It was just days before the beginning of eighth grade, and I was standing with my best pal, Bones, in a New York City subway car, trying  to hide my shock. Somehow I knew from the way Bones  was looking at me, I wasn’t doing a good job of hiding  anything. I was really worried and he knew it. The words  echoed in my head: Subject does not exist . . . ten months.  

Sometime next summer, I, CJ “Lumpy” King, would  be heading off to high school . . . but my closest friend  would not—because he had cancer. 

I was staring at Bones, trying to make sense of the  senseless, when he poked me in the ribs. “Hey, Lump,  cheer up!”  

His face, which a second ago had been etched with  worry, turned into his typical goofy grin. He took Stevie  Ching’s phone from my hand, and I didn’t object. We had Stevie’s phone because he had been kidnapped by the  Suits. We had been lucky enough to find the phone and  hide it from them. The Suits were a group of underground,  Chinese criminals, and they were desperate to get their  hands on what Bones and I were holding. This phone was  the most valuable piece of technology ever invented: it had  an app called LightYear and it let you time travel— for  real, time travel.  

We knew the Suits would stop at nothing to get the  phone back, but no way were we go-ing to give it to them— it was literally Bones’ lifeline. We needed to jump to the  future and find a cure for cancer before it was too late.