Revealed (9 page)

“Is it Jonah?” she asked. “Is Jonah related to Charles Lindbergh?”

Jonah gulped in a deep breath and held it. He could barely force himself to look at JB to see if he would nod his head yes or shake his head no.

JB did neither of those things. He scrunched up his face even harder, like a kid in school who'd encountered a virtually impossible question on a test.

“I—I don't know,” he said, sounding stunned.

“You are such a liar!” Jonah exploded. He balled up his fists and took a step closer to JB. “I asked you about my original identity days ago—well, before we went back to 1918. I asked you again when I was healing from the bullet wounds. You sure acted like you knew then! Like you knew but you weren't going to tell me!”

“I did know then!” JB insisted, cowering before Jonah. “But—it's gone now. I've forgotten!”

Jonah took a step back. He didn't want to believe JB. He would have preferred to keep looming over the smaller boy—maybe even punch him a time or two—until JB screamed,
All right! All right! I was lying! I'll tell you everything! You're really . . .

But Jonah did believe JB. The boy looked so baffled, so anguished—he had to be telling the truth.

“You're forgetting things too?” Angela said softly.

“Nothing else as important as this,” JB assured her. “But it's like there's a war going on inside my head. I keep wanting to think in German.”

“German?” Jonah repeated incredulously.

Then he understood. A long time ago—in a different century, a different life—JB had been somebody else. During all the unraveling of identities with the missing
children, JB had discovered that he himself had once had a different identity in a different time as well: He'd been the troubled second son of Albert and Mileva Einstein. To save him from the ravages of a mental illness that wasn't curable in the twentieth century, Mileva Einstein had secretly sent him on to the future.

“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.

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 right 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.