There was only one detail Matt withheld from his family—the part where he had discovered that he and Quine were actually the same person.
He’d almost told Corey and Ruby and Jia. The first night they’d returned. The information was still so new to him, so mind-boggling, he felt he might explode with it. But before he could even begin to get it out, Corey had declared in a venomous tone that Quine was the real enemy in all this, that he clearly had teamed up with Captain Vincent and given him the Aeternum. Matt had tried to defend Quine, said he might have his reasons.
“Yeah,” Corey had said. “To rip our family to shreds.”
“He didn’t seem all that bad when I met him. It didn’t seem like he wanted to destroy us or anything.”
Corey snorted. “We thought the same thing about Captain Vincent when we first met him. I don’t think we can go by first impressions here. Nice doesn’t always mean ‘good.’ It doesn’t mean he’s on our side.”
“I think Corey’s right,” Ruby said. “We can’t be naïve about these things anymore. We need to look at the facts.”
Matt looked to Jia, hoping she would back him up, but she remained silent. She’d been unusually quiet since they’d returned from Asilah.
Matt could see he wasn’t going to win this argument. He didn’t know how to refute Corey and Ruby’s logic. The facts as they stood were not in his favor. Matt knew he would do anything to protect his family, but he couldn’t fathom the thinking or desires of his older self. Quine had even told him they were very different people. Where did Mateo end and Marius Quine begin? And when?
Without these answers Matt did not feel he could reveal his and Quine’s shared identity. It was too much for them to deal with, and they were dealing with too much as it was. So he closed his mouth, tucked the information away. But it gnawed at him, like mice on a rope. The questions kept him awake and anxious at all hours. He felt increasingly alone.
The weather was unusually cold that morning. Definitely not summer weather.
When the rest of the household had woken, they’d all shivered and wrapped themselves in sweaters and blankets. Matt looked out the big kitchen window and saw that a heavy mist had descended over the Hudson River Valley. A light frost covered the ground. Uncle Chuck brought in a load of wood and lit a fire in the big fireplace in the living room. Gaga grumbled something about climate change and the world going to pieces.
Matt didn’t think this was climate change, at least not in the way Gaga was thinking, but he feared she was right about the world going to pieces. Not that he could talk to her about it, because Gaga still knew nothing about anything that had gone on in the past few days. Or years, decades, centuries, however you wanted to look at it. She knew nothing about her family being a bunch of time travelers, nor the fact that Chuck was really her long-lost son, Charles, or that her husband hadn’t really disappeared or died while hiking in Patagonia, but had, in fact, been kidnapped by a time pirate/maniac with infinite powers. Corey kept arguing that they should tell her, but both Mr. Hudson and Uncle Chuck kept putting it off. They said it wasn’t quite the right time, though Matt wondered what would the right time be to share such information.
Shortly after breakfast, Matt sat with his family (plus Jia and Pike) at the kitchen table, huddled around a globe covered in little red dots and gold stars.
“Tell me again, Charles,” Mr. Hudson said, staring at the globe. “Everything you can remember about where Vincent took you and Dad.”
His dark hair was messy, and his glasses did nothing to cover the dark circles under his eyes. His mom had them too. Clearly Matt wasn’t the only one having trouble sleeping.
Uncle Chuck, sitting next to Mr. Hudson, tugged his long silvery beard. “I don’t know,” he said. “It all happened so fast. I remember it was cold. There were icebergs, I think. And that’s it. I didn’t see anyone else. No people. No buildings. Nothing.”
Mr. Hudson puffed his cheeks full of air and then let it out. “That’s not much to go on.”
A few days ago, before everything had happened on the beach in Asilah, Matt had discovered, quite by accident, that Chuck, his grandmother’s quirky hippie farm manager, was actually Mr. Hudson’s long-lost brother, Charles. The resemblance was quite clear now, but no one had ever suspected who Chuck really was because he was supposed to be Mr. Hudson’s younger brother by six years. However, due to unforeseen circumstances involving time travel, Chuck was now a good two decades older, with long gray hair and a scraggly beard that reached his chest. He and his father, Henry Hudson, had both been abducted by Captain Vincent, who had mistaken them both for Matt’s dad at different points in time. Captain Vincent had been trying to prevent Mr. Hudson from meeting or marrying Mrs. Hudson. Uncle Chuck had managed to get away, though he’d escaped into the wrong decade. He’d come back home to his mom and brother but never told either of them who he really was.
Now that they knew what had really happened to Henry Hudson, they were trying to figure where he might be, and if they could potentially rescue him.
