Matt could barely believe he’d built this thing. Staring at it now he could see things he’d hardly noticed before, things he’d designed and built without fully understanding why he was building them, but now was starting to see a bigger picture.
He took the tweezers and started gently pulling things apart, removing small cogs, pushing aside thin wires, until he found the piece he was looking for, a thin metal disk. “I built a hard drive into the compass,” Matt said. “I meant for it to store various calendar systems and earth’s geographic coordinate system, so you know it would take us where and when we want to go, but there’s a possibility that it could have recorded and stored dates and coordinates to which it has traveled.”
“Genius! And you think you can access them?” Mr. Hudson asked.
“I think so, though I’m not sure exactly how. We might need to hook it up to a computer or a phone and see if we can decode it.”
Matt had that nervous-excited feeling he always got when he knew he was onto something, and the clarity of when he could see how all the pieces fit together. “Let’s see . . . if I hook this to this wire here and that there . . . ah!”
Matt fell back in his chair as the compass sparked and sputtered. And then something started flowing out of the compass. At first Matt thought it was just smoke. He must have triggered something, crossed some wires that weren’t supposed to be crossed. But then he saw that this was not any regular kind of smoke. It was certainly a vapor of some kind, but it had a bluish glow. And it was forming images. People and places that were all too familiar to Matt.
3The Return of the Vermillion
Matt gaped at the blue vapor pouring from his compass.
“That’s Asilah!” Ruby said, pointing to the white building along the shore. “And look, there’s Quine and Captain Vincent. It’s showing when he got the Aeternum!”
It was like a shadow of the past. There was Quine and Vincent, both of them looking down at a small object in the palm of a scarred hand. Matt’s hand. He was holding the Aeternum, the Chinese symbol glowing white-hot, and then Vincent plucked it from his hand and snapped it inside his own compass (which was technically the same as Matt’s compass).
“Gee, you sure did put up a fight,” Corey said.
“Corey, hush, he couldn’t help it,” Mrs. Hudson said, but Matt’s face flushed anyway. He knew he really couldn’t have helped it at the time. He couldn’t move, but watching this moment made him feel guilty. Like he was somehow complicit. Which he was, futuristically speaking, so maybe his guilt was warranted.
The image faded. The dials turned of their own accord. Another image poured forth, a horizon of endless water in all directions.
“That’s Nowhere in No Time,” Ruby said. There were his parents, Corey, Ruby, Jia, Pike, and Uncle Chuck. And Tui, when they still thought she was on their side.
“I never knew the compass could do this,” Mrs. Hudson said in wonderment. The dials kept turning, the vapor kept coming, showing them echoes of the events that had happened not long ago but felt like ages—the Chicago World’s Fair, Yellowstone National Park, Wrangel Island.
It was coming close to the time he’d built the compass. There was Matt on board the Vermillion, the very first time he’d traveled, facing his mother before she was his mother, when she was still Captain Bonnaire. Her image flowed out of the compass and disappeared.
The compass paused. It didn’t seem like any more would come out.
“That’s the point you built the compass, isn’t it?” Ruby asked. “I told you it wouldn’t show before that.”
“Well, it was a nice try anyway,” Corey said.
Matt poked a little at the compass and it started to spark again. The dials clicked and the bluish smoke poured out the ghostly images, more of Chicago and other places, but clearly from a different point of view—Captain Vincent’s. Jia gasped as she saw herself being discarded from the Vermillion several times. There was the battle at the Met, and then before that all the Hudson children’s travels with Captain Vincent, when they thought he’d been their friend. India and the 1986 World Series and stealing the Mona Lisa, and the first time the three Hudson children boarded the Vermillion, which was supposedly only a few months ago but felt like lifetimes. He even looked younger to himself, Matt thought.
Then there were all the times Captain Vincent had tried to kidnap the Hudson kids. It seemed like he’d tried nearly every day for all their lives. The Vermillion posed as buses, taxis. The ice cream truck where Brocco, dressed in a red cape, tried to lure all the kids aboard with Popsicles.
“It seems kind of miraculous that he didn’t get us sooner,” Ruby said.
“Maybe now you can appreciate how hard your father and I worked to keep you safe,” said Mrs. Hudson. “He tried more than even I realized.”
“It was inevitable,” Matt said. “We were going to board sooner or later.”
“I know,” Mrs. Hudson said. “I just hoped it would be later.”
It was the first time Matt had heard his mother acknowledge that all of this was supposed to happen. He’d always felt she wanted to keep them out of the time-travel business entirely.
The dials kept turning, the pictures flashing of the crew of the Vermillion on various missions, stealing art and money and treasure, and every now and then returning to New York, but not necessarily in any kind of chronological
