“Jordan, you don’t know all the dangers possible,” Jonah said.
“Not that it’s your fault,” Katherine added quickly.
That didn’t help. Jordan shot both of them a defiant look, then bent down toward the Elucidators in Jonah’s hands.
“Elucidators, send us ahead in time to five p.m. today,” he said.
Jordan didn’t feel any of the spinning dizziness of his last few trips through time. But maybe he wouldn’t, when he wasn’t even moving ahead a full day?
Then he saw words glowing near Jonah’s hands: MY ACTIONS ARE BLOCKED BY THE TIME-DEADENING PROPERTIES OF THIS ROOM. YOU MUST LEAVE THIS ROOM TO TRAVEL THROUGH TIME.
“Okay, that’s suspicious,” Jonah said. “Why could we get into this room with time travel, but not out of it?”
“Gary and Hodge’s coworkers said it’s a protected space,” Katherine reminded him. She cupped her chin in her hand, as if she planned to think for a long time. “Hmm . . .”
“Are you two going to do nothing but talk about this until five o’clock?” Jordan asked incredulously.
“We’ve got to figure out what’s going on,” Jonah said. “I don’t trust Second, he’s using Mom and Dad as bait, we don’t even know what year this is—we’ve got to be careful!”
What was it about Jonah that made Jordan feel so much like punching him?
“Right—Mom and Dad are missing, so I’m not going to just sit here doing nothing!” Jordan said.
He reached over and grabbed both the cell phone and the plastic card from Jonah’s hands. Then he stood up.
“Jordan, wait!” Katherine cried.
“You’re not thinking this through!” Jonah argued.
Both of them reached toward Jordan, trying to grab the two Elucidators back. But Jordan was a step ahead of them. He held both Elucidators high over his head, out of their reach. Katherine and Jonah scrambled to their feet, but Jordan anticipated that, too. He took off running toward the door.
“Jordan, you don’t know what’s out there!” Katherine called after him.
“Stop!” Jonah hissed.
Jordan reached the door and wrapped his hand around the knob.
I’ll show them. I’m not as careless as they think, he told himself. He pulled the door open only a crack, so he could peek out, just in case.
Outside the lab he saw an empty hallway. Maybe it was wildly futuristic; maybe the walls and floors and ceiling were made of some bizarre substance that didn’t even exist in the twenty-first century. Jordan didn’t pay attention to any of that. All he cared about was that the hall was empty. He gave himself an extra second of glancing around to see if there were security cameras anywhere in sight. His brain threw an irritating thought at him: Maybe in the future, security cameras are just woven into the wallpaper or otherwise completely undetectable. . . . But if there were security cameras, wouldn’t the three people who’d come into the lab already have shut them off? Jonah and Katherine had almost caught up with Jordan. He didn’t have time to worry about every little possibility.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jordan could see Jonah and Katherine reaching for him. Just as he felt them grab for his shirt, he yanked the door open and stepped out into the hall.
“Elucidator, take the three of us ahead to five o’clock today!” Jordan muttered.
The next thing Jordan knew, a very large man smashed into him.
“Where did you come from?” a deep voice asked.
TWELVE
Jordan slammed to the floor, which may have been cushioned more than a typical twenty-first-century floor, but he didn’t care about that either. His brain had just figured something out, way too late: Just because the hallway was empty and clear at the time you were leaving, that doesn’t mean it would be empty and clear in the time you traveled to. In fact, you knew three people were planning to be in this area at five o’clock. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Dimly, he realized that Jonah and Katherine had also toppled to the floor behind him. The fact that they had been reaching out of the protected room to grab him was evidently enough to make them travel through time too. And so all three of them fell like dominos when they ran into the large man.
“Who are you?” the man demanded, still in that amazingly deep voice.
Duh. He’s the man you were thinking of as Deep Voice, when you were eavesdropping from your safe, secure hiding place, Jordan realized. Of course Deep Voice or one of the other two would be walking into the lab for their meeting now.
Why did his brain have to get so smart now, when it was too late?
He decided to let Jonah or Katherine deal with Deep Voice’s questions.
But the man didn’t wait for any answers. He quickly glanced around, beads swinging out from his head—beads all over a man’s hair? Is that some typical fashion in the future? Jordan wondered. Then the man kicked the door behind them completely open and shoved all three kids back into the lab.
Jordan, Jonah, and Katherine somersaulted over one another. It was like some pileup on a soccer or football field, where Jordan lost track of whose elbow was in his ear and whose knee was in his stomach.
Jordan had never felt so guilty about causing a pileup in soccer or football.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Sorry. I should have thought . . .”
“Shh,” Katherine hissed at him, as if she still hoped she could hide, even as Deep Voice stared down at them.
No, not just Deep Voice. Two other people were staring down at them, too: A woman in a bright purple robe and a man with what seemed to be tattoos of eagles and trees across his face.
Maybe Jordan shouldn’t have gotten so distracted looking at clothes and tattoos and beads. In the next instant, Deep Voice snatched the two Elucidators from Jordan’s hand. And the woman went into a defensive stance and pointed something that looked like a flash drive at all three of the kids.
“Don’t move!” she commanded, just as if she were pointing a gun at them.
Oh, um, maybe she is? Jordan realized. Maybe that’s what guns look like in the future?
“Spies,” Deep Voice growled.
“The question is, who are they spies for?” the woman asked, still in her Don’t move or I’ll shoot you stance.
“We’ll interrogate them separately,” the tattooed man announced. “That should help.”
Jordan thought that would mean he’d have a few moments to whisper to Katherine and Jonah while they were being taken away. But the tattooed man pointed at three corners of the room, one after the other. Shimmering walls appeared instantly in each of those corners, creating small private cubicles.
“I’ll take the girl,” the woman announced, pulling Katherine up and away from Jordan and Jonah.
“You want old-timey-clothes boy number one or old-timey-clothes boy number two?” Deep Voice asked Tattoo Face.
Jordan wanted to protest, I’m not wearing old-timey clothes! But if this was the future, he guessed maybe his clothes would look old-fashioned. Did his T-shirt and sweatpants look as strange to the two men as their tattoos and beads looked to him?
“Don’t—” Jonah started to whisper in Jordan’s ear, but Deep Voice and Tattoo Face were already yanking them apart.
“Except for their clothes, it looks like they’re pretty much the same person,” Tattoo Face muttered. “So it’s probably not going to matter.”
Deep Voice pulled Jordan to the nearest cubicle. Although the walls looked see-through from the outside, they seemed to turn solid as soon as Deep Voice yanked Jordan inside.
“Let me go!” Jordan cried, jerking his arm away from the man. Evidently Jordan caught him off guard—Jordan slipped through his fingers. Immediately Jordan sprang up and hurled himself back toward the opening they’d just walked through.
It still looked like open space, but Jordan seemed to slam into a solid wall. He bounced back and landed on the floor once more.
“Lucky me, I got the spaz kid,” Deep Voice muttered. He settled into a chair at a tabl
e Jordan hadn’t noticed before. “Want to try that again, so I can laugh?”
Jordan ignored him, and put his hand out to touch the invisible wall.
Nothing, nothing, nothing . . . Jordan had his whole arm extended out of the cubicle, and hadn’t touched a wall yet. He rose up, intending to ease the rest of his body out too.
Maybe you just have to be slow passing through the doorway . . . , he thought.
His shoulder hit solid wall again, bouncing him back into a heap on the floor.
Deep Voice chuckled. “It’s so much fun watching time primitives encounter actual technology,” he murmured.
“I’m not from a primitive time!” Jordan protested. “We have computers! We have, uh, walls that look like mirrors from one side but are see-through from the other! That’s not so different from this! And we, um—”
Belatedly, Jordan realized that he might as well be telling Deep Voice what time period he was from. And Jonah’s Don’t had probably been the start of Don’t tell them anything.
“Oh, sorry,” Deep Voice said, not sounding the least bit sorry. “I didn’t mean to insult your highly advanced time period.”
Make him start telling you about his time period, Jordan told himself. Trick him into revealing stuff the way he tricked you.
What Jordan really wanted was to know was where his parents were and how he could get them back. But he didn’t trust himself to ask anything about them.
“Did you find out where Gary and Hodge are, and why they’re not answering you?” he asked instead.
Deep Voice narrowed his eyes.
“How did you know . . . ?” he began. His eyes were just slits now. It was amazing how terrifying this made him look. He was a mountain of a man, even with beads in his hair. “Did you overhear at lunchtime? After Doreen scanned the room and was certain it was empty?”
“Maybe there’s stuff you and Doreen and that other dude don’t know,” Jordan taunted. “Maybe your technology isn’t all that great, either, if your scanners can miss three whole people.”
Deep Voice glowered at Jordan.
“Sit,” he said, pointing at the chair opposite him at the table.
Jordan considered refusing, but didn’t see how that would help.
“I’m not telling you anything,” he said, even as he eased into the chair. “Not unless we trade information. You get one question, I get one question.”
That was how real spies would do it, wasn’t it?
Deep Voice didn’t look impressed. He stared down at something in his hands—maybe an Elucidator of his own, maybe one of the two that he’d grabbed away from Jordan.
“I’ve already done the DNA scan,” he said. “In a moment, I’ll have more information about you at my fingertips than you could ever tell me. And I’ll know my information is accurate.”
A DNA scan couldn’t really tell all that much, could it?
Jordan stayed silent. An instant later Deep Voice jumped, and glanced up at Jordan with an amazed expression on his face.
“You’re Jonah Skidmore?” he asked.
“Why do people always guess his name first?” Jordan complained. “Have you never heard of identical twins? Same genes and all? I’m not Jonah, I’m—”
At the last moment, he realized maybe he shouldn’t say his name. Maybe he shouldn’t have even said that about being identical twins.
The amazement left Deep Voice’s face.
“Oh, right,” he murmured. “Of course. It’s the other boy who’s Jonah Skidmore.”
Ouch, Jordan thought.
He guessed Deep Voice had done the futuristic equivalent of googling someone with the same name as a famous person, and all the stuff about the famous person came up first.
In this case, Jonah was the famous person. Jordan wasn’t.
“I see there was a twin left to die in the nineteen thirties,” Deep Voice said. “It was Claude and Clyde Beckman originally—looks like you’re Clyde. Gary and Hodge must not have thought you were worth rescuing.”
Not worth rescuing? That really hurt.
Jordan opened his mouth to protest, Don’t you see anything about me in the twenty-first century as Jordan Skidmore? Your fancy DNA scan isn’t very good after all, is it?
But probably that was what Deep Voice wanted him to do. Probably Deep Voice was trying to goad him into getting upset and accidentally revealing something Deep Voice wouldn’t have known otherwise.
Jordan felt proud of himself for figuring out that psychological game.
But is there any chance this guy really does think I was left behind in the nineteen thirties? Jordan wondered. What if he doesn’t know about me being kidnapped and ending up with Mom and Dad?
Could that also mean Deep Voice knew nothing about Jordan having his own dimension until Jonah made everything smash together?
And that means . . .
Jordan barely understood the different dimensions himself. But if Deep Voice didn’t know about them either, did that maybe mean that this was some future branch of time where the dimensions hadn’t blended? Or hadn’t blended yet?
Since everything’s in such a mess back in the twenty-first century, is it possible that the changes—and news of the changes—haven’t reached this future yet? Jordan wondered.
Jordan felt absolutely brilliant figuring that out. But he wasn’t sure what he could do with the information, or if it was even right.
What if it just means everything was ruined so badly with Mom and Dad being the wrong age that it’s too late to stop all of time from ending?
Okay, that wasn’t the right way to go for his next thought.
“The question is, how did you get here?” Deep Voice asked.
Now the man was looking down at the cell phone–like device and the plastic card that he’d grabbed from Jordan.
What if they worked well enough to tell Deep Voice everything?
“I’ll tell you what happened,” Jordan said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “The time agency sent me here. They gave me those Elucidators. They know where I am. You’ve got to let me go, or the time agency will come and arrest you!”
“It’s interesting that you would say that,” Deep Voice muttered. Strangely, he laid both the cell phone and the plastic card out on the table, where Jordan could easily reach them. The only thing that stopped Jordan from grabbing them was Deep Voice’s next words: “Because neither of these objects is a working Elucidator.”
THIRTEEN
“What?” Jordan asked. “They’re not? But—but—”
Had JB lied to him? Had Jonah? Had Second?
It wasn’t as if Jordan had understood much about Elucidators before. But this was even more confusing.
“But those Elucidators made us travel through time,” Jordan protested. “They did! We were at home, my whole family was—and some other people too—and then all that disappeared and we were in the dark and spinning and then we were here. And then we were in a time hollow and—”
Too late, Jordan realized that he probably shouldn’t be telling Deep Voice so much. But he wanted Deep Voice to admit, Oh, sorry. My mistake. You’re right. These are Elucidators.
“Huh,” Deep Voice grunted. “If what you’ve told me were actually true, that would be very interesting.”
“Why?” Jordan asked. His head was spinning again.
Am I getting even sicker? he wondered, even though all his travels through time had mostly distracted him from remembering he’d been sick back home. Did I bring my germs to the future with me?
What did it matter? His problems now were so much bigger than a minor twenty-first-century cold.
“You claim the time agency sent you here,” Deep Voice said. “And yet the time agency recently issued an edict prohibiting all travel bringing time natives from the past to the present. My present, I mean—your future. Why would the time agency break its own rules for a kid like you? One who wasn’t even worth removing from the nineteen thirties, when it was easy?”
Deep Voice sounded triumphant, like he thought he’d caught Jordan in some huge lie, and now he expected Jordan to spill everything.
Dude, I’ve got nothing to spill, because I don’t understand any of this! Jordan wanted to protest.
He started grasping for something—anything—that he might be able to figure out.
“So . . . it’s illegal now to bring people from the past to the future?” Jordan asked. “Doesn’t that make things hard for Gary and Hodge? Isn’t that what they do all the time, kidnapping babies?”
“They rescue endangered children from the past,” Deep Voice said, so smoothly it seemed as if that might be an official slogan. “We here at Interchronological Rescue perform a strictly humanitarian function. So of course we have protested the time agency’s edict. And we’ve sued for damages.”
“And Gary and Hodge disappeared,” Jordan said.
Were all those things connected?
Jordan remembered that Jonah claimed he knew why Gary and Hodge had disappeared: because Charles Lindbergh had turned them back into babies.
Did Charles Lindbergh work for the time agency too? Why hadn’t Jordan asked Jonah that question?
Was the time agency going to let Gary and Hodge grow up all over again, and hope that this time they didn’t become kidnappers capable of ending all of time?
And what did any of that have to do with Mom and Dad looking like teenagers again? Were they still teenagers, wherever Second had taken them? Were they still in this same time period as Jordan?
Maybe Jordan shouldn’t have been so hard on Jonah and Katherine for wanting to sit around waiting and thinking and talking endlessly before actually doing anything. Jordan could really use some more information right about now.
“What are you and Doreen and that other guy going to do about Gary and Hodge disappearing?” Jordan asked Deep Voice. “What are you going to do to stop their plan from ending all of time forever? What are you going to do to me and Katherine and Jonah?”
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