Redeemed (9 page)

Words glowed in the air once more:
I CAN'T ANSWER THAT.

Jonah shot Jordan an
I told you so
look. Jordan ignored that, too.

“Elucidator, where are Gary and Hodge right now?” he tried again.

At least the words changed this time:
GARY AND HODGE ARE NOT PRESENT IN THIS TIME PERIOD.

Okay. Maybe Jordan should have expected that. He'd heard their coworkers say they'd vanished. And with time travel, that probably meant that they'd vanished from this time.

But he wasn't going to give up, not with Jonah glowering at him.

“Then where—I mean, ‘when'—are they?” Jordan asked.

HERE IS A TIMELINE SHOWING ALL MOMENTS THOSE TWO HAVE ENTERED
the words glowed back at him.

Jordan saw a glowing line in the air with dots all over the place.

“Shut that down!” Jonah ordered. “That's so bright someone could see it from outside!”

The glowing line obligingly disappeared.

“We're wasting time,” Jonah hissed. “I already know why Gary and Hodge aren't answering their coworkers! Charles Lindbergh used an Elucidator I gave him and turned them into babies again, so they couldn't cause any more trouble. So—”

“Why didn't you tell us that before?” Jordan challenged.

Jonah ran his hand across his forehead. Jordan
recognized that motion: It was what Jordan himself did when he was frustrated.

Except for their clothes, Jonah already looked exactly like Jordan. Having him act like Jordan too made things even creepier.

“There hasn't been time for me
to
tell!” Jonah protested. “I mean, with you grabbing things and sending us the wrong places . . . And there's, like, more than five hundred years of stuff that happened to Katherine and me and Chip and the other missing kids that you don't know about, so where was I supposed to start?”

“I didn't know about Gary and Hodge turning back into babies either,” Katherine said quietly. And this was not like her. Katherine was never quiet. “Did you leave them in 1932? Or—”

“I don't know!” Jonah said, as if he were annoyed with Katherine, too. “JB took care of them. All I was thinking about was getting home and getting my normal life back. . . .”

The look he shot Jordan then was so disgusted he might as well have said out loud,
I wanted to get back to my life where you didn't exist.

“So for all you know, JB might have killed those two babies,” Jordan said, jumping to the most extreme example to get back at Jonah.

“JB wouldn't have done that,” Jonah protested.

“How do you know?” Jordan asked. “What if you're not even right about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are?”

“Stop it!” Katherine interrupted. “You two are, like, almost shouting at each other. Someone's going to find us!”

For some reason, Jordan felt angry with her right now too.

“You know, if I weren't here, I bet the two of you would just sit around saying, ‘Ooh, we're so scared, we're so scared, what will we do if someone finds us?' ” Jordan accused. He tried making his voice a little quieter, but it rose as he went on. “You think you know so much more than me—what good is all that knowledge if it just makes you scared? What are you ever going to do?”

“We're going to . . . to . . . ,” Katherine sputtered.

“We're going to skip ahead in time to five o'clock today, so we can hear what Gary and Hodge's coworkers say when they get back together,” Jonah finished for her.

“Could you do
that
for us, Elucidators?” Jordan asked mockingly.

He expected the Elucidators to tell him all over again what they couldn't do. But only one word glowed beside Jonah's hands:

YES.

Jordan's anger evaporated.

“Oh, wow,” he breathed. “That's so cool. Think how time travel could work with school—you could skip the whole boring day . . .”

“People would notice you were missing,” Katherine said. “You wouldn't get away with it.”

But she sounded more amused than annoyed now. Then she ruined it by turning to Jonah.

“Remember how amazed we were the first time we traveled through time?” she asked. “We made so many mistakes back in the fourteen hundreds . . . Jordan, just wait until the first time you turn invisible. That's really bizarre too!”

“Shouldn't we turn invisible before we skip ahead in time?” Jordan asked. He was proud of himself for thinking of this.

And Jonah and Katherine think I don't know anything. . . .

Neither of them looked impressed.

“I guess so, but it probably won't do any good,” Katherine said. “I bet everyone at Interchronological Rescue has traveled through time. That means they'd be able to see us anyhow.”

Jordan squinted at her blankly. Had he just then accidentally skipped ahead in time, and missed hearing something about traveling through time and being able to see invisible people?

“Katherine, remember, he doesn't know anything about the rules of time travel,” Jonah said impatiently. He turned toward Jordan, and slowed down his voice like he was talking to a little kid. A really stupid little kid. “See, Jordan, invisibility only fools time natives. Anyone who's ever traveled through time can see invisible people. It looks like they're made out of glass or something, but they're still visible.”

Jordan was not going to ask what a “time native” was. He could guess that one. Wouldn't it be someone native to a particular time? Someone who belonged in that moment?

“You'll see,” Katherine said. “It really is freaky. Elucidator, make us invisible.”

Nothing changed about Jonah, Katherine, or—Jordan looked down—Jordan himself. But when Jordan glanced
back up, he saw glowing words again near the Elucidators in Jonah's hands:
INVISIBILITY IS NOT A FUNCTION I CAN ACCOMPLISH AT THIS TIME AND IN THIS PLACE.

Jonah winced. “There is something really weird going on with these Elucidators,” he said. “Maybe we shouldn't use them anymore until we know what it is.”

“What, you want to just sit around waiting until five o'clock?” Jordan complained. He had no idea what time it was now, or how far away five o'clock was. Gary and Hodge's coworkers had made it sound like it might be hours before they met again—enough time to contact “sources” at the time agency and cover for someone's spying. But even if it was just five minutes, Jordan didn't want to wait. He could feel himself getting antsy, like he did during the last five minutes of science class, when it seemed like time stopped and the boring teacher was going to ramble on forever.

“Jordan, you don't know all the dangers possible,” Jonah said.

“Not that it's your fault,” Katherine added quickly.

That didn't help. Jordan shot both of them a defiant look, then bent down toward the Elucidators in Jonah's hands.

“Elucidators, send us ahead in time to five p.m. today,” he said.

Jordan didn't feel any of the spinning dizziness of his last few trips through time. But maybe he wouldn't, when he wasn't even moving ahead a full day?

Then he saw words glowing near Jonah's hands:
MY ACTIONS ARE BLOCKED BY THE TIME-DEADENING PROPERTIES OF THIS ROOM. YOU MUST LEAVE THIS ROOM TO TRAVEL THROUGH TIME.

“Okay, that's suspicious,” Jonah said. “Why could we get
into
this room with time travel, but not out of it?”

“Gary and Hodge's coworkers said it's a protected space,” Katherine reminded him. She cupped her chin in her hand, as if she planned to think for a long time. “Hmm . . .”

“Are you two going to do nothing but talk about this until five o'clock?” Jordan asked incredulously.

“We've got to figure out what's going on,” Jonah said. “I don't trust Second, he's using Mom and Dad as bait, we don't even know what year this is—we've got to be careful!”

What was it about Jonah that made Jordan feel so much like punching him?

“Right—Mom and Dad are missing, so
I'm
not going to just sit here doing nothing!” Jordan said.

He reached over and grabbed both the cell phone and the plastic card from Jonah's hands. Then he stood up.

“Jordan, wait!” Katherine cried.

“You're not thinking this through!” Jonah argued.

Both of them reached toward Jordan, trying to grab the two Elucidators back. But Jordan was a step ahead of them. He held both Elucidators high over his head, out of their reach. Katherine and Jonah scrambled to their feet, but Jordan anticipated that, too. He took off running toward the door.

“Jordan, you don't know what's out there!” Katherine called after him.

“Stop!” Jonah hissed.

Jordan reached the door and wrapped his hand around the knob.

I'll show them. I'm not as careless as they think,
he told himself. He pulled the door open only a crack, so he could peek out, just in case.

Outside the lab he saw an empty hallway. Maybe it was wildly futuristic; maybe the walls and floors and ceiling were made of some bizarre substance that didn't even exist in the twenty-first century. Jordan didn't pay attention to any of that. All he cared about was that the hall was empty. He gave himself an extra second of glancing around to see if there were security cameras anywhere in sight. His brain threw an irritating thought at him:
Maybe in the future, security cameras are just woven into the wallpaper or
otherwise completely undetectable. . . .
But if there were security cameras, wouldn't the three people who'd come into the lab already have shut them off? Jonah and Katherine had almost caught up with Jordan. He didn't have time to worry about every little possibility.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jordan could see Jonah and Katherine reaching for him. Just as he felt them grab for his shirt, he yanked the door open and stepped out into the hall.

“Elucidator, take the three of us ahead to five o'clock today!” Jordan muttered.

The next thing Jordan knew, a very large man smashed into him.

“Where did you come from?” a deep voice asked.

Jordan slammed to the floor, which may have been cushioned more than a typical twenty-first-century floor, but he didn't care about that either. His brain had just figured something out, way too late:
Just because the hallway was empty and clear at the time you were leaving, that doesn't mean it would be empty and clear in the time you traveled to. In fact, you knew three people were planning to be in this area at five o'clock. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Dimly, he realized that Jonah and Katherine had also toppled to the floor behind him. The fact that they had been reaching out of the protected room to grab him was evidently enough to make them travel through time too. And so all three of them fell like dominos when they ran into the large man.

“Who are you?” the man demanded, still in that amazingly deep voice.

Duh. He's the man you were thinking of as Deep Voice, when you were eavesdropping from your safe, secure hiding place,
Jordan realized.
Of course Deep Voice or one of the other two would be walking into the lab for their meeting now.

Why did his brain have to get so smart now, when it was too late?

He decided to let Jonah or Katherine deal with Deep Voice's questions.

But the man didn't wait for any answers. He quickly glanced around, beads swinging out from his head—
beads all over a man's hair? Is that some typical fashion in the future?
Jordan wondered. Then the man kicked the door behind them completely open and shoved all three kids back into the lab.

Jordan, Jonah, and Katherine somersaulted over one another. It was like some pileup on a soccer or football field, where Jordan lost track of whose elbow was in his ear and whose knee was in his stomach.

Jordan had never felt so guilty about causing a pileup in soccer or football.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Sorry. I should have thought . . .”

“Shh,” Katherine hissed at him, as if she still hoped she could hide, even as Deep Voice stared down at them.

No, not just Deep Voice. Two other people were staring down at them, too: A woman in a bright purple robe
and a man with what seemed to be tattoos of eagles and trees across his face.

Maybe Jordan shouldn't have gotten so distracted looking at clothes and tattoos and beads. In the next instant, Deep Voice snatched the two Elucidators from Jordan's hand. And the woman went into a defensive stance and pointed something that looked like a flash drive at all three of the kids.

“Don't move!” she commanded, just as if she were pointing a gun at them.

Oh, um, maybe she is?
Jordan realized.
Maybe that's what guns look like in the future?

“Spies,” Deep Voice growled.

“The question is, who are they spies for?” the woman asked, still in her
Don't move or I'll shoot you
stance.

“We'll interrogate them separately,” the tattooed man announced. “That should help.”

Jordan thought that would mean he'd have a few moments to whisper to Katherine and Jonah while they were being taken away. But the tattooed man pointed at three corners of the room, one after the other. Shimmering walls appeared instantly in each of those corners, creating small private cubicles.

“I'll take the girl,” the woman announced, pulling Katherine up and away from Jordan and Jonah.

“You want old-timey-clothes boy number one or old-timey-clothes boy number two?” Deep Voice asked Tattoo Face.

Jordan wanted to protest,
I'm not wearing old-timey clothes!
But if this was the future, he guessed maybe his clothes would look old-fashioned. Did his T-shirt and sweatpants look as strange to the two men as their tattoos and beads looked to him?