Redeemed (18 page)

Second, still in a wheelchair, left the hospital for a rehab center. Time flashed by quickly again: Second had books and computers, and he got meals delivered to his room three times a day. Mr. Reardon kept coming to see him, again and again and again.

“Gary and Hodge say Second managed to string along the FBI for thirteen years,” Doreen said, as if she was reading from some screen Jordan couldn't see. It kind of made him nervous that he couldn't see it. “He kept Mr. Reardon convinced that he did know something about the plane, but he'd only reveal the information for the right price.”

“What happened after thirteen years?” Jordan asked.

“This,” Doreen said. Her hands seemed to shake as she waved them through the air, advancing the scene before them.

Jordan saw a nondescript waiting room. The door opened, and four people walked in: Mom and Dad, looking the way they were supposed to, middle-aged and normal; Katherine, carrying the cell phone she was supposed to share with Jordan; and Jordan himself.

What? When did this happen?
Jordan wondered.

Was it some event that hadn't happened yet, but was supposed to in his near future, after Mom and Dad were their right ages again, but before he and Katherine grew up much more?

No—somehow he and Katherine both looked ever so slightly babyish on the screen, just a bit younger than they were right now. This was something that had already happened.

“It's the day we went to see Mr. Reardon,” Jonah breathed. “Because Dad and Mom actually thought the FBI would tell us the truth about my past. They actually thought the FBI
knew
.”

Jordan looked closer. It
was
Jonah, not Jordan, nervously taking a seat in the waiting room. But Jordan had to look for the placement of the chin dimple to be sure.

How am I supposed to keep track of time and different dimensions and tricky Second and everything else when I can't even see the difference between me and Jonah?
Jordan wondered.

“And that was the day we saw JB for the first time,” Katherine muttered. “Didn't he say it was the first time since the time crash that any time traveler could get in or out? And they could only get in or out at certain spots—points of impact, or something like that?”

“This is just what happened in the antechamber of Mr.
Reardon's office,” Doreen said. “Let me see if I can move the focus back to Second. . . .”

The camera angle seemed to move down the hallway, dipping briefly into an impressive office where Mr. Reardon sat in front of a desktop computer on an imposing desk. Then the camera angle moved through the wall into the office next door where Second, still in a wheelchair, hunched over a laptop.

“Coming through loud and clear,” Second said.

“Got it.” Mr. Reardon's voice came through the laptop speakers.

“They had things set up so Second could
eavesdrop
on our whole conversation?” Katherine asked, sounding outraged.

“By now Second is twenty-six,” Doreen answered. “He's been working with the FBI since he was thirteen. Mr. Reardon still doesn't trust him—he still thinks Second is keeping secrets—but he's now one of their top computer experts.”

“Of course, that's about to end,” Tattoo Face muttered.

Before Jordan could ask why, two men suddenly appeared out of nowhere on either side of Second's wheelchair. One was tall and muscular, the type of guy who probably worked out several hours a day. The other was older and more ordinary-looking. But he carried himself confidently.

“Wh-where did they come from?” Jordan stammered. “Who's that?”

He saw that Katherine and Jonah were staring at the screen with equally stunned expressions. But Katherine took pity on Jordan and glanced his way.

“You don't even recognize them, do you?” she asked. “You don't even know . . . Jordan—that's Gary and Hodge.”

“
That's
what they did the first chance they had to get into our time period after thirteen years?” Jonah exploded. “They went to see Second?”

“I don't think they're just visiting,” Doreen muttered.

Second was looking calmly from side to side, sizing up both men.

“You're the ones,” he said softly. “You have all the answers Reardon wants.”

“Don't think Hodge and I would ever help him!” the muscle-bound man taunted. So that was Gary.

Second leaned back slightly in his wheelchair and slid his laptop lower.

“I wouldn't expect you to,” he said. “It wouldn't serve your purposes.”

Hodge narrowed his eyes and studied Second's face.

“So,
Kevin
,” Hodge said. He raised an eyebrow. “Are you surprised we know the identity you went by before you started working with the FBI?”

Second only shrugged, but Jordan thought,
So it really was “Kevin!” his friends yelled when he fell off that fence!

Hodge didn't seem to care that Second didn't respond. The two of them just kept staring each other down.

“
You
figured out what the entire FBI couldn't,” Hodge said. “You knew that planeload of babies was from another time. How quickly did you put it all together?”

“Are you kidding?” Second asked. “ ‘Tachyon Travel'? You gave yourselves away.”

“Huh?” Jordan said.

“Those are the words Angela told the FBI she saw on the side of the airplane,” Katherine explained. “Tachyons are these particles that I guess have something to do with time travel. Angela never thought they believed her, but . . . they must have written down what she said. And Second saw it.”

“So he knew there was time travel involved,” Jonah murmured. “He and Angela both figured it out.”

“But the FBI didn't?” Jordan asked, still watching Second.

“Institutions sometimes . . . overlook the obvious,” Deep Voice said. He too was staring at the screen. “They
get stuck in their ways, caught in their usual pattern of thinking . . . they fail to consider all possible options. The FBI in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would never have considered time travel as a plausible explanation for anything.”

“Did you know, in the future there's no need for such a primitive tool as an IQ test?” Hodge was asking Second on the large, glowing screen. “All we have to do is scan a person's brain and we know how smart they are. We don't even have to be in the same time period as the person to do that. And we don't have to worry about them speaking a particular language or having the cultural background to understand the test questions. Our brain scans are an
absolute
measure of intelligence.”

“I'm certain I would do well with those scans,” Second said with a shrug. “I always do well on IQ tests.”

“There is a certain category of children that my colleague and I have done brain scans on, throughout history,” Hodge said. “You had the highest score of any of them.”

“I'm not a child,” Second said.

“You were thirteen years ago,” Gary said.

Second blinked. “You could have rescued me,” he said. “I was on that ledge, my friends had run away—there was a moment when nobody would have known if I'd simply
vanished.” He looked down at his legs, immobile in the wheelchair. “I bet you could have even
cured
me. I bet you still could.”

“Now, now,” Hodge said. “I won't go into the reasons, but it turned out not to be possible to get to you before this very moment. People would notice you missing now. And we only rescue children.”

Hodge and Second seemed to be negotiating something. Jordan couldn't understand. Why were they suddenly acting so intense?

Gary stepped closer to Second's wheelchair.

“At the very least, we could show you some of our technology,” he said in a bragging tone.

“Just as a professional courtesy,” Hodge added. “Because we respect your intellect.”

Gary seemed to be holding out an ordinary cell phone for Second to see.

“This totally looks like it belongs in your time period, doesn't it?” Gary asked.

Second grabbed the cell phone from Gary's hands. In the next instant, Second and his wheelchair completely vanished.

So did Gary and Hodge.

“Those cheaters!” Doreen exclaimed.

“Oh, but they had deniability,” Tattoo Face argued. “You saw what happened. They could always claim they were only following customary behavior of the time, one male bragging to another about the superiority of his cell phone. They can claim they had no way of knowing that Second would grab it. Or that he would know how to operate an Elucidator.”

“Didn't they see what happened when he was a teenager and he stole the Elucidator from Jonah?” Jordan asked, whipping his head back and forth between Doreen and Tattoo Face and the screen, which now showed only an empty room.

Jordan was confused anyway: How could Second have been twenty-six back in the twenty-first century, if he had
stolen the Elucidator from Jonah and left from the ravine as a teenager? How could the FBI have rescued him from the ravine when he'd already escaped on his own?

“Gary and Hodge didn't see that,” Deep Voice told him. “Because it hadn't happened yet when they went back to intervene in Second's life at the FBI headquarters.”

“But he was
twenty-six
then,” Jordan said. “He was only—what? Thirteen?—when we saw him disappear.”

It seemed perfectly logical to him that Second would be twenty-six
after
he was thirteen. But maybe Jordan shouldn't rely on that, considering how old his own parents were right now.

“Second grabbing Jonah's Elucidator is probably going to make it so that none of what you just saw actually happens,” Deep Voice said, waving his arm in the general direction of the screen. “The changes just haven't been released yet, so we can still see what would have been.”

Jordan saw Jonah and Katherine exchange glances. Was there something they didn't want to say in front of Deep Voice and the others?

“Where did Second go with Gary and Hodge's Elucidator?” Katherine asked, as if she was trying to distract the adults. “Where did he go when he stole Jonah's? Was it the same place? Was he the same age when he got there?”

“That's what I'm looking for right now,” Doreen said,
bending over a keyboard that seemed imbedded in the table in front of her.

“And why didn't JB or anyone else at the time agency know where Second had come from, when he worked for them?” Jonah asked. “Or—
did
they know?”

“That one we can answer without research,” Tattoo Face said, smirking. “Who do you think always did JB's intelligence work for him?”

“Second,” Katherine said.

“So don't you think it was really easy for him to determine what JB saw and what he didn't see?” Tattoo Face added.

“But after Second—” Jonah began.

Jordan saw Katherine dig an elbow into Jonah's side.

What's that about?
Jordan wondered.
What's she trying to keep him from saying?

All three of the grown-ups were hunched over the keyboard, so they probably didn't notice.

“This says Gary and Hodge took Second to a time before the time agency had all its regulations in place,” Doreen said. “So he was never registered as a time immigrant. And . . . Gary and Hodge were the ones who set Second up to work at the time agency. He was supposed to be their spy. Their source of insider information.”

“Second was working for Gary and Hodge from the
very beginning?” Katherine asked, sounding stunned.

“That's what Gary and Hodge thought,” Doreen said. Her eyes flickered, as if she was scanning large amounts of information. “But it appears that Second only ever works for himself.”

Jordan saw Jonah and Katherine glance at each other again.

Hello!
He wanted to say.
Include me! Don't act like I'm not even here!

He didn't have the slightest idea what Jonah and Katherine were trying to telegraph with their eyes.

Deep Voice looked up from the keyboard, and Jonah and Katherine instantly put on innocent, bland expressions.

“So Second vanishing from the moment of the time crash rather than the FBI office might actually heal one potentially devastating time-travel rip in the twenty-first century,” Deep Voice said. He sounded like he was just throwing out theories. “As he says, no one would have missed him disappearing from that rock in the gully. But that put him on the loose in time with an Elucidator of his own.”

“A parental-controls Elucidator,” Jonah reminded him. “That Elucidator Mr. Rathbone gave us was set up only to do what he wanted us to do.”

“Um, no offense, but I'm pretty sure Second would have been able to override the controls,” Tattoo Face said.

“Hey, we probably could have too!” Jordan protested. “Eventually, I mean! If we'd had enough time!”

Now it was Doreen, Deep Voice, and Tattoo Face exchanging glances. But before any of them had a chance to speak, a booming voice spoke from outside the lab.

“Attention, all Interchronological Rescue employees!”

Jordan guessed the sound came from speakers just outside the lab door.

“All employees are required to attend a mandatory meeting in the fifth-floor conference room in five minutes,” the voice continued. “I repeat, all employees must attend a meeting in the fifth-floor conference room in five minutes. Your actual presence is required. No virtual show-ups.”

Deep Voice moaned. “Do they know what I did?” he asked. “Am I going to be publicly shamed for unauthorized time travel? Is Rathbone going to make an example of me in front of the entire company? Will the police be there?”