“It was just a mistake, all of you ending up where you did. When you did,” he said. “Hodge was carrying his load of stolen babies to the future, and we—those of us who enforce the laws of time travel—we knew we had to stop him as soon as we could. There’s a protocol to stopping in the middle of the time stream, steps everyone agrees to, to avoid doing even more damage. Hodge broke every rule.”
“Oh, come now, that’s impossible,” Hodge said mockingly. “You time fanatics have so many rules, it’d take an eternity to break them all.”
JB glared at Hodge. Jonah could hear a few kids in the back of the room snickering.
“I’m not explaining this well enough,” JB said, looking back at Jonah. “It’s really complicated, but I’ll try to put this in terms you can understand. It’d be like a criminal kidnapping a bunch of babies in New York City and trying to fly them to Los Angeles. But when he’s caught in the middle of the country, he refuses to give up. Instead he crash-lands in Kansas City and sets off a nuclear weapon that completely destroys the Midwest.” He paused, looking down at the ropes around his wrists. Then he peered up again, earnestly. “I’m trying to undo that nuclear explosion.”
Everyone was silent for a long moment. Then Katherine complained, “That’s a stupid comparison. A nuclear explosion in Kansas City would kill all the stolen babies, too.”
Other kids began muttering as well—Jonah heard Alex say, “But the nuclear fallout blowing toward Los Angeles would be kind of like that time-ripple thing he was talking about….”
Jonah held up his hand and, to his amazement, everyone stopped talking.
“Okay, I get it that nobody planned for us to end up here,” he said. “But that’s what happened, and so we’ve lived all our lives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and so this is where we belong now. It’s what we know. It’s where our families are.”
His eyes skimmed over Katherine’s face as he said that. She smiled encouragingly.
“Look.” Jonah peered at Mr. Hodge. “You’re just going to have to find some other babies for those families in the future. And you—” he turned his attention to JB. “You’re going to have to figure out some other way to fix the ripple, to save time. I’m sure you can think of something. I don’t know about the other kids, but I’m staying here!” This would have come off very well, very dramatically, except that he realized he wasn’t saying exactly the right thing and was forced to add, weakly, “I mean, I’m staying now. Whatever. You know what I mean.”
Mr. Hodge smiled. Slyly.
“That’s what I’ve always loved about twenty-first-century Americans,” he said. “They’re always so convinced that they can control their own destinies. Go on, then. Walk out that door. Have a nice life.”
And then Jonah remembered the nothingness on the other side of the door, the fact that the twenty-first century—and everything else outside the cave—had disappeared.
“Tell me the code to go home,” he said. “Please.”
Mr. Hodge shook his head. Jonah turned to JB. After a second’s hesitation, JB began shaking his head too.
“You’re going to have to choose,” he said. “Your ‘now’ is off-limits. Which will it be—the future or the past?”
THIRTY-TWO
Nobody got hungry. Nobody had to go to the bathroom. Those were the good things. But, also, nobody could leave the cave. Nobody could go back to their regular lives, see their parents again, talk to their usual friends. Grow up.
Before, Jonah had had no sense of time stopping. He’d been too busy crashing to the floor, grabbing for the Elucidator, running for the ropes. But now, time—or really the lack of it—hung heavily on him. He didn’t even care anymore about finding out which missing child from history he actually was. The other kids were no more motivated. Everyone sat around, completely enervated.
“You know that saying about how time flies when you’re having fun?” Emily, the girl who’d been so soothing before, asked as she plucked pointlessly at her sweatshirt sleeve.
“Yeah,” Jonah said.
“I thought the opposite of that was the last five minutes of math class, when the teacher’s going on and on and on about decimals,” she said. She yawned. “I didn’t know it could be this bad.”
“Yeah,” Jonah said again. He thought about adding, “I know what you mean,” but it didn’t seem to be worth the effort.
Think, he commanded himself in disgust. Make a decision. Future or past? Past or future?
He couldn’t decide. It was like taking one of those multiple-choice tests in school when he wasn’t sure of the answer, so he tried eliminating all the choices he was sure were wrong—and then discovered that there were no possible right answers left. Going to the future would mean giving up everything. For that matter, so would going to the past.
And probably dying, on top of everything else. He couldn’t get the images out of his head of all those brutal deaths from history: the chopped-off heads, the swords slicing flesh, the hail of gunfire raining down on children.
“I’m a coward,” he whispered to himself. “I don’t want to die. Especially not like that.”
But he’d been raised by such nerdy, square parents, who’d dragged him off to Sunday school and Boy Scout meetings, and had talked so seriously about how important it was to be a good person. Because of that, he kind of felt like JB had the best argument. JB wanted to save the world.
Mr. Hodge and Gary didn’t seem to care.
“I don’t want to die,” he muttered, a little more loudly this time.
Maybe if everyone agreed to go back to the past, he’d be one of the lucky ones. Maybe he’d be someone who just kind of accidentally vanished from history, who still had a good life waiting for him in the past. Maybe he was one of those British princes. He could get used to chomping down on a huge turkey leg like some old-time king in a movie, couldn’t he? And living in a castle, and having thousands of soldiers at his command, and…
He looked around. He didn’t want any of the other kids to die either.