Adam listened to Uncle Henry’s steady snores coming from the living room. He turned on his side and pressed his ear against the pillow. He counted the number of cracks and peeling spots on the wall. His eyes felt like heavy lead weights, but he couldn’t sleep.
Victor was right, he thought. An object that warns of death is terrible. The warning alone was enough to frighten him more than anything ever did, and made him want to crawl under his bed. Except he was too old for that. So he made do with huddling under his blanket.
“Maybe it’s not going to be Uncle Henry,” he mumbled to himself for the fortieth time. “Maybe it’s Jack, or Daisy, or Francine, if she’s still alive, or…”
His gut, however, told him it wouldn’t be any of them. No, it would be someone closer to him.
The thought of Jack and Daisy tied his stomach into knuckle-sized knots. He couldn’t prevent their families’ deaths—even the notorious Robert Baron III didn’t deserve to die. He never got the chance to intervene in his own parents’ deaths. What was the point of owning something that could travel back in time, then, if it couldn’t save lives?
His mind wandered to seven years ago, the day of the plane crash. He’d been sitting awake in his bedroom, waiting for his parents, when the grown-ups from social services arrived to deliver the news. They told him his parents wouldn’t return, and that he would be moving to New York City to live with his uncle. They said other stuff too, but Adam didn’t understand. Their words sounded far away, as if the grown-ups were speaking underwater. Within days, Adam had been thrown from his comfortable, familiar home into a chaotic world of long meetings with lawyers, of strange grown-ups asking him how he was twenty times a day, of new, cramped spaces.
He had started building himself a cocoon after that. It was where he could remain safe from all the changes. But, as Adam was now realizing, he couldn’t avoid change any more than he could stay cocooned forever.
Francine and Victor had been right: there were memories he cherished, even after his parents’ death.
A sudden loud crash downstairs made Adam sit upright. Uncle Henry was still snoring. His heart jumping in his chest, Adam opened his bedroom door a crack and strained his ears.
Muffled footsteps were coming up the creaky stairs from the bakery.
Fear rooted Adam to the spot. His heart now hammered in his chest—pitter-patter-pitter-patter—echoing in his eardrums and drowning out every other noise.
“Uncle Henry!” he tried to cry out, but the words stuck in his throat.
Someone fiddled with the doorknob on their apartment door. The puny knob lock clicked forward.
What happened next seemed to be in slow motion.
The door swung partly open, halted by the chain lock holding it in place.
Uncle Henry awoke mid-snore on the futon. “Hrmph? What…?”
Long fingers pinching a pair of heavy-duty pliers reached through the door crack. In a second, the chain lock had been cut clear in half. The door thundered open.
This all happened within the span of five seconds. By the time Uncle Henry stood up with a start, and by the time Adam could regain his senses, the intruder had leaped forward.
Adam watched his uncle fall to the floor with a thud. The intruder—tall, dark suit, sharp chin—pinned down his uncle with his foot and whacked the squirming baker’s head with the pliers. Uncle Henry moved no more. Adam screamed.
The intruder turned to look at him. His hungry scowl sliced white in the dim light from the windows.
“Where is the snow globe?” barked M.
Adam slammed the door. On second thought, it probably wasn’t the best course of action, because now he was trapped in his bedroom.
He leaped toward the single window, which faced the back alley. Their apartment was only on the second story, but the cement ground below seemed miles away. A jump down would very likely break his leg.
His bedroom door swung open. Adam threw whatever he could at M—his library books, his pencil case. Each futile projectile only bounced off M and made the man madder. He snatched Adam’s arm and thrust him to the floor. Adam’s nose hit the edge of his bedpost when he fell forward. It started to bleed.
“Enough! Where is the snow globe?” M jerked Adam backward.
Adam scrambled for something else to attack M with. With his free hand, he threw his pillow, which M tossed aside easily. The man shook Adam again.
“You of all people should know how it feels to lose everything,” M hissed. “To lose your family and your home to a simple accident. We can turn it around. You can get your parents back. All you have to do is give me the snow globe.”
Adam knew it would take one swing of M’s pliers to knock him out like his uncle. He braced himself for the painful blow. A desperate idea formed in his mind—if he kept talking, maybe he could distract M.
“You can’t prevent all accidents,” he said, his voice shaking. “The snow globe is useless. People have already tried, believe me.”
“Hmph, I don’t expect a half-witted child like you to understand the snow globe’s true potential. You only used it so you could vanish and dazzle your stupid friends, didn’t you?”
“I don’t have any friends,” was Adam’s response.
“Really now?” M’s lips curled upward in a sneer. “That’s not what I found in my investigations. My dimwitted aunt was quite fond of you. Her name’s Daisy. You might remember her.”
Adam froze. “Daisy?”
“She mentioned a boy, a ‘wonderfully kind’ boy, who traveled from the future and encouraged her in her youth. If only she foresaw how useful the snow globe was, she could have taken it from
