Pulling shards of glass out of her hair, Clover gazed thoughtfully at the carnage around her. Puddles of various mixtures were all across the floor, two of the twenty-four students who’d come in were out cold, seven were bleeding, one girl was crying and bore a nasty burn from one or other of those very puddles, and the remaining seven were either just very shaken or slightly bruised.

But Mallory was missing. As were six other people, but Clover didn’t know who any of them were, and quite honestly…

She didn’t care.

The clock on the wall showed 11:44. By Clover’s watch, those two boys she had wanted to poison so badly they melted (and she knew how to do that) had shoved Mallory’s wheelchair — with the girl in it — straight into a precarious setup at 11:47. And her own watch, too, showed 11:44.

11:43, actually, now.

Of course, the apparatus was meant to be horrifically unstable, and Mallory was meant to be around to knock it over. Anyone else would have been alright too, but Mal wouldn’t question her older sister’s strange methods for obtaining research. And it could just be chalked up to Clover’s general bad lab habits. She was notorious for being so unsafe it was a miracle she hadn’t been forced to leave.

But Clover was lucky. Mallory was far less so.

Except here she was, gazing at the result of the greatest experiment of all time.

The burned girl gave her a strange look as she began to laugh, clapping her hands together with only one phrase on her lips.

“I can’t believe that worked! I cannot believe that actually worked!”

“What?” another kid asked, a boy. One of the two who had shoved Mallory.

“You did exactly as I needed you to! Do you know where your classmates are?”

Most of the people listening shared wary looks. Maybe they thought she was mad.

Maybe she was.

“They’re in the past. You, uh…”

“Jacob.”

“Jacob, yes. You, my friend, have just helped me send people back in time.”

“So that disaster was deliberate?”

“Yes, yes, of course. Don’t worry, they’ll be perfectly fine. D’you want me to take care of that burn?”