“So . . . you’re forgetting your life as JB and remembering your life as Tete Einstein?” Jonah asked, trying to figure everything out.
“Kind of, but not exactly,” JB said. “It’s more like . . . everything’s frayed and patched and jumbled together. The wires keep getting crossed, and I’m having trouble telling the memories apart. What I told you about my mother boiling a pan of water for steam for me to breathe in? I’m pretty sure that that was Mileva Einstein, not my adoptive mom.”
“Yeah,” Angela said as if she’d just thought of something. “Didn’t you tell me once that doctors can cure asthma by your time period in the future?”
“Probably,” JB said. His face twisted again. “But—I don’t remember.”
Katherine’s been kidnapped, all the other missing kids besides me have disappeared, Mom and Dad are teenagers and knocked out, JB and Angela are teenagers who are losing their memories—what could go wrong next? Jonah wondered.
He decided he probably shouldn’t ask that question. He turned to Angela.
“Do you have some secret second identity you’re starting to remember now too?” he asked.
Angela laughed, and at least that was a reassuring sound.
“I’ve never been anybody but myself,” she said. “And I guess this proves it. I’m not remembering any other childhood but my own. It’s just . . . some of my memories are getting vague and, well, questionable. I think that’d be the word for it. It’s like I’m losing certainty.”
JB frowned, as if concentrating hard.
“I remember . . . this is why the original time rescuers found they couldn’t go back in time and snatch endangered adults and un-age them back to being adoptable babies,” he said. “The adult brain is too established. Kids’ brains are still malleable and adaptable. Your brain can handle the changes. If someone tried to turn me back into a baby again, my mind would be . . . mush.”
Jonah cast an anxious glance over his shoulder toward the car where both of his parents sat, totally unaware.
“But you only went back to thirteen, not all the way to babyhood,” he said pleadingly. “Your mind mostly still works right. When you and Angela and Mom and Dad are turned back into adults again—you’ll be fine then, won’t you?”
JB shrugged hopelessly.
“It’s not something that’s been tested,” he said. “There are some experiments you just can’t do.”
Jonah gulped.
“Maybe we should try to make sure you spend as little time as possible as a thirteen-year-old?” he asked. “Maybe we should . . . fix everything as fast as we can?”
“Be my guest,” JB said, gesturing helplessly at the wall full of monitors, the images of Jonah’s sister and friend vanishing again and again and again.
Jonah watched Charles Lindbergh grab Katherine for the umpteenth time.
Whether he’s my biological father or not, that’s not what matters right now, Jonah thought.
“You said we should be able to watch some of Charles Lindbergh’s life, because he’s connected to someone who’s a missing child in history,” Jonah said to JB. “Right? Maybe we can’t see where Lindbergh took Katherine, but can’t we do what Angela suggested, and try to find him talking to Gary and Hodge beforehand? Making plans to kidnap her?”
JB gave Jonah another puzzled squint.
“I guess . . . we could try,” he said.
Jonah pulled out the cell phone again and called up the picture Katherine had taken of Lindbergh.
“How old do you think he looks here?” Jonah asked. “Let’s check his life right before he’s this age.”
Angela peered down at the picture.
“Late twenties?” she guessed. “Early thirties? He was twenty-five when he flew to Paris. I do remember that.”
“We’ll start with that, then, and work forward,” JB said.
He began typing on the wall keyboard again. Jonah noticed that he stopped every few moments to rub his hand across his forehead. Had JB been doing that all along? Or were his memory problems getting worse?
Nothing’s supposed to get worse in a time hollow, Jonah reminded himself. Nothing’s supposed to change at all.
Then he stopped watching JB because Angela gasped beside him.
“That’s Lindbergh’s plane,” she said in an amazed-sounding voice. “The Spirit of St. Louis. The real thing, not the one from the Jimmy Stewart movie.”
Jonah looked up at one of the monitors, where a small silver airplane seemed suspended over a vast spread of water. There was no land in sight.
“Zoom in,” Angela suggested.
JB rubbed his forehead again and typed in some kind of code.
The airplane took up a larger and larger portion of the monitor’s screen. And then something odd happened. Jonah’s head began spinning. The lights of the time hollow seemed to blink out, and Jonah felt like he was falling. Down, down, down . . .
He felt like he was going to fall into the ocean below the small silver airplane, which was crazy, because he was still in the time hollow—wasn’t he?
Everything spun around him, and Jonah felt the same sped-up sensation he always felt traveling through time, right before landing. Jonah broke through a cloud, and something silver glinted beside him in the moonlight. He threw his arms out without even thinking about it, and his fingers brushed something metal. He grabbed on tightly.
“Do I see spirits? I’m hallucinating. . . . Stay awake!” a voice said, just above Jonah’s head.
Jonah looked up, toward his own hands, which were clutched onto the rim of a window. An airplane window.
And through that window Charles Lindbergh was looking down toward Jonah.
FOURTEEN
I’m back in Charles Lindbergh’s time, Jonah thought dazedly. I’m with him, flying across the Atlantic.
“What? What’s happening?” Lindbergh said, turning frantically away from the window.
The action sent up a burst of light. Jonah could no longer see Lindbergh himself, but a glowing, ghostlike version of him who still had his head hung out the window, staring down toward Jonah and the water below.
His tracer, Jonah thought, his heart sinking. I’ve just changed time.
Jonah hated tracers, the ghostly representations of what would have happened in original time if no time travelers had intervened. Only time travelers could see them, and they were almost always a sign of trouble. On Jonah’s previous trips through time they had caused him no end of anguish and worry.
Although he’d also discovered during his time in the 1600s that not seeing tracers when you were supposed to could be a very bad sign too.
“Are we slowing down?” Lindbergh was muttering above him. “Could there be more drag all of a sudden? And more on the right than the left . . .”
Um, yeah, Jonah thought. Because I’m hanging on to the right-side window.
The soft glow of Lindbergh’s tracer gave a little more light to see by than just the moon and the stars. Jonah turned his head right and left, hoping to see someplace he could move to that wouldn’t create worse problems.
Like maybe a seat in first class? he told himself.
He was being ridiculous. Lindbergh’s plane was tiny, almost toylike. The window Jonah was clinging to didn’t even have glass in it. He couldn’t actually see into the cockpit, but he could tell there would only be room in there for one seat: Lindbergh’s. It was like Lindbergh was flying over the entire Atlantic Ocean in a slightly modified tin can.
No, Jonah thought, suddenly figuring out what he had his face pressed against on the side of the plane. Most of this plane isn’t even metal. It’s cloth.
“Psst, Jonah,” someone hissed at him. “Do you think you could climb over to the other side?”
Jonah looked down toward the voice and almost had a heart attack.
There, clinging to a support under the wing, were kid JB and kid Angela.
All three of them had come back to Lindbergh’s time. All three of them were on the ri
ght side of the plane.
“Not . . . sure . . . how . . . long . . . can hold . . . on,” Angela whispered.
Jonah realized he couldn’t actually feel his fingers. If it was just the numbness of timesickness, that would wear off in a moment or two. But with his face turned away from the plane, now he could tell exactly how biting and cold the wind was. His face was going numb now too.
“I’ll see . . . what I can do,” Jonah hissed back to the other two. Though maybe it didn’t come out like that, since his tongue felt numb and clumsy and useless too.
With great effort he started pulling his body up toward the window.
No different from doing a chin-up in phys ed class, he told himself.
That was a lie. Everyone thought Mr. Grunnion, the phys ed teacher, was mean, but he had never once made Jonah or any of the other kids do a chin-up while dangling thousands of feet above the ocean, in the freezing air, while the metal rim of an airplane’s window cut into his fingers.
Oh, great. Now’s the perfect time to start feeling my hands again, Jonah thought.
It was almost unbelievable, but Jonah’s biceps really were pulling his head and the rest of his body up. He inched higher and higher. He had some vague notion that he could lift his whole torso above the level of his hands, and then bring a foot up to stand on the window ledge. And then maybe he could flip himself over onto the top of the wing. . . .
Jonah’s knee hit something hard. He looked down.
Oh, stupid me, he thought, squinting down into the darkness. There’s another support there I could just stand on.
He brought his foot up onto the metal beam, which—Jonah squinted—also seemed to stretch up to the wing, to hold it in place.
This is a lot easier than chin-ups, Jonah thought, cautiously starting to stand up. The wing was right above the plane’s window—he didn’t want to bang his head.
Jonah edged up high enough that his face drew even with the bottom of the window ledge. Now he could see into the fuselage. By the light of Lindbergh’s glowing tracer, Jonah could see the crude, primitive instrument panel, the piles of maps, the pilot’s seat—Is that wicker? Jonah thought. It’s just made out of wicker? Lindbergh’s flying across the ocean on patio furniture?
It was a moment before Jonah figured out where Lindbergh himself was, because he was only partly separated from his tracer, and Jonah had to look through the tracer to see him. The real Lindbergh had his body turned toward the interior portion of the plane right behind the window. There was some sort of shelf there, and Lindbergh was pulling down a clear rectangular piece of glass or plastic or something like it.
Did they even have plastic back in the 1920s? Jonah wondered.
Lindbergh turned, moving the rectangular whatever-it-was toward the window on the other side of the plane. The rectangle seemed to be almost exactly the same size and shape as the window.
Oh, it’s like he’s putting the glass back in that window, Jonah thought. That’s a really high-tech way to roll up a window, Charlie!
That window pane slid into place. Then Lindbergh picked up another rectangular piece and turned toward the window whose edge Jonah was clinging to.
“Oh, no—don’t!” Jonah said without thinking, because he suddenly saw how Lindbergh closing the window would leave Jonah nothing to hold on to.
Lindbergh froze.
“Who said that?” he asked.
Before Jonah could say or do anything, Lindbergh reached into his jacket and whipped out a flashlight. He shone it directly into Jonah’s face.
“Aaaahhh!” Jonah and Lindbergh both screamed at the same time.
Jonah’s numb fingers slipped off the window rim. He fell backward. Fortunately, his right knee caught around the support bar beneath him. Now he was dangling upside down over the ocean.
On the other support bar, kid JB and kid Angela screamed out, “Jonah, be careful!” and “Are you all right?”
Above them all, Lindbergh thrust his head out the window again. He swept the flashlight back and forth in the darkness. The light landed on kid JB and kid Angela, who froze in terror.
“Who are you?” Lindbergh screamed. “How is this even possible?”
He jerked back from the window, hitting something inside the plane so hard that even Jonah heard the thud.
And then, barely an instant later, the plane began to plummet toward the water.
FIFTEEN
“No!” Jonah and JB and Angela all screamed together. Maybe inside the plane Lindbergh was screaming too.
The wind whistled through Jonah’s hair. He was falling fast. It was too dark below him to see how close the water was, and anyhow it hurt to keep his eyes open against the rushing wind. But Jonah had a thousand images in his head from movies and video games about what was going to happen next:
We crash, maybe the engine explodes, everyone dies . . .
The wind was so loud he could barely hear Angela on the other support above him, praying or screaming or crying, “Please! Save us! Get us back to the time hollow!”
And then Jonah stopped falling. He stopped moving at all. He just lay still, struggling to understand why none of what he’d imagined had come true.
Maybe this is what being dead is like . . . except wouldn’t I remember the crash and the explosion?
He forced himself to open his eyes, and there was no brutal, cold wind to blind him anymore. He still had to blink two or three times to make sense of what he saw around him: not water and sky. Rock.
He really was back in the time hollow.
Someone groaned beside him—kid JB.
“That shouldn’t have worked,” he muttered. “There was no reason we should have been able to come back here. . . .”
“I have a better question: How’d we end up back in Charles Lindbergh’s time in the first place?” Angela said from the other side of Jonah.
JB sat up.
“Yeah . . . about that . . . I should have remembered,” he said, grimacing.
“Remembered what?” Angela demanded, wincing as she propped herself up on one arm. “To bring a parachute or two before jumping onto Lindbergh’s plane?”
“And maybe a blow-up raft?” Jonah asked, sitting up as well.
“No . . . ,” JB said. “I should have remembered to double-check the code, since the one to watch a certain time is very similar to the one for actually going there. . . .”
He gingerly stood up and walked over to the wall, where he started flashing back through screenfuls of information.
“That’s weird,” he said. “I did do it right.”
“Well, okay, whatever,” Jonah said. “If those monitors can send us back in time without an Elucidator, let’s go back to this morning and stop Charles Lindbergh from kidnapping Katherine! And everyone else from disappearing!”
He jumped up, ready for this next mission. For some reason JB and Angela didn’t look so excited.
“We can’t, remember?” JB said, frowning. “All three of us already lived through that time period. You can’t go back to the same time and relive it a second time. You can only go to new times—moments you haven’t been to before.”
“Oh, right,” Jonah said. He’d known that. It was just easy to forget.
“Okay, okay,” Angela said, waving her hand in a way that seemed to forgive Jonah for being so stupid. “We don’t know exactly how the monitor malfunctioned to send us back to 1927. Was it the same malfunction that brought us back here?”
Kid JB looked more puzzled than ever.
“It couldn’t have,” he said. “A low-tech monitor like this wouldn’t have that range.”
“Your Elucidator didn’t suddenly start working again, did it?” Jonah asked.
JB pulled a small electronic device out of his pocket and held it up to his mouth, like someone giving voice commands to an iPhone.
“Show screen,” he said. “Show recent actions. Show power reading. Show anything you’ve got!”
He lowered his hand.
> “It’s still broken,” he said.
“Didn’t seem like it back in 1927,” Angela said. “I screamed out, ‘Get us back to the time hollow!’ and, like, one second later, here we were.”
“It was like a miracle,” Jonah said. “I thought we were dead, for sure.”
JB jerked his head up to look directly at Jonah.
“Dead—that’s it!” he said.
“Oh yeah, that would have been it for all of us,” Angela said.
“No, no—it was because you were in fear for your life,” JB said. He began hitting his head. “Oh, I am an idiot!”
Angela and Jonah watched him cautiously.
“Uh, do you want to tell us your evidence for that, and see if we agree?” Angela asked.
“The Elucidator is voice activated!” JB said. “This one is set only to my voice, which is standard agency operating procedure in a situation like we had this morning. But when I went back to being a thirteen-year-old again, my voice changed. The Elucidator didn’t recognize it anymore!”
“So when Lindbergh’s plane was falling toward the ocean and you were screaming like a little girl, then the Elucidator knew who you were?” Angela asked.
Jonah couldn’t help himself: He laughed.
JB just shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Then the Elucidator recognized your voice, Angela. Standard operating procedure is also that, and I quote: “ ‘When a time agent is in the field accompanied by a time rookie, even if the time agent must keep his/her Elucidator set at extreme security, the setting must also allow for the time rookie to request assistance in the event of potentially fatal consequences. . . .’ ”
“So I’m just a time rookie to you guys?” Angela asked. “And you people really haven’t figured out some other way in the future to say ‘his/her’ without actually saying ‘his/her’?”