45
Jonah could feel the time speeding past him: seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years… He was aware of the time passing before he could draw in a single breath, before he could open his mouth to complain, “No, wait, JB, don’t send us away…”
He could hear the other kids protesting too.
“No!”
“Stop!”
“Don’t!”
“Please!”
Jonah blinked. They weren’t actually in total darkness: A dim light glowed off to his left. It was just bright enough that he could make out shadowed figures nearby-four of them.
So just us kids, Jonah thought. Not JB. Not Dare. JB and the dog stayed behind.
Jonah and the other kids were all zooming forward in time together, in a loose circle around the light.
The light must be coming from the Elucidator.
Jonah reached toward it.
“JB, I’m going to reprogram the Elucidator,” he threatened. “If you don’t tell me the right code, I’ll just hit numbers at random, and who knows where we’ll end up!”
“I thought you might try that.” JB’s voice came from the Elucidator. “So I locked out any changes.”
“Why?” Jonah asked. “You probably just ruined time, sending us away!”
“But I’m keeping you safe,” JB said.
Jonah remembered way back at the beginning, when he’d wondered what JB would do if he had to make a choice between saving kids and saving history. This was his answer.
Who would have thought that Jonah would disagree?
“It gets harder and harder to care only about abstract issues like history when you get to know the people involved,” JB continued.
“Right, and this is about my grandfather, too,” Andrea yelled. “Please…”
“Don’t worry, Andrea,” another voice said.
This voice also had the tinny, slightly distorted sound of an Elucidator transmission, but it wasn’t JB speaking.
“Second?” Andrea whispered.
It was Second’s voice. Jonah saw Andrea looking down; he saw the surprise register on her face as she realized that she was still holding Second’s Elucidator.
“I planned for this, too,” Second continued. “This is a pre-recorded message, set to be triggered if you were sent forward in time. I knew what JB would do. If you hold on to your friends’ hands and press the glowing button, you can all go back to 1600.”
“Yes!” Andrea cheered.
“Can we trust him?” Katherine asked.
Jonah leaned closer to the Elucidator that JB had programmed.
“Do you hear that, JB?” he yelled. “If you don’t bring us back, Second will.”
JB didn’t answer.
“JB?” Jonah yelled.
The Elucidator made a whirring noise and clicked out an automated-sounding voice: “Subject you are attempting to reach has been knocked unconscious. Danger! Danger! Alert! Rescue mission needed!”
“That’s it,” Andrea muttered. “I’ll take my chances with Second’s plan. Brendan? Antonio?”
“I’m in,” Antonio said, grabbing Andrea’s hand. “I miss my tracer already.”
“I’m all for saving the world with art,” Brendan said, grabbing for Second’s Elucidator as well, his hand landing right on top of Andrea’s and Antonio’s.
“Me, too!” Jonah said, reaching forward. He hesitated. “But maybe Katherine shouldn’t-”
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Katherine screamed in his ear. She clutched her brother’s arm. “You’re not going to protect me! I’m going back too!”
Jonah’s fingers brushed Andrea’s, but at the last moment she yanked her hand away.
“What are you doing?” he yelled.
Andrea stared at him, her eyes sad in the dim light from the Elucidator.
“I don’t know if I can save my grandfather,” she said. “Or myself. But I know I can save you.”
“What? No!” Jonah screamed. He was dizzy suddenly. Did Andrea really mean that she was willing to take chances with her own life, but not his and Katherine’s? Was she protecting him?
“It’s supposed to be the other way around!” He yelled at Andrea. “Katherine and me, we’re supposed to be saving you!”
Andrea gave him a wistful half smile.
“If you really care about somebody, it works in both directions,” she said.
And then she was gone.
46
“No!” Jonah screamed. “No!”
“Wait!” Katherine screamed. “Andrea? Brendan? Antonio?”
All of them had vanished.
Jonah grabbed the Elucidator that JB had programmed.
“JB?” he yelled into it. “Andrea?”
Silence. They kept zooming through the darkness.
“At least you got what you wanted,” Katherine said after a few moments.
“What are you talking about?” Jonah asked. “We’re floating through time! We don’t know where we’re going! We don’t know what’s happening to Andrea and the others! I don’t have anything I want!”
“You got to hear Andrea say she cares about you,” Katherine said.
“She didn’t-” Jonah began. Then he stopped. He remembered Andrea’s last words: If you really care about somebody, it works in both directions. And then she’d protected him, just as he’d been trying all along to protect her. Was that like saying she cared?
“But that’s not how I thought it’d work!” Jonah complained. “When you and Chip had your big boyfriend- girlfriend talk, he ended up coming home with us. It fixed everything!”
“Yeah, well, it’s different this time,” Katherine said. “And-aaahhh!”
Something hit Jonah just then, a force powerful enough to spin him around and somersault him head over heels. He clutched the Elucidator with one hand; with the other, he grabbed Katherine’s arm while she held his.
“Wh-what was that?” Katherine asked when they’d both stopped spinning.
The Elucidator clicked and whirred.
“That would be the ripple,” a voice said from the Elucidator. “Flowing from all the changes in 1600. It’s come this far.”
“Is that Second again?” Jonah asked incredulously.
“On JB’s Elucidator?” Katherine added.
“If you’ve reached this point, you know I prepare for every possibility,” the voice continued. It was definitely Second’s. “I don’t want to brag, but I preloaded 6,582 different messages onto JB’s Elucidator, and I covered my tracks so thoroughly that I’m 99.994 percent certain that he didn’t find any of them. Although, if it’s you hearing this message, JB, I apologize for underestimating you again.”
Second paused.
