If you’re reading this, it may mean I’m in trouble. I am, Riley is, the whole world is in deep strife.

Rips have been appearing in the time continuum. People are falling into them and being spat out in the wrong periods and places throughout history. Some may be lost forever. Even those I love.

Time travel’s like that, you see. Here one day, erased the next.

I fear my record of events will eventually vanish in the time slip like everyone and everything else. But I’ll continue writing and hope that, by ordering events on the pages, it may help us work out what to do next. How to fix this untimely mess we’ve created.

***

I watched Riley tapping on the screen of his new-version time machine—about the size and shape of a phone—and felt glad to be travelling with him again. That deep dent of concentration between his brows was on display, which meant the scientific mind was active. His blond hair was tangled, like he’d stepped out of a wild, wild surf. He was lightly tanned, his arms more shapely and stronger than they used to be. And his blue eyes…

“What?” He caught me looking.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just thinking about what’s ahead.” Is he really the great brain of our time? Oppenheimer was a big-brain scientist too. We’d learnt about him in history, as the father of the nuclear bomb. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he was supposed to have quoted from Hindu scripture. I hoped Riley would never have to say anything like that.

Travelling in the time machine seemed colder, the mist more ominous than on previous journeys. I kept thinking I spied monsters through the milky swirls before realising it was our own reflections. Maybe I was imagining it, but this ride seemed bumpier than the others I’d taken. Like a ship on turbulent seas.

“Do you have any seasick bags?” I asked. At Riley’s stricken look, I added: “Kidding.”

But my stomach was roiling and not just because of the jolting. Nerve-shredding screams haunted the gloom beyond the walls.

“Riley, is it my imagination or does time seem…overwrought. Is this our doing?”

“Not totally ours,” he said. “Some of it’s due to Recall selling trips through time. But, before you say it, none of it could have happened if I hadn’t invented the stupid machine in the first place.”

“I wasn’t going to say it.” For once. And if Riley had finally realised his own culpability in creating and launching such a powerful technology without considering the consequences, well then, my work was done. “And the machine isn’t stupid. It might have got us into this mess but it’s also the key to getting us all out again.”