Five days later, Angela was on her way to the Liston Public Library. In the note she'd sent Chip, she'd told him to meet her there at 3:00. She'd told him not to attempt to contact her in any other way. And he hadn't. Angela had no way of knowing whether Chip would actually show up. She had no way of knowing whether he had even gotten her note.

But if he had, she was almost certain he would come.

Angela arrived at the library at 2:00 sharp. She was pretty sure this wasn't a trap, set up by the government or anybody else. But she had no way of knowing for sure. She wanted to be there early, just to keep an eye out for anything suspicious. Just to make sure she knew what she was getting herself into.

It'll be fine, she told herself. Chip's just a kid. I'm not in danger. This isn't a trap. And even if it is, I'm prepared. She clutched her purse tightly to her side. No one would suspect she had a Taser hidden in there. She would only use it if it was absolutely necessary. And it wouldn't be. She would tell Chip what she knew and what she suspected, and he would tell her anything he knew or suspected, and that would be that.

At 2:30, Angela spotted a group of kids coming into the library. Two boys and a girl. They tiptoed in as if on a secret mission, and headed straight to Conference Room B. The room where Angela had said she'd be willing to meet Chip.

One of those boys had to be Chip. And it looked like he had brought friends.

Angela watched as Chip and his friends prepared an elaborate setup for the meeting. One of the boys—Angela assumed it must be Chip—went into the conference room. The other boy went toward the non-fiction section, and the girl went over near the magazines. Chip—or whoever it was in the conference room—sat down with what looked like a cell phone in his lap, and started fiddling with it—probably calling or texting one of the other two. Sure enough, when Angela looked over at the girl, she was holding a cell phone to her ear, along with—was that a walkie-talkie?

Yes. The boy in the non-fiction section had a walkie talkie too.

Angela chuckled to herself. These kids were definitely bright. It was too bad, really, that she would have to break up their little setup. Just the cell phones may not be too bad. But walkie talkies… anyone could listen in.

Angela got up and walked over to the conference room. Chip looked up and saw her. "Oh, hello," he said, straightening up. "Are you the person who reserved this conference room for 3:00? The one who's willing to talk?"

Angela nodded. "Chip Winston?" she asked, just to make sure.

"Ye-e-es. And you are…?"

Angela didn't answer right away. She stepped into the room and looked over her shoulder at the other boy, the one in the nonfiction section. She laughed when she saw that the book he was pretending to read was upside-down. "Before we begin," she told Chip. "I'll have to ask you to turn that cell phone off. And tell your friends to turn off their walkie talkies. I appreciate their ingenuity, but they might as well come on in and listen in person."

Chip stammered that he had no idea what Angela was talking about, but Angela pointed out where the other two were and what they were doing. A moment later, the girl entered the room and introduced herself as Katherine Skidmore. Angela filed the name away in her memory.

"Come on, Jonah," said Katherine. "She's got us figured out."

Jonah. A J name. Did Jonah's last name begin with B? Could Jonah be the JB mentioned in the note?

Jonah seemed a lot more reluctant to enter the room than Katherine had been. "But I don't have to go in there, do I?" he asked. "I can stay out here if I want to. So I can run for help if anything happens."

Angela understood. She would be reluctant too, if she were in his situation. "You're the one I want guarding the door, then," she told Jonah. "Watching out for trouble. You can watch form the outside or watch from the inside. I don't care."

Jonah stepped a little closer, but didn't come into the room just yet. Angela introduced herself and held out her hand for Jonah to shake. He accepted it hesitantly, then joined Angela and the other kids in the conference room.

Angela sat in the seat that placed her back against the brick wall. The conference room was glass on three sides, so she wanted to be able to see if anyone else was coming. Chip and Katherine sat at the table, facing her. Jonah stood by the door.

"A little advice," Angela told the three of them. "Next time you do a stakeout, don't enter the building together." She explained that she had arrived early and had been watching them ever since they arrived. "I would have left you to your spy games if it weren't for the range on those things," she told them, gesturing to the walkie talkies. "I didn't want our conversation broadcast to every trucker passing by on the highway. Or… others who might want to listen."

"Oh, that's right," snapped Katherine. "You're afraid to even talk on the phone."

"I have my reasons," Angela told her.

"But it's safe to talk now?" asked Chip. "You can give us answers?"

Angela gave the area another look-over, making sure nobody else was nearby. "You're curious about your adoption, right?" she asked Chip. "What makes you think that I know anything about it?"

"Well…" said Chip with a glance at his friends. "A couple weeks ago, Jonah and Katherine went to the FBI to try to find out information about Jonah's adoption. And they didn't find out a lot, but they did find these lists, with names and addresses on them." He passed several sheets of paper over to Angela. "One was labeled Survivors, and the other was labeled Witnesses. You were on the Witnesses list. I'm on the Survivors."

"See, Jonah's name is on the list of survivors too," Katherine added, pointing to a name toward the bottom of the list: Jonah Skidmore.

Oh. Skidmore. Same as Katherine. Angela hadn't realized Jonah and Katherine were brother and sister. She smiled at Jonah, who looked slightly irritated as Katherine continued chattering on about how she wasn't on the list because she wasn't adopted, but how she'd been the one who had taken the pictures of the lists. I guess this rules out my theory of Jonah being JB.

"I can tell you what I witnessed thirteen years ago," Angela told the children, after taking a look through both lists. Monique, her old boss, was on the Witnesses list, but Angela didn't recognize any names on Survivors beyond Jonah and Chip. "Even though I'm not supposed to discuss it with anyone. You'll probably think I'm crazy, anyhow."

"You know where I came from?" exclaimed Chip, leaning forward in his chair. "Where we came from?"

This was the crucial moment. The moment when Angela would share her theory, and all three kids would probably start to think she was insane.

Angela shook her head slowly. "Not where, exactly. But I think I might have a pretty good guess about when."

"When?" Chip repeated. All three kids looked slightly dumbstruck.

"Oh, thanks," said Katherine sarcastically, starting to laugh. "That makes everything as clear as mud. We already know the 'when'. Chip and Jonah were both adopted thirteen years ago."

They weren't going to believe her. Angela already knew it. But she'd come this far. She had to tell them what she knew.

So she described what she had seen on her one day working at Sky Trails. Not everything—she didn't mention the note, and she didn't mention Monique yelling at her. But she described how she'd seen the plane land out of nowhere. Here Katherine interrupted. "Did it disappear, too?"

Angela looked at her, surprised that Katherine had asked that question. "I wasn't planning to get to that part until later, but… yes."

"I saw something like that happen once too," said Katherine. "Not a whole plane appearing and disappearing, but a person. A man."

"So you know what it's like." Angela couldn't believe how good it felt to realize that at least one other person in the world had some idea of what it had been like to see something that was there one moment, then gone. Even if the person was just a middle-school kid.

Angela continued her story, about how the plane had been unauthorized and nobody had known where it had come from, and how she'd heard a baby crying, and gone on board to see thirty-six babies, without a single adult.

"What—babies were flying the plane?" Chip burst out, laughing sarcastically. "You expect me to believe that? 'Goo goo gaa-gaa, air traffic control, this is baby plane one, over.' It sounds like something out of a diaper commercial."

Why am I even bothering telling these kids this story? Angela wondered. They already don't believe me, and I haven't even gotten to my theory yet. They definitely won't believe that.

Chip, Katherine, and Jonah all had to put forth their own theories, but eventually they allowed Angela to continue. She explained how the FBI had shown up and the place had turned into a crime scene. She explained how she and the other people there had carried the babies off the plane and lined them up on the floor of the gate area. And finally, she explained how the plane had disappeared, and how she and Monique had been the only ones to see it happen. She told them how James Reardon, the guy from the FBI, had been trying to cover it up, and how she'd tried over and over to get her story heard, but nobody had believed her.

"I get paid for doing nothing," she told them. "Even though I've called many times and said I don't deserve disability pay. So I decided to use the money to do research, to study physics…"

"Physics?" Katherine looked astonished.

"Well, yeah…" Okay, here goes. Angela took a deep breath and told them what she had seen on the side of the plane—the Tachyon Travel logo. Then she explained about tachyons, trying to keep the explanation simple enough for middle-schoolers to understand. "Tachyons are particles that travel faster than the speed of light."

"I thought nothing could travel faster than light," said Katherine.

"Nobody knows really," said Angela, looking carefully at each face. All three faces were still bordering on skepticism. "At least, nobody knows yet," she continued. "The theories are that if anything could go faster than light, all sorts of weird things would happen. Time and space would have a different relationship. Aging would be different. And, if a plane could travel that fast, it'd become… a time machine."

Jonah and Katherine's eyes were wide—with what, Angela wasn't sure. Disbelief? Surprise? Uncertainty?

Chip was shaking his head. "Who'd send a bunch of babies in a time machine? What would be the point?"

And now it was time for Angela to share her theory, the one that all her research had led to. She looked around at each of them. Katherine, with her wide, interested eyes and determination to solve the mystery. Chip, who underneath all his scorn and sarcasm seemed like a little boy desperate to know who he really was. And Jonah, who seemed different from the other two somehow, almost as if he was afraid to find anything out.

"I don't think anyone sent a bunch of babies in a time machine," Angela told them. "I think a bunch of adults got into a time machine. I think it was an experiment, one of the first attempts at time travel. They didn't understand all the effects. So they didn't realize what would happen when they arrived in our time."

Katherine was hanging on to every word. "You mean—?" She didn't finish.

"I mean," said Angela, "That Chip and Jonah used to be much older than they are now. I think they were changed by traveling through time. I think they—and all the other babies—came from the future."

Chip, Katherine, and Jonah just stared at her. Angela couldn't tell whether they believed her or not. Probably they were just too stunned to say anything.

"Well," Jonah said finally. "Thanks for meeting with us. Your ideas are very, um, interesting—"

Angela had no idea what he said next, if he said anything next. Because right then, a huge, muscular man slammed into the door right behind Jonah. Angela could do nothing but watch in horror as a different man tackled the large man, and both of them tussled with each other on the floor.

"You can't do this!" Angela heard one of the men—not the muscular one—hiss with fury. "Not here. Not now. Do you want to ruin time completely?"

Time. Had he really just said that? "Ruin time completely"? Was this proof that Angela's theory was right? Or at least, that time travel was real?

The man who'd mentioned time looked up and yelled, "Jonah! Chip! Run!"

Angela glanced around. There was nowhere to run. Except… "The window!" she yelled. She rushed over and tugged the window open. Chip ran over to help, then jumped out the opening. Katherine followed, but Jonah hesitated.

"Jonah, come on!" Katherine screamed from outside.

"Go!" the man yelled.

Jonah was still indecisive. "You go first, Angela," he said.

Angela was still watching the men fighting on the floor. The one who'd mentioned ruining time—who'd been telling Jonah and Chip to run—looked up again. "Angela DuPre! We have wronged you in time! We owe you—"

Clunk. The other man pulled him down again and they resumed fighting.

"Angela?" Jonah held out his hand to help her out the window. It was a kind gesture, and Angela had the feeling that Jonah was a really nice kid. But she didn't want to leave.

"You go on," she told Jonah. "I've been waiting thirteen years for something like this. I'm going to stick around and get some answers."

"But they're dangerous!"

"Probably." Angela pushed Jonah toward the window. "That's why you need to get out of here."

"Go, Jonah! Hurry!" Angela heard the voice of the man again, from somewhere under the conference table. "And, Jonah—" he added. "I saw your note! You have to be careful! Careful where you leave anything that could be seen later…anything that could be monitored later! Now get out of here! Go! Go! Now!"

Jonah finally jumped out the window and followed the other two. Angela stayed where she was, unsure of what to do. Should she jump in and help? Should she use her Taser? Who would she want to help, anyway? The man who'd been doing the talking seemed like he was trying to protect the kids from the other guy, but she couldn't be sure…

Suddenly, the man who'd told Jonah to leave stood up. Angela looked around for the other man, certain that he was going to pop up and resume the fight. But he didn't.

Had he been injured too badly? Angela looked under the table, expecting to see the muscular man lying there in pain, or unconscious.

He was nowhere in sight.

"Where did he go?" Angela asked the man who was still there. Now that he was standing still, she could get a good look at him. He was good-looking, with short dark hair and greenish eyes. Angela had never seen him before.

But he knew who she was. He had called her by name.

"Angela, I can't explain anything right now. I can't stay in this room for much longer. But I promise, I'll let you know what's going on. We've ruined your life enough, the least we can do is give you an explanation." He started hurrying around the room, putting everything back to how it had looked before he'd entered. The table, the chairs… He closed the window. He snatched the Witnesses and Survivors lists from the table. Then he glanced out the window. "See those trees? The pine trees over there, at the edge of the parking lot? Meet me over there. As soon as you can."

Then he disappeared.