Elara

"Wha . . . ? How is that even possible? Jaleesa made it sound like Jared was extremely old. How could he be my brother?"

"Well, if I had to guess, I’d say you have the same mother. Although I didn’t think my grandmother would ever come back here. She hated this planet."

"Alright. Let’s pretend this is all possible for a moment. How old would your grandmother be then?"

"Well, what is the year?"

"2007."

"That doesn’t make sense!"

Lubic looked at her blankly. "What do you mean that doesn’t make sense?"

"I . . . I need to see the stars. I need to know how much time has passed."

"Well," Lubic said, checking his watch, "we still have a couple of hours until nightfall. But maybe we can just figure this out. Can you tell me anything that would be historically significant? Like who led your people?"

"Alexander Molossus had just taken the throne."

"Okay. Umm, I’ve never heard of him. Where was he king of?"

"Epirus."

He looked at her blankly for a few minutes. "I have no idea where that is."

"Maybe we should go look at the stars then?"

"We could go and look it up on the internet."

"Internet?"

"Come on, I’ll show you."

The two of them went to Lubic’s computer. Lubic did his best to explain how everything worked. Eventually he asked her to take it on faith that the little boxes could indeed tell him what they wanted to know.

"I’ll bring you to a library tomorrow. The librarians might be able to explain it all better than me." He typed ‘Alexander Molossus’ into the search engine. He opened the first website, skimming it quickly. "Ancient Greece??!!"

"What? What does it tell you?" she asked.

"It says here that Alexander Molossus was king from 350 BC to 331 BC!"

"And what does that mean?"

"He was alive about 2,300 years ago!"

"What??"