with Pride and Brendan/One Who Survives Much-both in loincloths-standing by the real canoe. The Brendan figure bent down and crouched beside John White.
“He is hurt and sick and does not wake,” Brendan said.
“He has seen many troubles,” Andrea said. “It is written on his face.”
Jonah had stopped thinking of her as Andrea/Virginia. She still looked like the tracer-and was still completely joined. But Andrea was in control.
She bent down and stroked her grandfather’s forehead, smoothed back his hair.
“Your troubles are over now,” she said.
Jonah could see John White’s eyelids flutter-his real eyelids.
“Grandfather?” Andrea whispered. She had called him that before, but it sounded different now. Jonah could hear a trace of an accent in her voice-not English, but Algonquian. It sounded… right.
John White’s eyelids weren’t just fluttering now. They were blinking.
And then the eyelids stopped moving and his eyes focused. Even at this distance, Jonah could tell that John White’s eyes were focused on Andrea’s face.
“Oh, my child,” he whispered, “My child. You look just like my daughter, Eleanor.”
“Eleanor was my mother,” Andrea said. She touched her grandfather’s cheek. “She always said that you would come back.”
Jonah saw Katherine stumble out of the canoe. At first Jonah thought she was just making room for Andrea and her grandfather to talk, now that he could actually see her, now that he wasn’t just talking in his sleep. But Katherine kept walking, past the litter of bones, toward Jonah.
She seemed to run out of energy a few steps away. She clutched a tree as if she needed the help to stand up.
“What just happened?” she asked. “What was that?”
Jonah opened his mouth, even though he didn’t have the slightest idea what to tell her.
“Excellent question, my dear,” a voice said from behind Jonah. “I would call that a second chance. Which also happens-not so coincidentally-to be my name.”
Katherine gaped; her eyes seemed to double in size.
“Then, you’re… Second?” she whispered.
40
Jonah whirled around.
A strange man stood behind him. If they’d been in the twenty-first century, Jonah would have described the man as a standard-issue computer nerd. He had pasty-white skin, as if he’d spent too much time indoors. His blond hair stood out in all directions, as if, like Einstein, he had other things to think about than using a comb. And he had one side of his shirt tucked into his pants and the other hanging out loose-though for all Jonah knew, maybe that was the fashion in some far-off future.
“Second Chance, at your service,” the man said, bowing slightly. He cut off the ending of the bow and jerked back up hastily, to peer straight at Jonah. “But I’m forgetting myself… given that you were ready to punch Antonio just on the suspicion that he might be working for me, perhaps you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to place myself in such a vulnerable position.” He tilted his head to the side, thinking. “Of course, I believe flabbergasted would be a more predictable emotion than furious for the two of you right now.”
“I-you-” Jonah could barely speak, let alone throw any punches.
“See?” the man said. “Just as I predicted.”
Jonah still didn’t understand what was going on, but he didn’t like proving Second right.
“So…,” Jonah tried again, struggling to gather his wits enough to ask a complete question. “This is what you were aiming for all along?” He gestured weakly toward Andrea, still bent over her grandfather back at the canoe. “This? Andrea and her grandfather-I mean, Virginia Dare and John White-finding each other?”
“Exactly,” Second said, beaming.
Jonah squinted, no less confused. He’d gotten so used to thinking of Second as someone bad, someone to fight against. To resist.
“You want Andrea to be happy?” Jonah asked.
“Don’t you?” Second replied.
“Sure, but… that’s not how things went in original time, was it?” Katherine said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Second sighed. He glanced at something in his pocket.
“It took you three minutes and forty-one seconds to reach that conclusion,” he said. “That’s about what I predicted-I was just two seconds off. Still, it’s a bit disappointing, when you’ve just witnessed the biggest scientific advance since humanity discovered time travel in the first place, and all you can say is, ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen’?”
The way he mimicked Katherine’s voice was cruel, making her sound childish and stupid.
“As your friend Andrea pointed out, original time wasn’t some priceless, perfect jewel,” Second said. “Isn’t it better to make an old man and a little girl happy?”
Jonah didn’t like Second calling Andrea little.
“But… but… if you change time, you might cause a dangerous paradox,” Jonah said. “Make it so that your own parents are never born. Or you might make other things change-so that, I don’t know, hundreds of years from now, the South wins the Civil War. Nobody ever abolishes slavery. Hitler wins World War II. Or…”
Jonah was casting about for other examples of how history could go terribly wrong. But he couldn’t think clearly because Second had begun grinning in such a mocking way-almost chortling, even.
“What if we make it so that Hitler never starts World War II?” Second asked gleefully. “Or that slavery never catches on in the United States, and there’s no Civil War because there’s no slavery to fight over? So there’s no racism, because there’s no heritage of slavery… Martin Luther King is never shot, the Trail of Tears never happens, the Bay of Pigs never happens, the Maine doesn’t sink-”
“All that’s going to happen just because of Andrea and her grandfather?” Jonah asked incredulously.
“No,” Second said. “I am 99.9998 percent certain that none of that will change because of Andrea and her grandfather. But don’t you see? We start small, almost invisibly-one girl and her grandfather, on an out-of-the-way island-and then, who knows? Maybe everything else is possible too.”
He was back to beaming again.
Jonah remembered something Katherine had said way back when they’d first learned that Jonah and his friend Chip had a connection to time travel: If you’re going to go back in time, you save Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated. Or John F. Kennedy. Or, you keep the Titanic from sinking. Or you stop September 11. Or-I know-you assassinate Hitler before he has a chance to start World War II.
Maybe Second had heard her say that.
“So you’re trying to create alternative dimensions,” Jonah said, proud of himself for figuring this out. “Ones with all sorts of different possibilities.”
“No,” Second said. “Not alternative. You didn’t enter an alternative dimension when Andrea forced her tracer to step forward. Time itself changed. There’s only one time stream, only one history. Time travel just makes it look like more.”
“But tracers show ‘original time,’ and then there’s the way time really goes, what we see when we come back in time…,” Jonah interrupted. “So there’s two versions, right there.”
“You’re wrong,” Second said. “Tracers only live through time once, no more than anyone else. It was just that they always drew everyone and everything toward what seemed to be a preordained path. Toward their destinies, you might say. But tracers themselves could never change. Until now.” Jonah wouldn’t have said it was possible, but Second’s grin got even bigger. “You two just witnessed the first time shift in history. The first time destiny itself was derailed. The end of destiny. It’s like… you are Watson, and I am Alexander Graham Bell. You are the little boy who watched the first airplane flight, and I am Orville Wright. You are lizards in the New Mexico desert, and I am Robert Oppenheimer.”
