To rescue her missing mother, thirteen-year-old Mira must travel to sixteenth-century Rome, where she befriends the painter Caravaggio and other artists and scientists under suspicion for being forward thinking individuals.

When fourteen-year-old Talibah and her ten-year-old brother, Adom, visit modern-day Egypt with their historian-father, they become involved in a mystery surrounding Hatshepsut, a woman pharoah, and Senenmut, architect of her mortuary tomb, as well as their own deceased mother.

Instructed by her time-traveling mother to travel to World War I London and steal a German spy's briefcase, thirteen-year-old Mira enjoys meeting famous suffragists and such writers as Arthur Conan Doyle, but soon begins to struggle with whether the changes she has been working for are the right thing to do, or if history should be allowed to unfold without interference.