“My dad brought me here for pizza and games once when I was little. It was fun until he found a dirty diaper in the ball pit,” Duncan said. “I haven’t been back since.”

Matilda gagged.

“Note to self: Do not eat in this restaurant,” Jackson said.

Flinch shrugged. “Speak for yourself. This place has the best food ever.”

Heathcliff didn’t care where they were headquartered. On the ride from the Playground he had switched back and forth from tears to bitterness. Ruby understood why he was so mad, but she had bigger problems on her hands than wiping tears off the face of former agent Choppers. Aside from having to run for her life from the president of the United States and being exposed as a spy, she had disappeared from her parents’ house, after shouting that she hated all her relatives. They must have discovered she was missing by now. Her whole family would be in a panic.

Once inside the dingy restaurant, Ruby’s allergies went haywire. Her lips swelled up, her fingers got puffy, and her ears ached. Her eyes watered like faucets and her swelling ankles threatened to split her sneakers. One look around explained why. She was in a restaurant filled with a mob of sticky-faced pre-kindergartners who wiped their runny noses on their hands and then wiped their hands on anything that didn’t move. But it was the actual employees that made her suffer the most. She was allergic to minimum-wage, dead-end jobs and hopelessness. She reached into her pocket for an allergy tablet and swallowed it dry.

Most of the team squeezed into a booth with the principal while Flinch, mesmerized by the lights and sounds, decided to have a look around.

“So, as you can tell, we’ve got a few problems,” the principal said, trying to shout over a robotic Marty and his vermin friends singing the Happy Birthday song to a screaming kid.

“What about our parents?” Jackson asked.

“Yeah, they’re going to be worried when we don’t come home,” Matilda said.

“And what are we going to do to protect them? I’m sure the Secret Service will want to question them. What if they’re taken into custody to try to force us out?” Duncan asked.

“Most of your parents are aware of your secret lives. I contacted everyone’s except for Heathcliff’s and Ruby’s.”

Heathcliff groaned, then got up and stomped off.

“I should go see them,” Ruby said.

“I think that is a terrible idea,” the principal said. “Going home will put them in danger. The Secret Service will be watching your house, and the second you show up they’ll have you. Right now, the best thing you can do is let your parents believe you ran away.”

Ruby was shocked by his idea. “You want to make them worry?”

“Your parents will call the cops and report you missing and the police will show up and do an investigation. With police in the house, the Secret Service and the CIA might keep their distance. All those cops and all those family members might buy us a little time until we can finish this mission. Ruby, I know you hate this idea, but it’s the best one we’ve got right now.”

A teenager in a mouse costume approached their booth.

“Excuse me, but is he with you?” he asked, pointing toward a candy machine. Inside were mounds of chocolates and sweets with a large mechanical claw above them. Flinch had his arm trapped inside the dispenser, yet he was singing with joy. “He’s scaring the other kids.”

“Oh, but the six-foot rat bringing them food isn’t freaking them out?” Jackson asked.

“Hey, don’t say ‘rat’ in here. I’m a mouse! Do you want the health department coming down on us?”

Duncan stood up. “I’ll go get him.”

“Thank you,” the mouse said as he rushed off to take an order.

Jackson’s braces whirred nervously. “Is this place safe? If they find us, it’s only a matter of time before we’re lab rats.”

“Hey, kid!” the man in the mouse suit shouted from across the room. “Shut it!”

“Sorry,” Jackson said sheepishly.

The principal shook his head. “This restaurant is completely off the grid,” he said. “Only myself, Agent Brand, and a few former directors even know it exists. Best of all, soon it will be completely operational. We’ll have the full science team here before long.”

Ruby looked around the restaurant. She hadn’t noticed at first, but most of the cooks were scientists from the Playground. Now, instead of lab coats, they were wearing T-shirts with MARTY MOZZARELLA on the front and sliding trays of garlic knots into the ovens.

Duncan returned with Flinch, who was carrying a droopy slice of pepperoni and mushroom. “This place rules!”

Ruby turned to the principal. “What are we supposed to do in this dump?”

“This ‘dump’ is filled with massive computing power,” the principal said. He squeezed out of the booth, crossed the room, and pressed his hand on a game’s screen. A green light scanned his fingertips and then the game disappeared, replaced by an array of surveillance camera images from all over the world. “Every one of these arcade games has a hard drive with processor speeds far beyond anything we had at the Playground. The kitchen is stocked with the latest weaponry. There are surface-to-air missiles inside that robot squirrel over there.”

“So what’s the plan?” Matilda asked.

“The same as it was yesterday: Find Tessa Lipton. Only this time we’re not rescuing her. We’re bringing her to justice.”

“One suggestion!” Flinch cried, his mouth full of pizza. “Can we make this place our permanent headquarters? It’s amazing and the food is yum!”

“That looks like a Sit ’n Spin,” Funk snarled.

Tessa had to agree. Miss Information’s time machine appeared to be a very large version of a toy that caused her to throw up all over herself when she was four years old. Oh, what a delightful present that was, she thought. Hours of gut-wrenching fun!

“Are you sure you didn’t just swipe that from a playground?” Snot Rocket asked.

“We tried several designs, but this one promised to be the safest for the passengers,” the tired scientist replied. Tessa had learned her name was Dr. Rajkumar and that she was an expert on temporal physics—whatever that was.

“Why does it need to be safe?” Tammy screamed.

“Because it rips a hole in the fabric of time and space,” Dr. Rajkumar said. “To create the anomaly necessary for time travel, the machine has to generate power on the levels comparable to a supernova and—”

“Blah, blah, blah, science!” interrupted Miss Information. “So … how do we use it?”

“The passenger enters the precise date, time, longitude, and latitude into the control pad, then turns the wheel. A wormhole will open and everyone on board will be pulled through it. When your mission is complete, just press the HOME button and it will bring you back here.”

“Easy breezy,” Miss Information said.

“But at great personal risk to my health and well-being, I have to insist that you not do this,” Dr. Rajkumar said.

“PREPARE THE TIGERS!” Miss Information yelled.

“Please, I beg you. What you want to do could have very nasty side effects. If you go into the past and change something, there is no way of predicting the ripple effect it will have on the present. Let’s say you cause an accident that kills someone—hypothetically, say the grandfather of Alexander Fleming—”

“Who?” Tessa asked.

“The man who discovered penicillin. What if you accidently killed his grandfather? Hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions—of people would be dead because he never invented the vaccine.”

“Attention, kids, do not kill Alexander Fleming … OK—anything else?”

“Yes! Changes aren’t always so straightforward. Any little thing could change the course of human history. The simplest action could literally destroy the world—stepping on an ant, causing a traffic accident, stealing someone’s parking spot—all of these things could be tied to much bigger, much more important events. Cutting someone off in traffic could literally be tied to the birth of another human being. There’s just no way of knowing.”