Grandpa wore the late 50s and 60s version of the Rocket suit. Giles Hardwick wore the final version of his costume—red with a lightning bolt under an arch decorated with hieroglyphics. He’d always been fascinated with Egypt.

  Captain Commando’s blue costume with a US flag on it echoed Cassie’s, or more accurately, vice versa. Grandma wore a white jumpsuit, which seemed closer to skintight than I imagined for that era. Night Wolf’s black-accented grey costume with wolf head symbol had been the model for both Haley and Travis’ designs.

  C wore a purple costume and mask, his hair shorn close to his head. I hadn’t remembered him using that color for his costume, but Jaclyn had. The Mentalist still wore the black tuxedo version of his costume, the one inspired by Mandrake the Magician.

  They had to be in their late 30s or early 40s, younger than I’d ever seen them except in pictures.

  This would have been after running Giles through the power impregnator, but before anyone knew he’d turned supervillain. Was it also before he’d thought to turn supervillain? That was the kind of wrinkle I could do without.

  “Hey,” I said, “before you move to Magnus’ people, do you know why my grandparents and the rest of their team are here?”

  She replied, “Lee sent them here.”

  Still looking at the original team’s images, “Are they safe? Are they imprisoned? What were they trying to accomplish here?”

  Spark glanced over at them and over to me, “That may have been the most important question you could have asked. They were sent here by Lee after he hid this device. Removing his presence from it and his control of the device along with it, he and Nataw set up the device to prevent anyone from finding it without the two of them. They also prevented anyone from being able to arrive without Lee himself waiting on the other side.”

  Here, she shook her head. “Unfortunately, Nataw, while brilliant, isn’t a practical being, and Lee’s no technologist either. I don’t think they thought through the practicalities. Nataw figured out a way find it even though Lee wasn’t with him or inside waiting. He told me that he'd been curious about Kee’s design. Unfortunately, he didn’t know about the traps that Kee had designed to trap Artificers and Lee had armed as he left. He was immediately captured and imprisoned.”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Oh,” I shook my head. “That’s embarrassing. I assume you can’t let him out.”

  Spark’s lip quirked, “He’s told me that it’s embarrassing several times, and no, I can’t let him out. I have no control over that aspect of the system. Neither does Lee at this point. He came back later with your grandparents to remove himself from the system as an owner and hide it. Remaining connected would have resulted in a noticeable link between him and it, increasing the risk that both would be found. He’d had an incident that made him believe that Destroy’s forces were close and searching for him.

  “He did retain the necessary identification codes to allow him to retake control, but when he went back, Magnus had already taken control of the security system, imprisoning Lee, and invalidating the codes.”

  I frowned, “Why didn’t the security system imprison Magnus, or for that matter, me?”

  “Kee, my creator, had a soft spot for young Artificers. They’re cast out to fend for themselves for a thousand years and welcomed back to be taught after that. The system is programmed to allow them shelter for a time. Magnus took advantage of that time to use Kee’s tools and begin to take over this device.”

  Then Spark stopped, but added, “This all relates to answering your question about why your grandparents are here. I mentioned that this device exists in all times after a fashion, but that’s at the whim of the owner. When there’s no owner, people linger even though they’ve presumably left because it is possible they won’t leave in the end.”

  I thought it through. It made a kind of sense, but I had a bad feeling it would require delving into alien temporal physics for it to make sense. “So,” I began, “my grandparents are still here only because this place is between owners, and the next owner might not let them leave?”

  “Or they might be killed,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact.

  I asked, “In here?”

  Even as I said it, I thought about the possibilities. While I didn’t know for sure how time and paradox worked in the real world as opposed to science fiction, alternate universes made the most sense in the context of current theory. If this place were truly stuck at a specific spot in time, we might not be in the normal situation where, if someone made a particular decision, you’d get a new alternate universe where they didn’t. Instead, you might truly change the past.

  I asked, “Are you trying to tell me that if they die here, we wipe out pasts where they got to leave?”

  A brief smile flashed across her face, “Precisely.”