Xander stepped beside David, directly below Taksidian. He said, “
We’re
the Kings in this house, not
you
,” and he jabbed the two-by-four into Taksidian’s stomach.
Taksidian
ooph’d
. His waist buckled into the hole, and his head slipped through. His body arched farther into the hole, pulled toward the portal waiting for him in the room above. His nails gouged tracks in the floor joists exposed by the ripped-out opening in the ceiling.
He yelled, “Nooooo!” and shot up into the antechamber. His voice cut off in midscream, the door up there slammed shut, and he was gone.
S
ATURDAY
, 2:26
P. M
.
David saw a small item fall from the opening to the floor with a soft
tink
! A fingernail, sharp and thick and tipped with blood. His blood, from his hip. The nail flipped onto its tip and spun around fast. It sailed up into the hole, leaving a drop of blood on the floor.
“Holy cow!” Xander said, gaping at the ceiling.
Dad reached down and pulled David out from under the hole. Just in time: Chunks of ceiling, joists, and flooring fell out of it and crashed down. A cloud of dust billowed up. As it cleared, it swirled around the hole like smoke.
David conked his head on the floor. He held his bloody hip and didn’t care about the pain. He felt too good: They had beaten Taksidian. They had beaten the future.
Mom, Dad, and Xander knelt around him.
“Dae,” Mom said, holding his head. “I was so scared.”
Dad touched the metal plate. He looked at Xander and said, “
This
is what you got the plate for? You knew all along?”
Xander smiled. “When Dae said his heart hurt for Jesus, it hit me. I didn’t draw the heart on the note because I love my brother—
even though I do
,” he said quickly, smiling at David. “What I meant was that Taksidian
stabs
him in the heart. And it makes sense; a guy like that, he would. That got me think-ing about
A Fistful of Dollars
.”
“Huh?” Dad said. “The movie?”
David laughed. “That’s what
I
said.”
“Clint Eastwood puts a metal plate over his heart,” Xander explained, “because he knows the bad guy always shoots people in the heart. That’s how Eastwood’s character beats him.”
Mom touched Xander’s arm. “Remind me never again to complain about your movie watching.” She raised her fingers to his chin. “We need to take care of that.”
“A scar nobly got is honorable,” Xander said. “Dad told me that.” He rubbed his chin. “I don’t mind having a perma-nent mark to remember today.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I mind.”
The plate slipped off David’s chest and trembled. He unhooked it, and it zipped across the floor, looking—with its tail of a chain—like a robotic stingray. At the end of the hall, it whipped out of sight and clattered up the stairs to the antechambers above.
The front door banged open. Toria tromped in, spotted the hole, and said, “What happened?” She pounded up the stairs. “Dae, are you all right?”
“I am now,” he said.
Keal rushed into the foyer. “What’s going on? Everything okay? Where’s Taksidian?”
“Time took him,” Xander said. “He went back where he came from.”
“Yah!” Toria said, clapping.
“I don’t know for how long, though,” Dad said.
Another voice came from the foyer: “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Jesse?” David said. He rolled over to look though the rail-ing spindles. The old man stood in the doorway, smiling up at him. “Jesse!” David scrambled to his feet and ran down the stairs. He jumped into Jesse’s arms. He said, “You’re better! You’re . . .
walking
!”
The old man danced in place, smiling like a kid with a new pony.
At the doorway, Nana said, “Are we having a party?”
“Nana!” David said, giving her a hug.
Mom appeared at the banister. “I feel like the new kid in school,” she said. “I don’t know anyone.”
“Jesse, Keal, Nana—we found Mom!” David said. His heart almost burst at the sound of it, so he said it again. “We found Mom!”
He took them upstairs and made the introductions. They stood in a circle on the second floor: Mom, Dad, Xander, David, Toria, Jesse, Keal, and Nana.
Jesse looked up into the hole. “Taksidian’s really gone?”
Dad nodded. “Until he finds a portal back here.”
“He doesn’t have any antechamber items?” Jesse asked.
“No.”
Jesse scratched his beard-stubbled cheek. “I met Taksidian when he first found his way to the house,” he said. “He stumbled into a portal. The chances that he’ll be able to find another one without an antechamber item leading him to it are . . . I don’t know, one in a million?”
Dad scowled at the hole in the ceiling. He said, “I still don’t like the idea that he’s out there somewhere . . .
looking
for a way to get back here.”
“Portals are hard to see,” Xander said. “Even when you’re looking for them. They’re just rippling air.”
“And it took Nana thirty years to find her way home,” David added.
“Well,” Nana said, “good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“Jesse,” David said, “do you think sending Taksidian away fixed the future? I mean, the destruction of Los Angeles, the end of the world?”
Jesse aimed his frown at David. “I’m afraid not, son. The damage is done. You’d have to go back and undo everything he did that led to it.” He offered a knowing little smile. “That is,
if
you want to fix it.”
“If we want to fix it?” David said. “How can we
not
?”
“Think about it,” Jesse said, looking at each of them in turn. “It would mean staying in the house, figuring out just what parts of history he messed with, and making each one right.”
“But isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?” David said. “You said this was our destiny.”
Jesse nodded. “It’s true. Fixing the messes humans made in the past has always been in our bloodline. The portals to the past have been around forever. They’re a way for certain people to fix mankind’s mistakes—not to make everything perfect, but to make it . . . less bad, so we don’t wipe ourselves out before our time.”
“I don’t understand,” Mom said. “Only God has that kind of control. He knows when mankind’s time is up.”
“True,” Jesse said. “But he gives the world doctors to repair our bodies, and . . . “
“And he gives the world
us
to repair Time,” David said, getting it—at least as much as something so weird
could
be understood.
“Gatekeepers,” Xander said, using the word Jesse had used when they’d first met.
David said, “But why us?”
Jesse shrugged. “I know only that it
is
us. Our ancestors have always been drawn to the Time currents, like magnets to metal.”
“Then,” David said, “we’re
supposed
to be here. We’re sup-posed to make sure only the things that are
meant
to happen make it into the future. It’s our purpose.” He looked around at the others. “Right?”
Xander said, “What if we don’t
want
to do that?”
“It’s your choice,” Jesse said. “No one can make you. But I can tell you, whenever a generation has rejected the responsibil-ity, the world has gotten worse, darker. Think of humankind as a body, a human body. Sometimes it gets sick or injured. If we don’t tend to it—stitch it up, make it right—it gets worse . . . until eventually, it dies.”
“What do you mean, dies?” Xander said. “No more humans?”
Jesse shrugged. “Like the future you’ve seen. Or as we saw when you and David caused the Civil War to end years ear-lier, or when he saved that little girl who grew up to eradicate smallpox: without intervention, there’s a lot of death and grief that doesn’t need to happen.”
Overhead, something banged. David had heard the sound enough times to recognize it. “A portal door just opened,” he said. “Someone’s here.”
S
ATURDAY
, 2:49
P. M
.
“Or some
thing
,” Dad said.
They were all peering up at the hole. Through it, David could see the corner of a portal door in the antechamber directly over their heads. It was closed.
“Not that portal,” he said.
Another bang.
“Taksidian!” Xander said.
“No,” Jesse corrected. “Can’t be. Even if he could find a portal back here, it’s too soon. The forces of Time—the pull—would still be holding him in his own time.”
“Then who?” Dad said. “Or what?”
“Who cares?” Xander said. “Let’s get out of here . . . finally.” He stepped toward the grand staircase.
David grabbed his arm. “No,” he said. He stooped to pick up the two-by-four Xander had brandished against Taksidian. “This is
our
house. Whoever it is, I’m going to let him know that.” He shook the two-by-four. “And then I’m going to fix the future.”
He looked at Dad and Mom, hoping to find in their faces the same commitment he felt, the same sense of purpose. What he saw was more like astonishment. He added, “Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Who’s with me? Who wants to save the world?”
Xander looked at his bloody hand. “What makes you think we can?”
“The guy who made the mess is gone,” David said. “All we have to do is clean it up.”
“All we have to do?” Xander laughed. He turned question-ing eyes on Dad.
Dad nodded. “I believe we can. What do you think, Gee?”
Mom thought about it. “Let’s see,” she said. “Bake sales, Girl Scout meetings, laundry, dishes . . . or harrowing adventures through time.” She smiled. “I always did want to see Genghis Khan in action.”
Toria shook her head and quoted what Dad always said about Mom: “Definitely
not
a Gertrude.”
“Wait a minute,” Dad said. He looked at the wood in David’s hand, then up at the ceiling. Something on the third floor creaked. He wrapped his arm around Mom and pulled her close. “Don’t you want to . . .
rest
? Go out to dinner? Have a good night’s sleep?”
“Do I
want
those things?” Mom said. “Yes . . .
yes
! I want to sip a cup of tea and watch the sunset with my family. I want to take a hot bath. I want to tuck my children into bed. And I’ll do all that . . . when it’s time. Right now, I want to do what we’re
supposed
to do. Isn’t that what we’ve been doing? Doesn’t it feel right?” She smiled up at him.
“I’m in,” Keal said. He picked up a broken piece of wood that had fallen from the ceiling.
Nana said, “I don’t know if I ever want to see Genghis Khan . . . again. But I do have some skills that could come in handy, like stitching wounds, setting bones, and screaming.”
“But, Mom,” Dad said, “you can’t stay here, not with Time still after you.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I saw a nice little house in town. That’ll suit me just fine.”
“I’m sure I can find one too,” Jesse said, picking up another length of wood. “Between Nana and me, you’ll practically have an encyclopedia of knowledge about history and time travel.”
“Oh, yeah?” Xander said. “Then how come you didn’t warn us about David’s death when we first met you?”
“What?” Jesse said, looking between Xander and David. ”His
death
?”
Dad gripped Xander’s shoulder. “He doesn’t know about it, because it never happened, and you never went back to tell him it did. You never wrote the note.”
“Ooooh,” Xander said, thinking it through. He gave Jesse an embarrassed smile. “Sorry.”
“For what it’s worth,” Jesse said, “I always had a sense that you had to visit me while we were building the house. I don’t know why, just a feeling.”
“Your feeling saved Dae’s life,” Xander said. “Thank you.”
“Yeah,” David said. “Thank you.”
“You know,” Jesse said, giving Xander a sly look from the corner of his eye. “The life-saving doesn’t have to stop with David’s.”
Xander took that in, and David could tell his brother was thinking the same thing he was: all the people—children like them, adults like Mom and Dad, Nana, Jesse, and Keal—who would live, who would be spared grief and sorrow and pain, because the Kings lived in this house. Because they did what they were meant to do.
Xander said, “Yeah . . . yeah.” From the floor he selected a short board with nails sticking out of one end. “But I better get some movie ideas out of it.”
The linen closet’s door exploded off its hinges, and they all jumped. The school locker crashed out, falling to its side on the hallway floor. It looked like a metal coffin. The door was facing them, and David could make out the little number plate swinging back and forth by one rivet: 119. The entire locker had been beaten and battered, with dents and dings everywhere. But it had held together, and the door was still closed. A corner of the door had bent out, exposing a tri-angle of blackness. A face appeared in the opening—two eyes blinking at them.