Chapter One

Eli: Big Muddy

May, 1804

“Well, he’s certainly not a giant.”

“And he ain’t no Indian, either. I don’t think.”

“What shall we do with him, Mr. Jefferson?”

All this talking. It makes my head hurt. It’s like the time I fell asleep on the couch at my parents’ house during a party, and I still remember hearing the phrase “brain universe,” as I was being picked up off the sofa and put to bed.

I was five and I thought of colossal-sized brains until the time I found out it was spelled “brane,” and meant something else entirely, about the way the whole universe — and maybe the universes around it, or next to it — are designed.

The design of my own universe used to be better: There was no jarring time travel, no vanished parents, no talking dinosaurs to explain.

Well, wait. Not that I want the dinosaur to go away.

It feels sunny and bright above me… hot. And cold and damp underneath me.

I’m sweating and I’m rolling around in mud and my own “brain universe” — the one in my head — is aching. I think I’m sick.

But everyone around me is still talking.

“I am not ‘Mr. Jefferson,’ while I am on this trip, Mr. Howard. I am not ‘Mr. President.’ I am not in charge, and I am not even officially here. Captain Lewis and Captain Clark are in command. I am merely an interested citizen, here to pursue a little science, and to wish them well.”

I’d better open my eyes and find out who’s sounding like some kind of English teacher.

Not English teachers, as it turns out. Cowboys.

Or maybe not cowboys, exactly. Daniel Boone… sorts of guys. In scruffed buckskins and leather jackets and raccoon caps and floppy wide hats that look almost like sombreros.

Along with a few other guys in soldier clothes that look like they came from a production of The Nutcracker, dressed in long blue coats and boots and guns with pointy bayonets.

One of those guys is taller than the others. He’s not quite dressed like a soldier — but he still looks like something from an old painting. With pants that don’t go all the way down, and stockings and shoes with big buckles. He has a notebook, instead of a gun, and red hair pulled back in a little pony tail. Hair like one of the hippies I’ve seen in the history books.

I’d look around, but my “brain universe” — and all the other parts of my head — feel like they weigh a ton.

I turn my neck a little, and can see some horses and knapsacks and wooden wagons and long rifles in saddle holsters, or dangling from the arms of some of the men.

Thea and Clyne aren’t here.

I hope they made it out of the Fifth Dimension. I hope they’re okay.

I can hear a river nearby. I guess that explains the mud.

“Mr. Floyd! Have your men tend to the keelboat and mind how they load the crates! We can’t afford to lose any provisions before we’ve even begun!”

Whoever’s speaking now has dark hair and dark eyes that you can’t see all the way in to.

All these boats and provisions and guns. Maybe it’s some kind of war party, or patrol. Or expedition.

I try to sit up again, to say something. But my mouth feels like some of the sun, and the mud are at war in there, too. Only a gurgling sound comes out.

“Aye-aye, Cap’n Lewis, I’ll go down and give them what for.” It’s one of the cowboy-looking men, in smelly leather, with a stubbly beard, and a kind of Civil War costume hat. He leans in and touches my forehead. “The boy seems awful hot.”

The man takes a canteen, a leather canteen, from around his shoulder, and pours a few drops of water on my face.

I realize how thirsty I am.

I try to ask for more, but suddenly, I realize what this feeling is: it’s like the moment you come out of a dream, but aren’t fully awake, and some part of you knows you’re not sleeping anymore, but your body isn’t ready to start taking any orders yet, either.

Though I wonder, since I travel through time with a talking dinosaur and a girl who’s well over a thousand years old, if I’m even in the “coming out of a dream” stage at all.

“Let me see him.” A taller man with no hat, leans over the stubble-beard guy, and stares right at me, then opens my eye real wide with his finger and thumb.

“Ow!”

That came out clear enough.

“Least it ain’t yellow fever. You American? Or you just lost?”

He’s the first one to ask me a direct question.

“I’m — ” Before I can find out whether I’m up to speaking a complete sentence, I’m cut off.

“Thank you, York. And you too, Mr. Floyd. That will be enough for now.”

The man with the dark piercing eyes waves the two of them away. I notice his buckskin jacket is a lot cleaner than the other ones — like maybe his really did come from a costume shop.

“I’m Eli Sands.” The words were kind of croaked out, but like the “ow,” you could hear them.

“Well, young Master Sands. Then allow me to introduce myself. I am Captain Meriwether Lewis. Down on the boats somewhere is Captain William Clark. We are setting out on a journey that is probably foolhardy or maybe even suicidal. Perhaps you are foolhardy, as well, to be out here all alone. Or perhaps you are some kind of omen.” He follows the word “omen” with a tiny little smile.

The red-headed hippie in the costume comes closer, too, staring at me the way a doctor or dentist might do it.

“Never mind reading the will of heaven, Captain Lewis. Perhaps there’s a simpler explanation. Perhaps the boy is an incognitum.” He laughs, so maybe it’s a joke, but I feel like my own brain universe is about to explode. An incog-what?

“And this,” Lewis says, nodding toward the ponytailed redhead, “is Mr. Thomas Jefferson.”