“But the future’s even better,” Mr. Hodge said, as JB interjected, “No, you reallydon’t belong in the twenty-first century.”
“Yes, we do,” Jonah said stubbornly.
JB shook his head.
“It was just a mistake, all of you ending up where you did.When you did,” he said. “Hodge was carrying his load of stolen babies to the future, and we—those of us who enforce the laws of time travel—we knew we had to stop him as soon as we could. There’s a protocol to stopping in the middle of the time stream, steps everyone agrees to, to avoid doing even more damage. Hodge broke every rule.”
“Oh, come now, that’s impossible,” Hodge said mockingly. “You time fanatics have so many rules, it’d take an eternity to break them all.”
JB glared at Hodge. Jonah could hear a few kids in the back of the room snickering.
“I’m not explaining this well enough,” JB said, looking back at Jonah. “It’s really complicated, but I’ll try to put this in terms you can understand. It’d be like a criminal kidnapping a bunch of babies in New York City and trying to fly them to Los Angeles. But when he’s caught in the middle of the country, he refuses to give up. Instead he crash-lands in Kansas City and sets off a nuclear weapon that completely destroys the Midwest.” He paused, looking down at the ropes around his wrists. Then he peered up again, earnestly. “I’m trying to undo that nuclear explosion.”
Everyone was silent for a long moment. Then Katherine complained, “That’s a stupid comparison. A nuclear explosion in Kansas City would kill all the stolen babies, too.”
Other kids began muttering as well—Jonah heard Alex say, “But the nuclear fallout blowing toward Los Angeles would be kind of like that time-ripple thing he was talking about….”
Jonah held up his hand and, to his amazement, everyone stopped talking.
“Okay, I get it that nobody planned for us to end up here,” he said. “But that’s what happened, and so we’ve lived all our lives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and so thisis where we belong now. It’s what we know. It’s where our families are.”
His eyes skimmed over Katherine’s face as he said that. She smiled encouragingly.
“Look.” Jonah peered at Mr. Hodge. “You’re just going to have to find some other babies for those families in the future. And you—” he turned his attention to JB. “You’re going to have to figure out some other way to fix the ripple, to save time. I’m sure you can think of something. I don’t know about the other kids, but I’m staying here!” This would have come off very well, very dramatically, except that he realized he wasn’t saying exactly the right thing and was forced to add, weakly, “I mean, I’m stayingnow . Whatever. You know what I mean.”
Mr. Hodge smiled. Slyly.
“That’s what I’ve always loved about twenty-first-century Americans,” he said. “They’re always so convinced that they can control their own destinies. Go on, then. Walk out that door. Have a nice life.”
And then Jonah remembered the nothingness on the other side of the door, the fact that the twenty-first century—and everything else outside the cave—had disappeared.
“Tell me the code to go home,” he said. “Please.”
Mr. Hodge shook his head. Jonah turned to JB. After a second’s hesitation, JB began shaking his head too.
“You’re going to have to choose,” he said. “Your ‘now’ is off-limits. Which will it be—the future or the past?”
THIRTY-TWO
Nobody got hungry. Nobody had to go to the bathroom. Those were the good things. But, also, nobody could leave the cave. Nobody could go back to their regular lives, see their parents again, talk to their usual friends. Grow up.
Before, Jonah had had no sense of time stopping. He’d been too busy crashing to the floor, grabbing for the Elucidator, running for the ropes. But now, time—or really the lack of it—hung heavily on him. He didn’t even care anymore about finding out which missing child from history he actually was. The other kids were no more motivated. Everyone sat around, completely enervated.
“You know that saying about how time flies when you’re having fun?” Emily, the girl who’d been so soothing before, asked as she plucked pointlessly at her sweatshirt sleeve.
“Yeah,” Jonah said.
“I thought the opposite of that was the last five minutes of math class, when the teacher’s going on and on and on about decimals,” she said. She yawned. “I didn’t know it could bethis bad.”
“Yeah,” Jonah said again. He thought about adding, “I know what you mean,” but it didn’t seem to be worth the effort.
Think, he commanded himself in disgust.Make a decision. Future or past? Past or future?
He couldn’t decide. It was like taking one of those multiple-choice tests in school when he wasn’t sure of the answer, so he tried eliminating all the choices he was sure were wrong—and then discovered that there were no possible right answers left. Going to the future would mean giving up everything. For that matter, so would going to the past.
And probably dying, on top of everything else.He couldn’t get the images out of his head of all those brutal deaths from history: the chopped-off heads, the swords slicing flesh, the hail of gunfire raining down on children.
“I’m a coward,” he whispered to himself. “I don’t want to die. Especially not like that.”
But he’d been raised by such nerdy, square parents, who’d dragged him off to Sunday school and Boy Scout meetings, and had talked so seriously about how important it was to be a good person. Because of that, he kind of felt like JB had the best argument. JB wanted to save the world.
Mr. Hodge and Gary didn’t seem to care.
“I don’t want to die,” he muttered, a little more loudly this time.
Maybe if everyone agreed to go back to the past, he’d be one of the lucky ones. Maybe he’d be someone who just kind of accidentally vanished from history, who still had a good life waiting for him in the past. Maybe he was one of those British princes. He could get used to chomping down on a huge turkey leg like some old-time king in a movie, couldn’t he? And living in a castle, and having thousands of soldiers at his command, and…
He looked around. He didn’t want any of the other kids to die either.
Angela caught his eye. Cautiously, as if she was trying not to be seen by anyone else, she raised one eyebrow and mouthed something—“Walk”? What did that mean? Oh. No. Maybe it was “Talk”?
What good was that? How could they talk when she was still sitting right next to JB?
Jonah remembered Katherine was still holding the Elucidator. Chip still had the Taser in his hand. They still had some control.
Jonah stood up.
“We’re facing a very important choice,” he said.Wonderful , he thought.I sound like someone running for seventh-grade student council. But everyone was staring at him now. He had to go on. “And yet, we don’t know if we can trust the information we’ve been given.” He turned to face the adults. “How do we know you’re not all working together?”
JB and Mr. Hodge looked at him like he’d gone crazy. It was kind of a no-brainer—Jonah was absolutely certain that those two weren’t on the same side. Still, Jonah forged ahead.
“So we’re going to take each of you to a different corner of the room and talk to you individually,” he said.
“What good will that do?” one of the other kids jeered.
It figured—it was one of the kids in black sweatshirts with the skulls on the backs.
Jonah shrugged.
“I think it’s worth a try,” he said. “It’s better than sitting around doing nothing.”
Somehow, that energized the other kids. Within five minutes—or, what would have been five minutes, if time had been moving—one group of kids was clustered around Gary in the front right part of the cave and another around Mr. Hodge in the front left. Chip was with JB and a few others in the back right corner; and Jonah, Katherine, Alex, and Emily were in the group
with Angela in the back left.
“Quick—what do you think we should do?” Jonah hissed.
One look at Angela’s anguished face killed his hopes.
“I don’t know much more about this time-travel stuff than you do,” she said. “I can tell you this—the man you keep calling JB is sincere. That Hodge character doesn’t seem very trustworthy.”
Great. Jonah had managed to figure that out all by himself.
“What’s JB’s real name?” Katherine asked.
“Names in the future are very weird,” Angela said. “I can hardly pronounce it—it’s something like Alonzo Alfred Aloysius K’Tah—you might as well keep calling him JB.”
“How far in the future are we talking about?” Emily asked.
“He won’t tell me,” Angela said. “He says I’ve already been contaminated enough.” She grinned. “He says I was supposed to marry a plumber and have five kids. I told him, ‘Uh-uh, I don’t think so!’ He must have had me mixed up with somebody else.”
Jonah closed his eyes for a moment. Maybe JB and Hodge and Gary hadJonah mixed up with somebody else too. Wouldn’t it be nice to just have ordinary birth parents? Confused high school kids, maybe, who realized that they weren’t mature enough to raise a child themselves…
“Where did you go, that day at the library?” Katherine asked Angela. “Jonah saw you disappear.”
“You mean, earlier this afternoon?” Angela asked.
“No, it was, like, three weeks ago,” Katherine said.
Angela stared at her in disbelief.
“Get out!” she said. “Really?” She shook her head. “This time stuff can really mess with your mind. Honestly, to me it was just like an hour ago. Maybe an hour and a half.”
Jonah squinted at her.
“Three weeks felt like an hour to you?” he said.
“Because I wasn’t ‘in time,’ as JB calls it,” Angela said. “He took me into this place called Outer Time, where we could spy on all of history. It’s hard to describe, but it was kind of like being in an airplane and looking down on everything happening down on the ground. Or, I don’t know, like Google Earth, where you can focus in close on one spot, then zoom out and get the broader view too.”
“So JB and Hodge and Gary can zip back and forth through time?” Jonah said, with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “They could go back and, I don’t know, tackle me as I was walking into the cave a little bit ago, sending me back or forward in time that way?…”
The feeling of hopelessness was coming back. He pictured himself being sent back and forth endlessly, JB and Hodge fighting over him for centuries.
“No,” Angela said. “It doesn’t work that way. There’s something else JB called the paradox of the doubles. No one can live through a particular time more than once. So, for example, there couldn’t have been two or three copies of JB, jumped in from two or three different times, waiting at the back of the cave to attack Gary. Or two or three copies of me, either.”
That made Jonah feel a little better.
“And,” Angela continued, “I don’t pretend to understand all of this, but because of your plane crashing into our time, where it didn’t belong—where it changed lots of people’s lives—because of that, we’ve all been living through what’s known as Damaged Time. Kind of like a nuclear wasteland, maybe? When Mr. Hodge said that he couldn’t get to you all for thirteen years, he really meant it. Time travelers couldn’t get in at all for a long time. And they could see only limited moments in time—like some birthday party where you drank lots of Mountain Dew, Jonah?”
Jonah flushed with embarrassment.I was only ten , he wanted to protest. But Angela was still explaining.
“And then when they could get in,” she said, “it was only at spots that they call points of damage—places where the pain of the time damage was most intense. Katherine, Jonah, you know how you saw JB at Mr. Reardon’s office? How he appeared and disappeared?”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. Katherine just nodded.
“That’s because those were the only spots he could go to. Mr. Reardon was standing in the bathroom when he found out about the plane landing, and his boss was standing by that desk when he learned about the plane disappearing. So those were openings for JB,” Angela said.
“But the other janitor came out into the waiting room,” Jonah said. “The guy who gave me the Mountain Dew—”
“He truly was just a janitor for the FBI,” Angela said. “JB bribed him to help.”
At least that meant that the other janitor wasn’t still hiding at the back of the cave, waiting to jump into the action.
Probably not anyway.
“So when JB gave us the file of names, what did he want us to do with it?” Jonah asked.
“He was just trying to temporarily increase the damage, so he could get closer to you,” Angela said. “He didn’t expect you to be enterprising enough to take pictures of the files and call the phone numbers and meet with me.”
Katherine was grinning.
“I’m the one who thought of taking pictures,” she whispered to Emily, even though Emily couldn’t possibly have known what she was talking about.
“But all your enterprise just gave Gary an opening to try to grab you at the library,” Angela added. “We had too many people in the same room at the same time with connections to the mysterious plane. And then you had those printouts of the witnesses and survivors lists…. I don’t really understand how it works, but that created a huge doorway.”
Katherine’s grin faded a little.
Jonah was still trying to put it all together.
“So who sent the letters?” he asked. “JB or Hodge?”
“They each sent one,” Angela said. “Again, so they could get in, get close to you. But they were racing each other, so they wrote the letters back in the 1990s, on ancient computers programmed for automatic printout—they routed their messages through the mail rooms of giant corporations, so your letters went through machines set up to automatically stuff envelopes with bills or credit-card offers.”
“But the letters came in plain white envelopes,” Jonah said.
“They programmed that,” Angela said. “That worked the way they wanted it to. But the old computers cut off parts of their messages. So they had to use other methods as well.”
That was probably why they resorted to putting Post-it notes on the adoption papers,Jonah thought. And then when Jonah saw the mysterious figure searching his room, when Chip’s computer files vanished—was that just to increase the “damage”? Each unexplained event had made Jonah and Chip and Katherine more paranoid and worried and scared. Had the other kids faced similar mysteries? Did it even matter who had done those things—JB or Hodge?
Angela was still talking.
“It took JB a long time to figure out that Hodge had chosen this adoption conference to steal you all back,” she said. “JB thinks Hodge must have set up this cave twenty years ago, before the start of Damaged Time. He just had to trust that everything would stay ready…. Then Hodge and Gary broke hundreds of rules arranging for kids to move here, so they could pick up everyone at once. JB had to scramble to find all the addresses by looking at property records from the future.”
Jonah felt dizzy, trying to figure out all the connections through time.Future, past …the words didn’t have the same meanings he’d always counted on. In this strange new framework, the future could be the past, and the past could be the future, and…
“Oh, I see,” Katherine said, as ifshe understood everything. “That’s why it looked like the FBI knew Daniella McCarthy’s new address before her parents had even made an offer on the house.”
Angela nodded.
“Property transactions aren’t always recorded accurately,” she said. “Normally time travelers don’t do things like that, relying on future addresses to send letters into the past. But this was a desperate case, because of Hodge and Gary. JB says they totally mucked up time.”
Jonah could kind of picture it. He remembered a Boy Scout hike once where his troop had come upon a clear shallow stream. Jonah and a bunch of the other boys had jumped in and raced around splashing each other, even scooping up mud balls to throw at each other. The scoutmaster had given them a long lecture about disrupting nature—by the end of it, Jonah felt guilty about how many protozoans he’d probably killed. He could see how time could be like that clear stream. Probably Chip’s family wasn’t supposed to move; probably some other family was supposed to be in the house down the street from Jonah’s house. And there had been at least twelve families who moved, at least twelve families whose lives were changed…
No, thirty-six families, Jonah thought, with a sudden lump in his throat.Mom and Dad weren’t supposed to adopt me. Were they supposed to adopt some other kid? Was Katherine supposed to have a brother at all?
Katherine seemed to be thinking along similar lines.
“So even if JB managed to fix all that time in the past—even if he sent all the kids back—how would he fix all the damagenow ?” she asked in a thick voice. “How would he tell my parents they don’t have a son anymore?”
“I don’t know,” Angela admitted. “He’s really worried about my nonexistent five kids too. The way he acts, you’d think one of them was going to be president someday.”
Jonah squinted off toward the other side of the room, thinking. Just then, he heard screams and saw kids jumping up in the group gathered around Gary.
No, not just kids—Gary himself.
“Hey!” Jonah screamed. “Who untied Gary?”
For that, improbably, was what seemed to have happened. With the ropes dragging uselessly behind him, Gary was racing across the room.
“Some kids are smart enough to know the future’s the only choice!” Gary shouted.
“But—” Somehow Jonah had expected them all to vote on their decision. Didn’t everyone believe in democracy?
Suddenly he realized where Gary was headed.
“Chip!” Jonah yelled. “Watch out!”
Gary was already slamming against Chip, jerking the Taser out of his hands before Chip had time to react. Gary whirled around, running again. He pointed the Taser at Jonah.
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