Free The Time Travel Directorate by Penny Kim

The monk did not look pleased. Now soaking wet, Kanon pulled herself up onto the edge of the vessel, finding her balance. Leaping into the air, she landed delicately on the adjacent water vessel, and on the next—completing the circle as the monk did before her.
    T he monk nodded firmly, clapping his hands together.
    “Continue.”
    Excited with this seal of approval, Kanon began the circle again, her heart thumping with anxiety.
    Is this what Vin endured for two years? Kanon was not sure she would make it, and Vin didn’t strike her as someone who would accept defeat easily.

7
    “I can’t do this,” Vin shouted, throwing Jurisprudence of Time Travel on the floor of his dorm room. He stood up and kicked the heavy book across the room for good measure.
    Training was not going well. Travel law was complex, to say the least, with overlapping regulations and various legal interpretations. On day one, his instructor told the class that, despite the fact that reading panes offered standard applications for travel crime, they were still required to educate themselves via a classroom course. This was due, of course, to a lawsuit at some time in the distant past that required an anachronistic procedure the rest of the world functioned without.
    D espite his frustrations, Vin knew there was a more logical reason for the Directorate’s emphasis on the old school way of doing things. There were no reading panes in 18 th century France. The reading pane on the web was deliberately small. The Directorate did not want inspectors to rely on them.
    Their very existence was a closely guarded secret inspectors protected with their lives. If they inadvertently revealed the technology to someone in the past, it would surely impact Standard D, not to mention cost them their job, along with the added benefit of a lengthy prison stay. And that was if the inspector was lucky enough to make it back alive. Some of the more ugly attacks on inspectors occurred with the discovery of their webs—which, in regulated time periods, often denoted witchcraft. It was an obvious challenge to time travel regulation. Inspectors had modern technology at their disposal, which they could not use.
    Staring at the book from across the room, Vin reluctantly stood to retrieve it—slamming it on his desk. Flipping it open, he tried to concentrate.
    From Vin’s estimation, their campus was an abandoned 50’s era classroom—located somewhere in the Northeast. Bordered on all sides by dense forest, there was little to no distractions available to the inspectors. Meaning he had to study.
    Pouring over the legal texts, Vin wondered which was worse—studying or the training exercises with the monk. Training camp was a shared experience that bonded all inspectors. They all affectionately referred to the monk as “the teacher.” Rumor had it, the monk was from a Shaolin temple—recruited by the Directorate to train their inspectors in the martial arts. It was this training that effectively prepared inspectors for jumping in and out of time.
    The biggest challenge to time travel was not the physical demands of the past , which were many—the challenge was mental. Perseverance, hard work, and patience were the tools of an inspector. It was a lesson Vin learned the hard way during his first mission. After learning French and indoctrinating himself with pre-revolutionaries, Vin felt the mental toll of having to build up an identity. It was the overwhelming isolation that got to you the most. Vin felt like he was on an island, one populated by people he could not connect with in any meaningful way.
    The only thing that preserved his sanity was routine. Every morning he practiced the ancient techniques the monk had taught him. Preparing himself mentally, he was better able to absorb the culture and language around him—crafting the persona that would ultimately save Kanon Hay. And he had done it right under the nose of Julius Arnold.
    Vin smiled at this thought. He