Revealed (35 page)

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.”

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.”

“Babies go poo-poo,” Katherine said, and giggled.
“They go
blech
, after they drink their bottles.”

When Katherine was four, she'd been really good at making burping noises. Jonah had forgotten how funny that always sounded coming from the mouth of such a dainty little girl.

“Does Jordan laugh at your burping noises too?” he asked, and he couldn't keep the jealousy out of his voice.

“
Everybody
laughs at my burping noises!” Katherine said, chortling. She threw herself gleefully backward, tumbling out of Jonah's arms. He barely managed to catch her hand. But she curled her fingers trustingly around his thumb.

“When we get home, can I have ice cream?” Katherine asked. “Can we get Mommy and Daddy to let us stay up late and watch TV? Will you and Jordan play Clue Junior or Pretty Pretty Princess with me? Please?
Please?
”

You and Jordan
, Jonah thought.

This was proof. Proof that what JB had told him was true.

Katherine kept blabbing on and on—now she was asking if he thought Mommy would draw a picture of a fancy dress for her to color. Jonah decided it was fine to interrupt. It wasn't like Katherine had ever been the type of kid who'd stop talking long enough to give somebody else a chance.

“Do Jordan and I play games with you a lot?” Jonah asked.

Katherine tilted her head sideways again, obviously thinking deeply.

“Not both of you at once, I guess,” she said, sounding as solemn as a judge. She leaned in close and whispered conspiratorially. “Sometimes I think Mommy and Daddy make one of you play with me so I don't get my feelings hurt. They make you take turns.”

This actually makes sense
, Jonah thought.
Because she wouldn't have any memories of Jordan and me both playing with her at the same time.

Jonah didn't think he spent too long pondering this. But the next time he glanced toward Katherine, she looked about eight—maybe nine. Her hair flowed halfway down her back. She leaned against Jonah's side, and the top of her head came almost up to Jonah's shoulder.

“You know you're the only one I travel through time with,” she said. “You know Jordan always stays home. Don't you feel sorry that he doesn't get to have adventures like us?”

No
, Jonah thought. But for Katherine's sake he only shrugged.