The Skidmores would hate him for what he was doing. Of this, he had no doubt. Still, JB continued to administer the translation shot, as Sam rambled on about how she already spoke French and couldn't wait to understand and speak every language from every time period. Her demeanor had transformed drastically since he first brought her to the time hollow. He figured the image of "Isabelle Baron's" bedroom would tempt her, but he did not expect the instant flip from suspicious and terrified to excited and almost manic. She hadn't stopped talking since they shook hands. He tried to convince himself that her happiness right now would make up for what he would eventually have to do.

At least the agency would be satisfied.

Sam hurried back over to the screen on the balls of her feet as soon as JB pulled the needle out of her arm. She looked as excited as he was anxious. It seemed irrational to feel anxious when everything was going even better than planned, so he continued to feign confidence. No point imagining the horror on the Skidmores' faces if they learned of his mission.

"Are you sure we can't stop at Versailles on the way to Gévaudan?" she asked, not removing her eyes from the image of the bedroom. He didn't know what she was looking for. Maybe more details on the gowns.

"That's not how time travel works. There's no stopping 'on the way.' We'll be headed straight to Gévaudan." He scanned her with his elucidator one last time, made sure her measurements matched the agency's records.

"But I've always wanted to see Versailles before the French Revolution," she pleaded. "Oh, and to attend one of their costumed balls like the one where Louis XV first danced with Madame de Pompadour…did you know that she was friends with Voltaire before she met the king? Wait, of course you do, you're a time traveler…" He let her talk until she finally turned away from the screen and stared at him with her mouth agape, as if something very serious had just occurred to her.

"What's wrong, Sam?" He didn't know why he'd suddenly used her nickname. Her file had said that she went by Sam, but he wasn't exactly her friend. Force of habit, perhaps, from all those years working with Second, back when he was Sam Chase. JB missed the days when things were simple. When his projectionist wasn't a madman or a baby, when the agency trusted him, when he didn't grow attached to the victims of time criminals, when all that mattered was the greater good of time.

"I take medication for anxiety and OCD," she said nervously. "I don't want to run out and be stuck in the past without them."

"I already have extras packed for you. Zoloft, right?"

"Yeah! How did you know?"

"The agency does its research," he said. This was partially true. Having been dependent on medication for his own mental health until he was old enough to take the single dose treatment at eighteen, JB had always made sure to look into the psychological history of anyone new to time travel so they could have what they needed. He wasn't sure the agency would have thought of doing that on their own, however.

"What's your alias going to be?" she asked, apparently onto a new train of thought already. "You'll need to pretend to be my brother or something in this period if you expect us to hang around each other in public without raising any eyebrows."

He waved away her concern. "I already thought of that. I'll go by Jean Baron, your older brother. I even have a backstory for us: we're upper class people from America who are new to France and have just finished moving into our manor in the woods. We inherited our fortune from our late parents and have set out to Gévaudan to experience the peace and quiet of rural society."

Her eyes sparkled. "Perfect! That way if any of our behavior seems out of place, people will just assume it's because we're foreign. So what's the mission, exactly?"

"Well…" This was the hard part, telling her what they were up against. "See, back in the 1760s in the Gévaudan region of France, there were a series of attacks by an unknown beast. The attacks were mostly on women and children and they were pretty gruesome. The agency wants to find out what this beast actually was."

Sam crossed her arms and raised one eyebrow. "So the time agency has an entire file on me because of my historical knowledge, but they don't know anything about this beast? I mean, if I were a time agent, I think my first priority would be to go back in time and resolve all the unsolved mysteries of the world. Like, do you not know who Jack the Ripper was either?"

JB did not appreciate the sass. "Our priority is preventing paradoxes and fixing damaged time. Sure, there are some time detectives who get the mystery-solving tasks like finding out what happened to the Roanoke colony, but time travel is still in its infancy. We haven't solved all of history's unknowns. Technically time travel isn't even legal at the moment except for in special cases like this one."

"Wait, you know what happened to the Roanoke colony?" She'd lunged forward at his mention of it and now her wide brown eyes were only a few inches away from his. "What about Jonbenet Ramsey? Or the Zodiac Killer? I listened to an episode of a true crime podcast that said the Zodiac Killer might have been responsible for Jonbenet, but I'm not sure I buy that. Have they solved any other cold cases?" He shouldn't have said anything about Roanoke.

He took a step backward and shook his head at her. "I'm not telling you any of that. If you know too much about anything beyond your time period, the results could be devastating to your future."

"Oh." She looked disappointed, but surprisingly did not press further. Instead, she asked, "So how come all of a sudden you're solving an old mystery instead of saving time and stopping paradoxes like you usually do?"

"It's complicated." He hoped his clenched teeth weren't obvious. It wasn't his choice to be doing any of this for the agency, but it was their way to punish him for that stunt he'd pulled at the meeting where he "accidentally" let Katherine Skidmore steal his elucidator to rescue the Romanov children. So now he had to come up with excuses to bring Sam back to different periods in the past under the pretense of needing her expertise. Really, he was trying to find her original identity—the person she was before Interchronological Rescue used her as their experiment for un-aging children. IR had managed to keep her a secret for a long time, which is why the agency had no records of Samantha Cretney at all until IR collapsed after the death of their CEO. Still, a lot remained unknown about Samantha. Most of the records on her only covered her most recent life in the twenty-first century, where IR had dumped and forgotten her after twelve other tests. Naturally, her mere existence in thirteen different time periods had caused major damage to time.

This would be JB's last mission. He'd already told the Skidmore kids that there would be no more time travel until it became safe again. That was mostly true—it was now illegal for the average person to time travel. However, JB was not the average person and somebody needed to clean up the wreckage before time travel stopped entirely. The task would be extremely dangerous and unpleasant, which is why it was given to JB. He'd burnt all his bridges with the agency in his attempts to help the Skidmore kids. He cared too much about them and let that jeopardize history on several occasions. JB knew he was indeed guilty of this. That is why he accepted this final task without question. It would be difficult, it would be painful, it would probably ruin his life if he actually survived—but it was also the only way to save time and to finally give Jonah, Jordan, Katherine, Emily, and all the others a chance at a stable life from now on.