Redeemed

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “Yes, I see that too, Jordan,” Mr. Rathbone said. But there was still an enormous amount of glee in his voice. “After everything else I’ve done, don’t you think I’m capable of reassembling a mere Elucidator? Even . . .” His grin seemed even more malicious than ever. “Even the best Elucidator in the world?”

  He went over and crouched down and began picking up pieces from the carpet.

  “Repair mode!” he commanded.

  Jordan was horrified to see the broken pieces fitting back together in Mr. Rathbone’s hand.

  “Victory!” Mr. Rathbone gloated. “Now I have everything I wanted!”

  He glanced toward baby Kevin lying silent and still in Jonah’s arms. Then he looked back at Jordan.

  “And you actually thought you could defeat me?” he taunted.

  There was something odd about his last word, “me.” It came out phlegmy and wobbly, as if spoken by a completely different man. A much older man, perhaps.

  Mr. Rathbone put his hand to his throat, as if he had noticed the difference, too. Just in the moment that it took him to move his hand, it changed as well. It was suddenly covered with loose, flappy, age-spotted skin. The skin of his throat was loose and wrinkled too. So was his face. And his hair had suddenly become sparse and white. And then most of it vanished from the top of his head.

  “What’s happening to me?” Mr. Rathbone moaned. “Stop it! Stop . . .”

  He opened his mouth again, but no words came out. It was like watching a skeleton try to speak.

  And then Mr. Rathbone keeled over onto the carpet.

  He was dead.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Nobody moved. Everybody in the room was frozen now: five adults, four kids, and baby Kevin because of Mr. Rathbone’s commands, Mr. Rathbone because of his odd death. But Mr. Rathbone’s body kept deteriorating. Now he was a skeleton.

  Now he was dust.

  In the last moments while Mr. Rathbone’s hand still held together, it tilted forward, sliding away from the wrist as tendons and muscle and nerves broke down. The Elucidator Mr. Rathbone had reassembled fell through the bony fingers and rolled across the carpet, then onto the marble tiles.

  It came to rest right against Jordan’s forehead.

  Oh, no! Jordan thought. Is the same thing going to happen to me? Just because it’s touching me?

  He tried to squirm away, since he’d been able to move his head a little when Mr. Rathbone was still allowing everyone to talk. But he couldn’t tilt his head back far enough. The Elucidator stayed against his skin.

  Jordan stared down at his hands, motionless against the marble floor. Were they aging? Were they the hands of a fourteen-year-old now? A thirty-year-old? Was Jordan’s death by old age going to be even more excruciating than Mr. Rathbone’s, because it would take Jordan longer to get there?

  Jordan stared and stared and stared, and his hands didn’t change at all. He was fine, except for being frozen.

  So that death was just for Mr. Rathbone, Jordan thought. Second set it all up because somehow he knew what would happen.

  Did Second also know that Jordan would end up with the dangerous Elucidator right beside Jordan’s face?

  Jordan remembered his promise to Kevin, which he’d barely understood even as he was making it.

  Is there still more that I need to do? he wondered.

  Just then the door to Mr. Rathbone’s office slid open.

  “Markiel?” someone called cautiously.

  Then someone else cried, “Oh, my! What happened here?”

  It was Doreen, Tattoo Face, and . . . was that Cira? Cira the undercover time agent Jordan had mistaken for a candy striper at the hospital?

  Cira waved an Elucidator toward all the frozen people.

  “Unfreeze them enough that they can talk!” she commanded.

  A jumble of voices rose in the air.

  “This is your secret contact at the time agency?” Deep Voice exploded. “A little girl?”

  “I’m not a little girl!” Cira protested.

  “You were secretly working for them?” JB demanded.

  “I was getting information from them to overthrow Interchronological Rescue!” Cira countered.

  “Markiel, how could you have let Rathbone freeze you when you were carrying an Elucidator of your own?” Doreen demanded.

  “I told you I’m not very good with Elucidators! That’s why I needed you guys as backup!” Deep Voice replied.

  “Jordan, Jonah, Katherine—are you all okay?” Mom and Dad called out, practically together.

  Probably Jonah, Katherine, Angela, Chip, and even baby Kevin were shouting too, but Jordan lost track of all the individual voices.

  He himself said nothing. Words were still ringing in his head: Is there still even more that I need to do?

  He was no genius like Second/Kevin, and he’d never been inclined to make predictions about the future. Usually he didn’t even bother thinking about the future.

  But in that moment while everyone else was shouting, he could see exactly what was going to happen.

  Everyone was going to unfreeze. And then JB and Cira were going to get all official and territorial and insist on examining everything that had happened ever since Jordan grabbed the glitchy cell phone/Elucidator out of JB’s hands on that long-ago Tuesday morning in the Skidmore kitchen.

  Probably Mr. Rathbone’s entire office would be swarming with time agents inside five minutes.

  In the midst of all that, Mom and Dad would find Jordan, Jonah, and Katherine and exclaim over them endlessly. They’d insist on making sure that none of them were hurt; they’d probably check all three kids’ knees and elbows for injuries that even Jordan, Jonah, and Katherine might not have noticed.

  And then Mom and Dad would want to gather all of them—probably even including Chip, JB, Angela, Deep Voice, baby Kevin, and whatever random time agent was nearby—into a some huge, happy Skidmore family group hug.

  This time, Jordan would hug back. This time, Jordan would be as excited about it as his parents were.

  But at some point in all that examining and exclaiming and hugging, someone was bound to decide to study the dangerous Elucidator that was currently leaning against Jordan’s forehead. Probably the time agents would start cautiously, taking the pile of dust that had once been Mr. Rathbone as their warning. But eventually they’d lose that caution, because they’d just want to know. To understand. (In his head, Jordan could hear Second saying, I was Pandora, bound and determined to open that box. I was Adam and Eve, unable to resist the temptation of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.) And then would Second and Kevin’s secret come out, to destroy the real world and real time the same way Second had destroyed his own creation?

  Or was there still a way for Jordan to stop that?

  “Time-agency policy requires confiscating all Elucidators in the room,” JB reminded Cira, his voice rumbling louder than everyone else’s. “But—”

  But I can’t let that happen, Jordan thought.

  He lifted his head as well as he could, straining his half-frozen neck to get an inch or two off the floor. The dangerous Elucidator stayed half up on its side and rolled forward, toward Jordan’s ear.

  Then Jordan brought his head down against the Elucidator as hard as he could. All he had to do was smash it into pieces like before. Surely no one would try to put it back together after what happened to Mr. Rathbone. Jordan heard the Elucidator crack. He felt it give way under his cheekbone; he felt it shatter. When he hit his head against it a second time, he could feel pieces of it dig into his skin along his jawline and on his cheek and all the way back by his ear. But he didn’t stop. He kept bashing his head against the Elucidator and the floor as long as he could—until he could have sworn it was nothing but dust.

  EPILOGUE

  Back in the Twenty-First Century, Three Weeks Later

  Jordan opened the front door.

  “Jonah!” the girl standing on the Skidmores’ porch said.

>   “Uh, no, I’m the other brother,” Jordan said.

  “Right,” the girl said, blushing. “Sorry. I’m Andrea. I hear that you saved all of time too. Thanks.” She peeked past Jordan, her braids swinging forward and her fluffy winter hat sliding down on her forehead. “Where is Jonah?”

  “In there,” Jordan said, tilting his head in the general direction of the family room, where a huge group was gathered.

  Officially, the Skidmores were having a party for some “new friends” Katherine and Jonah had met at an adoption conference back in the fall, one day when Jordan was “sick.” In reality, the party was for all the missing kids from history who’d ended up in the twenty-first century.

  “These are kids you can just be yourself with,” Mom had said when she and Dad had started planning this event. “They’re the ones who actually know the truth about everything that happened.”

  She should have said they’re the ones who know Jonah and not me, Jordan thought, watching Andrea scurry past him toward the family room.

  It was weird knowing the background story of every single kid who walked in the door: He knew that Andrea had once been Virginia Dare; he knew that Antonio and Brendan had been such great artists in the sixteen hundreds that people traveled through time to steal their works; he knew stories about royalty and murdered inventors and shipwrecked children of celebrities. When he’d been in the time hollow with Kevin, Jordan had watched the most notable moments of all the kids’ lives.

  But the main thing the other kids knew about Jordan was that he’d spent most of his life in another dimension.

  Even among the kids who were most like him, he was the outsider.

  Rather than follow Andrea into the family room with the other kids, Jordan stepped out onto the front porch for a moment.

  It was just starting to snow, and the Christmas lights of the other houses up and down the street twinkled and shimmered and reflected in the flakes. But what Jordan mostly saw, looking around his neighborhood, was history. History he hadn’t been a part of.

  That’s where Jonah stood when he and Chip got their first mysterious letter. . . . That’s where Gavin jumped out and kidnapped Jonah, Katherine, Chip, and Daniella. . . . That’s where Jonah first saw JB and Angela after they’d been turned into kids. . . . That’s where JB stood when . . .

  Jordan blinked and realized he was seeing the present, not the past. JB really had just appeared out of nowhere on the front sidewalk. It was the adult JB, and Jordan was glad of that. But the time agent was wearing such an enormous winter coat that Jordan couldn’t tell if JB looked the same as the last time they’d seen each other or if a lot of time had passed for JB and the man had gained an extra fifty or hundred pounds.

  “Admiring the lights?” JB asked.

  “I guess,” Jordan said, shrugging.

  “I still can’t believe people in the twenty-first century go to the trouble of climbing up on ladders and roofs to put them up by hand,” JB said, shaking his head.

  “Why—how do people put up Christmas lights in your time?” Jordan asked, curious in spite of himself. “Do people still put up Christmas lights? That’s something else I never got to see in the future!”

  “I’ll never tell,” JB said, grinning in a way that took the sting out of his words. He brushed aside the snow on the porch step and sat down. “You know it really is just because I can’t. Not without—”

  “I know, I know,” Jordan said, rolling his eyes. “You don’t want to take any more risks with the space-time continuum. Katherine and Jonah and I already saw our lifetime supply of the future.”

  “You’ll get to see more of the future—” JB began.

  “Right—when we get there,” Jordan finished for him, because he’d already heard that before.

  This was something Jordan was a little bitter about. He’d helped save everyone and everything, and he still hadn’t been able to go around sightseeing in the future. JB had even refused to tell him how far into the future he’d already been, those times at Interchronological Rescue and at the futuristic hospital.

  How soon would it be before people invented time travel?

  “Otherwise, is everything okay with you now?” JB asked, turning his head to look up at Jordan.

  Jordan leaned against one of the porch pillars. How was he supposed to answer that?

  “Mom and Dad are acting as much like adults as ever, if that’s what you mean,” he said. They’d started doing this annoying thing where they’d say, You know, we do remember what it’s like to be your age. Actually, we remember it much better than most parents of teenagers, because it was a lot more recent. . . . But Jordan wasn’t going to tell JB that.

  “And you and Jonah?” JB asked. “How are the two of you getting along? Sharing a room and all?”

  Jordan shrugged. “Fine,” he said. It didn’t seem worth mentioning that neither of them cared that much about the posters on the wall. Or who got which bunk. “We’re not the problem. It’s . . . everyone else. Like, when our basketball coach puts both of us in at the same time, he forgets we’re two separate people. At our last game, the ref yelled at him and asked him if he knew how to count to five. And nobody can tell us apart.”

  “I think identical twins raised under normal circumstances have some of those same problems,” JB said gently. “And time will keep healing the discrepancies. Your coach will figure out how to count to five again.”

  “Is everything really going to be okay with time now?” Jordan asked. “Are we done with all our time travel and people being weird ages? Done with all the adventure?”

  Done with people aging into dust in the blink of an eye?

  He didn’t say that one out loud.

  JB paused. He seemed to be watching the snowflakes gently floating down. They swirled in a way that made Jordan think the wind patterns were very odd tonight.

  “Everything’s fine,” JB said, in a soothing voice that Jordan didn’t quite trust. “Or . . . everything will be fine. With time travel, you know, verb tenses get a little confusing.”

  Jordan tilted his head, trying to figure out what JB was really saying.

  “But that Elucidator I destroyed . . .” he began.

  “It can never be reassembled,” JB said. “By anyone. Ever. That electronic dust you left behind? There’s not even a trace of it anywhere. We looked for it with every microscopic search technique we know. But it vanished completely.”

  Maybe that was meant to reassure Jordan. But somehow it just spooked him.

  “And all the other changes . . .” Jordan tried again.

  JB nodded, seeming more confident now.

  “We released the ripple of changes from everything you were involved with—and for that matter, everything Jonah did connected to the nineteen thirties,” he said. “Second tricked me before into thinking all of that had already been resolved. Now it really is. And everything’s fine. You could say that between the two of you, you and Jonah fixed everything in the end. You two . . . and Kevin.”

  Jordan squinted at JB. He didn’t want to talk about Kevin yet. Or Second.

  “So now if I went to the future, everyone at Interchronological Rescue would know who I am,” Jordan said. Did he sound like he wanted to brag? “I mean, they’d know I’m Jordan Skidmore from the twenty-first century, not just some pitiful kid from the nineteen thirties.”

  “Yes—if there still were an Interchronological Rescue,” JB said with a scornful snort. “We’ve shut it down completely. And time agents are combing through the records so we’ll know how to prevent someone like Mr. Rathbone from doing what he did ever again. Some of the agents are a little upset that Mr. Rathbone is already dead, and they can’t prosecute him and send him to time prison—he broke a lot of laws.”

  Jordan didn’t want to talk about Mr. Rathbone’s death yet either.

  “I thought he said nothing could be traced back to him,” Jordan said instead.

  JB shook his head, the ghost of a grin on his face. />
  “A CEO can’t treat his employees with contempt and still expect them to take the rap for all the CEO’s crimes,” he said. “Especially when he’s dead and can’t punish them anymore. Interchronological Rescue employees are lining up to give us incriminating information. And some of them were smart enough to keep very good records.”

  “Deep Voice, Doreen, and Tattoo Face,” Jordan guessed, trying to match JB’s grin. “Will I get to see any of them again? Will we even get to see you ever again?”

  “I still have a few loose ends to tie up,” JB said. “That’s why I’m here tonight.”

  He stood up and brushed snow off his backside. The front part of his coat fell open while he was twisted around, and Jordan saw that JB hadn’t gained a lot of weight. Instead, he had something tucked inside a large inner pouch of his coat.

  No—someone.

  “You brought baby Kevin with you to the party?” Jordan asked, stunned. “You still haven’t turned him back to his right age?”

  “What would his right age be?” JB asked. “Thirteen, the age he was when he stole the Elucidator from Jonah? Twenty-six, like he was when Gary and Hodge gave him an Elucidator? Thirty-nine, like when he created his ill-fated other dimension? Thirty-nine and a half, like when he rescued me and Mr. Rathbone murdered him for it?”

  JB patted the baby’s back. The baby kept its eyes closed. Jordan didn’t know much about babies, but he guessed this one was soundly asleep.

  “Also, we’ve learned there are . . . complications,” JB said. “Some I need to talk to you about.”

  “Me?” Jordan repeated. “Not Jonah or Katherine? Or Mom and Dad?”

  “You’re first,” JB said. “Because you were the only one there when Kevin gave his command to the Elucidator. The command that re-aged your parents.”

  “I didn’t hear what he said,” Jordan said. “So that information is gone. That’s why I destroyed the dangerous Elucidator. I told you.”

  His voice came out strong and deep and defiant, and he was kind of proud of that.

  JB looked down at the sleeping baby sheltered from the cold wind by the heavy winter coat.