Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) by Adam Rex Page B

with the golden octagon, the time machine, in its claws. They turned the corner toward the wing’s only other entrance and saw that here too was a group of elves, just on the other side of the door, patiently punching lucky guesses into the keypad. They’d get it right, and soon.
    “Archie,” Merle gasped, turning to the owl flapping in place beside him. “Calculate a time jump for both of us. For both me and you.” The owl whistled back, and Merle checked his watch. It said DURATION?
    Distantly, from around the corner, Merle heard the click of a door.
    “One year,” he said. “No! Wait! They might think of that, come wait for me. A hundred years! No, that’s nothing to an elf.”
    Archimedes whistled again. The sound of light footfalls tapped down to them from the far door. The nearest door clicked, and the elves pushed through.
    “Five hundred years,” he whispered to Archie. “Execute as soon as you’ve done the math,” he added, and grasped the underside of the octagon so that he and the owl were holding it together.
    Three elves stopped close on his left; another three turned the corner on his right. Conor was at the front of these.
    “Put the device down, Merle,” said Conor in that creepy voice he had. “Oberon himself requests an audience.”
    “ That’s kinda desperate, isn’t it?” said Merle. “Collecting an audience at sword point? Must be a pretty bad show.”
    Five elves cocked their slings, aimed sharp flint missiles at Merle’s head.
    “Is Queen Titania gonna let him be the ventriloquist this time, or is he still the—”
    Merle and Archimedes winked out of existence.

    “—dummy,” Merle finished, five hundred years in the future. Then he commenced falling.
    The math of a five-hundred-year jump was, it turned out, tricky. He hadn’t reappeared in his lab or even on solid ground. He found himself, instead, crashing downward through a canopy of leaves, then another, then grasping hold of a lean branch that bowed, snapped, and deposited him roughly on the forest floor. Archimedes fluttered down to meet him.
    Mick punched Merle in the arm.
    “Ow! Why?”
    “Yeh hadn’t said anythin’ for a bit,” said Mick. “Thought yeh needed perkin’ up.”
    “I was thinking!”
    “So where did you end up?” asked Scott.
    “Near as I can tell, Costa Rica somewhere. I don’t know for sure because I discover at this point that there don’t seem to be any satellites for Archie to sync up with. But that’s fine, I think. Five hundred years have passed, technology is probably so different now that Archie can’t recognize it, and vice versa. So I nearly kill myself hiking out of the forest, living off fruit and rainwater, dreaming about my new plan, which is this: I find some future person here who’s invented time travel to the past, and I use it to go back and save my parents and the whole world. I dream about this plan, even though I know there’s something fundamentally wrong with it.”
    “What?”
    “That if time travel to the past were ever really possible, then the past would be lousy with time travelers. But it wasn’t. Nobody from my time had ever met a time traveler from the future, so what does that say?”
    “Maybe …,” said Scott, not yet ready to give up on the possibility. “Maybe all the time travelers were really secret about it,” he said, though he had to admit that didn’t seem very likely.
    “Well, whatever, it’s a moot point. Because I spend the next six months traveling the earth, and I never meet another person.”

    “Not one?” said Mick. “Not even a fairy?”
    “Not even a mouse. Not a creature was stirring. I find canned food, I find a bicycle, but everywhere it’s empty towns, overgrown cities. I’ve jumped too far, and something terrible’s happened.”
    “Jeez,” said Scott. Immediately he wished he’d said something a little more profound.
    “Yeah. Well. Eventually I can’t take the loneliness anymore, so I ask Archie to jump us