Redeemed (26 page)

Then both men vanished. The wall was blank for a moment, then the scene came back. This time one of the men had his coat drawn higher over his ears.

“You—” the man said again.

“Let's try another time period,” Second said.

Now it was a man and a woman sitting at a table.

“Should—” the woman said.

The scene flashed out of sight again.

“I think your Elucidator is broken,” Jordan said. “Or your TV or computer or whatever's showing those images.”

“No, it's my world that's broken,” Second said sadly. “That's all that's left of it. Flickers of existence, and then it's gone. I ruined everything. I destroyed it all.”

Jordan believed him.

It was weird: He didn't like Second, and he still didn't trust him. But somehow he was certain that Second was telling the truth.

About this, anyway.

“Well, um, the real world's still okay, right?” Jordan asked. It was almost as if he were trying to comfort Second. “Real time, I mean. If you just created that other dimension to play around with—and if it was dangerous to real time—then who cares if it broke?”

For some reason, he found he had a lot more to say to Second about this topic.

“Maybe you should think of your other dimension like . . . like a video game or a movie or a book,” Jordan said. “It seemed real to you while you were playing it or
watching it or reading it. Whatever. It
felt
like it mattered. But it really didn't. So . . . no problem. Let it go. Move on.”

Maybe Jordan didn't have a great future ahead of him as a guidance counselor or a therapist or anything like that. Second's expression just got sadder and sadder with every word Jordan spoke. The corners of his mouth drooped more and more.

“Don't you want to know
why
my world failed?” Second asked.

Jordan was so tempted to say no. He didn't want any part of the sadness that was clearly weighing Second down.

“I think you're going to tell me, whether I want to know or not,” Jordan said.

This at least earned Jordan a rueful head shake from Second.

“You can accuse me of hubris,” Second said. “You can accuse me of playing God. You can—”

“I don't want to accuse you of anything,” Jordan said. “I just want—”

“I know, I know,” Second said. “You just want your family back. You just want your life to be normal again. Who are you—Dorothy in Oz? She goes to an incredible place like the Land of Oz, and the whole time she's there all she wants to do is go home?”

Jordan didn't like that comparison. He wasn't some girl
in a gingham dress and stupid sparkly shoes. He didn't even have a dog. Still, he felt compelled to defend Dorothy.

“She was worried about her family,” Jordan said. “Auntie Em and, well, whatever her uncle's name was. If she'd had them with her—or just known they were okay—she would have been really happy to hang out with the Munchkins and all, and enjoy Oz. Not so much the Wicked Witch, though.”

He cast a worried glance at Second. Was Second as much like the Wicked Witch of the West as Katherine and Jonah seemed to believe? Or was he more like the Wizard of Oz, someone hiding behind a fake image?

What if Second was just trying to trick Jordan again, trying to get him to think that anything about his situation was like Dorothy's in Oz?

“Can we skip the language arts lesson and go back to talking about rescuing my parents?” Jordan asked.

Second sank to the floor. Jordan felt weird towering over him, so he crouched down beside the man.

“You
can
help my parents, can't you?” Jordan asked.

Second stared fixedly at a point on the floor a few feet from Jordan's knee.

“The time agency always thought time travel itself endangered reality,” he mumbled. “They thought, if any human can travel through time and change the past or
watch the future, doesn't that alone destabilize the space-time continuum?”

“Does it?” Jordan asked.

Second glanced up and let his eyes meet Jordan's for the briefest of instants. Then he went back to staring at the floor.

“The truth is, time travel is hard, and people are lazy,” he said. “It twists your brain in knots, and after a few experiences of unintended consequences, most people will choose lives of comfort over constant exploration and change. From the very beginning of my new world, humanity disappointed me.”

“Why? Because the people in your world did what
they
wanted instead of what
you
wanted them to do?” Jordan asked. He wasn't sure why Second was making him so mad all of a sudden. “Why didn't you just stay home and play Sims? That lets you control people!”

Unexpectedly, Jordan's outburst earned him a grin from Second.

“See, you
are
going to accuse me of playing God,” he said.

“I mean—” Jordan began.

Second waved away his interruption.

“Truthfully, I deserve that accusation,” he said. “I thought I was smarter than God. I thought the world I created would be better than the original world.”

“Gary and Hodge pretty much told you you were the smartest person ever,” Jordan said, remembering the scene he'd watched in the laboratory at Interchronological Rescue. “Though, did that really happen after all, since Katherine and Jonah and I went back and rescued you as a thirteen-year-old?”

Second didn't answer that question. He went back to staring at the floor.

“In the original world, time travel had built-in limits, even without the limits the time agency added,” he said. “Time is very good at protecting itself against paradoxes.”

“So why does the time agency worry so much?” Jordan asked. “JB just about freaked out when I . . .”

Should he tell Second what had happened with JB at the hospital?

Was there any chance that Second didn't already know? He
had
been able to follow Jordan to the time hollow, when the Elucidator said no one could do that.

No—the Elucidator said no one from the time agency could do that,
Jordan remembered.
It never answered the question about whether Second could do that.

Jordan gasped. “Are you the one who's been controlling the Elucidators from the very beginning?” he asked. He remembered wondering about the Elucidator Second had left with JB. That had to be the same faulty Elucidator JB
had had in the Skidmore family kitchen, didn't it? The one Jordan swiped?

Jordan looked down at the Elucidator he was clutching in his hand at this very moment. It was the Elucidator Mr. Rathbone had handed Jonah at Interchronological Rescue. The one that teenage Second had stolen right out of Jonah's hand.

“So you were the one who set up Mr. Rathbone, too, to send us back to rescue you at a younger age,” Jordan said.

Second started shaking his head so forcefully that his messy hair trembled.

“No,” he said. “No. I
did
have control over the Elucidator I gave JB. He needed to think he was in contact with the time agency, but I needed to keep the rest of the agency in the dark. That was a necessary deception.”

“But this one—” Jordan held up the Elucidator that had come from Mr. Rathbone.

“I
wish
I'd had total control of that one,” Second said, lifting his own hands in a show of innocence. “I'm just lucky I could do anything with it. I could track it and follow you here.”

Second's voice held so much pain that Jordan hesitated.

“But you thought . . . I mean, the teenage version of you thought . . . that he'd gotten a message from his older self about how to unlock this Elucidator,” Jordan said. “He
thought the instructions had come from you!”

Second just stared at Jordan.

“You saw Mr. Rathbone program that Elucidator,” Second said. “It was based on information he'd gotten from Gary and Hodge. Because all three of them wanted the idea I had in my head even as a thirteen-year-old. The idea that destroyed my world. And that will destroy your world unless we stop it.”

“Okay, okay, let's stop it!” Jordan snapped.

Second just stared at Jordan. The man's eyes seemed sadder than ever.

“Don't you understand yet?” he asked. “It's the same idea that you want to use to rescue and fix your parents. Saving your parents means destroying the world.”

For a moment, Jordan could only gape at Second.

“Are you saying they have to stay teenagers forever?” he finally asked. “Or, well, just grow up alongside Katherine and me? And, uh, Jonah? And Angela?”

For a moment he tried to imagine this: his normal life along with a new twin brother and his parents always the same age as him. They'd have to have someone come and stay with them to act like actual adults. Maybe their grandparents? And he guessed someone would have to figure out the whole money thing, so they could afford food and everything else. And . . .

“No, I'm not saying they'd have to stay teenagers forever or grow up with you and Katherine and Jonah,” Second said irritably. “Don't you see what a huge disruption in time that would be, to have your parents consistently thirty
years too young for the rest of their lives? And remember, it's not just them. The ages of some sixty other adults were knocked back at the same time. Time can't survive that big of a change for very long.”

“So if we change my parents and the others back to their right ages, the world ends,” Jordan said. “And if we don't change them back, the world ends. Isn't there another choice?”

Second's eyes bored into Jordan's.

“I think you're ready to hear what went wrong with the alternate world I created,” he said softly.

Jordan nodded, but Second didn't launch into his story right away.

“What's the best thing about time travel?” Second asked. “Or, I should say, what would you have said the best thing was before you actually traveled through time?”

Jordan considered this question seriously.

“Getting to see the future,” he said. “And . . . getting to see my own future.”

It was kind of disappointing that in all his travels through time, he hadn't yet had a chance to look at his own life when he was, say, twenty-five. Or whenever he'd be all grown up and doing whatever he was supposed to do as an adult. Maybe he'd be a professional basketball player by then. Maybe he'd have made a million dollars somehow. Maybe . . .

“Okay,” Second said. “So what if you see your own future and you're
not
rich and famous? What if your future's not even mediocre? What if it kind of sucks?”

“Then you go back in time and make it so you are rich and famous in the future. Or . . . whatever your goal is,” Jordan said, just so Second didn't think he only cared about being rich and famous.

“Right,” Second said. “That, I've found, is how most people think. Or if their present sucks, they want to go back to the past to fix that. The principle's the same.”

“So that's what messed up your world?” Jordan asked. “People kept wanting to go back and forth in time to change things?”

“No,” Second said. “That's not what ruined everything. Because it's still hard. People can't duplicate themselves in time, so they'd have to figure out a work-around for that. And they'd have to be willing to go through a potentially dangerous un-aging process to go back to whatever age they were when they could make a difference. Then they'd have to do all the hard work of, say, practicing the bassoon for six hours every single day for twenty years so they'd be champion bassoonists. Or athletes, or whatever they were aiming for. With time travel, a lot of people did learn from their mistakes and changes their lives the second or third time around. But a lot of people . . . didn't.”

“So people ruined your world because not enough of them wanted to work hard enough to become champion bassoonists?” Jordan asked.

That made Second chuckle. But it was a sad chuckle.

“No,” he said. “People ruined my world because I remembered something I started thinking about when I was a thirteen-year-old climbing a fence. It was about a way to skip over the unpleasant parts of life. Without consequences.”

Jordan remembered wishing he could use time travel to skip the boring parts of school.

“You mean, like, your body would feel like you'd eaten your spinach, but you didn't ever have to taste it?” Jordan asked.

Second wrinkled his nose.

“In my case, as a teenager, it was that my father would feel he'd had the satisfaction of beating me, but I didn't ever have to experience it,” he said. “But yes, I think you have the general principle.”

“Everybody would want that,” Jordan said.

“Right,” Second said. “The problem is, if people skip too many parts of their lives, they're constantly the wrong age. Others can tell they've stepped out of time. And, well, that they've cheated, and haven't actually earned anything they accomplished.”

“But if everyone's doing that, who cares?” Jordan argued.

“Time cares,” Second said. “Time makes barriers to that. So I thought I was fixing everything when I made it possible for people to readjust their ages any time they wanted. Time travelers knew almost from the very beginning how to do that with kids. But it was always seen as an impossibility with adults. Before my brilliant idea.”

There was still some pride in his voice—pride at his own brilliance. But somehow it was mixed with shame.

Jordan waited for Second to explain what happened next. But the man seemed strangely out of words.

Jordan tried to figure it out for himself.

“I guess . . . I guess if anybody can change anything they want, anytime, and be any age they want, anytime, then nothing's stable,” Jordan said. “Nobody's reliable. Nobody could count on anyone or anything.”