Redeemed (17 page)

“Why didn't you get us when we were down on the rock?” Jonah asked. “Then we wouldn't have had to risk our lives climbing that tree, and you would have had an extra twenty or thirty minutes to get us out.”

Deep Voice winced. “We ran the numbers on that,” he
said. “The force of me—or even Doreen—landing there would have knocked that rock down into the river below. Someone could have died.”

Jordan shivered. Had the rock really been that fragile beneath them? Deep Voice was huge, of course, but Doreen wasn't. When Jordan, Jonah, Katherine, and the mystery kid had all been on the rock together, had they been close to falling into the river?

“You could have landed at the top and lowered a ladder down to us,” Jonah suggested.

“Would you have trusted me?” Deep Voice asked.

No,
Jordan thought.

“Or . . . you could have just had the Elucidator pull us up to the top of the gully with you,” Katherine suggested. It was almost as though she and Jonah were quizzing Deep Voice to test his motives.

“I'm not used to Elucidators,” Deep Voice said. “Believe me, I was doing well to get to the past at all. This was all planned on the fly. It's possible I'll be arrested when I get back. But I
had
to do this.”

“Why didn't you or someone else from your company just go back and get that kid to begin with?” Jordan asked. “Why did Curtis Rathbone say Katherine and Jonah and I were . . . what did he call it?”

“Uniquely qualified,” Katherine muttered.

“Because you two boys are time natives, and Katherine, your natural lifetime is very close by,” Deep Voice said. “This isn't my field of specialty, but I believe that made time more . . . receptive . . . to letting the three of you in. And time was very fragile at that point.
I
couldn't have gotten in if you hadn't been there first.”

“The time agency and Jonah and everybody—even you—have been telling me that I wasn't in my right time,” Jordan said angrily. “They said I was born in the nineteen thirties! Are you telling me now that that was all a lie?”

He was kind of hoping Deep Voice would nod and say something like,
Yeah, about that . . . I was wrong, and so was everybody else.

But Deep Voice shook his head no.

“You and Jonah
were
born in the nineteen thirties,” he said. “And that means you could have still been alive the day of the plane crash if—”

“If we hadn't been kidnapped first,” Jonah said.

“
I
was going to say ‘if you'd survived childhood in a nineteen thirties orphanage,' ” Deep Voice said.

“You really believe all that garbage about how Interchronological Rescue is just a charity that saves kids?” Katherine asked angrily.

Deep Voice looked off into the distance, at the lights growing closer on the horizon. Jordan could tell he was
terrified of peering toward those lights—or of seeing anything around them as they floated through time.

But maybe right now it was even harder for Deep Voice to look directly at Jordan, Jonah, and Katherine?

“I . . . I used to believe Interchronological Rescue had a noble cause,” Deep Voice said. “That was why I applied to work there. But . . . a lot of things have changed recently. I can't just sit at my desk anymore doing my job and ignoring everything else. I don't trust Curtis Rathbone anymore.”

“But you let us go off and have him send us to the past on a dangerous mission?” Jordan asked. Maybe he'd caught some of Katherine's anger.

“I thought you were all safe in the secret cubicles!” Deep Voice protested. “We thought you were safe until we figured out what to do next!”

“Second let us out,” Jonah said. “
Was
that the kid version of Second who stole our Elucidator? Or was it his identical twin or just someone who looks like him, or—”

“Second?” Deep Voice asked, his tone shooting up an octave. “You mean Second Chance is involved? The former Sam Chase? And . . . you think
he
was the kid down there on that rock? You think this was all a setup? Even Rathbone was set up, even
I
was set up . . .”

He rolled his head around in a way that made Jordan
think of a giant beast—an elephant, maybe—falling down.

“Are we wrong?” Katherine challenged.

“I . . . don't . . . know . . . ,” Deep Voice moaned.

If he managed to say anything after that, it got lost in the churning of time travel, as they hit the part of the trip where Jordan felt like his whole body was being torn into tiny shreds.

When Jordan felt like he could see and hear again, Deep Voice was still moaning.

“Not cut out for derring-do . . . scariest moment of my life . . . and now these kids say I was just a pawn for that twisted Sam Chase . . .”

Jordan heard a slapping sound. By squinting, he could just barely make out the sight of someone's hand hitting Deep Voice's face.

“Dude-io Markiel, get ahold of yourself,” another man's voice said. It was Tattoo Face. “You rescued all three kids we sent you after. How bad could things have been?”

“You have no idea,” Deep Voice moaned again.

Jordan tried to squint past Deep Voice and Tattoo Face—even though Second had told him their real names, the nicknames seemed to fit better. Jordan did remember that the woman who'd been with them was named Doreen Smith. Jordan could just barely make out a blurry shape on the other side of Markiel/Deep Voice. Maybe that was her.

And past her he could see tables, desks, and the glow of what seemed to be a computer monitor. . . .

They were back in the futuristic lab.

Jonah and Katherine were already struggling up into a seated position.

“Please,” Katherine was groaning. “Please. If you want to help, find out where Second went. As a kid
and
as an adult. Find out how he's planning to mess up time now. . . .”

There was a rustle off to the right: Doreen moved toward one of the suspended glowing areas that looked like a TV or computer screen.

Deep Voice zoomed from lying on the floor to standing up and rushing to her side. It was like watching a beached whale suddenly jump up and start running.

“Don't!” he cried. “Don't reboot or do anything else to eliminate the information that would have been there before Second changed things—”

“You think he might have released the ripple?” Jonah asked.

Whatever that means,
Jordan thought.

He hoped Jonah was just pretending to know what he was talking about, throwing around some time-travel term he barely understood. He hoped Jonah was just a really good actor.

Because otherwise, there was something really scary
that Jonah—and Katherine and Deep Voice and Tattoo Face and Doreen—were all worried about.

Release the ripple,
Jordan thought.
Does he mean the ripple of changes from the kid version of Second grabbing the Elucidator out of Jonah's hand? Would there have been some way to hold back those changes?

He didn't ask, because everyone else clustered around the computerlike screen alongside Doreen. Jordan concentrated on pushing himself off the floor so he could stand beside the others.

“It doesn't do any good to look for traces of Sam Chase, or his alter ego, Second Chance,” Tattoo Face objected. “He managed to hide them all—or maybe it was the time agency that did that when Second betrayed everything they stood for?”

“Oh, but I can show you everything about Second's life,” Doreen said, sounding less worried than she looked.

“How?” Deep Voice challenged.

“Because,” Doreen said, “I just figured out how to get into the secret files Gary and Hodge left behind.”

“What if it's a trick?” Jonah asked. “What if Second stealing the Elucidator and traveling through time as a teenager changed things in such a way that
that's
why you are suddenly able to get into Gary and Hodge's secret files? What if Second arranged that to trap you all somehow, and to trap Katherine and Jordan and me?”

“You think he figured all that out as a teenager?” Doreen asked incredulously.

“He's really smart,” Katherine offered. “And sneaky.”

Doreen touched something on the table in front of her.

“I've always wondered what his story was . . . ,” she murmured.

The projection in midair expanded and moved back toward the wall. Suddenly Jordan felt as though he were back on the rock suspended over the gully—or maybe
hovering in midair watching the teenage version of Second on the rock suspended over the gully. A small clock in the corner sped through minutes: Second just lay there and lay there and lay there.

“He was
not
there for two hours,” Katherine muttered. “This is a different version of time. Or a different dimension.”

“Shh,” Jonah and Jordan said together.

On the screen a sudden bright light appeared, aimed from above toward the boy on the rock. A dark figure began rappelling down the cliff. The climber landed on the rock and seemed to be checking Second for broken bones and other injuries. And then the climber tied Second to a backboard suspended from a helicopter. The camera seemed to follow Second's precarious progress up from the rock.

When Second reached the top of the gully, Jordan expected to see ambulances and more medical types. Instead a man in a dark suit stepped past the blinding light and bent over Second.

“You!” the man spat. “You were the pilot, weren't you? And like a coward you tried to run away.”

“Is that . . . Mr. Reardon?” Katherine asked.

“Who?” Jordan asked.

Katherine glanced cautiously toward the three grown-ups.

“We already know about him,” Doreen said, smirking. “He was the FBI agent who was in charge of investigating the plane crash-landing. The agent Jonah and Katherine and your parents went to see to find out about Jonah's background.”

“Yeah,” Jonah said. “He knew something strange had happened, but he could never figure out what it was. So his goal was just to keep everything secret.”

On the screen Mr. Reardon clutched the front of Second's shirt.

“What terrorist group are you working for?” Mr. Reardon demanded. “What are you trying to prove?”

Second only moaned. Mr. Reardon let go. Second's head bounced against the stretcher beneath him.

“Give him medical care, but keep him in a private room,” Mr. Reardon said. “Keep a guard outside his door.”

The scene shifted into something like time-lapse video, where days and weeks and months were condensed into a few seconds. Second was lying in a hospital bed . . . sitting in a wheelchair . . . struggling on an apparatus that was probably supposed to help him relearn how to walk . . . and then returning to a wheelchair again.

The speeding scenes slowed for the many times Mr. Reardon came into Second's hospital room to interrogate him.

“You say you're an ordinary runaway—why is there
no record of anyone reporting you missing?” Mr. Reardon demanded in his first visit to the hospital.

“I didn't want to be caught. So I hacked into the school and law enforcement and child welfare system computers and eliminated all my records,” Second said, staring defiantly up from his hospital bed. “And . . . it's not like my foster parents actually
missed
me. Neither did my caseworker. Or my teachers. No one wanted to try very hard to find me.”

“Tell me your foster parents' names,” Mr. Reardon demanded. “Tell me what city you lived in, what school you went to. Tell me where to find people who would remember you.”

Second turned his face toward the wall and didn't answer.

Beside Jordan, Katherine muttered, “That does sound like something Second would do. He probably was a great hacker even as a kid.”

“And he wouldn't give the FBI a straight answer,” Jonah agreed, under his breath. “He doesn't give anyone a straight answer.”

“But what game is he playing?” Doreen asked. “What does he hope to accomplish? Why doesn't he want to prove he's got nothing to do with the time-crashed plane?”

“Who knows, with Second?” Katherine answered.

On the screen Mr. Reardon shifted tactics.

“Baby smuggling is a serious crime,” he said. “There were thirty-six babies on that plane. We could charge you with thirty-six counts of kidnapping.”

That, at least, got Second to look back at Mr. Reardon.

“Does FBI mean Federal Bureau of Idiots?” he asked. “If any of you were any good at analyzing footprints, you would know that I fell when I was trying to sneak
into
the airport grounds, not out.”

“And why would you do that?” Mr. Reardon asked, hunching forward over a notepad.

“It was a dare, all right?” Second snarled. “I was with my friends and we were talking about what it would be like to stand on a runway when a plane was landing and . . . we decided to try it out.”

“That's a crime too,” Mr. Reardon said.

Second shrugged. “It ain't thirty-six counts of kidnapping,” he said.

“Oh!” Doreen said, sounding surprised. “Gary and Hodge left behind notes on this conversation—Second and his gang had this idea that they could sneak into the airport and pretend to be baggage handlers, and steal all sorts of things from suitcases. And Second didn't want to go back to his foster family because he stole money from them when he ran away.”

Tattoo Face leaned over Doreen's shoulder.

“And he thought as long as the FBI wanted information from him, they'd take care of him?” Tattoo Face asked, sounding surprised.

“Looks like he was right,” Deep Voice said.