Jonah opened his mouth, even though he didn’t have the slightest idea what to tell her.
“Excellent question, my dear,” a voice said from behind Jonah. “I would call that a second chance. Which also happens—not so coincidentally—to be my name.”
Katherine gaped; her eyes seemed to double in size.
“Then, you’re . . . Second?” she whispered.
Jonah whirled around.
A strange man stood behind him. If they’d been in the twenty-first century, Jonah would have described the man as a standard-issue computer nerd. He had pasty-white skin, as if he’d spent too much time indoors. His blond hair stood out in all directions, as if, like Einstein, he had other things to think about than using a comb. And he had one side of his shirt tucked into his pants and the other hanging out loose—though for all Jonah knew, maybe that was the fashion in some far-off future.
“Second Chance, at your service,” the man said, bowing slightly. He cut off the ending of the bow and jerked back up hastily, to peer straight at Jonah. “But I’m forgetting myself . . . given that you were ready to punch Antonio just on the suspicion that he might be working for me, perhaps you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to place myself in such a vulnerable position.” He tilted his head to the side, thinking. “Of course, I believe flabbergasted would be a more predictable emotion than furious for the two of you right now.”
“I—you—” Jonah could barely speak, let alone throw any punches.
“See?” the man said. “Just as I predicted.”
Jonah still didn’t understand what was going on, but he didn’t like proving Second right.
“So . . . ,” Jonah tried again, struggling to gather his wits enough to ask a complete question. “This is what you were aiming for all along?” He gestured weakly toward Andrea, still bent over her grandfather back at the canoe. “This? Andrea and her grandfather—I mean, Virginia Dare and John White—finding each other?”
“Exactly,” Second said, beaming.
Jonah squinted, no less confused. He’d gotten so used to thinking of Second as someone bad, someone to fight against. To resist.
“You want Andrea to be happy?” Jonah asked.
“Don’t you?” Second replied.
“Sure, but . . . that’s not how things went in original time, was it?” Katherine said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Second sighed. He glanced at something in his pocket.
“It took you three minutes and forty-one seconds to reach that conclusion,” he said. “That’s about what I predicted—I was just two seconds off. Still, it’s a bit disappointing, when you’ve just witnessed the biggest scientific advance since humanity discovered time travel in the first place, and all you can say is, ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen’?”
The way he mimicked Katherine’s voice was cruel, making her sound childish and stupid.
“As your friend Andrea pointed out, original time wasn’t some priceless, perfect jewel,” Second said. “Isn’t it better to make an old man and a little girl happy?”
Jonah didn’t like Second calling Andrea little.
“But . . . but . . . if you change time, you might cause a dangerous paradox,” Jonah said. “Make it so that your own parents are never born. Or you might make other things change—so that, I don’t know, hundreds of years from now, the South wins the Civil War. Nobody ever abolishes slavery. Hitler wins World War II. Or . . .”
Jonah was casting about for other examples of how history could go terribly wrong. But he couldn’t think clearly because Second had begun grinning in such a mocking way—almost chortling, even.
“What if we make it so that Hitler never starts World War II?” Second asked gleefully. “Or that slavery never catches on in the United States, and there’s no Civil War because there’s no slavery to fight over? So there’s no racism, because there’s no heritage of slavery . . . Martin Luther King is never shot, the Trail of Tears never happens, the Bay of Pigs never happens, the Maine doesn’t sink—”
“All that’s going to happen just because of Andrea and her grandfather?” Jonah asked incredulously.
“No,” Second said. “I am 99.9998 percent certain that none of that will change because of Andrea and her grandfather. But don’t you see? We start small, almost invisibly—one girl and her grandfather, on an out-of-the-way island—and then, who knows? Maybe everything else is possible too.”
He was back to beaming again.
Jonah remembered something Katherine had said way back when they’d first learned that Jonah and his friend Chip had a connection to time travel: If you’re going to go back in time, you save Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated. Or John F. Kennedy. Or, you keep the Titanic from sinking. Or you stop September 11. Or—I know—you assassinate Hitler before he has a chance to start World War II.
Maybe Second had heard her say that.
“So you’re trying to create alternative dimensions,” Jonah said, proud of himself for figuring this out. “Ones with all sorts of different possibilities.”
“No,” Second said. “Not alternative. You didn’t enter an alternative dimension when Andrea forced her tracer to step forward. Time itself changed. There’s only one time stream, only one history. Time travel just makes it look like more.”