Torn-missing 4 (24 page)

“And we’re not going to do that to JB,” Katherine said, finishing for Jonah. “We’re not going to send him into the dangers of 1600 without warning him first.”

“But—but—this is preposterous!” Second sputtered. “You’re children! You don’t know what you’re doing! You could make time collapse after all! This—this voids our deal!”

“All you said was that we had to help you in 1611!”
Jonah said. “You didn’t say we had to be your slaves forever! You didn’t say we had to obey your every command! You—”

And then Jonah stopped talking, because the air before them was shimmering. A moment later, JB appeared.

Jonah had seen JB in numerous stressful situations in the past—
er, would it be in the future?
—but JB had always exuded a certain confidence and certainty. Part of it was that he was really good-looking. Even before they knew who he was, Katherine had taken one look at JB’s dark hair and dark eyes and handsome features and begun calling him “cute janitor boy.”

JB didn’t look so handsome now. Or confident or certain. He had dark circles under his eyes; his mouth was drawn into an anxious frown; his hair was so messed up that it looked as if it’d been days since he’d washed or combed it.

Had he looked this bad when they saw him arriving in 1600? Or had Jonah and Katherine been too stressed out to notice?

“JB?” Katherine said hesitantly, as if she didn’t quite recognize him in such an unkempt state.

JB squinted at her. Jonah had gotten so used to Katherine being nearly invisible that he’d stopped thinking about it. But JB acted as if he couldn’t trust anyone who looked so much like crystal.

“Katherine?” JB asked. “Is that really you? Or just another one of Second’s tricks? I’ve followed so many of his blind alleys, but this time, coming to this time hollow, I thought—I hoped that—”

“Of course it’s us!” Jonah said.

JB’s squint deepened as he turned to Jonah.

“Who are you?” JB asked.

Jonah had forgotten that he was still disguised as John Hudson—probably looking worse than ever after his day in the stocks, his repeated time in the shallop, and his encounter with the bear.

Jonah tugged at his mask, but he couldn’t get it to budge.

“I’m Jonah!” he protested, but of course his voice came out sounding all wrong. In the past day Jonah had almost stopped noticing how different his John Hudson voice was from his usual voice, but now the weirdness came back to him.

He wasn’t surprised that JB backed away from him.

“Nice try, Second,” JB muttered. “But unless these holograms—are they holograms?—unless one of you can tell me where to find the real Jonah and Katherine and Andrea, I’m out of here.”

“We—,” Katherine began.

Quickly Jonah clapped his hand over his sister’s mouth.

“Don’t tell yet!” he commanded.

Katherine blinked at him.

“I was just going to say that we
are
the real Jonah and Katherine,” she muttered, her words muffled by Jonah’s hand.

“I’m in a hurry, kids,” JB said. “I don’t have time for this.”

“Yes, you do,” Jonah said. He tried to think of something he could tell JB that would make it clear who they were. But before he went rogue, Second had been JB’s trusted projectionist; if he had created holograms or some other fake version of Jonah and Katherine, he could give them any secret knowledge he wanted.

This was awful. Jonah was going to have to resort to the same kind of tactics Second used.

“You have to listen to us,” Jonah said. “Because we have information you need. And we’re not going to give it to you until you listen to our whole story.”

It felt as if it took hours to tell everything, even in the time hollow, where time didn’t move. Maybe things would have gone better if Jonah had let Katherine tell the whole story by herself, or if Katherine had let Jonah tell it all. But neither of them could resist constantly interrupting—“No, the book I found on Hudson’s ship with Andrea’s picture in it wasn’t
New Visions of the New World
; it was
New Views of the New World.
” “You know, I was freezing the whole time I was in 1611. If this is pretty much a do-over, is there any way you could get me a coat this time around?” “I
had
to crash into Henry Hudson’s room when I thought the sailors had found Katherine! What else could I have done?” “Wait—isn’t this kind of like proof? Look at these papers that I took from Wydowse’s desk!”

Jonah expected Second to chip in too, with his version
of events. Or perhaps with the information that JB truly wanted.

But the Elucidator stayed silent.

Finally Jonah and Katherine were done.

“So, do you believe us?” Katherine asked.

JB frowned.

“I don’t
want
to,” he said. “But …” He leafed through Wydowse’s papers for the third or fourth time, as if he hoped the words on them would change. He sighed. “Let me see that Elucidator.”

Jonah handed it over. JB pressed a few buttons, then held it up to his ear. Then he lifted his own Elucidator to his mouth.

“We didn’t know what we were doing,” he said in a tense voice, into the Elucidator. He hit something on the Elucidator, then spoke again. “Jonah? Katherine? We tried. We really tried. …” Another pause. More button-pushing. “Who else would it be?” Pause again. “
Second
was talking to you again? Oh, no….”

Katherine gasped.

“That’s all the stuff you said to us when we first got to 1611!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing? Are you
recording
that?”

JB lowered the Elucidator and peered over at her and Jonah.

“If everything you just told me is true, I’m not really going to be able to talk to you from 1600,” JB said.

“What?” Jonah asked. “Then—that’s all fake, too? Another setup? None of it’s true?”

JB looked at the screen of the Elucidator Jonah had been carrying.

“Oh, by the time you hear it in 1611, it will be true all right,” JB said. “Just not the whole truth.” He read something from the screen. “‘I see that we made even more mistakes than I thought’—oh, yes, absolutely. Truer words have never been spoken.”

“But—when we’re in 1611, we’re going to
believe
that you’re talking to us from 1600,” Katherine protested. “We’re going to believe that you’re all right.”

“And that Andrea’s all right,” Jonah added. “And Brendan and Antonio.”

“Well, none of us can survive unless you believe that we
have
,” JB said. “Everything collapses unless you have faith enough to keep going, to get here, so you can tell me how to save you in 1600, and begin the cycle all over again.” He flashed them a pained grin. “It’s kind of a conundrum, isn’t it?”

Jonah’s head ached trying to straighten it all out. He watched in silence as JB finished recording the comments that Jonah had already heard him make. Then JB pressed the two Elucidators together.

“This will transfer the alarm and siren sound effects,” JB muttered. “And all of Second’s recorded comments.”

“You’re doing that on purpose? You’re letting Second have all the control?” Jonah asked incredulously.

“I am working within the trap that Second set for us all,” JB said. “When you’re in a cage and someone hands you a key, you take it.”

He stood up and handed Jonah one of the Elucidators.

“Don’t go,” Katherine said. “Or—take us with you. Or—”

It didn’t seem as if she could settle on the right solution.

JB grimaced.

“We all know what I have to do now,” he said. “I just hope there aren’t any hidden traps I don’t know about.” He hesitated. “Are you sure when you were traveling from 1600 to 1611, you were leapfrogging back and forth with the ripple of changes Second unleashed?”

“That’s not something we could forget,” Jonah said sarcastically. Crossing the ripple again and again had been like riding an amusement-park ride designed by a madman.

“But we got to 1611 before the ripple,” Katherine added. “We landed, and then the book with the picture of Andrea fell on Jonah’s face.”

JB nodded grimly.

“Then Second calibrated all of this very, very closely. We have to play it his way,” he said.

He began typing coordinates into his Elucidator. Katherine took a step toward him, and for a minute Jonah was afraid that she was going to grab JB and refuse to let go.

Instead she pulled a lock of his hair down onto his forehead.

“What?” she said, when Jonah—and JB—stared at her in confusion. “That was something I noticed when you arrived in 1600—the way your hair looked.”

Jonah and JB both rolled their eyes.

“But what should we do now?” Jonah asked, and he was ashamed that his voice cracked.

“Do a search for ‘costume removal’ on your Elucidator,” JB said. “I’ve programmed it to be easy for you to use. Follow the directions exactly. And then … then, if I don’t come back, type in your home phone number and hit enter. That should take you somewhere safe.”

“Should?” Katherine echoed forlornly.

“When we’ve opened up even the past for revision, what certainty can anyone offer about the future?” JB asked.

“But—,” Jonah began.

JB was already gone.

Like a fool Jonah dashed to the spot where JB had been standing. Jonah even swiped his hands at the empty air a few times before he could convince himself it was useless. He expected Katherine to laugh at him—until he realized Katherine was doing the same thing.

“Ahem,” Jonah said, clearing his throat and dropping his hands to his side. “Just … getting a little exercise …”

“Right,” Katherine said, shaking her head.

She lowered her hands as well.

And then they both stood there, helpless.

“Um, costume removal?” Katherine said.

“Sure,” Jonah agreed.

He didn’t want to look and sound like John Hudson a second longer. But he found himself moving slowly as he lifted the Elucidator to look at the screen.

What if we finish with that really quickly and then we have nothing to distract us and JB still isn’t back? How long would we wait before we’d give up?
Jonah wondered.

Fortunately, getting rid of the John Hudson costume appeared to be a complicated process. First, they had to figure out how to do a search on the Elucidator—the problem was that it was about a million times more advanced than an iPhone. You barely had to think about typing or swiping at the screen and the Elucidator was already obeying. But that meant that Jonah and Katherine kept giving it conflicting commands.

“Here it is—how to remove a historical costume you no longer need,” Katherine finally said. “You just …”

“Wait—if I get rid of the costume, what will that leave me to wear?” Jonah asked. “Do I get my old clothes back, or what?”

Katherine wrinkled up her nose. “Oh, right, let’s make sure you’re not going to be sitting here in your underwear,” she muttered.

Jonah decided not to tell her that his 1611 costume didn’t include underwear.

The two of them had to read tons of fine print, but eventually they found the proper commands to type in. Instantly Jonah was back in the T-shirt and jeans he’d worn first to 1600, and then to 1611. The T-shirt still
had sweat stains from his time on Roanoke and Croatoan islands; the jeans were stiff with a crust of sand from the knees on down.

“Do I look normal now?” Jonah asked his sister.

“What do you mean? You’ve never looked normal,” she answered.

But her eyes shone.

It was only a second later that both of them began looking around, waiting for JB to reappear. The costume change had been a good distraction, but it hadn’t lasted long enough.

“Second, can’t you tell us if JB is coming back?” Jonah asked the Elucidator.

The Elucidator was silent.

“Jonah, I don’t think he was ever really talking to us here,” Katherine said. “I think everything he said over the Elucidator was prerecorded, too.”

“But—he answered our other questions! How did he know what we were going to ask?” Jonah asked.

“Voice-activated prompts,” Katherine said. “Like on a phone. ‘For store hours, press or say, one. For store directions, press or say, two,’” she imitated in a robotic voice.

“For assurance that you didn’t die, mention the word ‘heaven,’” Jonah said bitterly. “And if you ask anything I don’t really want to answer, I’ll just tell you, ‘We need to
move this along.’ Ergh! You’re right! Remember, he did the same kind of thing before? When we were traveling
to
1611?”