“Liam opened the Hourglass to serve the private sector. For a moral purpose.” He raised his head but didn’t meet my eyes. “It had one until he died. You know what it’s like to have an ability with no idea what it is or how to use it. Liam wanted a safe place for people like us to get help. A place where we could figure out a way to make a difference in the world instead of doing damage to it.”
“You left. You aren’t part of the Hourglass anymore,” I realized.
“When Liam died, Jonathan Landers took over.” Even Michael’s profile displayed anger. “As much as I want to be loyal to the Hourglass and Liam’s memory, I refuse to be part of it with Landers in charge.”
“Why?”
“For starters, he’s obsessed with getting to Liam’s research. Kaleb’s been keeping it under lock and key, trying to smuggle it out of the house when he can, but Landers or his minions are always in the way. There’s something specific he wants. He has an agenda. I can feel it.”
“Why didn’t you stay at the Hourglass house to keep an eye on him?”
“I had other things on my plate.” He looked at me, and I felt remarkably like a hamburger with a side of fries. “Besides, Kaleb has a better reason to be in the house than I do. It’s his.”
“If the two of you are friends, why were you so worried about being seen there tonight?”
“Because Landers doesn’t know where I am or what I’m doing, and I don’t want him to know. I’ve been trying to keep you off his radar.” He raised his fingertips to his temples, rubbing them as if he had a headache. “And you practically walked up to his front door and knocked.”
I didn’t mention how close I’d come to doing just that.
Michael leaned his head from side to side, stretching his neck. I wondered if his muscles were as tight as mine, and what he would do if I reached out to massage his tension away. Instead of touching him, I bit the bullet and apologized.
“I’m sorry. For going to the Hourglass, and for not trusting you, and spying on you.” I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender. “All of it.”
“I’m sorry for acting like some kind of overprotective freak without giving you a reason. But we’re invaluable to someone like Landers. If he could, he’d use me to travel to the future to manipulate the present—find cures for diseases, the economy, the energy crisis.”
“Is that why you were worried about his finding me? Did you think he’d send me back in time to … buy Google stock or something?” Surely that wasn’t what caused Michael to be so secretive. Or so angsty. “Did you think I’d go along with it?”
“No, it’s nothing like that at all.” Shifting on the couch, he leaned his body toward mine. Close enough to make my heart skip a beat. “It’s a sense I have. The guy’s obsessed with the past, and I was afraid he’d persuade you into seeing things his way. I hoped that wouldn’t be the case, but I couldn’t be sure until I’d met you, spent time with you.”
I looked into his eyes, wondering what he saw when he looked back at me. Turning my head away, I worried my bottom lip between my teeth before asking my next question. “And what’s the verdict?”
“I trust you,” he said. “Enough to ask you for help.”
“How can I possibly help you?”
“I need you to stop Jonathan Landers.”
“Stop him from what?”
“From murdering Liam.”
Chapter 23
You need me to do what?”
“I need you and your ability to travel to the past so I can keep Jonathan Landers from killing Liam. I can’t do it without you.”
I sat back, taking a pillow from the couch and holding it over my chest like a shield. Tremors started in my legs, working their way up my body, through my stomach, out to my arms, and to the tips of my fingers. “I don’t understand.”
“If we can keep Liam from dying, Landers can’t take his place as the head of the Hourglass.”
“How? It’s already happened. If we tried to change it—wouldn’t that create like a … a paradox or something?” I knew nothing about time travel except what I gleaned from Back to the Future marathons on cable and Lost reruns, but paradoxes seemed basic. And, up until now, fictional. I clutched the pillow more tightly. “How can you stop someone from dying—especially if he’s already dead?”
My chest ached at the possibility.
“There’s a theory, called the Novikov Principle. It’s a scientific loophole that would allow us to save Liam without altering time. No paradoxes. Liam was killed when there was a fire in his lab. It burned everything in the place beyond recognition.”
“When you found the search pulled up on my computer …” I stopped. I never would’ve found the facts I needed in a news article. “I’d just finished reading about it.”