Redeemed

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Jonah started running toward the fence. He sounded so sure of himself that Jordan found himself stumbling after him. Even Katherine ran along.

  They reached the fence, and Jordan saw that the gully on the other side was so deep and filled with trees that he couldn’t see to the bottom of it. He saw no sign of a body down below. But now he thought of the climber as a body, not a person. Nobody could survive a fall like that.

  Katherine reached up and put her hands on the chain-link fence, as if she were about to climb.

  “Katherine, that’s not safe!” Jordan cried. “You can’t do anything to help! It’s too late!”

  “I don’t have a problem with heights like you and Jonah do,” Katherine said.

  Jordan glanced at the other boy. Could he possibly hate heights as much as Jordan did?

  “Elucidator, can you just carry us down the hill to stand beside the kid who fell?” Jonah asked.

  YES glowed above Jonah’s hand. I WILL.

  In the next instant, the three of them were standing on a flat rock outcropping above what seemed to be a raging river far below. A boy in ragged jeans and a dark sweatshirt lay on the rock beside them, his face hidden in dead leaves.

  Jonah bent down beside the boy and gently touched his shoulder.

  “Hello?” Jonah said. “Are you awake? Does anything hurt?”

  Jordan guessed that Jonah had gone through first-aid training in Boy Scouts too.

  “He’s bleeding,” Katherine said, pointing.

  Now Jordan saw that the boy’s right leg was twisted, and the jeans below his right knee were dark.

  “Does he need a tourniquet?” Jordan asked, crouching down beside Jonah. “A splint?”

  Most of what Jordan had learned in first aid seemed to be spinning uselessly in his brain. How were they supposed to know if the bleeding required a tourniquet, or if just applying pressure to the wound would do the trick? Why hadn’t his brain held on to such details?

  The boy moaned and turned his head, his messy blond hair flopping against the dead leaves.

  Katherine gasped. “Is that . . . Doesn’t he look like someone?” she asked. “Like . . . maybe the kid version of Second?”

  In the next instant the boy reached up, snatched the Elucidator from Jonah’s hands—and vanished.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  For a moment Jordan, Katherine, and Jonah could do nothing but gape at the empty space where the boy had been. The rock was still stained with his blood.

  “That—that was Second, wasn’t it?” Katherine said, sinking down alongside Jordan and Jonah.

  “He was the kid Gary and Hodge were coming to kidnap?” Jonah asked numbly. “Did Second set this whole thing up so we would rescue him?”

  “But then how was he in the future to begin with, if nobody rescued him in original time?” Katherine asked. “And Curtis Rathbone sent us here, not Second—or did Second somehow know that all of this would happen?”

  “Could Second have an identical twin?” Jonah asked.

  All the time-travel questions and speculation made Jordan’s head ache. And he didn’t like the way Jonah looked accusingly at Jordan when he said the words “identical twin.” Jordan’s mind jumped ahead to a different question.

  “How are we going to get off this rock without killing ourselves?” he asked.

  Jonah winced. “And how are we going to get out of this time period without an Elucidator?” he asked. He glanced up at the sky. “I don’t know what time it is now, but we have to get out before the plane arrives. No—we have to get out before I arrived with you as a baby, Katherine. We got here thirty minutes before the plane. It was already kind of dark then, but . . .”

  Jordan craned his neck to peer up toward the sky, too. It seemed much more shadowed and dusky than it had when they were standing up by the fence. He hoped that was mostly because of all the trees now towering above them.

  “We should be able to climb down from here,” Katherine said. She leaned out and peeked over the side of the rock and seemed to change her mind. “Or up. Remember, distances are kind of messed up when you’re suffering from timesickness. Probably this ravine isn’t deep at all, if falling into it didn’t kill that kid. Didn’t kill Second, I mean.”

  Jordan really didn’t want to think about falling right now. Or Second.

  Does he even care that we’re stuck here now? Jordan wondered. He didn’t understand all the ins and outs of time travel, but he could tell that Jonah and Katherine thought it would be disastrous if any of them were duplicated in time. Did Second want that to happen? Was he trying to ruin everything? How did the kid version of Second (or his twin) know to grab the Elucidator anyway?

  “This tree looks pretty sturdy,” Katherine said, tugging on a tree that stood beside the rock. She squinted upward. “If we climb to the top, we can probably grab the bottom section of that fence, and then . . .”

  Then fall just like that kid did, Jordan thought.

  “You don’t have to use any tricks like you did to get me to climb the mast of Henry Hudson’s ship or that tree when we were hiding from the Serbians,” Jonah told Katherine. “I’ll climb it on my own . . . in a minute.”

  Jordan didn’t like hearing about adventures Jonah and Katherine had had without him. But something in Jonah’s expression looked familiar.

  “Hey,” Jordan said. “Did you almost fall off the climbing wall at Boy Scout camp last year too? Because Dustin and Keenan were playing a trick with the ropes? And that made you scared of heights?”

  “It was Dustin and Keenan’s fault?” Jonah asked. “I thought I just slipped.”

  “Could it have been their fault in my dimension and not in yours?” Jordan asked.

  “Guys,” Katherine said. “Talk about this while you’re climbing. We don’t have much time!”

  Automatically, Jordan reached for the bottom branch of the tree. It was pretty stupid to talk about being afraid of heights while climbing a tree you were afraid to climb. But he had other questions for Jonah.

  “Do you think a lot of the same things happened to us in our different dimensions?” Jordan asked, pulling himself up. “Did you . . . drink a whole two-liter of Mountain Dew once at a birthday party?”

  “I did!” Jonah said, starting to climb the tree himself. “Are you trying out for the seventh-grade basketball team?”

  “Yeah,” Jordan said. Honesty forced him to add, “But it looks like I’ll be sitting on the bench a lot.”

  “Huh,” Jonah said, in a way that made Jordan suspect that Jonah might somehow be first-string in his dimension.

  “Who do you like better, the Reds or the Indians?” Jordan asked, reaching for a higher branch. “The Browns or the Bengals?”

  “Reds and Bengals,” Jonah answered. “Of course.”

  “That’s because Dad always liked the Cincinnati teams instead of Cleveland’s,” Katherine said. “In both of your dimensions. Don’t have some big bonding moment over something stupid like that.”

  Did Katherine actually think Jordan and Jonah were bonding?

  Something shut down in Jonah’s face, but Jordan couldn’t tell if it was because they were getting higher and higher in the tree, or because hearing Dad’s name reminded him they still hadn’t rescued their parents. And how were they supposed to do anything now without an Elucidator?

  “If all three of us make it to the top of this tree, what are we going to do then?” Jordan asked.

  What if he was risking his life for nothing?

  “The last time I was in this time period—I mean here, right before the plane crash—I gave Angela a note at the airport,” Jonah said. “And then that led to this other time agent, Hadley Correo, getting an Elucidator to me. Maybe if we work fast, we can kind of do the same thing all over again. Maybe there’s still time.”

  He looked up at the sky again. Jordan did the same thing. It really was starting to get dark.

  Jordan reached for a higher branch.

  “What if talking to Ange
la again messes up you getting an Elucidator at all?” Katherine asked. “What if it changes the version of time we needed before to fix everything?”

  “If none of us can think of a better plan, we’re going to have to take that chance,” Jonah said quietly. “Maybe it can work out somehow with the three different dimensions. Because they were separate for thirteen years after the plane crash.”

  “Except weren’t you already in all three of the dimensions, at least briefly, right after the plane crash?” Katherine asked him. “Wouldn’t having you here when the plane crashes in any dimension ruin everything?”

  Jonah didn’t answer. Jordan’s head throbbed.

  I just want to make Mom and Dad the right age again, he thought. I just want everything to go back to normal.

  “Keep climbing!” Katherine called behind him. “Hurry!”

  The tree thinned at the top, and it was scary reaching for smaller and smaller branches.

  What if the next one I reach for can’t hold me? Jordan thought. What if I fall and knock Jonah and Katherine to the ground too?

  He drew even with the top of the gully, where the fence was. The branch he was on started to tilt the other way. Before he could think about what he was doing, he flipped over toward the fence. Even as he dropped, he wasn’t sure if he was going to land on nice, safe dirt or hard rock far below.

  “Open your eyes and get out of the way!” Katherine yelled at him. “Before Jonah and I fall on you!”

  Oh, Jordan realized, feeling spiky grass beneath him. I guess I landed by the fence.

  He rolled over, and Jonah and Katherine landed right beside him.

  “Glad that’s over,” Jonah muttered.

  “Yeah, except now don’t we have to climb the fence to get back to the airport?” Katherine asked, pointing up again.

  Jordan’s knees got shaky.

  “Can’t we wait a little before we do that?” he asked. “Or—I know—why don’t we walk along the fence and find, like, the road that normal people take to get to the airport—without risking their lives?”

  “I don’t think there’s time,” Katherine said, glancing up toward the sky. Jordan realized that the sun had dropped even farther while they were down on the rock and climbing the tree. “I’m not even sure there’s time to climb the fence and run across the runways and—”

  “We’ve got to try,” Jonah said grimly.

  He reached for the fence first, but Jordan and Katherine were almost as fast.

  As soon as Jordan touched the fence, he heard a thump behind him.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” a voice cried from just over Jordan’s right shoulder. “Grab on to me! We’ve only got three minutes to get all of you out of here!”

  Jordan whirled around.

  A huge man stood behind them, wobbling at the edge of the gully. There was no room for him on that edge, and he looked even more enormous here than he’d looked back in the lab at Interchronological Rescue.

  It was Deep Voice.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Jordan froze. Was he supposed to trust his own fence-climbing and running skills—or the supposed help of his enemy and interrogator? Could Deep Voice possibly be right that they had only three minutes?

  Jonah and Katherine seemed equally paralyzed.

  “It’s true!” Deep Voice roared. And then he lunged for them, his massive arms yanking them away from the fence and into a clump.

  “Take us back to headquarters!” Deep Voice screamed. “Now!”

  The fence disappeared. The gully disappeared; the lights of the airport off in the distance vanished as well.

  They were speeding through time once again.

  “What—who—did you just rescue us?” Katherine demanded. “Did Curtis Rathbone send you? We didn’t do what he wanted. We—”

  “I don’t care about Curtis Rathbone,” Deep Voice growled. “I’m trying to save time. And my own backside. And the three of you.”

  “But . . . you interrogated us,” Jordan complained. “If you were on our side all along, why didn’t you say so?”

  “I—” Deep Voice began. Then he grimaced and reeled his head backward. “Whoa. Is traveling through time always so awful? I’m not used to this. I’m just a . . . what would people from your time call it? A desk jockey?”

  Jordan had never in his life heard the term “desk jockey.”

  “This is actually kind of the easy part of time travel,” Katherine said apologetically. “We’re just gliding now. It’s fun.”

  Deep Voice didn’t look like he thought it was fun.

  “It gets worse?” he asked. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but his face was starting to look almost greenish. “I, um, I think I kind of blacked out for a while on my trip to get you. Didn’t wake up until I landed. And then we only had three minutes, so I didn’t have time to think. . . .”

  “Why didn’t you get us when we were down on the rock?” Jonah asked. “Then we wouldn’t have had to risk our lives climbing that tree, and you would have had an extra twenty or thirty minutes to get us out.”

  Deep Voice winced. “We ran the numbers on that,” he said. “The force of me—or even Doreen—landing there would have knocked that rock down into the river below. Someone could have died.”

  Jordan shivered. Had the rock really been that fragile beneath them? Deep Voice was huge, of course, but Doreen wasn’t. When Jordan, Jonah, Katherine, and the mystery kid had all been on the rock together, had they been close to falling into the river?

  “You could have landed at the top and lowered a ladder down to us,” Jonah suggested.

  “Would you have trusted me?” Deep Voice asked.

  No, Jordan thought.

  “Or . . . you could have just had the Elucidator pull us up to the top of the gully with you,” Katherine suggested. It was almost as though she and Jonah were quizzing Deep Voice to test his motives.

  “I’m not used to Elucidators,” Deep Voice said. “Believe me, I was doing well to get to the past at all. This was all planned on the fly. It’s possible I’ll be arrested when I get back. But I had to do this.”

  “Why didn’t you or someone else from your company just go back and get that kid to begin with?” Jordan asked. “Why did Curtis Rathbone say Katherine and Jonah and I were . . . what did he call it?”

  “Uniquely qualified,” Katherine muttered.

  “Because you two boys are time natives, and Katherine, your natural lifetime is very close by,” Deep Voice said. “This isn’t my field of specialty, but I believe that made time more . . . receptive . . . to letting the three of you in. And time was very fragile at that point. I couldn’t have gotten in if you hadn’t been there first.”

  “The time agency and Jonah and everybody—even you—have been telling me that I wasn’t in my right time,” Jordan said angrily. “They said I was born in the nineteen thirties! Are you telling me now that that was all a lie?”

  He was kind of hoping Deep Voice would nod and say something like, Yeah, about that . . . I was wrong, and so was everybody else.

  But Deep Voice shook his head no.

  “You and Jonah were born in the nineteen thirties,” he said. “And that means you could have still been alive the day of the plane crash if—”

  “If we hadn’t been kidnapped first,” Jonah said.

  “I was going to say ‘if you’d survived childhood in a nineteen thirties orphanage,’ ” Deep Voice said.

  “You really believe all that garbage about how Interchronological Rescue is just a charity that saves kids?” Katherine asked angrily.

  Deep Voice looked off into the distance, at the lights growing closer on the horizon. Jordan could tell he was terrified of peering toward those lights—or of seeing anything around them as they floated through time.

  But maybe right now it was even harder for Deep Voice to look directly at Jordan, Jonah, and Katherine?

  “I . . . I used to believe Interchronological Rescue had a noble cause,” Deep Voice said. “That
was why I applied to work there. But . . . a lot of things have changed recently. I can’t just sit at my desk anymore doing my job and ignoring everything else. I don’t trust Curtis Rathbone anymore.”

  “But you let us go off and have him send us to the past on a dangerous mission?” Jordan asked. Maybe he’d caught some of Katherine’s anger.

  “I thought you were all safe in the secret cubicles!” Deep Voice protested. “We thought you were safe until we figured out what to do next!”

  “Second let us out,” Jonah said. “Was that the kid version of Second who stole our Elucidator? Or was it his identical twin or just someone who looks like him, or—”

  “Second?” Deep Voice asked, his tone shooting up an octave. “You mean Second Chance is involved? The former Sam Chase? And . . . you think he was the kid down there on that rock? You think this was all a setup? Even Rathbone was set up, even I was set up . . .”

  He rolled his head around in a way that made Jordan think of a giant beast—an elephant, maybe—falling down.

  “Are we wrong?” Katherine challenged.

  “I . . . don’t . . . know . . . ,” Deep Voice moaned.

  If he managed to say anything after that, it got lost in the churning of time travel, as they hit the part of the trip where Jordan felt like his whole body was being torn into tiny shreds.

  When Jordan felt like he could see and hear again, Deep Voice was still moaning.

  “Not cut out for derring-do . . . scariest moment of my life . . . and now these kids say I was just a pawn for that twisted Sam Chase . . .”

  Jordan heard a slapping sound. By squinting, he could just barely make out the sight of someone’s hand hitting Deep Voice’s face.

  “Dude-io Markiel, get ahold of yourself,” another man’s voice said. It was Tattoo Face. “You rescued all three kids we sent you after. How bad could things have been?”

  “You have no idea,” Deep Voice moaned again.

  Jordan tried to squint past Deep Voice and Tattoo Face—even though Second had told him their real names, the nicknames seemed to fit better. Jordan did remember that the woman who’d been with them was named Doreen Smith. Jordan could just barely make out a blurry shape on the other side of Markiel/Deep Voice. Maybe that was her.