Torn-missing 4 (27 page)

Jonah was having a hard time absorbing this.

“Then Brendan and Antonio and Andrea are all eighteen now,” Jonah said, looking at the others.

“And Jonah and I are still, like, little kids,” Katherine said. She was practically pouting.

Jonah almost said,
Speak for yourself
, because he didn’t want Andrea thinking of him as little. But it was hopeless. She was
eighteen
now, and he was still just thirteen.

The native man beside JB said something again, and JB answered him in Algonquin: “I am sorry, honored chief, but I cannot explain everything we are discussing right now. It is a very long story, best suited for a night of talking around the campfire.”

“And there is no night in this room,” the native chief said, nodding. He looked around at the windowless walls. “And no day, either.”

Jonah thought the chief had figured out the time hollow with incredible speed.

“So what are you going to do with everyone?” Jonah asked.

“Right now I’m just trying to figure out who is here, what happened, what’s going on with time—I can’t even begin to think about what we should do next,” JB said. He started to look back at the Elucidator, then looked
up quickly. “Except—
nobody
is going to be sent back to a certain death.”

“Excuse me,” a strange voice spoke from the back of the room. It sounded oddly familiar, but Jonah couldn’t quite place it.

Then a boy shoved his way through the crowd toward JB and Katherine and Jonah. Was he someone Jonah had seen before? With his light hair and blue eyes, he looked out of place in the roomful of Native Americans.

“
Another
hottie?” Jonah heard Katherine murmur under her breath. “I mean, he’s no Brendan or Antonio”—she glanced toward the two tall boys, who were still completely fixated on their drawings—“but, whoa.”

Jonah remembered that Brendan and Antonio had said their tribe was very generous about taking in people from other cultures. He guessed that that must have happened with this boy—except that as the boy stepped closer, Jonah saw that he had the perfect straight teeth that came only from years of wearing braces. And, while all the other males in the room—even JB—were wearing some variation of loincloths or deerskin pants, this boy was wearing a Cincinnati Reds T-shirt and shorts with a little Reebok logo at the bottom.

“Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” the
boy asked, his voice trembling slightly. “This guy shows up, he tells me it’s my turn to go back in time, and suddenly I’m in this hut that’s on fire. And then the next instant I’m in this room. What happened? Was that all I had to do? Can I go home now?”

Jonah realized that this must be one of the other missing kids from time. He would have been in the time cave back at the beginning with everyone else—that had to be the reason he seemed vaguely familiar.

JB squinted at the boy.

“What’s your name, son?” JB asked, in an unusually gentle voice.

“Um.” For some reason, the boy was screwing up his face and squinting at JB, as if JB had asked a difficult question. “My real name—well,
I
still think of it as my real name—I’m Dalton Sullivan.”

Yep,
Jonah thought. That had been the name of one of the other kids in the time cave back at the adoption conference where they’d all met. Jonah had heard the organizers call out the name Dalton Sullivan. But he’d been too preoccupied to notice or remember the boy who answered to it.

“And did anyone tell you what your original identity was?” JB asked, still speaking gently. “Or what year you were supposed to go to?”

For some reason JB practically seemed to be holding his breath.

The boy grimaced.

“Not the year part,” he said, shaking his head. “But I think I’m supposed to be someone called John Hudson?”

“That
hottie
was supposed to be hideous in original time?” Katherine burst out, so surprised that she didn’t manage to keep her voice down.

“Um—hideous?” Dalton Sullivan/John Hudson asked, his voice trembling again. “Was there—I mean—
is
there something awful that’s supposed to happen to me?”

“She just means you would have looked a little … uh … weather-beaten in 1611,” Jonah said. He felt kind of defensive about the original John Hudson’s appearance. “Just from the scurvy and the frostbite and the knife fights and—oh, don’t worry about it. You were a pretty nice kid, no matter what you looked like. And I think you missed all the awful stuff. Right, JB?”

JB was hunched over the Elucidator, mumbling and swiping and typing in a frantic blur of motion.

“So Second sent John Hudson to 1605 instead of 1611,” JB muttered. “By mistake? On purpose? What could he have been planning?” He looked directly at Dalton for a moment. “You really arrived in 1605 in the middle of the fire? You didn’t go anywhere else?”

“You mean, in time?” Dalton said. “See, I think of ‘going places’ as being a geographical thing. This whole time-travel thing, I’m still trying to figure it out—”

“He hasn’t spent more than two minutes in the past,” Katherine interrupted, sounding sure of herself once more. “If he had, he wouldn’t talk like that.”

“But—1605?” JB repeated. “That’s impossible. The original John Hudson was already
in
1605, living in England, I’d guess. …” He studied the Elucidator. “Yes, absolutely. Here’s the proof.”

He tapped the screen.

“So, then, for about two minutes in 1605 there were two John Hudsons in the world?” Jonah asked. “I thought that was impossible unless time’s unraveling. So Second was unraveling time
backward
? All the way back to 1605?”

“Yes, yes …,” JB said, his face awash with horror.

“Then when will it stop?” Dalton whimpered.

“Now,” a voice said authoritatively.

Jonah looked around. Was the
room
speaking?

“Embedded speakers—don’t anybody freak out,” the walls spoke.

“Second,” JB said calmly. “We meet again.”

Jonah saw that Andrea’s grandfather and a few of the more elderly Native Americans had fainted.

“Everybody—chill out. That’s just a weird kind of thunder,” Antonio said over his shoulder as he drew.

The natives stopped looking so worried.

Jonah didn’t feel particularly soothed.

“Did you say we meet again?” Second’s voice boomed out. “Not so much with the meeting thing. If you think through the possibilities, I’m sure you will realize that this message was prerecorded, like so many others. In fact if you’ve triggered this message, we shall never meet again.”

“I’m sure you’ll understand that I wouldn’t be too upset about that—if I really believed you,” JB said wryly.

“I’m downloading proof to your Elucidator right now,” Second said, and the voice seemed to surround them. Everyone was cringing away from it now.

“I made a deal with Jonah and Katherine,” Second continued. “They upheld their end of the bargain and saved 1611 for me. And so now I shall uphold my end of the bargain and allow them to save their friends.”

“We
already
saved JB and Andrea and Brendan and Antonio, you idiot,” Katherine yelled at the wall. “We did
it ourselves—or, well, Jonah did. We don’t need your deal anymore.”

“Yes, you do,” Second said, as if he could really hear her, could really answer. “If I wanted to, I could go on meddling in your time. But I promise from here on out I will stay only in mine.”

“What’s this ‘your time, my time’ you’re talking about?” JB asked, looking up from the Elucidator. “Time is time is time. It’s all interconnected. Even if you stay in 1611, everything you do will affect the future. And these kids’ lives are uniquely at risk if—”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” Second thundered. “Poor JB, you’re such a rule follower, you can’t even think about what’s possible if the rules are broken. I’ll walk you through this one. We’ve always known time protects itself, right? So if someone throws too many changes at time, creates too many paradoxes—”

“Time collapses,” JB said grimly. Under the ash and soot on his face he’d gone pale.

“Usually,” Second agreed. “But not if the paradoxes are carefully controlled. It’s like how twentieth-century scientists figured out that splitting the atom wasn’t just useful for creating incredibly destructive bombs. They could also use nuclear energy to power lightbulbs.”

“But—think about Three Mile Island,” JB muttered.
“Chernobyl. People make mistakes. It’s too dangerous to—”

“Ah, but Jonah and Katherine protected everyone from any mistakes I might have made, splitting time,” Second said confidently. “They fixed everything.”

“We did?” Jonah asked, startled.

He remembered the moment in the shallop when everything had seemed to divide: one shallop full of sailors headed toward shore, the other going back to a ship that appeared out of nowhere. Time
had
split in that moment. One version was healed, and the tracers came back.

The other version was changed—and completely under Second’s control.

“I was confident that Jonah and Katherine would choose to save people—Wydowse, in the shallop, and their friends in 1605,” Second explained. “They’re very predictable.”

“Did you predict just how
many
people Jonah would save from 1605?” JB muttered. He looked around at the roomful of people. Then he caught Jonah’s eye. “Not that I’m complaining. I would not wish to be mourning my friends right now.”

JB slung his arm around the chief’s shoulder. The chief had been staring at the talking walls in befuddlement, but now he looked at JB and nodded stoutly.

Jonah looked at Katherine. “Second did kill Wydowse in that other version of
time,” Jonah said. He was certain of it now. “He’ll probably kill other people, too. He doesn’t care.”

“Why should I?” Second answered. “These people already get their regular lives, in original time. Aren’t I being generous, giving them a second chance at life anyway? Giving them other choices?”

“You don’t give chances or choices,” Jonah said. “You just force people to do what you want!”

Jonah didn’t feel like he was talking to a wall, talking back to a recording. Even though he knew Second wasn’t there for real, Jonah felt like he was finally getting to tell him off.

It felt really good.

For a long moment the wall was silent. Jonah thought maybe he’d won the argument. Maybe Second was completely done talking.

Then Second whispered back.

“Oh, Jonah, haven’t you been making your own choices all along?” Second asked. “What choice do you want that you don’t have?”

“The choice to …,” Jonah began, and then he stopped. This felt dangerous, like telling a genie your wishes in a fairy tale. What if it really mattered what he said?

He thought about what he’d wanted so badly ever since he’d landed on the deck of Henry Hudson’s ship.
Fix time, save Andrea, save everyone else
… Now that he and Katherine had accomplished those things, anything else he might ask for seemed childish and silly.

I want Andrea to be my girlfriend.
Well that wasn’t going to work out if she was eighteen and he was thirteen. And, anyhow that would have to be her choice, too.

I want all the natives and John White and even Dare to be taken care of, to have good lives, and the people back in 1611 to be okay.

Again, that wasn’t really something he could control.

I want a million dollars, I want a TV and a computer in my room at home, I want all the kids at school to like me, I want to just be Jonah Skidmore and not have to be anybody else anywhere else or any
time
else….

He realized that everyone was watching him, waiting for his answer. And he realized what he wanted most.

“I just want to go home,” he said. “Me and Katherine—we’ve been away a long time.”

“But of course.” Second’s voice poured from the walls. “Of course you want to go home. Don’t you know this is all over now, and you can?”

That’s prerecorded,
Jonah reminded himself.
Once again Second knew exactly what I was going to say.

But he couldn’t worry about that right now. Because JB was nodding, agreeing with Second. And then Katherine
was grabbing Jonah and hugging him and jumping up and down, all at the same time.

“We’re going home!” she shrieked.

“We’re going home,” Jonah repeated, almost too dazed to believe it. “We get to go home.”