Both Brad and Lucy were stunned. “She isn’t even part of the team,” Brad sputtered.

“She’s perfect. She’s obviously read this book a hundred times. She knows how it’s supposed to work.” Here Casey looked at Brad. “And we have plausible deniability. We were doing tests and she pulled the handle while our backs were turned.” He’d gone through all the permutations in his mind. One: It didn’t work. Nothing lost. Two: It did work and she went back and returned. He won big. Three: She went back and only the machine returned. He won. He didn’t care about her. Four: She went back and neither she nor the machine returned. That was bad. They’d have to admit that she hoodwinked them. But it was one in four. Odds were with Casey. Really with Casey with how big the odds were that it wouldn’t work in the first place.

Lucy felt the lab almost tremble with intent. Brad’s face was a comical combination of eagerness and guilt. He wanted so badly to try the machine. Badly enough to risk her life? Apparently. “Brad?”

He took a long breath. Fear flashed across his face before he pulled down a mask over both the fear and the eagerness. “You’ll be okay, Lucy.”

So that was it. He did want it that bad, but he didn’t have the courage to use it himself.

Casey looked at her. Brad looked at her.

It all came down to this moment. The months of obsession, the feeling of her life being without purpose, stale, and tasteless since her father died, her fascination with how happy Frankie Suchet had been. If she walked out now, what would she be walking out to? She had nothing out there. A successful business, maybe even wildly successful since Frankie and Henri had directed all their friends to frequent her shop, but it didn’t mean anything to her. She had no friends except a crazy old loon of a landlord and Brad, and Brad didn’t look to be a great friend right now. She had nothing but her obsession with the book. And if she walked out, they’d never let her take the book with her. That left . . . nothing. Her life beyond the walls of this lab had not a shred of magic in it. But here, in this sterile place, magic hung in the air, delivered across time by a magician named da Vinci.