But Jonah was peering suspiciously around his room. It looked like usual, the NBA poster a little crooked on the wall, the blue bedspread slightly rumpled, the closet door open a crack with his shoes half-in and half-out. It was all so familiar. But it had been invaded at least twice now, that he knew of. The very air seemed to crackle with danger.
Except—was it really dangerous right this minute? If people could just appear anywhere they wanted (and he was still trying to get his mind around that idea), why didn’t someone just grab him now? Why hadn’t they taken him back with the plane, or during any one of the thousands of seconds of his life since then?
Maybe time travel wasn’t so easy.
Be careful! Careful where you leave anything that could be seen later…anything that could be monitored—
Seen later. Monitored…Maybe the next word after that would have been later too. Maybe, if time travel even existed, there were limits to it. Maybe it was something about the rotation of the earth, or sunspots, or something bizarre like that. So anything written down was dangerous, because it could be seen at any time. And other things, things that could be monitored were cell phone pictures, and computer hard drives, and…
Jonah gasped.
“Chip, I can’t tell you anything right now. Not over the phone.”
“Why not?” Chip demanded. “This is crazy—you’re starting to sound like Angela.”
“What if Angela’s right?”
TWENTY-TWO
Jonah, Chip, and Katherine slumped in various chairs in Chip’s basement.
“Is this safe?” Katherine asked. “Talking together here now?”
“I don’t know,” Jonah said miserably. “How long do sound waves stay in the air?”
“I can check online,” Chip said. He turned around to the computer and began to type in, How long do…
“Chip, someone could check your search record, find out that you asked that question,” Jonah objected.
“So what? I could just be doing science homework,” Chip said. But he stopped typing. The words How long do stayed on the computer screen.
How long do we have to figure everything out? Jonah wondered. How long do we have before someone appears out of nowhere and carries us away?
He’d finally told Chip and Katherine about seeing an intruder in his room, the night they’d first gotten the lists of witnesses and survivors. Then he’d explained his theory about how someone—the janitor? The janitor’s enemy?—had found out about Chip’s computer files from the note in Jonah’s desk. And how, if he—whoever “he” was—could find Jonah’s note and Chip’s computer files, then that person could just as easily tap their phones. For all Jonah knew, someone could have gone back in time to tap their phones ten years ago, but was listening to their conversations fifty years in the future.
Jonah was beginning to feel hopeless. How could you resist someone with that kind of power?
“All right,” Katherine said briskly. “Let’s assume that talking is safe because, if it isn’t, we can’t do anything. Chip, do you have any paper?”
“Katherine, I told you—they can read anything we write down!”
Katherine rolled her eyes and reached down to pull a sheet of paper out of Chip’s printer. She snagged a pen out of the middle of a stack of computer games and dodged Jonah’s hands when he tried to pull the pen away from her.
“I know, I know,” she said impatiently. “I’ll destroy the evidence as soon as I’m done. I’ll eat the paper if I have to. But we have to get organized!”
She bent over the computer desk and wrote two headings on the top of her paper: What we know and What we think. She drew a line down the middle of the page, dividing the two topics. Under What we know, she wrote, JB gave us witnesses/survivors lists. And then under What we think, she added, So JB’s probably not the one who took them away.
“ JB?” Chip asked.
“Janitor boy,” Katherine said. “I would have called him CJB for ‘cute janitor boy,’ but that’s just my opinion, and probably not how you and Jonah think about him, so—”
“Katherine!” Jonah growled through gritted teeth. He pointed to the list. “Focus!”
Katherine grinned triumphantly, not looking chastised at all. Dimly, Jonah realized that she may have been trying to aggravate him, to jolt him out of his gloom. She shook her wet hair gleefully, sending out drops of water all over the paper.
Wait a minute—had Katherine really agreed to come down here to Chip’s without blow-drying her hair first? Jonah hadn’t noticed before, because he’d been so freaked out. But this undoubtedly meant that Katherine didn’t have a crush on Chip. Or, if she did, she thought this mystery was more important…
Jonah decided to apply his brainpower to Katherine’s list instead of her love interests.
“JB was trying to protect us from E,” he said, pointing to the What we know column. “And E stands for enemy.”
Nobody argued with him.
“Okay,” Katherine said after a pause, and wrote it down.
“We need another category,” Chip said. “ What we don’t know—why was JB protecting us? What did E want to do with us?”
He pulled out another sheet and handed it to Katherine. None of them commented on the fact that What we don’t know got a whole sheet of paper, while What we know and What we think got only a half sheet apiece.
JB tried to warn Jonah went into the know category, but they all agreed that the phones are tapped only qualified for What we think.
“Angela vanished into thin air,” Jonah said. “Know.”
He was glad that Chip didn’t challenge that one.
Without asking, Katherine added into a time warp? and with our lists under What we think.
“And then under What we don’t know, you can add about a billion questions,” Chip said. “How? Why? How did she know the time warp was there? How did she go through it today when she’d been studying time travel for thirteen years and hadn’t gotten anywhere?”
Katherine chewed on the pen thoughtfully.
“I bet JB helped her,” she said.
“But Jonah would have seen JB if he’d been there with her,” Chip objected.
“Maybe he told her how the time warp worked,” Katherine said. “Or…maybe he was invisible.”