Torn-missing 4 (20 page)

He was practically clapping his hands.

“But is that ‘fun’ worth threatening all of time?” Jonah asked. “Killing everybody?”

“No, no, you weren’t listening closely enough,” Second
said, shaking his head. “You’re going to stop that from happening. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Jonah looked at Katherine. Even with his trembling legs and his wobbly muscles, he wished they could just beat up Second and be done with it, or shove him away and scramble down the rigging—or do something else that required only physical strength and effort. It was so much harder to stand here and listen to Second and try to sort out the truth from his half-truths and manipulations.

He’s not really saying anything different than JB did, that everything depends on me and Katherine,
Jonah thought.
But how could JB have wanted us to side with Second?

Katherine looked like she was going to throw up. Jonah felt the nervous tremors spread to his own stomach.

“I’m not saying we’re agreeing to help you,” Jonah said cautiously. “But—what do you want us to do?”

“Go back in time,” Second said.

“Back to live out more of 1600?” Jonah asked hopefully. “Back to Andrea?”

“
No,
lover boy,” Second said, rolling his eyes. “Not such a distant trip.”

“But you did promise,” Katherine joined in. “Back before we arrived in 1611, you said if we fixed this time period, we could rescue Andrea and JB and Brendan and Antonio—”

“But you haven’t fixed this time period yet, have you?” Second asked through gritted teeth. “Don’t get so far ahead of yourself. One thing at a time. All I’m asking is for you to go back a little ways in time—back to this morning.”

“You mean—back to a moment this morning before we originally landed on the ship?” Jonah asked. “Because we know nobody can live through the same time period more than once.”

This had actually struck him as a very comforting rule, the first time he’d heard it. If no one got more than one shot at any one moment, that meant that none of his enemies could keep coming back again and again to the same point in time to attack him all at once.

It would be confusing enough to have his five a.m. happen after he’d lived through the entire rest of the day.

“You think nobody can live through the same time period more than once?” Second asked. “Did JB tell you that?”

“Yes … er, no, I guess it was Angela, back home, when we first found out about time travel,” Katherine said. “But she’d heard it from JB.”

“Ah,” Second said. “Well. That
is
what they teach in Time Travel 101.” He leaned over and lifted the candle-holder from its hook. “But me—I’m in the advanced class. The one nobody else knew existed.”

The smirk was back.

Jonah remembered what JB had said when they’d first arrived in 1611, when Jonah and Katherine were still lying on the icy deck, suffering from timesickness:
We didn’t know what we were doing. … We made even more mistakes than I thought. … What we thought about time itself—a lot of
that
was wrong. … Things that don’t show up until you’ve made mistake upon mistake upon mistake …

“
You
changed the rules of time, then,” Jonah said. “You re-created them.”

“Not exactly,” Second said, with fake modesty. “For once you give me too much credit.”

“But if we can go back—why don’t we go back and fix 1600?” Katherine said, already thinking ahead. “That way we could avoid this whole mess.”

She waved her hand toward the darkness beyond the crow’s nest, but Jonah knew she meant the river that wasn’t supposed to exist, the stocks she’d taken an axe to down below, the dead man lying in his hammock in the hold.

And the mutineers who were left on an ice floe, when it was the captain and those faithful to him who were supposed to die?
Jonah wondered.

“You can’t go back to 1600,” Second said impatiently. “You can only go back and relive a moment where time is unraveling. Where everything is falling apart.”

“You’re really making this sound appealing,” Jonah muttered.

He looked down and saw that his knuckles had turned white where he’d been gripping the railing so hard, for so long.

“I see that I will have to give some explanation,” Second said with a sigh. “What do the two of you know about physics?”

“Nothing,” Jonah said flatly.

“Um—black holes?” Second tried again.

“They’re out in space and scary,” Katherine said. “They suck everything into them, and never let anything out.”

“Not even light,” Jonah added. The darkness beyond the crow’s nest was really starting to bother him.

Second sighed again.

“I suppose that will do as a basic explanation,” he said. “I bring them up because things happen near a black hole that would seem to defy the rules of physics as they were understood before black holes were discovered. In the same way, in a spot where time is unraveling—”

“You’re saying that makes the rules of time different?” Katherine asked.

Second nodded.

“And nobody knew, because nobody unraveled time before,” Jonah said. “Not before you. It’s your fault.”

Second twisted his expression in a way that could have been called a pout if he’d been a little kid.

“You’re always so determined to see the negatives,” he complained. “Someday my accomplishments will go down in history. I guarantee it.”

“That’s if history still exists when you’re done with it,” Jonah muttered.

“It will, it will—shall we proceed?” Second asked, lifting the candleholder from the hook on the mast. He seemed to be looking closely at … Was that a digital clock on the side of the candleholder?

Katherine gasped.

“Yours is an Elucidator too,” she said.

Jonah was watching Second’s face. His habitual smirk had returned.

“And
your
Elucidator still works,” Jonah said. “Unlike ours.”

“You think so?” Second practically taunted.

Katherine grabbed his arm.

“Let us talk to JB before we do anything else,” she pleaded. She glanced at Jonah. “And to Andrea.”

Second shook his arm out of Katherine’s grasp.

“Who do you think is in charge here?” he asked. “We don’t need another mutiny on this ship. I have all the power here. I’m in control.”

“No—you just said you need us to help you,” Jonah said. “You need us on your side. To save all of time. And all your plans—”

“You’ll help me, whether you want to or not,” Second said.

He had his head bent over the Elucidator, punching in commands. Jonah saw that they didn’t have much more time. He did the only thing he could think of to stall: He yanked his cloak off and threw it toward Second.

Jonah’s goal was to have the cloak settle over Second’s head and shoulders, snuffing out the candle and keeping him from finishing his commands. Then maybe Jonah or Katherine could grab the Elucidator; they could scramble down the rigging with it; they could …

It didn’t matter that Jonah couldn’t figure out what they would do then. Because the ship lurched violently to the right just as Jonah tossed his cloak. It missed Second entirely and dropped over the edge of the crow’s nest, plunging down toward the deck.

“Interesting choice of weapon,” Second murmured, completely nonplussed. “It will be even more interesting to see what you do next.”

Katherine and Jonah both lunged toward Second, their hands outstretched, reaching for his Elucidator. But
he was already stabbing his finger at the Elucidator with a disturbing finality.

“What a fascinating experiment!” he crowed. “I can’t wait to see what you choose!”

Katherine and Jonah were on the verge of tackling Second—and then he vanished.

No,
Jonah corrected himself.
We vanished. Katherine and me.

He could no longer see the crow’s nest, the railing or the battered rigging. He couldn’t have said if they were speeding through Outer Time or not, because everything happened so quickly.

Second said we’d go back to earlier today,
Jonah thought, and even his thoughts seemed chopped up and rushed.
We’ll have another chance to choose … something….

He felt a cloak around his shoulders again.
Of course; I had the cloak on earlier today.
But this was a clue—he wouldn’t get a chance to choose again whether or not to impersonate John Hudson. That decision had already been made.

Now Jonah could feel hard wood pressing against his spine. He’d stopped moving backward through time. He’d arrived … somewhere. He realized that he’d had his eyes squeezed shut, in a panic, and he forced himself to open them.

He expected to see the deck of the ship below him,
the early-morning glow of sunrise starting to cut through the fog, the mutiny beginning around him.

Please let this be
after
that sailor hit me over the head with a club,
Jonah thought.

His eyes came into focus almost instantaneously—timesickness was evidently nearly nonexistent when you traveled less than twenty-four hours back in time.

He wasn’t on the deck of the ship. He didn’t have to worry about the sailor with the club.

He and Katherine were back in the shallop, all their choices in the mutiny behind them.

“What?” Jonah actually said out loud. “No!”

Nobody else in the shallop looked at him oddly. Maybe “What? No!” was an appropriate thing to say right at this moment. Actually, nobody was looking in his direction at all. They were all staring down toward the other end of the boat—toward the severed end of a rope.

He realized he and Katherine had arrived just as the shallop was cut adrift from the
Discovery
.

Another collection of possible choices eliminated,
Jonah thought.
I can’t scramble back up the rope, back onto the deck of the ship, to fight against all the mutineers.

The wind caught the
Discovery
’s sails, and the ship sped away. Jonah couldn’t get back to the ship now unless he wanted to jump into the water, struggle through the
ice floes—and probably freeze or drown in the process.

And this is already past the point when we last heard JB’s voice on our Elucidator,
Jonah thought, still trying to figure out what he could possibly do.

He felt a hand against his chest.

“Let me read your half of Wydowse’s letter,” Katherine hissed in his ear. “Now, while nobody’s looking.”

Jonah wasn’t sure it would still be there—what were the rules for objects transferred backward through time, perhaps even duplicated in time? What happened to those rules when time itself was unraveling? Then he stopped wondered about theoretical issues, because he was too busy trying to figure out how he could keep Katherine from making it look as if a torn sheet of paper were floating through midair.

“I’ll get it,” he whispered back.

He reached into his shirt and curled his fingers around the paper he found inside.

Okay, so we brought the paper with us,
he thought.
So that means …

He lost track of his thoughts, because several people gasped just then. Had they seen the paper in his hand? Had they figured out that, technically speaking, it was a letter from the future, from a man who was going to die in less than twenty-four hours?

No, they were gasping because they’d just seen the huge ice floe floating toward them—the ice that, the last time around, Jonah had feared would sink the shallop.

Jonah slipped the paper onto the seat beside him, hoping no one could see it but Katherine. He remembered that the last time, this was the moment when he’d yelled out,
JB! Get us out of here! Now!

Should he yell that again? Was that something that needed to be repeated, or something that needed to be changed?

He remembered that his yell had led to Henry Hudson being suspicious of him, and Staffe standing up for him, saying that he was actually praying.

Maybe Jonah should just pray to begin with, and not make Staffe have to lie?

“Please, God!” Jonah screamed. “Help us!”

It felt good to yell that.

“The Lord helps those who help themselves,” Staffe called over to him from the opposite side of the shallop.

At the same time Hudson cried out, “Raise
our
sails! Row toward starboard!”

Jonah remembered that the last time around Hudson’s cry had been followed very quickly by a hand slamming against the side of his head, and Hudson growling at him,
I said, row!

This time Jonah decided to avoid getting hit.

He grabbed for an oar. John King, on the other side of the shallop, was barely a split second ahead of Jonah beginning to paddle. And Hudson and Staffe set up sails in the middle of the boat.

Katherine did not help Jonah row this time. She kept her head bent over the papers hidden on the seat beside Jonah.

The wind caught the sails, and the shallop lurched to the left, narrowly edging past the ice.

Jonah stopped rowing.

“I
am
an excellent captain!” Henry Hudson screamed out into the fog. “You had no right to banish me!”

Just as before, during the time that they’d spent avoiding the ice, the larger ship had disappeared. Once again Hudson’s screams echoed off nothing but ice. Jonah was certain that no one from the
Discovery
would be able to hear.