Angela caught his eye. Cautiously, as if she was trying not to be seen by anyone else, she raised one eyebrow and mouthed something—“Walk”? What did that mean? Oh. No. Maybe it was “Talk”?
What good was that? How could they talk when she was still sitting right next to JB?
Jonah remembered Katherine was still holding the Elucidator. Chip still had the Taser in his hand. They still had some control.
Jonah stood up.
“We’re facing a very important choice,” he said. Wonderful, he thought. I sound like someone running for seventh-grade student council. But everyone was staring at him now. He had to go on. “And yet, we don’t know if we can trust the information we’ve been given.” He turned to face the adults. “How do we know you’re not all working together?”
JB and Mr. Hodge looked at him like he’d gone crazy. It was kind of a no-brainer—Jonah was absolutely certain that those two weren’t on the same side. Still, Jonah forged ahead.
“So we’re going to take each of you to a different corner of the room and talk to you individually,” he said.
“What good will that do?” one of the other kids jeered.
It figured—it was one of the kids in black sweatshirts with the skulls on the backs.
Jonah shrugged.
“I think it’s worth a try,” he said. “It’s better than sitting around doing nothing.”
Somehow, that energized the other kids. Within five minutes—or, what would have been five minutes, if time had been moving—one group of kids was clustered around Gary in the front right part of the cave and another around Mr. Hodge in the front left. Chip was with JB and a few others in the back right corner; and Jonah, Katherine, Alex, and Emily were in the group with Angela in the back left.
“Quick—what do you think we should do?” Jonah hissed.
One look at Angela’s anguished face killed his hopes.
“I don’t know much more about this time-travel stuff than you do,” she said. “I can tell you this—the man you keep calling JB is sincere. That Hodge character doesn’t seem very trustworthy.”
Great. Jonah had managed to figure that out all by himself.
“What’s JB’s real name?” Katherine asked.
“Names in the future are very weird,” Angela said. “I can hardly pronounce it—it’s something like Alonzo Alfred Aloysius K’Tah—you might as well keep calling him JB.”
“How far in the future are we talking about?” Emily asked.
“He won’t tell me,” Angela said. “He says I’ve already been contaminated enough.” She grinned. “He says I was supposed to marry a plumber and have five kids. I told him, ‘Uh-uh, I don’t think so!’ He must have had me mixed up with somebody else.”
Jonah closed his eyes for a moment. Maybe JB and Hodge and Gary had Jonah mixed up with somebody else too. Wouldn’t it be nice to just have ordinary birth parents? Confused high school kids, maybe, who realized that they weren’t mature enough to raise a child themselves…
“Where did you go, that day at the library?” Katherine asked Angela. “Jonah saw you disappear.”
“You mean, earlier this afternoon?” Angela asked.
“No, it was, like, three weeks ago,” Katherine said.
Angela stared at her in disbelief.
“Get out!” she said. “Really?” She shook her head. “This time stuff can really mess with your mind. Honestly, to me it was just like an hour ago. Maybe an hour and a half.”
Jonah squinted at her.
“Three weeks felt like an hour to you?” he said.
“Because I wasn’t ‘in time,’ as JB calls it,” Angela said. “He took me into this place called Outer Time, where we could spy on all of history. It’s hard to describe, but it was kind of like being in an airplane and looking down on everything happening down on the ground. Or, I don’t know, like Google Earth, where you can focus in close on one spot, then zoom out and get the broader view too.”
“So JB and Hodge and Gary can zip back and forth through time?” Jonah said, with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “They could go back and, I don’t know, tackle me as I was walking into the cave a little bit ago, sending me back or forward in time that way?…”
The feeling of hopelessness was coming back. He pictured himself being sent back and forth endlessly, JB and Hodge fighting over him for centuries.
“No,” Angela said. “It doesn’t work that way. There’s something else JB called the paradox of the doubles. No one can live through a particular time more than once. So, for example, there couldn’t have been two or three copies of JB, jumped in from two or three different times, waiting at the back of the cave to attack Gary. Or two or three copies of me, either.”
That made Jonah feel a little better.
“And,” Angela continued, “I don’t pretend to understand all of this, but because of your plane crashing into our time, where it didn’t belong—where it changed lots of people’s lives—because of that, we’ve all been living through what’s known as Damaged Time. Kind of like a nuclear wasteland, maybe? When Mr. Hodge said that he couldn’t get to you all for thirteen years, he really meant it. Time travelers couldn’t get in at all for a long time. And they could see only limited moments in time—like some birthday party where you drank lots of Mountain Dew, Jonah?”
Jonah flushed with embarrassment. I was only ten, he wanted to protest. But Angela was still explaining.
“And then when they could get in,” she said, “it was only at spots that they call points of damage—places where the pain of the time damage was most intense. Katherine, Jonah, you know how you saw JB at Mr. Reardon’s office? How he appeared and disappeared?”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. Katherine just nodded.
“That’s because those were the only spots he could go to. Mr. Reardon was standing in the bathroom when he found out about the plane landing, and his boss was standing by that desk when he learned about the plane disappearing. So those were openings for JB,” Angela said.