Franklin's trip

I have a system in my garage. That's what I call it — a system. My sister Priya calls it "a fire hazard with a Wi-Fi connection," but she is wrong, and also she never comes in here, so her opinion doesn't count.

The system includes: one folding table with three wobbly legs, a plastic bin of salvaged circuit boards, a string of Christmas lights I rewired to run off a nine-volt battery, and approximately forty-seven things my parents think I "donated" to the community center. Every Saturday, I add to it. I am ten years old, and I am a junior chronologist, which means I study time the way other kids study soccer stats. I read about pendulums. I draw gear trains in the margins of my math homework. I once built a clock out of a potato, and it worked for six hours before the potato went bad.

Today, though, I was hunting.

The sea chest had been sitting in the corner of the garage since Dad bought it at an estate sale three months ago. It smelled of damp oak and ancient salt, with iron hinges that looked almost black and scratched letters across the lid that might have spelled something once. Dad said it was "purely decorative." I said it was "unexplored territory," and I had been working up the courage to dig through it ever since.

"Leo!" Mom's voice shot through the garage door. "Dad and I have a Zoom in four minutes! Don't touch anything with a plug!"

"Totally not touching plugs!" I called back. I was touching approximately zero plugs. I was touching a chest. Totally different.

I lifted the lid. Inside: a folded piece of canvas that smelled like salt water, three brass buttons, and a lot of sawdust. Pretty disappointing. I was about to close it when my knuckle knocked against the bottom and something gave a hollow thunk. I froze. I knocked again. Thunk. Thunk. The floor of the chest was not the actual floor of the chest. I found the edge of a loose wooden panel, worked my thumbnail under it, and pried it up.

There, in a little carved-out pocket lined with what looked like dried-out velvet, was a watch.

Not a regular watch. This thing was heavy brass, the size of a hockey puck, with a surface covered in tiny gears and symbols I didn't recognize. The front face had two displays: one showed regular numbers, moving like a normal clock. The second display was different. It read: HISTORY RESET: 24:00:00 and the numbers were frozen, waiting.

"Okay," I whispered. "Okay, okay, okay. This is either the most expensive prop I have ever found, or this is the greatest Saturday of my entire life."

I picked it up. It was warm, which was weird because the garage was cold. The winding crown stuck out from the right side, a little brass knob with ridges on it. I turned it over in my hands, studying the engravings. There were tiny planets carved around the rim, and between them, what looked like a lightning bolt chasing its own tail.

"Leo!" Dad's voice now. "Zoom is starting! We'll be on for two hours, buddy!"

"Cool, great, no problem!" I yelled, which was a lie, because I was already pressing my thumb against the winding crown to feel how stiff it was.

It clicked.

Just once. A small, precise, totally innocent click.

The garage shook.

Not like an earthquake. More like the whole room hiccuped. My Christmas lights exploded into purple light instead of red and green. I looked down at my sneakers, the ones with the light-up soles that I have worn every day since third grade, and they were glowing. Not their usual blinks white. A deep, electric purple, pulsing in rhythm with the watch face, which had suddenly lit up like a screen.

HISTORY RESET: 24:00:00

Then the numbers started moving. Counting down.

"No, no, no, no, that is not great—" I fumbled with the crown, trying to turn it back, but the watch had made up its mind. The air in the garage went strange. It smelled like old paper and ink and something else underneath, something sharp, like lightning after a storm. The walls went soft at the edges, like someone had drawn them in pencil and was now slowly erasing them.

Golden sparks bloomed from the floor. They drifted up past my knees, past my rocket engine T-shirt, past my face, and they were warm. My stomach did a full somersault. Then it did another one. Then it kept going, because something had grabbed me from the inside and was pulling, hard, like a magnet dragging me down through the floor, except the floor wasn't there anymore.

I opened my mouth to scream and the garage was gone.

There was a tunnel. It was gold and roaring and moving fast, and I was moving with it, tumbling forward through light that smelled like ink and sawdust and somebody's old library. My sneakers kept blazing purple. The watch kept ticking. My hair whipped across my face, and I thought, with great clarity, that I should have listened to my sister at least once in my life.

Then I hit a floor.

Wood. Hard. Covered in pale curls of wood shavings that scattered everywhere when I landed. I lay there for one full second, staring up at a low ceiling with a hanging oil lamp that swayed slightly, like the building itself had felt me arrive.

The watch beeped once. I looked at the timer.

HISTORY RESET: 23:59:53.

I sat up slowly. The room around me was dim and smelled like ink and metal. Heavy iron machines lined the walls. Stacked papers everywhere. Somewhere outside, a horse clomped past on a cobblestone street.

My light-up sneakers faded back to their normal white blink, like nothing had happened.

I was definitely not in 2026 anymore.