Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

making
themselves inconspicuous when a car passed.  Luckily, by eight o’clock
this far from Harrisburg, most commuters using this road had already made it
out of town by now. 
    Soon enough, they arrived at Julie’s house.  They snuck
around to the back, with Julie glancing nervously at the windows to make sure
nobody was looking back at them.  “Even though it’s a school day, I know
Mikey claimed he was sick a lot in my timeline, so he was out of school a good
bit.
    “What are we going to dig with?” asked Billy.
    “There’s shovels in the garage.  In my timeline, my
family leaves a spare key under a mat on the back porch.  We’ll give it a
try, and if it’s not there we’ll smash a window.  It’s not like we’ll be around
long enough to get yelled at for it,” Julie reasoned.  “All we’ve got to
do now is make sure neither of my parents stayed home with Mikey today. 
If there’s no cars in the driveway, we should be alright, at least assuming my
father keeps the garage as messy in this timeline as in mine so that nobody
could park there.”
    They snuck around to the front of the house.  As Tim
tried not to feel foolish crouching behind a lilac bush on the side of the
house like an incompetent criminal in broad suburban daylight, he made a small
but helpful discovery.  “There’s a window here,” he told Julie, as he
turned around and peered into it.
    “Oh, hey, that’s right.  I hardly ever go into the
garage, so I forgot,” said Julie.  There wasn’t much light in the garage,
but they were able to see enough to notice that it was overly cluttered, and
there was no car in it. 
    The driveway was also clear, and a quick survey of nearby
houses showed that the cars were not in the driveways and the shades were
mostly closed.
    So it was with confidence that she wouldn’t be seen that
Julie approached the back porch.  “Ah-ha!” yelled Julie triumphantly as
she moved the mat and found a silver house key.
    It was a bit easier digging now than the last time they had
searched for a message from Steven Hopkins, because this time Billy was there,
too.  Besides, the last time they had dug back here, they had been doing
it with Julie’s parents’ permission, under the pretense of working on an
archaeology project for social studies class, so they’d used little
trowels.  Now, they were taking turns wielding two large shovels. 
Still, Billy was definitely the most athletic of the four of them, so he was
using a shovel most of the time, as the other three teens took turns with one
of the shovels and occasionally relieved Billy of his. 
    “So is this why you guys have me on your time-travel
team?  Because I’m good at digging?” asked Billy during one of the times
he was taking a break.
    “Ask Julie, it was her idea,” said Tim.  After Julie
was recruited, she first chose Tim because he knew history, she trusted him,
and they had been really close in the timeline she’d originally come
from.  She was from a different timeline because Hopkins had recruited her
by showing her how he fixed her own timeline by ensuring that John Wilkes Booth
was able to assassinate Lincoln.  He knew that by the time she got back to
her own time, the Emperors would have changed the timeline again to suit their
needs, but he sent her back with the instructions to recruit three friends who
could help her fight back against the Emperors.  Rose had been Julie’s
second choice, an obvious one since they’d been best friends for about ten
years in each timeline.
    Julie groaned.  “You two both agreed that he was a good
choice.”
    “I was just kidding,” Tim said.  “Of course you made
the right decision.  He saved our whole mission with the idea to bring
stuff back to the room from the future.”
    “I just wondered why you picked me in the first place,
that’s all,” said Billy.
    “Well,” said Julie, now less defensive, “I knew you pretty
well in the other timeline, so I know you’re a