Revealed (34 page)

Was that maybe the best way for him to decide?

He took another deep breath—not rushing into anything, not being the impulsive, careless kid who'd annoyed Katherine and Angela.

He was still certain of his decision.

“Send this plane back to the scene of the time crash,” he said aloud, and the words felt exactly right.

A second later the plane vanished.

And JB appeared in the space where it had been.

This was adult JB, normal-age JB, conscious JB, and—as far as Jonah could tell—sane JB.

Still clutching baby Katherine and her bottle, Jonah sprang up from the ground and launched himself toward JB. It wasn't until Jonah and Katherine were engulfed in JB's arms that Jonah realized: JB was also holding a baby wrapped in a blanket.

“Why does everybody think they have to bring me a baby?” Jonah joked, because there weren't words to say everything else he wanted to. “I don't even like babies!”

“You did it,” JB cried, reaching around both babies to pound Jonah on the back. “You saved time! And the other kids! And Katherine! And me!”

“And my parents?” Jonah began. “And Angela—”

“They're fine too,” JB said.

“And they're the right age again?” Jonah asked anxiously.

“I'm sure they
will
be,” JB said reassuringly. He shrugged. “The time agency took care of my problems first, because of my other issues. And then I left to come here as soon as I could—I couldn't wait to congratulate you for saving everyone.”

“Well, really, Charles Lindbergh did a lot too,” Jonah said modestly. “And Angela and Hadley and . . . and you, JB. You got me to the time cave, and you got the monitor to work just about as well as it could work, and . . . It really wasn't your fault that coming back here made you crazy.”

He pulled back a little and gazed anxiously into JB's face. What if coming back to 1932 once more, even as an adult, created problems for JB all over again?

To cover, Jonah started to pull back the blanket hiding the baby in JB's arms.

“Who's this baby you're carrying around, anyhow?”

JB pulled the baby back away from Jonah, but not before Jonah got a good look.

This baby was painfully thin, and his eyes looked too old somehow, as if he had already seen too much in his short life.

Other than that, this baby looked like Jonah had as a . . . well, not a four-month-old. Maybe when he was a year and a half or so?

Jonah took a step back. Everything seemed frozen in the heavy August afternoon around him.

“How could you?” Jonah exploded. “Just when everything was fixed, you of all people are trying to split time again, putting two copies of me in the same time period, just like Gary and Hodge did—how is that even possible? How can I stand here looking at some replica of myself from another time stream?”

JB laid a calming hand on Jonah's shoulder.

“Jonah, this
is
the same baby Gary and Hodge showed you,” JB said. “But it isn't you.”

Jonah squinted hard at JB. He remembered how much, back at the airport, he'd wanted to believe that Gary and Hodge were lying to him. He remembered the other possibilities he'd thought of for the baby's identity, and how quickly he'd dismissed them.

“Then they did clone me,” Jonah said.

JB shook his head.

“Why do you always go for the most outlandish, sci-fi explanation you can find?” he asked. “Isn't it easier to believe you have an identical twin?”

“A
twin
?” Jonah repeated. He peered down at the baby again, thinking,
Not me, not me, not me . . .
It was a huge relief, since this baby looked so pathetic and desperate, like a picture from a fund-raising appeal for starving children.
“But why didn't you tell me all this from the very beginning?”

“Time is very delicate,” JB said. “And Gary and Hodge muddied so many things about this time period . . . what if we told you something that tipped the balance into letting them win? Or left a dangling paradox that made all of time collapse? There were a trillion ways all of this could have failed, and—we now see—only one possible sequence of events that could have worked. Only none of us could see the successful outcome until everything fell into place.”

Jonah glanced anxiously toward the baby versions of Gary and Hodge still lying on the ground. It was almost like he had to reassure himself that they were still there, defenseless and defeated.

“But sending that plane back to the time crash—that healed the time split, right?” Jonah asked. “The fact that you're sane again and an adult again and could come back to rescue me—doesn't that mean that everything's going back to normal?”

“Um . . . ,” JB began. He glanced down at a watch on his wrist. “Hold on a minute. I need to put your twin back in place.”

JB disappeared for a split second, then reappeared. If Jonah had blinked, he would have missed the change. The only difference he would have noticed was that the baby JB had been holding had vanished.

Even knowing that he'd just witnessed JB sweeping in and out of time, Jonah still automatically reached out and swiped his hand through the space where the baby had been.

“Even in an overcrowded orphanage where children die of malnutrition, there was a danger that someone would have noticed that baby missing if I'd kept him much longer,” JB said apologetically.

Jonah squinted at JB in dismay. He really only heard one word JB said:
Die.

“Wait—you just took that baby back to die in an orphanage?” Jonah asked, horrified. “My identical twin? You'd show him to me and then just . . . let him die?”

Without even thinking about it, Jonah tightened his grip on baby Katherine. She bit down on the bottle nipple a little harder in protest, and a tiny stream of milk flowed down her cheek.

Jonah reached down and wiped it away.

I should have at least asked the Elucidator to give that other baby a bottle too
, Jonah thought.
Or JB should have.

JB put a steadying hand on Jonah's shoulder.

“Your twin brother would have died in original time, yes,” JB said with a sigh. “But that changed, remember? He was only supposed to live a little longer than you did. In just a little bit, Gary and Hodge are going to steal him out
of time to put him on the alternate version of the plane to the future. And then when they leave him at the scene of the time crash, you'll deliver him to your parents because you'll think he's you.”

“Oh yeah,” Jonah said. He wrinkled his nose, annoyed at having to remember that Gary and Hodge stealing the baby could be in Jonah's past but still in his twin's future. “But then, that stream of time with my twin in it? That's going to collapse. Gary and Hodge said so.”

Just thinking about all that made Jonah feel strange. A moment ago he'd been outraged at the notion of JB condemning the twin to an untimely death. Of course the boy would end up just as dead if his branch of time collapsed. And yet the thought of some other kid—even his own identical twin—essentially living Jonah's life in an alternate dimension of time made him strangely jealous.

It's all because of me that he'd have my same family
, Jonah thought.
Would he have the same friends, too? The same interests, the same experiences—would it be like he was just another version of me?

Was it wrong for Jonah to be a little bit glad that that branch of time was supposed to collapse, so he didn't have to worry about any of it?

“Gary and Hodge originally
intended
that branch of time to collapse,” JB corrected. “But you and Charles Lindbergh changed everything.”

Jonah tried to keep the look of dismay off his face.

“Okay, so twin boy gets to keep his separate branch of time,” he said, trying to sound casual and carefree. And glad. He wanted to sound happy that his twin got to survive.

“He's Jordan,” JB said gently. “Your parents are going to name him Jordan.”

Jonah made a face. He'd always thought Jordan was a stupid name. And there'd been a girl named Jordan Knowles in the same grade as him all through elementary school. Had kids in that other branch of time constantly said, “Jordan the girl or Jordan the boy?” just like kids said, “Taylor the boy or Taylor the girl?” about Jonah's classmates Taylor Wickerson and Taylor Donis?

“The two of you were Claude and Clyde in original time, so it could have been a lot worse,” JB said.

Claude and Clyde?

Jonah decided not to ask which of them was Claude and which was Clyde. As far as he was concerned, the names were equally horrendous.

“I'm going to try to forget that you told me that,” Jonah said. “Just tell me this is all over and I get to go home and I never have to worry about Gary and Hodge again, never even have to think about that other dimension that's out there. . . . It'll be like the other dimension that Second
Chance created back in the 1600s, right? It's not going to affect any of us in
real
time, is it?”

JB frowned.

“Jonah, the time agency is almost certain now about where Gary and Hodge went when we couldn't find them,” he said grimly. “They were in Second Chance's alternate dimension, where they learned some of his secrets. So ‘real' time, as you put it, was never as separate as we thought from that other dimension. And . . .”

JB let his voice trail off. He reached down and brushed baby Katherine's cheek, wiping away the last of the spilled milk.

“Tell me this,” JB said. “Why did you send that planeload of babies back to the scene of the time crash?”

“Because that's what I thought all the kids on the plane would want,” Jonah said. “The Elucidator said it
might
work out. And that's what I would have wanted if I'd been on that plane.”

JB's frown deepened.

“We thought you understood . . . ,” he murmured.

“Understood what?” Jonah asked.

He wanted to hold on to his excitement over time being saved and JB being cured. But he couldn't get the memory of his twin's sad eyes out of his mind; he couldn't get rid of the nagging sense that JB really wanted him
to keep worrying about alternate dimensions.

One of the babies on the ground—either Gary or Hodge—finished draining his bottle and let it fall out of his mouth. It hit the hard-packed dirt with such a bang that Jonah jumped.

“You
had
to send that plane back to the scene of the time crash,” JB said. “Or it would have left a terrible hanging paradox that no one could have fixed. Time would have collapsed.”

Jonah gaped at JB.

“Well, why didn't somebody tell me?” he asked grumpily. “Why didn't the Elucidator? I thought about that decision for a long time. You could have made it easy!”

“Some things are clear only with hindsight,” JB said. “That's true even with time travel. The time agency was . . . well, I guess it's most accurate to say they were paralyzed with indecision. It's like you and Charles Lindbergh were teetering on the edge of a cliff, and they feared that just stepping forward to rescue you would knock you over.”

“After Lindbergh left, I was standing in a grass field with nobody else around,” Jonah grumbled. “Then I was sitting on the ground, holding a baby with a bottle. I wasn't on a cliff!”

“You were at the brink of Gary and Hodge's time split,” JB corrected him. “Remember, they wanted their
‘Unsettled Time' to start in 1932. Everything about time was at risk.”

Jonah looked around. The airfield was silent and still; the wind sock by the office hung limp and motionless in the heat. Off in the distance he could hear a car engine—the old-timey kind that sputtered. But that was the only noise. It seemed as if even the reporters at the airfield's front gate had given up hounding Lindbergh and gone home.

“Nothing
looks
that different,” Jonah said.

“Time was in flux,” JB said. “Gary and Hodge intended a series of time splits, each one getting them closer and closer to their wealthy future. Instead there was one three-way branching, determined by who was in seat two-C of that plane when it arrived at the time crash.”

Jonah thought he saw what JB meant.

“Me once, my twin once, and an empty seat once,” Jonah said, ticking off the possibilities. Something struck him that hadn't occurred to him before. “Except . . . wasn't it really twice that that plane landed at the site of the time crash with an empty seat two-C? Once when I sent it forward, and once when Gary and Hodge did?”

JB's face twitched.

“No, it was only once with the empty seat,” he said, and Jonah could hear the strain in his voice. “Gary and
Hodge were lazy and didn't think things through. After they tricked you into believing you were responsible for splitting time, they double-checked the twenty-first century only to see if you were still there in that version of time. When you weren't—not in that branch, anyway—they thought you'd died and time had gone on without you . . . and everything from that branch was already set up to lead directly to their glorious futures. So they didn't think they needed to send forward a plane with an empty seat.”

Jonah pictured the drawing Angela had made on her Elucidator, and how the Elucidator changed it to show what Gary and Hodge wanted to happen. Jonah and Angela hadn't asked enough questions. They'd just assumed there
had
to be an empty-seated version of time. How else would Gary and Hodge get their glorious futures if the other two branches of time collapsed?

The thing was, if Jonah really had delivered his own infant self to his parents, the time period around that action really wouldn't have lasted long. But because the baby was Jordan instead, that branch of time had been fine.