Torn

  No! No! No! Jonah’s brain screamed.

  Because she was falling. She tried to get her grip again. But both her hands slid off the ropes, slid off the railing. Her feet slipped too, and then she was tumbling down, the flickering candlelight making everything seem as if it were happening in slow motion. But in a second it would speed up, she would plunge into the darkness below, and—

  Prickett reached out and grabbed Katherine by the wrist. Then he yanked her over into the crow’s nest.

  Jonah’s brain stopped working.

  What he’d just seen was impossible. Prickett couldn’t have grabbed Katherine and rescued her. He couldn’t have seen her to rescue her, because Katherine was completely invisible to everyone but time travelers. And Prickett wasn’t a time traveler; he belonged in 1611. He looked just as starved and scarred and scurvy-ridden as everyone else on the ship; everyone knew him and acted as if he’d been there all along.

  Of course, Jonah also looked just as starved and scarred and scurvy-ridden as everyone else on the ship; everyone recognized him as John Hudson and acted as if he’d been there all along.

  If Jonah was a time traveler disguised as a 1611 boy, couldn’t Prickett be a time traveler disguised as a 1611 man?

  How else could he have seen Katherine to rescue her?

  Jonah realized his brain was working, after all. It was just working slowly.

  Even as he clung to the rigging, all but paralyzed in place, his brain lurched on to the next question:

  If Prickett was actually a time traveler, not a 1611 sailor, who was he for real? Was he somebody Jonah knew?

  Prickett leaned out over the railing.

  “You might as well climb on up here too, Jonah,” he called out softly.

  So, Jonah thought. Whether or not I know him, he knows me.

  He had to peel his numb fingers from the rope he’d been clinging to.

  Maybe I should be climbing down—running away, Jonah thought. Whoever he is, Prickett murdered Wydowse.

  But Prickett had also rescued Katherine.

  And—he still had Katherine in the crow’s nest with him.

  Jonah took a deep breath and started climbing up. He reached the crow’s nest just as Katherine was blinking up at Prickett and murmuring, “If that’s really you, JB, I’m going to be so mad that you didn’t tell us you were on the ship with us this whole time.”

  Prickett shook his head.

  “You know JB’s stuck in the past,” he said. “He can’t even talk to you.”

  “Hadley?” Jonah guessed, stepping gingerly over the railing. “Hadley Correo?”

  Hadley was another time traveler who’d worked with JB and had helped them out on one of their previous trips through time, back in the 1400s. That time he’d kept his identity secret until a particularly dangerous moment. If this was Hadley, Jonah wished he’d revealed himself a lot sooner. But it would still be so good to see him, to know that someone who knew a lot about time was there to help them.

  Prickett practically pouted.

  “Wrong again,” he said. “I’m insulted that you haven’t figured this out already. Who’s responsible for you being in 1611 in the first place?”

  “JB,” Katherine and Jonah said, almost simultaneously.

  “No, no, no,” Prickett said, truly sounding annoyed now. “Who’s really responsible? JB would never have been so reckless if I hadn’t forced his hand, forced history to change, forced everyone to count on two inexperienced children to save all of time….”

  Jonah clutched the railing behind him. He didn’t trust the way the crow’s nest lurched about, dipping and tilting with the whim of the waves so far below him. He didn’t trust the way the wind shrieked, seeming to promise tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards—dangers Jonah could only imagine.

  But most of all Jonah didn’t trust the man standing before him.

  “Second?” he whispered.

  Jonah half expected Second to rip off his Abacuk Prickett costume, revealing his true self. Jonah had seen the man only briefly when they’d first met, back in 1600—and Jonah had been in shock then, trying to comprehend massive changes in time. But Jonah still remembered Second’s pasty-white skin, which looked as though he’d hardly ever spent a moment outdoors. He remembered Second’s sticking-out-all-over-the-place blond hair; his half-tucked shirt; the smug, smirking tone that hung over Second’s every word.

  That’s why Prickett sounded different to me when I couldn’t see his face, Jonah thought. Even when Second was using Prickett’s voice, he still sounded like he was smirking. And that one time I did catch a bit of his smug expression….

  Second’s appearance didn’t change at all—he still looked like the scarred, starving, sickly Abacuk Prickett, his skin as weather-beaten as an old shoe.

  “So what are you doing here?” Jonah asked accusingly. “What are you trying to do?”

  “For the last fifteen or twenty minutes I’ve been trying to lure the two of you up to this crow’s nest,” Second said. “I’d say I succeeded.”

  Katherine sprang up and grabbed the railing, clutching it every bit as desperately as Jonah was.

  “Now, now,” Second said. “I just saved your life. Do you think I would have done that if my intent was to harm you?”

  “You killed Wydowse,” Katherine accused, even as Jonah shook his head frantically at her.

  Don’t make him mad! Jonah thought at his sister. Let’s get down from here; let’s get somewhere safe. Then we can start throwing out the accusations!

  But Second only began thoughtfully tapping his chin.

  “Did I kill Wydowse?” he asked, as if it were merely an academic question. “Or did he just die on his own at a very convenient time? How will you ever know? He was desperately ill. That time he spent in the shallop, and standing on the deck watching Jonah being put in the stocks, and even sitting at his desk writing so feverishly … all of that had to have taken its toll on him.”

  “You had a motive,” Katherine insisted. “The things he was writing about you—about Prickett, I mean …”

  Second laughed and almost playfully hit Katherine on the head with the rolled-up papers from Wydowse’s desk.

  “Actually, these papers are more incriminating toward my goals than toward Prickett’s character,” Second said. “Wydowse was a scientist, skilled at observation. Even near death he could see the logical inconsistencies around him. And he wanted so badly to record his observations, in hopes that someone could make sense of them in the future. But, alas, his writings are too dangerous to stay on this ship.”

  Second sounded so careless and offhand, Jonah didn’t anticipate what happened next: Second ripped the papers in half.

  Both Jonah and Katherine sprang at him, a dangerous motion in the crowded crow’s nest.

  If he holds his hands up in the air, we’ll have to grab the papers before he throws them out into the water, Jonah thought. We’ll have to jump. But we can’t jump too high or too far, or we’ll all fall….

  But Second didn’t try to keep the ripped papers away from Jonah and Katherine. Instead he handed them right to them—the top half to Katherine, the bottom to Jonah.

  In his astonishment Jonah almost dropped his half.

  “You wanted those papers so badly—don’t you know what to do with them?” Second asked sardonically. “What if I change my mind and try to take them back?”

  Quickly Jonah tucked his half into his cloak. Then he decided that wasn’t good enough, and he shoved them between his shirt and his skin instead. Katherine stuffed hers into her jeans pocket.

  Second laughed.

  “Don’t worry—I’m not taking them back,” he said, shaking his head. “I probably need you to have those.”

  Now, what did that mean? Jonah wondered.

  He felt a little like some helpless prey, hypnotized by a snake’s gaze.

  Don’t let Second keep control of the conversation, Jonah told himself. Throw him off. Surprise him into revealing more than he
intends.

  But Second was the champion of predictions. Before he’d betrayed JB, Second had been a projectionist, someone who always knew what to expect. Nothing surprised him.

  Jonah tried anyway.

  “So why did you want us up here?” he asked abruptly. “What’s the point?”

  This earned another laugh from Second.

  “Now you’re thinking!” he chortled. “Don’t ask about the past, ask about now, the only moment we have any control over. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what people always said about time before they learned they could go back and change the past after all?”

  Jonah remembered that back in 1600, Second had seemed a little off, a little too happy.

  A little crazy.

  But he still outsmarted us, Jonah thought. He outsmarted JB. Sometimes craziness works.

  “Have you noticed what a small ship this is?” Second asked. “How difficult it is to find a space where three people can talk in secret, without being overheard? Without being seen?” He glanced at Katherine. “The second part of that is not such a problem for you, my dear, but for Jonah and me …” He shook his head. “There have been enough events this day to strain credulity, even among a bunch of superstitious, feverish, starving sailors. Up here I can cover our conversation with the sound of a fake wind.”

  Jonah realized that that was the reason the wind sounded so fierce when he could hardly feel it at all.

  Second was still talking.

  “Under the circumstances the crew would be completely undone if they heard a female voice, coming from nowhere,” he said. “Or the sight of sworn enemies holding a cozy tête-à-tête …”

  Jonah forced himself to try to keep up.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re saying you and me—er, Abacuk Prickett and John Hudson—we’re sworn enemies?”

  “Oh, we weren’t before today,” Second said. “John Hudson was kind of a goody-goody, the peacemaker on the ship, even though some of the crew hated him just because of his father. But today it became necessary for me to totally discredit you, just in case you started to spout off, accusing me of, oh, I don’t know—messing with time, maybe? Releasing a ripple of bizarre changes from 1600? Being an impostor?”

  Second grinned as if this were all a joke.

  “And, too, I had to get you into those stocks,” he went on. “You were inept enough climbing up to the crow’s nest this morning. What if somebody had asked you to raise the mizzen sail? Or tie off the halyard? Climb out on the bowsprit? You would have been hopeless. You might have gotten hurt. You definitely would have blown your cover as John Hudson.”

  “So you were protecting me, putting me in the stocks?” Jonah asked faintly.

  “Protecting you, protecting time—today it was all the same,” Second said with a shrug.

  “You still care about time?” Katherine asked, sounding startled. “After everything you’ve done to ruin it—”

  “Yes, well, it turns out I have to care,” Second said. “It’s a technicality, really, some little things that have to be fixed.”

  Jonah felt his knees go weak with relief.

  “You will fix time, then,” he said. “You’re back on JB’s team. On our side.”

  “Um, no,” Second said. “Sorry. It’s more like—you have to join my team. You’re going to save time, and me.”

  “What if we don’t want to?” Katherine asked. “You’re a murderer!”

  “Oh, that again,” Second said, waving the accusation away as if it meant nothing. “I’m afraid you don’t have much of a choice. If you don’t do what I want, the paradoxes bury us all.”

  “Bury us?” Jonah repeated in a faint voice.

  “Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words—the two of you have such a morbid outlook this evening!” Second said. “I wish I could break this to you a little more subtly, but time is growing short. Put simply, you have to help me.”

  “What happens if we don’t?” Katherine challenged.

  “We all die—everyone and everything,” Second said. His smirk had vanished; his voice was completely serious. “If you don’t help me, all of time ends in 1611.”

  Jonah backed up against the railing of the crow’s nest again, his knees wobbly. He needed something to steady him.

  It can’t be that bad, Jonah thought.

  One thing they’d discovered about Second back in 1600 was that even when he told the truth, he sometimes left out important details. What was Second not telling them? And how could they get Second to reveal everything?

  Katherine went for the blunt approach.

  “Why should we believe you?” she asked. “That doesn’t even make sense. I mean, how could I be standing here if time ends in 1611? It’s going to be, like, almost four hundred years before I’m even born!”

  “Oh, good. You’re catching on quickly,” Second said. “That’s one of the paradoxes. Given the direction time is going now, it’s become impossible for you to ever exist. Or Jonah. Or me. So everything we’ve done here, everything we’ve caused to happen—it’s all impossible too. So, poof!” He gestured wildly, mimicking an explosion. “Time could collapse. Everything could end.” He put one hand over his heart and finished melodramatically: “Good-bye, cruel world.”

  “Shouldn’t you have thought of that before?” Jonah grumbled.

  “Now, now,” Second scolded. “I was sure there’d be a way out. I was just as hopeful as Henry Hudson, sailing into the dead-end James Bay, believing so strongly that he’d find a passage to China….”

  “But there wasn’t one for Hudson,” Katherine protested. “The Northwest Passage didn’t exist. And he was supposed to disappear in a rowboat in the ice!”

  “Not anymore,” Second said. “Hudson’s back with his ship. And—what do you think we’re sailing through right now?”

  Jonah stared at him.

  Second-disguised-as-Prickett brought the ship back to Hudson, Jonah thought. So for the other changes …

  “You dug the Northwest Passage yourself,” Jonah said, suddenly understanding. “That’s why that native said he’d never seen this river before. You just created it. You’re probably making everything up as we go along!”

  “How?” Katherine asked faintly.

  “Robotic diggers from the future—believe me, it was very complicated working all this out,” Second said.

  “But why bother?” Katherine asked. “Who cares?”

  Second scowled at her.

  “Do you know how much time explorers spent searching for the Northwest Passage?” Second asked. “John Cabot, 1497; Samuel Champlain, 1604 to 1607; Hudson, Davis, Baffin … Even when Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark west in 1803, he was hoping they’d come back with news of a river route that stretched all the way to the West Coast. If Europeans had found such a route before they’d even seen much of North America, would they have swarmed to this continent even faster? Or would they have said, ‘The Americas? Who cares? Let’s just get to China and back as fast as we can!’ Would they have left the Native Americans alone? Would the ties between Europe and China and Japan have developed centuries sooner? Would India’s role in history change? The possibilities are so fascinating to contemplate! This is so much fun!”

  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 …