It would work. The machine, the plan, everything. The Night Room was so close Cole could almost taste it, death and decay at the back of his tongue.
Tomorrow, thirty years ago, in a world where lions born in a zoo would never see the world outside their cage, some better version of Cole would tell Ramse I told you so, and neither of them would know how right he was.
Teen, canon divergence. Cole gets sent on a little detour and finds out a secret.