Angela tried desperately to move, to speak, to do anything at all in an attempt to find out what was going on. She could still see and feel, so she knew that she was still in Mr. Rathbone's office, and that at least some of the others were still there with her. But what had happened to Mr. Rathbone? And how long were they going to have to stay here, immobile and muted?

The sound of a door opening startled her, and she strained to position her head in such a way that would allow her to see the door that led out of the office. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught three figures stepping into the room. Great, she thought. More Interchronological Rescue workers. Just what they needed.

"Markiel?" one of the people called out.

"Oh my!" a different voice exclaimed. "What happened here?"

"Unfreeze them enough that they can talk," a third voice said. Angela felt a loosening somewhere in her throat.

Before she had a chance to say anything, a deep voice bellowed, "This is your secret contact at the time agency? A little girl?"

"I'm not a little girl!" the person who'd unfrozen them protested.

"You were secretly working for them?" This was JB's voice.

"What's going on?" Angela couldn't resist asking.

Unfortunately, no one heard her. Everyone else had realized they could talk again, and almost everyone's voice was now sounding at once. Linda and Michael were asking if their kids were okay, the unfamiliar deep-voiced guy was complaining that he wasn't good with Elucidators, and Katherine was demanding that they all be fully unfrozen.

"Everybody quiet down!" JB shouted. "Cira, unfreeze us the rest of the way."

"But that's not protocol—"

"Cira…" JB sounded like he was speaking through gritted teeth. "I am a twelve-year triple-class Certification Level A time agent, and I'm ordering you to unfreeze us."

"Fine." A teenage girl with light brown pigtails—evidently the person who'd unfrozen everyone's vocal cords—muttered into the Elucidator she was holding, "Unfreeze them all completely."

Angela's rigid limbs relaxed, and she immediately twisted her body around and sat up. All around her, the others were doing the same. Michael and Linda and JB. Katherine and Chip and Jordan. Jonah was already standing, off to the side, the baby—miraculously still sleeping—in his arms.

JB was the first of the group on the floor to stand. "First things first—what happened to Curtis Rathbone?" he asked, turning his head from side to side, darting his gaze all around the room as if he thought the man might be hiding somewhere.

"Um." Jordan was the one to speak up. He was sitting a few feet away from everyone else, the side of his face coated in some kind of metallic dust. "He—he's—he's dead."

"Dead?" JB echoed in disbelief. "But how did that happen? He was just right here!"

"The Elucidator—he tried to repair it, but then it started aging him forward. It aged him all the way until—until he died. And then he became dust."

JB's eyes darted around again, still flooded with concern. "Where's the Elucidator now?"

Jordan looked up at him with a hint of defiance in his eyes. "It's gone. I destroyed it."

"You just said Rathbone fixed it," JB said with a frown. "Where did it go? Did he drop it somewhere?"

As JB started visually sweeping the floor for any signs of a wrecked or repaired Elucidator, Linda lunged toward Jordan, pulling Katherine along with her. She enveloped both of them in a hug, and Michael joined them a second later, reaching out and grabbing Jonah, who stumbled forward, nearly dropping the baby. A gray-haired woman in a vivid purple robe reached out to take the baby from him, but Jonah tightened his grip.

Who are all these people? Angela wondered. In addition to the gray-haired woman and the unfamiliar teenage girl, there was also a large man whose hair was full of colorful beads, and a lean man whose face was covered in tattoos of trees and eagles. They didn't seem to be dangerous—at least not yet. But where had they come from, and why were they here?

The Skidmore family finally pulled out of their hug. Linda eased the baby from its awkward position in Jonah's arms and held it to her chest with a mother's expertise. Katherine grabbed Jordan by the shoulders. "What happened?" she demanded. "What did Second do after he sent Jonah and me away? How did you escape? And how did everyone get re-aged again? And wait—how did Mr. Rathbone get out of that time hollow Second sent him to when he was a baby?"

"And where is Second?" Jonah cut in, now looking around as worriedly as JB, as if expecting Second to pop out of thin air at any moment.

"Second?" The man with the tattoos on his face sounded alarmed. "So you did run into him again? What did he do with that Elucidator he stole from you?"

JB whipped around to face the tattoo man and the three kids. "You saw Second? In this dimension? But then—no, the charts didn't say anything about his dimension merging with the others too…" He looked around wildly and his gaze fell on Cira, the girl with the Elucidator. He held his hand out to her, palm up. "Sign me in to your Elucidator. We need to get this all figured out."

Even as the girl typed in a few passcodes and handed the device to JB, JB glared distrustfully at the other three strangers. "Interchronological Rescue employees, I take it?"

The woman was the one to answer. "We were. But recently we began to get suspicious of Rathbone and his intentions. Particularly with the disappearance of Gary and Hodge, and how Rathbone seemed to be trying to cover that up. Then he decided to go and jeopardize time and the lives of these three kids—"

"He sent us to save Second," Jonah interrupted. "Second as a kid, I mean. I guess Rathbone wanted to use us to kidnap him so he could de-age him and sell him in the future—"

"No, that wasn't the reason," Jordan contradicted. "That's what he wanted us to think his plan was. Really he wanted Second so he could de-age him and raise him as his own kid so Second would tell him all his secrets to re-aging and time travel and everything."

"He actually thought that would work?" Katherine scoffed.

"It almost did," said Jordan quietly.

"Hadley?" Angela turned eagerly at the sound of JB's voice, expecting to see Hadley walking through the door or standing in the room, having just appeared through time travel. But JB was holding Cira's Elucidator up to his ear, as if talking on the phone. "Yes, it's me… were you able to figure out why we got cut off earlier?... When I called you from November 21, 2012. …No, I'm talking about after you re-aged me and reversed the schizophrenia and brought me up to speed in the time hollow… what?" His face paled, and for a moment he looked as confused as he had back in the nineteen thirties as Tete. "No, that can't be… it was you; you were talking to me; you explained everything… that's impossible!" He was silent for a moment, evidently listening to whatever Hadley was saying, and then his eyes fell on Jordan. "Okay. I'll do that." He pulled the Elucidator away from his ear and frowned at it, then pocketed it, ignoring Cira's objections. All eyes were on him as he addressed the Interchronological Rescue employees. "The time agency will be here soon," he told them. "You'll all have to submit to official interrogations, as will any other employees who were in today. For now, you all need to stay within my sight." He pulled Mr. Rathbone's chair out from behind the desk and sat down in it. "Jordan, from what I understand, you're the one who knows the most about the situation right now. Tell me everything that happened after you grabbed my Elucidator in your kitchen."

Everyone settled themselves into more comfortable positions as Jordan hesitantly explained that the Elucidator had brought him and his family to some sort of futuristic lab. "It was here, at Interchronological Rescue," he elaborated. "Just down the hall a ways. We found a plastic card thing that we thought was an Elucidator, and then—"

"Then Second appeared," Katherine interjected. "So we went to a time hollow, but he followed us there. And then he took Mom and Dad."

"Took them where?" asked JB, frowning.

"Um… to some sort of place that was just all black, what did he call it again? Outer Time or something like that? He put them in suspended animation," said Jordan.

"I don't remember any of that," said Linda. "I just remember that all the sudden, I was my real age again, and Michael was too, and then a minute later we were back home."

Okay, that's two time paths explained, Angela thought. "What about the rest of you?" she asked the kids.

"Um…" Jordan seemed to be thinking hard, as if a lot had happened between the time he was thinking about and now. "We went back to the lab, and we overheard Deep Voice and Doreen and Tattoo Face talking." He blushed slightly, glancing over at the three Interchronological Rescue employees, who were listening to the story as raptly as everyone else. "I mean, uh… Markiel and… I'm sorry, I don't remember your real name."

The man with the tattooed face grinned. "Liam," he supplied. "But Tattoo Face is cool too."

"Yeah," Jordan mumbled, embarrassed. "Anyway, so we heard them talking, and then they put us in these interrogation cubicles—"

"Only after you skipped us forward in time to when we knew they'd be coming back to the room," Katherine accused.

"We only put them in the interrogation cubicles to keep them safe," the huge man with the beaded hair—undoubtedly the one Jordan had been calling Deep Voice—spoke up. "We didn't know what Rathbone was up to, and we didn't want him to discover them."

"But then Second let us out of the cubicles," Jonah picked up the story. "He sent Jordan and me through some kind of virtual-reality training sequence in which we faced a bunch of the things Katherine and I had faced before, during our trips through history. Once that was done, he let Katherine out too, and then the three of us went to Rathbone's office."

"You brought us to Rathbone's office," Katherine pointed out. "And on the way, those freaky invisible walls and tornado winds sucked my ponytail band and both of our fake Elucidators up through the ceiling."

Up through the ceiling? In spite of herself, Angela couldn't help wondering how that had worked. She was so caught up in trying to figure out the science behind it that she almost missed the other part of what Katherine had said.

"Fake Elucidators?" JB questioned, frowning. "What do you mean, fake Elucidators?"

"Oh. One of them was the one you had, JB," Jonah explained. "The one Jordan took from you in the kitchen. It was giving us as much trouble as it was giving you. Although—" he shot a quizzical look at Jordan, then at the three Interchronological Rescue employees. "Were they really fake, or just broken? Or programmed by Second?"

"Mine was just malfunctioning," said JB. "It was definitely a real, time-agency-issued Elucidator."

The man referred to as Deep Voice let out a barking laugh. "You thought that piece of junk was your time-agency-issued Elucidator? Even I could tell it was a fake, and I have less experience with Elucidators than even these kids here!"

JB opened his mouth to argue, but Jordan cut him off before he had a chance to say anything. "Let me finish explaining! You guys don't know the full story yet."

Everyone reluctantly fell quiet, and Angela marveled at the change in Jordan from the confused, immature boy he'd been just moments ago in the Skidmores' kitchen. She didn't know how long he'd spent in the past—er, rather, the future, it seemed—but whatever had happened to him along the way had certainly served to bolster his self-confidence.

"Anyhow, we went into Rathbone's office and Mr. Rathbone said he had a job for us to do. He wanted us to go back to the night of the time crash and save one last kid," he continued. "Second."

"But what was Second doing as a kid in your time period in the first place?" JB wanted to know. "How did he get there? Was this something his older self dreamed up, and—"

"Second was from our time period to begin with," Katherine interrupted. "We saw him and his friends trying to climb the fence at the airport. Second fell and got so hurt he almost died, and his so-called friends just left him there. So we went down to help, but then—"

"He grabbed the Elucidator right from my hands," Jonah said flatly. "He knew. He knew we were going to be there, and he knew we would have an Elucidator."

"But that was only what happened in my dimension," Jordan picked up the explanation. "In Jonah's dimension, the one where the plane stayed and Angela saw it and everything, the FBI found him. He made them believe that he knew something about the plane, and kept stringing them along for thirteen years. Until Gary and Hodge came and got him."

"The day we first met you, JB," Katherine added. "Remember, when we thought you were a janitor, and I saw you appear and disappear when you put those papers on Mr. Reardon's desk? Second was there, on the other side of the wall, listening in to our whole conversation as we talked to Mr. Reardon. Then Gary and Hodge showed up and let him grab their Elucidator, to bring him to the future, I guess."

"The time window," JB murmured, cradling his forehead in his hands. "I wondered if they would try to do something that day—it was the first day anyone could get in for thirteen years. I was surprised when they didn't show up to try and grab Jonah. I never even thought…"

Angela watched him with concern. The last time she'd seen him so distressed, he'd had a complete mental breakdown and turned into Tete. Of course, he'd also been the wrong age at the time, and it seemed like that problem had been fixed, but…

"So, wait," said Chip. "You're saying there was a version of Second who went to the future with Gary and Hodge, and one who grabbed an Elucidator from Jonah when he was a kid? Which one was the one who did all the stuff in the 1600's?"

"The first," Jordan responded. "The one who went to the future with Gary and Hodge. Apparently Gary and Hodge set him up to spy for them at the time agency—"

"What?" JB shouted. "He was working for Gary and Hodge? But that doesn't even—"

"Gary and Hodge thought he was working for them," Jordan clarified. "But he wasn't. He betrayed them just like he betrayed Mr. Rathbone."

"And me," muttered JB.

"Not… exactly," said Jordan.

Angela raised an eyebrow. Jordan hadn't been with Jonah and Katherine on all of their time-travel adventures. He didn't know all the details behind what had happened with the Virginia Dare mission. And if he had just been talking face-to-face with Second, Second had probably fed him alternate information, or at least twisted things around to make himself look like the good guy.

"He definitely betrayed JB," Katherine contradicted. "And time itself, for that matter."

"Maybe he did, that one time," said Jordan. "When he tried to make an alternate dimension. He was trying to make a world where you could skip through the bad parts of life—the example he gave me was skipping through his dad beating him. I think he had a really rotten childhood." For some reason, Jordan's eyes flicked to the baby in Linda's arms for a moment, before returning to JB. "His other dimension didn't work out, because allowing people to skip through time whenever they felt like it and be whatever ages they wanted made it so nothing was stable."

"Which is why the time agency exists in the first place," said JB exasperatedly. "You'd think, after working there for so long, and with his level of intelligence, he would've realized that bad things happen when people go messing around with time."

"He did realize that," said Jordan. "And he realized that he couldn't share his secret to re-aging adults with anybody, because what if word got out and our world became just like the one he'd tried creating?"

Angela frowned. "But the time agency already knows how to re-age adults. They re-aged all of us."

Jordan shook his head. "No, they didn't. That was Second. He made it so the kid version of him—the one who took the Elucidator from Jonah down on the rock—met back up with me. I had to let him whisper the secret into the Elucidator. The one that killed Mr. Rathbone when he tried to repair it."

JB looked toward the spot on the carpet where Mr. Rathbone had been standing when they'd all first entered the room. "And you said Mr. Rathbone aged forward rapidly until he became dust? What happened to the Elucidator?"

"I told you," said Jordan. "I destroyed it. I crushed it to pieces with my head, back when we were all still mostly frozen. Second said it was really important to not let anyone hear that secret."

"And you trusted him?!" JB ran a hand through his hair in frustration. "I don't trust anything about this situation. Second's been manipulating us all along. He's still manipulating us. Second!" he bellowed at the ceiling. "I know you're listening; probably having the time of your life watching us try to figure out this disaster. Just come out and tell us all what's really going on."

"He can't," said Jordan. "You're right that he was manipulating us to begin with. He gave you that Elucidator that you had back in the kitchen. He left recordings or something on it to make you think you were talking to the time agency. And then he manipulated a bunch of the other stuff that happened, but I don't know for sure what was him and what was Rathbone, and in the end his plans went really wrong…"

"Second's plans never go wrong," JB disagreed. "Not from how he intends them to go, at least. You should've seen what he pulled in the 1600's. He's an expert at predicting what everyone is going to do. And now if there are two of him running around—"

"You aren't letting me finish!" Jordan complained. "There aren't two of him running around. The adult version of him is dead. He died saving you, JB. He turned you back into an adult and fixed all the other problems you had, and gave you the Elucidator you brought over to our house. Then just as he was leaving, Mr. Rathbone killed him."

JB opened his mouth, looking stunned for a moment before shaking his head. "No, that's—no, that couldn't have happened. What made you think that?"

"His hologram told me," Jordan replied. In any other circumstance, those words might have seemed ridiculous, like Jordan was playing a joke on everyone. But he looked dead serious. "The whole time we were talking to him, like in the time hollow and the futuristic lab—that wasn't really him. It was just a hologram. Set up by… by Mr. Rathbone, I think. Mr. Rathbone was controlling the Elucidators, and—and he set up one of the Elucidators to turn the kid version of Second into a baby." He pointed at the infant still nestled in Linda's arms. "That baby."