Redeemed (4 page)

Seriously?
Jordan thought.
Katherine thinks we're going to fall for that?

Nobody laughed or even smirked. The other kids all looked grim. JB frowned and put his hand over the pocket in his shirt where he'd evidently put his cell phone. Or his “Elucidator.” Whatever.

“Maybe we can limit the explanations to only the information that Jordan—and, for that matter, Linda and Michael—absolutely need,” JB muttered, sweeping his hand toward Mom and Dad, lumping them in with Jordan. “They're not going to travel through time ever again, so they won't need to know about Elucidators.”

“But it sounds like Elucidators and time travel shaped our lives—and our family,” Mom said in a steely voice. “Don't we need to know about them to understand our past? What's the saying? ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'?”

Trust Mom, even as a teenager, to come up with something like that.

JB stopped beside the island in the middle of the kitchen. Jordan would have preferred to sit down—he still felt a little dizzy—but everyone else seemed too keyed up for that. They all stood around the island, almost as if they were squaring off and choosing sides for an argument.

“You can't expect the Skidmores not to have questions,”
Chip said. It sounded like he was trying to be a peacemaker. “I mean, even I'm confused, and I've been to other centuries! The separate dimensions with Jonah and Jordan—how did that work? They were both in the same dimension back in the nineteen thirties, right?”

The nineteen thirties?
Jordan thought.
What?

But once again, everyone else seemed to accept this with absolute calm.

JB sighed and leaned against the island. “Jonah and Jordan, like typical identical twins, were born in the same dimension,” he began. “There
was
only one dimension when they were born, more than eighty years ago. Time split when they were kidnapped from history and—”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Jordan interrupted, because he couldn't stand it any longer. “I don't know about that Jonah kid, but I was
not
born more than eighty years ago. I'm thirteen! I'm not like them”—he gestured wildly at the kid versions of Mom and Dad—“I've never been any older than this! I've never been kidnapped, and I wasn't ever in ‘history,' and, and . . . I do
not
have an identical twin!”

Everyone looked back and forth between Jonah and Jordan. Jordan didn't have to be a mind reader or have any of those time-travel Elucidator hocus-pocus skills to be able to tell: Every single person in the room was thinking some variation of
Dude, scream all you want. But you two
are
identical
.

“I mean, I'm not
supposed
to have a twin!” Jordan said. “It's not right! It's never been this way before!”

JB looked around at the whole crowd. “And you thought knowing more would make things
easier
for him?” he asked.

“This is hard no matter what,” Jonah said, and for some reason everyone turned to him respectfully, as though he were some wise person who knew more than anybody else.

“Maybe
he
really is eighty-some years old, and he got turned back into a kid, just like Mom and Dad,” Jordan said frantically, trying out a new theory. “But me—I'm thirteen. I was born
thirteen
years ago! I—”

“Quit embarrassing yourself,” Katherine muttered, digging her elbow into Jordan's ribs. And this was so much like the normal Katherine, the one he was used to, that Jordan managed to bite down on his lip and keep from screaming anything else.

“The two of us are both thirteen, but we were both born more than eighty years ago,” Jonah said, still in that freakishly calm voice. But Jordan thought maybe the other kid wasn't as calm as he sounded: He wouldn't quite meet Jordan's eyes. “The reason you don't remember the nineteen thirties, Jordan, is because our enemies kidnapped you when you were only a year and a half old. And then they un-aged you and brought you to this time period. They kidnapped me, too. And a bunch of other kids.”

Jordan jerked his gaze accusingly toward JB—hadn't JB said that he'd last seen Jordan when Jordan was only a year and a half old?

“It wasn't me!” JB protested. “It was two men named Gary and Hodge.”

“They were collecting famous missing children from history, to take far into the future to be adopted by families who would pay them a lot of money,” Angela added.

“I'm famous?” Jordan asked incredulously. He turned to his parents and squinted at them in confusion. “And you paid time-traveling
kidnappers
to get me?”

“We didn't know anything about the time travel or the kidnapping until . . .” Mom glanced at the kitchen clock. “Until about an hour ago.”

“But—this is weird—it's like I can't remember exactly how your adoption worked,” Dad said, wrinkling up his nose in a confused squint. “It's like we went through one procedure with Jordan, and a different procedure with Jonah, but it was all at the same time. . . . Why would we have done the adoptions separately?”

“Because the two of us were in different dimensions, and you remember both of them,” Jonah said.

“Your brain is probably trying to fuse the memories from both dimensions together,” JB said. “It's only because you're in the midst of other oddities that you can see the discrepancy.”

He pulled out his phone—
no, Elucidator,
Jordan corrected himself—and glanced at it anxiously, as if hoping he'd gotten a message, maybe about Dad's memory. JB grimaced. Did that mean he'd gotten bad news, or just no news at all? Jordan slid a little closer to JB and craned his neck, but he couldn't see anything on the phone/Elucidator screen.

JB raised his head and glanced suspiciously toward Jordan. To cover for his spying, Jordan quickly blurted, “Let's go back to . . . am I famous?”

“Oh yeah, that's right—Jonah, if you went back to the nineteen thirties, did you find out your original identity?” Chip asked curiously. “Yours
and
Jordan's, I guess, if you're twins. Are you royalty, like me and Alex and Daniella and Gavin? The secret children of someone famous, like Emily? Or someone who only became famous in the future, like Brendan and Antonio? Or—”

“We're nobodies,” Jonah said, and for the first time he didn't sound calm. His voice was tight. “We were just fakes Gary and Hodge used
to try to fool people. To fool Charles Lindbergh and to fool the people who wanted to adopt famous kids from history and”—he darted a quick glance at Jordan and then, just as quickly, looked away—“to fool
me
.”

Somehow he said the last part as though it were Jordan's fault. Jordan wanted to protest:
I didn't do anything to try to fool you! I'd never even seen you before this morning! Believe me, I would have been happy never to have met you at all!

“But all the kids on the plane were famous!” Chip protested.

“Not me,” Jonah said, his face rigid. “Not Jordan, either.”

“What plane?” Jordan asked.

“The one that brought you to this time period,” Angela said, picking up the explanation. “Well, it was actually a time-travel device, but it
looked
like an ordinary plane. Gary and Hodge were trying to escape some time agents who were chasing them, and so they crash-landed the plane in this time period. Thirteen years ago, I mean. I was working at the airport then, and that's how I got involved. I saw the plane appear out of nowhere, carrying only babies . . .”

She stopped and squinted toward JB.

“Wait,” she said. “Now the different dimensions are confusing me, too. Did Jordan's plane crash-land, too? Or did Gary and Hodge send him here on purpose, just to confuse Jonah and make everything work with Charles Lindbergh?”

“Hard to say exactly at this point,” JB said distractedly, glancing down at his phone/Elucidator again. “Everything's a little muddy right now, until . . . Ugh! Why can't anyone locate that Lindbergh Elucidator at a moment that a qualified time agent can sneak into, so we can steal it?”

He slapped his hand against the granite counter.

“How about sending someone who isn't a qualified time agent?” Jonah asked. “If you need that defective Elucidator so you can make Mom and Dad and Angela the right age again, then—”

“We would never send anyone except a qualified time agent after that Elucidator,” JB said, with a tight smile that seemed neither happy nor friendly. “So it doesn't matter whether anyone else could sneak after it or not.”

He made time travel sound almost like hide-and-seek or capture the flag or some other spylike game—only with higher stakes and greater consequences. The minute JB's gaze dropped to his phone/Elucidator again, Jordan saw all the other kids besides Mom and Dad exchanging significant glances.

Dad seemed oblivious. But Mom caught Jordan looking at her and she raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“Send me to get that Elucidator,” Mom said abruptly, pointing right at the sparkliest
E
of the word
CHEER
! on her sweatshirt.

“What?” JB exclaimed, dropping his hand so his phone/Elucidator almost hit the counter.

“It makes sense,” Mom said. “I don't belong in this time period anyhow, as a teenager. So I'm out of place to begin with. And that Elucidator would either be in the nineteen thirties or the far-off future, and I haven't been in either
of those time periods before, so there wouldn't be any chance that I'd mess up time by being in the same place twice. And this would help my family.”

She looked around beseechingly, her gaze lingering on Jordan and Jonah and Katherine.

“Oh!” Dad said, as if he were just catching on. “Send me, too!”

“Right, because the two of you have the least amount of time-travel experience of anyone in the room,” JB said scornfully. “Even
Jordan's
done more time travel than you!”

Why did he have to use Jordan as the example of someone stupid and inexperienced?

“You could send me,” Katherine said. “Or Chip or Jonah or Angela. If it's against time-agency regulations, you could do what you did when we were dealing with 1918 and you kind of accidentally on purpose set your Elucidator for voice commands. How were you supposed to know that some eleven-year-old girl like me would grab the Elucidator and zip off to the past in front of a bunch of assassins?”

Did Katherine actually do that?
Jordan wondered. His stomach felt queasy.

“Because if you tell me to do something ‘accidentally on purpose,' the time agency would never suspect me of faking a mistake,” JB muttered sarcastically.

Did he mean that he would have tried something like
that if Katherine hadn't just ruined his plan by suggesting it?

Is the time agency still spying on all of us?
Jordan wondered.

There was an awkward silence that reminded Jordan of the school play last year, when one of his friends forgot his lines and none of the other actors knew how to cover for the mistake.

“Hey—Venn diagrams,” Katherine said.

“
What
are you talking about?” Jordan and Jonah both said. And it was horrible how identical their voices sounded, blending together. Their voices even cracked on the same word.

Katherine smiled sweetly at both of them, turning her head side to side.

“I think I figured out the best way to make sense of the different dimensions,” she said. “It's like those Venn diagrams they have us draw at school.”

She turned around and grabbed the pad of paper Mom kept by the phone for messages. Then she rifled through the junk drawer for a pen. While everyone watched, she put the paper down flat on the island and drew two interlocking circles.

“See, these are the two separate dimensions Jonah and Jordan were in,” she said. “Everybody except the kids who came from the past lived in both dimensions, and remembers things from both dimensions.”

In the center, where the circles overlapped, she wrote,
Just about everybody.

“I see where you're going with this, but there should really be three circles,” Jonah said. “Because there was a third dimension too, where no kids from the past ended up in this time period. So I guess you got to be an only child there, Katherine.”

He grabbed the pen and drew a third interlocking circle around the
Just about everybody.