Caught

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Katherine put her hand on Emily’s shoulder, ready to push her down. At the same time, Katherine reached out her other hand toward Mileva, to help her back up.

  Jonah had a sudden flash of memory: him and Katherine and Angela standing on the doorstep at Chip’s house, all of them linked together. And then, a split second later, Jonah and Katherine floating back through time. He still didn’t understand why that had happened. And that had been four time travelers linked together in the midst of stopped time. But what if the same effect worked when it was only three?

  “No! Katherine! Stop!” Jonah screamed.

  Maybe there wasn’t time for her to hear him and understand and actually do what he said. Katherine wasn’t that great at doing what he said under the best of circumstances. So Jonah scrambled forward, reaching for Katherine to yank her back.

  Jonah wasn’t planning on tripping.

  The toe of his shoe caught on the edge of the carpet, and he started falling toward the others. He saw Katherine tighten her grip on Emily’s shoulder, steadying herself. Katherine stopped reaching for Mileva and grabbed Jonah’s arm instead. Mileva reached out for him too—defensively, because she probably thought he was going to smash down onto her.

  “No!” Jonah tried to scream. “Don’t touch me! Let go!”

  The words were ripped from his mouth even as he felt Mileva’s hand on his wrist, even as everything went black, even as he found himself falling and falling and falling . . . .

  Falling through time.

  Jonah had just caused the very thing he was trying to prevent.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “Oops,” Jonah said.

  “You! Are! An! Idiot!” Katherine screamed.

  “Okay, okay, agreed,” Jonah said meekly. “Can we just move on from you telling me what a huge mistake I made, to figuring out what we’re going to do next? Are we all here together? Were we all holding on?”

  He squinted into the darkness. Katherine was squeezing his arm a little too tightly on his left, and he twisted his wrist around to ease her grip. Just in case, he grabbed onto her arm, too. That gave him enough confidence to lean out and peer past her. He could just barely make out another person on her other side.

  “Emily?” he called. “Mileva?”

  “I’m here.” Emily’s voice came from the dark shape beyond Katherine. “But—I wasn’t holding onto Mileva. I was just touching her hair. Did we lose her?”

  Now, see, that’s the way to act, Jonah wanted to tell Katherine. Emily’s really upset and worried about Mileva, but she’s not screaming or anything. She didn’t even raise her voice.

  Emily being so calm helped keep Jonah calm too. He looked around cautiously.

  “Oh,” he said after a moment. “Mileva’s right beside me. Mileva?”

  Everything had been a jumble from the moment Jonah tripped on the carpet, but he could kind of reconstruct the whole sequence now. They’d started falling the instant Mileva had touched his wrist—that must have been the last link connecting the four of them. But at some point after they’d begun falling through time, Mileva had let go.

  Now Jonah grabbed her hand, just to be sure she didn’t float away.

  “Mileva?” he repeated.

  He shook her gently. She didn’t answer. Her legs and her free arm flopped helplessly, as limp as a rag doll’s.

  Jonah lost his Emily-influenced sense of calm.

  “What happened to her?” Jonah asked frantically. “What if—what if this killed her?”

  He was so sorry for tripping. He was so sorry for everything he’d done wrong leading up to this moment. Did it go back to him and Katherine deciding to walk out of school, back in their own time?

  Sheesh, what if all those stupid lectures at school are right, and skipping school is the first step toward really awful stuff? Like killing Einstein’s wife?

  He realized he couldn’t really believe that Mileva was dead, if he was thinking such flippant thoughts.

  Emily—who seemed to be a natural at the weightlessness of floating through time—swung around and felt Mileva’s wrist. Then she put her hand under Mileva’s nose.

  “She has a pulse and she’s still breathing,” Emily said. “So she’s not dead. I think she just fainted—you know, with being pregnant, she’s more susceptible to that. Remember, she fainted out in the woods, too.”

  “You should be a doctor,” Jonah said admiringly.

  “Because I can tell if someone’s alive or dead?” Emily asked.

  “No, because you stay calm in emergencies—unlike certain other people,” Jonah said, turning to glare at Katherine.

  “Well, if certain people weren’t constantly causing disasters by being total klutzes—,” Katherine began.

  “Oh, hey, can you save that for later?” Emily asked. “We’re traveling through time again, aren’t we? Do either of you have any idea what we’re headed toward? Can we come up with any sort of plan?”

  It’s easier just to argue, Jonah thought.

  But Emily made him feel like a misbehaving little kid. He dutifully switched to looking around. The freaky emptiness of Outer Time was familiar to him now, but it was still unnerving.

  “We’re definitely going a lot farther than we did when Mileva skipped us ahead to Albert’s arrival,” Jonah said. “That was so quick, I barely even felt the time travel.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right,” Emily said. “But are we going forward in time, or back?”

  “I—can’t tell,” Jonah said, and that was unnerving too. “What do you think, Katherine?”

  That was his olive branch, letting her have the chance to act smarter than him.

  But she shook her head.

  “I can’t tell either,” she said. “Doesn’t it kind of feel like we’re falling sideways?”

  “That’s not going forward or back in time, then,” Jonah said. “That’s going—”

  “Out of time,” Katherine finished for him. “To a time hollow.” She’d accepted his peace offering. And she seemed to like the conclusion they’d both reached. Even in the near-complete darkness, Jonah could see a grin on her face. “Don’t you think it will probably be the time hollow where JB—”

  But before she could finish her sentence, the air rushed up at them, the sensation of smashing through time accelerated, and all sorts of strange forces tore at Jonah’s body. And then all four of them landed in a heap.

  Jonah just wanted a moment to catch his breath, but Katherine was already lifting her head, looking around.

  “Yes!” she cried out. “I was right! We found JB! We’re in the same time hollow as him!”

  That was enough to get Jonah to raise his head and look too. It kind of made sense. If JB had been watching Albert Einstein in 1903, then he must have been in the nearest time hollow. That would be a logical place for Jonah and the others to fall to, if they had to fall out of time.

  As Jonah began craning his neck, an unpleasant thought struck him, one that kept him from cheering as loudly as Katherine. JB had told them that he was trapped in a time hollow. Would Jonah and the others just end up being trapped too?

  JB will figure out what to do, Jonah told himself. Now that we’re all together again, we’ll be fine.

  Then Jonah got his first glimpse of JB.

  JB was sitting with his back to Jonah and the others. He hadn’t turned around at the sound of four people falling into his room, thudding against the ground. He hadn’t turned around at Katherine’s triumphant shriek, “Yes! I was right!” He didn’t turn around now, even as Jonah cried out, “JB? What’s wrong? Can’t you hear us?”

  In fact, JB was sitting completely still. His shoulders didn’t rise and fall with even the faintest hint of breathing. No muscle twitched; no foot tapped; not even a single hair on his head shifted position in even the tiniest breeze.

  Jonah didn’t know how it was possible, in a time hollow. Or how this could have happened to JB.

  But it certainly looked as if time had stopped for him
, too.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “No!” Katherine screamed. “JB! Wake up!”

  “He isn’t sleeping,” Jonah said wearily.

  Awkwardly, he managed to stand up and weave toward JB. Jonah couldn’t have said if it was timesickness that made him feel so sluggish, or just shock. He waved his hand in front of JB’s unseeing eyes. Nothing. JB looked just like Albert Einstein had, frozen back in 1903, or like Jonah’s science teacher had, frozen in the twenty-first century. JB’s mouth was open, as if he’d been stopped in the midst of speaking. His brown eyes seemed to be focused very precisely, but the pupils didn’t shrink or grow even when Jonah shaded JB’s eyes with his hand or pulled his hand back completely.

  “Is he dead?” Emily asked, in such a small, careful voice that it jolted Jonah.

  “Oh—no,” Jonah said. At least they had that to be grateful for. “I’m pretty sure time has just stopped for him. Somehow.”

  “But we’re in a time hollow, aren’t we?” Katherine asked. “How can time stop in a time hollow? Time doesn’t exist here, remember? It can’t stop or start or move or—or do anything!”

  She was screaming again. She sprang up and practically shoved Jonah out of the way so she could grab JB by the shoulders and shake him.

  “Wake up!” she shrieked right in his ear.

  JB didn’t move. In fact, his body seemed to just absorb Katherine’s shaking and her shouting into its stillness.

  I’ve heard of antimatter, Jonah thought. Is there such a thing as anti-motion?

  “I think you just woke up Mileva,” Emily said softly.

  “Oh, sorry,” Katherine said, and actually had the grace to look a little ashamed.

  Emily crouched down beside Mileva and brushed her hair out of her face.

  “Are you okay?” Emily asked. Dimly, Jonah realized that she’d switched back to speaking German for Mileva.

  “No worse than usual,” Mileva said. She coughed, clearing her throat. “I don’t do pregnancy very well.” She sat up gingerly, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Actually—I kind of feel better than usual. What did you do to me? Where are we? And”—she gazed around anxiously at the blank room around them, completely empty except for JB in his chair—“where’s Albert?”

  Jonah exchanged glances with Katherine. He wondered if they should at least tell Mileva that just as people in a time hollow couldn’t feel hungry or thirsty, they probably couldn’t feel nauseated or dizzy or faint either.

  No. It was dangerous to tell Mileva anything.

  “Maybe you should just lie down and go back to sleep,” he suggested to Mileva. “Not . . . learn things that might mess up time even worse.”

  “Jonah,” Emily said gently. “She already knows about time travel. She figured out how to use the Elucidator.”

  “Better than we did,” Katherine muttered.

  “So don’t you think we might need Mileva to really know what’s going on, so she can help us decide what to do?” Emily finished.

  Jonah frowned. He looked down at JB. Jonah knew JB hadn’t moved a hair in the past few seconds—hadn’t moved at all since Jonah and the others had arrived. But it still seemed as if JB’s gaze had taken on an accusatory cast, as if he were already blaming Jonah for mistakes he hadn’t even made yet.

  For most of Jonah’s first trip through time, JB had lectured again and again about how time needed to be left undisturbed, kept or restored as much as possible to its original state. Through their next few journeys through time, JB had come to care more about keeping the people he loved alive, rather than preserving the original flow of time. But what did it mean that he’d sent Emily back in time after promising to stop all time travel until it was safe again?

  Had anything that Jonah witnessed in the year 1903 seemed safe?

  “I just wish we knew what JB would want us to do,” Jonah muttered.

  “Why? Can’t you make a decision on your own?” Katherine challenged.

  Jonah shook his head.

  “She’s Albert Einstein’s wife,” he said, pointing at Mileva. “If she tells him even one thing she finds out about time travel, don’t you think that could change the entire twentieth century? And everything after that? Like—oh, no. What if she’s the reason that time froze in the twenty-first century?”

  “What if she is?” Katherine argued. “The twenty-first century is already frozen. The year 1903 is already frozen. This time hollow is already frozen. What more can go wrong?”

  Mileva was sitting up.

  “You forget that I am also a scientist in my own right,” she said, in a dignified voice. “And—don’t you think I would do everything in my power to protect my own child?” She laid a hand on Emily’s leg. She laid her other hand over her stomach. “Both my children?”

  Jonah realized that the hand that Mileva held over her stomach was still clutching the papers that Albert had handed her back in 1903. The papers covered with math formulations that she was supposed to check to help her “cheer up.”

  “We probably do need to go about this in a methodical, scientific way,” Jonah admitted grudgingly. “Think. What if it wasn’t just the danger of Albert seeing his daughter that stopped time back in 1903? What if it was something about those papers that was a problem, too? Like—that Mileva wasn’t supposed to see them?”

  “You want to look at these?” Mileva asked, holding the papers out toward Jonah. “See if they’re dangerous? You’re welcome to check the math yourself.”

  Was she being sarcastic or trying to be helpful? It didn’t matter—even from several feet away, Jonah could see that the papers were covered with the same kind of incomprehensible scrawl that he and Katherine had seen back at Albert and Mileva’s Bern apartment.

  “I’m not good enough at math,” Jonah admitted. “Neither’s Katherine. Emily?”

  Emily shook her head.

  “I love math,” she said. “But I don’t think even my teachers would be able to make heads or tails of that.” She pointed ruefully at the scrawl on the top sheet of paper.

  Jonah walked over and took the papers from Mileva’s hand. She didn’t resist. He put them down in JB’s lap.

  “Let’s try to figure out how to unfreeze JB,” Jonah said. “Then he can make sense of these.”

  Mileva opened her mouth, but shut it quickly.

  Katherine took a step back, away from Jonah and JB.

  “Maybe we should all be careful to stay apart from one another,” she said. “There’s something about time travelers clumping together in stopped time . . . Who knows what we’d fall into next?”

  “It seems like four people being linked together is the magic number,” Jonah mumbled. “We were always okay in stopped time until we had four people holding on to each other.”

  “Why?” Mileva asked. “Why four?”

  Jonah shrugged.

  “I’m picturing it the same way my science teacher explained gravity,” he said. “He said to picture a bowling ball on a trampoline, and marbles rolling down toward the dent made by the bowling ball . . . The bowling ball stretches everything out of shape. Maybe certain events in time travel kind of work the same way.”

  “But are four time travelers linking together the bowling ball in that analogy?” Mileva asked. “Or are we just marbles being acted on by forces we can’t control?”

  Jonah couldn’t actually answer that.

  “It feels like we broke through the whole trampoline—or space or time or whatever it’s supposed to represent,” Katherine muttered. “We broke through twice.”

  “Jonah,” Emily said, “I think Einstein was the person who came up with that analogy about the bowling ball on the trampoline.”

  Jonah winced.

  “You have to promise you’ll never tell him,” Jonah told Mileva sternly. “If he comes out with his theories at the wrong time—it could mess up everything.”

  “You want me to make promises about bowling balls?” Mileva asked incredulously. “When I’m thinking I
may never see my Albert again in my life?”

  She had a point.

  “Okay, okay,” Katherine said, holding out her hands in a calming gesture. Jonah noticed that she still stayed several steps back. “We just need to slow down and think about everything. Mileva, you still have the Elucidator, right? Jonah, can you check and see where JB’s Elucidator is? Even if it’s frozen too, maybe we can get the two Elucidators to, I don’t know, communicate with each other. That’ll help us figure out why time stopped again.”

  “All right,” Jonah said.

  He hated taking orders from his sister, but he had to admit he should have thought of looking for JB’s Elucidator himself.

  He leaned down and looked in JB’s hands. He felt in JB’s shirt pocket, in his pants pockets, beside him in the chair.

  Nothing.

  Feeling a little creepy, Jonah bent down and felt around JB’s socks and shoes. He felt along JB’s belt. He patted down his shirt and sleeves.

  Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  “He doesn’t have an Elucidator with him,” Jonah announced.

  “What?” Katherine asked. “He has to! He was talking to us from this time hollow—”

  “You want to see for yourself?” Jonah asked, stepping back, holding his hands out, giving Katherine a chance. “An airport security pat-down couldn’t find an Elucidator on JB! He doesn’t have one!”

  “Can’t we just look at this one?” Mileva asked, holding out the Elucidator she’d been keeping in her pocket. “This is what you’re calling an Elucidator, right? Isn’t one enough to help us?”

  Something changed in the moment that Mileva pulled out the Elucidator.

  Jonah was looking in her direction. Since they were in the time hollow now, not a particular time period where any disturbance to regular time could ruin everything, he wondered: Was this the moment to just rush over to her and grab the Elucidator from her hand? To take control?