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particularly gory battle from history. He adjusted his wire-rim glasses and finally noticed Jafney. “Oh, hello there. I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”
    Jafney took that as her cue to begin talking about herself … and … didn’t stop the entire dinner.
    Turned out, her mother was a sociologist who’d written her dissertation on communal habitation choices, hence the hippy father. Jafney had lived with her grandparents after her mother died when she was five.
    â€œActually, not my grandparents.” Jafney waved her fork in the air between bites. “My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandniece or something and her husband.”
    â€œHuh?” Georgie was the one who said it even though we were all clearly thinking it.
    â€œYeah, it’s kind of confusing,” said Jafney. “My mom lived on the commune off and on for years, where she met my father. She got pregnant with me and had me here—well, I mean, had me in the twenty-third century. She lied about the identity of my father so they wouldn’t disrupt her research. Then she got pregnant again. With my brother. She gave birth on the commune back in the past, but she developed eclampsia during labor and died in childbirth.”
    The Mastersons and I all looked at each other, stunned, as Jafney continued.
    â€œThey had a hard time locating any suitable guardians in the twenty-third century. My mom was an only child, and her parents died when I was a baby. So once they figured out what had happened, they tracked down my brother’s descendants and there you go.”
    â€œI’m so sorry for your loss,” I managed to mumble through my shock.
    â€œOh, she’s not dead,” said Jafney cheerfully. “Not really.”
    Uhhhh …
    â€œDon’t get me wrong,” Jafney went on. “I miss her. And Dad and my little brother. But once I turn off this chip, I can go back and see them. They’re alive. Just not in my time.”
    I almost started to argue with her, but then I glanced over at Finn and realized that by my own logic, I was eating dinner with a corpse.
    See, said the voice in my head I’d grown to loathe, It will never work. It’s too convoluted .
    No one at the table had a response, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who was thankful when Charlotte sprang up from her seat and said, “Who wants plum tart?”
    As I watched Charlotte bustle into the kitchen, I realized how uncomfortable life could be for her—constantly surrounded by people who had no concept of linear time. She had once told me that she thanked the Good Lord every day she wasn’t born a Shifter because what if she floated away with the stove on and burnt the house down?
    â€œBut maybe your future self could go back and extinguish it,” I pointed out.
    â€œAnd maybe I’ll let Finn bring that flying-cow poop machine back to the twenty-first century with him sometime.”
    And thus ended the deepest temporal theory conversation I ever had with Charlotte.
    *   *   *
    Jafney’s chip reversal went smoothly. It was a simple injection that acted like a vaccine, allowing the brain to fight off the control of the chip. It could leave you weak and with a mean headache for a few hours, but otherwise, pretty non-traumatic. The traumatic part came later. When you realized the world you lived in wasn’t the world you thought you lived in.
    John sedated Jafney for the procedure. I wasn’t sure if it was actually necessary or just to shut her up for more than three minutes.
    â€œShe’ll be asleep for an hour or so.” John patted her foot.
    Finn came up behind me, his Labrador, Slug, trailing behind him, sniffing suspiciously at Finn’s fingers. Slug could probably still smell Ed.
    â€œDo we have time to catch that movie?” Finn asked.
    â€œShould we leave?” I pointed at Jafney. I’d feel a little