Redeemed

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  And past her he could see tables, desks, and the glow of what seemed to be a computer monitor. . . .

  They were back in the futuristic lab.

  Jonah and Katherine were already struggling up into a seated position.

  “Please,” Katherine was groaning. “Please. If you want to help, find out where Second went. As a kid and as an adult. Find out how he’s planning to mess up time now. . . .”

  There was a rustle off to the right: Doreen moved toward one of the suspended glowing areas that looked like a TV or computer screen.

  Deep Voice zoomed from lying on the floor to standing up and rushing to her side. It was like watching a beached whale suddenly jump up and start running.

  “Don’t!” he cried. “Don’t reboot or do anything else to eliminate the information that would have been there before Second changed things—”

  “You think he might have released the ripple?” Jonah asked.

  Whatever that means, Jordan thought.

  He hoped Jonah was just pretending to know what he was talking about, throwing around some time-travel term he barely understood. He hoped Jonah was just a really good actor.

  Because otherwise, there was something really scary that Jonah—and Katherine and Deep Voice and Tattoo Face and Doreen—were all worried about.

  Release the ripple, Jordan thought. Does he mean the ripple of changes from the kid version of Second grabbing the Elucidator out of Jonah’s hand? Would there have been some way to hold back those changes?

  He didn’t ask, because everyone else clustered around the computerlike screen alongside Doreen. Jordan concentrated on pushing himself off the floor so he could stand beside the others.

  “It doesn’t do any good to look for traces of Sam Chase, or his alter ego, Second Chance,” Tattoo Face objected. “He managed to hide them all—or maybe it was the time agency that did that when Second betrayed everything they stood for?”

  “Oh, but I can show you everything about Second’s life,” Doreen said, sounding less worried than she looked.

  “How?” Deep Voice challenged.

  “Because,” Doreen said, “I just figured out how to get into the secret files Gary and Hodge left behind.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “What if it’s a trick?” Jonah asked. “What if Second stealing the Elucidator and traveling through time as a teenager changed things in such a way that that’s why you are suddenly able to get into Gary and Hodge’s secret files? What if Second arranged that to trap you all somehow, and to trap Katherine and Jordan and me?”

  “You think he figured all that out as a teenager?” Doreen asked incredulously.

  “He’s really smart,” Katherine offered. “And sneaky.”

  Doreen touched something on the table in front of her.

  “I’ve always wondered what his story was . . . ,” she murmured.

  The projection in midair expanded and moved back toward the wall. Suddenly Jordan felt as though he were back on the rock suspended over the gully—or maybe hovering in midair watching the teenage version of Second on the rock suspended over the gully. A small clock in the corner sped through minutes: Second just lay there and lay there and lay there.

  “He was not there for two hours,” Katherine muttered. “This is a different version of time. Or a different dimension.”

  “Shh,” Jonah and Jordan said together.

  On the screen a sudden bright light appeared, aimed from above toward the boy on the rock. A dark figure began rappelling down the cliff. The climber landed on the rock and seemed to be checking Second for broken bones and other injuries. And then the climber tied Second to a backboard suspended from a helicopter. The camera seemed to follow Second’s precarious progress up from the rock.

  When Second reached the top of the gully, Jordan expected to see ambulances and more medical types. Instead a man in a dark suit stepped past the blinding light and bent over Second.

  “You!” the man spat. “You were the pilot, weren’t you? And like a coward you tried to run away.”

  “Is that . . . Mr. Reardon?” Katherine asked.

  “Who?” Jordan asked.

  Katherine glanced cautiously toward the three grown-ups.

  “We already know about him,” Doreen said, smirking. “He was the FBI agent who was in charge of investigating the plane crash-landing. The agent Jonah and Katherine and your parents went to see to find out about Jonah’s background.”

  “Yeah,” Jonah said. “He knew something strange had happened, but he could never figure out what it was. So his goal was just to keep everything secret.”

  On the screen Mr. Reardon clutched the front of Second’s shirt.

  “What terrorist group are you working for?” Mr. Reardon demanded. “What are you trying to prove?”

  Second only moaned. Mr. Reardon let go. Second’s head bounced against the stretcher beneath him.

  “Give him medical care, but keep him in a private room,” Mr. Reardon said. “Keep a guard outside his door.”

  The scene shifted into something like time-lapse video, where days and weeks and months were condensed into a few seconds. Second was lying in a hospital bed . . . sitting in a wheelchair . . . struggling on an apparatus that was probably supposed to help him relearn how to walk . . . and then returning to a wheelchair again.

  The speeding scenes slowed for the many times Mr. Reardon came into Second’s hospital room to interrogate him.

  “You say you’re an ordinary runaway—why is there no record of anyone reporting you missing?” Mr. Reardon demanded in his first visit to the hospital.

  “I didn’t want to be caught. So I hacked into the school and law enforcement and child welfare system computers and eliminated all my records,” Second said, staring defiantly up from his hospital bed. “And . . . it’s not like my foster parents actually missed me. Neither did my caseworker. Or my teachers. No one wanted to try very hard to find me.”

  “Tell me your foster parents’ names,” Mr. Reardon demanded. “Tell me what city you lived in, what school you went to. Tell me where to find people who would remember you.”

  Second turned his face toward the wall and didn’t answer.

  Beside Jordan, Katherine muttered, “That does sound like something Second would do. He probably was a great hacker even as a kid.”

  “And he wouldn’t give the FBI a straight answer,” Jonah agreed, under his breath. “He doesn’t give anyone a straight answer.”

  “But what game is he playing?” Doreen asked. “What does he hope to accomplish? Why doesn’t he want to prove he’s got nothing to do with the time-crashed plane?”

  “Who knows, with Second?” Katherine answered.

  On the screen Mr. Reardon shifted tactics.

  “Baby smuggling is a serious crime,” he said. “There were thirty-six babies on that plane. We could charge you with thirty-six counts of kidnapping.”

  That, at least, got Second to look back at Mr. Reardon.

  “Does FBI mean Federal Bureau of Idiots?” he asked. “If any of you were any good at analyzing footprints, you would know that I fell when I was trying to sneak into the airport grounds, not out.”

  “And why would you do that?” Mr. Reardon asked, hunching forward over a notepad.

  “It was a dare, all right?” Second snarled. “I was with my friends and we were talking about what it would be like to stand on a runway when a plane was landing and . . . we decided to try it out.”

  “That’s a crime too,” Mr. Reardon said.

  Second shrugged. “It ain’t thirty-six counts of kidnapping,” he said.

  “Oh!” Doreen said, sounding surprised. “Gary and Hodge left behind notes on this conversation—Second and his gang had this idea that they could sneak into the airport and pretend to be baggage handlers, and steal all sorts of things from suitcases. And Second didn’t want to go back to his foster family because he stole money from them when he ran away.”

  Tattoo Face leaned over Doreen’s
shoulder.

  “And he thought as long as the FBI wanted information from him, they’d take care of him?” Tattoo Face asked, sounding surprised.

  “Looks like he was right,” Deep Voice said.

  Second, still in a wheelchair, left the hospital for a rehab center. Time flashed by quickly again: Second had books and computers, and he got meals delivered to his room three times a day. Mr. Reardon kept coming to see him, again and again and again.

  “Gary and Hodge say Second managed to string along the FBI for thirteen years,” Doreen said, as if she was reading from some screen Jordan couldn’t see. It kind of made him nervous that he couldn’t see it. “He kept Mr. Reardon convinced that he did know something about the plane, but he’d only reveal the information for the right price.”

  “What happened after thirteen years?” Jordan asked.

  “This,” Doreen said. Her hands seemed to shake as she waved them through the air, advancing the scene before them.

  Jordan saw a nondescript waiting room. The door opened, and four people walked in: Mom and Dad, looking the way they were supposed to, middle-aged and normal; Katherine, carrying the cell phone she was supposed to share with Jordan; and Jordan himself.

  What? When did this happen? Jordan wondered.

  Was it some event that hadn’t happened yet, but was supposed to in his near future, after Mom and Dad were their right ages again, but before he and Katherine grew up much more?

  No—somehow he and Katherine both looked ever so slightly babyish on the screen, just a bit younger than they were right now. This was something that had already happened.

  “It’s the day we went to see Mr. Reardon,” Jonah breathed. “Because Dad and Mom actually thought the FBI would tell us the truth about my past. They actually thought the FBI knew.”

  Jordan looked closer. It was Jonah, not Jordan, nervously taking a seat in the waiting room. But Jordan had to look for the placement of the chin dimple to be sure.

  How am I supposed to keep track of time and different dimensions and tricky Second and everything else when I can’t even see the difference between me and Jonah? Jordan wondered.

  “And that was the day we saw JB for the first time,” Katherine muttered. “Didn’t he say it was the first time since the time crash that any time traveler could get in or out? And they could only get in or out at certain spots—points of impact, or something like that?”

  “This is just what happened in the antechamber of Mr. Reardon’s office,” Doreen said. “Let me see if I can move the focus back to Second. . . .”

  The camera angle seemed to move down the hallway, dipping briefly into an impressive office where Mr. Reardon sat in front of a desktop computer on an imposing desk. Then the camera angle moved through the wall into the office next door where Second, still in a wheelchair, hunched over a laptop.

  “Coming through loud and clear,” Second said.

  “Got it.” Mr. Reardon’s voice came through the laptop speakers.

  “They had things set up so Second could eavesdrop on our whole conversation?” Katherine asked, sounding outraged.

  “By now Second is twenty-six,” Doreen answered. “He’s been working with the FBI since he was thirteen. Mr. Reardon still doesn’t trust him—he still thinks Second is keeping secrets—but he’s now one of their top computer experts.”

  “Of course, that’s about to end,” Tattoo Face muttered.

  Before Jordan could ask why, two men suddenly appeared out of nowhere on either side of Second’s wheelchair. One was tall and muscular, the type of guy who probably worked out several hours a day. The other was older and more ordinary-looking. But he carried himself confidently.

  “Wh-where did they come from?” Jordan stammered. “Who’s that?”

  He saw that Katherine and Jonah were staring at the screen with equally stunned expressions. But Katherine took pity on Jordan and glanced his way.

  “You don’t even recognize them, do you?” she asked. “You don’t even know . . . Jordan—that’s Gary and Hodge.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “That’s what they did the first chance they had to get into our time period after thirteen years?” Jonah exploded. “They went to see Second?”

  “I don’t think they’re just visiting,” Doreen muttered.

  Second was looking calmly from side to side, sizing up both men.

  “You’re the ones,” he said softly. “You have all the answers Reardon wants.”

  “Don’t think Hodge and I would ever help him!” the muscle-bound man taunted. So that was Gary.

  Second leaned back slightly in his wheelchair and slid his laptop lower.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to,” he said. “It wouldn’t serve your purposes.”

  Hodge narrowed his eyes and studied Second’s face.

  “So, Kevin,” Hodge said. He raised an eyebrow. “Are you surprised we know the identity you went by before you started working with the FBI?”

  Second only shrugged, but Jordan thought, So it really was “Kevin!” his friends yelled when he fell off that fence!

  Hodge didn’t seem to care that Second didn’t respond. The two of them just kept staring each other down.

  “You figured out what the entire FBI couldn’t,” Hodge said. “You knew that planeload of babies was from another time. How quickly did you put it all together?”

  “Are you kidding?” Second asked. “ ‘Tachyon Travel’? You gave yourselves away.”

  “Huh?” Jordan said.

  “Those are the words Angela told the FBI she saw on the side of the airplane,” Katherine explained. “Tachyons are these particles that I guess have something to do with time travel. Angela never thought they believed her, but . . . they must have written down what she said. And Second saw it.”

  “So he knew there was time travel involved,” Jonah murmured. “He and Angela both figured it out.”

  “But the FBI didn’t?” Jordan asked, still watching Second.

  “Institutions sometimes . . . overlook the obvious,” Deep Voice said. He too was staring at the screen. “They get stuck in their ways, caught in their usual pattern of thinking . . . they fail to consider all possible options. The FBI in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would never have considered time travel as a plausible explanation for anything.”

  “Did you know, in the future there’s no need for such a primitive tool as an IQ test?” Hodge was asking Second on the large, glowing screen. “All we have to do is scan a person’s brain and we know how smart they are. We don’t even have to be in the same time period as the person to do that. And we don’t have to worry about them speaking a particular language or having the cultural background to understand the test questions. Our brain scans are an absolute measure of intelligence.”

  “I’m certain I would do well with those scans,” Second said with a shrug. “I always do well on IQ tests.”

  “There is a certain category of children that my colleague and I have done brain scans on, throughout history,” Hodge said. “You had the highest score of any of them.”

  “I’m not a child,” Second said.

  “You were thirteen years ago,” Gary said.

  Second blinked. “You could have rescued me,” he said. “I was on that ledge, my friends had run away—there was a moment when nobody would have known if I’d simply vanished.” He looked down at his legs, immobile in the wheelchair. “I bet you could have even cured me. I bet you still could.”

  “Now, now,” Hodge said. “I won’t go into the reasons, but it turned out not to be possible to get to you before this very moment. People would notice you missing now. And we only rescue children.”

  Hodge and Second seemed to be negotiating something. Jordan couldn’t understand. Why were they suddenly acting so intense?

  Gary stepped closer to Second’s wheelchair.

  “At the very least, we could show you some of our technology,” he said in a bragging tone.

  “Just as a
professional courtesy,” Hodge added. “Because we respect your intellect.”

  Gary seemed to be holding out an ordinary cell phone for Second to see.

  “This totally looks like it belongs in your time period, doesn’t it?” Gary asked.

  Second grabbed the cell phone from Gary’s hands. In the next instant, Second and his wheelchair completely vanished.

  So did Gary and Hodge.

  Twenty-Nine

  “Those cheaters!” Doreen exclaimed.

  “Oh, but they had deniability,” Tattoo Face argued. “You saw what happened. They could always claim they were only following customary behavior of the time, one male bragging to another about the superiority of his cell phone. They can claim they had no way of knowing that Second would grab it. Or that he would know how to operate an Elucidator.”

  “Didn’t they see what happened when he was a teenager and he stole the Elucidator from Jonah?” Jordan asked, whipping his head back and forth between Doreen and Tattoo Face and the screen, which now showed only an empty room.

  Jordan was confused anyway: How could Second have been twenty-six back in the twenty-first century, if he had stolen the Elucidator from Jonah and left from the ravine as a teenager? How could the FBI have rescued him from the ravine when he’d already escaped on his own?

  “Gary and Hodge didn’t see that,” Deep Voice told him. “Because it hadn’t happened yet when they went back to intervene in Second’s life at the FBI headquarters.”

  “But he was twenty-six then,” Jordan said. “He was only—what? Thirteen?—when we saw him disappear.”

  It seemed perfectly logical to him that Second would be twenty-six after he was thirteen. But maybe Jordan shouldn’t rely on that, considering how old his own parents were right now.

  “Second grabbing Jonah’s Elucidator is probably going to make it so that none of what you just saw actually happens,” Deep Voice said, waving his arm in the general direction of the screen. “The changes just haven’t been released yet, so we can still see what would have been.”