“But the other janitor came out into the waiting room,” Jonah said. “The guy who gave me the Mountain Dew—”
“He truly was just a janitor for the FBI,” Angela said. “JB bribed him to help.”
At least that meant that the other janitor wasn’t still hiding at the back of the cave, waiting to jump into the action.
Probably not anyway.
“So when JB gave us the file of names, what did he want us to do with it?” Jonah asked.
“He was just trying to temporarily increase the damage, so he could get closer to you,” Angela said. “He didn’t expect you to be enterprising enough to take pictures of the files and call the phone numbers and meet with me.”
Katherine was grinning.
“I’m the one who thought of taking pictures,” she whispered to Emily, even though Emily couldn’t possibly have known what she was talking about.
“But all your enterprise just gave Gary an opening to try to grab you at the library,” Angela added. “We had too many people in the same room at the same time with connections to the mysterious plane. And then you had those printouts of the witnesses and survivors lists…. I don’t really understand how it works, but that created a huge doorway.”
Katherine’s grin faded a little.
Jonah was still trying to put it all together.
“So who sent the letters?” he asked. “JB or Hodge?”
“They each sent one,” Angela said. “Again, so they could get in, get close to you. But they were racing each other, so they wrote the letters back in the 1990s, on ancient computers programmed for automatic printout—they routed their messages through the mail rooms of giant corporations, so your letters went through machines set up to automatically stuff envelopes with bills or credit-card offers.”
“But the letters came in plain white envelopes,” Jonah said.
“They programmed that,” Angela said. “That worked the way they wanted it to. But the old computers cut off parts of their messages. So they had to use other methods as well.”
That was probably why they resorted to putting Post-it notes on the adoption papers, Jonah thought. And then when Jonah saw the mysterious figure searching his room, when Chip’s computer files vanished—was that just to increase the “damage”? Each unexplained event had made Jonah and Chip and Katherine more paranoid and worried and scared. Had the other kids faced similar mysteries? Did it even matter who had done those things—JB or Hodge?
Angela was still talking.
“It took JB a long time to figure out that Hodge had chosen this adoption conference to steal you all back,” she said. “JB thinks Hodge must have set up this cave twenty years ago, before the start of Damaged Time. He just had to trust that everything would stay ready…. Then Hodge and Gary broke hundreds of rules arranging for kids to move here, so they could pick up everyone at once. JB had to scramble to find all the addresses by looking at property records from the future.”
Jonah felt dizzy, trying to figure out all the connections through time. Future, past…the words didn’t have the same meanings he’d always counted on. In this strange new framework, the future could be the past, and the past could be the future, and…
“Oh, I see,” Katherine said, as if she understood everything. “That’s why it looked like the FBI knew Daniella McCarthy’s new address before her parents had even made an offer on the house.”
Angela nodded.
“Property transactions aren’t always recorded accurately,” she said. “Normally time travelers don’t do things like that, relying on future addresses to send letters into the past. But this was a desperate case, because of Hodge and Gary. JB says they totally mucked up time.”
Jonah could kind of picture it. He remembered a Boy Scout hike once where his troop had come upon a clear shallow stream. Jonah and a bunch of the other boys had jumped in and raced around splashing each other, even scooping up mud balls to throw at each other. The scoutmaster had given them a long lecture about disrupting nature—by the end of it, Jonah felt guilty about how many protozoans he’d probably killed. He could see how time could be like that clear stream. Probably Chip’s family wasn’t supposed to move; probably some other family was supposed to be in the house down the street from Jonah’s house. And there had been at least twelve families who moved, at least twelve families whose lives were changed…
No, thirty-six families, Jonah thought, with a sudden lump in his throat. Mom and Dad weren’t supposed to adopt me. Were they supposed to adopt some other kid? Was Katherine supposed to have a brother at all?
Katherine seemed to be thinking along similar lines.
“So even if JB managed to fix all that time in the past—even if he sent all the kids back—how would he fix all the damage now?” she asked in a thick voice. “How would he tell my parents they don’t have a son anymore?”
“I don’t know,” Angela admitted. “He’s really worried about my nonexistent five kids too. The way he acts, you’d think one of them was going to be president someday.”
Jonah squinted off toward the other side of the room, thinking. Just then, he heard screams and saw kids jumping up in the group gathered around Gary.
No, not just kids—Gary himself.
“Hey!” Jonah screamed. “Who untied Gary?”
For that, improbably, was what seemed to have happened. With the ropes dragging uselessly behind him, Gary was racing across the room.
“Some kids are smart enough to know the future’s the only choice!” Gary shouted.
“But—” Somehow Jonah had expected them all to vote on their decision. Didn’t everyone believe in democracy?
Suddenly he realized where Gary was headed.
“Chip!” Jonah yelled. “Watch out!”
Gary was already slamming against Chip, jerking the Taser out of his hands before Chip had time to react. Gary whirled around, running again. He pointed the Taser at Jonah.
No—he was pointing it at Katherine.