And what about two kids from the twenty-first century? Jonah wondered.
And then he didn’t have time to think about such unpleasant topics, because the tracer John Hudson froze, a look of panic on his face.
“What’s his problem?” Katherine whispered. She turned to gaze in the same direction as the tracer. “Oh. Oh, no….”
Jonah looked too. At first he thought that the land around them wasn’t as flat as he’d first thought. There was a small, dark hill right in front of them.
Then the “hill” moved.
It wasn’t a hill.
It was a bear.
“Run!” Katherine shrieked.
“Er—is a bear one of those animals you should run away from? Or one where you should freeze and not show fear?” Jonah asked. He forgot he was supposed to be hunting. His mind blanked. His knees locked. He might have to freeze just because he couldn’t get his body to do anything else.
“But it’s running toward us!” Katherine screamed.
She grabbed Jonah’s arm and pulled him along, and Jonah discovered he was capable of running after all. John Hudson’s tracer turned and ran as well, and Jonah felt closer to John Hudson than ever. John Hudson had to be thinking exactly what Jonah was: I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die …
The bear growled then, a sound that seemed to shake the earth. Or maybe it was the bear’s paws hitting the ground that caused tremors.
Jonah’s vision went splotchy. He was running so hard that his head was jarring up and down; his gaze was bobbing all over the place. But he could see a dark blob ahead of them.
“That’s a cub!” Jonah screamed. “You—never—get—between—a—bear—and—its—cub!”
Jonah, Katherine, and John Hudson’s tracer all veered away from the cub at the same time. But the tracer was thinking one step ahead of Jonah: He had his rusty knife low in his hand, the blade ready.
“Knife!” Katherine screamed at Jonah. “Get out your knife!”
It’s got a three-inch handle! Jonah wanted to scream back at her. I couldn’t survive getting three inches away from those claws!
There wasn’t enough air in his lungs to say anything. But Jonah imitated the way the tracer was holding the knife.
Guess I’ve still got some hope left, Jonah thought.
He gulped in a quick breath and dared to throw a glance over his shoulder. The bear was even closer than Jonah thought. It reared up on its hind legs and roared again.
“You go that way!” Jonah yelled at Katherine. He pointed away from the cub. “I—I’ll stay and fight!”
“We fight together!” Katherine yelled back at him.
“We’ve only got one knife!”
Screaming at Katherine gave him enough courage to act. He shoved Katherine out of the way and slashed the knife blindly at the bear. Without thinking about it, he mimicked the tracer’s motion. Jonah’s knife and the tracer’s knife cut into the exact same spot on the bear’s gut.
And both knives stuck there, swallowed up in the fur.
The bear roared louder and slashed a front paw toward Jonah. Jonah didn’t have time to react. The paw came closer and closer and closer …
And then the bear whirled to the side, because Katherine was kicking its left leg.
“Divide and conquer!” Katherine screamed. “You hit the other side!”
Jonah saw something falling toward him, but it was only the tracer bear, attacking the tracer John Hudson. Jonah didn’t have time to worry about the fate of tracers when his real sister was in danger. Jonah took a step closer to the bear and reached for the knife.
I can twist it, Jonah thought. Twist the knife, distract the bear, save Katherine …
Jonah couldn’t find the knife. He settled for punching the bear’s gut.
Oh—there’s the knife!
His punch landed directly on the handle, driving the blade deeper into the bear’s fur. The bear howled and swiped both front paws toward Jonah.
No hope now, Jonah thought. No hope, no hope.
Everything went black.
Jonah woke up.
This surprised him. His mind still held the image of the two huge bear paws swinging toward him—people didn’t wake up after being hit by something like that. Or, if they did, they were in excruciating pain, gushing blood, on the verge of death.
Jonah felt fine. Just a little groggy. And he couldn’t see anything, but that might have been because he was lying in the dark.
“Is this heaven?” a voice whispered beside him. Katherine’s voice.
Someone laughed.
“You two didn’t die. You think I’d let that happen to you? After everything you’ve done for me? With everything you’ve still got left to do in the future?”
Jonah couldn’t quite identify the voice. It was too distorted, too far away. Or maybe it was close by and normal, but Jonah wasn’t hearing it right. In fact, his ears seemed as messed up as they always did when he had …
Timesickness.
“Out of time,” he murmured. “You pulled us out.” Jonah had trouble pronouncing the words, which confirmed it. “But … where are we now?”
“Some kind of time hollow, I think,” Katherine whispered beside him. Once again she seemed to be recovering faster than Jonah.
“It would be delightful to just watch the two of you figure everything out, but time is of the essence,” the voice said. “We need to move this along.”
“That’s Second talking,” Jonah said. Disappointment seeped through him—he’d wanted it to be JB. He’d wanted JB to be there, assuring them that they’d done everything right, everything was over, everyone was safe.
“But Second’s not here, is he?” Katherine asked. Jonah could see just well enough to tell that she was peering around and reaching out into the darkness. “He’s just talking to us through …”
“The Elucidator,” Jonah said.
He pulled the Elucidator out of his cloak, and it instantly began to glow, showing that it had transformed from its 1600s candleholder shape to something more like a cell phone.
“You deserve a reward for your deductions,” Second’s voice came out of the Elucidator. “So—let there be light.”
The Elucidator grew brighter, illuminating an empty, windowless, sterile, safe room.
No bear was charging at them. No danger lay in this space at all.
It didn’t matter. Jonah kept seeing the bear’s paws swiping toward him. He kept feeling echoes of the terror he’d felt just a moment ago—his heart pounded as if his brain were still screaming at him, I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die …
Jonah began shaking the Elucidator.
“Why’d you let that go on so long?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you pull us out sooner? You could have done it as soon as I was out of sight of all the men from the shallop. Or even before that—when time split, or whatever that was. Katherine and I could have died!”
“Calm down—stop that! You’ll break the Elucidator!” Second cried. “I had to wait until you punched the knife—the knife had to go in as deep as the tracer’s knife, so the bear would bleed enough that Hudson’s men could follow the trail of blood. When they saw the knife, they figured out that the bear had killed John Hudson. And the bear was weak enough from its wound that they could kill it. The meat kept them alive and gave them something to trade with the natives, when they met them….”
Second said all that in an offhand way, as if the bear dying and John Hudson dying and the other men living were all just facts from the past, requirements of time—no more interesting or important than i’s that had to be dotted and t’s that had to be crossed. And now it was over and done, and that was all Second cared about.
But Jonah had felt the bear’s hot breath on his face. He’d felt awe along with his terror, seeing the massive bear rear up on its hind legs.
My puny knife helped kill that? he marveled.
And Jonah had spent practically an entire da
y living John Hudson’s life. He’d taken the scorn aimed at John Hudson: the one mutineer bragging about giving the “pup” what he deserved; the other mutineer jibing that the shallop needed a ship’s boy; John King slamming the top of the stocks down on Jonah’s neck.
And Jonah had gotten the care and concern John Hudson had earned. He’d heard Staffe tell him, The wrong Hudson is captain of this ship. He’d seen practically the entire shipload of sailors avert their eyes when Jonah was trapped in the stocks.
And Jonah had been in the shallop with everyone else, just as much in fear for his life as any of them.
“Who died?” Jonah asked. “Who lived? Who did I save, punching that knife?”
“Well, they all died eventually,” Second said. “That’s how it works. People live, they die, time goes on….”
“You know what he means!” Katherine interrupted.
“Philip Staffe survived,” Second said. “He married a native woman, had children … as far as I could tell by watching, he had a happy life.”
I helped save Staffe’s life, Jonah thought. My few moments of terror—okay, they were worth it for Staffe’s life.
“And the others?” Katherine asked.
“Not such happy endings,” Second said. “Hudson pretty much went mad with grief when his son died. John King died of a mysterious fever. Wydowse only lived another month.”
“That’s a month more than you would have given him!” Jonah protested.
“As I was saying before,” Second said in a steely voice. “We really do need to move this along.”
“Why?” Katherine asked. “We’re in a safe place. Time doesn’t move in a time hollow. We could ask you questions all day.”
“No,” Second said. “Not this time. Not in this hollow.”
Jonah felt a shiver of foreboding crawl down his spine.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“We’re almost out of time,” Second said. “Because in a few minutes JB’s going to show up.”
“He’s safe?” Jonah cried. “Then—so are Brendan and Antonio and—and Andrea! Andrea! You’re keeping your deal! You’re letting them out of 1600!”
“It’s not time to call in the deal yet,” Second said, in such a solemn voice that Jonah stopped exulting instantly. “This isn’t going to be JB after he’s rescued from 1600. This is JB before. On his way into danger to rescue you.”
Jonah’s brain short-circuited. It wasn’t enough that he’d had to deal with a bear, a mutiny, ice floes, a clubbing, and life-and-death impersonation. Now he was supposed to figure out Second’s scrambled sense of time, too?
“JB’s coming from before his trip to 1600, but we’re after it,” Katherine said slowly. “So …”
“So technically this type of interaction is completely prohibited, because the time police are always convinced that time travelers meeting from opposites sides of a visit would cause serious paradoxes,” Second said. “But they think everything could cause paradoxes, and this is actually going to finish healing time. All you have to do is tell him to go to Croatoan Island on August 3, 1600. And hand him the Elucidator. Don’t tell him anything else.”
“No,” Jonah said.
Katherine looked at her brother.
“I’m with Jonah,” she said. “No.”
“No, what?” Second said, and now his voice carried a note of frustration. “No, you won’t give him the Elucidator? No, you won’t tell him to go to Croatoan Island?”
“Oh, we’ll do that,” Jonah said. “But we’ll tell him other stuff too.”
“Everything,” Katherine said.
Jonah grinned at her, and nodded.
“What?” Second cried. “Don’t you understand the danger of paradoxes?”
“We understand that you have been using us,” Jonah said. His voice grew more confident with each word. “We understand that we’re just puppets to you. Just like Hudson’s men were puppets to him, until they rose up and told him different.”
“And we’re not going to do that to JB,” Katherine said, finishing for Jonah. “We’re not going to send him into the dangers of 1600 without warning him first.”
“But—but—this is preposterous!” Second sputtered. “You’re children! You don’t know what you’re doing! You could make time collapse after all! This—this voids our deal!”
“All you said was that we had to help you in 1611!” Jonah said. “You didn’t say we had to be your slaves forever! You didn’t say we had to obey your every command! You—”
And then Jonah stopped talking, because the air before them was shimmering. A moment later, JB appeared.
Jonah had seen JB in numerous stressful situations in the past—er, would it be in the future?—but JB had always exuded a certain confidence and certainty. Part of it was that he was really good-looking. Even before they knew who he was, Katherine had taken one look at JB’s dark hair and dark eyes and handsome features and begun calling him “cute janitor boy.”
JB didn’t look so handsome now. Or confident or certain. He had dark circles under his eyes; his mouth was drawn into an anxious frown; his hair was so messed up that it looked as if it’d been days since he’d washed or combed it.
Had he looked this bad when they saw him arriving in 1600? Or had Jonah and Katherine been too stressed out to notice?
“JB?” Katherine said hesitantly, as if she didn’t quite recognize him in such an unkempt state.
JB squinted at her. Jonah had gotten so used to Katherine being nearly invisible that he’d stopped thinking about it. But JB acted as if he couldn’t trust anyone who looked so much like crystal.
“Katherine?” JB asked. “Is that really you? Or just another one of Second’s tricks? I’ve followed so many of his blind alleys, but this time, coming to this time hollow, I thought—I hoped that—”
“Of course it’s us!” Jonah said.
JB’s squint deepened as he turned to Jonah.
“Who are you?” JB asked.
Jonah had forgotten that he was still disguised as John Hudson—probably looking worse than ever after his day in the stocks, his repeated time in the shallop, and his encounter with the bear.
Jonah tugged at his mask, but he couldn’t get it to budge.
“I’m Jonah!” he protested, but of course his voice came out sounding all wrong. In the past day Jonah had almost stopped noticing how different his John Hudson voice was from his usual voice, but now the weirdness came back to him.
He wasn’t surprised that JB backed away from him.
“Nice try, Second,” JB muttered. “But unless these holograms—are they holograms?—unless one of you can tell me where to find the real Jonah and Katherine and Andrea, I’m out of here.”
“We—,” Katherine began.
Quickly Jonah clapped his hand over his sister’s mouth.
“Don’t tell yet!” he commanded.
Katherine blinked at him.
“I was just going to say that we are the real Jonah and Katherine,” she muttered, her words muffled by Jonah’s hand.
“I’m in a hurry, kids,” JB said. “I don’t have time for this.”
“Yes, you do,” Jonah said. He tried to think of something he could tell JB that would make it clear who they were. But before he went rogue, Second had been JB’s trusted projectionist; if he had created holograms or some other fake version of Jonah and Katherine, he could give them any secret knowledge he wanted.
This was awful. Jonah was going to have to resort to the same kind of tactics Second used.
“You have to listen to us,” Jonah said. “Because we have information you need. And we’re not going to give it to you until you listen to our whole story.”
It felt as if it took hours to tell everything, even in the time hollow, where time didn’t move. Maybe things would have gone better if Jonah had let Katherine tell the whole story by herself, or if Katherine had let Jonah tell it all. But neither of them could resist constantly interrupting—“No, the
book I found on Hudson’s ship with Andrea’s picture in it wasn’t New Visions of the New World; it was New Views of the New World.” “You know, I was freezing the whole time I was in 1611. If this is pretty much a do-over, is there any way you could get me a coat this time around?” “I had to crash into Henry Hudson’s room when I thought the sailors had found Katherine! What else could I have done?” “Wait—isn’t this kind of like proof? Look at these papers that I took from Wydowse’s desk!”
Jonah expected Second to chip in too, with his version of events. Or perhaps with the information that JB truly wanted.
But the Elucidator stayed silent.
Finally Jonah and Katherine were done.
“So, do you believe us?” Katherine asked.
JB frowned.
“I don’t want to,” he said. “But …” He leafed through Wydowse’s papers for the third or fourth time, as if he hoped the words on them would change. He sighed. “Let me see that Elucidator.”
Jonah handed it over. JB pressed a few buttons, then held it up to his ear. Then he lifted his own Elucidator to his mouth.
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” he said in a tense voice, into the Elucidator. He hit something on the Elucidator, then spoke again. “Jonah? Katherine? We tried. We really tried. …” Another pause. More button-pushing. “Who else would it be?” Pause again. “Second was talking to you again? Oh, no….”
Katherine gasped.
“That’s all the stuff you said to us when we first got to 1611!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing? Are you recording that?”
JB lowered the Elucidator and peered over at her and Jonah.
“If everything you just told me is true, I’m not really going to be able to talk to you from 1600,” JB said.
“What?” Jonah asked. “Then—that’s all fake, too? Another setup? None of it’s true?”
JB looked at the screen of the Elucidator Jonah had been carrying.
“Oh, by the time you hear it in 1611, it will be true all right,” JB said. “Just not the whole truth.” He read something from the screen. “‘I see that we made even more mistakes than I thought’—oh, yes, absolutely. Truer words have never been spoken.”
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