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For David
ONE
Jonah saw the man before the man saw him.
The man—a total stranger—was standing in the Skidmore family’s living room on Tuesday morning when Jonah came downstairs before school. Jonah had just gotten home from a long, secret trip the night before; as he stepped into the living room, he was lecturing himself: Just don’t say or do anything to make Mom or Dad suspicious.
He was pretty sure that he’d fooled his parents into thinking the night before that he and his sister Katherine had just run down the street to their friend Chip’s house for a few minutes. But Jonah still had to be careful. There was no way he could let his parents find out that he and Katherine—and Chip and two other kids—had actually traveled through time to the year 1918, and to the distant future, and to a few places called time hollows that were completely removed from time.
And—oh, yeah—Jonah really had to keep his parents from finding out that he’d come back from all that time travel with two bullet wounds in his left leg.
You’re just an ordinary kid on an ordinary day headed to ordinary seventh grade at his ordinary school, Jonah told himself. Then he instantly corrected himself: Well, even if none of that’s true, at least you can pretend it is.
Ordinary kids did not have secret second identities that threatened to ruin their lives. Ordinary kids had not traveled to dangerous moments in four different centuries to try to save other kids’ lives. Ordinary kids had never seen all of time freeze at their school, right in the middle of seventh-grade science. Ordinary kids had not been kidnapped as babies and carried off to be adopted in a totally different time period.
Ordinary kids did not have bullet-hole scars.
But ordinary kids could see a strange man standing in their family’s living room at seven a.m.—couldn’t they?
Maybe Dad’s car broke down and this is some friend or neighbor who’s going to drive him to work, Jonah told himself, scrambling for explanations. Maybe the car battery’s dead, and this is the guy from AAA, here with jumper cables.
But Jonah probably would have recognized any friend or neighbor either of his parents would have called for a ride to work. This man standing in the living room wasn’t holding jumper cables, either, and he didn’t look like any tow-truck driver Jonah had ever seen.
For one thing, he was wearing a suit—kind of an old-fashioned-looking suit, actually, if Jonah let himself think about it. It was brown, with a checked pattern, and it just didn’t look like it belonged in the twenty-first century.
The man was also wearing a hat.
People wear hats like that in this time period, Jonah told himself defensively. Sometimes. Isn’t that what people call a fedora?
If Jonah knew the name “fedora,” didn’t that mean it was an ordinary thing now?
But people now wear fedoras like a joke. Like how rappers do it, Jonah told himself. Sarcastically.
This man did not look like a rapper. He looked serious. And determined. And—maybe a little lost?
Even though Jonah had clattered noisily down the stairs just a moment ago, the man hadn’t yet turned his head to look in Jonah’s direction. Instead the man seemed to be squinting down at his own hand, which was clenching the back of a chair as if he thought he needed help just to stay upright.
That doesn’t have to mean he’s a time traveler who’s dizzy from the trip, and who’s temporarily lost his sense of hearing and sight because of timesickness, Jonah told himself.
Before his own first trip through time, Jonah had mostly been an “act first, think later” kind of kid. But constantly facing danger in all those other centuries had changed him. So he didn’t call out, Dude! Who are you, and why are you in my living room? He didn’t rush off for one of his parents or yell to them, Did you know there’s some strange man standing in our living room?
Instead he silently backed out of the room and off to the side, so he could keep watching the strange man just by peeking around the corner.
Unfortunately, Jonah didn’t look behind him first. He smashed right into his sister Katherine as she walked by in the hall.
“Jonah! What’s wrong with you?” she cried.
A few months ago if he’d run into her like that some morning before school, she would have gone into full bratty-little-sister mode—not just yelping, but threatening to tattle and ranting that he’d messed up her hair, and now all the other sixth graders were going to laugh at her, and . . .
And, really, Jonah had usually just tuned out Katherine’s rants, so all he’d have heard after a while was blah, blah, furious blah.
But today Katherine asked “What’s wrong with you?” like she was truly worried about him. Running into her, he’d knocked a strand of her blond hair down from her ponytail, and she didn’t even notice.
Quickly Jonah put a finger over his lips and used his other hand to point toward the living room. Katherine raised one eyebrow and poked her head around the corner to squint curiously into the other room. But she didn’t say anything else.
Jonah stretched his neck out so he could look into the living room at the same time as Katherine. And then everything happened very quickly, one surprise after another.
First the man in the old-fashioned brown suit and hat turned and stared right at Jonah and Katherine.
Next Katherine gasped and yanked her cell phone out of her pocket and, before Jonah had a moment to think about it, snapped a picture of the strange man.
And then the man vanished.
TWO
“Who was that?” Katherine cried. She ran into the living room, to the exact spot beside the chair where the man had been standing. She gazed all around. “What was that about?”
Jonah ran behind her. He grabbed her arm and yanked her back. He didn’t think whatever force or entity had zapped the strange man out of sight could linger to work on Katherine, too, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He’d seen a lot of bizarre things during his travels through time—as far as he was concerned, anything could happen now.
“JB?” Jonah called softly. “Help?”
Jonah looked around, as if he expected someone to appear out of nowhere just as dramatically as the strange man had disappeared. JB was a time agent Jonah and Katherine had met a few months ago, and Jonah knew JB deserved a lot of credit for making sure that he and Katherine and their friends had survived all their dangerous time travel.
Of course, in many cases JB had been the one sending them into danger, so calling for JB wasn’t always the safest strategy.
Not that it mattered right now. Neither JB nor anyone else showed up.
“Didn’t that guy look kind of familiar?” Katherine asked.
“Not to me,” Jonah said.
“Sure he did,” Katherine said. She was already fiddling with the phone, calling back the picture she’d just taken. “That dimple in his chin, that brownish-goldish hair you could just barely see under the hat . . . Jonah, he kind of looked like you!”
She held out the phone, but Jonah didn’t glance at it. He let go of Katherine’s arm and took a step back.
Somewhere out in the world, somewhere in time, Jonah knew, there had to be people who looked like him. Maybe the birth parents he didn’t remember, maybe brothers or sisters or grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins he knew nothing about.
But the odds against any one of those people showing up in Jonah’s living room—and then vanishing a moment later—were astronomical.
“You’re crazy,” he told Katherine. “He didn’t look anything like me.”
And even though all their travels through time together had generally made Jonah act nicer to Katherine, just as she acted nicer to him, this time his words came out growly and mean.
Katherine narrowed her eyes at him. Then she patted his arm.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said comfortingly. “I don’t know what I was thinking. That guy was so tall—do you think he was six-three? Six-four? Anyhow, basketball-player height. And you’re, like, normal height. And . . .”
That’s right—normal, Jonah thought fiercely. Ordinary.
Jonah hadn’t particularly noticed the strange man’s height—he thought Katherine was exaggerating. But there had been something about the man that made Jonah think people probably always noticed him, even when he wasn’t showing up in weird places he didn’t belong and then disappearing.
Jonah forced himself to peer at the picture on the cell-phone screen. He couldn’t tell what was under the man’s hat—a bald head? A lot more wavy, sandy-colored hair?—and that bothered him.
So did the suspicion that was creeping over him, that maybe the man did kind of look familiar.
Maybe he was someone Jonah should be able to recognize.
“Jonah! Katherine! What are you doing? You’re going to be late for school!” Mom called from the kitchen. “You haven’t even had breakfast yet!”
Jonah and Katherine exchanged glances.
“How can we go sit in classes all day and do nothing?” Katherine asked. “When we don’t know what’s going on?”
“What could we do even if we didn’t go to school?” Jonah asked. “The strange man’s gone now, and it’s not like we could chase him. We don’t know where JB is, we don’t have an Elucidator to call him . . .”
Elucidators were what Jonah figured cell phones would eventually turn into. They enabled time travelers to move between various years, and let them communicate across centuries.
Between time-travel trips, Jonah generally tried to forget about all the problems Elucidators could create, too.
Katherine shrugged helplessly.
“What if Mom decides to work from home today?” Katherine asked. “What if that man comes back and she’s in danger? How—”
Just then Mom stepped into the living room behind them. Katherine froze. Jonah darted a glance toward Mom—if she’d heard anything they’d said, they would need to come up with a good cover story, pronto.
But Mom’s frown just looked annoyed, not frightened.
Oh, yeah, I guess we were whispering, Jonah thought. All those trips through time had evidently made them more cautious, even without thinking about it.
“What’s the holdup, kids?” Mom was saying, rushing toward them. “You have fifteen minutes before the bus comes. You . . .”
Mom stopped talking. Jonah realized that Katherine still had her arm out, her hand tilted just so, to let Jonah see the cell-phone screen. But Mom was close enough now that the screen was tilted just the right way for her to see too.
“Katherine, is that a picture of . . . Charles Lindbergh on your phone?” Mom asked curiously. “How did you make it look like he was standing in our living room? He must have died forty years ago!”
THREE
Okay, then, Jonah thought. There’s proof. This does have something to do with time travel.
He hadn’t actually needed proof. From the moment he’d rounded the corner and seen a strange man towering over Dad’s favorite recliner, he’d known that that man didn’t belong in the twenty-first century, and that his presence was probably a bad sign.
Jonah was mostly just trying not to let himself think about the fact that he recognized the name Mom had said. Not because he was a history buff like her. Not because of any visits he’d made to the past. But because weeks ago, before his first trip through time, Jonah had seen that name, Charles Lindbergh, on a seating roster for a planeload of children stolen from time.
Jonah had been on that plane. His original name—the identity he would have carried through life if time travelers hadn’t intervened—had been on that list too. He just hadn’t known what it was.
He still didn’t know.
What if I was supposed to be Charles Lindbergh? he wondered. Is that why Katherine thought that man looked like me?
Only how was Jonah supposed to be Charles Lindbergh if this man who’d suddenly appeared and then disappeared from the living room was already Charles Lindbergh?
Belatedly, Jonah remembered that the name on the plane’s seating roster hadn’t just been Charles Lindbergh. It had been Charles Lindbergh Jr. or Charles Lindbergh III or something like that.
Jonah’s knees felt so weak all of a sudden that he sank down onto the nearby chair.
Katherine glanced at him, horror spreading across her expression. Then she smoothed out her face and turned back to face Mom.
“Instagram,” Katherine said calmly.
What? Jonah wondered. Then he realized his sister was trying to explain how she could have a picture on her phone of someone who’d died forty years ago, but who somehow magically looked like he was standing in their living room five minutes ago.
Will Mom believe her? Jonah thought. Does Mom even know what Instagram is?
Maybe Jonah needed to help out.
“Didn’t you use kind of a mix of Photoshop and Instagram together?” Jonah asked faintly. He looked up at Mom. “Didn’t Katherine do a good job faking everything?”
Mom tilted her head and took the phone from Katherine’s hand.
“It looks so real,” Mom said. “You’ve even got the candlesticks on the mantelpiece looking crooked, like they always do because someone’s always jumping around in here, knocking things sideways. . . .”
She glanced accusingly at Jonah.
Accusingly was good. Accusingly meant that she didn’t know there was anything truly weird and dangerous going on.
“Mom, all I did was take a picture of this room,” Katherine protested. “And then I put it together with a modernized picture of, you know, Charles, um, Charles . . .”
Jonah couldn’t tell if Katherine really couldn’t remember the last name, or if she was trying to distract Mom from looking more closely at Jonah. Jonah could feel prickles of panicky sweat on his face; he could feel exactly how close he’d come to fainting. And how close he still was. He didn’t want to be thinking, Am I really Charles Lindbergh’s son or grandson or . . . related somehow? Am I? But he couldn’t get the words out of his head.
He was just lucky Mom was focused on glaring at Katherine now.
“Katherine, please don’t tell me this was another one of those school assignments where you spent hours making sure everything looked good, but you didn’t spend five minutes actually reading about the topic you were supposed to be learning,” Mom said, waving the phone at her. “It’s Lindbergh. Charles Lindbergh. Do you even know what he was famous for?”
“Um . . . ,” Katherine stalled.
Mom threw her hands up in exasperation.
“Jonah?” she challenged, turning back to him. “Do you know who Charles Lindbergh was?”
My birth father? Jonah thought. Someone I probably would have known really, really well, if time-traveling kidnappers hadn’t stolen me away?
Now he didn’t just feel sweaty and faint. He also felt like vomiting. It was a good thing he hadn’t had breakfast yet.
“Mom, this wasn’t my homework assignment,” Jonah protested weakly. “I’ve never had to know about Charles Lindbergh.”
If his original identity actually was Charles Lindbergh’s son, had he known his father really, really well back in some other time period, some other century? How old had Jonah been when the time-traveling kidnappers took him and un-aged him back to being a baby all over again—and then crash-landed while escaping
from time agents, like JB, who wanted to stop them? Had Jonah had time to form a lot of memories with his original father before the kidnappers erased them all? If that man who’d stood in the Skidmore living room just ten minutes ago was actually Charles Lindbergh, had he once upon a time thrown a baseball back and forth with Jonah and told him stories about his own childhood and playfully punched him in the arm and called him “a chip off the old block”?
Those were all things that Jonah’s adoptive dad—his real dad—had done with Jonah in this century.
“Jonah, if Katherine is learning about Charles Lindbergh this year, then you were probably supposed to learn about him last year,” Mom said, frowning. “This is what I keep telling the two of you, that you’re not just learning stuff so you can get graded on it and then forget everything after the test. You’re eleven and thirteen years old!”
“Almost twelve,” Katherine interrupted. “Remember, my birthday’s just a few weeks away.”
Mom barely paused to look sternly at Katherine.
“Right. So you really should know who Charles Lindbergh is,” Mom lectured. “It’s like—cultural literacy! And it’s interesting! Charles Lindbergh lived a fascinating life!”
This was one of Mom’s favorite topics: It wasn’t enough for him and Katherine to do well in school. They were also supposed to learn things “for life,” so they could “appreciate the treasure of knowledge . . .”
Yeah, right, Mom, Jonah thought. I really treasured finding out firsthand that they didn’t have toilet paper in the year 1483. And finding out how sailors got punished in 1611—because I got put in the stocks. And watching our friend Emily almost die because medicine was so bad in 1903. And, in both 1485 and 1918, seeing how many people got killed because certain countries wanted different leaders . . .
Now Jonah had chills, along with his sweating and light-headedness and nausea. What horrors awaited him in whatever time period Charles Lindbergh had lived in? What if there was nothing Jonah could do to avoid them?