“Are you all right?” she demanded.
Jonah realized she was peering only at him and Katherine. Chip and Alex, incredibly enough, were wearing the same clothes they’d had on in the beginning: the Ohio State sweatshirt and jeans and Nikes for Chip; the Einstein T-shirt and jeans for Alex. They looked clean and tidy, perfectly normal.
Jonah and Katherine, on the other hand, were still wearing dented, battered, muddy armor, which, strangely, now also seemed a bit rusty.
“We’re fine,” Jonah said. “We just look awful.”
“Speak for yourself,” Katherine corrected him. Then she looked down at the clumps of mud clinging to her hair, the leather straps on her armor that seemed to be worn almost all the way through. “Oh, well,” she said. “Sometimes you can’t help getting a little messy.”
Jonah was glad that at least the whiskery soldier looked muddy and battered too. The soldier stood up, creakily, and stuck out his hand to Angela.
“Hadley Correo, ma’am,” he said politely. “I’m very glad to meet you.”
“You too,” Angela said, equally politely. “Angela DuPre. I take it you’re a friend of JB’s?”
Jonah didn’t have the patience for stupid grown-up chitchat.
“Where’s JB?” he demanded. “Did everything work out? Chip and Alex are safe, but what happened to history?”
JB stepped out from behind the screaming kids, who were finally beginning to settle down a little. Jonah wasn’t sure if he’d been there all along, or if he’d just arrived from some foreign time as well.
“We have an expression in this business,” JB said. “Time will tell. It will take a while to be sure of the outcomes—”
“Oh, come on,” Jonah said, annoyed again. “I know how time travel works now. You probably zoomed up to the future before coming back here—you probably already spent years studying how the changes rippled through history!”
JB laughed, unoffended.
“It’s true that I could have,” he admitted. “But I didn’t. My first priority was making sure all of you were all right.”
Jonah watched JB’s eyes and decided he was telling the truth. Maybe JB wasn’t concerned solely about time after all.
“These kids are troopers,” Hadley Correo said, patting Jonah and Katherine on the back. “I’d put them up against some of the best time agents I’ve ever worked with.”
“Thanks a lot!” JB said, rolling his eyes. “Remind me of that the next time I nearly kill myself getting recertified! I still won’t be as good as thirteen-year-old amateurs!”
Despite his words, he didn’t seem truly offended. Jonah guessed that Hadley and JB had probably worked together before.
“Why didn’t you tell us somebody else was there on the battlefield to help us?” Katherine demanded.
“All our projections showed that wouldn’t work,” JB said. “You had to feel responsible. And … you were. Hadley wouldn’t have known to talk about Chip’s dad. He wouldn’t have known to talk about Katherine’s variety of boyfriend choices.”
Jonah noticed that Katherine was blushing under her coating of mud.
“Um,” Emily said hesitantly now that the other kids had stopped screaming. “I don’t get it. Those kids were only gone an instant. How’d they get so beat up? Why are you talking about battlefields and boyfriends and time agents, like a lot of stuff happened while they were away?”
“An instant?” Chip asked. “Are you crazy? We were gone for two years!” His voice shot up an octave and squeaked on the word “years,” and he looked stunned and embarrassed. “Two years,” he tried again, only marginally deeper. He clamped his mouth shut, his face turning as red as Katherine’s.
Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. Chip probably got used to being fourteen and a half, almost fifteen—his voice probably never squeaked then. It must be pretty grim to have to go back to being thirteen all over again.
“See,” Alex explained to Emily, “with time travel you can be away for years—decades, even, if you need to—and then come back to your original time so quickly that no one would even notice that you were gone.”
“Oh,” Emily said. “I get it.”
“Is that what’s going to happen to the rest of us?” Andrea Crowell asked in a small voice. “You’re going to send us away, and then we’re going to come back looking that … weathered?”
Weathered? Jonah thought. What kind of a kid uses a word like that? He sort of liked it, though. It was better than being described as “battered” or “beat up.”
“I don’t know about the ‘weathered’ part,” JB said, “but yes, you’re all going back in time.”
Andrea gulped.
“Now?” she asked.
“No,” Jonah said.
JB and Hadley turned to him in surprise.
“Well, actually, I thought—,” JB began.
“No,” Jonah said again. “You’re going to give us a chance to go home and get used to the idea that we’re missing kids from history. You’re going to let us eat our favorite foods and hug our parents good-bye if we want to.”
JB frowned; Jonah could tell he wasn’t convinced.
“Look,” Jonah said. “It’s not like we can tell anybody about this, because nobody would believe it anyway. So … just give us some time to adjust.”
Several of the other kids were nodding. Even one of the scariest-looking kids, who had a skull on the back of his sweatshirt, muttered, “He’s right, dude.”
Angela stepped forward.
“I think you should listen to Jonah,” she said. “He knows what he’s talking about.”
Me? Jonah wanted to say. Somebody’s acting like I’m the expert?
JB and Hadley exchanged glances. Jonah couldn’t be sure, but he thought maybe the two men’s images flickered for a second, as if they’d time-traveled out of the cave to have a long discussion about the pros and cons of Jonah’s suggestion and then returned to give their final decision.