Chronal Engine Read online

  I nodded.

  “That means that originally you didn’t have the vest, right?” she asked. “Does that mean you can change the past? Or change the future by changing the past?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I guess.”

  “I think,” Kyle put in, “that you have to be able to change things. That the past can’t be fixed . . . because the Chronal Engine makes it possible to meet people in the past, and otherwise the people we meet in the past aren’t people, they’re, I don’t know . . .”

  I thought about that for a moment, trying to sort out the syntax. “But, then,” I said, “do we have the right to change things . . . or even go to the past? I mean, to do things that could affect whether people in the future exist or not.”

  Even to save Emma. Except that she shouldn’t have been here in the first place, either.

  Samuel, who had remained silent throughout the conversation, now looked thoughtful. “If you did, you’d never be able to tell, so does it matter?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. But it sounded wrong.

  “Right, then,” Samuel said, but he had a look on his face that made me wonder what he was thinking.

  Chapter XII

  Night Moves

  THAT NIGHT, AT SAMUEL’S INSISTENCE, PETRA SLEPT IN THE hollowed-out tree trunk, while Kyle, Samuel, and I slept on the ground by the fire. (She seemed to think he was being chivalrous and not sexist.)

  I woke up from a deep sleep once. For a moment I thought it was time for my watch, but then realized no one had tapped my shoulder.

  Then I heard a soft noise of someone moving around. Probably, I figured, whoever was on watch, tending the fire. But something made me cautious. I moved my head slowly to peer over, so as not to draw attention.

  Samuel was crouched on the other side of the fire, lit by the flickering flames. He was staring into a backpack beside him. My pack, I suddenly realized. The one with my laptop and the lab notebooks.

  I sat still and watched, wondering what he was looking for.

  Then he pulled out one of the notebooks and opened it.

  “Hey!” I yelled, and sat up. “What are you doing?”

  He looked over, startled, and I walked around the fire toward him, ignoring the twigs and rocks my bare feet were stepping on.

  “Umm.” He pushed the notebook back into the pack.

  “What is it?” Petra asked as she peeked her head out of the tree.

  “He was going through our backpacks,” I said.

  Samuel said nothing, while Kyle, sitting up, gave me a long look.

  “You weren’t dreaming?” Kyle asked.

  “Oh, come on,” I replied. “I was not dreaming.” Just because once, when I was eight, I’d been convinced that someone had broken into the house next door, and, well, let’s just say the police were called and Mr. Mims wasn’t too mad, although he did move to Florida not long afterward.

  “Just checking,” Kyle said. “All right, Samuel, what’s going on?”

  “I knew we shouldn’t trust him!” I put in.

  “Trust me?” Samuel said. “I’m the one who shouldn’t trust you! I’m not the one with the, the whatever you called it, Recall Device! I just happened to appear here out of nowhere! How do you think y’all look to me?”

  “Why were you going through my backpack?” I asked.

  He hesitated. “I wanted to see what you were hiding . . . if anything. How did you get those books?”

  “Never mind that!” I exclaimed. “You can’t—”

  “Max, shut up!” Kyle said, glaring at me. “Samuel, can you read any of those?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I told my brother. “How can we trust him if—”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Kyle answered. “We’re the only ones here, and our number-one priority is rescuing Emma and getting home. Nothing else matters.”

  “How do we know he isn’t in on it with the kidnapper?” I demanded.

  “Why would he be?” Petra asked, still in the tree trunk. “He’s already got Emma. The kidnapper, I mean. There’s no reason to send a spy.”

  Kyle nodded.

  “I did not kidnap your sister,” Samuel said.

  “What’s in your backpack?” I asked, not ready to let it go.

  He reached for his pack and upended it, dumping its contents on the ground near the fire. “Satisfied?”

  I stepped over and prodded the pile with my foot. Clothes, toiletries, first-aid kit. Nothing remarkable.

  In the distance something screeched, startling us all.

  “Listen.” Samuel glanced back into the forest. “We’re stuck here together . . . I’m sorry. If we’re all to survive and get back home, we have to work together.”

  He held out his hand.

  I hesitated, considering. He could’ve been lying. He could’ve been telling the truth. But it was late. There was no way everything would get resolved right then, anyway. And he may have been right, at least on the part about working together to get home.

  We shook on it. “Were you able to read anything in the notebooks?”

  “No.”

  I awoke disoriented, wondering what had possessed me to camp out, and my back was sore from the ground. Then I remembered where I was. When I was.

  Standing, I saw that Petra was still asleep, Aki curled in the crook of her arm.

  After the incident with the backpacks, I’d been more than happy to stay awake and take over from Samuel. The night watch had been uneventful. After killing about a thousand mosquitoes and trying not to worry too much about the hair-raising screeches deep in the forest, I’d handed off to Kyle.

  I stretched. The morning wasn’t as hot as the day, but it would never be cool. Maybe about eighty. And humid.

  Samuel was asleep, too, lying beside his backpack, bow and quiver up against the tree trunk.

  I glanced toward the riverbank, where Kyle sat, legs crossed, on a rock next to a cypress. For a moment I was anxious, but the bank here was too high for a gator to climb. Beside him lay a branch that had been trimmed into a spear.

  As I approached, I began, “Hey—”

  Kyle shushed me and pointed just upriver, at a bend, where another cypress rose from the bank. An Ornithomimus stood, peering into the shadows between the tree and the bank. About six feet tall, it looked sort of like a slim, less feathery ostrich, but with a long tail and arms, not wings, that ended in claws.

  It stood still a moment, head cocked, until with a quick darting movement, its head and neck struck at something on the ground.

  When it came up, it was holding a lizard in its teeth. Another quick movement, and the lizard was swallowed whole.

  I took a step forward, crunching a dried fern branch.

  Startled by the noise, the Ornithomimus looked over at me, then turned and ran off through the ferns, upriver.

  “Sorry,” I whispered in response to Kyle’s glare, and sat on the riverbank beside him. For a while we both listened to the water gurgling.

  I stared into the river, watching as the currents flowed around a rock, swirling, sometimes bubbling, as leaves and bits of wood meandered downstream. Schools of fingerlings darted in and out of the shadows.

  That reminded me. “What do you remember from Dad’s funeral?”

  Kyle turned his head slowly toward me. “What?”

  It was something we never talked about. At least Kyle and Emma never talked about it with me.

  “Do you remember anything about Grandpa being there?” I clarified. “Did he say anything to you?” I’d been eight and didn’t really remember much of the day, but I was hoping maybe Kyle might’ve.

  He gave me a thin smile that was more of a grimace. “He said it was my job now to take care of y’all.”

  “I don’t need you to take care of me,” I said. “City boy.”

  He threw a rock into the water. “Grandpa didn’t say a word about a time machine.”

  Chapter XIII

  Sunny-Side Up


  WE CONTINUED UPRIVER, RELYING ON SAMUEL’S CLAIM THAT there was a lake a little over a day’s walk away that he thought might be the launch’s destination. Supposedly, en route was the cave where we could make a base camp.

  I still didn’t think it was a good idea to trust him, but Petra and Kyle didn’t seem onboard with my suspicions, and we were already heading in that direction, anyway. I just hoped we weren’t being led into a trap.

  By early afternoon I was sweaty, footsore, hungry again, and in a lousy mood. My ankle had scabbed over, but still hurt. The aspirin weren’t doing a whole lot of good.

  The lab books, which had been sealed up almost all night, were better, but still damp, some of the pages sticking together. I was beginning to wonder if they’d ever get completely dry in this humid environment.

  By tonight I thought I’d be able to take a look at them. Hopefully the ink hadn’t all washed away.

  The redwood trees offered shade, but no relief from the heat. My T-shirt was soaked through, and some insect was making an incredibly loud, high-pitched, sawing noise that somehow made me feel even hotter.

  I took a swig from my canteen, then jogged to where Samuel and Kyle had paused to stand at the top of a small rise.

  “How much farther?” I asked.

  “Not much,” Samuel said with a gesture. “But we’ve arrived at lunch.”

  As I reached the top of the rise, I looked and had to laugh.

  Laid out before us, surrounding a pond that was about twice the size of an Olympic pool—amid cycads, ferns, and stands of magnolias—was a nesting colony of what I thought might be Leptoceratops, ridiculous-looking, tiny relatives of the three-horned, elephant-sized Triceratops.

  The sheep of the Cretaceous, they were called. No more than six feet long from nose to tail and about waist high, the Leptoceratops didn’t have horns, but they did have enormous heads with a bony frill and huge, parrot-like beaks. Their hind legs were much larger than their forelimbs, so they looked completely out of balance on all fours.

  The effect was even more comical when they hoisted themselves up on their hind legs to run or “box” with each other.

  Spread out in the shallow valley were almost a hundred nests, crater-like mounds about six feet in diameter and about ten feet apart. Most nests had at least one Leptoceratops near it, either lying down or adjusting the vegetation that at least partially covered the eggs.

  “You said ‘lunch’?” I asked, turning to Samuel.

  “Eggs,” Samuel replied. “I reckon if we were here awhile, we could come back and do some real hunting, but today I think we should just raid some nests and get to the cave as soon as possible. Especially with tyrannosaurs out and about.”

  I stared down at the colony. Most nests had a guardian. And even though they weren’t big by dinosaur standards and looked cute and all, Leptoceratops were still big enough to be dangerous.

  “Look over there,” I said. Ahead and to my right, a couple of the Leptoceratops were rooting around at the base of a cycad. “That’s what the beaks are for. If they can cut through a cycad trunk, they can do the same to an ankle. Or an arm. And they’re going to be protecting those nests.”

  Samuel leaned on his bow. “We have fire.”

  “You want to burn them out?” I said, my tone kind of hostile. I pictured a stampede and a field full of charred eggs.

  “We just need a few torches,” Samuel explained. “We drive them back and take the eggs.” He pulled out his bowie knife and approached a tree.

  The bark seemed to be peeling slightly. Samuel plunged the knife into the trunk, then drew it downward. Before long, he had a sheet of bark, which he rolled into a narrow cone. “Birch-bark torches.”

  “Oh, give me a break!” Petra said. “We also have these.” She raised her bow, Aki still on her shoulder. She pointed a bit to the left of straight ahead. “There.”

  Then she nocked an arrow to the string, aimed, and shot, before anyone could say anything. The broad-head struck the Leptoceratops she was aiming at (at least I assumed it was the one she was aiming at)—an animal with a nest at the edge of the herd. It made a noise somewhat like a combination of a pig’s squeal and a sheep’s bleat, and then fell over, but kept making the noise. Others of the herd around it made snorting noises and trotted a couple paces off. Then they stopped, not wanting, I guess, to leave their nests.

  “Gentlemen,” Petra said, “I give you an unprotected nest.”

  Leaning on his spear, Kyle hid a smile while Samuel looked outraged.

  “We didn’t need to do that!” Samuel said, dropping his birch-bark cone. “We can’t take any of the meat with us. You wasted it!”

  “Better the Leptoceratops than one of us,” Petra replied. “This is survival, not camping. Besides, it isn’t wasted. Something will come and eat it.”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “let’s get some eggs before the something gets here.”

  I led the way down the hill into the valley, toward the colony, surveying the nesting dinosaurs and being eyed warily in return. Up close, the Leptoceratops looked less like Mesozoic comic relief and more like unpredictable wild animals.

  “Nice fella,” Kyle said in a soothing tone to the wounded Leptoceratops as we approached its nest. “Nice pig-dinosaur thing. We don’t want to hurt you. We just want to kill you and eat your young.”

  I filled a pack with eggs while Kyle stood ready with his makeshift spear. In the meantime, Petra slit the Leptoceratops’s throat and pulled out her arrow.

  “You sure we can’t bring any of this with us?” Petra asked.

  “Not with tyrannosaurs running around,” Samuel replied, a little stiffly. “We need to get out of here and get the blood cleaned off you. Posthaste.”

  I hoisted the egg bag and turned to go.

  “Umm, guys,” I said. Our path back was cut off by a pair of Leptoceratops. They didn’t look like they’d really even noticed us, but they were in the way. I took a step, figuring I’d just skirt behind the one on the left, which it must’ve seen, because it gave an angry bleat and stood facing me, raising its frill to make it look bigger.

  The Leptoceratops took a two-step warning charge at me, but then stopped.

  “Oh, this is ridiculous,” Petra said, raising her bow again.

  “No!” Samuel yelled, as the Leptoceratops let out a shrill trumpet, then charged.

  Kyle stepped forward, lowered his spear, and thrust it at the creature’s face. The spear struck the top of the bony frill and glanced away.

  With another bleat, the Leptoceratops shook its head, brushing off the blow.

  Then, lunging forward, the Leptoceratops knocked Kyle into Samuel, who tried to dodge back.

  “Watch out!” Kyle yelled as he and Samuel hit the ground.

  The Leptoceratops ignored them and continued forward into the colony.

  But Petra and I were blocking the creature’s path.

  As I lowered my quarterstaff, the animal caught it with its beak.

  With a snap of its jaws, the Leptoceratops cut the staff in two and grunted twice, pawing the ground.

  Then Petra jabbed at the animal with the bloody arrow she’d taken from her kill.

  The Leptoceratops paused, flanks heaving, as it let out a bellow.

  Meanwhile, Kyle and Samuel got untangled and edged out of the way, clear of the colony’s stragglers.

  A moment later the Leptoceratops grunted once more, then trundled off to the side, ignoring us completely.

  We retreated from the nesting ground, up the gentle incline to our overlook spot on the rise. Petra washed her hands with water from her canteen.

  Taking a glance back, I saw the Leptoceratops whose nest we’d raided lying stiff on the ground. I felt a brief moment of regret, but to be honest, I couldn’t tell whether it was because we’d killed the creature or because we weren’t taking any of its flesh.

  I wondered what the eggs would taste like. And how Emma was faring.

  And then I heard a loud s
quealing. When I found the source, I saw a Nanotyrannus on the other side of the colony approach the herd. Another came out of a stand of cycads immediately behind.

  The nearby Leptoceratops shied away, parting like a sea.

  The pair eyed the herd, trying to select, I guess, one to go after.

  Then they must’ve picked up the scent of the dead animal, because they lowered their heads, looking in our direction.

  Petra fitted an arrow to her bow. “Why don’t we get out of here?”

  “Wait,” Samuel said, although he, too, nocked an arrow.

  “What for?” I asked as the Nanotyrannus came closer.

  “To make sure they’re stopping,” Samuel said. Even as he spoke, the Nanotyrannus pair walked up to the Leptoceratops and, from either side, began to devour it.

  The same pair I had seen two nights ago.

  “Now we should go,” Samuel announced.

  “I don’t understand it,” Petra said, as we grabbed our packs and Aki and left.

  “What?” I asked when no one else did.

  “How do . . . how do these sheep things survive?” she asked. “I mean, they have these nests on the ground out in the open, and they’re totally defenseless. Anything can come and eat them or steal their eggs.”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “It’s like Luby’s cafeteria only it’s all free, and you don’t need a tray.”

  “Yes.” Petra shook her head. “It’s exactly like Luby’s.”

  “They survive,” I said, “the same way animals like ostriches, alligators, and turtles survive. They lay a lot of eggs, so there’s a good chance at least some of them will make it. Plus, there are a lot of them here, which means that any given predator is only going to get one. Most will survive.”

  “And I don’t know how defenseless they are,” Kyle added. “They did a number on Max’s quarterstaff.”

  It wasn’t long before we had left the colony far behind.

  Every now and then, I would pause, listening to make sure we weren’t being followed by the two Nanotyrannus.