Surprisingly, Jordan's first question once they were all back in the kitchen wasn't anything about time travel or Jonah or his parents being kids. Instead, he wanted to know how JB had known he was in the dining room, since he hadn't been making any noise.
Angela exchanged glances with Jonah, Katherine, and Chip, wondering if JB would explain to Jordan about the call he'd received on his Elucidator.
It was Katherine who responded. "That's something you should know about time travel. People from the future can see pretty much anything we do. Anytime."
Linda shivered. "That's creepy. Why isn't that illegal?"
"It typically is in connection with the recent past," JB responded, sounding at least a little more at-ease than he had before. "But—"
Michael interrupted. "I'm confused. JB wasn't in the future. He was standing right here with the rest of us. I didn't hear Jordan make any noise. How did JB know he was out of his room?"
Once again, Katherine was the one to give the explanation. "His Elucidator told him. That thing that looks like a cell phone. He got a message from the future."
JB frowned, placing his hand over the bulge in his shirt pocket that must have been his Elucidator. "Maybe we can limit the explanations to only the information that Jordan—and, for that matter, Linda and Michael—absolutely need. They're not going to travel through time ever again, so they won't need to know about Elucidators."
Linda fixed him with an ice-cold glare. "But it sounds like Elucidators and time travel shaped our lives—and our family," she pointed out, sounding every bit the stern parent despite her young appearance. "Don't we need to know about them to understand our past? What's the saying? 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'?"
"You can't expect the Skidmores not to have questions," Chip added before JB had a chance to say anything. "I mean, even I'm confused and I've been to other centuries! The separate dimensions with Jonah and Jordan—how did that work? They were both in the same dimension back in the nineteen thirties, right?"
"Jonah and Jordan, like typical identical twins, were born in the same dimension," JB began explaining, leaning against the kitchen's island, where everyone had congregated. "There was only one dimension when they were born, more than eighty years ago," he continued. "Time split when they were kidnapped from history and—"
"No, no, no, no, no," Jordan blurted out. "I don't know about that Jonah kid, but I was not born more than eighty years ago. I'm thirteen!" He waved his hands in the direction of Michael and Linda, who were standing across the island from him. "I'm not like them. I've never been any older than this! I've never been kidnapped, and I wasn't ever in 'history', and, and… I do not have an identical twin!"
Angela couldn't help cutting her gaze over to Jonah, then back to Jordan. There was no way that anyone in their right mind could look at those two boys and not immediately know that they were identical twins.
"I mean, I'm not supposed to have a twin! It's not right!" Jordan protested. "It's never been this way before!"
JB cast an exasperated look around the island. "And you thought knowing more would make things easier for him?"
"This is hard no matter what," Jonah spoke up wisely, and Angela nodded in agreement.
Jordan still seemed to be scrambling for an alternate explanation. "Maybe he is really eighty-some years old, and he got turned back into a kid, just like Mom and Dad. But me—I'm thirteen. I was born thirteen years ago! I—"
"Quit embarrassing yourself," muttered Katherine, rolling her eyes as she jabbed an elbow into his side. Jordan shut his mouth, his expression still frantic.
"The two of us are both thirteen, but we were both born more than eighty years ago," Jonah explained calmly. "The reason you don't remember the nineteen thirties, Jordan, is because our enemies kidnapped you when you were only a year and a half old. And then they un-aged you and brought you to this time period. They kidnapped me, too. And a bunch of other kids."
Jordan suddenly turned to glare at JB. JB held his hands up innocently. "It wasn't me! It was two men named Gary and Hodge."
"They were collecting famous missing children from history, to take far into the future to be adopted by families who would pay them a lot of money," Angela added, in an attempt to help Jordan understand why time travelers from the future would even be interested in kidnapping a twentieth-century baby.
Jordan gawked at her. "I'm famous?" Before she had a chance to reply, he turned to his parents. "And you paid time-traveling kidnappers to get me?"
"We didn't know anything about the time travel or the kidnapping until… until about an hour ago," Linda assured him, stealing a glance at the kitchen clock.
Michael wrinkled his nose as if trying to puzzle something out. "But—this is weird—it's like I can't remember exactly how your adoption worked. It's like we went through one procedure with Jordan, and a different procedure with Jonah, but it was all at the same time… why would we have done the adoptions separately?"
"Because the two of us were in different dimensions, and you remember both of them," Jonah supplied.
JB nodded. "Your brain is probably trying to fuse the memories from both dimensions together. It's only because you're in the midst of other oddities that you can see the discrepancy."
Angela recalled the barrage of memories she'd been hit with outside the cave, at the moment when the dimensions had first merged. All of those years surrounded by family and friends, learning to fly, traveling the world… contrasting greatly with an equal amount of time spent poring over books and articles, contacting physicists and researchers, always alone. Michael and Linda had experienced a slight discrepancy in the way their two sons' adoptions had worked out, and maybe a minute difference here or there as the boys were growing up. But in each dimension, they'd still been parents to a son and a daughter, they'd still probably worked their same jobs and interacted with the same people.
Angela had lived two completely separate lives. She doubted her brain would ever be able to fuse those memories together.
She'd missed a bit of the conversation. Jonah was now explaining to Chip how he and Jordan hadn't really been famous, but just fakes that Gary and Hodge had used with the intent to fool the people in the future. "And," he added, shooting a quick glance over at Jordan before looking away just as quickly. "To fool me."
Angela could only imagine what was going on in Jonah's head when he looked at Jordan. Jonah had been the one responsible for Jordan ending up in the Skidmore family. Was he regretting his decision to bring the baby that he'd thought was himself over to his parents' house when he'd thought time was about to end?
If Jonah hadn't done that, where would Jordan be now?
"But all the kids on the plane were famous!" exclaimed Chip.
"Not me," Jonah countered stoically. "Not Jordan, either."
"What plane?" Jordan wanted to know.
"The one that brought you to this time period," Angela jumped in. "Well, it was actually a time-travel device, but it looked like an ordinary plane. Gary and Hodge were trying to escape some time agents who were chasing them, and so they crash-landed the plane in this time period. Thirteen years ago, I mean. I was working at the airport then, and that's how I got involved. I saw the plane appear out of nowhere, carrying only babies…" She trailed off, trying to remember if she had still seen the plane in Jordan's dimension too, or just in Jonah's. We thought the moment the plane landed was the moment time split, because thirteen-year-old Jonah was there at the airport, giving me the note, and then baby Jonah arrived on the plane, she remembered. And maybe that was the case, but then… where does Jordan's plane come in? Or… wait, if thirteen-year-old Jonah was actually in the dimension that Jordan's plane landed in, then was he even still duplicated, like we thought? Or hold on… didn't JB say something earlier about the time split happening back in the thirties?
"Wait," she said, looking up at JB. "Now the different dimensions are confusing me, too. Did Jordan's plane crash-land, too? Or did Gary and Hodge send him here on purpose, just to confuse Jonah and make everything work with Charles Lindbergh?"
JB was frowning at his Elucidator. "Hard to say exactly at this point. Everything's a little muddy right now, until… Ugh! Why can't anyone locate that Lindbergh Elucidator at a moment that a qualified time agent can sneak into, so we can steal it?" he exclaimed, smacking the counter in frustration.
Jonah perked up. "How about sending someone who isn't a qualified time agent? If you need that defective Elucidator so you can make Mom and Dad and Angela the right age again, then—"
"We would never sent anyone except a qualified time agent after that Elucidator, so it doesn't matter whether anyone else could sneak after it or not," JB interrupted him.
Angela raised an eyebrow. Oh yeah? And was it a "qualified time agent" who just saved all of time by convincing Lindbergh not to listen to Gary and Hodge? Was it a "qualified time agent" who just took care of you for five and a half months in a foreign time period, all while navigating an Elucidator and avoiding causing major disruptions to time? She wasn't sure how much JB actually remembered about all that, but still. By now, he should have known better than to assume time agents were the only ones who could fix a situation.
Angela glanced around at Jonah, Katherine, and Chip, all of whom seemed to be thinking the same thing she was. None of them got a chance to say anything, though, because Linda spoke up. "Send me to get that Elucidator."
"What?" JB looked shocked by the suggestion. Angela couldn't blame him. An hour ago, Linda hadn't even known what an Elucidator was.
"It makes sense," Linda reasoned. "I don't belong in this time period anyhow, as a teenager. So I'm out of place to begin with. And that Elucidator would either be in the nineteen thirties or the far-off future, and I haven't been in either of those time periods before, so there wouldn't be any chance that I'd mess up time by being in the same place twice. And this would help my family."
"Oh!" Michael said with a start. "Send me too!"
"Right," said JB sarcastically. "Because the two of you have the least amount of time-travel experience of anyone in the room. Even Jordan's done more time travel than you!"
"You could send me," suggested Katherine. "Or Chip or Jonah or Angela. If it's against time agency regulations, you could do what you did when we were dealing with 1918 and you kind of accidentally on purpose set your Elucidator for voice commands. How were you supposed to know that some eleven-year-old girl like me would grab the Elucidator and zip off to the past in front of a bunch of assassins?"
Is that how it worked? Angela thought, startled. She'd known that JB and Katherine had both had a hand in rescuing the kids from the cellar in 1918, but she'd never been told all the details.
JB rolled his eyes. "Because if you tell me to do something 'accidentally on purpose,' the time agency would never suspect me of faking a mistake."
An awkward silence fell over the kitchen, and Angela wondered if JB had actually been planning something along the lines of Katherine's suggestion before Katherine had ruined his plan by voicing it out loud. Maybe he only said that thing about needing a qualified time agent to cover himself in case the time agency is listening in, she realized.
"Hey," Katherine spoke up abruptly. "Venn diagrams."
"What are you talking about?" Jonah and Jordan asked in unison.
"I think I figured out the best way to make sense of the different dimensions," Katherine explained. "It's like those Venn diagrams they have us draw at school." She turned around and rummaged in a drawer for a moment before emerging with a piece of paper and a pen. "See, these are the two separate dimensions Jonah and Jordan were in," she explained, drawing two interlocking circles. "Everybody except the kids who came from the past lived in both dimensions, and remembers things from both dimensions."
Angela leaned in closer to get a better view.
"I see where you're going with this," Jonah spoke up as Katherine wrote the words Just about everybody in the area where the two circles overlapped. "But there should really be three circles. Because there was a third dimension too, where no kids from the past ended up in this time period. So I guess you got to be an only child there, Katherine." He drew an additional circle, overlapping the other two.
Katherine tilted her head to the side and frowned. "I did? Shouldn't I remember that, too?"
JB, who was still staring down at his Elucidator, responded, "It's easier for time to overwrite an absence than a presence. So it makes sense that you've already forgotten that dimension. It's harder to forget either Jordan or Jonah when they're standing right in front of you."
Ohhhh, Angela realized. Maybe that was why the only version of her first night at Sky Trails she could remember was the one in which she'd taken the babies off the plane and later gotten fired. The excitement of that night must have overwritten the mundanity of that night in the other dimensions.
That's not really fair, Angela thought stubbornly. Maybe something good happened that night in one of the other dimensions. Maybe I had a great conversation with a customer, or heard a funny joke or learned something interesting, and I don't even remember that it ever happened. What else had she forgotten from the last thirteen years of her two separate lives?
Jordan was teasing Katherine, saying it was too bad that she didn't remember being an only child because she had probably loved it. Katherine still wore a thoughtful frown as she said, "No… I think I do kind of remember. I was lonely."
I was lonely too, Angela thought, sifting through memory after memory of being alone in her house, poring over her research, never having anyone to share her discoveries and theories with. She'd never realized the extent of her loneliness before, but now that she could cross-examine that version of her life with the one that had constantly been filled with family and friends…
Katherine was continuing to fill in the circles, now writing in the spaces that didn't overlap with any of the others. Nobody extra from the past, she wrote in one of them. Jonah, Chip, other kids from plane, she wrote in another, explaining how those kids only remembered their own dimension. "And this is Jordan's dimension," she finished, writing Jordan's name in the third circle.
"Wait—you're saying I'm the only person in that category?" Jordan asked, sounding a little panicked.
"That's right," Jonah confirmed, almost a little too eagerly.
"But why? Weren't there other kids on the plane in my dimension too?"
"In your dimension, you were the only baby taken off the plane thirteen years ago," Jonah informed him. "All the other babies in your dimension stayed on the plane and—well, then it gets complicated. All you need to know is that you're the only person who remembers only your dimension and nothing else."
Wait—so what did end up happening to the other thirty-five kids in Jordan's dimension? Angela wondered. Did Gary and Hodge get their way? Did Lindbergh actually take those versions of them into the future? And what about the third dimension—what happened to them? Her brain was running in circles trying to puzzle out the different dimensions and how everything had actually turned out. Hang on, what ever happened to Gary and Hodge? Are there now three versions of them that we need to be concerned about?
Linda was comforting Jordan, who seemed distraught at the realization that he was all alone, even though, as Linda was pointing out, he wasn't really alone, since "just about everybody" remembered his dimension in addition to the others.
Chip nodded, adding that the circles Katherine had drawn only showed what happened before the dimensions merged, and that everybody was in the same circle now. "That's how you saved time, isn't it?" he asked Jonah.
Angela didn't get a chance to hear if Jonah said anything in response, because she became distracted by JB shaking his Elucidator in frustration. "How could the Elucidator malfunction at a time like this?" he complained. "Hadley, listen, I'm not getting your transmission."
Hadley? Hadley's on the other end of the line? Angela's heart rate picked up as she stepped closer to JB, straining her ears in an attempt to hear anything from the device.
"I'm going to have to put this on voice commands and reset," JB continued. "Hold on."
Angela watched with bated breath as he slid his fingers across the screen in a fluid motion that seemed to be a combination of swiping and typing. He held it up to his mouth and spoke into it like someone speaking into a walkie-talkie. "Okay, now try to retransmit."
Oh, please let this work, Angela found herself praying. It would be so good to hear Hadley's voice again after so long.
A few seconds passed in anxious silence. Then a hand reached over and snatched the Elucidator right out of JB's hands. "Take me to the future! Take me where I can get that Elucidator we need to help Mom and Dad!" Jordan shouted.
