Jonah didn’t have the slightest idea who Robert Oppenheimer was, but he thought it was a little insulting to be called a lizard.
“Hold on,” Katherine said, stamping her foot. “You want us to think this is like you just created the atomic bomb?”
Oh, Jonah thought. That must be what Robert Oppenheimer did.
“I’m not comparing the morality of it,” Second said. “I’m just saying-this is that monumental. Its repercussions will reverberate forever.”
Katherine glared at him.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “And conceited.”
“Now, now,” Second said. “Do you like the way time was supposed to go?”
Jonah opened his mouth. Then he shut it. He noticed that Katherine didn’t say anything either.
“In original time, Virginia Dare and her grandfather were never to be reunited,” Second said, a tinge of sadness entering his voice for the first time. “It was what we call a near miss. Time is rubbed so thin at the site of a near miss… Virginia Dare was standing here and her grandfather was just a few yards away, and they would never know it. They were destined to go to their graves without ever knowing the fate of the other. And, believe me, their graves were coming for both of them, very soon. Wouldn’t you call that a mistake on time’s part? Didn’t it need to be corrected?”
The question hung in the air. Jonah saw doubt flutter over his sister’s face.
“You’re manipulating us again,” Jonah accused Second. “You’ve been manipulating us all along!”
Second raised an eyebrow.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Though perhaps not as much as you think.”
“You lied to Andrea to get her to change the Elucidator!” Katherine said.
“True,” Second said. “That was necessary, though I do regret the pain it caused her.”
“You wanted us to lose the Elucidator!” Jonah charged.
“Of course,” Second agreed.
“Didn’t you know we’d be scared?” Jonah asked.
“I had every reason to believe you’d be okay,” Second said.
“Then… somehow… you arranged it so Walks with Pride and One Who Survives Much weren’t there to save John White,” Katherine said.
Second shrugged.
“I just delayed Brendan and Antonio’s return to their proper time by a few days,” he said. “Just as I changed Andrea’s return to time only slightly-placing her on Roanoke Island instead of Croatoan.”
“You did that so we would rescue John White, right?” Jonah said. “And so Andrea would get attached to him?”
“Bingo!” Second said, his grin back.
“What if we hadn’t saved him?” Katherine challenged. “What if he’d drowned?”
“Well, I did have to bribe Dare with some dog treats, to get him to bark at the right time,” Second admitted. “That was a little dicey. But once you were there on the beach, watching, there was virtually no chance that you wouldn’t try to help.”
“Andrea could have drowned!” Jonah said. “I could have drowned!”
“Nope,” Second said, shaking his head. “Not even statistically possible. You were both too strong and determined for that.”
Jonah frowned. Something was still nagging at him.
“How’d you know we’d have Dare with us anyhow?” he asked. “That’s not even something JB planned for. He just sent Dare with us because his projectionist said…”
Jonah stopped, because Second was pulling some sort of timepiece out of his pocket.
“Hmm,” he said. “I really had projected that you would figure out this part by now. You’re eleven seconds off. Perhaps a small clue is in order. As you might have guessed, Second Chance isn’t the name my parents gave me at birth. I adopted that appellation only very recently, to go along with my quest to change history. You might actually have heard of me previously, by another name-Sam, perhaps? Sam Chase?”
Sam, Jonah thought. Sam Chase. Back home, Jonah knew two Sams and a Samuel at school, and a Sammy on his soccer team. But all that seemed so far away, so long ago-or long ahead. Even the most recent time he’d heard the name Sam seemed distant. It had been JB speaking, JB saying, Sam is the most brilliant projectionist I’ve ever worked with…
Jonah’s jaw dropped. He felt his eyes bugging out.
“You’re JB’s projectionist?” he gasped.
41
Second clicked his thumb against the object in his hand-maybe it was a stopwatch.
“Wow,” he said. “Thirty-six seconds off. I’m really slipping. Or, the two of you are.”
“It’s true, then?” Katherine asked. “You work for JB?”
“JB signs my paychecks,” Second said, his cocky grin back.
“Then… then he knew what was happening to us along?” Jonah asked. He was having trouble believing this. “He knew from the beginning that Andrea was going to change the Elucidator, that we were going to lose all contact, that we were going to rescue John White, that… that this was what we were moving toward?” Without looking, he gestured toward the other kids and Andrea’s grandfather, still back at the canoe.
“Let’s just say that JB can be a bit hands-off as a boss,” Second said. “All about the big picture, not so concerned about the tiny details along the way. Looks at the forest, not the individual trees. Leaves it to me to understand the trees.”
Jonah didn’t have a clue what any of that meant. He couldn’t stop thinking about how certain he’d been, back in the hut on Roanoke Island, that JB had lost them completely. Hadn’t JB assured them, back at the beginning when he was shaking their hands, that they were all on the same team? That there wouldn’t be any secrets on this trip?
No, Jonah realized. That wasn’t what JB said. He said no one would keep any secrets “unnecessarily.”
Jonah felt betrayed. He wanted to scream out, like Andrea’s grandfather in the midst of one of his nightmares, “Treachery! Betrayal! Deceit!”
“But… but… the big picture here is that Andrea changed history,” Katherine said. “JB’s big picture isn’t about changing history. He just wants to put kids back where they belong so history will go the way it’s supposed to.”
“You think JB is still the same time purist he was when you first met him?” Second asked. “Do you think, if he’d stayed like that, he would have let you rescue Chip and Alex from the fifteenth century?” Second smirked. “Don’t you know how people’s hearts go soft around orphans and dogs?”
He pointed toward Andrea and Dare, but Jonah just kept staring at Second.
“JB would never have let you give Andrea steroids in her food,” Jonah said.
“There weren’t any steroids in her food pellet. It was just food,” Second said.
“But the way she paddled,” Jonah argued, “when she was trying to catch up with the tracer canoe-”
“She was just determined. Very, very stubborn and full of resolve,” Second said. “Like you were full of resolve when the food pellets showed up-you were so determined that you were going to spite me by not eating them, that you forgot to think about being hungry. And that carried you through until you could eat the fish.”
Jonah winced. Second was exactly right-that was how Jonah had felt.
“I will admit that I tampered a bit with the food pellet I knew Andrea would give to John White,” Second said. “It had a sedative in it, to make sure that he didn’t wake up too soon. And, although the medicine in the pellet helped him heal, it made him look like he was getting worse.”
Jonah’s jaw dropped.
“Why would you do that? Andrea was so worried about her grandfather!” he protested.
“And so convinced that she had to keep him with his tracer,” Second said. He smirked again. “Ultimately, it was
