Hoping that if Ray realized he’d been manipulated by telepaths, he wouldn’t decide to come back and kill me, I connected with the device and instantly understood how to send him back to his own time.

It was actually simple. Ejecting him to anywhere else would be hard and not just hard. It would also have consequences, changing the past in ways I couldn’t predict.

I hadn’t been wrong about my earlier guess about obvious subsystems to include. The GCD did include subsystems for predicting what would happen based on what someone had experienced in here and being sent back to their own time.

Using them, however, was another thing.

I could use the most basic version, but anything beyond that required understanding an alien conception of time and how to manipulate it. Kee and the other Artificers had billions of years to figure it out and I didn’t. So I wouldn’t be able to simulate all an infinity of options and choose the best one.

Not that it mattered with Ray. For that matter, it didn’t matter with any of them. We were trying not to change anything, after all.

Except, I’d killed those Abominators. That might have effects, but bearing in mind that all Abominators were dead, it shouldn’t be large. The other aliens, Cabal members, True, and for that matter, Prentkos, would be going back to times and locations where it shouldn’t matter. Colette and Jody were a different problem. I decided to bring them to Daniel’s attention.

In any case, the extremely limited version that I could use didn’t show red flags for sending Ray or the others back. It put it as “minimal to nonexistent deviation from the current time line.”

One other question struck me. Could I bring Travis back? Hypothetically, I might include a message to the Xiniti telling them to give Travis an implant before he died and disappear him as well.

There were problems with that. For one, unlike Ray whose body had been collected by the FBI immediately, I knew exactly what happened to Travis. We’d sent him into some of the near miraculous alien tech we had available and it didn’t work on him. We were now using it to preserve his body for the funeral.

The other piece of it was that the Xiniti had withdrawn to help with the war against the Human Ascendancy, leaving us in charge of demolishing the planet if that were necessary. That had already been true when Travis died which meant they couldn’t grab him behind the scenes.

Of course, I could set it up to give us a message. If I sent it to Ray’s implant, the Xiniti could forward it to me via ansible around the right time.

With enough of a lead, I could make it so that Travis’ suit handled Johnny Destruction’s explosive death well enough that he could survive. Even if I could only get close, Travis’ healing factor and the implant’s ability to repair could handle the rest, right?

I fed the idea into the GCD’s predictive subsystem and it not only returned, “Significant deviations predicted,” but Spark said, “Don’t do that.”

Letting my attention center on her instead of the GCD and its virtual dashboard, I said, “Why?”

“Because ‘significant deviations’ means the possibility of never reaching the moment where you entered the portal. Even if you reach here again, it will be different series of events. You’d have the opportunity to integrate yourself into the new time line, but if you wanted to make sure you stayed in control of this device and defeated Magnus, you’d all become refugees from a version of your universe that no longer exists. New versions of yourselves would fill your spots.”

Spark said it without raising her voice or giving any hint that she knew what that would feel like. She was, after all, software.

As I imagined losing our parents, friends, and pasts, I shook my head. “We won’t be doing that. I’ll send Ray back.”

I sent the command to the GCD and Ray faded out. Though I didn’t track the process intentionally, I saw him, as if out of the corner of my eye, fade away and into a hotel room somewhere. When? Spring during my senior year of high school.

In my head, Daniel said, I think you made the right decision. I don’t think that we can survive anything this big without getting hurt. Knowing him, I don’t think he’d want us to exile ourselves to save him.

I think you’re right, I replied. I know I wouldn’t want you to do that to maybe save me. I’m just not looking forward to telling Haley about it.

She’ll get it, Daniel said. By the way, we blurred Colette’s memory of what happened. We’re doing the same to Jody.

He let the conversation go as Grandpa walked up. “You beat them. I’m not even sure how you did it or if I should let you tell me. Have you released Lee?”

“That’s next,” I said.