Redeemed (6 page)

“I can't,” he whispered. “JB wasn't just pretending that this Elucidator was messed up. It really is broken!”

Jordan began spinning. He felt like every cell in his body—or maybe every molecule? Every atom?—was being torn apart.

“Don't worry!” Katherine screamed. “This part doesn't last long! We'll land soon!”

Jordan wasn't sure how he could hear her, because it felt as though his ears—like every other part of his body—had been broken down into individual atoms. Or maybe individual electrons, protons, and neutrons.

If this really is just some hallucination caused by cold medicine, I am
never
doing any actual serious drugs,
Jordan thought.
This is what they should do to kids in DARE class, instead of giving all those stupid lectures. . . .

And then he couldn't think anything else. Maybe his body really had been torn to bits.

The next thing Jordan knew, he was lying on some sort of flat, motionless surface—a floor? The ground?

Probably floor,
he decided.
Something indoors, because it's so smooth. . . .

He knew from camping in Scouts that no matter how carefully you tried to pick a flat space for your sleeping bag outdoors, there were always tiny pebbles and twigs and clumps of dirt that would poke into your back in the middle of the night.

And how could he be thinking about Scouts and sleeping bags and dirt at a time like this?

Think about . . . finding that other Elucidator thing to fix Mom and Dad,
he reminded himself.
And maybe that will make it so I'm back in my normal dimension, or whatever gives me back my normal family and my normal life. . . .

Finding anything was going to be hard, because he felt both blind and deaf. He couldn't see or hear anything. He tried blinking a few times, and feebly lifted one hand to hit the side of his head, to try to clear his ears. He couldn't even feel his own hand. Had he lost all his senses?

Even as he started gasping in panic, he began hearing Jonah whispering nearby, “Elucidator, don't make any noise. And please make us invisible. Please, please, please, Elucidator, let that function still be working. . . .”

Invisible?
Jordan thought.
Is that why I can't see?

Somehow he knew that wasn't right, but it took his brain a moment to figure out why:
Oh, yeah. Invisible is when other people can't see you, not that you can't see anything. . . .

“What was in that cold medicine?” Jordan tried to say. But it came out more like “Unh ah inh . . .” because his tongue felt as thick and uncooperative as a slab of meat.

Also, something slapped against his face and covered his mouth.

Katherine's hand?
he thought.
Oh—I can feel things now!

“Shh!” Katherine hissed in his ear. “Don't make any noise until we know where we are, and if we're safe. . . .”

Was there some reason they wouldn't be safe? And . . . hadn't they been going to the future?

It was so weird, how his brain couldn't seem to hang on to a detail like that.

“Mom, Dad, Jordan—if you're feeling sick, it's just because you're in a new time, and it takes a little while to adjust,” Katherine whispered. “You'll feel better in a little bit. Just stay hidden and be quiet until you can think and hear and see straight. . . .”

Jordan wanted to ask,
Are we hidden now?
But getting his tongue and mouth to form those words seemed about as likely as climbing Mount Everest at the moment.

And, oh, yeah, she said to stay quiet. . . .

“
Are
we invisible?” Katherine hissed, probably to Jonah.

Wasn't it crazy that she'd ask a question like that? And sound serious about it?

Jordan squeezed his eyes shut and opened them a second time, and finally they started working again. He could see Katherine and Jonah and Dad lying beside him. He turned his head the other direction, and there was Mom. All four Skidmores—five, if you counted Jonah—were lined up on some hard floor.

Like corpses,
Jordan's brain told him, and he felt himself start to shiver.

Belatedly, his brain also told him that Jonah had been shaking his head no. Every single Skidmore was completely visible, the red of Dad's T-shirt and the purple and pink of Katherine's sweater as bright as neon.

The Elucidator in Jonah's hand hadn't been able to turn any of them invisible.

“Is there, like, crazy-strong air-conditioning in the future, or are we someplace really cold, like Hudson's ship in 1611?” Katherine asked, still in a whisper.

Was she talking about the year 1611 like it was a time she'd actually lived through?

“Shh,” Jonah replied. “You have to be quiet, too.”

“Unhhh . . .” That was Dad.

“Do you think Mom and Dad are having even worse
timesickness because of that whole un-aging thing?” Katherine asked anxiously.

Jonah shrugged and drew his fingers across his lips. Evidently that meant
zip it!
in all dimensions.

And then Jordan saw Jonah struggle up into a sitting position. If Jonah could sit up, Jordan could too.

Jordan started pushing himself up on his wobbly arms. The vague shapes above and around him swung in and out of focus. Sterile-looking tables . . . colorful projections that glowed like a computer or TV but without any sort of actual screen or wall behind them . . .

Jordan's best guess was that they were in some sort of futuristic lab.

Maybe it's empty,
he thought.
Maybe it won't matter that the Elucidator couldn't make us invisible, or that our whispering might have been too loud. . . .

At the edge of Jordan's range of vision, Jonah had not only managed to sit up, but was now twisted around and peeking over the top of the nearest lab table.

“What do you think an Elucidator might look like in the future?” Jonah whispered, turning his head toward Katherine. “Maybe . . . like the thinnest credit card ever?”

Jordan watched as Jonah glanced around, then slipped his hand over the edge of the table and picked up something.

Just then Jordan's elbows buckled and his chest slammed down against the floor. Pain shot through his body, and he screamed, “Ahhhh!”

The sound echoed in the silent lab.

A moment later, a strange face loomed over him.

“Get us out of here!” Jonah hollered. “Take us all . . . someplace safe! Like—the nearest time hollow?”

In the next instant, the face disappeared from Jordan's view. So did the tables and the colorful screenlike projections and everything else about the sterile lab. Everything went dark and spinny.

Time traveling again?
Jordan thought.

But the sensation of spinning and zooming through darkness ended as quickly as it had started. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, Jordan was on solid ground again—or, actually, solid floor. He could see a room around him now. But when he looked around for any identifying features or clues about where he was, there weren't any. The room was just empty and bland, with nothing-colored walls and a nothing-colored floor
and lighting that didn't seem to come from anywhere—it just
was
.

The bright colors of Dad's red shirt and Katherine's pink-and-purple sweater were even more jarring here.

So Jonah brought us to a place where there's nowhere to hide?
Jordan thought anxiously.

Before he could point that out, Dad sat up and said in an amazed voice, “I don't feel sick anymore.”

Katherine giggled. “That's how time hollows work,” she said. “As long as we're here, you also won't get hungry and you won't get thirsty and you won't ever have to go to the bathroom. It's like we're totally outside of time. Nothing changes in a time hollow. Jonah and I were stuck in a time hollow for decades once, and we never got hungry or thirsty that entire time.”

She had to be making that up. Didn't she?

Jordan saw Mom raise one eyebrow questioningly—having her do that with a kid's face didn't work as well as when she was a grown-up. Katherine and Jonah ignored her. Dad just patted his stomach.

“You're right,” he said thoughtfully. “I don't feel hungry, and I seem to remember that when I was thirteen the first time around, I was
always
hungry. It's so strange—I don't feel like I need anything at all.”

“I'd take being an adult again,” Mom said, practically in
the same annoyed and annoying tone that Katherine so often had in her voice. Then Mom grimaced. “I guess that's what both of you, Jordan and Jonah, were trying to accomplish. I
do
appreciate the effort. But maybe this time around we could take things slow and you could
think
before you act?”

Jordan realized that everyone else was already sitting up. He pulled himself up and glared at Jonah.

“I
might
have taken us to the right time period—Jonah didn't exactly give us much of a chance to look around,” Jordan complained. “So some man saw us. So what? Maybe he could have helped us. Maybe we could have made up some really convincing story and . . .”

Jonah and Katherine were both shaking their heads.

“Jordan—I recognized that man,” Jonah said. “He's our worst enemy.”

“Gary? Hodge?” Dad asked. “Was it one of them?” He clenched his fists like he was ready to punch someone.

Jonah and Katherine looked at each other.

“This guy's even worse,” Katherine said. “That was Second.”

Maybe it wasn't possible to be hungry or thirsty or sick in a time hollow, but Jordan could have sworn he felt his stomach start churning, just at the grimness of Katherine's voice. She wasn't joking about any of this. She was terrified.

But Jordan couldn't let anyone see that he was scared too.

“You're afraid of some guy who's named for a number?” Jordan asked. “What—is he that proud of coming in second place?”

By the standards of wisecracking movie heroes, that was pretty lame. But Jordan was proud he could joke at all.

Nobody laughed.

“Second's real name is Sam Chase,” Jonah said, frowning. “He used to work for JB—JB
trusted
him. He told us Sam Chase was his best projectionist.”

“And a projectionist is . . . ,” Dad prompted.

“Someone who makes predictions for time travelers,” Katherine answered. “So they can see how their trip might affect time. Usually you don't want to change anything about the past, because it could mess up everything.”

“But Sam Chase got sick of things not changing.” Jonah took up the story. He crossed his arms in a way that made him look furious. “He tricked JB—and, well, me and Katherine and our friend Andrea, too—and he decided to rearrange history. He started calling himself Second Chance.”

“And he shifted and split time, just for the fun of it,” Katherine finished. “He almost destroyed it completely.”

Jonah and Katherine were just talking. They were just
kids
. And there was nothing remotely dangerous anywhere
in sight. Even the face Jordan had seen back in the lab hadn't seemed that menacing—the guy had mostly just looked like a computer nerd with messy hair.

But Jordan still found himself having to fight the urge to shiver in fear.

“JB thinks Second is the one who taught Gary and Hodge how to make their split dimensions,” Jonah said.

“Really?” Katherine said. Evidently this was news to her, too. “So you and Jordan growing up in different dimensions—that all traces back to him too?”

“How is he at re-aging people who already lived through their teen years once and would rather just be adults again?” Mom asked, and at least she managed to sound
slightly
humorous about the whole thing.

“I don't know,” Jonah said, shrugging helplessly. It was still strange how much looking at Jonah was like looking into a mirror. But Jordan had never seen his own face look so miserable. “I don't know if that was Second when he was still Sam Chase and still loyal to JB. I don't know if he's told the whole time agency we were there, and now we've gotten JB into serious, serious trouble. I don't know if we somehow managed to cross over into the new dimension Second created, and maybe he'd try to follow us if we went back home. I don't even know if this plastic thing I grabbed is an Elucidator or not!”

He held up the thin sliver of plastic he'd swiped from the table back at the lab.

“Okay. Okay,” Mom said. She took a deep breath, just like she always did when she was trying to talk Katherine down from some stupid sixth-grade drama with her friends. “Let's just look at this logically.
Something
got us out of that lab and into this . . . what did you call it? A time hollow? And we know the other Elucidator Jordan took from JB wasn't working. . . .”

“
Do
we know that?” Jonah asked. “That Elucidator took us from our kitchen into the lab in what must have been the future. I was thinking the Elucidator was broken the same way as the light switch in our bathroom last summer, where sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, and it was impossible to predict. Remember, Dad, you had me help you fix that?”

“Ummm . . . ,” Dad said.

“No,
I
helped Dad fix the bathroom light switch!” Jordan said hotly. It'd been, like, a five-minute job, and Jordan had complained the whole time. But he still didn't want Jonah taking credit.

Dad scrunched up his face.

“I . . . can't really remember which of you helped me,” he said. “It might have even been Katherine. . . . Sorry, guys.”