So JB can still remember complicated time regulations, but he really can’t remember my original identity? Jonah wondered. “How about you translate that into regular English?” he asked.
Kid JB nodded, some of his normal confidence returning.
“In almost every case, this Elucidator will only respond to my voice—my normal adult voice,” he said, peering hopefully down at the Elucidator in his hand, even as he strained to make his voice sound deeper. Evidently the Elucidator wasn’t convinced, because kid JB shrugged and put it back into his pocket. “But because Angela was the time rookie in my care, when we really were in a life-threatening situation, the Elucidator took orders from her instead.”
Angela seemed to be thinking hard about that one.
“So, hey,” Jonah said. “I’ll threaten to kill Angela, and she’ll wish for an Elucidator all her own to save her, and then we’ll have a way to solve all our problems.”
JB shook his head.
“You can’t manipulate it that easily,” he said. “The Elucidator knows you wouldn’t really kill Angela. It has to be a ‘true, credible threat.’ ”
Jonah thought he was quoting again.
Angela’s eyes got wide.
“So we really were about to crash into the ocean,” she said. “And Charles Lindbergh—what happened to him after we were saved?”
JB put his hands against his face in dismay and darted his eyes toward Jonah.
Is he watching me to see if I’ll just suddenly stop existing? Jonah wondered. Because if Charles Lindbergh was my biological father, and we changed time to make him crash into the ocean before I was even born—then would I still exist?
Jonah crossed his arms and clutched his own biceps. He felt normal. His biceps weren’t exactly bulging and muscular, but that wasn’t any different than usual.
“I don’t know what happened to Charles Lindbergh next,” JB said in a panicky voice. “I don’t know if he survived, or . . .”
“Let’s look!” Angela said, pointing to the wall full of monitors.
Jonah realized that the screen that had contained the view of the Spirit of St. Louis now held nothing but random dark-and-light pixels, even as the rest of the monitors kept showing endless loops of his friends and his sister vanishing.
“Angela, we can’t,” kid JB said, his face twisted with worry again. “I don’t trust these monitors. No matter how carefully I set the coding, we could end up dangling from that little plane again.”
“So? I’ll just scream for help and the Elucidator will rescue us again,” kid Angela said.
“And then, even if Charles Lindbergh survived his last encounter with us, this time we really could end up killing him?” kid JB asked.
Jonah could see why this might not be a good idea.
“Then let’s go to some other time in Lindbergh’s life after that, to see if he’s there or not,” kid Angela argued. “We have to find out! What about—what about when he lands in Paris? It was kind of like a stampede; everyone was so eager to get close to Lindbergh. So that would be life-threatening too. People were in danger of dying. So that way I’d scream and we’d get back here right away.”
Angela’s using “It’s life-threatening!” as an argument for doing this? Jonah marveled.
She would never have done that as an adult.
JB wasn’t disagreeing. He had his head tilted sideways, considering.
“In the early days of time travel, Lindbergh landing in Paris was one of the moments in history that a lot of people wanted to go visit,” kid JB said. “They loved the excitement, the sense of triumph—it was one of those moments of pure joy. . . .”
“Okay, that’s even better,” Jonah said. “So why don’t we just go meet up with one of those time travelers? We could hitchhike back home with them. Or ask to borrow their Elucidator.”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” kid JB said. He started punching codes into the keyboard on the wall. “Except I wasn’t going to ask. Anybody ready to play Grand Theft Elucidator?”
SIXTEEN
Jonah stood with the other two in front of the wall full of monitors. They’d taken a short break because JB had suddenly realized that they couldn’t appear in 1920s Paris in twenty-first-century blue jeans and T-shirts. Until they got a working Elucidator, they wouldn’t have the protection of invisibility.
Fortunately, it turned out that there was a small stash of what JB called “emergency costumes” at the back of the cave. Now Jonah and kid JB were both wearing light pullover sweaters; a weird kind of pants that ended at their knees; and stiff, uncomfortable brown shoes. Angela had on what she called a “flapper” dress. It just looked baggy and shapeless to Jonah.
“Ready?” JB said, stepping toward the keyboard in the wall. “I can’t do projections ahead of time, and I can’t target our landing position very precisely, so we may have to react quickly when we arrive.”
“We know,” Jonah said impatiently. “You’ve already said that ten times.”
Had becoming thirteen again turned JB into an even bigger worrywart than he had been as an adult?
Or was he repeating himself because he couldn’t remember what he’d said before?
“Oh, right,” JB said sheepishly, in a way that made it seem like he knew what he was saying.
He started typing in the code. Jonah felt his muscles tighten up. This was like standing on the sidelines of a soccer game, on the verge of being sent in to play. Except in a soccer game Jonah only worried about messing up and letting the other team get the ball. This time he was worried about ruining all of history and making time collapse and not being able to rescue Katherine or fix his parents.
Oh yeah—and dying. He was worried about dying, too.
JB stepped back from the wall. The monitor that had sent them into the past to cling to Lindbergh’s plane was coming back to life again.
Oh no, Jonah suddenly thought. Did JB or Angela think about what would happen if the monitor sends us back in a way that has us on the plane again? What if us being there makes Lindbergh crash into a crowd of thousands of people?
There wasn’t time to ask. As soon as the scene on the monitor came into focus—showing hordes of people packed together near an array of bright lights—Jonah’s head began spinning and he felt himself falling.
“Tried to aim for . . . back of crowd,” JB mumbled beside him. Or maybe it was above or below him. Jonah’s sense of direction had vanished.
It seemed like only a moment later that Jonah felt solid earth beneath him.
Timesickness . . . shouldn’t be as bad this time, he told himself. Since I was already in the 1920s before . . .
His senses of sight and hearing were coming in and out, but he could feel someone pulling on his sweater.
“Get up! Not enough room . . . to lie on ground!” kid JB was commanding him.
Jonah wasn’t sure his legs would work—especially now that being out of the time cave had reawakened the pain from hitting his knee on Lindbergh’s plane over the Atlantic, and his older wounds from being shot back in 1918. But it wasn’t just JB tugging on him. Dozens of hands were yanking him upright.
“Such a shame! People fainting with the excitement!” someone yelled near his ear.
“And the waiting!” someone else screamed back.
The crowd surged around him, filling in the space Jonah had taken up when he’d been flat on the ground. Jonah felt dizzy enough that he thought he might faint for real. But even if he did, he didn’t think he could actually fall to the ground—he was packed in too tightly along with the rest of the crowd.
Someone said “waiting”—does that mean Lindbergh’s not here yet? Jonah wondered.
Had the monitor sent them back a little too early? Or was Lindbergh never going to arrive because Jonah, JB, and Angela had made him crash into the ocean?
Jonah blinked a few times to get his eyes to work right, and he pounded his hand against the side of his head in hopes that that would make his ears work be
tter. He made himself think about what language the people around him were speaking—was it French? Were they definitely in France? Having the ability to understand all languages in all time periods sometimes made it hard for Jonah to remember that he wasn’t just constantly hearing English.
On his third blink Jonah’s eyes cleared up completely, and he instantly wished they hadn’t.
Now he could see that beside him, kid JB and kid Angela were gazing around with looks of absolute dismay on their faces.
And streaming past all of them were hordes of tracers.
It was like a stampede of ghosts, the wispy versions of thousands of Parisians flowing through and past Jonah, and through and past every single one of the real people standing around him. The ghostly tracers all looked triumphant and overjoyed—maybe like fans storming a football field after their team had just won a national championship.
The real Parisians standing around Jonah looked hopeful and expectant but maybe also a little worried.
And the real people and the tracers are different because . . . , Jonah thought.
He rose up on his tiptoes and looked in the direction all the tracers were running: Yes, there was a small tracer plane descending toward the ground, appearing out of the night sky.
But it was only a tracer. No actual plane was anywhere in sight.
Because Charles Lindbergh was supposed to be in sight now, Jonah thought. He’s supposed to be landing, and all the Parisians who have been waiting for him are supposed to be storming the runway, and . . . and . . . he’s supposed to have survived!
Jonah turned his head toward kid JB, ready to say, Is this our fault? Did we kill Charles Lindbergh?
But just then a cheer went up. It was like everyone in the crowd was speaking with a single voice, everyone screaming together, “There he is!”
Jonah looked up and saw a real plane overhead. It truly was the plane Charles Lindbergh had piloted across the Atlantic. He’d made it to Paris—even with the little distraction of three time travelers surprising him in the midst of his trip.
But Jonah had no time to say or do anything, not even to cry, “There he is!” along with everyone else. Because instantly the crowd was pressing against him even tighter. The people behind him were rushing forward, and the people in front of him had nowhere to go because of all the people in front of them.
“Hold on! Just wait a minute!” Jonah tried to scream at the people behind them.
But maybe he accidently yelled in English rather than French—or maybe they couldn’t hear him—because the people from behind just kept pressing forward.
Jonah still wasn’t sure that his legs were working very well yet, but it almost didn’t seem to matter. The pressure of the crowd carried him along.
“Jonah! JB! We’ve got to stay together!” kid Angela screamed.
Jonah reached out his arm and grabbed for Angela’s hand or arm or something. He caught her by the sleeve and the material ripped away in his hands. But then Angela wrapped her hand around his wrist, and he was able to wrap his hand around hers. He couldn’t actually see the rest of her because of the crowd, but he was so glad she had darker skin than the other people around them. At least he knew he was holding on to the right person.
Jonah reached out his other hand and somehow managed to grab on to kid JB’s arm.
“Get us out of here!” Angela was screaming. “Get us out of here!”
Nothing changed. The crowd just kept surging around them.
So . . . the Elucidator doesn’t really believe our lives are in danger? Jonah wondered.
Maybe this should have made him feel better, but it didn’t.
Still a little numb from the timesickness, Jonah let himself be carried forward with the rest of the crowd. Back in 1600 he’d had a moment of almost drowning, and this was the same sensation: He couldn’t control which way the crowd carried him any more than he could have controlled the storm-tossed waves off Roanoke Island.
“Try . . . looking . . . around . . . ,” JB said, which was ridiculous, because Jonah wasn’t even sure he could control the direction his head was pointed. He caught glimpses of the sky, the ground, the elbow of the man in front of him, someone’s cap lying on the ground . . .
The next time Jonah got his head turned toward the place where he’d seen Lindbergh’s plane before, it was much lower in the sky, and Jonah could actually read the words “Spirit of St. Louis” on the side. Lindbergh was leaning out the window and yelling. Jonah couldn’t tell what he was saying, but the pilot didn’t look happy at the sight of all the people welcoming him to Paris. He waved his arm, and it wasn’t a Hey! Good to see you! Glad to be here! type of wave. It looked more like he was trying to tell the crowd, Get out of the way!
Oh, um . . . are there so many people down here that there’s nowhere for Lindbergh to land? Jonah wondered.
Lindbergh’s plane came closer and closer.
Does he maybe not even have enough fuel left that he could go somewhere else to land? Jonah thought.
Some in the crowd apparently understood what Lindbergh’s wave meant—or maybe they heard what he’d yelled—because they began scurrying off to the side, out of the direct range of the plane. But they just collided with others in the crowd who didn’t understand, who just wanted to keep running toward Lindbergh to be the first to give him a hero’s welcome.
And then maybe even those people understood, because the area around Jonah seemed to empty out. Jonah tugged JB and Angela closer and yelled to both of them, “We’ve got to run to the side! Out of the way!”
They both squinted at Jonah like they couldn’t quite hear him, or couldn’t quite understand—or maybe couldn’t quite get their bodies to do what they wanted either. Maybe, without the crowd carrying them, they couldn’t even walk well, let alone run. Angela half turned toward Jonah. And then Jonah could tell that she was looking past him; her eyes got bigger, and she put her hand over her mouth like she was too terrified to scream.
Jonah whirled around as best he could to see what she was looking at.
There, directly behind him—only inches away and speeding closer—was the whirring propeller of Lindbergh’s plane.
SEVENTEEN
So this is how I’m going to die, Jonah thought.
Beside him Angela screamed, “Get us out of here! Take us back to the cave!”
Jonah squeezed his eyes together because he didn’t want to see the propeller hitting him or JB or Angela. He felt a floating sensation.
When he opened his eyes again, he really was back in the time cave.
“That . . . was too close,” he moaned.
“And for all that, we didn’t get an Elucidator,” JB groaned beside him.
Angela sat up woozily.
“That propeller wasn’t really that nearby, was it?” she asked.
“Oh yeah,” Jonah said, sitting up as well. “Timesickness messes up your sense of distance. So the propeller just seemed like it was seconds away from hitting us.”
“No, it really was that close,” JB said grimly. “I’d say that we had less than a second left.”
Jonah shivered even though he knew it wasn’t technically possible to feel cold in a time hollow.
“So now do we have to worry about changing time, because thousands of Parisians saw three kids vanish into thin air the minute Lindbergh landed?” Angela asked.
How could she have been less than a second away from death and shift so quickly into worrying about the effect of her actions on time?
“My guess is that there will be all sorts of fantastical stories floating around about that moment,” kid JB said. “But no one will actually believe them. There were fantastical stories about that moment anyway. I think we’re safe.”
“I saw an entire airplane vanish into thin air, and nobody believed me,” Angela muttered.
Jonah knew she was talking about the airplane that had carried Jonah and the other missing children from the past to their modern-day lives.
&nbs
p; Kid JB sat up and scooted over so he had the rock wall of the cave holding him up. He rubbed his temples, his face contorted as though he had a killer headache.
“So, okay, that didn’t work,” Jonah said. “I guess we didn’t make anything worse, and at least now we know we didn’t actually murder Charles Lindbergh. But what should we do next? We’ve got to get Katherine back!”
JB kept rubbing his temples. Angela frowned.
“Is there some other moment in Charles Lindbergh’s life we could go to?” she asked. “Someplace we know we could get an Elucidator, but we’d have a little bit more time before I’d have to scream, ‘Get us back to the time cave!’?”
JB pulled his hands back from his forehead as if just that simple motion was a huge challenge. Jonah could tell that the other boy was gritting his teeth.
“I should be able to remember more about Lindbergh,” JB moaned. “But . . .”
“But what?” Jonah asked.
JB winced.
“There’s only one other moment I can think of that might work,” kid JB said.
“That’s better than none!” Angela said. Jonah could tell that she was trying very, very hard to sound hopeful.
“There’s got to be some other way,” JB said, shaking his head as though he was fighting with himself over what to do. He squinted toward the rock wall across from him. “Maybe if . . . no, that won’t work. Or . . . no, if the time agency hasn’t come for us yet, there’s no way we can expect them to help. Or . . . no, not that either.”
A long moment passed, with kid JB just staring at the wall.
Jonah racked his brain, but he knew so little about Charles Lindbergh that he didn’t expect to think of anything. He couldn’t think of any other solution that wasn’t connected to Lindbergh either.
Because he’s the one who stole Katherine, he thought stubbornly. Because we don’t just need to find a working Elucidator—we also need to see Lindbergh with Gary and Hodge, to find out what “deal” Lindbergh was supposed to seal by carrying off Katherine.
“If you know of even one thing that will work, then that’s what we need to do,” Jonah told JB. “Let’s stop wasting time and just do it!”
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