Lucy mustered up a smile. Brad was a strange mixture of rampant ego and insecurity. It was kind of nice to have a friend who needed you as much as you needed him. And she had been needy after her father died. “You know I think you’re brilliant.”

Brad’s eyes darkened. He set his lips. “Yeah. You think I’m smart. That’s why you bother to hang around with me.”

That was only part of it. They did have good conversations. But she also hung with Brad because he’d known her father. Now that she was alone in the world, Brad was a kind of connection to her father. And Brad had been a friend indeed, helping her with the funeral, arranging to sell her father’s boat so she could keep the store going. “You know it’s more than that.”

A little glimmer of something flashed in his brown eyes. “I know.”

That was puzzling. But this whole thing was puzzling. When Brad saw the picture of the machine in Leonardo’s wonderful book, he freaked out. He said the machine actually existed. The Italian government found it under Il Duomo cathedral in Florence and asked Stanford’s Super Collider Lab to find a way to power it. No one knew what the machine actually did.

Except Lucy. Leonardo’s book told her.

It was supposed to be a time machine.

Therefore, it wasn’t real. She couldn’t be hurrying down some corridor of a lab in the hills of twenty-first-century San Mateo County to see a time machine built in 1508. Impossible.

But that’s not what her bones were telling her. She’d always known that Leonardo’s treatise, which had such a hold on her, was no ordinary book.

It had all started with a girl named Frankie Suchet.

“I’ve got a book I want authenticated,” the beautiful young woman said. Her blond hair was spiked out and tipped with coal black. Her blue eyes glowed in translucent white skin. She was lean and boyish, dressed in tight leather pants and a skimpy sweater that showed her flat belly. Just the kind of body Lucy always wanted to have. “Professor Lambeth over at Berkeley said you could do the job.” The woman began unwrapping a brown paper package tied with string.