JB! Angela thought elatedly, turning around to run back to the living room so she could see him with her very own eyes, and confirm for herself that he really was back to normal, and that the age change and time in 1932 hadn't had any permanent effects on him. In her haste, she accidentally crashed into Michael, sending both of them careening down to the floor in opposite directions. "Oh—I'm sorry!" she apologized, as he rubbed his head. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," grunted Michael. "Do you play any sports? You've got a mean tackle."
"Mom!" Jonah exclaimed, before Angela had the chance to respond. "What are you doing?"
Angela turned her head to see Linda, eyebrows raised, looking like she'd been about to creep into the living room. "There's a strange man in our living room with Jordan and Katherine," she explained. "I don't recognize his voice. I need to see—"
"Oh, that's not a strange man," said Jonah, shaking his head. "That's JB. The time agent. The one we told you about."
"He's the one who'll be able to turn you guys back into adults again," Angela added, getting up and heading for the living room again.
She had only made it a few steps when Michael, still sitting on the floor, complained, "I thought we all weren't supposed to go in there just yet. Wasn't the whole point of us coming into the kitchen so we wouldn't freak Jordan out any more than he already is?"
Angela stopped, caught up in indecision. She was dying to see JB, to make absolutely sure he was okay. But it sounded like he was talking to Jordan right now, so she doubted she could get into the living room without Jordan seeing her.
Would it really be that bad if he saw me, though? I'm not his unaged parents. I'm not his identical twin brother that he never knew existed until today. I'm just a random stranger. I'm the least of his concerns!
Still, she made herself wait, standing next to Linda near the entryway into the living room, listening to the conversation on the other side of the wall. "Didn't you black out a minute ago?" Katherine was asking. "Don't you think you should just go back to bed?'
"And then everything will be fine when you wake up," JB added in a forced-cheerful voice. But it's his own voice, Angela thought joyfully. His adult voice. And he's clearly JB again.
Chip was speaking now. "Oh, right. That's how these things work. When you're sick, I mean."
It sounded like they were all trying to convince Jordan to go to bed, maybe hoping that he would follow their advice and leave the room so they could work at figuring things out without having to worry about him fainting again if he saw Jonah or his parents. Angela raised a skeptical eyebrow. If Jordan was anything at all like his brother and sister, that wasn't going to happen.
To her surprise, however, she heard Jordan mumble something, then say, "Maybe I will go back to bed. I feel kind of weird."
"Great idea!" JB congratulated him, still faking enthusiasm.
Angela heard the padding of Jordan's retreating footsteps, followed by the sound of someone climbing the stairs. A few heartbeats later, Katherine, Chip, and JB entered the kitchen.
Angela couldn't contain it anymore. "JB!" she exclaimed, running over and throwing her arms around him. He looked exactly the same as he had all those months ago, when he'd arrived at her house the morning of November 21st and told her she needed to drive him over to the Skidmores'. Back to his normal height—a few inches taller than her, since she was still a thirteen-year-old—and more importantly, back to his right mind. He wasn't drooling anymore, or staring vacantly off into space, or laughing madly or screaming in hysteria. JB was back.
JB hugged her tightly for a moment, and when they pulled apart, his face was etched with a mix of gratitude, relief, and an underlying tension. "Angela," he said. "I can't even begin to explain how grateful I am. Everything you did… I can't thank you enough."
"I'm just glad you're okay," she choked out, feeling the beginning of tears pinpricking her eyes. "How are you okay? What happened? Did the time agency remotely zap you from the cave, or… I was so worried when I didn't know where you disappeared to."
"Hadley did it," JB explained. "He re-aged me in the cave and dropped an Elucidator in for me, then almost immediately pulled me into a time hollow, where he brought me up to speed on exactly how Gary and Hodge had orchestrated their plot involving Jonah and Jordan in the nineteen thirties, and the time split and the blended dimensions. And I thought the dimensions being blended would solve everything, but there's still so much—"
"Where's Hadley now?" Angela interrupted, her heart suddenly pounding at the idea that she might actually be able to see him soon, now that she was back in her own time period and time hadn't come to an end. "I've tried to call him, but the Elucidator wouldn't let me—"
"That's what I'm saying." JB stepped back, a worried frown etching across his face. "Something's still off. Communications and teleportations aren't working the way they should. Hadley wanted to wait to re-age me until I was in transit, because that's the safest way to do it. But he said he wasn't even able to pull me out of time until I was re-aged. And then he couldn't get to the time hollow to brief me; we had to talk over the Elucidator. I tried to just meet him at the time agency, but the Elucidator told me it wasn't able to perform that function quite yet, even though it ended up letting me go get Jonah and Katherine from 1932 and come here. It might just be something to do with the latent energy from the blending of the dimensions, but this is obviously something we've never had to deal with before, so who knows." He threw his hands up in frustration. "And now on top of all this, we have Jordan to contend with, and it's going to be difficult enough trying to keep him occupied while the rest of us are figuring things out… ugh." He shook his head, pulling his Elucidator out of his pocket to glance at it, his face hardening into a grimace.
"I know we just sent Jordan upstairs, but… I kind of think maybe we should bring him back down again," Katherine spoke up. "I just feel sorry for him. He's so confused. Is it really going to make any difference if he hears everything?"
"We have to contain the damage!" JB insisted tensely, now swiping through screen after screen on his Elucidator. Angela leaned over to try to peer at what he was doing, but JB's Elucidator evidently had one of those privacy screens that made it so the viewer had to be at just the right angle in order to be able to see the display.
Angela thought about the poor, confused boy upstairs, whose life had just been turned completely upside-down in a single instant. A little like the way hers had been that night at the airport, but in a way even worse. Angela had chosen to devote the next thirteen years of her life to solving the mystery of the plane, but she hadn't needed to. If she'd just gone along with what her supervisor and the FBI and everyone said, and convinced herself that the plane's sudden appearance had been a trick of the light and there was nothing strange at all about a cabin full of unaccompanied babies, her life could have stayed relatively the same as it had been before.
Jordan didn't have the option of looking the other way and pretending nothing had happened. This was his very family that had been changed as a result of time travel.
She started voicing her objections to JB. "But if Jordan's going to have to live with the—what did you call it? Blended dimensions?—for the rest of his life, shouldn't he at least get to hear how it all happened?"
"Angela, I'm not talking about the dimension challenges. Those will work themselves out. I'm sure of it. It's you and the two Skidmores being the wrong ages—and Chip's parents too, and God knows how many other adults around here—"
"Angela said that was going to be fixed," Michael protested. "Right after we got to see our kids."
Did I? thought Angela. Everything that had happened since meeting Jonah on the airfield had been such a blur, she was having a hard time remembering exactly what she'd said and to whom.
"The time agency is working as fast as they can," JB said through clenched teeth, still staring down at his Elucidator.
But the speed at which the time agency is working shouldn't be relevant to how much time is passing in this time period, Angela thought, confused. The time agency could spend weeks, months, even years working everything out on their end, all while no time at all passed in the twenty-first century—right?
"You're saying we can't do anything but wait?" Linda complained. "And you're saying we have to keep our own son confined to his room and in the dark about everything until we're adults again?"
"That is what I'm saying," JB confirmed. "All of you need to sit tight and let the experts do their jobs."
"JB, I thought you'd eased up on thinking experts are the only ones who can solve problems," said Jonah. "These are my parents, remember? And they've just met you. Be nice."
JB finally looked up, chagrined. "I know, I know. I'm sorry. There's just a lot at stake."
"Isn't there always?" said Katherine with a hint of a teasing smile. "But if two totally different dimensions can smash together, and that's working out, then can't the age problems be okay too?"
JB didn't answer. He's acting like fixing our ages is going to be really, really difficult, thought Angela. Why? Katherine's right. All that stuff that just happened with Lindbergh and Gary and Hodge and the babies and all the dimensions—that's all way more complex than just aging some people forward twenty or thirty years.
"The time agency was able to solve all your problems, JB," Jonah pointed out.
Right, thought Angela. JB was not only de-aged, but also experiencing severe symptoms of schizophrenia, and convinced that he was a completely different person! If the time agency could fix that, how is simply changing ages so much more difficult?
"They only risked changing me because the alternative was worse," JB admitted.
Ohhh. Was the time agency worried about the potential for brain damage if they re-aged everybody? Was there still a high chance of that, even though they hadn't been un-aged all the way back to infancy?
Because everyone was still looking at him, waiting for more information, JB sighed and started to explain. "What happened with all the un-aging—it was unprecedented. We've got dozens of adults within a one-mile radius who went back to being thirteen-year-olds. An entire middle-school staff is now the same age as the students."
Angela frowned. Harris Middle School? But the secretary she'd spoken to on the phone when she'd called to try to dismiss Chip had still been an adult, hadn't she?
"With every second that ticks by, the likelihood of permanent damage increases," JB continued.
Katherine cocked her head to the side. "But why—"
JB didn't let her finish. "We don't know! All we can think is that there was something seriously wrong with the Elucidator Charles Lindbergh was using."
Linda's eyes darted over toward Angela. "Elucidator—that's the device that lets people travel through time, right?"
Angela nodded.
Chip, who'd just been hanging back listening since coming into the kitchen, spoke up. "Hold on—who's Charles Lindbergh? What's he got to do with anything? I thought this was all Gary and Hodge's fault."
"It was," Jonah confirmed. "But they manipulated Charles Lindbergh into doing some of their dirty work. Lindbergh was a famous pilot from, like, eighty or ninety years ago."
Katherine nodded. "He was the one who kidnapped me and turned me into a baby."
Chip squinted at her. "Turned you into—what?"
"Oh yeah, you weren't here when I told them. He turned me into a baby. It was so weird. I don't really remember most of it, but it was—"
A ringing noise caused them all to jump. Angela glanced eagerly at JB's Elucidator, which seemed to be the source of the ringing. JB held the Elucidator to his ear, and his face immediately contorted into dismay. "Noooo…." He groaned.
Angela felt a shiver of worry. His reaction didn't seem to imply that the news he'd received was catastrophic, but it didn't seem good either. "I'll take care of it," JB muttered resignedly, slipping the Elucidator back into his pocket.
"JB, what's going on? They are going to be able to fix this, aren't they?" Angela couldn't resist asking.
Instead of answering, JB strode purposefully out of the kitchen, turning into the fancy dining room which Angela had seen but never entered. "Get out of here!" she heard him growl. "How much did you hear?"
It was Jordan's voice that responded, sounding like a nervous wreck. "Elucidator. Charles Lindbergh. Time travel. And… there are bunk beds in my room."
"Bunk beds? Really?" Katherine crinkled her face, looking surprised as she led the way toward the sound of JB's and Jordan's voices. Angela and the others followed.
"Haven't our sons always had bunk beds?" Michael asked, but the doubt was evident in his voice.
"Did the time agency put them there, or did it just happen?" Angela wondered out loud, remembering how the time agency had placed extra beds and clothes for Maria and Leo when they'd moved into her house. She experienced a sudden flash of panic—they were with me for one night and then I went and left them alone for five and a half months!—before remembering that for Maria and Leo, not even twelve hours had passed since the last time they'd seen her.
"Is his room my room now too?" Jonah asked in dismay.
JB finally came into view, gripping Jordan's arm tightly as he gritted his teeth, appearing even more frustrated and stressed than he was before. "Can we all just please stop talking about beds and rooms and—" he broke off, shaking his head and trying to steer Jordan toward the stairs. "I know this is a difficult time for you, Jordan, but remember, you're sick. You're going to go back to sleep, and later you'll just remember that you were delirious, and—"
Linda stepped forward and grabbed JB's arm, roughly separating it from Jordan's. "Don't do that to my son. You may think you're in charge here, because you're the only one who's an adult right now, and you know more about time travel than the rest of us. But this is still our house—my, uh, husband's and mine—" She faltered ever so slightly on the word husband, and Angela thought about how weird it would be to feel thirteen but still have the knowledge that you were married to someone. The hint of an uncomfortable thought started trickling into her brain, and she pushed it away, focusing on the rest of what Linda was saying. "It's not fair for you to lie to Jordan like that and make him think he's just imagining things. I won't allow it."
"Yeah," Michael added, stumbling over to stand next to Linda, mimicking her crossed-arms position. "What she said."
Katherine giggled and slid into place next to them. "Nobody messes with the Skidmore family. And Jordan probably already heard so much that you might as well tell him everything. And the rest of us too."
JB was still clenching his jaw, looking like he wanted to argue with the whole lot of them. Angela thought she could understand his dilemma—he didn't even understand everything that was going on, so he wanted to focus his energy into attempting to learn about and solve the problems, rather than explaining what he did know to someone who didn't even have the most basic knowledge of time travel. But none of this was Jordan's fault. He was just a very confused kid experiencing what was undoubtedly the weirdest day of his life. Did JB really think that not giving him an explanation would somehow prevent time from getting any more damaged than it already was?
If anything, that'll just increase the damage, she thought, once again going back to how her quest for information had taken over every aspect of her life for nearly thirteen years. "JB, maybe some damage just can't be contained," she said as gently as possible. "Maybe it's not even damage."
She was about to remind him of the other apparent catastrophes they'd lived through, which had actually turned out to be necessary for keeping time on track, but Chip spoke up with the wisdom of a medieval king: "Sometimes when your troops complain against you, it's not because they're insubordinate. It's because you're wrong." He leaned in closer to JB, a conspiratorial look on his face. "Ruler to ruler, I'll tell you, sometimes you have to give the people some of what they're asking for, lest they seize power for themselves."
Despite the tenseness of the situation, Angela had to bite her lip to keep from laughing at the exasperated look that crossed JB's face at the fact that he was getting leadership advice from a thirteen-year-old.
"Okay, okay," JB finally relented, after a heavy sigh. "Jordan can come back into the kitchen with us. But there are some questions I'm not answering from anybody."
