Revealed (18 page)

Were his knees stable yet? Would he have any chance at all if he grabbed Katherine and ran away now?

Lindbergh nodded thoughtfully.

“I believe I was six feet tall by the time I was thirteen,” he said. “I thought my son would be taller, more like me.”

“Your wife's what—barely five feet?” Hodge asked scornfully. “Look, you've seen the boy now. That's all you asked. Go finish the tasks you promised you'd do for us, and then you'll see. You will have your son, and he
will
be the right age then. And if something's not right . . . how are you any worse off than you were before we made our deal? You're getting to see time travel, sir! That's something no other gentleman of your era will ever experience!”

Lindbergh was nodding slowly, as if he were about to give in.

“Now that I think about it, maybe there is a way to know for sure,” he said. “To see if this is really my son or not.”

Make it something lengthy—stall!
Jonah thought.
Give my legs a little more time to be ready to run!

Lindbergh reached into his flight jacket. For a moment Jonah wondered if Lindbergh was going to pull out his
notebook again and make Jonah take some sort of drawing test. Did Lindbergh think his son would automatically know how to draw an airplane engine or something like that?

But when Lindbergh pulled his hand back out, he wasn't holding the notebook. He was holding the camera Elucidator.

And he reached out and placed it directly in Jonah's hands.

Jonah's muscles were out of practice after months of sitting in the time cave doing nothing but watching the monitor. And he could still feel the aftereffects of timesickness along with his bullet wounds throbbing. But maybe he'd inherited Lindbergh's laser-fast pilot's instincts, even if he hadn't gotten the height or the exact hair color.

Jonah's right hand instantly closed around the Elucidator. With his left arm he scooped up baby Katherine from the table beside Lindbergh. Jonah held her at his side, like a football. And then, before anybody else had a chance to react, he danced past Gary and Hodge and out the door of the airport office.

“What'd you do that for?” Gary screamed behind him.

“I had to see if he thinks like a Lindbergh,” Lindbergh said calmly.

Oh, no pressure
, Jonah thought.

Then he wiped that from his mind, because he didn't care if he thought like a Lindbergh or not. All he cared about was getting Katherine to safety and himself to safety and finding kid JB and kid Angela and rescuing them and fixing their ages and Mom and Dad's ages, and of course fixing Katherine's age too. And then hunting down and rescuing the other missing kids from history who'd vanished from the twenty-first century, and . . .

One thing at a time, maybe?
Jonah thought.

He spun around the corner of the building, because the only other choice seemed to be running flat out across the empty airfield, in plain sight.

But maybe Gary and Hodge would expect me to hide around the corner of the building?
Jonah thought, even as he crouched down low, running past a window.

In his arms baby Katherine started to make fussing noises again.

“Shh, shh,” Jonah hissed. “I'm saving you! Don't give us away!”

She screwed up her face like she was ready to let out a full-blown wail. Jonah didn't exactly remember what Katherine had been like as a tiny baby the first time around, but probably she wasn't that different from the Katherine she'd been after that: When she was upset,
there wasn't much you could do to shut her up.

Jonah peered down at the camera Elucidator Lindbergh had put in his hands.

“Get us out of here!” he demanded in a hushed, frantic tone. “Take us back to the time cave!”

Words lit up the back part of the camera: I CAN'T. BECAUSE OF THE WAY I'VE BEEN PROGRAMMED, I CAN OFFER YOU ONLY A LIMITED NUMBER OF DESTINATIONS. WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE ANOTHER SELECTION?

“Somewhere safe!” Jonah said impatiently, barely remembering to keep his voice down. “Somewhere it won't matter if Katherine's loud!”

THAT IS NOT A SPECIFIC ENOUGH INSTRUCTION, the back of the camera flashed at him, and even the typeface seemed to be scolding him. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE YOUR CHOICES?

“Yes!” Jonah hissed.

Tiny type began to scroll across the camera back. Jonah could hear footsteps coming around the corner behind him. He didn't have time to read anything right now.

“I can change where I'm going while I'm traveling through time, can't I?” Jonah asked the Elucidator.

OF COURSE, appeared on the camera back.

“Then aim Katherine and me toward the farthest place on that list!” Jonah demanded.

The stucco building beside him and the dusky airfield beyond instantly disappeared. The sound of the running feet behind him instantly stopped. Now he and Katherine were floating through Outer Time.

They'd gotten away.

“I didn't do too badly, did I?” Jonah bragged to baby Katherine. “And I didn't even have you trying to tell me what to do!”

He looked down at her tiny form. He was holding her upside down now, and palming her head like a basketball. It was probably a good thing there wasn't exactly gravity in Outer Time, or else he would have dropped her. It was also amazing that she hadn't started screaming yet, because that couldn't be a comfortable position.

Jonah shifted her weight in his arms, clutching her more securely. Now he could see his sister's face more clearly: She was wide-eyed and awed-looking, turning her head to peer around at the darkness and scattered lights of Outer Time. It was like this was the first time she'd ever seen such a thing—well, maybe it was, technically. Maybe after Lindbergh had un-aged her, he'd kept her so tightly wrapped in blankets that she couldn't see anything.

A tiny wrinkle appeared between Katherine's eyebrows, as if it had just occurred to her baby brain that Outer Time might be as terrifying as it was amazing.

“Hey, hey, don't worry,” Jonah said quickly, jiggling her a little to keep her happy. “We'll be fine. We're just going to—”

He remembered he didn't have the slightest clue where they were going.

Baby Katherine was peering up at him now, her expression just as astonished and clueless as when she'd been staring at Outer Time. It was unnerving to have her looking at him like she didn't recognize him. It was unnerving to be holding her, and to have her be such a little baby.

It was unnerving that she couldn't even talk.

“Okay,” Jonah said. “First order of business. Elucidator, as we're traveling through time, let Katherine age back up to her right age. Eleven and . . . let's see . . . eleven years, eleven months and fourteen days. That's it. Then—”

AGING HUMANS TO THAT CHRONOLOGICAL MARKER IS NOT A TASK I CAN ACCOMPLISH, the Elucidator camera glowed up at him. And then, as if to make sure Jonah understood, it flashed the words, NO CAN DO.

Oh no
, Jonah thought, little prickles of panicky sweat breaking out on his forehead.

On his trip to 1918 he and Katherine and their friends had had to use a severely limited Elucidator set up to manipulate them into doing only what Gary and Hodge wanted.

Of course Gary and Hodge wouldn't have handed
Charles Lindbergh an Elucidator that unlocked all the possibilities of time travel for him. Of course they wouldn't have let him have that much power.

Of course they wouldn't have trusted him.

Hadn't the Elucidator already told him it was programmed to be limited?

“Okay, okay,” Jonah said, trying to calm himself down. “I
know
this Elucidator was used before to turn people thirteen years and three months old. So make Katherine that age again.”

She would make a big deal about being the exact same age as Jonah, and it'd be really annoying. But he could put up with that while she helped him fix everything else, couldn't he?

But the Elucidator was still flashing objections: THAT FUNCTION HAS BEEN DISABLED NOW AS WELL.

“What?” Jonah said. “But you just
did
that. You made her thirteen this morning!”

Well, this morning in a different century. But Jonah thought the Elucidator would know what he meant.

AND THEN AFTER THE AGE CHANGE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, CHARLES LINDBERGH RESET MY FUNCTIONS SO I COULD NO LONGER DO THAT, the Elucidator explained.

Charles Lindbergh figured out how to tamper with the Elucidator's settings?
Jonah thought with begrudging respect.

In his own time travels Jonah had barely managed to get Elucidators to do what they were set to do when they were supposed to obey him.

But maybe on this Elucidator I would have the Lindbergh skill?
Jonah wondered.

He started to bend down to peer more closely at the Elucidator. But that motion made him more aware of everything flowing past him: Time. Space. Choices. Changing the Elucidator could take ages, and he probably didn't have much more than a few more moments to play around with.

He glanced at baby Katherine once more: She was blowing spit bubbles.

“Okay, last try,” Jonah told the Elucidator. “What age
can
you make Katherine?”

FOUR MONTHS OLD, the Elucidator glowed back at him. THAT WOULD BE A SUBTRACTION OF TWENTY MINUTES AND EIGHT SECONDS. WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO MAKE THE CHANGE?

“Don't bother,” Jonah muttered.

He resisted the urge to bang his hand against his head—or smash the Elucidator over his knee.

Focus
, he reminded himself.

He could feel Outer Time rushing past him and Katherine. They seemed to be speeding up.

“Tell me where we're going,” Jonah commanded the Elucidator. “And then tell me my other choices.”

THIS IS WHERE YOU'RE HEADED, the Elucidator flashed at him. It showed a very precise time and date and location. But it was somewhere Jonah had already been: his family's living room at 6:57 that morning. As far as Jonah could tell, it was probably the very moment that Katherine had vanished.

“Are you kidding?” Jonah complained. “I already lived through that moment! If I went back, it'd create a paradox! It'd unravel time! It's not even physically possible for you to send me there, is it?”

The Elucidator flashed a lengthy answer at him, which seemed to be explaining all the theories of time. It was like scrolling through all the legal fine print for accepting a software upgrade on a computer. Jonah didn't know anybody who ever read all that.

Well, except my dad—my adoptive dad
, Jonah thought nervously.
But even he would say this is an emergency, and it's okay to cut corners now.

Jonah caught sight of the name Second Chance—his other enemy besides Gary and Hodge—and that was all he needed to see.

“Never mind,” he told the Elucidator. “Just tell me the other times and places you can take me. And make sure you don't list any moment in time where Katherine and I have already been.”

THEN YOU HAVE TWO CHOICES, the Elucidator flashed at him. YOU CAN GO BACK TO 1932, BUT ONLY AT THAT NEW JERSEY AIRFIELD WITHIN A LIMITED TIME RANGE.

Where Gary and Hodge would just finish the task of recapturing me?
Jonah thought.
No, thanks.

“Or?” he challenged, glancing anxiously toward the lights of the future speeding toward him, faster and faster.

OR YOU CAN GO TO THE SCENE OF THE TIME CRASH, the Elucidator began.

“You mean,
my
time crash?” Jonah asked. “Thirteen years ago, at that airport, when the planeload of babies appeared out of nowhere? You know I can't go there! I was on that plane!”

I CAN LAND YOU THERE UP TO THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE THE TIME CRASH, the Elucidator flashed back at him. Jonah didn't know how the Elucidator could convey exasperation with just flashing lights, but it really did seem annoyed with him. YOU WEREN'T PRESENT IN THAT TIME THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE THE TIME CRASH. AND NEITHER WAS KATHERINE.

Why would I want to go there?
Jonah wanted to shout at the Elucidator.

But with time speeding past him faster and faster, maybe his brain sped up a little too. An idea jumped into his mind. Maybe there
was
a good reason for him to go to the scene of the time crash a half an hour before it happened.

“Okay! Okay!” he screamed at the Elucidator. The winds of Outer Time ripped the words from his mouth, and baby Katherine started wailing at the brutality of the forces pounding against her tiny frame. Jonah clutched her even tighter and struggled to say what he had to say.

“Take! Us! Then!” he bellowed into the Elucidator. “Take us to thirty minutes before the time crash!”

They landed on the runway.

“Ha-ha,” Jonah muttered. “Very funny.”

He seemed to be flat on his back, with baby Katherine lying on his chest and the Elucidator clutched in his right hand. The Elucidator felt smaller—oh, it was a digital camera now, not a boxy 1930s type. Jonah blinked up at the blurry runway lights instead. The timesickness seemed to be having an odd effect on him, making the lights seem to stream closer and closer with each moment that passed.

Closer?
he thought groggily.

He squinted, trying to bring the lights into focus against the twilight sky. Then he bolted upright.

Oh, crap! Those lights really are getting closer! They're on an airplane!

The motion and panic made Jonah dizzier than ever,
but he managed to clutch Katherine to his chest and scramble across the concrete.

Hmm . . . maybe it's better if I don't crawl parallel to the runway lines?
Jonah wondered.

He rolled off the cement into frozen mud, just as a huge jet zoomed past him.