I got back from the meeting with Dr. Jackson, I told Kenta that you are starting to rebuild Iago. I told Rashad. I told my parents, and they are telling your parents right now,” Rahim said.

  Kasia jumped to her feet like the stoop was hot. “You did what?” she said. She put her hand on her head.

  “Aevum is dangerous. It made us, us in the future, its chumps. It made us liars. It takes over the world. I can’t let that happen.”

  She wasn’t getting it. All she was getting was more stubborn. “That’s what I’m preventing. That’s what I’ll prevent. There has to be a way,” she said. Rahim knew she was smarter than him, but right now it didn’t seem like it.

  “I had to do it,” he said. “It was the only thing that felt right. These other things all feel wrong.”

  “I’m going home, Rahim,” Kasia said. “Right now.”

  “Talk to you later.”

  “Maybe,” she said. She stomped down the steps and walked back to her house. Rahim could hear her parents’ voices when she went inside, then he heard Kasia’s, then everything went quiet.

  Rahim’s mom was giving lessons in the house. When they were over, she came outside with her student. It was Shia. “Hey, Rahim,” Shia said, and smiled, just like she had last time. Rahim wasn’t in the mood, but he lifted up his chin to say hi. “Bye, Rahim,” she said.

  Rahim’s mom sat next to him on the stoop.

  She put her arm around him and gave him a hug.

  “You did the right thing, son. She’ll come around,” she said.

  Rahim shrugged. “Doesn’t feel like it,” he said.

  “Give her a day to cool down,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “I’ve been in those situations. One day they seem hopeless, then the sun goes down and comes up again, and heads are cooler.”

  Rahim shook his head.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  24

  Rahim was standing at the back of the school auditorium as Denise Evans sang a cover of an old R & B song for the talent show. Rahim couldn’t sing at all, which he knew surprised people. His mom and his sister were both good at it. Denise had a really nice voice, maybe even better than nice. Rahim thought he liked Denise. Like, like liked her.

  He checked his phone, a regular non–time traveling phone, and looked for the hundredth time at the lyrics he’d written. After Denise wrapped up, Dasha, Jaleen, and Tomas performed a dance routine to a song Kasia had designed. Kasia was there, sitting with some other new friends. The routine was good—Dasha was a really talented dancer, and Jaleen and Tomas could kind of keep up with her—but the song was even better. He would have loved to rap over it. But all he had was a drum and snare beat he’d created with a music app and some help from Mr. Alves. He wasn’t really taking music lessons, but he was hanging out with Mr. Alves from time to time. He was learning some interesting things about music in general—not just the trumpet.

  He had to make his own beats, after all, and he wanted to do the best job he could.

  Rahim checked his phone.

  He was next.

  Mr. Jordan, the assistant principal, came to the microphone. “And now,” he said, “we have Rahim Reynolds, also known as R-Squared, performing an original song. Give it up for R-Squared!”

  Rahim walked to the stage.

  “That’s our boy!” he heard his mom cheer.

  “Come on, Rahim!” Yasmine said.

  “You got this, son!” Professor Reynolds said.

  Rahim went up the steps of the stage, took out his phone, and put it on a table with one of the extra mics. He pushed the button for music, and his drum and roll snare beat started playing.

  “This is a song called ‘Time for a Change.’ I hope you like it,” Rahim said.

  He grabbed the mic, closed his eyes, and started rapping on the beat.

  Riding through time like a rocket on blast,

  Things fall apart, but we’re fixing the past.

  The future to the present, forever make it all last,

  Push go forward, step on the gas!

  It’s time for a change,

  Time to rearrange,

  Shift the paradigm,

  Cross oceans of time.

  The beat on his phone stopped.

  The audience was silent as a stone.

  Then Harris stood up and clapped.

  “That’s my boy!” he shouted. The rest of the crowd erupted into cheers. Rahim opened his eyes and saw his parents standing and clapping. He saw Denise and Olivia clapping and smiling. Even Man Man looked like he wanted to clap. He didn’t, but he looked like he was considering it.

  Rahim still lost.

  Well, technically, everyone except Denise lost. He’d seen Harris walking home with her and her trophy. But he didn’t feel like a loser. He’d done it. He’d performed and he was … good?

  Yeah. I was good, he thought.

  * * *

  His parents had already gone home. He’d told them he’d be along later. He was outside now sitting on the front step of the school. He pulled out a cell phone and began to scroll through hip-hop videos.

  Eventually Kasia and her friends came out and walked by him. He stood and hurried over to Kasia. She turned toward him, and the look on her face made him feel okay for a second. Maybe his mom was right. “Y’all go ahead,” she said to her friends. “I’ll catch up.”

  “Hey,” he said. “I saw you at the talent show. That dance was good.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sorry you didn’t win.”

  He told her his theory, that not-winning was a kind of winning. Usually she would jump right in and agree with him, or disagree in a way that made him feel better, but she was kind of quiet. Even though they were outside, there was an elephant in the room. “Also,” he said. “I want to talk about yesterday.”

  She crossed her arms. “What about it?”

  “I’m sorry that we see things differently. I don’t want it to mess up anything.” He looked down at the ground when he spoke and waited to hear the same from her. But he didn’t. Instead, he heard a voice he didn’t recognize. It was Kasia, but it was an angry and cold version.

  “You can say you’re sorry,” Kasia said. “But sorry’s just a word. And you can say you don’t want to mess up anything, but you messed up everything. You told my parents and Kenta about Iago. They took him away from me. All of him, the original and the new one I was building. They took the phone I built, too. And they put monitoring software on my computers. Yesterday it was all theory, this idea that I couldn’t trust you to do the right thing. But now it happened. I thought we were friends.”

  “K, Iago turned into some kind of monster. You were there. You saw what happened. How could I feel safe with—”

  “So you aren’t sorry?” Now Kasia’s voice was raised. “I knew it.” A stray hair fell into her face, and she pushed it out of the way. Her eyes were starting to get shiny with tears. “Iago was my friend. I could make sure he wouldn’t become evil. I know I could.”

  “I’m your friend, too.”

  “Are you?” She was almost yelling now. Then she calmed down. She pushed her glasses up her nose again and wiped her eyes a little. “I gotta go,” she said.

  “Kasia, please, wait,” Rahim said, but she shook her head.

  “I’m not waiting,” she said. She turned the corner and was gone.

  Rahim leaned against a wall. He looked around him. He saw no one, even counting the people across the street, the people on the bus, the people coming out of stores. He was alone.

  That night, in his room, he felt the same way, but worse. He had hoped that his mom was right. He had hoped the situation would get better. He did think that he and Kasia could fix anything, including their friendship. But he had tried and failed. Maybe she really was gone. He felt a cold spreading in his stomach that he thought was disappointment, but that he realized after a minute was sadness. He had never had a friend like Kasia. What if he never spoke to her again? He fell asleep in his clothes, and his mom had to come in and wake him up gently and tell him to change for bed.

  The next morning, Rahim walked to school more slowly than he ever had. From the minute he left his door, he felt like he was under a permanent cloud. Then he looked up and saw that he was. A huge triangle-shaped aircraft was silently hovering over him. A circular door on the bottom of the craft opened, and a pair of metal poles slid out. Two individuals slid down as cars slammed on their brakes and people hopped out with their cell phones taking videos of the aircraft.

  The two of them stopped about five feet from the ground and hovered in space. One of them spoke. He wasn’t moving his mouth, but Rahim heard his voice loud and clear, like it was being beamed directly into his mind.

  “Rahim, hello. I’m Ronaldo, and this is Kanisha. We are versions of you and your friend from an alternate universe, and we need your help.” Rahim was frozen in place. He thought it was fear at first, but it turned out that Ronaldo was looking at him in a way that actually, physically paralyzed him. He tried to move his foot but couldn’t. When he looked down at it, he saw that he was several feet off the ground and rising, sliding upward until he was in the ship. The space was huge, and there were screens on every surface. Ronaldo went to one wall and began to touch it like it was some kind of video game. Each push on the wall made a musical tone. It was almost like Ronaldo was playing a song.

  Kanisha, the other individual, spoke to him. “Come this way,” she said. He tried to walk the way she was walking, but his legs were still frozen. Still, he found himself floating along behind her. They went out of the main space into a smaller space. It looked sort of like a bedroom, with narrow beds along one wall, a bookshelf on the other, and two chairs. Kasia was sitting in one of them.