Revealed (23 page)

“I'd rather savor the riches waiting for me in the future,” Gary said, a giant smirk breaking over his face.

“JB and the rest of the time agency—they're never going to let you collect all that money in the future,” Jonah said, turning his head side to side so he could address both men at once. “Maybe they'll go easy on you if you turn yourself in. Maybe if you get Lindbergh to bring back all those babies on the plane right now, then—”

“You're right,” Hodge said to Gary. “The boy has become tiresome. Let's go.”

“Don't forget,” Gary said, pointing to the baby cradled against Hodge's chest.

Jonah lunged at Hodge, ready to rip baby Katherine out of his grasp. Because it suddenly seemed like the two men were planning to just head off into the future, leaving Jonah behind. Alone. He still didn't understand what was going on—or why they weren't worried about the time agents—but there was no way he was letting them get away with baby Katherine without him.

Hodge didn't react the way Jonah expected. The man didn't jerk the baby to the side out of Jonah's reach. He didn't command his Elucidator to take him and the baby away.

Instead Hodge dropped the baby into Jonah's arms.

In his surprise Jonah almost let the baby slip on down to the floor.

“Katherine!” he cried, grabbing for the edge of the blanket, or for an arm or a leg he could get a firm grip on. He finally stopped the baby's downward motion with one hand clenched around the baby's right ankle and the other hand around her left wrist. The blanket snaked its way down to the floor.

And then what Jonah saw almost made him drop the baby all over again.

Because there wasn't a purple-and-pink-striped sweater under the blanket. There was a patched, threadbare sleeper, covering the scrawny form of a baby that Jonah recognized from old photos. But it wasn't baby Katherine he was holding in his arms. It wasn't even a baby girl.

It was the baby version of Jonah himself.

“What? No!” Jonah moaned.

This was a time violation—a time abomination. Every second that ticked by with Jonah as a thirteen-year-old and Jonah as a baby occupying the same time period threatened to make all of time collapse forever. It wasn't even possible for both of them to occupy the same time period—unless someone was deliberately trying to ruin time.

“How could you?” Jonah snarled at Gary and Hodge.

Jonah was still holding on to the baby by one wrist and one ankle, and just those two points of contact seemed to make Jonah guilty too. He eased the baby version of himself down to the floor and let go. He stepped as far to the other side of the stairwell as he could. But Hodge was blocking the door and Gary was blocking the stairs
down—Jonah couldn't get more than three feet away.

Gary and Hodge burst out laughing once again as Jonah pressed himself tightly against the wall.

“Finally the boy understands without us having to explain everything,” Hodge said to Gary.

“Yes, you do!” Jonah insisted. “But—explain after you undo this! Fix time before it collapses! Stop this! What's wrong with the two of you?”

The two men just kept laughing. Jonah pointed a trembling finger at the baby on the floor.

“Send one of us away!” Jonah insisted. “Before time splits!”

He reached blindly for Hodge, as if there were any hope that Jonah could fix time himself by snatching the watch Elucidator from the man's wrist or the camera Elucidator from his pocket or wherever he'd stashed it. Hodge easily shoved Jonah away. Jonah landed on the floor right beside his baby self.

“I guess he doesn't understand,” Gary mocked. “Jonah, we did this on purpose! Splitting time is exactly what we wanted to happen!”

“This is your destiny! Your contribution to history!” Hodge said, waving his hands dramatically.

Jonah couldn't let himself think about how much he was destroying, just by his very existence. His doubled existence.

“Then where's Katherine?” he asked, shifting worries, because the entire fate of the universe and time itself was too overwhelming to think about. “What did you do with her?”

He craned his neck, as if he'd be able to see past Hodge and out the door.

Hodge's smirk looked even more self-satisfied than ever.

“Ah, but that was the pure genius of our plan,” Hodge said. “We still get to benefit from selling thirty-six famous endangered children from history in the future. She replaced you on the plane!”

Jonah's tortured brain tried to make sense of this. Hodge had walked out of the stairwell carrying baby Katherine wrapped in a purple-and-pink sweater. He'd guided Lindbergh onto the plane, the plane had taken off, and Hodge had returned carrying another baby wrapped in an ordinary baby blanket.

But Gary and Hodge said I wasn't on the plane this time
, Jonah thought.

No. They'd said he wasn't going to be on the plane to the future with Lindbergh. They hadn't said that he hadn't been on the plane from the past. They'd split hairs answering him, just like they were trying to split time.

“But—but . . . Katherine's not from history!” Jonah protested.

“The early twenty-first century
is
history, to us in the future,” Gary sneered. “Stupid!”

He kicked Jonah in the side, as if trying to make the insult hurt worse. Jonah guessed he should be grateful that Gary hadn't kicked the baby.

“But Katherine's not famous! Or endangered!” Jonah persisted.

Hodge crouched beside him, almost as if he were trying to show some sympathy.

“Sure she is,” he said. “Because of you, in both cases.”

Jonah could do nothing but stare blankly at him.

“Thanks to all her time travel with you, Katherine was solely or partly responsible for rescuing a dozen other endangered kids from history,” Hodge said. “She
is
famous in our time period for that. Most experts will argue that she played a much bigger role in saving kids and time than you ever did. But that will partly be because people are going to resent how you ended up.”

Dimly Jonah realized that Hodge was trying to get him to be jealous of Katherine.

“Wait a minute,” Jonah stopped him. “What do you mean, how I ended up?”

“This,” Hodge said, waving his hand to indicate Jonah sprawled on the floor right beside the baby version of himself. “The way you claimed JB's rogue assistant, Second
Chance, as your role model, and tried to destroy all of time forever by going back to the night of the time crash—and staying even after the baby version of yourself appeared. The way you
would
have destroyed all of time, if Gary and I hadn't exiled you and this entire time period into a dead-end split.”

“Dead-end split” sounded like time-travel gobbledygook once again, but Jonah could make enough sense of it that it gave him chills.

“I'm not trying to destroy anything!” Jonah protested. “You're making this happen!”

Hodge shook his head with fake sadness.

“That's not how history is going to record this moment,” he said.

“But time travelers will see the truth!” Jonah said. “The time agency will come back and stop you! JB and Hadley—they'll be here any minute!”

“So why aren't they here already?” Gary taunted.

Jonah couldn't answer that question.

“This time period is already shutting down,” Hodge said. “The first thing that goes is time travel
into
a period. Gary and me,
we'll
still be able to get
out
for a little while longer.”

But not me?
Jonah wondered.

He decided this wasn't a good question to ask out loud.

“And then, eventually, your whole branch of time—kablooey,” Gary said, throwing his hands up in the air, acting out an explosion. “Total destruction. Game over.”

“And then there won't be any future for you to make your billions in!” Jonah protested. “You're destroying time for nothing!”

Hodge shook his head.

“This one really is a slow-brain,” he said. “I pity anyone who ever tried to educate him.”

Gary kicked Jonah again.

“Time's splitting, remember?” Gary asked. “Thanks to you and baby you? We get our future, all right. Free and clear and trouble free.”

“
Our
future won't have time agents,” Hodge clarified. “You might say we modeled it exactly on what's best for us.”

“But, but—” Jonah sputtered.

“You should be thanking us for at least saving your sister,” Hodge said mockingly. “Because if we'd left her here, she would have died with everyone else.”

“That's if this time period even exists long enough for her to be born,” Gary added.

A year from now
, Jonah thought frantically.
Katherine's not supposed to be born for another year.

He was getting confused—if time didn't last long
enough for Katherine to be born, how could he have eleven years of memories with her? How could he have just carried her baby self from 1932 to now, before Gary and Hodge snatched her away?

He decided he didn't have time to worry about any of that right now.

“This time period won't last anywhere close to a year,” Hodge said, glancing at his watch. “I'd be surprised if there are more than a couple days left.”

“Maybe even just a couple hours,” Gary agreed.

Were they just trying to psych Jonah out? Make him give up?

“You can't do this,” Jonah said desperately. “You can't. It's not fair. It's not right.”

Hodge leaned in close, almost as if he and Jonah were best buddies.

“We don't actually have much choice,” Hodge said. “Once that plane crash-landed in this time period, this time was doomed. It's always been doomed. You lived through thirteen years of it being doomed.”

“I tried telling the boy that,” Gary interrupted. “I don't think he understood that, either.”

Jonah remembered what Gary had said:
It was never possible for time to survive with you or any of the other babies from that plane living in this time period.

“Didn't you ever wonder why you never saw tracers, growing up?” Hodge asked.

Not until twenty minutes ago
, Jonah thought numbly.

He didn't want the missing tracers to be important. But he knew they were. The only other time he'd seen tracers vanish completely from a time period was when Second Chance messed up everything in the 1600s.

When he was making time split.

Why didn't JB or any of the other time agents notice this problem?
Jonah wondered.
Or—did they know, and they just didn't want to upset us kids by telling us the truth?

“All the time agency's frantic efforts—all
your
frantic efforts—those were like rearranging the deck chairs on the
Titanic
,” Hodge said. “Though they did enable us to set up a backup safety plan. A second future to be gloriously wealthy in . . .”

“So what are we waiting for?” Gary asked.

“Nothing,” Hodge said. “Nothing else.”

“Good-bye, Jonah,” Gary said.

Were they leaving? Now?

Jonah lunged once again for Hodge, who was squatting down so close, right in front of him. If Jonah just grabbed Hodge and held on, then Jonah would go with them. It didn't even matter where they were going. Jonah had to get out of this time period. How much time had
passed with him and his baby self here together? Was it little enough that Jonah could still rescue his time period and thwart Gary and Hodge?

Jonah slammed hard into concrete. He'd fallen straight through the space where Hodge had been crouched.

Gary and Hodge were already gone.

Jonah just lay sprawled on the concrete for a long moment. He could practically feel the bruises starting to form on his elbows and knees. And maybe on the side of his face as well.

But what does it matter if all of time's about to end?
he asked himself.

No. Not all of time. Just
his
time, where he'd spent almost his entire life.

My adopted time. Which I'm now ruining just as much as I ruined my adopted family
, Jonah thought.

It felt like he deserved the pain shooting through his body.

Shake it off
, Jonah told himself.
Play through the pain.

He felt like he was quoting somebody—oh yeah, his soccer coach thirteen years from now.

So stop lying here
, Jonah told himself.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get up and—

And what? What could Jonah possibly do to stop Gary and Hodge's plan? He didn't have an Elucidator. He couldn't get out of this time period or do anything to fix it. He couldn't contact any time agents, and even if he could, they couldn't get in to help him. He did know plenty of people in this time period—but none of them would recognize him as a thirteen-year-old. His own
parents
wouldn't recognize him.

And now they never will
, Jonah thought, blinking hard.
They'll never have a chance to be my parents.

Maybe Gary and Hodge were lying about that? Maybe they were lying about everything?

Jonah looked over at the baby version of himself, who seemed to be sleeping entirely too peacefully for an infant who'd been dropped and dangled by his wrist and ankle only moments ago.

Sedated
, Jonah thought dully.
Just like Gary and Hodge said they always do with babies. That part of their story checks out.

In his sleep the baby twisted his face, as if concentrating hard on some dream. That one action made him look exactly like the hundreds of pictures Jonah's parents had taken the day he'd arrived.