Torn

  “But—when we’re in 1611, we’re going to believe that you’re talking to us from 1600,” Katherine protested. “We’re going to believe that you’re all right.”

  “And that Andrea’s all right,” Jonah added. “And Brendan and Antonio.”

  “Well, none of us can survive unless you believe that we have,” JB said. “Everything collapses unless you have faith enough to keep going, to get here, so you can tell me how to save you in 1600, and begin the cycle all over again.” He flashed them a pained grin. “It’s kind of a conundrum, isn’t it?”

  Jonah’s head ached trying to straighten it all out. He watched in silence as JB finished recording the comments that Jonah had already heard him make. Then JB pressed the two Elucidators together.

  “This will transfer the alarm and siren sound effects,” JB muttered. “And all of Second’s recorded comments.”

  “You’re doing that on purpose? You’re letting Second have all the control?” Jonah asked incredulously.

  “I am working within the trap that Second set for us all,” JB said. “When you’re in a cage and someone hands you a key, you take it.”

  He stood up and handed Jonah one of the Elucidators.

  “Don’t go,” Katherine said. “Or—take us with you. Or—”

  It didn’t seem as if she could settle on the right solution.

  JB grimaced.

  “We all know what I have to do now,” he said. “I just hope there aren’t any hidden traps I don’t know about.” He hesitated. “Are you sure when you were traveling from 1600 to 1611, you were leapfrogging back and forth with the ripple of changes Second unleashed?”

  “That’s not something we could forget,” Jonah said sarcastically. Crossing the ripple again and again had been like riding an amusement-park ride designed by a madman.

  “But we got to 1611 before the ripple,” Katherine added. “We landed, and then the book with the picture of Andrea fell on Jonah’s face.”

  JB nodded grimly.

  “Then Second calibrated all of this very, very closely. We have to play it his way,” he said.

  He began typing coordinates into his Elucidator. Katherine took a step toward him, and for a minute Jonah was afraid that she was going to grab JB and refuse to let go.

  Instead she pulled a lock of his hair down onto his forehead.

  “What?” she said, when Jonah—and JB—stared at her in confusion. “That was something I noticed when you arrived in 1600—the way your hair looked.”

  Jonah and JB both rolled their eyes.

  “But what should we do now?” Jonah asked, and he was ashamed that his voice cracked.

  “Do a search for ‘costume removal’ on your Elucidator,” JB said. “I’ve programmed it to be easy for you to use. Follow the directions exactly. And then … then, if I don’t come back, type in your home phone number and hit enter. That should take you somewhere safe.”

  “Should?” Katherine echoed forlornly.

  “When we’ve opened up even the past for revision, what certainty can anyone offer about the future?” JB asked.

  “But—,” Jonah began.

  JB was already gone.

  Like a fool Jonah dashed to the spot where JB had been standing. Jonah even swiped his hands at the empty air a few times before he could convince himself it was useless. He expected Katherine to laugh at him—until he realized Katherine was doing the same thing.

  “Ahem,” Jonah said, clearing his throat and dropping his hands to his side. “Just … getting a little exercise …”

  “Right,” Katherine said, shaking her head.

  She lowered her hands as well.

  And then they both stood there, helpless.

  “Um, costume removal?” Katherine said.

  “Sure,” Jonah agreed.

  He didn’t want to look and sound like John Hudson a second longer. But he found himself moving slowly as he lifted the Elucidator to look at the screen.

  What if we finish with that really quickly and then we have nothing to distract us and JB still isn’t back? How long would we wait before we’d give up? Jonah wondered.

  Fortunately, getting rid of the John Hudson costume appeared to be a complicated process. First, they had to figure out how to do a search on the Elucidator—the problem was that it was about a million times more advanced than an iPhone. You barely had to think about typing or swiping at the screen and the Elucidator was already obeying. But that meant that Jonah and Katherine kept giving it conflicting commands.

  “Here it is—how to remove a historical costume you no longer need,” Katherine finally said. “You just …”

  “Wait—if I get rid of the costume, what will that leave me to wear?” Jonah asked. “Do I get my old clothes back, or what?”

  Katherine wrinkled up her nose. “Oh, right, let’s make sure you’re not going to be sitting here in your underwear,” she muttered.

  Jonah decided not to tell her that his 1611 costume didn’t include underwear.

  The two of them had to read tons of fine print, but eventually they found the proper commands to type in. Instantly Jonah was back in the T-shirt and jeans he’d worn first to 1600, and then to 1611. The T-shirt still had sweat stains from his time on Roanoke and Croatoan islands; the jeans were stiff with a crust of sand from the knees on down.

  “Do I look normal now?” Jonah asked his sister.

  “What do you mean? You’ve never looked normal,” she answered.

  But her eyes shone.

  It was only a second later that both of them began looking around, waiting for JB to reappear. The costume change had been a good distraction, but it hadn’t lasted long enough.

  “Second, can’t you tell us if JB is coming back?” Jonah asked the Elucidator.

  The Elucidator was silent.

  “Jonah, I don’t think he was ever really talking to us here,” Katherine said. “I think everything he said over the Elucidator was prerecorded, too.”

  “But—he answered our other questions! How did he know what we were going to ask?” Jonah asked.

  “Voice-activated prompts,” Katherine said. “Like on a phone. ‘For store hours, press or say, one. For store directions, press or say, two,’” she imitated in a robotic voice.

  “For assurance that you didn’t die, mention the word ‘heaven,’” Jonah said bitterly. “And if you ask anything I don’t really want to answer, I’ll just tell you, ‘We need to move this along.’ Ergh! You’re right! Remember, he did the same kind of thing before? When we were traveling to 1611?”

  He shook the Elucidator in frustration. Katherine must have thought he was actually so upset he might throw it, because she grabbed his arm.

  “Jonah! That could be our only way out of here!” she complained, jerking on his elbow.

  “No, no, I’m certain JB will be back in an instant, and we can get out of here with his Elucidator,” Jonah said sarcastically.

  Katherine stopped pulling on Jonah’s arm. She let go completely.

  “Oh, no. Oh, no,” she said, practically hyperventilating.

  “What’s wrong?” Jonah asked.

  “That’s why JB hasn’t come back yet,” Katherine said.

  “Huh?”

  Katherine leaned forward, her hands on her knees. She seemed to be trying to catch her breath. She turned her head to look at Jonah.

  “Because we have his Elucidator,” she said. “Remember? He gave it to us when we left 1600.”

  Just once Jonah wanted to figure out something about time before Katherine did.

  Or, right now, he’d settle for proving her wrong.

  “No! That can’t be right!” he protested. “It’s—JB was talking to us on this Elucidator when we were traveling from 1600 to 1611. That has to mean he had a second Elucidator with him!”

  “That could have been another prerecorded message,” Katherine argued. “Second could have even created it, faking JB’s voice.”

  Jonah couldn’t deny it. If Jonah could
sound like John Hudson, Second could undoubtedly make an Elucidator sound like JB.

  “But we told JB everything we heard him say, and he didn’t object to any of it, so those weren’t lies,” Jonah began, trying to puzzle everything out. Then he realized that that wasn’t the important issue right now. “Anyhow, Andrea had an Elucidator with her too. They could all use that one to escape. Remember? The one she got from Second?”

  “You’d trust an Elucidator that came from Second?” Katherine asked, making a face. “He probably set it to malfunction too. If any of them had a working Elucidator, don’t you think JB would be back by now?”

  She had a point. But he could kind of see where she was going with this, and he didn’t like it.

  Then he thought of something he liked even less.

  I’ve changed my mind, he thought. I don’t want to figure out anything about time ahead of Katherine. I don’t want to figure out anything. I just want to hide out here in this time hollow, bury my head in the sand …

  “What’s wrong?” Katherine said. “You look really pale. Did you hit the ‘turn invisible’ button on the Elucidator?”

  “I’m thinking,” Jonah said.

  “Well, there’s a first time for everything,” Katherine said. But Jonah could tell that her heart wasn’t in the insult. She didn’t add to it, the way she normally would. She just fell silent, and waited.

  “We both think this Elucidator is the same one JB had in here a few minutes ago, right?” Jonah asked, holding up the Elucidator.

  Katherine nodded.

  “Sure,” she said. “We just saw him load it up with all the things he said to us when we got to 1611. Of course it’s the same.”

  “Then … this one object was here twice—in my hand and in JB’s,” Jonah said slowly. “We know that, under the usual rules of time, there can’t be two versions of the same person in the same time. So wouldn’t that same rule apply to objects?”

  “Oh, but the rules can change,” Katherine said. “When …”

  “Time’s unraveling,” Jonah finished.

  Katherine’s eyes got big.

  “Then we didn’t fix everything, when we went back to the shallop,” she said. “Time’s still falling apart.”

  “Maybe my theory’s wrong,” Jonah admitted. “Maybe there are rules we don’t know about, for normal time. Maybe all bets are off in a time hollow. Maybe objects can duplicate all they want.”

  Katherine was shaking her head.

  “No, you’ve got to be right about all this,” she said. She put her hands up to her face. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  Jonah bit his lip.

  “Everything still depends on us,” he said. “If there’s even a chance that we’re the only ones with an Elucidator, we’ve got to help. We’ve got to go rescue JB and the others.”

  Jonah was a “rip Band-Aids off as quick as possible” kind of kid. If he had to do anything that required even the slightest hint of bravery, he wanted to do it immediately, before he had time to think.

  So what they did next practically killed him:

  Research.

  “Come on! Let’s just go!” he begged Katherine.

  “Go where?” she asked him, looking up from the Elucidator she’d grabbed from Jonah’s hand. “For once let’s do this intelligently. Let’s make some plans.” She seemed to be scrolling through screen after screen after screen of information. She sighed. “I’m getting sick of typing. Can we try voice commands?” she asked it. “Where’s JB right now?”

  A single word glowed on the screen: WHEN? Then that was replaced with WHICH ‘RIGHT NOW’ ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

  Katherine sighed again.

  “Oh, right,” she said. “I should have remembered.”

  They weren’t in time, so there was no such thing as “right now.”

  “Let’s just follow JB back to 1600,” Jonah said. “Like, a minute or two after he sent us away?”

  THAT’S DAMAGED TIME, the Elucidator flashed at him. NO TIME TRAVELERS ALLOWED IN OR OUT.

  “Wait a minute,” Katherine said. “Brendan and Antonio and Andrea got back into that time.”

  WHAT DO YOU THINK DAMAGED IT? the Elucidator asked.

  Jonah shivered.

  “Then take us to JB in the first moment we’re allowed in!” he insisted.

  OK, flashed on the computer screen.

  Jonah immediately began feeling dizzy. “Jonah! It’s obeying you!” Katherine shrieked. “Wait! Stop! We haven’t planned anything yet! We don’t know where we’re going! We—”

  The screen flashed: TOO LATE. CAN’T STOP.

  And then Jonah and Katherine were zipping back through time.

  “Don’t you ever pay attention to any of those guidance assemblies at school?” Katherine demanded as they floated through the darkness of Outer Time.

  “Huh?” Jonah said.

  “You know, when they talk about impulse control, about how you shouldn’t just do or say anything you feel like, anytime you feel like doing or saying it?” Katherine said. “How that’s what growing up is all about?”

  “Honestly?” Jonah said. “No.”

  He wished Katherine would shut up, so maybe they could ask the Elucidator where they were going, and what they would face when they arrived. Maybe they could tell the Elucidator to make him invisible too.

  But how could he suggest that without admitting that they should have done all that already?

  He was still debating this when suddenly everything sped up. Lights zoomed at them. Jonah felt as if his body were being torn apart; gravity and time and all the other forces of the universe seemed to be tugging him in opposite directions.

  And then everything stopped. They’d landed.

  “Hot,” Katherine moaned. “Too hot.”

  Probably … new symptom of timesickness, Jonah thought irritably. He was more annoyed than ever with the creaky way his timesick brain worked. Come on. … Come on. … Function!

  He tried to stretch his fingers out, feeling for the Elucidator, but his fingers weren’t working any better than his brain.

  Oh, right. Katherine was holding the Elucidator, not me. And I know Katherine’s timesick too, because she said she was hot….

  Dimly Jonah remembered that they’d been cold landing on Hudson’s ship, and that that hadn’t been a time-sickness symptom. It really had been cold and icy.

  So maybe the heat was real too?

  Duh. The last we knew of JB, it was August 1600, and he was in what’s going to be North Carolina. It’d make sense that we’re hot, if this is still North Carolina in August. Or August again.

  Jonah’s brain got hung up for a ridiculously long time on the notion that this could be a different August from 1600, and they could still be near JB. JB and Andrea and Brendan and Antonio might have lived through all of 1600 and all of 1601 and all of 1602 and …

  Does it really get this hot in North Carolina in the summertime? Jonah wondered. This feels more like, I don’t know … fire?

  Jonah’s faulty brain spun a bit of poetry at him that his seventh-grade English teacher liked to quote whenever the heat or air conditioning in her classroom malfunctioned, as it often did: “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice …”

  She’d always laughed about it, but Jonah didn’t see the world ending as a joking matter anymore.

  It felt like the world could have ended in ice on Hudson’s ship, Jonah thought. And now, and now …

  He realized that he’d been keeping his eyes closed, because his eyelids felt so hot and baked and uncomfortable. Like he really was lying right beside a crackling fire. Maybe he should open them and see if that might be true? And then maybe try to roll away?

  He got his swollen eyelids open a crack. He did indeed seem to be staring into flames. He opened his eyes a little wider.

  He saw more flames.

  He opened his eyes all the way, and still he could see nothing but fire. He was staring into a huge wall of fla
mes.

  Advancing right toward him and Katherine.

  “Fire!” Jonah screamed. “Fire!”

  “Shh,” Katherine whispered beside him. “Not supposed … to disturb time. Not change …”

  The firelight glowed through her—she was still mostly invisible.

  “Can you run?” Jonah shouted at her.

  “Run?” she murmured. “Can’t … even … move … yet.”

  Jonah grabbed the Elucidator from her hand.

  “Send Katherine back to the time hollow!” he yelled into it.

  Katherine vanished.

  Jonah sat there panting for a moment, trying to draw oxygen from the baked air into his lungs.

  Impulse control, he thought. Right. Duh. Why didn’t I think before I started yelling at the Elucidator? Why didn’t I send myself back with Katherine?

  It seemed as if there had been some reason he hadn’t wanted to, some reason he shouldn’t ask to be zapped directly back to safety right now.

  He’d just forgotten what it was.

  He looked around, trying to focus his eyes on something besides the flames lapping toward him. Dark black lines stood out in the flames—trees, Jonah realized. That’s a forest fire I’m watching.

  What was he doing in a forest fire? They’d been on a beach the last time he’d seen …

  JB, Jonah remembered. I can’t leave until I rescue JB.

  He turned his head the other way and saw JB lying on the ground. It was a struggle, but Jonah managed to half crawl, half stumble toward JB. He grabbed the man’s shoulders and shook them hard.

  “JB! Wake up!” he shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here! Where’s everyone else? Brendan and Antonio and … and Andrea …”

  JB didn’t move. He seemed to be struggling to breathe.

  Is this what happens when someone passes out from smoke inhalation? Jonah wondered.

  His brain wasn’t working well enough to figure it out. Except—shouldn’t JB get out of the smoke?

  “Send JB back with Katherine!” Jonah yelled into the Elucidator.