Caught (Missing) (26 page)

Mileva smiled sweetly, gazing straight out at Jonah and the others.

But mostly, it seemed, at JB and Hadley.

“I’m sure everyone understands now that nothing I did can be changed,” she said. “You can search for answers. You can ask how a time conundrum so intricately constructed was meant to be. But mostly I just want you to know that I did this out of love for you, Tete.”

She paused. Nobody so much as took a breath.

“Or should I say, I love you, my son JB?” she asked.

Jonah stepped down from the school bus alone. Chip was still absent with the stomach bug, and Mom had picked up Katherine at school to take her to a dentist appointment. Katherine had been agonizing for days that the dentist was probably going to tell her it was time for her to get braces. To Mom and Dad she’d wailed, “I’ll look hideous! I won’t be able to eat!” Privately, to Jonah and Chip, she’d whined, “And what if we have to make another trip to the past? And the invisibility conks out on us again? Braces will give me away every time!”

“Katherine,” Jonah had said quietly. “I’m not sure we’re ever going to make another trip to the past. Everything’s too confused.”

And confusing
, he thought now, as he kicked his way through the clumps of fallen leaves that had drifted here
and there between the bus stop and his own house. For perhaps the millionth time in the past week, he mentally replayed his most recent trips through time, culminating with JB finding out that he had a secret second identity of his own.

“JB,” he muttered, “you really weren’t fair.”

Even as Emily had stood there in the time hollow gasping, “Wait—JB—
you’re
Tete Einstein? You’re my
brother
?” JB had been violently shaking his head no. He’d held his hands out, as if trying to shove everyone else away.

“We can’t have this,” he’d cried. He’d grabbed his fallen Elucidator from the floor and begun punching in commands. “All of you—go back to your regular lives. Go back to normal. Forget all of this!”

And then Jonah had found himself back in the seventh-grade wing at Harris Middle School, right beside the lockers. And Katherine had gone back to the sixth-grade wing. He assumed that Emily and Angela had gone back to their regular lives, too, but he was afraid to contact them to find out.

With JB acting so terrified, how could that not terrify Jonah, too?

“JB,” he muttered now, “you owe us some answers. If you don’t come and explain things soon, I’m going to have to start searching for answers on my own!”

As threats went, this one was pretty stupid. If JB had
been monitoring Jonah’s life at all, he’d know that. Of course Jonah and Katherine hadn’t been able to forget anything. They couldn’t go back to their regular lives. They couldn’t act normal anymore—“normal” had completely changed for them.

For one thing they’d already begun searching for answers on their own.

The school bus zoomed past Jonah, driving away, and he let out a combination snort-chuckle. Just last night he and Katherine had convinced Dad to take them to the library. When they all three met back at the checkout table, Jonah and Katherine were each holding several books about Einstein and Einstein’s theories.

“You’re
both
doing reports about Albert Einstein for school?” Dad asked. “Wow—what are the odds of that?”

“And we didn’t even know what the other person was working on!” Katherine said airily, even as she kicked Jonah under the checkout table.

Jonah knew that kick was supposed to say,
Don’t tell Dad anything! Don’t give anything away!

And then Katherine started making fun of Jonah because one of the books he’d checked out was
Einstein for Dummies.

“Oh, yeah? Well, I saw The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Einstein on the shelf, too—want me to go back and get it for you?” Jonah asked.

But his voice came out fake and lifeless, so Dad probably did notice that there was something wrong.

And five minutes with the Einstein books had convinced Jonah that he was probably the one who needed
The Complete Idiot’s Guide
. It was hard to concentrate on Einstein’s examples of trains and beams of light when what Jonah really wanted to know was,
Did we ruin time forever? Did I? Was that all just fate? How much free choice did any of us have if I had to give Mileva that Elucidator for JB to grow up when he did, and become a time agent, and leave the Elucidator for Angela to give me in the first place so I could give it to Mileva?

Forget figuring out the answers—just thinking about the questions tied Jonah’s brain in knots.

“JB—help!” Jonah moaned.

He’d reached the door of his own house now. He pulled out his key and turned it in the lock, then shoved the door open. He dropped his backpack on the floor.

There! That’s something I can act normal about,
he thought.
I can be as messy as usual!

He thought about how much time he’d spent watching Mileva cook and clean and scrub out cloth diapers. He thought about how all that drudgery had left her so bleached-out and sad. He thought about how hard his own mom worked.

He moved his backpack into the hall closet where it belonged.

Maybe Mom will think I’m being considerate because I know she’s had to deal with Katherine whining about getting braces,
Jonah told himself.
Wouldn’t I have thought of that anyhow? Wasn’t I sometimes a considerate kid back in my regular life, before I took my first trip through time?

It was hard to remember what his regular life had been like, now that everything had changed.

Jonah sighed and went into the kitchen for a snack. He was standing in front of the pantry thinking about cereal choices—did he want Apple Jacks? Rice Chex? Granola?—when he heard someone clearing his throat behind him.

Jonah whirled around.

JB was sitting at the kitchen table.

Jonah clutched his hands to his chest and tried to catch his breath.

“Don’t you know . . . sneaking up on people . . . is dangerous?” he gasped. “It could really mess up time if you surprise me so much that I drop dead of a heart attack!”

“Are you sure?” JB asked sardonically. “What if that’s your destiny? Why would you think I have any choice in this matter—or any other?”

Jonah realized JB had been thinking about all the same questions Jonah had been thinking about.

“You did ask me to come,” JB pointed out.

“Maybe the rules are different in your time period,” Jonah said. “But around here it’s customary to knock at the front door before entering someone’s home. Not just—appear!”

“You want to run the risk that one of your neighbors might see you letting a strange man into your home? You want them to tell your parents?” JB asked.

Jonah backed up against the pantry door.

“Maybe I do want my parents to know about all this,” Jonah said. “Maybe I want to tell them everything. Maybe I’m supposed to.”

JB tapped a finger against the table. It was the only sound in the quiet house.

“Jonah, your parents are wonderful people,” he said. “They love you and Katherine the way all kids should be loved. But they’re not going to be able to give you all the answers either.”

Jonah bit his lip.

“‘Either’?” he repeated. “If my parents don’t have all the answers ‘either,’ then are you saying . . . you’re confused too?”

JB sighed. He shifted from tapping his finger to fiddling with the edge of the place mat on the table in front of him. Mom liked switching out the place mats by month and season, so this one was part of the November
set—it had
We Give Thanks
embroidered on it.

“If you’d asked me back in the time cave, back at the beginning of all this—when it began for you, I mean—I would have said that I understood time travel perfectly,” JB said. “I knew that the past was set in stone, and had to be kept that way, to prevent any paradoxes or cause-and-effect catastrophes. But I thought that the present—my present—was open and flexible and free for me to use however I wished. I thought my contemporaries and I had free will, but everyone in history was locked into . . . well, shall we call it fate?”

“You changed your mind about history,” Jonah said, and his voice chose that moment to go all shrill and girly. He really wished his voice would just change and be done with it. He cleared his throat and tried again.

“You realized it was safe for us to rescue Chip and Alex from the fourteen hundreds,” he said. “And you yourself refused to send all those Native American villagers back to die in 1605. And—”

“And we managed to ride out all of Second’s craziness together by being flexible,” JB finished for him.

“Didn’t everything work out in the end with Albert and Mileva, too?” Jonah asked. His voice had gone shrill again, but he decided to ignore it. “And—for you? You’re not actually wishing that you were stuck in a mental
institution in the twentieth century, are you?”

JB’s toying with the place mat had become so intense that he almost flipped the whole thing over. He stopped himself and laid both hands down, one on top of the other.

“Of course I’d rather be me, in my own time—what I think of as my own time, what I think of as my real self,” he said. “And, yes, it does appear that Mileva covered all her bases, and fixed time completely. And somehow she managed to keep everything secret until it was too late to stop her. But . . . it shouldn’t have been possible, how all that worked out! How did we get through all those layers of cause and effect in so many centuries without destroying time? Was it
all
just fate? Was everything just meant to be?”

“After Katherine and I got back from the sixteen hundreds, you told me we shouldn’t feel like Second just manipulated us into everything,” Jonah said. “You said we still made our own choices.”

“Yeah, yeah,” JB said, shrugging away this explanation. “But how did I have any choice when I
had
to be frozen in that time hollow when you went back in time with Mileva—just so I could become who I really am? So I could become the person who was frozen in that time hollow? Don’t you see how circular all of this is?”

“I’m not stupid,” Jonah said.

He saw that JB had begun twisting his hands together, the right hand squeezing the left, the left squeezing the right . . . His moment of letting his hands lie peacefully on top of the Thanksgiving place mat was over.

“I’m not accusing you of stupidity,” JB said. “This has the smartest time experts of my era tearing their hair out.”

“Just because everything fits?” Jonah asked.

“Because things that should have been random were absolutely necessary to make everything fit,” JB said. “We thought it was random that you and Katherine were sucked back to 1903—just a side effect of the time chaos, and an accident of you holding the Elucidator.”

“But . . . 
you
sent Emily back in time,” Jonah said hesitantly. He cleared his throat. “Right? That wasn’t random. You did that yourself.”

“Yes, but that was only because things had gotten so freaky in the time hollow,” JB said. “Objects were appearing and disappearing at will—we thought Einstein was the key. Sending Emily back was a last-ditch effort, the only way I could think of to stabilize time.”

“You told me you weren’t going to return any more missing children to history,” Jonah said stubbornly.

“Can you see why I had to change my mind?” JB asked. “And didn’t get a chance to warn you?”

Reluctantly, Jonah nodded. “But things still got freakier,”
he added. “Time freezing, even in the time hollow—”

“Which everyone
used
to think was impossible,” JB interrupted.

“And then Hadley appearing out of nowhere,” Jonah said. “And his Elucidator appearing and disappearing—”

“The random results of time instability,” JB said. “It had to be random!”

He’d stopped twisting his hands together only so he could wave them uselessly at Jonah.

Jonah was still trying to catch up. He suddenly realized why it mattered so much that JB had been frozen in the time hollow, randomly or not.

“If you hadn’t been frozen, you would have stopped me from going back with Mileva,” Jonah said. He meant it as a question, but the words came out more as an accusation. “You would have stopped her from learning about time travel. You would have stopped me from handing her that Elucidator.”

“Of course!” JB said. “So, tell me, how did I have any choice in the matter? How did you?”

It was so weird, JB being the one with all the questions, not the answers. But Jonah thought he saw a way to try to explain.

“Katherine and I both started reading about Einstein’s theories,” Jonah said. “And I don’t understand all of them,
but maybe this whole free will versus fate thing is kind of like what Einstein thought about light. When he was starting out, everyone thought light moved in waves. Then Einstein came along and said, ‘Nope, it moves in packets called quanta.’”

“Max Planck actually thought of quanta first, but so far I’m with you,” JB said.

“But then later on,” Jonah continued, “Einstein himself said, ‘You know what, guys? Light really is kind of waveish, after all. So how about if we say it’s both, waves and quanta all at once? Doesn’t that make the most sense?’”

“You’re saying our lives are like light waves/quanta?” JB asked. “We have fate and free will all at once?”

“Exactly!” Jonah said.

JB was rubbing his forehead.

“I’d have to double-check to see what scientists in this time period think about light, to really know how to answer you without ruining time,” JB said. “The problem is, if you don’t know if you’re riding a wave or a quantum packet of light, how do you make your choices? How do you decide how to live your life? How do you know what’s important?”

“Well, it seems like things work out best when time travelers try to help people,” Jonah said, shrugging.

He thought about how long it’d taken him to realize
that he should give Mileva the Elucidator. Back in 1611 he’d been slow about figuring out how to help too. And in 1600 he’d been a total idiot about his priorities.