Redeemed

  Jordan himself showed up on the screen as an infant, and Jordan watched as Jonah struggled to deliver Jordan to their parents.

  Would I have worked so hard to do that, faced with all the same odds Jonah faced? Jordan wondered.

  Now Jonah was challenging Charles Lindbergh. Now Lindbergh was leaving Jonah with a planeload of babies, the fate of every single one of them—and time itself—in Jonah’s hands.

  I’m glad it was him and not me! Jordan thought.

  Jonah sent the planeload of babies away from the nineteen thirties. And then the scene shifted back to teenage JB, who was sitting in a car, staring off at nothing, his expression blank. Jordan could tell it was the same car JB had been in with Angela, but it seemed to be parked in a cave now, and JB was alone.

  Suddenly a hooded figure appeared beside the car door and leaned in through an open window toward JB.

  “JB, I’m going to take care of you,” the figure whispered. “The time agency must never find out. You and I both know they wouldn’t approve.”

  And then, before Jordan’s eyes, JB turned into an adult again. The figure slipped something into JB’s hand: a familiar-looking cell phone.

  Could that be the exact same cell phone JB had in our kitchen? Jordan wondered. The one I stole, that was actually a faulty Elucidator?

  Being an adult again seemed to startle JB out of his blankness. He glanced down at the cell phone/Elucidator in his grasp. His gaze seemed to linger on his own hand, as if he was figuring out that he wasn’t a teenager anymore.

  “Angela?” he called. “Jonah?”

  He turned his head to the right, toward the hooded figure standing beside the car. Jordan was eager for JB to see the figure; maybe JB would know who it was. Maybe he’d call out the person’s name, and Jordan could go find that person and get him or her to cure Jordan’s parents, too.

  The figure spun away from JB, his motion exactly synchronized to JB’s. At the instant JB’s head turned far enough that he would have seen the figure, the figure vanished completely.

  But not before Jordan got a view of the figure’s face. Not before Jordan got his biggest surprise of the day—which was really saying something, given that his day had included so many surprises.

  Because Jordan knew the person who had returned JB to his proper age.

  It was Second.

  FORTY-ONE

  “This doesn’t make sense!” Jordan screamed at the Elucidator in his hand.

  WHY NOT? the Elucidator asked. But the words sounded aloud, as well as glowing above the Elucidator. Either the Elucidator had reset itself, or someone behind him had also asked, “Why not?”

  Jordan whirled around. The adult Second was standing right there. Second dropped a hood from his head, revealing his familiar shock of bright blond hair. Jordan guessed he was wearing the same hooded cloak he’d had on when he’d helped JB.

  Jordan took a step back, but that only meant he was trapped against the wall.

  “Aren’t . . . aren’t you and JB enemies?” Jordan stammered. “Aren’t you on opposite sides? Why would you help him?”

  Second tilted his head thoughtfully.

  “Is it possible for you to see the, shall we say, multiple dimensionality of this situation?” Second asked. “I know your recent experiences—and your siblings’ prejudices—have convinced you to think of me as a villain. But what if I’m capable of being a hero, too?”

  “Why would I trust you?” Jordan asked, his back against the wall.

  “I know how to cure your parents,” Second said.

  Jordan could feel the wall digging into his spine. Or his spine digging into the wall. Whatever.

  See, I can see the—what did Second call it? The multiple dimensionality?—of this situation, Jordan thought.

  He had a choice of how to answer Second. He went for the default mode of a seventh-grade boy: sarcasm.

  “Oh, right, and you’re the only person in the whole world who can do that,” Jordan said.

  He was about to add, So, thanks, but I’ll find someone else to do that. Someone I really can trust!

  But Second wasn’t reacting in a predictable way. The corners of his mouth turned up into a slow, sad smile.

  “You could twist yourself into knots over the exact definition of ‘only’ in that sentence,” Second said. “But yes, that’s pretty much the sum of it. I am the only one who can help your parents.”

  Was he lying? Telling the truth? Just trying to trick Jordan?

  Jordan decided the last option was the likeliest.

  “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Then why didn’t you just help them right from the beginning? Why didn’t you change them at the same time you changed JB?”

  Second didn’t move a muscle, but somehow his smile looked even more forlorn than before.

  “Remind me—what did Jonah and Katherine tell you about me?” he asked.

  “That you’re their worst enemy,” Jordan said, and it felt strangely good to say that out loud. “That you rearranged time and split it and created some other dimension. You almost ruined everything. And then you taught Gary and Hodge how to mess things up too.”

  “And you trust Jonah and Katherine’s opinions,” Second said. He toyed with the button on his cloak.

  “Are you trying to convince me I shouldn’t trust them?” Jordan asked. “You think I’m more likely to trust you than my own . . .”

  He stopped.

  “Were you about to say ‘brother and sister’?” Second asked, leaning closer. “Have you grown to feel that way about Jonah?”

  “Are you trying to manipulate that, too?” Jordan asked, trying to distract Second.

  He had been about to say brother and sister. Did he really think of Jonah that way? When had that happened?

  Second confuses me too much for me to know what I think, Jordan told himself.

  Second didn’t answer Jordan’s question.

  “Jonah and Katherine have good reason to despise me,” Second said instead. “I did . . . push them to the brink. Mostly just for my own entertainment. I nearly destroyed all of time just because I was curious about what would happen without all the time-agency regulations. I craved that knowledge beyond all reason.”

  Jordan didn’t know what to say.

  “A well-educated young man might point out that I’m describing my errors—my sins, you might say—in very recognizable ways,” Second said. “I was Pandora, bound and determined to open that box. I was Adam and Eve, unable to resist the temptation of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

  “I have heard of Pandora and Adam and Eve,” Jordan said. He wasn’t going to admit that he hadn’t been thinking about any of them. He’d still been thinking about Katherine and Jonah.

  “You probably think I’m confessing,” Second said. “You probably think I’m trying to convince you to tell Jonah and Katherine to forgive me.”

  “Then will you help my parents?” Jordan asked. “Then can we all just go back to normal life?”

  He’d seen the expressions on Jonah’s and Katherine’s faces every time they’d encountered Second. He didn’t think it would be easy for them to forgive Second. But maybe they would do it to help their parents.

  Or maybe we could just trick Second into thinking they’d forgiven him? Jordan wondered.

  Second sighed. “Let me show you something,” he said, turning to the wall where Jordan had just watched JB return to his proper age.

  Jordan stepped back from the wall and away from Second as the man ran his fingers in a careful pattern against the wall. Jordan guessed he was programming in some sort of command.

  “You know from Jonah and Katherine that I created my own dimension, my own little world,” Second said. “This is what it ended up looking like.”

  On the wall, a scene sparked to life: two men in heavy wool coats leaning over the edge of a boat.

  “You—” one man said.

  Then both men vanished. The wall was blank for a moment, then the
scene came back. This time one of the men had his coat drawn higher over his ears.

  “You—” the man said again.

  “Let’s try another time period,” Second said.

  Now it was a man and a woman sitting at a table.

  “Should—” the woman said.

  The scene flashed out of sight again.

  “I think your Elucidator is broken,” Jordan said. “Or your TV or computer or whatever’s showing those images.”

  “No, it’s my world that’s broken,” Second said sadly. “That’s all that’s left of it. Flickers of existence, and then it’s gone. I ruined everything. I destroyed it all.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Jordan believed him.

  It was weird: He didn’t like Second, and he still didn’t trust him. But somehow he was certain that Second was telling the truth.

  About this, anyway.

  “Well, um, the real world’s still okay, right?” Jordan asked. It was almost as if he were trying to comfort Second. “Real time, I mean. If you just created that other dimension to play around with—and if it was dangerous to real time—then who cares if it broke?”

  For some reason, he found he had a lot more to say to Second about this topic.

  “Maybe you should think of your other dimension like . . . like a video game or a movie or a book,” Jordan said. “It seemed real to you while you were playing it or watching it or reading it. Whatever. It felt like it mattered. But it really didn’t. So . . . no problem. Let it go. Move on.”

  Maybe Jordan didn’t have a great future ahead of him as a guidance counselor or a therapist or anything like that. Second’s expression just got sadder and sadder with every word Jordan spoke. The corners of his mouth drooped more and more.

  “Don’t you want to know why my world failed?” Second asked.

  Jordan was so tempted to say no. He didn’t want any part of the sadness that was clearly weighing Second down.

  “I think you’re going to tell me, whether I want to know or not,” Jordan said.

  This at least earned Jordan a rueful head shake from Second.

  “You can accuse me of hubris,” Second said. “You can accuse me of playing God. You can—”

  “I don’t want to accuse you of anything,” Jordan said. “I just want—”

  “I know, I know,” Second said. “You just want your family back. You just want your life to be normal again. Who are you—Dorothy in Oz? She goes to an incredible place like the Land of Oz, and the whole time she’s there all she wants to do is go home?”

  Jordan didn’t like that comparison. He wasn’t some girl in a gingham dress and stupid sparkly shoes. He didn’t even have a dog. Still, he felt compelled to defend Dorothy.

  “She was worried about her family,” Jordan said. “Auntie Em and, well, whatever her uncle’s name was. If she’d had them with her—or just known they were okay—she would have been really happy to hang out with the Munchkins and all, and enjoy Oz. Not so much the Wicked Witch, though.”

  He cast a worried glance at Second. Was Second as much like the Wicked Witch of the West as Katherine and Jonah seemed to believe? Or was he more like the Wizard of Oz, someone hiding behind a fake image?

  What if Second was just trying to trick Jordan again, trying to get him to think that anything about his situation was like Dorothy’s in Oz?

  “Can we skip the language arts lesson and go back to talking about rescuing my parents?” Jordan asked.

  Second sank to the floor. Jordan felt weird towering over him, so he crouched down beside the man.

  “You can help my parents, can’t you?” Jordan asked.

  Second stared fixedly at a point on the floor a few feet from Jordan’s knee.

  “The time agency always thought time travel itself endangered reality,” he mumbled. “They thought, if any human can travel through time and change the past or watch the future, doesn’t that alone destabilize the space-time continuum?”

  “Does it?” Jordan asked.

  Second glanced up and let his eyes meet Jordan’s for the briefest of instants. Then he went back to staring at the floor.

  “The truth is, time travel is hard, and people are lazy,” he said. “It twists your brain in knots, and after a few experiences of unintended consequences, most people will choose lives of comfort over constant exploration and change. From the very beginning of my new world, humanity disappointed me.”

  “Why? Because the people in your world did what they wanted instead of what you wanted them to do?” Jordan asked. He wasn’t sure why Second was making him so mad all of a sudden. “Why didn’t you just stay home and play Sims? That lets you control people!”

  Unexpectedly, Jordan’s outburst earned him a grin from Second.

  “See, you are going to accuse me of playing God,” he said.

  “I mean—” Jordan began.

  Second waved away his interruption.

  “Truthfully, I deserve that accusation,” he said. “I thought I was smarter than God. I thought the world I created would be better than the original world.”

  “Gary and Hodge pretty much told you you were the smartest person ever,” Jordan said, remembering the scene he’d watched in the laboratory at Interchronological Rescue. “Though, did that really happen after all, since Katherine and Jonah and I went back and rescued you as a thirteen-year-old?”

  Second didn’t answer that question. He went back to staring at the floor.

  “In the original world, time travel had built-in limits, even without the limits the time agency added,” he said. “Time is very good at protecting itself against paradoxes.”

  “So why does the time agency worry so much?” Jordan asked. “JB just about freaked out when I . . .”

  Should he tell Second what had happened with JB at the hospital?

  Was there any chance that Second didn’t already know? He had been able to follow Jordan to the time hollow, when the Elucidator said no one could do that.

  No—the Elucidator said no one from the time agency could do that, Jordan remembered. It never answered the question about whether Second could do that.

  Jordan gasped. “Are you the one who’s been controlling the Elucidators from the very beginning?” he asked. He remembered wondering about the Elucidator Second had left with JB. That had to be the same faulty Elucidator JB had had in the Skidmore family kitchen, didn’t it? The one Jordan swiped?

  Jordan looked down at the Elucidator he was clutching in his hand at this very moment. It was the Elucidator Mr. Rathbone had handed Jonah at Interchronological Rescue. The one that teenage Second had stolen right out of Jonah’s hand.

  “So you were the one who set up Mr. Rathbone, too, to send us back to rescue you at a younger age,” Jordan said.

  Second started shaking his head so forcefully that his messy hair trembled.

  “No,” he said. “No. I did have control over the Elucidator I gave JB. He needed to think he was in contact with the time agency, but I needed to keep the rest of the agency in the dark. That was a necessary deception.”

  “But this one—” Jordan held up the Elucidator that had come from Mr. Rathbone.

  “I wish I’d had total control of that one,” Second said, lifting his own hands in a show of innocence. “I’m just lucky I could do anything with it. I could track it and follow you here.”

  Second’s voice held so much pain that Jordan hesitated.

  “But you thought . . . I mean, the teenage version of you thought . . . that he’d gotten a message from his older self about how to unlock this Elucidator,” Jordan said. “He thought the instructions had come from you!”

  Second just stared at Jordan.

  “You saw Mr. Rathbone program that Elucidator,” Second said. “It was based on information he’d gotten from Gary and Hodge. Because all three of them wanted the idea I had in my head even as a thirteen-year-old. The idea that destroyed my world. And that will destroy your world unless we stop it.”

  “Ok
ay, okay, let’s stop it!” Jordan snapped.

  Second just stared at Jordan. The man’s eyes seemed sadder than ever.

  “Don’t you understand yet?” he asked. “It’s the same idea that you want to use to rescue and fix your parents. Saving your parents means destroying the world.”

  FORTY-THREE

  For a moment, Jordan could only gape at Second.

  “Are you saying they have to stay teenagers forever?” he finally asked. “Or, well, just grow up alongside Katherine and me? And, uh, Jonah? And Angela?”

  For a moment he tried to imagine this: his normal life along with a new twin brother and his parents always the same age as him. They’d have to have someone come and stay with them to act like actual adults. Maybe their grandparents? And he guessed someone would have to figure out the whole money thing, so they could afford food and everything else. And . . .

  “No, I’m not saying they’d have to stay teenagers forever or grow up with you and Katherine and Jonah,” Second said irritably. “Don’t you see what a huge disruption in time that would be, to have your parents consistently thirty years too young for the rest of their lives? And remember, it’s not just them. The ages of some sixty other adults were knocked back at the same time. Time can’t survive that big of a change for very long.”

  “So if we change my parents and the others back to their right ages, the world ends,” Jordan said. “And if we don’t change them back, the world ends. Isn’t there another choice?”

  Second’s eyes bored into Jordan’s.

  “I think you’re ready to hear what went wrong with the alternate world I created,” he said softly.

  Jordan nodded, but Second didn’t launch into his story right away.

  “What’s the best thing about time travel?” Second asked. “Or, I should say, what would you have said the best thing was before you actually traveled through time?”

  Jordan considered this question seriously.

  “Getting to see the future,” he said. “And . . . getting to see my own future.”

  It was kind of disappointing that in all his travels through time, he hadn’t yet had a chance to look at his own life when he was, say, twenty-five. Or whenever he’d be all grown up and doing whatever he was supposed to do as an adult. Maybe he’d be a professional basketball player by then. Maybe he’d have made a million dollars somehow. Maybe . . .