Emperors of Time by James Wilson Penn

Billy seems to be
okay.”
    “Definitely,”
agreed Julie. 
    “For sure,”
agreed Rose.
    “He’s nice enough,”
explained Tim.  “And he’s good in an emergency.  Now we just need to
find out how he deals with time travel.”

Chapter 7
Wright’s Ferry Mansion
     
    The next day,
just before noon, the four teens climbed out of a car in a metered parking lot
in Columbia, Pennsylvania, just a block down and over from Wright’s Ferry
Mansion.  Billy had driven them in what he had taken to calling the
miracle car, since it had sustained no damage the night before. 
Apparently Billy’s father had driven his car home the previous night, when his
mother made him come home with her.  The word, “Moms…” and an eye-roll had
accompanied this story when he told it to Julie, Tim, and Rose on the drive
that morning. 
    “So you’re into
old things, Rose?” asked Billy as they all climbed out of the car.
    “Runs in the
family, I guess,” said Rose with a nod.  “My aunt and uncle own an antique
shop.”  Tim remembered that Julie had needed to convince Billy that Rose
wanted to visit Wright’s Ferry Mansion for him to come, but he hadn’t known about
her aunt and uncle.
    “Cool,” said
Billy in what seemed to be a genuine tone of voice.
    As they began to
walk toward the mansion, their conversation turned once again, as it had more
than once this afternoon, to Billy’s injury.
    “How many
stitches?” asked Rose, who still seemed to think of the injury as her fault,
forgetting that someone had ordered the missile to be fired in the first place.
    “Just
four…  Apparently one piece of glass nicked me really good as it
passed.  And since the stitches dissolve I won’t have to go get them
removed.  So that’s cool,” said Billy.
    “Were many
others injured?” asked Julie.  “We had to hightail it out of there to
avoid the wrath of Rose’s mother, so I didn’t get a count of how many were
hanging out by the ambulance.”
    “Four or five
others.  No fatalities, luckily.  Actually, the emergency responders
said we were the only injuries last night.  One of the missiles hit an
office building…  If it’d been daytime, that could’ve been a disaster.”
    “Oh, wow…” said
Rose in a hushed voice.  “Yeah…  it could have been just like
Cleveland.”
    Julie gave Tim a
blank look.  She was the only one who wouldn’t have heard about it for
about a month straight afterwards.  He couldn’t explain it to her here
though, since doing so would have meant having to explain why she didn’t know
something so obvious.  The Cleveland missile strike had happened about a
year ago, and it happened on a Wednesday afternoon. 
    The building it
hit had a private backup missile defense contractor, one that served all the buildings
in that part of the city.  These kind of private contractors were standard
in big cities.  Tim knew that in Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, State College,
Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh all had their own.  But on this particular
day, the contractor had a malfunction.  A missile blew a hole in the side
of the building, and it crumbled.  Two thousand workers were killed.
    It was the worst
loss of life on American soil in five years, and tons of people were
affected.  The president even took a rare trip outside of the White House
Bunker to speak on site later that week, expressing his deepest
condolences.  Still, some people on the internet said the president
secretly wanted to send the Russians flowers for that hit.  It gave him
the votes in Congress that he needed to keep up his draft policies and saw a
spike in military recruitment like no other since the war began. 
    They reached
Wright’s Ferry Mansion.
    “Mansion is a
little bit of an overstatement, isn’t it?” asked Julie, looking at the
building.
    It wasn’t one of
the lavish mansions that modern celebrities lived in, but Tim had no doubt that
it had given its first owners a high standard of living. 
    It had