"I'm already regretting this and we haven't even gotten all of our bags packed yet."
"Zip it," Grace hisses. "You are not backing out now. I already lied to Mom. I've already got blood on my hands."
"You're way too dramatic," Ellie sighs, rolling her eyes.
"We're about to steal an actual time machine, Ellie," she says, attempting to stuff two notebooks into a backpack. "We passed dramatic a long time ago."
Ellie amusingly watches as her little sister struggles with trying to fit everything into her bag. "Why are you taking notebooks? It's not like your gonna have time to write."
The girl pauses, thinking. "What if we come back and they never existed? I'm not taking that chance."
Ellie scoffs. "Momma's girl!"
"Daddy's girl!" Grace shoots back easily.
They've yelled over this before.
After a few more moments of wrestling with her backpack, Grace finally gets it zipped and looks over to see what progress Ellie has made.
"You ready?" she asks, and Ellie laughs as she rises from her perch on Grace's bed.
"I've been ready for the past ten minutes," she says shouldering her pack. "Did you get your pocketknife?"
The younger of the two pats her jeans pocket. "Got it. You?"
"I never leave home without it."
After extensive research, the girls came to the conclusion that Mason Industries only had two night guards and that if they were careful, they wouldn't run into them.
Ellie had left a window in the basement open so when the girls pulled into the parking lot and slinked around the edges of the building, they could drop in without setting off an alarm.
"Are you sure that they'll be in different parts of the building?" Ellie asks, peering out into the hallway. "We can't save Rufus if we get caught."
"Relax. I've been planning this for weeks," Grace responds. "You think I'm gonna let some security guards hinder my mission?"
And then she adds, "Plus, even if we do get caught, you're like seven feet tall, so you can just drop-kick 'em."
Ellie shrugs. "I mean, I could-" The girl immediately quiets, putting a finger to her lips. "Someone's coming."
"I told you that one guard usually walks this corridor between 9:30 and 10:00," Grace explains, checking her watch. "And it's 9:56. He should be gone soon."
And she was right.
The girls were able to dart down the hallway, and into the main room where they stored the time machine, without issue.
Now came the hard part.
Actually stealing the time machine.
