Caught

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “Besides, aren’t you worried that having me travel through time again would just mess things up all over again?” Mileva asked, and now there was almost a teasing tone to her voice.

  The teasing didn’t fool Jonah.

  “After everything you’ve been through, after everything you’ve seen, how can you just . . . let it end?” Jonah asked.

  Mileva put her hand over her stomach.

  “End?” she said. “End? I have a new baby on the way. I have a husband who’s about to have the most amazing year in science that anybody’s ever had. I’ll get to share that with him. I’m only twenty-seven. Some would say that my whole life lies ahead of me.”

  “But you know . . . you know all the bad things that are going to happen to you,” Jonah whispered. “After 1905, after Albert’s famous . . .”

  “And I can’t change any of them, right?” Mileva said. “Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me all along? Didn’t we agree from the very start that I would sacrifice myself to make sure that Emily has a chance at a good life, and Hans Albert has a chance at a good life, and Tete has, well, at least a chance to live . . . ? Isn’t that what any good mother would do?”

  They had agreed on that. Jonah had known from the start that Mileva intended to go back to live out her original life, pretending at every turn that she knew nothing of time travel. That was the only way to get Albert to forget split time and focus only on the ideas he would have had in original time.

  But, staring into Mileva’s eyes, suddenly Jonah realized that he’d been as oblivious as Albert Einstein. He’d been so focused on the technicalities; he hadn’t understood the big picture.

  Mileva intended to relive all of it. The misery, the depression, the pain, the sorrow . . . what she intended was the equivalent of someone falling on a sword to save her children. But hers would be the slowest and most agonizing of deaths: more than forty years of giving up. Letting go. Avoiding practically every joy, killing almost every possibility for happiness.

  Suddenly Jonah saw why Mileva had chosen to unfreeze him in the time hollow, rather than Katherine or Emily. Mileva had probably thought that Katherine or Emily would come to understand all this too soon. She’d thought that Katherine or Emily, as females, would have too much empathy for a mother’s dilemma.

  Mileva had been counting on Jonah to be as oblivious as Albert Einstein. She was counting on Jonah to be as heartless toward people in the past as JB had once been.

  But Jonah wasn’t like that. He couldn’t be.

  “No, Mileva, you can’t do this,” Jonah said, shaking his head. “It’s not fair. There’s got to be some other way.”

  “I’m married to arguably the most influential man of the twentieth century. Time magazine is going to name him the man of the century,” Mileva said. “If I change anything else—who can say how much that will ruin in time? Believe me, I checked all my options. I ran through all the possibilities. I don’t have any other choice.”

  Her voice was heavy with resignation and despair—the same kind of despair he’d already watched older versions of Mileva struggle with on the screen back in the time hollow.

  “Now, go,” Mileva said. “Leave me to my misery.”

  She shoved at his hand, pushing him away.

  Jonah caught her wrist instead. He flipped her hand over and slipped his away—leaving the Elucidator in her palm.

  “Keep trying to think of options,” Jonah said. “Don’t give up. And when you think of something, use the Elucidator to escape.”

  Mileva stared down at the imitation compass. She brushed a finger against the painstakingly carved surface.

  “Jonah, no, it’d be too much temptation,” she whispered. “In a weak moment I might give in and do something awful . . .”

  “You’re too strong for that,” Jonah said firmly. “And—you love your kids and Albert too much. I’m not going to leave you without any options. Wouldn’t it be awful if three seconds after I left, you thought of an even better solution, but you couldn’t do anything about it because you didn’t have an Elucidator?”

  He reached out and curled her fingers inward, one by one, so she had a firm grip on the wooden case. He glanced back at Albert, still buried in his papers.

  Then Jonah let go.

  “Good-bye, Mileva,” Jonah said. “Elucidator, send me back to the time hollow. But you stay here with Mileva. Take good care of her . . .”

  His voice had already started to echo, as everything about 1903 disappeared.

  FORTY-THREE

  JB’s going to kill me, Jonah thought, as he whirled through Outer Time.

  He couldn’t find it within himself to have any regrets.

  I had to leave Mileva with the Elucidator, Jonah thought. I had to. If JB doesn’t understand—well, that’s his problem, not mine.

  Jonah landed on the cold, bland tile of the time hollow, and immediately four people tackled him.

  No, not tackled—hugged. It was just a little hard to tell the difference.

  “Jonah, we were so worried about you!” Katherine shrieked.

  “Is Mileva okay?” Emily asked.

  “Did Outer Time look healthy again as you were traveling through?” Hadley asked.

  “Did the plan work?” JB asked.

  Jonah shoved Katherine’s elbow out of his left ear and Hadley’s beard out of his right eye.

  “You’re all unfrozen, aren’t you?” Jonah asked. “You tell me if the plan worked!”

  Hadley and JB exchanged glances over Jonah’s head.

  “We’ll have to check in with all the other time agents, check all the relevant time coordinates,” JB told Hadley.

  “Right,” Hadley said, already tapping instructions into his Elucidator.

  It seemed as if Jonah barely had time to blink before every wall of the time hollow was covered with digital charts and graphs and long columns of numbers. It reminded Jonah of the kind of high-tech military control rooms he’d seen in movies.

  Unfortunately, the movies where he’d seen those kind of control rooms were usually the ones where there’d been some kind of disaster, like aliens invading or an asteroid knocking the Earth toward the sun, putting all humanity in danger of extinction.

  “Mileva and I did the only thing we could think of,” Jonah said. “I mean, she thought of it. She’s really smart. I bet if she’d been born in a different time period, people would say, ‘You’re as smart as Mileva Einstein!’ instead of ‘You’re as smart as Albert Einstein!’”

  “Jonah,” JB said sternly, as he scanned six charts and three graphs simultaneously. “She was born when she was born. But”—he pointed at one of the graphs—“that line right there shows the probability that the next time I return to my own native time, people will say ‘as smart as Mileva Einstein.’ About as often as they say ‘as smart as Albert Einstein.’”

  It was a really long line.

  “Then she does manage to escape,” Jonah breathed.

  JB was still staring at the charts.

  “Escape?” he said absentmindedly. “No, of course not. How could she? Mileva’s going to be famous because people will know what she just did with you, copying the tracer pages and convincing Albert those were his current original thoughts and—” JB broke off and turned and looked directly at Jonah. “Is there any reason you think Mileva might have escaped? Escaped what? To where? And how?”

  His gaze dropped to Jonah’s hands.

  Jonah decided to go into full confession mode. He held up his hands, showing exactly how empty they were.

  “You . . . left . . . the Elucidator . . . behind?” JB said faintly.

  “Well, it’s not like I just lost it,” Jonah said defensively.

  “You purposely gave a time-native a second-generation, top-of-the-line, freestyle Elucidator?” JB asked.

  Even as JB spoke, he was calling up a scene on the wall: Jonah’s last moments in 1903. Jonah leaving the Elucidator in Mileva’s hand and saying good-bye.

  “S
he’s not just any ‘time-native’!” Jonah protested. “She’s Mileva Einstein! She—”

  He had so many arguments tangled in his head he couldn’t pick which one he wanted to use first. She just unfroze all of time. Doesn’t she deserve some sort of reward? Or, You saw the life she was going to have to lead. Would you force her to live like that? What he settled on was, “Don’t you care?”

  JB flashed Jonah a disgusted look.

  “If I cared that much about every person in all of time, then how could I let anyone stay in misery?” he asked.

  But he didn’t seem to be paying attention to his argument, or to Jonah. He was too busy scanning the vast displays in front of him.

  “She didn’t use the Elucidator even once that first year,” he muttered.

  “I’ve just checked 1905, too,” Hadley said behind him. “No change.”

  JB let out a big sigh.

  “Okay, that was the big worry,” he said.

  “See? See? She’s not going to do anything to mess things up!” Jonah crowed.

  “Check the other time periods of Albert’s huge influence and revelations. What about 1915? Or 1919? Or 1939?” JB asked Hadley.

  Katherine and Emily crowded near him, watching.

  “Clean,” Hadley reported barely a moment later.

  “See, everything’s going to be all right,” Jonah said, with slightly more confidence than he felt.

  Though he was thinking, So everything’s going to be all right—for everyone except Mileva.

  An alarm started going off on the other side of the room.

  “What year is it?” JB asked resignedly. “Which year does Mileva ruin?”

  Hadley dashed over to a new scene that had appeared on the wall, below flashing lights.

  “Looks early twenty-first century,” he said. “Not Mileva’s native time period. The setting is some kind of school. Kids have cell phones, there are computers along the wall, but the teacher’s still using a dry-erase marker—no, he just dropped his marker . . .”

  “That’s not Mileva’s time period, then,” Jonah said. “That’s ours!”

  “And Jonah, isn’t that your science teacher?” Katherine said, peering at the wall. “What’s his name? Mr. Stanley?”

  Jonah rushed behind her.

  “Yeah, that’s the class I was in when time stopped,” he said. “You know, JB, right before Angela picked us up and took us to Chip’s house . . .”

  “Oh, no!” Hadley said. “Everything else Mileva resolved, and it’s all going to be for nothing if Jonah and Katherine aren’t back where they belong when time resumes—”

  “What’s the big deal?” Katherine said. “Can’t you let us get back into position and then start time up again?”

  Hadley and JB were shaking their heads quite violently.

  “Things don’t work that way when so much of time has been stopped,” JB said. “We don’t have that much control. You’ve got to get back into place as soon as you can, and we’ll just have to hope—”

  Jonah didn’t even hear the rest of JB’s sentence. Because even as he spoke, JB was wrenching the Elucidator from Hadley’s grip and hitting buttons.

  And before Jonah had a chance to take a breath, he and Katherine were pitching forward through time.

  FORTY-FOUR

  They landed back on Chip’s porch, right beside Angela, right in front of Chip. Angela had her hand on Jonah’s shoulder, and Katherine had her fingers against Chip’s hand, and both Jonah and Katherine immediately jerked back and away from their friends.

  “No! We’ll fall!” Katherine screamed.

  “Katherine, what are you talking about?” Angela asked. “Jonah, where’d you put the Elucidator? What were you saying about JB talking on it?”

  No time at all had passed for Chip and Angela.

  Does that mean everything will be all right if we just get back to school? Jonah wondered.

  “No time to explain,” Jonah said quickly. “You’ve got to get us back to school right now!”

  “But what about—,” Angela began. She looked at Jonah and Katherine a little more closely. “You two have been in another time, haven’t you?”

  Jonah realized that Katherine’s hair was longer—his probably was too—and her T-shirt had lost most of its glittery lettering. She had a hole starting in her blue jeans. Jonah looked down at his clothes: He had grass stains and mud stains across his jeans, and one sleeve of his T-shirt hung in tatters.

  From being in the time hollow for decades? Jonah wondered. He reminded himself that clothes wouldn’t deteriorate in a time hollow, where time stood still.

  But we were in 1903 for several days, he remembered. I guess clothes show the wear and tear pretty fast when you never change them and never wash them and go climbing trees and running away from people holding torches and . . .

  Why was Katherine stepping into Chip’s house instead of running back toward the car?

  “Katherine!” Jonah cried. “Come on!”

  “I just have to make sure Chip’s okay first!” Katherine insisted. “You didn’t have another panic attack about being back in the Middle Ages, did you, Chip?”

  She was leaning in toward Chip, cradling the palm of her hand against his face.

  “Katherine!” Jonah cried. “Nobody wants to watch you two kiss!”

  Chip took a step back, yanking away from Katherine.

  “And—I’ve got the stomach flu,” he said. “Really, that’s all it is. But I don’t want you to catch it.”

  “I am not watching anyone else puke!” Jonah insisted. He tugged on Katherine’s arm. “Come on!”

  He grabbed Angela’s arm, too, and the three of them raced for the car.

  “You will tell me the whole story later on,” Angela said as they scrambled back in. “Wait—where’s the Elucidator to make this go?”

  Jonah reached over the seat and turned the key in the ignition. The engine sprang to life.

  “You don’t need the Elucidator for that anymore,” he said. “We’re back in regular time.”

  Angela turned toward Jonah, her eyes huge and horrified. Jonah could almost see her thinking, Then time’s started up again, and Jonah and Katherine are missing from their classrooms, and—what if that messes up time all over again?

  “I’ll get you back to school immediately,” Angela said.

  She slammed the car into gear and squealed her tires pulling out of the driveway.

  Jonah was acutely aware of all the movement around him as they sped toward school: Birds zoomed by overhead; leaves blew down from the autumn trees; cars stopped and started and changed lanes all around them.

  Finally Angela pulled into the school driveway, and the three Canadian geese that had landed on the pond out front were taking off again in a flurry of wings and dropped feathers. The woman in the minivan that had been suspended over the speed bumps was driving out the exit now.

  How much time had they missed? More importantly—had anyone noticed they were gone?

  Angela hit the brake as they lurched toward the front entrance.

  “You’ll have to come in with us, to sign us in,” Katherine said miserably. “We’ll have to think of some good excuse—they’ve rigged the front doors so no one can get in the building without walking through the office first.”

  “Katherine, we can’t go in through the front,” Jonah said. “There’s that security camera right there—we can’t leave a record that we were outside of the school.”

  He saw a tall shadow just inside the front door. So that was where Assistant Principal Richey really lurked, watching for truants and sneaks.

  “Down, Katherine!” Jonah cried, pushing her head below the level of the car window. He ducked his own head down out of sight, too.

  “Jonah, you know all the other doors are locked during the day,” Katherine hissed at him. “What do you want to do—break a window? Right, nobody’s going to notice that.”

  Jonah made a quick decision.

  “Driv
e on around to the side door,” he told Angela.

  “It’s going to be locked, and we’ll just waste even more time—,” Katherine complained.

  “That’s where the cook and the janitor were kissing, remember?” Jonah told Katherine. “What do you bet they have the door propped open?”

  Angela hit the accelerator.

  The cook and the janitor were nowhere in sight when they got around to the side door. But they must have just walked back into the building, because the door was just swinging shut.

  “Run!” Jonah yelled at Katherine. “Angela—”

  “I know—later,” Angela finished for him. “Now, go!”

  Jonah dashed out of the car and dived for the door. He caught the door just a split second before it clicked into place. He stood holding it barely open for just a second while he and Katherine caught their breath.

  “Just act normal,” he told her. “I don’t know how we can just slip back into class, but—”

  The sound of the bell ringing reverberated through the building. Jonah could feel the door handle vibrating in his hand.

  “Okay, that’s a good thing,” Jonah said. He hoped he was right. “This way, we can just blend in with everyone else changing classes.”

  He jerked the door all the way open and both of them slipped inside. A stampede of kids thundered through the hall in front of them.

  “Jonah, this is the eighth-grade wing,” Katherine whispered, her voice trembling.

  Jonah almost laughed. Katherine had survived time disasters in four different centuries, but she was terrified of walking through the eighth-grade hallway?

  “Yeah, well, contrary to the rumors, they do not actually eat sixth graders for lunch,” Jonah said. “You’ll be fine!”

  “Thanks a lot,” Katherine muttered, but she stepped forward into the crowd.

  Jonah took a deep breath and followed her.

  The sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade sections of Harris Middle School were laid out like spokes, each grade kept separate from the others. Jonah knew it should be a straight shot to the center of the school—the library, gym, and cafeteria—and then an easy turnoff to the seventh-grade wing. But the eighth graders who stood between him and his turnoff were huge.