Scorched by Mari Mancusi

One night, at her grandfather's museum, Trinity hears a voice calling to her from the strange egg her grandfather claims is a dragon egg.  The voice is asking Trinity to save her.  Connor has a single focused mission: destroy the egg and the save the future of the world.  He knows what the future looks like, that's when he's from.  His twin brother Caleb has also come from the future, but his goal is to save the dragons at all costs.

It reminded me a lot of The Terminator.  Someone has come from the future to change the past which will save the world.  Someone else from the future has also come back to the past to make sure the future still happens.  It wasn't exactly like that, but the situation was similar enough that I was thinking about it from the very begging.  Trinity actually remarks how things are getting to feel a bit like The Terminator.

Trinity spends much of the book trying to figure out whom she can trust.  She meets Connor first, and after what he tells her and shows her, she's pretty sure he's right; the egg must be destroyed.  It's the egg or the world.  But when she meets Caleb, things start to get confused.  Caleb doesn't seem evil, but he wants to save the dragons.  The connection between Trinity and the egg are growing stronger and stronger, and she wants to protect it.  The Dracken is an organization that wants to save the dragons, and they want to help Trinity with the egg, but at the same time, she's a prisoner there.  Trinity doesn't know who's telling the truth, who's just trying to use her and who, if anyone, is really evil.

Time travel is tricky.  It's hard to be consistent with the world building and make sure things make logical sense when you throw in time travel.  Things can get confusing.  There were a couple of things in particular that confused me.

Spoilers
Trinity asks Connor if he'll disappear at someone point, since they'll have changed the past.  "It doesn't work like that.  My timeline has already been established.  There's no way to alter that.  But by destroying the egg, we can set your world on an alternate time line.  One that doesn't end in apocalypse."  And this means, somehow, that Connor can't go back because in the new alternate future he wouldn't exist.  Does that make sense and I'm just not understanding?  Why can't he go back?  If anything it seems like that would allow for him to return to his own time, if he wanted to, what with it being destroyed by the dragon apocalypse.  His world will still exist, right?  If you understand, please explain it to me!

Then there was the big one.  The entire reason the Dracken returned to the past, was, apparently, to sell dragons to different countries to start a war.  The dragons would destroy the world with their dragon fire, and the world would be cleansed.  But...why did they have to go back in time and set up this whole operation and put in all this effort?  That happens!  The dragons destroy the world in the future they came from!  What, they needed it to start three years earlier?  I just didn't understand.  Why did they go to all that effort to make something happened that happened on its own?  If anything, they should have been there trying to make sure Connor didn't change anything so that the dragon apocalypse happened as it did before.  So the whole dramatic twist at the end didn't make any sense to be at all.

Scorched comes out September 3, 2013.