Katherine leaned forward in her chair, and her chair leaned with her.
“Really?” she breathed, seeming to forget any hurt feelings. “You’ll tell us where we’re going this time—before we get there?”
JB laughed.
“You didn’t give me much of a chance the last time,” he reminded her.
“That wasn’t our fault,” Jonah argued hotly. “If you hadn’t sent Chip and Alex back without telling them anything, and if you hadn’t cheated when I gave you the Elucidator, and if—”
JB held up his hand, cutting Jonah off.
“Hey, hey,” JB said. “Calm down. I’m sorry, okay? That’s over and done with. Water under the bridge. Haven’t you ever heard the expression, ‘No need to relive the past’?”
Katherine and Jonah both stared at him blankly.
“Um, isn’t it kind of, uh, contradictory, for a time traveler to say that?” Katherine asked.
“Yep.” JB beamed at them. “You caught the irony. Time-traveler humor—gotta love it.”
He turned toward Andrea, who was still sitting quietly, unaffected.
“As far as I’m concerned, we’re all on the same team this time around,” JB said. “From the very beginning. No keeping secrets unnecessarily. Deal?” He held out his hand to Andrea.
“Of course,” Andrea said calmly. She shook JB’s hand, before he moved on to shake Jonah’s and Katherine’s in turn. Maybe if Jonah hadn’t been paying such close attention to Andrea now, he wouldn’t have noticed that Andrea hesitated slightly before speaking, before taking JB’s hand.
She is scared, Jonah thought. She really does need me to take care of her.
“So you’ll tell Andrea who she really is?” Katherine asked eagerly.
And me? Jonah almost asked, forgetting that he was supposed to be all about protecting Andrea at the moment. Jonah had seen his two friends Chip and Alex learn their original identities in history. And he knew that, ultimately, he would have to return to his original time period, at least briefly—just like all the other missing kids from history. But, as much as he wanted to know his own identity and his own time period . . . maybe he wasn’t quite ready to know right now?
The moment when he could have asked was past. JB was answering Katherine.
“I thought I’d just show her,” he said.
JB flipped a switch on the wall behind Jonah’s chair, and the wall opposite them instantly turned into what appeared to be an incredibly high-definition TV screen. Waves crashed against a sandy beach, and Jonah had no doubt that, if he looked carefully enough, he’d be able to make out each individual grain of sand.
“Just skip to the part she’s going to be interested in,” JB said.
Jonah wasn’t sure if JB was talking directly to the TV screen (or whatever futuristic invention it actually was) or if there was someone in a control room somewhere who was monitoring their entire conversation. Sometimes Jonah just didn’t want to think too much about the whole time-travel mess. He knew that JB had already pulled them out of the twenty-first century, and the waiting room they were in was a “time hollow,” a place where time didn’t really exist. He knew that JB was probably about to show them some scene from Andrea’s “real” life, before she’d been kidnapped by unethical time travelers, and before she’d crash-landed (with all the other missing kids) at the very end of the twentieth century. But it made Jonah feel better if he told himself he was just watching a TV with really, really good reception.
The scene before him shifted, seeming to fly across the water to a marshy coastline and then inland a bit to a primitive-looking cluster of houses. Some of the houses were encircled by a wooden fence that was maybe eight or nine feet tall. Both the houses and the fence looked a bit ramshackle, with holes in several spots.
The view shifted again, focusing on a woman rushing out of one of the nicer houses. The woman was wearing what Jonah thought of as old-fashioned clothes: a long skirt, long sleeves, and a funny-looking hat covering her head. The skirt wasn’t quite as sweeping as the ones he’d seen in the fifteenth century, but Jonah wasn’t sure if that meant that he was looking at a different time period now, or if he was just watching different people. Poorer ones. Not royalty anymore.
“Mistress Dare’s baby has arrived!” the woman called, joy overtaking the exhaustion in her face. “A wee girl child, strong and fair!”
Other people began rushing out of the other houses, cheering and calling out, “Huzzah, huzzah!” But Jonah got only a brief glimpse of them before the camera—or whatever perspective he was watching—zoomed in tighter. Through the door, across a clay floor, up to a bed . . . On the bed a woman hugged a tiny baby against her chest.
“My dearest girl,” the woman whispered, her face glowing with love, even in the dim candlelight. “My little Virginia.”
“NO!” someone screamed.
It took Jonah a moment to realize that the screaming hadn’t come from the scene before him. He peered around, annoyed that Katherine would interrupt like that. But Katherine, beside him, was gazing around in befuddlement too.
It was Andrea—quiet, calm, unperturbed Andrea—who had her mouth open, who was even now jumping to her feet, eyes blazing with fury.
“NO!” she screamed again. “That’s not me! That’s not my mother!”
The “TV screen” turned back into a blank wall.
“Andrea,” JB said soothingly. “I know this is hard to comprehend, but you really are Virginia Dare. The first English child born in the so-called New World. Would you like to see the DNA evidence?”