Free A Mutiny in Time by James Dashner

this statement, and Dak suddenly felt like the biggest idiot ever born. He’d just wanted to whip out the Ring and start touring history. Save the world and find his parents while he was at it. But here was an entire room full of people who were devoting their lives to a noble cause, hoping all along that someone would come along and give them the means to stop an unending series of tragedies.
    Mari continued her speech. “We have a lot to do over the next couple of days before we send Dak, Sera, and our insertion squad back in time to fix the Breaks. Our current plan is to begin the operation at 0800 hours on Thursday. I know everyone’s eager to begin, but we need two days to fully prep our new associates.”
    She went on to say more, but Dak tuned out. He was having a heavy episode of missing his parents, worrying about what could’ve happened to them. Two days was a long time to do nothing. And while he was here, they were out there somewhere — lost, possibly hurt, maybe running afoul of one of the Time Wardens. Finally, he understood a little about Sera’s haunting Remnant. Loss, mixed with a maddening uncertainty.
    He noticed Brint was looking at him expectantly.
    “Um, oh, sorry,” Dak stuttered. “Did I miss something?”
    Brint smiled. “I asked if you were ready to start meeting people.”
    “Oh. Yeah. Sure.”
    And so they started making the rounds, but all the names and faces quickly became a jumble to Dak. Some dude who was in charge of tracking natural disasters and their frequency. Some chick who watched for anomalies in weather patterns. Some other dude who mapped out daily world events and analyzed them for potential Break material. Some other chick who tracked SQ activity overseas. Other dudes and other chicks who did other things.
    Dak kept yawning even though he tried not to — which meant he kept doing that weird contorted face trick. Sera shot him dirty looks about every thirty seconds.
    One Hystorian they met stood out from the pack. His name was Riq and he was far younger than everyone else, with dark skin and darker eyes. He was a kid compared to the rest of the geezers in the room.
    “Riq is an absolute prodigy when it comes to languages,” Brint said when he introduced him. “He learned five languages by the age of five, and he’s set a goal to pick up one a year since then.”
    “You guys are supposed to be smart,” the young man said. “I’m sixteen. You’ve got three seconds to guess how many languages I know. Go.”
    “
Sixteen
,” Sera said, her voice laced with annoyance.
    “Wow,” Riq responded. “Stunning. No wonder they chose you for this.”
    “They didn’t choose us,” Dak said. “We invented a time-travel device and no one else can make it work. Ever done that before? Invent a time-travel device?”
    Riq rattled off something in another language. All Dak knew was that it had a lot of clearing of the throat.
    “You need to spit somewhere?” Dak asked him. “Or did you swallow part of your oversized brain?”
    “If I did, maybe I
should
spit it out. It’d still be bigger than yours, apparently.”
    “Okay,” Brint said as he stepped between them. “Good to see you two hit it off so well. We’ll be coming back to Riq tomorrow for some language-device training.” He mumbled, “That ought to be fun.”
    Next they were introduced to Arin, a young woman with thick blond hair. Of all the Hystorians they’d met so far, she seemed the most stressed, clutching a disorderly stack of papers to her chest.
    “Arin is in charge of creating a Hystorian’s Guide for each Break,” Brint explained. “She’s been combing through our archives, gathering the information that will be most useful to you in different time periods.”
    Arin shook hands with Dak, then Sera. “
Archives
sounds impressive, but what Brint means is that I’ve spent months rummaging through boxes full of mildewed papyrus and crumpled bamboo scrolls. There was one twentieth-century