Redeemed (10 page)

“Don't—” Jonah started to whisper in Jordan's ear, but Deep Voice and Tattoo Face were already yanking them apart.

“Except for their clothes, it looks like they're pretty much the same person,” Tattoo Face muttered. “So it's probably not going to matter.”

Deep Voice pulled Jordan to the nearest cubicle. Although the walls looked see-through from the outside, they seemed to turn solid as soon as Deep Voice yanked Jordan inside.

“Let me go!” Jordan cried, jerking his arm away from the man. Evidently Jordan caught him off guard—Jordan slipped through his fingers. Immediately Jordan sprang up and hurled himself back toward the opening they'd just walked through.

It still
looked
like open space, but Jordan seemed to slam into a solid wall. He bounced back and landed on the floor once more.

“Lucky me, I got the spaz kid,” Deep Voice muttered. He settled into a chair at a table Jordan hadn't noticed before. “Want to try that again, so I can laugh?”

Jordan ignored him, and put his hand out to touch the invisible wall.

Nothing, nothing, nothing . . .
Jordan had his whole arm extended out of the cubicle, and hadn't touched a wall yet. He rose up, intending to ease the rest of his body out too.

Maybe you just have to be slow passing through the doorway . . . ,
he thought.

His shoulder hit solid wall again, bouncing him back into a heap on the floor.

Deep Voice chuckled. “It's so much fun watching time primitives encounter actual technology,” he murmured.

“I'm not from a primitive time!” Jordan protested. “We have computers! We have, uh, walls that look like mirrors from one side but are see-through from the other! That's not so different from this! And we, um—”

Belatedly, Jordan realized that he might as well be telling Deep Voice what time period he was from. And Jonah's
Don't
had probably been the start of
Don't tell them anything.

“Oh, sorry,” Deep Voice said, not sounding the least bit sorry. “I didn't mean to insult your highly advanced time period.”

Make him start telling you about his time period,
Jordan told himself.
Trick him into revealing stuff the way he tricked you.

What Jordan really wanted was to know was where his parents were and how he could get them back. But he didn't trust himself to ask anything about them.

“Did you find out where Gary and Hodge are, and why they're not answering you?” he asked instead.

Deep Voice narrowed his eyes.

“How did you know . . . ?” he began. His eyes were just slits now. It was amazing how terrifying this made him look. He was a mountain of a man, even with beads in his hair. “Did you overhear at lunchtime? After Doreen scanned the room and was certain it was empty?”

“Maybe there's stuff you and Doreen and that other dude don't know,” Jordan taunted. “Maybe
your
technology isn't all that great, either, if your scanners can miss three whole people.”

Deep Voice glowered at Jordan.

“Sit,” he said, pointing at the chair opposite him at the table.

Jordan considered refusing, but didn't see how that would help.

“I'm not telling you anything,” he said, even as he eased into the chair. “Not unless we trade information. You get one question, I get one question.”

That was how real spies would do it, wasn't it?

Deep Voice didn't look impressed. He stared down at something in his hands—maybe an Elucidator of his own, maybe one of the two that he'd grabbed away from Jordan.

“I've already done the DNA scan,” he said. “In a moment, I'll have more information about you at my fingertips than you could ever tell me. And I'll know
my
information is accurate.”

A DNA scan couldn't really tell all that much, could it?

Jordan stayed silent. An instant later Deep Voice jumped, and glanced up at Jordan with an amazed expression on his face.

“
You're
Jonah Skidmore?” he asked.

“Why do people always guess his name first?” Jordan complained. “Have you never heard of identical twins? Same genes and all? I'm not Jonah, I'm—”

At the last moment, he realized maybe he shouldn't say his name. Maybe he shouldn't have even said that about being identical twins.

The amazement left Deep Voice's face.

“Oh, right,” he murmured. “Of course. It's the
other
boy who's Jonah Skidmore.”

Ouch,
Jordan thought.

He guessed Deep Voice had done the futuristic
equivalent of googling someone with the same name as a famous person, and all the stuff about the famous person came up first.

In this case, Jonah was the famous person. Jordan wasn't.

“I see there was a twin left to die in the nineteen thirties,” Deep Voice said. “It was Claude and Clyde Beckman originally—looks like you're Clyde. Gary and Hodge must not have thought you were worth rescuing.”

Not worth rescuing?
That really hurt.

Jordan opened his mouth to protest,
Don't you see anything about me in the twenty-first century as Jordan Skidmore? Your fancy DNA scan isn't very good after all, is it?

But probably that was what Deep Voice wanted him to do. Probably Deep Voice was trying to goad him into getting upset and accidentally revealing something Deep Voice wouldn't have known otherwise.

Jordan felt proud of himself for figuring out that psychological game.

But is there any chance this guy really does think I was left behind in the nineteen thirties?
Jordan wondered.
What if he doesn't know about me being kidnapped and ending up with Mom and Dad?

Could that also mean Deep Voice knew nothing about Jordan having his own dimension until Jonah made everything smash together?

And that means . . .

Jordan barely understood the different dimensions himself. But if Deep Voice didn't know about them either, did that maybe mean that this was some future branch of time where the dimensions
hadn't
blended? Or hadn't blended yet?

Since everything's in such a mess back in the twenty-first century, is it possible that the changes—and news of the changes—haven't reached this future yet?
Jordan wondered.

Jordan felt absolutely brilliant figuring that out. But he wasn't sure what he could do with the information, or if it was even right.

What if it just means everything was ruined so badly with Mom and Dad being the wrong age that it's too late to stop all of time from ending?

Okay, that wasn't the right way to go for his next thought.

“The question is, how did you get
here
?” Deep Voice asked.

Now the man was looking down at the cell phone–like device and the plastic card that he'd grabbed from Jordan.

What if they worked well enough to tell Deep Voice everything?

“I'll tell you what happened,” Jordan said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “The time agency sent me
here. They gave me those Elucidators. They know where I am. You've got to let me go, or the time agency will come and arrest you!”

“It's interesting that you would say that,” Deep Voice muttered. Strangely, he laid both the cell phone and the plastic card out on the table, where Jordan could easily reach them. The only thing that stopped Jordan from grabbing them was Deep Voice's next words: “Because neither of these objects is a working Elucidator.”

“What?” Jordan asked. “They're not? But—but—”

Had JB lied to him? Had Jonah? Had Second?

It wasn't as if Jordan had understood much about Elucidators before. But this was even more confusing.

“But those Elucidators made us travel through time,” Jordan protested. “They did! We were at home, my whole family was—and some other people too—and then all that disappeared and we were in the dark and spinning and then we were here. And then we were in a time hollow and—”

Too late, Jordan realized that he probably shouldn't be telling Deep Voice so much. But he wanted Deep Voice to admit,
Oh, sorry. My mistake. You're right. These are Elucidators.

“Huh,” Deep Voice grunted. “If what you've told me were actually true, that would be very interesting.”

“Why?” Jordan asked. His head was spinning again.

Am I getting even sicker?
he wondered, even though all his travels through time had mostly distracted him from remembering he'd been sick back home.
Did I bring my germs to the future with me?

What did it matter? His problems now were so much bigger than a minor twenty-first-century cold.

“You
claim
the time agency sent you here,” Deep Voice said. “And yet the time agency recently issued an edict prohibiting all travel bringing time natives from the past to the present. My present, I mean—your future. Why would the time agency break its own rules for a kid like you? One who wasn't even worth removing from the nineteen thirties, when it was easy?”

Deep Voice sounded triumphant, like he thought he'd caught Jordan in some huge lie, and now he expected Jordan to spill everything.

Dude, I've got nothing to spill, because I don't understand any of this!
Jordan wanted to protest.

He started grasping for something—anything—that he might be able to figure out.

“So . . . it's illegal now to bring people from the past to the future?” Jordan asked. “Doesn't that make things hard for Gary and Hodge? Isn't that what they do all the time, kidnapping babies?”

“They rescue endangered children from the past,” Deep Voice said, so smoothly it seemed as if that might be an official slogan. “We here at Interchronological Rescue perform a strictly humanitarian function. So of course we have protested the time agency's edict. And we've sued for damages.”

“And Gary and Hodge disappeared,” Jordan said.

Were all those things connected?

Jordan remembered that Jonah claimed he knew why Gary and Hodge had disappeared: because Charles Lindbergh had turned them back into babies.

Did Charles Lindbergh work for the time agency too? Why hadn't Jordan asked Jonah that question?

Was the time agency going to let Gary and Hodge grow up all over again, and hope that this time they didn't become kidnappers capable of ending all of time?

And what did any of that have to do with Mom and Dad looking like teenagers again?
Were
they still teenagers, wherever Second had taken them? Were they still in this same time period as Jordan?

Maybe Jordan shouldn't have been so hard on Jonah and Katherine for wanting to sit around waiting and thinking and talking endlessly before actually doing anything. Jordan could really use some more information right about now.

“What are you and Doreen and that other guy going
to do about Gary and Hodge disappearing?” Jordan asked Deep Voice. “What are you going to do to stop their plan from ending all of time forever? What are you going to do to me and Katherine and Jonah?”

Deep Voice swept his hands across the table, knocking the plastic card and the cell phone to the side. He didn't bother putting them back in place. He acted like they were as worthless as an empty gum wrapper or a used Kleenex—or as worthless as he'd accused Jordan himself of being. Something you forgot about once you were done with it.

“This interrogation is over,” Deep Voice rumbled.

He stood up and walked out the doorway of the cubicle as though it were the easiest thing in the world.

But of course when Jordan tried to sneak behind him, Jordan hit a solid wall and smashed to the floor once more.

“Wait!” Jordan cried. “Come back! You can't just leave me in this . . . this jail cell!”

Deep Voice kept walking away. An instant later the see-through area of the cubicle clouded up, completely blocking Jordan's view of anything outside the cubicle.

He
was
in a jail cell. No, worse than that—he was in a jail cell with no door. There was nothing he could do to escape.

And if Deep Voice thought he was worthless, would anyone ever bother coming back for him?

Jordan panicked.

He pounded his fists against the walls and screamed, “Let me out! Let me out!”

He screamed himself hoarse before it occurred to him that this was a cubicle made for interrogations, and so it was probably soundproof.

Probably nobody could hear anything he said, no matter how much he screamed.

He slammed his shoulders against first one wall, then another, hoping to find some weak spot, some crack in the defenses.

That just made his shoulders ache.

He snatched up the cell phone and the plastic card from the table. Even though Deep Voice had said they weren't Elucidators—and Jonah had said they were
suspicious—Jordan shouted commands at them anyway.

“Talk to me! Tell me what to do!”

Nothing happened.

“You answered questions before! Answer questions now!”

Still nothing.

“Where are all the glowing words?” he asked. He put the plastic card down, and yelled into the cell. “Even if you're just, like, a smartphone from the twenty-first century, can't you answer anything?”

If he was holding a smartphone from the twenty-first century, it was one with a dead battery.

He slumped against the wall. Nobody could hear him. Nobody could see him. So he let himself do what he really wanted to do.

“Mommy? Daddy?” he moaned. “Why can't you come and find me? I'm sorry! Come and fix everything I messed up! And everything everybody else messed up, too . . .”

Nobody came. It was entirely possible that he would be stuck here until the end of time—especially since Gary and Hodge's coworkers seemed to think that could happen soon. Which was worse, being stuck in a doorless cubicle when time ended quickly, or having to spend weeks and months and years in a doorless cubicle, and then just dying of old age?