The Time Agency Headquarters had grown significantly less chaotic since Cira took over as Agency Director. Even those who opposed her at first now had to admit that despite her youth and small stature, Cira had transformed the Agency faster than any other director before her. As for Cira, she relished in her well-earned title as the youngest director in the Agency's history. She was barely twenty-four years old when she took on the role of undercover agent, and she looked even younger. That was probably why Agent K'Tah—or, JB, as the time primitives called him—always stuck her in silly little girl roles during her training. High school student, candy striper, girl scout…she hated it. He'd never taken her seriously, even though he was the one breaking all the rules by buddying-up with time primitives. The audacity! She'd always been a better time agent than him. Well, now she was the boss and he had to follow her orders, even if that meant sending him on a wild goose chase to clean up yet another one of Interchronological Rescue's messes.
This particular mess was named Samantha Cretney, and if Agent K'Tah hadn't been so busy stumbling all over history to save his little friends, he might have realized that Rathbone had done far more damage to time than anyone thought. It was only because Cira had taken it upon herself to go undercover as an IR employee that a few records on Samantha remained. Rathbone was very careful to destroy evidence of illegal activity, so it was merely a stroke of luck that Cira managed to access a small portion of the records before they were entirely deleted. Now, if K'Tah had just done his job and returned the kids to their proper times instead of creating even more ripples in an attempt to save them, then perhaps IR would have been shut down much earlier, there would be full records on Samantha, and time wouldn't have to go through a long healing period before it was safe to travel it again.
Cira wondered if time travel would ever return. Without tracers or records of Samantha's previous lives, it would be practically impossible to truly save the twenty-first century from collapse. At least the collapse could be delayed by several years if K'Tah could keep her from staying in one time period for too long, and perhaps that would give the agency enough time to figure out where she came from originally. For now, K'Tah would just have to keep investigating historical mysteries while dragging Samantha along until a lucky coincidence or a miracle brought them to her proper time period. It was a job Cira wouldn't wish upon anyone but the man who jeopardized her career.