A Mutiny in Time (Infinity Ring #1)

The funeral service had been slightly boring and lasted roughly one hundred and thirty hours, but now they were finally at the family dinner that came afterward. Dozens of people who’d been boo-hooing their eyeballs out an hour earlier were laughing like overcaffeinated hyenas, stuffing their faces with a whole week’s worth of SQ-rationed food. Dak wondered whether funerals for old people always ended up being such festive affairs.

He sat at a table with a bunch of cousins, none of whom he’d ever met. They were talking about all kinds of things that he didn’t care about. Like that lame show where they crown the next SQ intern. Or game five of some sports championship that was so dull Dak didn’t even know which teams were playing (or what sport it was). Then some kid with a pimple the size of President McClellan’s face on Mount Rushmore started talking excitedly about the latest fashion trends, namely those jeans with the pockets that made your rear end look like it was upside down. Seriously? Dak thought. These people couldn’t possibly share the same genetics with him, could they?

Just as he decided he couldn’t take any more, a sudden feeling came over him — a familiar itch that he’d learned long ago was impossible to ignore.

He had to share his tremendous knowledge of history, and he had to do it now.

Dak stood up and cleared his throat. When no one paid him any attention, he picked up his glass and tapped it loudly with his spoon until everyone in the room finally shut their yappers and looked at him.

“I just have something I’d like to say to everybody,” he announced. He heard a few groans in response, but he assumed those were the old fogies, feeling aches and pains as they shifted in their seats. A quick glance at his mom showed that she’d put her head in her hands, and his dad was looking at him wide-eyed, slowly shaking his head back and forth. There was something like panic on his face.

Dak hurried to continue before somebody forced him to stop. “I know we’re gathered here for a very solemn occasion. Poor Great-Uncle Frankie has gone the way of the dodo bird, soon to rot in peace. Um, I mean, rest in peace. But, um, I wanted to share something to help you all realize that things aren’t as bad as they seem.”

He paused to gauge people’s reactions. They all seemed enraptured.

“You see,” he continued, “our dear relative could’ve gone out the same way as Rasputin, the grand Russian mystic, in the year 1916. That poor man was poisoned, shot four times, clubbed over the head, then drowned in a river. Drowned in a river, for crying out loud! After being poisoned, shot, and clubbed! Poor fella.” Dak let out a little chuckle to set the right mood. “So, as you can clearly see, Great-Uncle Frankie got off pretty easy when all is said and done.”

Dak finished by pulling in a long, satisfied breath. He looked around the room and saw nothing but blank faces staring back at him. Lots of blinking.

“Thanks for listening,” he finally said. Then he held up his water glass and yelled, “Cheers!”

His mom fell out of her chair.



The next day brought the field trip he’d been looking forward to for months. For someone who loved history as much as Dak did, going to the Smithsonian was better than getting locked in a candy factory overnight. He planned to gorge himself on information.

On the bus ride there, he sat by his best friend in the whole wide world. Her name was Sera Froste, and so far no one had given them any flack about being such good friends. Well, except for the occasional “when’re you gonna get married” jokes. And the “Dak and Sera, sittin’ in a tree” songs.

Okay, so they’d received plenty of flack.

“What exhibits are we going to see before lunch?” Dak asked her after he’d gone over the museum’s floor plan with fluorescent highlighters. “And which ones after?”

Sera looked up from the electronic book that she was reading on her SQuare tablet, fixing him with the sort of stare she usually reserved for a bug in a jar. Her long dark hair made her expression look even more severe, as if it were on display in a picture frame. “Would you relax? Let’s just play it by ear, roam around. I don’t know, actually enjoy ourselves.”

Dak’s mouth dropped open. “Are you insane?” And he really meant it — she obviously didn’t comprehend the opportunity they were about to be given. “We need to plan this to the second — I’m not taking any chance of missing something cool.”

“Oh, for the love of mincemeat,” was her only response before she returned her attention to String Theory and Other Quantum Leaps in Quantum Physics.

Sera was a nerd in her own right, almost nerdy enough in stature to compete with Dak himself. Oh, who am I kidding? Dak thought. She had him beat by a mile.

This was the girl who had recently convinced him to attend a Saturday afternoon thesis reading at the local university — “convinced” him by threatening to scream out in the middle of lunch that she was in love with him if he said no. Dak had fiercely protested because he’d wanted to see the guy at the state fair who swore he was so old that he’d been Mussolini’s foot doctor during World War Two. (The man evidently had toenail clippings to prove it.) But Sera swore that it’d be more exciting to hear a three-hour presentation called “The Effect of Tachyon Generation on Ambient Wellsian Radiation.”