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The silence from the Elucidator continued. Jonah worried that they’d floated out of range, or that the battery had stopped working, just like a defective cell phone
.

Then JB’s voice came through again, faint but distinct
.

“All right,” he said wearily. “I’ll let you try.”

It was a rough landing. Lights streamed past Jonah’s face, an unbearable glare. Some force that had to be more than just gravity tugged on him, threatening to pull him apart from Chip and Katherine, from the Elucidator and the Taser, from his own self. The image that burned in his mind was of his body being split into individual cells, individual atoms. And then that image broke apart too, and he couldn’t think, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. He could only feel time passing through him, time flipping back on itself, time pressing down, down, down. …

Then it was over. He lay in darkness, gasping for air. Dimly he heard JB’s voice say, “Welcome to the fifteenth century. Good luck.” But he couldn’t quite make sense of the words. It was like hearing something underwater, sounds from another world.

“You’re hiding, aren’t you? Staying out of sight?” It was JB’s voice again, hissing and anxious. “You have to stay out of sight.”

“Darkness,” Jonah mumbled. “Safe.”

His tongue felt too thick to speak with. Or maybe it was too thin—too insubstantial. He didn’t feel quite real.

There was movement beside him. Someone sitting up.

“You’d like to keep us in the dark, wouldn’t you?” Chip accused. “You didn’t tell us anything we’d need to know to survive in the fifteenth century.”

Whoa. How could Chip manage to sound so normal at a time like this? And so angry (which was pretty much normal for Chip)? Wasn’t his head spinning too? Wasn’t his vision slipping in and out of focus? Didn’t he feel like he might throw up if he had to do anything more strenuous than breathe?

“You didn’t even tell us who we’re supposed to be,” Chip continued.

Distantly, as if he was trying to retrieve a memory from centuries ago—no, he corrected himself, centuries
ahead
—Jonah puzzled over what Chip meant.
Who we’re supposed to be …
Oh, yeah. The whole reason they were in this mess was that a group of people from the future had gone through history plucking out endangered children. This would have been very noble and kind, except
that they began carrying off famous kids, kids whose disappearances were noticed. JB, who seemed to oppose any tampering with history, was convinced that all of time was on the verge of collapse because of these rescues. He and his cohorts had managed to freeze the effects of the rescues—the “ripples,” as they called them—and gone after the missing children. There’d been a battle, and thirty-six kids from history had crash-landed at the very end of the twentieth century.

Chip was one of those kids.

So was Jonah.

For the past thirteen years, though, they’d known nothing about their true identities. They’d been adopted by ordinary American families and grown up in ordinary American suburbs, playing video games and soccer, trading Pokémon cards, shooting hoops in their driveways. They had no way of knowing that their ordinary lives were ordinary only because they were in Damaged Time—time itself, trying to heal, had kept both sides of the battling time travelers out.

But Damaged Time had ended. And JB and his enemies, Gary and Hodge, immediately swooped in, each side eager to finish what they’d started.

And that, boys and girls, is how I came to be lying in the dark in the fifteenth century
, Jonah thought, his mind working a little
better now. That “boys and girls” line was imitating someone, someone on TV probably.

Someone who wouldn’t be born for another five hundred years.

A wave of nausea flowed over Jonah. He wasn’t sure if it was because it’d just sunk in that he was hundreds of years out of place, or if it was because his senses were working better now and he’d just realized that the fifteenth century reeked. A smell of mold and decay and—what was that, rotting meat?—surrounded him. And his nose brought him the first fact he was sure of about the fifteenth century: Whatever else was happening then, no one had modern flush toilets yet.

“Where is that Elucidator?” Chip demanded. He was feeling around on the floor now. “JB, you’ve got to tell me the truth. Who am I?”

“Well, it’s kind of a delicate situation,” JB hedged. “We shouldn’t be talking at all right now, until you’re sure that no one else can hear us. …”

His voice trailed off to just a whisper, which Jonah could barely hear. Why was Jonah having so many problems? He’d been holding the Elucidator—he ought to be able to tell Chip where it was. But his hands felt too numb to be sure if he was still clutching anything or not.

Meanwhile, Chip seemed perfectly capable of sliding
his hands all around, groping all along the stones of the floor. He nudged first Jonah, then, apparently, Katherine. Jonah could hear her moaning softly, as if she felt every bit as miserable as Jonah did.

“So help me, JB. If you don’t tell me who I am, right now,” Chip fumed, “I’ll scream so loud that people will hear me in
two
centuries!”

“No, don’t,” JB begged. “I’ll tell you. Just be quiet. You’re … you’re …”

“Yes?” Chip said, his voice rising threateningly.

“It’s hard to pinpoint the date, exactly, since the three of you took the Elucidator, and that may have thrown some things off, but I think it’s probably safe to say, given when you should have landed, that you’re … um …”

“Tell me!”

“I think, right now, you’re the king of England.”

“The king?” Chip repeated. “The
king
? Of England?”

“Shh,” JB shushed him. “Keep your voice down, Chip. I mean, Edward. That’s your real name—Edward the Fifth. I think, technically, at that point in history, the title was King of England and France. That wasn’t precisely accurate, but—”

“I’m the king!” Chip marveled.

It was far too dark to see Chip’s face, not that Jonah’s eyes were working very well anyhow. But just from his voice Jonah could tell that Chip was grinning ear to ear.

“All those times my dad told me I was dumb and stupid and worthless and … and—I’m really the king of England? And France?” Chip laughed. “That’s great!”

Chip’s glee reminded Jonah of something. Someone crowing about being king … No. About
wanting
to be
king. Simba in the
Lion King
movie, singing “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.”

Great
, Jonah thought.
My mind’s working well enough that I can remember Disney movies. Now I’m as smart as the average three-year-old
.

But he couldn’t remember everything about
The Lion King
. There was something wrong with Simba singing that song, some twist the little lion cub hadn’t grasped … something like not understanding that for him to be king, his father had to die.

“Uh, Chip …,” Jonah started to say, but he couldn’t get the rest of the thought out. Somebody in the movie killed Simba’s father, didn’t they? And tried to kill Simba, too?

What if it wasn’t such a great thing to be king?

Before Jonah could get his brain and mouth to work together to form any sort of warning for Chip, another voice spoke out in the darkness.

“So if he’s the king, who am I?”

By squinting, Jonah could just barely make out the shape of another boy, sitting against the stone wall.
Alex
, he realized. The other boy who’d been kidnapped from the fifteenth century. The other kid JB had sent back to the past.

“You’re his younger brother. Prince Richard,” JB said.

Alex seemed to be considering this.

“One of those ‘heir and a spare’ deals, huh?” he asked.

“You could say that,” JB said, sounding reluctant.

“So what happens to us?” Alex asked. “Happened, I mean—the first time around?”

“I can’t tell you that,” JB said. “For you it hasn’t happened yet.”

Katherine moaned again.

“Can you all just … stop talking?” she mumbled. “Hurts …”

With an effort that seemed practically superhuman, Jonah managed to prop himself up on his arms. They trembled horribly.

“Katherine?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Katherine groaned. “I think I’m going to die.”

“Timesickness,” JB diagnosed, his voice slightly smug. “You don’t die from it, but like seasickness or airsickness, sometimes you want to.”

“Oh … my … gosh,” Katherine moaned. “Is this what it felt like all the time for you guys in the twenty-first century? Being out of place? In the wrong time period?”

Jonah thought about that. He didn’t know who he was supposed to be in history—the day he’d found out that he had another identity, there’d been a lot of fighting and screaming and scrambling desperately to get the upper
hand. It hadn’t exactly been a good time for absorbing life-changing news and thinking through the ramifications and asking good follow-up questions. But if he really did belong in another time, did that mean practically his entire life had been, well …
wrong
?

“No,” he told Katherine emphatically, just as Chip whispered, “Oh, I see,” and Alex murmured, “It all makes sense now.”

“What?” Jonah demanded.

“Remember?” Chip said. “I told you. That day on the school bus. I told you my whole life I’d felt out of place, like I didn’t belong, like I belonged someplace else. Only, I guess it was some
place
and some
time
else. …”

“Do you feel really, really great right now?” Alex asked. “Better than you’ve ever felt in your entire life?”

“Oh, yeah,” Chip said. Even in the darkness Jonah could tell that Chip was nodding vigorously.

“Well, I don’t,” Katherine muttered. “I feel worse than ever before. This is worse than the time I had strep throat and Mom had to put me in an ice bath to get my temperature down. Worse than the stomach flu. Worse than—”

“Katherine, I can still tell you and Jonah how to come home,” JB spoke through the Elucidator, and even across the centuries and through the slightly tinny reception Jonah could hear the craftiness in JB’s voice. Reflexively
Jonah clenched his hands, bringing numbed nerves back to life—oh, he was still holding on to the Taser and the Elucidator. The Elucidator just felt different now. Before, Jonah would have said it was smooth and sleek and stylish: a futuristic version of a BlackBerry or Treo or iPhone, maybe. Now he seemed to be holding something rough-hewn and scratchy.

So my sense of touch is still a little off
, Jonah thought.
So what?

“
I’m
fine,” Jonah assured JB. “I don’t need to go anywhere. But maybe Katherine—”

“I’m. Staying. Too.” It was impressive how, even lying helplessly on the floor, Katherine could make her voice sound so threatening.

“If timesickness is like seasickness, then I bet she’ll recover fast,” Chip said comfortingly. “No one stays seasick for long once they’re on land, right? And we’ve landed now. …” He made a noise that seemed to be half giggle, half snort, and a giddy note entered his voice. “Hey, Katherine, maybe once you’re feeling better, you’ll decide you like the fifteenth century and want to stay for good. Maybe you’ll want to be
queen
of England!”

Wait a minute—that’s my sister you’re talking about!
Jonah wanted to say. But JB spoke first.

“There are actually two kinds of timesickness, and
Katherine is undoubtedly suffering from both of them,” he said. “One is just from the act of traveling through time—which probably felt worse to Katherine, since it was her first trip.”

Mine, too
, Jonah wanted to say. Except it wasn’t. He remembered that he and Chip and Alex had traveled through time as infants, before their crash landing. He didn’t know exactly how Gary and Hodge had arranged the trip. Maybe Jonah had been all through time as a baby, stopping in one century after another, while the “rescuers” picked up the other kids. Maybe he was like this kid he knew at school who’d circled the globe but didn’t remember any of it because he’d done it all before his first birthday.

“The other kind of timesickness comes from being in the wrong time period,” JB continued. “It’s very technical and difficult to explain, but … I think this would be an appropriate way to explain it to twenty-first-century kids. Do you know where your bodies came from?”

“You want to give us the birds-and-the-bees talk?” Katherine screeched. “Now? At a time like this?”

In her indignation she seemed at least temporarily capable of overcoming timesickness. She even lurched up from the floor a little.

“No, no—maybe I’m a little off with my view of your
time period—I meant the
building blocks
of your bodies,” JB hastily corrected.

“Are you trying to get at the fact that the stuff we’re made of—the carbon atoms and the oxygen atoms and so on—all of it’s been hanging around the universe since the big bang?” Alex asked.

“Cleopatra breathed my air,” Katherine muttered.

“She’s delirious!” Chip said.

“No, she’s right,” Alex said. “Haven’t you heard that thing about how, at any given moment, at least one atom of the air in your lungs was probably once in Cleopatra’s lungs? Or George Washington’s or Albert Einstein’s or Martin Luther King’s, or whoever you want to pick from history?”

“So Katherine just has the wrong air in her lungs right now?” Chip asked. Jonah couldn’t really see very well, but he thought Chip was crouching beside Katherine now, pounding on her back. “Breathe it out!”

Katherine coughed weakly.

“It’s not just the air,” JB said. “Every atom that made up her body in the twenty-first century was, shall we say, otherwise occupied in the fifteenth century. The same is true for Jonah, who also doesn’t belong there.”

“Then,
anyone
traveling through time would be out of place and disruptive in the other time,” Alex objected.
“And Chip and I surely have some future atoms in our bodies too, since we were there for thirteen years. What happens? Do the atoms duplicate, so the same atom can be in my body at the same time that it’s, I don’t know, part of this wall?” He thumped the stone wall beside him. “How could that work? How is time travel even possible?”