Infinite Time: Time Travel Adventure by H.J. Lawson, Jane Lawson

torn between staying close to help out my mom or getting as far from Neil as possible.
    If only my dad hadn’t died.
    Scarlet comes back into the building a lot quicker than I expected her to. She tosses a retail bag at me.
    “Put those on.”
    “Where’d you get them?”
    She rolls her eyes. “A store. Where do you think?”
    “How’d you pay for them?”
    “With money.” She pulls a wallet out of the bag she has had strapped to her back this whole time, and opens it to reveal money of all nationalities and denominations. There’s probably enough there to pay our rent for six months. “Another benefit of time travel,” she says with a rare smile.
    “Did you steal it?” I ask, really awed by what I see.
    “Of course not,” she snaps, closing the wallet as I reach my fingers out to touch it. I feel stupid, like Julia Roberts in that old movie my mom makes me watch all the time, Pretty Woman.
    “Get dressed,” she repeats.
    I walk off, moving behind the boxes to don the jeans and t-shirt she bought for me. She even thought to get socks and tennis shoes, which my sore feet are very grateful for.
    “If we’ve traveled through time,” I ask, “where exactly are we? In the future or the past?”
    “We’re eleven years in the past from our current present.”
    Eleven years. That means that Tora is probably my age in real time. That’s kind of a surreal thought, but cool. It would have been even cooler to be in the future, like way in the future when we have hover boards, though.
    “How far in the future have you traveled? Have you seen what the world will be like in fifty, sixty years? What about a hundred years from now? Are we all traveling in self-driving cars? Do they float off the ground? Are we still living on Earth or have we all moved to space stations? Do we still breathe air, or are we capable—”
    “There won’t be a future if we don’t protect Tora,” Scarlet snaps at me.
    As I come around the boxes, fully dressed, Scarlet kneels down next to Tora. She touches her head with surprising gentleness and begins to speak to her in a quick spattering of another language—Japanese, the same language she’d spoken before that I couldn’t quite identify.
    Tora’s almond-shaped eyes open, and it takes her a moment to realize where she is. Her face turns stern, a look a child should never have to have.
    “What are you talking to her about?” I ask after a few moments of their conversation.
    Scarlet ignores me, still speaking so quickly that I’m not even sure she’s speaking real words, or if she’s just spouting nonsense. But then Tora, newly awakened and rubbing her eyes, answers back. Scarlet listens for a minute and makes a couple more comments. Tora points toward me, then Scarlet stands and crosses to where she left her bag sitting on top of a box.
    “What was that all about?” I repeat. “And why is she so important?”
    Scarlet glances at me. “I was asking her where she came from. She told me that Tora and her parents were taken by some bad men. Then more men came; they were dressed in black suits and not Asian and there was a big gun fight, between them and the men that took them. I’m guessing Vandir’s men.” Scarlet pauses then nods to herself. “And her parents told her to run, in the confusion. That’s when she found you.”
    “Who’s Vandir?”
    “The man Hector and Clint work for.”
    I kind of shake my head and she glares at me. “We don’t have time to go into that now,” she snaps.
    “Why do they want the girl? Can you tell me that?”
    Scarlet again ignores me as she pulls a tablet out of her bag, like an iPad, but nothing like any iPad I’ve ever seen. It’s too thin and it seems to glow as though it has some incredible internal light. She quickly turns it on and asks the device for something. She speaks quickly, in English this time, but I still don’t understand half of what she says.
    Everything’s quiet for a minute.
    “What are you