Torn-missing 4 (26 page)

He’d just forgotten what it was.

He looked around, trying to focus his eyes on something besides the flames lapping toward him. Dark black lines stood out in the flames—
trees,
Jonah realized.
That’s a forest fire I’m watching.

What was he doing in a forest fire? They’d been on a beach the last time he’d seen …

JB,
Jonah remembered.
I can’t leave until I rescue JB.

He turned his head the other way and saw JB lying on the ground. It was a struggle, but Jonah managed to half crawl, half stumble toward JB. He grabbed the man’s shoulders and shook them hard.

“JB! Wake up!” he shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here! Where’s everyone else? Brendan and Antonio and … and Andrea …”

JB didn’t move. He seemed to be struggling to breathe.

Is this what happens when someone passes out from smoke inhalation?
Jonah wondered.

His brain wasn’t working well enough to figure it out. Except—shouldn’t JB get out of the smoke?

“Send JB back with Katherine!” Jonah yelled into the Elucidator.

JB vanished too.

Something crashed down from above, landing in the exact spot where JB’s face had been only a moment earlier. Whatever it was, it was on fire.

Roof,
Jonah thought.
Roof falling in.

He realized that he was in a hut—or the remains of a hut. One side of it had already been eaten away by flames.

Jonah had to get out. But—

“JB, were you alone in here?” he shouted.

He started groping around on the ground, wincing because he kept touching sparks. Then he noticed a new message glowing on the Elucidator screen:
HE WAS ALONE
.

“Great! Now you tell me!” Jonah mumbled, staggering out the door.

He found himself in the center of a cluster of huts—a familiar-looking place, because he’d seen Native American villages like this on his last trip to 1600. Only he hadn’t seen any of those villages bursting into flame.

“Where are Andrea and Brendan and Antonio?” he yelled at the Elucidator.

IN OTHER HUTS
, shone on the Elucidator screen.

“Thanks a lot!” he yelled. “Can’t you be more specific?”

Then he got distracted, because a man ran past him carrying a huge carved figure.

“Hey!” Jonah yelled at him. “Why don’t you save the people before the artwork?”

For just an instant the man and the carving were silhouetted against the flames.

Then they both vanished.

Artwork,
Jonah thought.
Brendan and Antonio are artists
…

He remembered what JB had told his friends Brendan and Antonio about their lives in original time in the early 1600s. A fire had swept through their village, killing them and destroying all their art. But when time travelers discovered the brilliance of their work, some people from the future had illegally come back to steal the art right before it burned.

The running man had to be one of those time travelers.

So this must be the fire that’s going to kill them.

“No! I won’t let it!” Jonah screamed.

He ran to the door of the next hut.

“Brendan? Antonio? Andrea?” he called.

Small children stirred on the floor of the hut and looked up at him drowsily. Their eyes widened when they saw the glow of the flames behind him.

“Run!” they cried out. “Mama! Papa! Wake up! We have to run!”

The fear in their voices was so strong that Jonah thought he would have understood even without any translation help.

“Yeah—run!” he said. “Great idea!”

He looked back at the flames, which were even closer now. They stretched from horizon to horizon, eating up everything in their path.

Small children couldn’t outrun that. Nobody could.

Jonah made a snap decision.

“Send everyone from this hut into the time hollow with JB and Katherine!” he yelled at the Elucidator.

Instantly the hut was empty.

He ran to the next hut and yelled the same thing. And the next one. And the next one. And the next one.

Jonah didn’t count the huts he ran to. He didn’t count the people he saved. He didn’t even really look at any of them. He just zigzagged back and forth, hut to hut to hut, yelling the same phrase into the Elucidator again and again and again. By the second-to-last hut, he could barely squeeze out the words from his dry, scratchy throat. He could barely see through the smoke. Flames licked at his heels.

One more,
he told himself, forcing himself onward.
Just one more.

He fell to his hands and knees. His elbows collapsed under him, and then he could do nothing but squirm forward through the dirt.

But it’s better down here,
he told himself.
Less smoke.

He rolled over, just enough to get his head into the last hut. He squinted. Was anybody in here? Was that an
old man cowering in the corner? Was a boy patting the old man’s arm?

They might have been figments of Jonah’s imagination, illusions formed in the smoke. But he croaked out anyway, “Send everyone from this hut back to the time hollow.”

He paused. Was he forgetting something? He just wanted to sleep—to shut his eyes against the smoke that stung them, close his mouth and nose to the burning air, drop into some oblivion where the flames climbing the walls wouldn’t matter. But Katherine always got so mad at him for forgetting things, for failing to think ahead. Was there something else he needed to do before he slept?

“Oh … yeah,” he said painfully, each word causing a new ache. “Send … me … too.”

Jonah woke to cheering.

“It’s the boy who saved us!”

“He lives too!”

“Jonah!”

Then he heard Katherine say sarcastically, “And I thought you looked bad in the John Hudson costume. Have you been rolling in mud—or ashes?”

She threw her arms around his shoulders. Someone had turned her completely visible once again, but for a minute Jonah couldn’t tell if she was going to hug him or beat him up.

“You idiot! I thought you were dead! All these other people kept showing up, but not you.” She choked on a half sob. “Why didn’t you let me stay and help?”

“You were practically comatose!” Jonah protested.

“I wouldn’t have been, if you’d given me an extra minute to recover from the timesickness,” Katherine said.

“We didn’t
have
an extra minute,” Jonah said.

Katherine’s grip on his shoulders turned into a real hug. She seemed to have forgotten about the mud and the ash.

“You really scared me,” she whispered.

“Can I talk to him?” another voice said softly behind Katherine.

It was Andrea.

Katherine pulled back, letting Jonah see past her. At least he
should
have been able to. He sat up and blinked hard, trying to get his eyes to work right. Now he could see a crowd of dark-haired people—all the Native Americans from the village. And he could see blank walls beyond them, so he knew they really were back in the bland, featureless time-hollow room. But it took a moment before his eyes would focus nearer in, on Andrea.

That
was
Andrea, wasn’t it? She still had those striking gray eyes and that long brown hair that shimmered in the light. And she was wearing a deerskin dress, just like the last time he’d seen her. But she didn’t quite look like herself. It wasn’t just that she’d lost the sadness that had always haunted her face before. She also looked … older.

“Jonah, thank you,” she said, bending down beside him with a quiet dignity that made her seem even more mature. “Thank you for risking your life to save mine. Again.”

Was now a good time for Jonah to say,
Andrea, I thought of you the whole time I was in 1611. You had to have known I’d come back for you. I missed you so much
?

No, it wasn’t the right time. Andrea was still talking.

“And most of all, thank you for saving my grandfather,” Andrea finished.

Jonah blinked hard, and realized that an old man with a neatly trimmed white beard was behind her.

“Your—grandfather? I did?” Jonah blurted. “But I thought he was already dead! I saw a drawing of the funeral!”

Andrea drew back.

“What?” she gasped.

“Jonah, that was in the
other
time,” Katherine said warningly beside him.

“What’s that young man saying?” Andrea’s grandfather asked. “And I’d still like to know how he magicked all of us here. I know science and philosophy can provide rational explanations for everything, but—”

“Jonah, we’ll talk later,” Andrea said, standing up again and leading her grandfather to the side. “Grandfather, perhaps this is another one of those moments you
should think of as a dream. Something to inspire your art, perhaps….”

“We honor you,” a deeper voice rumbled from behind Andrea.

“Yeah, dude, thanks,” an equally deep voice added.

Jonah blinked and squinted all over again. His eyesight was clearing up, but he still didn’t quite trust it. The boys who had spoken were so tall—he should probably be thinking of them as men. But how could that be possible?

“Whoa,” Katherine said beside him, catching her breath. “Brendan, is that you? And—Antonio?”

“No—it’s One Who Survives Much and Walks With Pride,” Antonio corrected.

“It’s been a long time since anyone has called us those other names,” Brendan said apologetically. “We almost forgot them.”

Jonah was still blinking and trying to see the Brendan and Antonio he’d known in the giants who stood before him. They were teenage boys—it was possible for them to have grown a lot in a short time, wasn’t it? Didn’t Jonah’s own dad always brag about how he’d grown three inches the summer he was fifteen?

Brendan and Antonio looked as if they were each more than a foot taller.

“I know this is a lot to ask, but … you didn’t happen to save any of our artwork, did you?” Brendan asked.

“I didn’t, but I saw someone else taking some big carving away,” Jonah said.

Brendan and Antonio high-fived each other. It was a very high high-five.

“Then I honor art-stealing, law-breaking time travelers too!” Antonio crowed. “As long as our work survives!”

A strange look came over his face.

“JB, the plain walls in this room are killing me,” he said, calling back over his shoulder. “And I’ve got some ideas. Okay if I do something about them?”

“The walls are the least of my worries right now,” JB’s voice came from the midst of a crowd of Native Americans. “Be my guest.”

Jonah was relieved to see that JB was alive—and conscious.

“Mind if I borrow your shoes?” Antonio asked Jonah.

“My—shoes?” Jonah asked.

“Sure. I’ll give them back in a few minutes,” Antonio said.

Jonah kicked them off and watched as Antonio carried them to the wall and began pressing the soles against it. Ashy copies of the Nike imprint from the bottom of Jonah’s shoes transferred to the blank wall.
Brendan produced a charred stick from somewhere and began drawing a path alongside the shoe prints.

Both of them seemed to have forgotten about Jonah and Katherine.

“Well, they’re happy,” Katherine muttered. “But—how old do you think they are?”

Jonah shrugged.

“Chip and Alex aged two years when we were apart from them back in the 1400s,” he said. “But then they went back to normal when we went home. So does it really matter?”

“I guess not,” Katherine said. But she didn’t look particularly comforted.

A sheepdog wormed its way out of the crowd and rubbed against Jonah’s leg.

“Dare made it out too!” Katherine rejoiced.

“Guess the Elucidator counted him as part of ‘everybody’ in whatever hut he was in,” Jonah muttered. He patted Dare’s head, but couldn’t quite focus. Was there something else Jonah should be paying attention to?

He looked back at JB, who was surrounded by dozens of puzzled-looking Native Americans. They all seemed to be talking at once. JB was nodding and saying, “Um-hm, um-hm,” even as he expertly swiped his fingers again and again across the screen of an Elucidator—the
Elucidator Jonah himself had been holding when he came into the time hollow.

Puzzled natives. JB. Elucidator.

Jonah struggled to get up, and then to dive toward JB and the Elucidator.

“JB, no!” Jonah screamed. “Don’t just send them right back into the fire!”

JB looked up from the Elucidator.

“You think I would do that?” he asked in an offended voice.

“Because time—we changed it—you like things to be authentic—” Jonah couldn’t get the words out.

“Jonah, these people have been my friends and neighbors for the past five years,” JB said. “They took me in. They kept me alive. They’re—they’re
blood.
”

One of the natives said something in Algonquin, and JB translated his own words. The native nodded vehemently, evidently agreeing about the whole “blood” relationship.

Jonah just gaped at them.

“Did you say … five years?” Katherine asked faintly. “You … and Brendan … and Antonio … and Andrea … were really in 1600 for five years?”

“Well, 1600 for a half year, and then 1601 for a year, and so on, until now it’s 1605,” JB said. “Er, that’s what it was when you rescued us.”