Revealed

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Just thinking about all that made Jonah feel strange. A moment ago he’d been outraged at the notion of JB condemning the twin to an untimely death. Of course the boy would end up just as dead if his branch of time collapsed. And yet the thought of some other kid—even his own identical twin—essentially living Jonah’s life in an alternate dimension of time made him strangely jealous.

  It’s all because of me that he’d have my same family, Jonah thought. Would he have the same friends, too? The same interests, the same experiences—would it be like he was just another version of me?

  Was it wrong for Jonah to be a little bit glad that that branch of time was supposed to collapse, so he didn’t have to worry about any of it?

  “Gary and Hodge originally intended that branch of time to collapse,” JB corrected. “But you and Charles Lindbergh changed everything.”

  Jonah tried to keep the look of dismay off his face.

  “Okay, so twin boy gets to keep his separate branch of time,” he said, trying to sound casual and carefree. And glad. He wanted to sound happy that his twin got to survive.

  “He’s Jordan,” JB said gently. “Your parents are going to name him Jordan.”

  Jonah made a face. He’d always thought Jordan was a stupid name. And there’d been a girl named Jordan Knowles in the same grade as him all through elementary school. Had kids in that other branch of time constantly said, “Jordan the girl or Jordan the boy?” just like kids said, “Taylor the boy or Taylor the girl?” about Jonah’s classmates Taylor Wickerson and Taylor Donis?

  “The two of you were Claude and Clyde in original time, so it could have been a lot worse,” JB said.

  Claude and Clyde?

  Jonah decided not to ask which of them was Claude and which was Clyde. As far as he was concerned, the names were equally horrendous.

  “I’m going to try to forget that you told me that,” Jonah said. “Just tell me this is all over and I get to go home and I never have to worry about Gary and Hodge again, never even have to think about that other dimension that’s out there. . . . It’ll be like the other dimension that Second Chance created back in the 1600s, right? It’s not going to affect any of us in real time, is it?”

  JB frowned.

  “Jonah, the time agency is almost certain now about where Gary and Hodge went when we couldn’t find them,” he said grimly. “They were in Second Chance’s alternate dimension, where they learned some of his secrets. So ‘real’ time, as you put it, was never as separate as we thought from that other dimension. And . . .”

  JB let his voice trail off. He reached down and brushed baby Katherine’s cheek, wiping away the last of the spilled milk.

  “Tell me this,” JB said. “Why did you send that planeload of babies back to the scene of the time crash?”

  “Because that’s what I thought all the kids on the plane would want,” Jonah said. “The Elucidator said it might work out. And that’s what I would have wanted if I’d been on that plane.”

  JB’s frown deepened.

  “We thought you understood . . . ,” he murmured.

  “Understood what?” Jonah asked.

  He wanted to hold on to his excitement over time being saved and JB being cured. But he couldn’t get the memory of his twin’s sad eyes out of his mind; he couldn’t get rid of the nagging sense that JB really wanted him to keep worrying about alternate dimensions.

  One of the babies on the ground—either Gary or Hodge—finished draining his bottle and let it fall out of his mouth. It hit the hard-packed dirt with such a bang that Jonah jumped.

  “You had to send that plane back to the scene of the time crash,” JB said. “Or it would have left a terrible hanging paradox that no one could have fixed. Time would have collapsed.”

  Jonah gaped at JB.

  “Well, why didn’t somebody tell me?” he asked grumpily. “Why didn’t the Elucidator? I thought about that decision for a long time. You could have made it easy!”

  “Some things are clear only with hindsight,” JB said. “That’s true even with time travel. The time agency was . . . well, I guess it’s most accurate to say they were paralyzed with indecision. It’s like you and Charles Lindbergh were teetering on the edge of a cliff, and they feared that just stepping forward to rescue you would knock you over.”

  “After Lindbergh left, I was standing in a grass field with nobody else around,” Jonah grumbled. “Then I was sitting on the ground, holding a baby with a bottle. I wasn’t on a cliff!”

  “You were at the brink of Gary and Hodge’s time split,” JB corrected him. “Remember, they wanted their ‘Unsettled Time’ to start in 1932. Everything about time was at risk.”

  Jonah looked around. The airfield was silent and still; the wind sock by the office hung limp and motionless in the heat. Off in the distance he could hear a car engine—the old-timey kind that sputtered. But that was the only noise. It seemed as if even the reporters at the airfield’s front gate had given up hounding Lindbergh and gone home.

  “Nothing looks that different,” Jonah said.

  “Time was in flux,” JB said. “Gary and Hodge intended a series of time splits, each one getting them closer and closer to their wealthy future. Instead there was one three-way branching, determined by who was in seat two-C of that plane when it arrived at the time crash.”

  Jonah thought he saw what JB meant.

  “Me once, my twin once, and an empty seat once,” Jonah said, ticking off the possibilities. Something struck him that hadn’t occurred to him before. “Except . . . wasn’t it really twice that that plane landed at the site of the time crash with an empty seat two-C? Once when I sent it forward, and once when Gary and Hodge did?”

  JB’s face twitched.

  “No, it was only once with the empty seat,” he said, and Jonah could hear the strain in his voice. “Gary and Hodge were lazy and didn’t think things through. After they tricked you into believing you were responsible for splitting time, they double-checked the twenty-first century only to see if you were still there in that version of time. When you weren’t—not in that branch, anyway—they thought you’d died and time had gone on without you . . . and everything from that branch was already set up to lead directly to their glorious futures. So they didn’t think they needed to send forward a plane with an empty seat.”

  Jonah pictured the drawing Angela had made on her Elucidator, and how the Elucidator changed it to show what Gary and Hodge wanted to happen. Jonah and Angela hadn’t asked enough questions. They’d just assumed there had to be an empty-seated version of time. How else would Gary and Hodge get their glorious futures if the other two branches of time collapsed?

  The thing was, if Jonah really had delivered his own infant self to his parents, the time period around that action really wouldn’t have lasted long. But because the baby was Jordan instead, that branch of time had been fine.

  So I guess Gary and Hodge just wanted to torture me in that branch of time, making me think that everything was about to end, Jonah realized. A new thought hit him. Or . . . they thought I’d get so desperate that I’d make that branch of time end all by myself.

  He felt proud all over again that he’d escaped instead. With a little help from Angela and Hadley.

  Only, did JB mean that Gary and Hodge had been helped when that branch of time stayed alive? Because it paved the way to their glorious futures without them having to work so hard?

  Jonah thought of another problem.

  “But . . . I stood on that empty-seated plane that you say wasn’t supposed to be there!” Jonah protested. “I stood on it at the site of the time crash—and that was before I came back to 1932 and sent the plane forward for me to stand on it!”

  “And . . . that’s just one of the paradoxes you somehow navigated without ending time,” JB said quietly.

  Jonah realized he’d started breathing hard. Baby Katherine batted her now-empty bottle against Jonah’s chest. Jonah took it from her and let his arm drop helplessly. />
  “I don’t know how that’s possible,” Jonah whispered.

  “Oh, there’s more,” JB said.

  He bent down and picked up the bottle from beside the baby versions of Gary and Hodge. He gently eased the final bottle—also empty—from the slower baby’s mouth. Both babies seemed to have dropped off to sleep.

  “It turns out,” JB said as he straightened up, “that it really was the Elucidator that Angela had in her pocket, unbeknownst to you or me, that saved us when we were on Lindbergh’s plane over the Atlantic and then when we were in Paris. I don’t know how she showed such restraint, but she was convinced that she shouldn’t even mention it until she was in 1932 again.”

  “But if I’d died over the Atlantic or in Paris in 1927, I wouldn’t have even been able to go back to the site of the time crash to tell Angela to carry an Elucidator,” Jonah said. “That Elucidator saved my life twice before I made sure that Angela had it to save my life. And yours.”

  “Exactly,” JB said. “Also, you and Katherine saw Lindbergh at your house before you gave him the Elucidator that enabled him to get there that time around.”

  “Yeah . . . ,” Jonah said, feeling a little proud that he had at least noticed that discrepancy. But why had his mind let him glaze over it so easily? What else had he half forgotten? “I know the time agency doesn’t like paradoxes like that.”

  “Like them?” JB snorted. “They’re illegal!”

  “But time kind of protects itself, doesn’t it?” Jonah asked. “Like how it worked out with the paradox of you being Tete Einstein. And . . . aren’t there lots of things that people kind of forget or don’t notice? Like the missing tracers?”

  JB froze for a moment. Then he fixed Jonah with a level gaze.

  “You figured it out,” JB murmured. “You realized that you and the others should have been seeing tracers your entire childhood.”

  “And even Katherine should have seen tracers after we got back from the 1400s,” Jonah said, glancing down quickly at the baby in his arms. Then he peered back at JB again. “The fact that we never saw tracers in the twenty-first century . . . that was a sign that time was really messed up, right? Gary and Hodge made it sound awful.”

  Grimly, JB nodded.

  “It was,” he muttered. He sounded like he could barely get the words out.

  “But they said time couldn’t be fixed!” Jonah protested. “And you still tried to fix it! You and the other time agents kept returning and rescuing the other missing kids from time—you took care of all of them. . . . Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We were trying to protect you,” JB said. “And protect time.”

  “But why did you even try if you didn’t think it was possible to fix everything?” Jonah asked.

  “We still had hope,” JB said, spreading his hands wide apart in a gesture that could have looked like giving up—or appealing for help. “We kept thinking there could be some solution we couldn’t see yet. And then . . . you found it.”

  Embarrassed, Jonah looked down at the ground. JB seemed to be giving him more credit than he deserved. It wasn’t like Jonah had known what he was doing.

  “Everything did work out fine in the end, didn’t it?” Jonah asked, glancing back at JB. “You said everything’s fixed now—Gary and Hodge were wrong, after all, about the twenty-first century being doomed. Weren’t they?”

  “They always started from the assumption that they would steal all of you missing children back after you turned thirteen and Damaged Time ended,” JB said. “And yes, that would have doomed time. It would have been too much of a disruption.”

  “But we can rescue everyone from that time hollow where Charles Lindbergh isn’t going to go and tranquilize them,” Jonah said excitedly. “Right? So then the twenty-first century is safe again. And everything can go back to normal.”

  “The other missing kids from history are being rescued right now,” JB said. He seemed to be speaking very carefully. “They’re fine. But things going back to normal? Don’t you remember that other dimension with your twin brother, Jordan?”

  “Oh, right,” Jonah said quickly, because he didn’t want to think or talk about his twin any more than he had to. “He can have normal in his branch of time; I can have normal in mine. Whatever.”

  JB seemed to be gazing off into the distance. Then he glanced down quickly at the sleeping babies on the ground.

  “I told you Gary and Hodge always started from the wrong assumption,” JB said gravely. “But so did the time agency.”

  “Right—because, you know all us missing kids? We are fine spending the rest of our lives in the twenty-first century,” Jonah said. He sounded like he was trying to convince both JB and himself. “We can have what we wanted from the very start.”

  “Yes,” JB said, surprising Jonah. Jonah looked at him sharply. Then JB added, “And no.”

  Jonah jerked his head forward and put on his most extreme What are you talking about? expression.

  JB sighed.

  “Barely avoiding tragedy with all those paradoxes—that created an incredibly powerful force,” JB said. “A searing energy source greater than anything the time agency ever encountered before. We don’t entirely understand it even now, but . . . it appears that that overwhelming force sucked all of Gary and Hodge’s branches of split time back together again. Like an explosion in reverse. Time healed itself.”

  “Okay,” Jonah said. He didn’t really understand, but “healed” sounded like a good thing. “So my time branch is okay now, my twin brother’s time branch is okay . . .”

  JB winced.

  “You’re both okay, yes, and the time period around you both will be okay now, but . . . when you go back, both times will be the same,” he said.

  Jonah had no idea what JB was talking about. Then a bizarre thought struck him, and he hugged baby Katherine closer to his chest.

  “Wait, you don’t mean . . . you’re not saying . . . When I get back to the twenty-first century, will I have a brother or a sister?” Jonah asked.

  “You’ll have an eleven-year-old sister named Katherine, just like before,” JB said in a tone that Jonah was sure was supposed to be reassuring. There was something behind it, though, that kept Jonah from untensing his muscles.

  “But?” Jonah prompted.

  JB seemed to be gritting his teeth.

  “Oh, pretty much everything else will be just like you remember,” he continued. “Except . . . you’ll also have a twin brother named Jordan.”

  Jonah stared at JB.

  “But which of us will people remember being there before?” Jonah asked incredulously. “Me or him?”

  JB cleared his throat and seemed to be choosing his words very carefully.

  “Both,” he said. “Everyone around you will remember both you and Jordan being there all along.”

  EPILOGUE

  Jonah floated through time, holding baby Katherine in his arms. JB had sent the two of them on ahead to the twenty-first century without him, because, JB said, he needed to figure out what to do with the baby versions of Gary and Hodge.

  Dimly Jonah suspected that JB just didn’t know what else to say.

  What was there left to say? Jonah wondered. “Thanks, Jonah, for saving all of time—sorry you ruined your own life”?

  Jonah remembered JB’s original explanation: There were a trillion ways all of this could have failed, and—we now see—only one possible sequence of events that could have worked.

  That made it impossible for Jonah to go back and beg, Please! Let’s undo this! Let’s find some other solution!

  He must have been gripping baby Katherine a little too tightly, because she started to struggle against him, pushing an elbow into his ribs, a foot up into his armpit.

  Or was she just growing?

  Jonah shifted her position from lying down to being held upright. Just in the moment it took him to make that one change, Katherine went from seeming like she could barely hold her head up by herself to being
able to reach out and grab his face and turn it toward her. She blinked up at him, her eyes wide and innocent.

  “Jo-Jo,” she whispered. Then a moment later, “Jo-Jo ’tect Ka-Ka. Jo-Jo ba-ba.”

  Jonah remembered enough of Katherine’s early toddler talk to be able to translate. Or maybe his time-travel translation help worked even on baby talk. Either way, he knew she was saying, Jonah protects Katherine. Jonah’s my big brother.

  “Yeah, and what do you call your other brother?” Jonah muttered, with more bitterness in his voice than anyone should have talking to a toddler.

  Katherine didn’t seem to hear the surliness. She tilted her head quizzically and answered as if it’d been a serious question.

  “Ord’n,” she said.

  Is that how she pronounces Jordan? Jonah thought, horrified. So . . . this proves JB was right? Even this version of Katherine remembers Jordan?

  Katherine—now probably about the size of a two-year-old—patted Jonah’s face as if she knew he deserved her sympathy.

  This isn’t just a “version” of Katherine, Jonah reminded himself. It’s really her. Only younger.

  They floated on in silence for a moment; then Katherine evidently passed whatever developmental milestone had turned on her chatterbox tendencies.

  “That bad guy,” she said emphatically. “Bad guy made go bye-bye.”

  She kept talking. Most of it just sounded like gibberish to Jonah, but he had the feeling that she was trying to tell him the complete story of her kidnapping and un-aging.

  “Well . . . , I don’t really think Charles Lindbergh was such a bad guy,” Jonah said. “Just desperate. And maybe too used to always being able to get what he wanted? Anyway, you should really blame Gary and Hodge, but—”

  “Them really bad guys,” Katherine said.

  She had a thick headful of hair now, curling around her ears. Jonah had kind of forgotten that she’d ever had even slightly wavy hair.

  “Right,” Jonah told her. “But we don’t have to worry about Gary and Hodge ever again. Because they’re babies again.”