*****Content warning: This chapter mentions suicide. Please take care while reading.*****

"Wait, that's it? That's it?" Katherine yelled at the blank screen after the image faded. "She just dies?"

The twins stared from her to the screen and back again, Jonah shaking his head and Jordan biting his bottom lip. Kevin could have screamed, I told you so! but the scene he'd just witnessed did not put him in a bragging mood.

"JB?" Jonah called. "We, uh, finished watching."

JB appeared in front of the screen, looking somehow even more decrepit and elderly than before. Kevin wondered if he'd been invisibly watching along with them the whole time. "Thank you," he said. "It's a comfort to know Sam won't be forgotten now."

"Forgotten?" said Katherine. "Why would she be forgotten?"

"Because she technically doesn't exist." He spoke quietly, as if the words caused him immense pain. "She was returned to her native time, and when she died, all twelve of her later identities vanished from history."

Katherine cocked her head. "Then how come I remember going to one of her history camps in fifth grade?"

JB shrugged sadly. "You remember how things didn't line up immediately back when you and Jonah were time traveling. It's complicated. What I do know is that eventually, she will fade from any historical record, and all that will be left is my memory and the memory of anyone who's seen the footage I just showed you."

"Not if we find a way to stop Cira," said Jonah. "Katherine, tell the elucidator to take us back to 1865."

Katherine sprung to attention and opened her mouth to speak into the elucidator, but JB stopped her.

"Don't," he said. "It won't work and you'll only be putting yourselves in danger. That's the last thing I want."

"How do you know it won't work?" said Katherine.

"I've spent years running all sorts of projections, even hiring projectionists that could rival Second Chance, and none of them found a way to save her. It's no use."

Kevin suddenly remembered something. "Okay, but Jonah and Katherine have surprised projectionists before. When they followed Chip and Alex to the fifteenth century, everything changed then, didn't it?"

"Yeah!" said Katherine. "If anyone can defy the odds, it's us."

"Katherine, no," said JB. He appeared to be growing increasingly agitated. "I promised you years ago that I wouldn't put you in danger again. I won't have you risking your lives for a hopeless cause. I'm done losing people I care about."

Katherine stood her ground, becoming just as heated as JB. "What happened to you? Where's the JB that had faith in us, the one that all but handed me an elucidator when Chip and the Romanovs were stuck in that cellar? Now you show us all this, then pull the rug out from under our feet and tell us there's nothing we can do? Don't you care to even try?"

"What do you think it was like to experience it, Katherine?" JB hissed. "To know that Sam died believing I didn't care about her? To know it was my fault she's gone? Don't talk to me about trying. I would have blown through my whole retirement fund hiring projectionist after projectionist if the agency hadn't seen the state I was in and had me attend mandatory therapy. For a while, they thought my schizophrenia had somehow re-emerged—that's unheard of with a vaccine. But I was seeing her everywhere. I still do, in a sense; I feel her presence before every snowfall, hear her voice in every ballad—she is in every cup of peppermint tea, every dandelion in the park, every page of every book I've read since…"

"But if you just let us—"

"Did I mention how she died?" he interrupted bitterly. "She drowned herself. Jumped into a river because apparently, she didn't think her life was worthwhile. I even tried to find her grave, but by my time, it was impossible. Climate change—you know, that thing your generation is trying so hard to prevent—it changed the global landscape. Lots of flooding. So now I can't so much as leave a flower at her gravesite because she's drowning all over again…drowning forever." He paused and took a long, labored breath. "You have no idea how many years of therapy I had to endure to finally come to terms with the reality that nothing could be done. If I start hoping again, I know I'll lose whatever sanity I have left."

Katherine was stunned silent now. Jordan stared at his feet and Jonah kept opening and closing his mouth, as if trying to draw on his psychology education, but coming up short. As for Kevin, he just wanted to go home and scrub this whole encounter from his memory, to go back to a life where kids didn't have to save the world and grown-ups never cried. Of course he understood that wasn't reality, but he'd grown up in a household with such protective parents and siblings, that he never had to reckon with the possibility that some situations were simply hopeless.

JB slouched against the wall and finally said, "I'm sorry for yelling. I know you only want to help."

"I'm sorry too," said Katherine. "I just think you deserve to be happy."

"If you promise to remember Sam, I will be happy."

Kevin could tell Katherine didn't believe him, but she didn't say so. Instead, she hugged him and said, "We promise."

The twins joined in the hug and pulled Kevin in with them. JB wished them a merry Christmas and vanished.

When he was gone, Katherine looked right at Kevin and said, "Okay, Kev, I can't believe I'm saying this, but we've kept you in the dark long enough. We're going to split up and figure this out. Some of us will go to 1865 and the rest will go home and update the adults. Hadley and Angela may have some ideas on how to help from the twenty-first century. What do you want to do?"

"You're also not required to participate at all if you don't want to," Jordan added.

Kevin was baffled. "What? I thought JB told us to let it go?"

"Old Man JB told us to let it go," said Jonah. "And for his own mental health, he needs to believe that we have. Like he said, his own sanity depends on him giving up."

"Okay…"

"But younger JB," said Katherine, "the one we know, is sitting outside an empty cottage in 1865. And I think that JB could use a hand."