“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?”
JB was silent for a moment.
“Alex, you were severely underrated by history,” he said. “And I mean that in the nicest possible way.” He cleared his throat. “I can’t answer those questions for you in any terms you could understand. Even the best minds of the twenty-first century don’t have the right vocabulary to understand time travel, so how could I explain it to kids?”
Jonah wanted to object to that, but he figured Katherine would speak up first. She hated it when people used that “You’re just a kid” excuse. And Katherine did seem to be struggling to sit up and talk. But she was coughing again, practically choking.
Chip wasn’t pounding on her back anymore.
“Um, Katherine, if you’re going to spew, turn the other way, okay?” he said. “Or just go somewhere else. … Here. I’ll help you.”
Chip and Alex both seemed to be trying to lift Katherine. Jonah kind of wished it were light enough that he could see Katherine’s face, because he was sure she was shooting really nasty looks at both boys.
And Chip thinks she’d want to be his queen … ha! Jonah thought.
Somehow Chip and Alex managed to get her to a standing position.
“Leave me alone,” she growled, shaking off their grip. She wobbled toward the door—Jonah could see now, by the thin light that glowed around the edges, that there was a large door leading out of their dark room. He was amazed that Katherine was apparently strong enough to grab the doorknob and yank. The door creaked open a few inches.
Katherine gasped.
“What’s wrong?” Chip asked, and there was an edge of fear in his voice. Nobody seemed to be worried anymore about Katherine vomiting. Even Katherine seemed to have forgotten why she’d struggled toward the door.
“I think … I think JB must have sent us to the wrong time,” Katherine whispered, clinging to the door. Whatever she could see in the next room had her mesmerized.
“What are you talking about?” Alex demanded. “This time feels right.”
“Yeah,” Chip echoed.
Katherine glanced over her shoulder. Even in the dim light filtering in from the next room her face shone with horror.
“But … it looks like … both of you … the original versions … you’re already dead,” she said.
“How could you know that?” Alex scoffed.
Katherine looked back toward the other room again and gulped. Either Jonah’s ears were overamplifying noises now, or her gulp was so loud that it sounded like a gunshot.
“I see your ghosts,” she said.
THREE
It turned out that Jonah was capable of scrambling up from the floor—even scrambling up quickly. But he wasn’t sure that his brain was working properly yet. Wouldn’t it make more sense to run away from ghosts, not toward them?
Then Jonah stopped worrying about his brain. Chip and Alex were also rush
ing to join Katherine by the door. Jonah got there last, so he had to stand on his tiptoes, trying to see. Chip’s head was in his way, but if Jonah weaved to either side, the door or the wall blocked his view. He stumbled forward, jostling against Katherine, whose shoulder slammed sideways into the door. The door creaked open wider.
Now Jonah could see.
The room beyond was very dim. As far as Jonah could tell, it was lit only by a single candle. And if these were royal accommodations, fifteenth-century style, the whole interior-decorating industry was still years in the future. There was a plain, colorless rug on the floor, a single bed shoved against the wall.
Two boys sat on the bed.
No, Jonah corrected himself. Not boys exactly.
Boys wouldn’t have that unearthly glow—these boys gave off nearly as much light as the candle. Boys also wouldn’t be see-through. And Jonah was sure that he could make out the exact curve of stone in the wall behind the boys.
But he could also make out their distinct features: their dark blue eyes; their shoulder-length blond curls; their odd dark clothes, a sort of tunic-and-tights arrangement that Jonah associated with Shakespearean plays. The boys sat with their heads together, whispering intently. But Jonah couldn’t hear what they were saying. It was like watching a silent movie. And, like actors in a movie, they took no notice of their audience—the four kids staring at them from across the room.
“Hello?” Alex said experimentally. Neither boy budged. “Hello?” Alex said louder.
Still nothing.
“Maybe it’s the time travel,” Alex said. “Maybe that’s just how people from this time period look to us, because we’re coming from the future. And maybe they can’t see or hear us at all—maybe that’s how time protects itself from all those paradoxes.”
“But we saw JB and Gary and Hodge when they came to our time,” Katherine objected. “They looked normal.”
“Oh, yeah,” Alex said, shrugging. He stared at the eerie figures on the bed and added stubbornly, “But those aren’t ghosts. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
They sure looked like ghosts to Jonah.
But he could understand how Alex—and Chip—would be freaked out after what Katherine had said. Jonah gave her a little shove on the back.
“You were wrong, Katherine,” he said. “Those aren’t Chip’s and Alex’s ghosts. They’re just … ghosts of some other boys. Or something,” he finished weakly.
“They’re girls!” Chip insisted, his voice cracking. “Don’t you see those curls?”
“Girls would be wearing dresses,” Katherine said scornfully. “And are you guys blind? Don’t look at the clothes and the curls. Look at the faces. That’s Chip and Alex!”
Jonah squinted, concentrating. Block out the girly hairstyle and the weird clothes. … For a moment he thought he saw the resemblance. Then it was gone.
“They’re younger than us,” Alex said. “Like, nine and eleven, maybe? Or ten and twelve?”
“Remember, the people who kidnapped you messed around with your ages,” Katherine said. “They made you babies again. So you wouldn’t have to be the same age as your, uh, ghosts.”
She said the last word apologetically.
Suddenly Jonah felt someone grabbing his left hand, prying his fingers off the Taser, jerking it from his grasp. By the time this registered and Jonah turned his head, Chip was aiming the Taser at the ghostly boys on the bed. He squeezed the trigger.
“That’s not me!” Chip said. “It’s not!”
The barbs shot out but fell harmlessly through the ghostly Chip, onto the bed. The ghostly Chip and Alex just kept whispering soundlessly, their expressions solemn and intent.
“What just happened?” JB demanded, his tense voice coming from the Elucidator Jonah still clutched in his right hand. “What was that?”
Alex snickered.
“Chip just tried to Taser his own, uh, ghost,” he mumbled. “It wasn’t very effective.”
The next thing Jonah knew, the Taser had vanished. Even the barbs on the bed disappeared. Chip stared at his empty hand, a dumbfounded expression on his face.
“Hey!” he exclaimed. “How’d you do that?”
“You do not use future technology in the past,” JB said, and Jonah could tell that he was speaking through gritted teeth. “One of the first rules of time travel.”
“But you just did,” Alex said. “Making things disappear—I don’t think they could do that in the 1400s.”
“I had to,” JB said, still sounding as though his jaw was clenched. “Chip just proved that the four of you can’t be trusted with a Taser in the fifteenth century.”
Chip was flexing his hand, as if he still couldn’t believe that the Taser was gone.
“Wait a minute,” Jonah said. “If you can just zap things out of time, why didn’t you do that to Katherine and me?”
Katherine, Chip, and Alex all turned to glare at Jonah. Oops. It probably wasn’t too brilliant to point out how easily JB could just do whatever he wanted to them.
“It wasn’t safe to do that while you were traveling through time,” JB said. “And then you convinced me … I did promise to let you try to help Chip and Alex.”
JB’s voice was soothing now, like he wanted to calm them all down. Jonah couldn’t decide how he felt about JB. It was nice to know that JB wouldn’t break his promises. But he hadn’t exactly given them much information. And how could Jonah trust JB’s motives in sending the stolen kids back in time, when it was pretty clear that history hadn’t been kind to any of them?
“So who are those boys?” Katherine asked. “Are they Chip’s and Alex’s ghosts from the past?”
For a moment Jonah wasn’t sure that JB was going to answer. Then he said, “They’re tracers. They show you exactly what would have happened if no one had interfered in their time.”
Jonah watched the ghostly boys on the bed. Together they were standing up—no, now they were kneeling beside the bed. They bowed their heads and clasped their hands.
They were praying.
One solitary tear slipped out of the younger boy’s eye and began to roll down his cheek. He opened one eye and glanced anxiously toward his older brother, then quickly wiped away the tear before his brother could see.
“I wouldn’t have done that,” Alex objected. Jonah wasn’t sure if he was referring to the praying or the crying.
“Oh, but you did do that, the first time through history,” JB said. “That’s what you would be doing right now if Hodge hadn’t stolen you away.”
The tracer boys were still praying, the picture of piety.
“This is too weird,” Chip said. “It creeps me out.”
JB laughed.
“Most people have that reaction,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons modern weapons aren’t allowed in the past. The first time travelers were spooked beyond belief by tracers, and it took a good decade for anyone to be sure what they were. Usually time travelers see duplicates—the real person, thrown off his rightful path, and the tracer. And that’s even eerier.”
Jonah tried to picture that. When JB came to the twenty-first century, had he been able to see tracers of Jonah and Katherine and Chip? Ghostly shadows doing whatever they would have been doing if JB weren’t there?
Then Jonah remembered that he and Chip wouldn’t have been in the twenty-first century in the first place if it hadn’t been for time travel. Where was Jonah’s tracer? What was his proper time period?
JB was still talking.
“We have a saying in time-travel circles, to explain the tracers,” he said. “‘Time knows how it’s supposed to flow.’ There’s a persistence in the very nature of time, always trying to get back to its original outcomes. …”
The ghostly tracer boys were done praying now and had climbed back up on the bed. The older one was looking at the younger one, his eyes serious and sad. And then the older one put his right hand in his left armpit and began pumping his left arm up and down.
&nb
sp; “Is he doing what I think he’s doing?” Katherine asked.
“You mean, making fart noises?” Jonah said.
“Boys!” Katherine sniffed.
The younger boy on the bed began laughing silently. The older one did too.
He’s trying to cheer up his brother, Jonah thought. He must have known he was crying.
“I would have thought the fifteenth century would be full of chivalrous behavior,” Katherine fumed. “Knights and ladies and all that. Not boys acting as stupid as ever!”
“Oh, grow up, Katherine,” Jonah said.
Alex was ignoring them. He pushed past Katherine and stepped into the other room. He moved slowly, like each step might be risky. When he reached the bed, he lifted one hand and waved it first through the older tracer boy’s shoulder, then through the younger boy’s arm.
“Oh,” Alex said, his voice flooded with surprise. “That’s …” He turned back to the others. “Come and try something.”
Chip was already walking toward the tracer boys. Something about the way he moved made Jonah think of moths desperately flapping toward flame or—what was it, lemmings?—those creatures that would follow each other off a cliff. Jonah felt like he had to follow too, if only to protect Chip. Katherine lurched unsteadily beside him.
“Put your hand out,” Alex directed. “What does that feel like to you?”
It didn’t seem to have hurt Alex any, so Jonah obediently shoved his hand into both tracer boys’ chests.
He felt nothing. It was just like sticking his hand out into empty air. And the tracer boys didn’t seem to notice at all. Now they were shoving at each other, still laughing soundlessly.
“So?” Katherine said, having waved her hand through both tracers too.
“Don’t they feel different?” Alex said. “It’s like this one seems more … real.” He pointed to the younger boy, the one who had the same arched eyebrows and hooked nose as Alex.
“No, this one does,” Chip argued. He was standing beside the older boy, who had his right arm lifted in the air, emphasizing some point he was making to his younger brother. Jonah wished he could read lips, to tell exactly what the boy was saying.