Found (17 page)

“Angela!” JB called. “The Taser!”

Instantly, Jonah saw his mistake. In a second, Angela would turn around and aim her Taser at him, and they’d just re-enact the scene from a few moments ago. Except this time it would be Jonah writhing on the floor and then passing out, and JB scooping up the fallen Elucidator. And then…what would happen then?

Jonah didn’t know, but he could still hear Mr. Hodge’s words echoing in his brain:
I can’t believe they think you’re on their side. You must not have told them what you want to do.
What did that mean? What should Jonah do? Was there anyone he was sure he could trust?

That was one question he could answer.

“Katherine!” he called out. “Catch!”

He tossed the Elucidator in the air, an easy toss, easier than passing a basketball. He knew without turning to look that Katherine would catch it, that she would hold on tightly, that she wouldn’t betray him. She might make fun of him, she might roll her eyes and call him an idiot, but she wouldn’t let go. She’d already proved that.

As soon as the Elucidator was in the air, Jonah took off running. JB made no attempt to stop him because he was spinning around, following the arc of the Elucidator. So Jonah had a clean, fast sprint to the back of the cave. He needed the speed; he needed the element of surprise if he had any prayer of wrestling the Taser out of Angela’s hand before she aimed it at him.

He was too late.

Even in the dimness of the back of the cave, Jonah could see that Angela had already turned around. In one smooth quick move, she pulled a cartridge from her pocket, reloaded the Taser, and pointed it back toward Jonah.

Jonah took a stumbling step to the side, just in case he had a chance of dodging the laser light and the barbs and whatever else the Taser was about to send zinging at him. He hoped it wouldn’t hurt too badly. He hoped he wouldn’t scream as loudly as Gary and Mr. Hodge had. He hoped…

Angela held the Taser steady, aiming past Jonah. Aiming toward Mr. Hodge and Gary.

“Shoot Jonah!” JB was yelling helpfully.

Thanks a lot
, Jonah thought. He didn’t have any hope now. He was too close to Angela, too close to reverse his course, too close for her to miss. Just as soon as she corrected her aim and squeezed the trigger, he’d be on the ground.

Angela spun toward Jonah, but she didn’t squeeze the trigger. She stepped forward and glanced out toward the brighter part of the cave, though that made no sense—surely Jonah was blocking her view. She turned the Taser sideways, not pointing at anyone anymore. Then she reached over and slid the Taser into Jonah’s grasp.

She was handing over her weapon.

“What?” Jonah demanded, dumfounded.

Angela pressed a finger to her lips, then she moved the finger and began to scream.

“No! You can’t have it!”

Jonah’s ears were reverberating with all that lung power released in such a small space. But already Angela was expecting him to listen. She leaned in close and whispered in his ear, “I really am on your side. Completely. You deserve to know the truth. So pretend that you captured me.”

Jonah just stood there. He was so stunned he almost dropped the Taser.

“Maybe you should shout something about getting the ropes?” Angela whispered, bending down to pick up looped coils from the floor of the cave.

“Move it! Get those ropes now!” Jonah hollered. His voice cracked; surely that wasn’t a convincing yell.

But Jonah could hear JB calling from the lighter part of the cave, “Angela! What happened?” before breaking off to warn Katherine, “Young lady! Really—you can’t press any of those buttons! You don’t know what they do!”

“What’s going on?” Jonah hissed at Angela. “Tell me!”

She grimaced.

“There isn’t time to talk. Besides, you should hear it from the experts, not me.” She nudged him. “Go on.”

Jonah started to back out of the darkness.

“A-hem,” Angela said. She stepped in front of him and moved her hand over his so that the end of the Taser was pressed into her ribcage. “Don’t you dare set that off now—you’re too close,” she whispered. “But
please
, make it look like it’s possible that you captured me.”

“Angela?” JB called again, sounding even more worried.

Angela dropped her hand from the Taser. Together, Jonah and Angela stepped out into the light.

“He got your weapon?” JB said incredulously. “He overpowered you?”

“He’s a very strong young man,” Angela said defensively. “Stronger than he looks.”

Well, that was an insult, wasn’t it? Jonah dug the Taser more deeply into Angela’s ribs. He shoved her forward, more roughly than he’d intended.

“Maybe not quite so realistic,” she muttered.

“Give the ropes to Chip,” Jonah ordered.

“Uh, Jonah, I’m not a Boy Scout,” Chip said. “My dad said he didn’t have time for all those camp-outs, so I don’t know anything about tying knots, and—”

“Here,” Jonah said, slapping the Taser into Chip’s hand. “Shoot her if you have to.”

Anguish spread over Angela’s face. Jonah could tell she wasn’t acting now, either, because it was Chip holding the Taser, and there was no way Jonah could signal Chip to let him know that she was really on their side, without JB’s seeing as well.

Jonah tied Mr. Hodge’s and Gary’s wrists and ankles. They lay calmly now, their eyes half-closed. Jonah couldn’t tell if they were still dazed, or if they were faking it, biding their time. He tied the knots as quickly as he could.

He walked toward JB, ropes still dangling from his hands.

“Not me, too?” JB asked, with an ingratiating grin. “I think you’ve gotten confused. Remember—I was the one trying to save all of you.”

“What were you saving us from?” Jonah asked in a dull voice. “What were you saving us for?”

“Tell your sister to give me the Elucidator, and I’ll explain,” JB said.

“Explain, and maybe we’ll decide that you deserve the Elucidator,” Jonah said.

He looped the rope around JB’s wrists and tied his firmest knot yet. JB didn’t resist. Then Jonah tied JB’s ankles and Angela’s ankles and wrists.

Someone was sniffling behind him.

“Oh, please.” It was Ming, the girl who’d temporarily been a human shield. “Just open the door and let us go to our parents. My cell phone isn’t working—I’ve been trying and trying to call the police—once we’re out of the cave, I’m sure it will work right….”

Jonah hadn’t even thought about cell phones, but now he noticed that just about every kid had one out. One boy near the back bench kept stabbing a finger at his phone three times, waiting, stabbing three times again, waiting….

Nine-one-one
, Jonah thought.
Of course
. His knees almost gave way at the thought that a bunch of police officers in dark uniforms would soon come swarming into the cave, saving them all, saving Jonah from having to make any more choices, any more mistakes.

Then Jonah realized that the reason the boy kept stabbing at the phone was that none of his calls was going through.

“Sure,” he told Ming. “You find a way to open that door; we’re all out of here.”

“No! Don’t!” JB shouted.

“Oh, let them try,” Gary said groggily from the ground. “There’s a keypad by the entryway. The code is twenty-one ST.”

Was it a trick?

Jonah turned back to JB.

“What will happen if we try that code? If we open the door?” he demanded.

“You’ll see…. You’ll find out too much, all at once,” JB said. “It might scare you.”

“It might scare you”? After everything that’s already happened, JB’s worried about scaring us?

Jonah decided to take his chances.

He rushed toward the entryway, and it was as if
he’d
become the Pied Piper now. Most of the other kids shoved in behind him. His finger shook as he pressed in 2 1 and then ST. An image was growing in his mind of what he might see when the door slid back. Maybe, somehow, Gary and Mr. Hodge had already slipped them into the future. They’d step out of the cave, and all the trees would be gone; the newly built houses would be ancient and falling down. That
would
be scary, but Jonah was braced for it.

The door began moving, slowly this time, like it was an ancient boulder covered with a thousand years of moss. As soon as there was a crack between the door and the wall, Jonah darted toward it, peeking out. He peeked out and saw…

Nothing.

Behind him, other kids began to scream in terror, but Jonah could only stare. It wasn’t dark beyond the cave door—darkness would be
something
; darkness would mean that, with a little light, there’d be plenty to see. Darkness would be comforting, actually. This was so much worse. There was just enough light filtering out from the cave to show that there were no trees anymore, no houses, no path, no rocks, no clouds, no sky. Nothing. It was like being deep in outer space, so far away from everything else that he couldn’t even see any stars.

“We’re in a black hole!” someone screamed behind him.

Automatically, instinctively, Jonah hit the keypad again: 2 1 ST. He hoped it was like the garage-door opener at home, where the same code worked for opening and closing. Mercifully, the door began to roll shut again.

“It’s not a black hole,” another kid was explaining, sounding perfectly rational. “In a black hole the gravity would crush us.”

“It reminds me of the Bible,” a girl said thoughtfully. “Genesis. ‘The Earth was without form and void….’”

Jonah grabbed the “not a black hole” boy and the girl who’d thought of the Bible and pulled them through the crowd. He wanted people by his side who could think when everyone else was screaming. He walked back to the adults, who were all sitting on the floor now, with their backs against the wall, Chip and Katherine pointing the Taser and the Elucidator at them. Gary and Mr. Hodge looked amused. JB and Angela looked distressed.

“Explain,” Jonah demanded. “Where are we?”

“The more appropriate question,” Mr. Hodge said teasingly, “would be, ‘When are we?’”

JB kicked at him, with both legs at once, since JB’s legs were tied together.

“Don’t be cruel,” JB said. “This is bound to be very traumatic for all of them.” He looked over at the screaming, hysterical mass of kids clustered by the door, then back at Jonah. “We call this a time hollow. When they shut the door, Hodge and Gary pulled this whole cave outside of time.”

“So, what—like, we don’t exist right now?” the “not a black hole” kid asked. Jonah glanced at him more closely now. He had curly blond hair, kind of like Chip’s. His name tag said
Alex
.

“No,” JB said. “We exist. But ‘now’ doesn’t.”

“Why not?” the girl said. Her name tag said
Emily
.

JB glanced toward the hysterical crowd once more.

“Get them calmed down,” he said. “And make them sit on the benches again. Hodge and Gary and I will explain everything.”

“We will?” Gary growled.

“
I
will,” JB said. “And it’s fine with me if they hear only my version.”

“We’ll explain too,” Hodge muttered.

It took forever to get all the kids back to the benches, to get them to be quiet. Jonah thought he and Emily and Alex had accomplished it when one kid happened to glance at his cell phone.

“It still says ten eighteen!” he screamed. “It’s said ten eighteen since we got here!”

“Shh, shh,” Emily soothed him. “Sometimes cell phones break.”

She sat beside him, holding his hand, and that seemed to calm him down.

Katherine, Chip, and a few other kids had worked to pull the adults to the front of the room. They stood like dangerous prisoners on trial, Katherine and Chip guarding them from the side.

“Just show them the presentation,” Hodge was suggesting.

“You mean, your commercial?” JB sneered. “No way.”

“You can give the counterpoint afterward,” Gary said. “We promise.”

“Let them,” Angela said. “You showed it to me.”

JB frowned, then shrugged.

“All right,” he said.

“Go into demo mode on that Elucidator, sugar,” Hodge told Katherine. “See the
DEMO
button at the top?”

Katherine glared, offended by the “sugar.” But she seemed to be following his orders.

“Let me guess,” she said. “The one that says
ADOPTION PROMO
?”

“You got it,” Hodge said. “Now aim at the wall.”

Instantly, on the front wall of the cave, a movie screen appeared. No—Jonah went over and touched it—it was still solid rock. No light shone from the Elucidator, but it was clearly the source of both the screen and the images that suddenly glowed from the screen: shifting photographs of hundreds of faces, seeming to represent every era and culture in history. Despite the rock surface, the faces were clear and unruffled. This was beyond high definition; it was like watching reality.

“From the time humankind achieved time travel,” a voice boomed out, just like in a movie preview, “people have been stirred with compassion for the sufferings of the past.”

What followed was a montage of images that Jonah could barely stand to watch. People lost their heads to guillotines; soldiers on horseback ran swords through infants, bodies fell into pits dug to bury the living with the dead. It went on and on and on, agonizingly. Jonah felt like he’d seen all the worst moments of human history by the time the killings finally ended.

“I’m not allowed to watch R-rated movies!” a kid behind Jonah screamed. “Make it stop!”

“Shh. It’s over now,” a girl’s voice comforted. “It’s in the past.” Jonah looked back—it was Emily again.

On the screen now, all the death and destruction was replaced by a grim-faced man sitting in what appeared to be a TV studio. A caption at the bottom of the screen identified him as Curtis Rathbone, CEO, Interchronological Rescue.

“The past was a very brutal place,” he intoned solemnly. “But as much as modern humanity’s hearts went out to their ancestors, their antecedents, they knew that the paradox and the ripple would make intervention very difficult.”

“Pause it for a moment, will you?” JB called out. “I think you need a few definitions.”

Katherine squinted at the Elucidator. “Where is—oh, wait, wait, I got it!”

Curtis Rathbone, CEO, froze on the screen.

“The
paradox
,” JB called out. “That’s the possibility that time travelers might cause some event in the past that would lead to their own nonexistence. Such as, for instance, accidentally killing their own parents. And the
ripple
is what we call any significant change caused by time travelers, which then alters the present and the future. Think of a stone thrown into a pond, and the way the ripples spread out to the very edge of the water…. Is that clear? Does everyone understand?”

Jonah expected the other kids to begin shouting out, “Time travel? What are you talking about? Are you nuts?” or “The ripple? The paradox? Yeah, right. Try the psych ward!” But when he looked around, the faces around him were as solemn as Curtis Rathbone’s. The other kids had seen the nothingness outside their cave; they were ready for explanations, however far-fetched.

“Okay, back to the propaganda,” JB said.

On the screen, Curtis Rathbone began talking again.

“We here at Interchronological Rescue were determined to take action,” he said. “We studied time very carefully, centuries worth of wars and genocide, famines and pestilence—all the very worst of human suffering. And we discovered hundreds whose deaths were so horrendous, so chaotic, so terrible, we knew we had to save them. And we knew we
could
.”

Someone gasped behind Jonah.

“That’s right,” Curtis Rathbone said, almost as if he’d heard the gasp. “Rescue was possible. Oh, we knew we couldn’t save everyone. Much as we would have liked to, say, save every victim of the twentieth-century European Holocaust, we knew that was off-limits. The ripple would have been extreme—too much happened as a result of that Holocaust. But to save even the small, insignificant victims of the past—the ‘orphans of history,’ as it were—didn’t our own humanity demand that we try?”

A single tear glistened in Curtis Rathbone’s eye. He dabbed at it and smiled fleetingly out from the screen.

“We began ten years ago, rescuing children of the Spanish Inquisition,” he said. “Babies left in houses that were then burned to the ground, children left for dead who were easily revived by our modern techniques—we could save them! Save them without causing a ripple or a paradox, because they had as good as vanished from history, even without our intervention. And, thus, we could transform those dark days of humanity into a triumph of the human spirit, of modern humanitarianism.” Now he beamed out at the crowd, the terrors of history receding into the past.

“The response of the modern age has been overwhelming,” Rathbone continued. “Everyone was eager to adopt a desperate child from the past, to reach out across the centuries to save some poor soul who had never had a chance. Within five years, we were running ten rescue missions a week, in every century since the beginning of time. Our generous age paid for plastic surgery for Neanderthals, counseling for war refugees, reconstructive surgery for land-mine victims…. And then we perfected our age reversal techniques, so the children we rescued didn’t even have to remember their ordeals. We could deliver perfect happy, healthy bouncing babies to our clients—”

“That’s enough!” JB snarled. “Turn it off!”

Katherine must have managed to hit the right buttons, because Curtis Rathbone disappeared from sight. Maybe it was Jonah’s imagination, but the lights in the room seemed a bit brighter as well.

“Perhaps Curtis Rathbone had humanitarian intentions in the beginning,” JB growled. “Perhaps.”

“He did!” Hodge shouted. “He does!”

JB ignored him.

“But what Interchronological Rescue became was something entirely different,” he said bitterly. “Purveyors of prestigious names from history for wealthy idiots who want to brag at their cocktail parties, ‘Oh, yes, my little Henry comes from a line of British kings.’…Didn’t you try to kidnap Amelia Earhart out of the skies over the Pacific? Didn’t you lure Ambrose Bierce to the Mexican border?”

“The age reversal doesn’t work on adults,” Gary muttered.

“You know that—now,” JB countered.

“Hold on,” Jonah said, because no one else was speaking up. “Age reversal?”

JB flashed him an angry glance, then turned his glare back to Hodge.

“Traumatized children from traumatic times in history have a lot of issues,” JB said sarcastically. “There were problems Interchronological Rescues never wanted to talk about, never wanted the prospective adoptive parents to know about.”

“Erase the memories and you erase the problems,” Hodge said cheerily. “What’s wrong with that?”

Jonah stared at Hodge, trying to understand.

“This is one of the few parts of the theory I was right about,” Angela spoke up, apologetically. “They had turned you all into babies again, even though some of you had once been much older. Teenagers, even.”

Angela’s words seemed to echo in the stone room.
Turned you all into babies again…
Watching JB’s outrage, Jonah had almost forgotten that any of this time-travel talk had anything to do with him.

“Us?” he whispered. “You’re talking about us?”

JB was still glaring at Hodge and Gary.

“Interchronological Rescue got sloppy,” he accused. “They began taking children whose disappearances were noticed. They caused ripple upon ripple upon ripple….”

He closed his eyes, pained beyond words.

“Oh, and your intervention worked so well,” Hodge accused. “We could have repaired the ripples. We could have put a few children back, if we had to. But, no, you and your friends insisted on attacking, right in the middle of the time stream—”

“The time crash was not my fault!” JB screamed. “If you’d just surrendered…You’re the one who chose to speed away, to slam into the time frame, to ruin her life”—he pointed at Angela—“to nearly destroy thirteen years of time—no, to nearly destroy all of time!”

Even tied up, they were about to come to blows again. Jonah had had it. He’d had it with the suspense, the implications, the accusations, the strain. He stood up. That wasn’t enough. He climbed up on top of a bench and yelled, “Who are we?”

JB and Hodge both fell silent. Then JB said, “Show them. They’re going to have to find out eventually.”

“It’s F six on the Elucidator,” Hodge said.

Jonah watched his sister hit a button. The screen reappeared, displaying a chart. It was a seating chart, Jonah realized, like for a classroom. Or an airplane. He stepped down from the bench to get a closer look and squinted at the names: Seat 1A, Virginia Dare

1B, Edward V of England

1C Richard of Shrewsbury

His eyes skimmed down the list, looking for boys’ names, or names that sounded familiar: 9B, John Hudson; 10C, Henry Fountain; 11A, Anastasia Romanov; 12B, Alexis Romanov; 12C, Charles Lindbergh III….

“That’s who you are,” JB said quietly. “You’re the missing children of history.”