Andrea didn’t answer his question.
“I know I was probably being stupid, all right?” she said. “I knew I shouldn’t trust the man. But don’t you see? If there was any chance at all, I had to try!”
“Try what?” Jonah and Katherine asked together, the words spilling out almost completely in sync.
Andrea looked up at them and blinked back tears.
“I had to try to save my parents.”
Now Jonah was even more confused.
“You mean, Mistress Dare and—what would it be?—Master Dare?” he asked.
“No, no, my real parents. The ones I knew.” Andrea seemed annoyed that Jonah didn’t understand. “Back in our time. In the twenty-first century.”
Jonah saw the real problem: Andrea didn’t understand time travel.
“Andrea, you don’t have to worry about your parents,” he said. He almost chuckled, but stopped himself. He didn’t want to embarrass her for not understanding. “They’re fine—they’re just waiting for us back home in the twenty-first century. All we have to do is get you out of history—the right way, this time—and then you can go home and see them again. Honest.”
Jonah spoke with the same soothing tone he’d used with homesick Cub Scouts when he’d worked as a counselor-in-training at camp. Really, if Andrea had been so confused all along, why hadn’t she just asked before?
Andrea shook her head.
“No, Jonah,” she corrected him. “My parents aren’t waiting for me back in the twenty-first century.”
“Of course they are,” Jonah argued. “And the great thing is, because you’ll get back just a split second after you left, they won’t even know you were gone.”
“Don’t you get it?” Andrea said. She didn’t sound annoyed anymore. The sorrow in her voice crowded out everything else. “Back in the twenty-first century, my parents are dead.”
Jonah and Katherine both stared at Andrea, their jaws dropped. That wasn’t a possibility Jonah would have thought of. It was too awful.
“It was a car crash,” Andrea said. “Last year.”
She sounded tougher now, brusque, as if she’d learned how to mask her voice as well as her facial expressions.
“I’m—,” Katherine began.
“Don’t say you’re sorry. Don’t say you can imagine just how that would feel,” Andrea said. “You can’t.”
Jonah was trying to imagine it anyway. What would it be like to lose both your mom and dad? At the same time?
“You mean, your adoptive parents?” he asked cautiously. “The ones who got you after the time crash?”
He was hoping he’d misunderstood somehow.
“Yes, my adoptive parents,” Andrea said impatiently. “I said my real ones, didn’t I?”
Jonah kept trying to get his head around the thought of someone losing two sets of parents by the time she’d turned thirteen. Katherine sniffed, like she might start crying on Andrea’s behalf.
“I don’t like telling people,” Andrea said. “I usually won’t. Because then they start acting like this.” She waved her hand vaguely at Jonah and Katherine. Jonah tried to sit up a little straighter and look normal. It wasn’t easy.
“But you told us because . . . because it’s connected to something that man told you?” Katherine said, her voice full of bafflement. “Something . . . about the Elucidator?”
Andrea nodded.
“He promised,” she whispered. “He said I could go back. He said I could stop . . .”
Andrea waited, as if she expected Jonah and Katherine to figure everything out. But Jonah couldn’t think at all while he was watching the pain play over Andrea’s face.
“He said you could stop . . . ,” Katherine prompted. Then she gasped. “Oh, oh—I get it.” Now her words came in a rush. “That man, what he told you—he said you could go back just a year in time, right? So you thought you could stop your parents from being in that crash. You thought you could save their lives!”
Andrea looked down at the ground.
“He said all I had to do was reprogram the Elucidator,” she murmured.
Jonah felt the anger wash over him again.
“Couldn’t you tell the man was lying?” he growled. “Time doesn’t work that way. You can’t go back to a time period you’ve already lived through. You know that! Didn’t you hear anyone talking about the ‘paradox of the doubles’? Or—didn’t you think about what it meant that we’d been living in Damaged Time? Like Katherine was talking about before?” Jonah realized that Andrea had probably been too far ahead to hear anything when he and Katherine were talking about Damaged Time. He just leaned in closer, nearly yelling at her now. “No time travelers could get in for almost thirteen years! Practically our entire lives!”
Andrea recoiled, as if he’d slapped her.
“Nobody told me that,” she whispered.
Belatedly, Jonah realized that could be true. When would she have gotten her crash course in the rules of time travel? The day they’d been trapped in the cave with all the grown-ups fighting over them? Everything was chaos that day. Nothing had been explained very clearly.
“Jonah, it was Angela who mostly told us about all that,” Katherine said. Angela was the only twenty-first century adult who knew about time travel. She had taken a lot of risks to help Jonah and the other kids. “It was when we were divided up into groups—Andrea wasn’t with us then.”
Jonah sighed, his anger washing away. He wished he could stay mad—anger was so much easier.
“See, here’s how it works,” Katherine was explaining to Andrea. “When Gary and Hodge kidnapped you and the other kids from history, and JB was chasing them, you know they crash-landed into our time. Well—” she snuck a glance at her brother “—my time anyway. We still don’t know Jonah’s right time, and he’s too chicken to ask.”
“I am not!” Jonah argued, even as he was thinking, How did Katherine notice?