“Are you okay, Ronald?” Ms. Lottie asked.

  “Did you see that?” Rahim asked.

  “See what? That’s just my uncle Cy,” Omar said.

  “Do you feel all right, Ronald?” Ms. Lottie asked with noticeable concern.

  Rahim shook his head. “I’m fine. I just tripped.”

  “Let’s get you some water,” Lottie said as she led the boys to the kitchen.

  “Welcome, folks, to the beginning of our coverage for the 1997 NBA finals between the Houston Rockets and the Detroit Pistons,” a voice from the television said.

  Rahim started to say something, but he told himself he hadn’t heard the announcer correctly. It was 1997 and everyone knew it was the Bulls and the Jazz in the NBA Finals. He’d just misunderstood what the announcer had said, that was all.

  That had to be it . . . right?

  Rahim shook his head and continued after Omar and Ms. Lottie into the kitchen.

  KASIA FOLLOWED IAGO ALL the way home until he flew through her open bedroom window. When she got upstairs, she saw that Iago had deposited all her equipment on her bed. After about fifteen minutes, she had everything hooked up again with a few slight modifications.

  She installed a new, stronger firewall that would hide her systems from any prying eyes. She then set up a program to bounce her IP address all around the world every five seconds. Then she ran downstairs, got a bowl of her dad’s vegetarian chili, and brought it up to her room.

  I’m no good at hacking on an empty stomach, she thought. Back in her chair, she started trying to break into the government satellites again between spoonfuls of shredded jackfruit. Her dad said jackfruit was a healthy vegetarian alternative to meat, so he used it in his chili. Kasia thought it looked like a giant walnut with weird, soft, pulpy skin. Rahim said it tasted like soggy cardboard, but Kasia liked it, especially with her dad’s secret sauce.

  She was halfway through the first satellite’s security system when there was a knock at her door. Kasia jumped up and opened the door a crack. Her mom was standing on the landing with a worried frown on her face.

  “Hey, Mom,” Kasia said cautiously.

  “How was the library?” her mom asked.

  “It was okay,” Kasia said.

  “Kasia, Mrs. Reynolds just called.”

  “Uh-huh?” Kasia knew what was coming next.

  “She’s looking for Rahim. He isn’t in his room, and he’s not at the library. I told her he wasn’t here. She can’t find him anywhere.”

  Kasia gulped.

  “He didn’t say anything to you about sneaking out, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t say anything to me.” Technically, that was true. Rahim definitely had not said anything about going back in time to her before he did it.

  “Kasia, you’re telling me the truth, right? This is very serious.” Her mom’s frown deepened. Kasia knew this was her mom’s super-serious face.

  “No, Mom. He didn’t say anything to me about going anywhere,” Kasia said.

  “Okay. Your father is still on the phone with your uncle. He’s trying to see if he will cut his vacation short to help get your laptops back.”

  “Aw, Mom. It’s not a big deal. I don’t want Uncle Dontae to come back early from Australia for me.”

  Her mom took a deep breath and stepped into the room. Kasia could hear her sigh.

  “Kasia, you may not think it’s a big deal, but it’s important that we stand up for ourselves. Now, those men may have had a warrant, but that doesn’t mean them coming in here and taking your things was right. Your uncle is one of the very best attorneys in the country, and he will gladly get on that twenty-three-hour flight to help his only niece.”

  Kasia snuck a quick glance over her shoulder. “Really, Mom, it’s okay. Trust me,” Kasia said. Her mother smiled at her, but it wasn’t her usual full-face dimple-cheeked smile. Usually when her mom smiled, it lit up her whole face and made her light brown eyes sparkle. But this time her smile vanished almost as fast as it had appeared.

  “Don’t worry, we gonna get this straightened out. And if Rahim comes by here, please let me know so I can let his mom know, okay? It’s important.”

  “I will, Mom.”

  “That’s my girl.” Her mom turned and walked back down the stairs. Kasia returned to her desk and let out a deep sigh. She couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. Dr. and Mrs. Reynolds were probably worried sick about Rahim. If she was being honest, she was getting worried about him too.

  “All right, let’s get you home, homie.” Kasia’s fingers flew over the keyboard. First things first. She had to ease his parents’ minds about him being missing in action. She pulled up the file that had all the songs they had recorded together. She used her sound-editing program to pull snippets of Rahim’s voice out of the songs. Then she searched for the Reynoldses’ home phone number. She knew that they had one of the last landlines in all of Philadelphia.

  The phone rang once before his father’s deep voice answered. “Hello. Rahim, is that you?”

  Kasia pushed enter on her keyboard.

  “It’s me . . . I’m . . . fine. I’m at . . . the library to learn . . . some skills.” The program sounded like Rahim if he was impersonating a robot.

  “What? Let me tell you something, son. You have exactly ten minutes to get back and explain to me and your mother why you left the house without telling anyone where you were going,” Dr. Reynolds said. Kasia didn’t have to see his face to realize he was on the verge of being very angry.

  “No problem . . . I’ll be there . . . lickety-split, leave you leaning like the Tower of Pisa with more hits than Goku or Frieza.”

  “Oh snap!” Kasia quickly pushed some buttons on her keyboard.

  “What . . . what did you just say to me?” Dr. Reynolds said.

  “Gotta go,” the simulation said.

  Kasia ended the call. “Yikes. I hope by the time I bring you back your dad has chilled out.”

  Kasia then called Rahim. She wasn’t sure how the phone signal was able to cross time and space, but she had an idea. She’d read an article on a science website about quantum computers and how the quantum dynamics could be used for communication in the future. Kasia had a feeling the government had solved that problem and the future was now.

  Rahim took forever to answer the phone.

  “Ra, where are you? And who are you with?” Kasia asked.

  “It don’t matter. When can you get me home?”

  “Um, I’m no expert in time travel or teleportation, but I’m learning fast. You being in the past will change things. The longer you’re there and the more people you get involved with, the more things are gonna change. I read a book on time-travel paradoxes about twenty minutes ago,” Kasia said. “This can get really bad. Now, you wanna tell me who you’re with?”

  “No. Call me when everything is fixed,” Rahim said.

  The line went dead.

  He.

  Had.

  Hung.

  Up.

  On.

  Her.

  “Oh, you are so lucky you’re my friend or I’d leave you right where you are,” Kasia said out loud to herself as her hands flew over her keyboard.

  RAHIM FINISHED HIS LAST spoonful of beans and used a napkin to wipe his mouth. Omar had loosened his tie while he ate his dinner. He finished off his glass of juice with an exaggerated ahhh.

  “Boy, you so silly,” Ms. Lottie said. As she gathered up their plates and washed them in the sink, Rahim heard the front door open, then close with a loud slam. An older man walked into the kitchen followed by a tall kid with a high-top fade. The man was dressed in dirty blue khakis and a gray work shirt. The name sam was stenciled over the left front pocket of the shirt. On the right pocket the words sam’s handyman service were embroidered in blue thread on a white background.

  “You get it fixed?” Ms. Lottie asked.

  Mr. Reynolds grunted and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Yeah. I told Gus he gotta stop letting his people pour hot grease down the only working drain in his restaurant. Then, while we were there, his freezer went on the fritz, so we had to fix that too.”

  Rahim tried not to stare at Mr. Reynolds. The grandfather he knew bore little resemblance to this man with the broad bowling-ball shoulders and wide hands. The grandpa Sam he knew was a kindly old man who liked to play solitaire on the front porch in his sweatpants. This Sam was tall with muscles that strained against the sleeves of his shirt.

  “You save me anything to eat, Booger?” the kid with the high-top fade said as he put Omar in a playful headlock.

  “Let me go,” Omar said with a hint of a laugh.

  Although forty pounds lighter and four inches shorter, his uncle Shaka was easy for Rahim to recognize.

  “Who’s this?” Grandpa Sam asked as he jerked a thumb toward Rahim.

  Ms. Lottie dried the last plate and put it in the cabinet. “This is Ronald. He’s a friend of Omar’s. He says he’s lost and it’s no use calling his parents because his phone is off. I tried to call and nobody answered,” Mrs. Reynolds said. She and Sam exchanged a quick glance.

  “Is that right, son?” he asked.

  “Yes . . . yes, sir,” Rahim said. Sam smoothed down his shirt.

  “Yo, why your jeans so skinny, dog?” Shaka said, laughing. “Look like you wearing tights.”

  “Shaka, hush,” his father said. He crossed his arms and leaned against the sink. “There’s nobody you can call, son?”

  Rahim shook his head. Mr. Reynolds sighed.

  “You better call Johnny Law, Sam. That boy might be on a milk carton,” Cy yelled from the living room. His grandfather rolled his eyes.

  “You think that’s what we should do?” Ms. Lottie asked.

  “I’m not calling the cops on a Black kid who’s lost. Or a runaway,” Mr. Reynolds said. He looked at Rahim when he said this. They locked eyes for the briefest of moments before Rahim dropped his head. He was definitely lost. There was no doubt about that at all.

  “Can he hang out with us for a while, Pops?” Omar asked.

  “You really don’t know any other way to get in touch with your parents? I know they gotta be worried about you if they don’t know where you are.”

  You have no idea, Rahim thought. “No, sir,” he said.

  Sam let out a breath. “Let’s do this. You can spend the night, then tomorrow we go down to the social service building and see if they can help you.”

  “Come on. I’ll show you my room!” Omar said.

  “Before you show him your room, show me your book report,” Sam said.

  “You gotta do book reports during the summer?” Rahim asked Omar.

  The whole house got quiet.

  “My boys are both gonna be college graduates. They both have to do book reports and math assignments when they’re out from school. While the rest of these kids running the streets, my boys are getting ahead of the game,” Grandpa Sam said.

  “Every game should have a time-out,” Shaka murmured.

  “You got something to say, Shaka?”

  “Nope, Pop.”

  “Go get your book report and then you can show him your room,” he said. Omar got up from the table and went over to the pile of books he and Rahim had carried from the library.

  “Do you know your home address?” Ms. Lottie asked Rahim.

  “Two twenty-four St. Albans Street,” Rahim said. “But my parents aren’t there.” Technically, that was the truth.

  Grandpa Sam sighed again. “Where are they, then?” he asked.

  “They are far, far away,” Rahim said.

  Ms. Lottie clucked her tongue.

  Omar walked back into the kitchen and handed his father a piece of paper.

  “The Rockpile by James Baldwin. Nice one. Glad to see you made good use of your time at the library.”

  “Can I show Ronald my room now?” Omar asked.

  “Yeah, but, Ronald, after he shows you his room, we are gonna take a ride over to your house. Just to make sure your parents are far, far away,” Grandpa Sam said.

  Rahim swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”

  “Come on,” Omar said. Rahim followed Omar through the short hall and up a narrow staircase to the second story of the house. There were two doors to their right and one to their left. At the end of the hall up another flight of stairs was an attic door. Omar opened the second door.

  “This my room. Shaka moved his room to the attic. Said he needed his privacy. That’s fine by me.”

  Just as Rahim was about to follow Omar into his room, he saw something flickering out the corner of his eye. He turned his head to the right and saw a figure standing at the end of the hall by the attic door. The figure was wearing some type of helmet that covered their entire face like a fencing mask, a long metallic-green trench coat, a black vest, and a white shirt with a red silky scarf around their neck.

  Rahim stopped. “Hey, is that another uncle?” he asked.

  “Who?” Omar asked.

  Rahim nodded his head to the right. “Whoever this is here in the hall.”

  Omar poked his head out the door. “What are you talking about?”

  Rahim turned back to the figure, but it was gone. “Huh?” he said.

  “I think the heat done boiled your brains.” Omar laughed.

  Rahim didn’t join in the laughter. He knew there had been someone standing in the hallway. He hadn’t imagined it. As he was trying to decide just how crazy he might be going, his phone rang.

  “YES!” RAHIM SAID. He pressed the green button on the screen as he stepped back into the hall. “Please tell me you fixed it?”

  “First, don’t hang up on me again. That’s rude,” Kasia said. “Second, let me guess: You didn’t stay away from people like I told you to, did you?”

  “What? How do you know . . . Why would you say that?” Rahim asked.

  Kasia groaned. “I checked my homework while I was getting back online with the satellite. Of the three different systems, the communications one is the easiest and—”

  “Wait, you were checking your homework while you were breaking into a satellite?” Rahim said.

  “Duh, you know I’m a multitasker. Anyway, I was reading my history homework and there are things in the file I don’t remember or I remember differently. It’s fascinating, actually.”

  “What? I don’t understand,” Rahim said.

  “Listen. I do my homework on the same computer I used to design your phone. It uses the same network as the satellite, which is the same network your phone uses, which is basically a quantum computer. Theoretically, it’s on the same temporal wave as your phone.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rahim said. He didn’t understand anything she was saying.

  Kasia kept going. “The phone and my computer are still on the old timeline. You know, the one that existed before you did what I told you not to do. Since the information in those files is stored in a quantum cloud, it’s not affected by the changing timeline. Think of it like this: It’s like we wrote a message and put it in a bottle. Then we threw it in the ocean. No matter what happens in the ocean, what we wrote on that message ain’t gonna change,” Kasia said.

  Rahim didn’t say anything.

  “Look, that’s the best way I can explain it right now.”

  He closed his eyes. “Do me a favor. Use your other computer—the one that’s not on the network, the one we use to record—and check something for me,” Rahim said.

  “What do you want me to check?”

  “Who won the 1997 NBA championship.” He heard the click and clack of computer keys.

  “The Detroit Pistons beat the Houston Rockets, four–zip,” Kasia said.

  “Aww, man,” Rahim said.

  “I guess that’s not what you remember?”

  “My uncle is a big basketball fan. He talks about the Chicago Bulls’ dynasty all the time,” Rahim said.

  “Yikes. Okay, obviously your being there is changing things. Right now, it’s just a basketball game. But it could get worse. Don’t talk to anybody else. Go somewhere quiet and just stay there until I can break into the other two satellites and get you home,” Kasia said.

  “You got any suggestions where I should go? It’s a hundred degrees here, and I don’t have any money.”

  “I don’t know. Let me think for a minute,” Kasia said. “Wait, where are you right now?”

  Rahim didn’t respond.

  “Ra? Where are you?”

  Rahim looked over his shoulder. His dad . . . er, Omar was pretending not to listen to his conversation. He was playing with the rook from a chessboard as he sat on his bed.

  “I’m at Omar Reynolds’s house,” Rahim said.

  “Who?”

  “Omar Reynolds. You know, he’s Rahim’s father.”

  Kasia was quiet for a moment, and then she let out a long groan.

  “You’re unbelievable. That’s the last place you should be and the last person you should be around. You’ve already changed the timeline and cost the Bulls a championship. You could do something that keeps your parents from meeting and having you and your sister. You ever heard of the butterfly effect?” Kasia yelled.

  “Look, I didn’t have a lot of places I could go.”

  “Oh boy. When you mess up, you go for the gold,” Kasia said.

  “Hey, you’re the one who gave me this phone,” Rahim said.

  “Oh, excuse me for trying to be nice to my friend.”

  Rahim closed his eyes. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m kinda scared, K.”

  “I know, Ra. Just . . . I don’t know. Try not to do anything to draw attention to yourself. The less you interact with people, the less likely it is you’ll change the timeline any more than it’s already changed. Meanwhile, I’m gonna get back to work on the other two firewalls.”