Revealed (10 page)

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.

“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'?”

So JB can still remember complicated time regulations, but he really can't remember my original identity?
Jonah wondered. “How about you translate that into regular English?” he asked.

Kid JB nodded, some of his normal confidence returning.

“In almost every case, this Elucidator will only respond to my voice—my normal adult voice,” he said, peering
hopefully down at the Elucidator in his hand, even as he strained to make his voice sound deeper. Evidently the Elucidator wasn't convinced, because kid JB shrugged and put it back into his pocket. “But because Angela was the time rookie in my care, when we really were in a life-threatening situation, the Elucidator took orders from her instead.”

Angela seemed to be thinking hard about that one.

“So, hey,” Jonah said. “I'll threaten to kill Angela, and she'll wish for an Elucidator all her own to save her, and then we'll have a way to solve all our problems.”

JB shook his head.

“You can't manipulate it that easily,” he said. “The Elucidator knows you wouldn't really kill Angela. It has to be a ‘true, credible threat.' ”

Jonah thought he was quoting again.

Angela's eyes got wide.

“So we really were about to crash into the ocean,” she said. “And Charles Lindbergh—what happened to him after we were saved?”

JB put his hands against his face in dismay and darted his eyes toward Jonah.

Is he watching me to see if I'll just suddenly stop existing?
Jonah wondered.
Because if Charles Lindbergh was my biological father, and we changed time to make him crash into the ocean before I was even born—then
would
I still exist?

Jonah crossed his arms and clutched his own biceps. He
felt
normal. His biceps weren't exactly bulging and muscular, but that wasn't any different than usual.

“I don't know what happened to Charles Lindbergh next,” JB said in a panicky voice. “I don't know if he survived, or . . .”

“Let's look!” Angela said, pointing to the wall full of monitors.

Jonah realized that the screen that had contained the view of the
Spirit of St. Louis
now held nothing but random dark-and-light pixels, even as the rest of the monitors kept showing endless loops of his friends and his sister vanishing.

“Angela, we can't,” kid JB said, his face twisted with worry again. “I don't trust these monitors. No matter how carefully I set the coding, we could end up dangling from that little plane again.”

“So? I'll just scream for help and the Elucidator will rescue us again,” kid Angela said.

“And then, even if Charles Lindbergh survived his last encounter with us, this time we really could end up killing him?” kid JB asked.

Jonah could see why this might not be a good idea.

“Then let's go to some other time in Lindbergh's life after that, to see if he's there or not,” kid Angela argued. “We have to find out! What about—what about when he
lands in Paris? It was kind of like a stampede; everyone was so eager to get close to Lindbergh. So that would be life-threatening too. People
were
in danger of dying. So that way I'd scream and we'd get back here right away.”

Angela's using “It's life-threatening!” as an argument for doing this?
Jonah marveled.

She would never have done that as an adult.

JB wasn't disagreeing. He had his head tilted sideways, considering.

“In the early days of time travel, Lindbergh landing in Paris was one of the moments in history that a lot of people wanted to go visit,” kid JB said. “They loved the excitement, the sense of triumph—it was one of those moments of pure joy. . . .”

“Okay, that's even better,” Jonah said. “So why don't we just go meet up with one of those time travelers? We could hitchhike back home with them. Or ask to borrow their Elucidator.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” kid JB said. He started punching codes into the keyboard on the wall. “Except I wasn't going to ask. Anybody ready to play Grand Theft Elucidator?”

Jonah stood with the other two in front of the wall full of monitors. They'd taken a short break because JB had suddenly realized that they couldn't appear in 1920s Paris in twenty-first-century blue jeans and T-shirts. Until they got a working Elucidator, they wouldn't have the protection of invisibility.

Fortunately, it turned out that there was a small stash of what JB called “emergency costumes” at the back of the cave. Now Jonah and kid JB were both wearing light pullover sweaters; a weird kind of pants that ended at their knees; and stiff, uncomfortable brown shoes. Angela had on what she called a “flapper” dress. It just looked baggy and shapeless to Jonah.

“Ready?” JB said, stepping toward the keyboard in the wall. “I can't do projections ahead of time, and I can't
target our landing position very precisely, so we may have to react quickly when we arrive.”

“We know,” Jonah said impatiently. “You've already said that ten times.”

Had becoming thirteen again turned JB into an even bigger worrywart than he had been as an adult?

Or was he repeating himself because he couldn't remember what he'd said before?

“Oh, right,” JB said sheepishly, in a way that made it
seem
like he knew what he was saying.

He started typing in the code. Jonah felt his muscles tighten up. This was like standing on the sidelines of a soccer game, on the verge of being sent in to play. Except in a soccer game Jonah only worried about messing up and letting the other team get the ball. This time he was worried about ruining all of history and making time collapse and not being able to rescue Katherine or fix his parents.

Oh yeah—and dying. He was worried about dying, too.

JB stepped back from the wall. The monitor that had sent them into the past to cling to Lindbergh's plane was coming back to life again.

Oh no
, Jonah suddenly thought.
Did JB or Angela think about what would happen if the monitor sends us back in a way that has us
on
the plane again? What if us being there makes Lindbergh crash into a crowd of thousands of people?

There wasn't time to ask. As soon as the scene on the monitor came into focus—showing hordes of people packed together near an array of bright lights—Jonah's head began spinning and he felt himself falling.

“Tried to aim for . . . back of crowd,” JB mumbled beside him. Or maybe it was above or below him. Jonah's sense of direction had vanished.

It seemed like only a moment later that Jonah felt solid earth beneath him.

Timesickness . . . shouldn't be as bad this time
, he told himself.
Since I was already in the 1920s before . . .

His senses of sight and hearing were coming in and out, but he could feel someone pulling on his sweater.

“Get up! Not enough room . . . to lie on ground!” kid JB was commanding him.

Jonah wasn't sure his legs would work—especially now that being out of the time cave had reawakened the pain from hitting his knee on Lindbergh's plane over the Atlantic, and his older wounds from being shot back in 1918. But it wasn't just JB tugging on him. Dozens of hands were yanking him upright.

“Such a shame! People fainting with the excitement!” someone yelled near his ear.