Torn-missing 4 (25 page)

He shook the Elucidator in frustration. Katherine must have thought he was actually so upset he might throw it, because she grabbed his arm.

“Jonah! That could be our only way out of here!” she complained, jerking on his elbow.

“No, no, I’m certain JB will be back in an instant, and we can get out of here with
his
Elucidator,” Jonah said sarcastically.

Katherine stopped pulling on Jonah’s arm. She let go completely.

“Oh, no. Oh, no,” she said, practically hyperventilating.

“What’s wrong?” Jonah asked.

“
That’s
why JB hasn’t come back yet,” Katherine said.

“Huh?”

Katherine leaned forward, her hands on her knees. She seemed to be trying to catch her breath. She turned her head to look at Jonah.

“Because we have his Elucidator,” she said. “Remember? He gave it to us when we left 1600.”

Just once Jonah wanted to figure out something about time before Katherine did.

Or, right now, he’d settle for proving her wrong.

“No! That can’t be right!” he protested. “It’s—JB was talking to us on this Elucidator when we were traveling from 1600 to 1611. That has to mean he had a second Elucidator with him!”

“That could have been another prerecorded message,” Katherine argued. “Second could have even created it, faking JB’s voice.”

Jonah couldn’t deny it. If Jonah could sound like John Hudson, Second could undoubtedly make an Elucidator sound like JB.

“But we told JB everything we heard him say, and he didn’t object to any of it, so those weren’t
lies,
” Jonah
began, trying to puzzle everything out. Then he realized that that wasn’t the important issue right now. “Anyhow, Andrea had an Elucidator with her too. They could all use that one to escape. Remember? The one she got from Second?”

“You’d trust an Elucidator that came from Second?” Katherine asked, making a face. “He probably set it to malfunction too. If any of them had a working Elucidator, don’t you think JB would be back by now?”

She had a point. But he could kind of see where she was going with this, and he didn’t like it.

Then he thought of something he liked even less.

I’ve changed my mind,
he thought.
I don’t want to figure out anything about time ahead of Katherine. I don’t want to figure out anything. I just want to hide out here in this time hollow, bury my head in the sand …

“What’s wrong?” Katherine said. “You look really pale. Did you hit the ‘turn invisible’ button on the Elucidator?”

“I’m thinking,” Jonah said.

“Well, there’s a first time for everything,” Katherine said. But Jonah could tell that her heart wasn’t in the insult. She didn’t add to it, the way she normally would. She just fell silent, and waited.

“We both think this Elucidator is the same one JB had
in here a few minutes ago, right?” Jonah asked, holding up the Elucidator.

Katherine nodded.

“Sure,” she said. “We just saw him load it up with all the things he said to us when we got to 1611. Of course it’s the same.”

“Then … this one object was here twice—in my hand and in JB’s,” Jonah said slowly. “We know that, under the usual rules of time, there can’t be two versions of the same person in the same time. So wouldn’t that same rule apply to objects?”

“Oh, but the rules can change,” Katherine said. “When …”

“Time’s unraveling,” Jonah finished.

Katherine’s eyes got big.

“Then we didn’t fix everything, when we went back to the shallop,” she said. “Time’s still falling apart.”

“Maybe my theory’s wrong,” Jonah admitted. “Maybe there are rules we don’t know about, for normal time. Maybe all bets are off in a time hollow. Maybe objects can duplicate all they want.”

Katherine was shaking her head.

“No, you’ve got to be right about all this,” she said. She put her hands up to her face. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

Jonah bit his lip.

“Everything still depends on us,” he said. “If there’s even a chance that we’re the only ones with an Elucidator, we’ve got to help. We’ve got to go rescue JB and the others.”

Jonah was a “rip Band-Aids off as quick as possible” kind of kid. If he had to do anything that required even the slightest hint of bravery, he wanted to do it immediately, before he had time to think.

So what they did next practically killed him:

Research.

“Come on! Let’s just go!” he begged Katherine.

“Go
where
?” she asked him, looking up from the Elucidator she’d grabbed from Jonah’s hand. “For once let’s do this intelligently. Let’s make some plans.” She seemed to be scrolling through screen after screen after screen of information. She sighed. “I’m getting sick of typing. Can we try voice commands?” she asked it. “Where’s JB right now?”

A single word glowed on the screen:
WHEN?
Then
that was replaced with
WHICH ‘RIGHT NOW’ ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Katherine sighed again.

“Oh, right,” she said. “I should have remembered.”

They weren’t in time, so there was no such thing as “right now.”

“Let’s just follow JB back to 1600,” Jonah said. “Like, a minute or two after he sent us away?”

THAT’S DAMAGED TIME
, the Elucidator flashed at him.
NO TIME TRAVELERS ALLOWED IN OR OUT.

“Wait a minute,” Katherine said. “Brendan and Antonio and Andrea got back into that time.”

WHAT DO YOU THINK DAMAGED IT?
the Elucidator asked.

Jonah shivered.

“Then take us to JB in the first moment we’re allowed in!” he insisted.

OK
, flashed on the computer screen.

Jonah immediately began feeling dizzy. “Jonah! It’s obeying you!” Katherine shrieked. “Wait! Stop! We haven’t planned anything yet! We don’t know where we’re going! We—”

The screen flashed:
TOO LATE. CAN’T STOP.

And then Jonah and Katherine were zipping back through time.

“Don’t you ever pay attention to any of those guidance assemblies at school?” Katherine demanded as they floated through the darkness of Outer Time.

“Huh?” Jonah said.

“You know, when they talk about impulse control, about how you shouldn’t just do or say anything you feel like, anytime you feel like doing or saying it?” Katherine said. “How that’s what growing up is all about?”

“Honestly?” Jonah said. “No.”

He wished Katherine would shut up, so maybe they could ask the Elucidator where they were going, and what they would face when they arrived. Maybe they could tell the Elucidator to make him invisible too.

But how could he suggest that without admitting that they should have done all that already?

He was still debating this when suddenly everything
sped up. Lights zoomed at them. Jonah felt as if his body were being torn apart; gravity and time and all the other forces of the universe seemed to be tugging him in opposite directions.

And then everything stopped. They’d landed.

“Hot,” Katherine moaned. “Too hot.”

Probably … new symptom of timesickness,
Jonah thought irritably. He was more annoyed than ever with the creaky way his timesick brain worked.
Come on. … Come on. … Function!

He tried to stretch his fingers out, feeling for the Elucidator, but his fingers weren’t working any better than his brain.

Oh, right. Katherine was holding the Elucidator, not me. And I know Katherine’s timesick too, because she said she was hot….

Dimly Jonah remembered that they’d been cold landing on Hudson’s ship, and that that hadn’t been a time-sickness symptom. It really had been cold and icy.

So maybe the heat was real too?

Duh. The last we knew of JB, it was August 1600, and he was in what’s going to be North Carolina. It’d make sense that we’re hot, if this is still North Carolina in August. Or August
again.

Jonah’s brain got hung up for a ridiculously long time on the notion that this could be a different August from 1600, and they could still be near JB. JB and Andrea and Brendan and Antonio might have lived through all of
1600 and all of 1601 and all of 1602 and …

Does it really get
this
hot in North Carolina in the summertime?
Jonah wondered.
This feels more like, I don’t know … fire?

Jonah’s faulty brain spun a bit of poetry at him that his seventh-grade English teacher liked to quote whenever the heat or air conditioning in her classroom malfunctioned, as it often did: “
Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice …”

She’d always laughed about it, but Jonah didn’t see the world ending as a joking matter anymore.

It felt like the world could have ended in ice on Hudson’s ship,
Jonah thought.
And now, and now …

He realized that he’d been keeping his eyes closed, because his eyelids felt so hot and baked and uncomfortable. Like he really was lying right beside a crackling fire. Maybe he should open them and see if that might be true? And then maybe try to roll away?

He got his swollen eyelids open a crack. He did indeed seem to be staring into flames. He opened his eyes a little wider.

He saw more flames.

He opened his eyes all the way, and still he could see nothing but fire. He was staring into a huge wall of flames.

Advancing right toward him and Katherine.

“Fire!” Jonah screamed. “Fire!”

“Shh,” Katherine whispered beside him. “Not supposed … to disturb time. Not change …”

The firelight glowed through her—she was still mostly invisible.

“Can you run?” Jonah shouted at her.

“Run?” she murmured. “Can’t … even … move … yet.”

Jonah grabbed the Elucidator from her hand.

“Send Katherine back to the time hollow!” he yelled into it.

Katherine vanished.

Jonah sat there panting for a moment, trying to draw oxygen from the baked air into his lungs.

Impulse control,
he thought.
Right. Duh. Why didn’t I think before I started yelling at the Elucidator? Why didn’t I send myself back
with
Katherine?

It seemed as if there had been some reason he hadn’t wanted to, some reason he shouldn’t ask to be zapped directly back to safety right now.