It took everything in her not to fling open the car door, run to Hadley, and throw her arms around him. Instead, she opened the door gently and calmly stepped out. "You're finally here," she said to Hadley.

Hadley raised his eyebrows, a hint of his usual teasing in his eyes. "Finally? It's only been a week."

She shrugged. "I didn't know when to expect you. I'm glad you're here now."

She introduced him to Maria and Leo, and they all went inside. Leo went to get ready for bed, while Maria sat down at the kitchen table to continue a sketch she'd been working on earlier that day. "JB and I would like to bring you to Time Agency headquarters," Hadley told Angela. "It'll be easiest to explain everything there, and that way the others can drop by and see you too if they're available. Does that work for you?"

Angela nodded, excited that she was getting another opportunity to go to the future. She tried not to think about how it might be her last.

Hadley started moving closer to her, probably to place a hand on her arm or shoulder so they could travel through time together. He seemed to second-guess the decision, though, and instead simply typed a command into his Elucidator from where he was. An instant later, he and Angela were both floating through time, a few feet apart from one another.

It was almost as awkward as their first time-travel trip together. Angela searched for something to say. "How long has it been for you?" she finally asked. "Since that night in Rathbone's office, I mean."

"A week, same as you," he replied. "We thought it would be best to keep the time streams consistent. And we wanted to give you enough time to settle in with Maria and Leo, and reconnect with your family and… the rest of your twenty-first century life."

The words neither of them were saying hung between them. Finally, Angela spoke up. "Marcus and I… decided to just be friends."

"I know," said Hadley. He didn't say anything else, and a moment later, the lights were speeding toward them and they were arriving at time agency headquarters.

The first thing Angela became aware of was the sound of a baby crying. She blinked several times to dispel the timesickness, and eventually realized that she was lying on a soft, carpeted floor next to some kind of crib.

"There, there, buddy; it's okay," Hadley's voice was crooning softly. She sat up and saw that he was standing next to the crib, holding a red-faced baby.

Before she had a chance to say or do anything, another baby started crying from somewhere behind her. She turned around to see another crib, crammed in between the door and a bookshelf.

"Agh, I always try to be as quiet as possible time-traveling into and out of here," Hadley sighed, seeming exhausted. "But one of them always ends up waking up anyway. And, of course, as soon as one starts crying, the other is always quick to follow."

Angela pulled herself to her feet and walked over to the crib by the door, reaching down and pulling the crying baby out of it. Years of babysitting nieces and nephews helped her know exactly how to hold him to make him comfortable, and how to gently bounce him up and down to gain his interest and help him stop crying.

The baby in Hadley's arms had calmed down too, and Hadley gave Angela a grateful look. "Thank you. It's always hard trying to placate them both at once."

"I can imagine," said Angela. She looked down at the baby in her arms, who was regarding her with wide, innocent eyes. She knew who these babies were, but somehow it was impossible to think of them as the enemies who'd stolen children and tried to doom Jonah to a collapsing branch of time and almost ruined time completely. They were just babies. Innocent little infants who could grow up to be anyone.

"I've started calling them by different names," Hadley told her. "I didn't like calling them by their old names, but I couldn't just call them Baby One and Baby Two either, so I named them Gregory and Henry. That's Henry you're holding."

Gregory and Henry. Angela liked that. She liked how Hadley was working in every way possible to make distinctions between these two babies and the men they'd once been.

"Has the time agency made a decision about them yet?" she asked.

He shook his head. "People are still arguing about it. I keep bringing them everywhere I go around Headquarters, because I know that actually meeting them in person will change a lot of people's minds. Even JB wasn't sure where he stood on the issue until he saw for himself how cute and harmless they are." He sighed. "Of course, then there are the people who refuse to even look at them, and insist that they have to be re-aged and tried for their crimes. I'm not going to name any names, but I know you've met at least one of them."

Angela didn't have to ask to know that he was referring to Tida. "How is she handling all these new developments? The blending of the dimensions and everything the Skidmores were involved in?"

"She's furious," said Hadley, looking like he was trying hard not to crack a smile. "Or at least, that's what she wants everyone to think. I think in actuality, she's seriously struggling to reconcile her lifelong chronism with the fact that time keeps repeatedly being saved by people from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. First there was the thing with Mileva and JB, which in all honesty shook all of us up pretty significantly. And for Tida in particular, I'm sure it came as a shock that JB, who she always respected as a competent time agent despite some differences in opinion, wasn't actually from this time period to begin with."

Angela nodded. "And then all the more recent stuff too…"

"Aye. As if seeing you and Jonah in action in 1932 wasn't enough, the blending of the dimensions fixed so many problems we time agents hadn't even identified yet. And to top it all off, the mastermind behind all of this, who could arguably be considered the most intelligent person to ever walk the planet, turns out to have been born in 1986. I suspect that it's going to turn out to be very hard for Tida to continue convincing herself that people from the past are less smart or less capable than people from right now."

Hadley glanced at a clock on the wall that Angela wasn't sure had been there before, then shifted Gregory to his other arm. "We're supposed to head to JB's office in about five minutes, so why don't we go over there now and we can start explaining everything from the beginning? I would've chosen here to go over everything with you, but Kylin and Shen are joining us too, and, well—" He gestured to the two cribs. "My office isn't exactly the roomiest."

Hadley offered to take Henry from Angela's arms, but he was resting contently now, and Angela didn't want to disturb him. She and Hadley walked out of the room and turned right, where Hadley announced their arrival to the door. It opened to reveal JB and Kylin sitting across from each other at JB's desk. The flush in both of their cheeks and the quickness with which Kylin was scooting her chair away made Angela wonder if she and Hadley had just intruded on something private.

"Hi Angela," Kylin greeted her. "I see Hadley wasted no time in introducing you to his babies."

"They're not my babies!" Hadley protested.

"They might as well be," said JB. "You have them with you 24/7."

"Well, what am I supposed to do, leave them alone in my office all day?" said Hadley.

JB rolled his eyes but didn't answer. "Hi Angela. Come sit down."

There was a comfortable-looking couch placed against the wall of digital charts and graphs, and Angela sank down onto it, Hadley sitting next to her. JB and Kylin moved their chairs over to face them—Angela couldn't help noticing how gracefully the wheeled chairs moved across the thicker-than-usual office carpet—and a moment later the door opened and Shen walked in, taking the seat next to Hadley. "Ariti and Marrison would be here too, but they're busy," he explained. "Did I miss anything?"

The other time agents assured him he hadn't, and after a little bit of small talk, began explaining what had happened in the week since Angela had seen them.

"This past week we've been swamped with former Interchronological Rescue employees coming in to report on all sorts of illegal things Rathbone was doing," Kylin told Angela. "Apparently he was a very disliked boss, but everybody feared what he would do to them if they spoke up against him, so they stayed quiet for years. Now that he's dead and the company is being shut down, everyone has a story to tell."

"What kinds of illegal things was Rathbone doing?" Angela wanted to know.

"A bunch of creepy stuff with aging and un-aging, mostly," said Kylin. "That's why he wanted to know Second's secret to re-aging adults so badly. He thought that would be the last piece he needed to complete his line of highly-priced 'age services.' Disgusting things like letting parents un-age troublesome children back to an age when they were easier to manage, or aging elderly people forward at an accelerated rate to clear up space in nursing homes."

Angela stared at her in horror. The capacity to change people's ages had been one of the first things she'd learned about time travel, but it had never crossed her mind that people may apply it to things like this.

"There are quite a few people who are upset that Rathbone's already dead," said Shen. "Because it means he can't be punished any further for everything he did."

Angela frowned, the mention of Rathbone's death reminding her of one of the many questions she had. "Jordan said Rathbone died by being aged forward when he tried to repair a broken Elucidator," she said. "But that doesn't sound like something that would happen under normal circumstances. What exactly caused that?"

JB was the one to answer. "It was something Second set up," he explained. "As Jordan explained that night in Rathbone's office, Rathbone's end goal was to un-age the kid version of Second and raise him as his son, so he could benefit from all of Second's brilliant discoveries. But Second, as we all know, was always ten steps ahead of everybody else. We deduce that at some point he sent his younger self a note, presumably explaining what was about to happen and what he would have to do. That's how he knew to grab the Elucidator from Jonah, and to authorize the changes that would revert you and all the other un-aged adults to your correct ages. We think that when he authorized those changes, he activated a command that made it so the Elucidator would be very easy to destroy, and that Rathbone would age forward if he tried to repair it."

Angela sat still for a moment, trying to wrap her head around everything Second had done. "So the adult version of Second set all this up. The one who lived in my time period for thirteen years before Gary and Hodge took him." It was still so bizarre to think of Second as being from her time period. "And then in one of the other dimensions, he grabbed the Elucidator from Jonah…" She frowned. "But wait. Time only split after the plane landed, right? So how could Jonah have been there, since he was already present in all three dimensions?"

All of the time agents looked at JB. He sighed. "The way time splits work… it's a little different from what we originally thought," he told her. "Keep in mind, the whole concept of splitting time wasn't even heard of until Second made his dimension in the sixteen hundreds. So with just one example to go off of, we didn't have a very good grasp on cause and effect."

Angela scrunched up her face, trying to follow. "So… it isn't duplications of the same person in the same time period that cause time to split?"

"If you remember, in the sixteen hundreds there were technically two duplications, though they each worked a little differently," JB said in response. "There was the one in which Jonah and Katherine were able to go back to a time period they'd already lived through and make a different choice, and also the one in which Dalton Sullivan, who was originally John Hudson, was placed in a burning hut in 1605, while the original version of him was still living over in England."

"That's right," Angela remembered. "So the one with Jonah at the scene of the time crash was more like the Dalton one. That's why Jonah said the split felt different from last time."

"As it turns out," said JB. "Both kinds of duplications are required in order for time to split. Dalton's appearance in 1605 was the catalyst that allowed Jonah and Katherine to be able to go back and re-do their own actions. Obviously, time needs to be incredibly unstable in the first place to even allow duplications at all, but actually creating a duplication increases that instability."

"When a person gets duplicated in time the way Dalton did, the effects of that duplication ripple out and create years of Unsettled Time," Kylin picked up the explanation. "It is only during Unsettled Time that it is possible, under certain conditions, for people to step back into a situation they've already lived through and change their own actions. This is what actually splits time into separate dimensions, because they can't overwrite what they originally did—they can only create an alternate version of events."

"So at the scene of the time crash…" Angela said slowly. "Jonah was the catalyst, but then… who re-did their own actions?"

"That's just it," said JB. "Nobody re-did anything in that time period. But Gary and Hodge used the unsettled time opportunity to go back and re-do their kidnapping of Jonah in 1932, placing Jordan on the plane instead this time around. The actual time split started in 1932, but since it was such a subtle change, the time streams didn't fully pull away from each other until the effects became apparent in 1999."

For a moment, it all made sense. Then Angela was confused all over again. "Wait, but wouldn't Gary and Hodge already have had to split time in 1932 before the thing with Jonah at the airport, since it was Jordan's plane that appeared? And hang on—if Jonah wasn't even on that plane, how did his presence create a duplication?"

JB grimaced. "It didn't. Gary and Hodge thought it would, but they were operating under wrong assumptions. And yet, time was still able to split like they wanted it to, because someone else had already created a huge wall of Unsettled Time by duplicating themselves just fourteen years before Gary and Hodge took Jonah and Jordan from the orphanage." He looked like it was paining him even to talk about it, and Angela realized what he was referring to.

"You," she breathed. "When you went into 1918 to save Jonah and the others, without considering the fact that Tete was already in 1918."

"Yep," said JB heavily. "Without any of us realizing it, I played right into their hands."

Kylin reached over and interlaced JB's fingers with her own, giving his hand a squeeze. "But it was only good things that resulted from that decision," she reminded him. "You saved the kids from being shot to death in that basement, and then the splitting of time made it so Jordan could survive and have a good life in the twenty-first century too. And then the blending of the dimensions pretty much fixed everything the time crash messed up, and that couldn't have happened if time hadn't split in 1932."

Angela was still trying to puzzle everything out in her mind. "What about the third dimension, then? Did that split happen in 1932 as well?"

"The third dimension was different," Hadley explained. "When you and Jonah were in the cave, and the Elucidator was explaining some of how the time split had happened, you both jumped to the conclusion that there had to be a version of time in which no one was in Jonah's seat on the plane. Because you didn't know that the baby Hodge handed to Jonah was actually Jordan."

Angela nodded, remembering back to when she and Jonah had been making their plans. "We sent Jonah to the empty-seated version," she recalled. "Wait—does that mean we created the third dimension, when we did that?"

"Not exactly," said Hadley. "After Lindbergh realized Jonah wasn't his son, he took the plane back to where he'd sent Jonah to wait for him in 1932. He left the plane with Jonah, and Jonah decided to send it back to the scene of the time crash. That was what created the third dimension—and prevented a paradox that would have destroyed time forever."

Angela stared at him, her eyes going wide as she realized what he was saying. "We sent Jonah to the empty-seated plane before Jonah made it so there was an empty-seated plane!"

"Uh-huh," JB confirmed. "Just like you had your secret hidden Elucidator when you were traveling with Jonah and me, before Jonah told you to bring it. And how the first time Jonah and Katherine saw Lindbergh appear in their house, he was coming from a time after he'd already kidnapped Katherine and met Jonah. And how Jordan was the one who gave me the warning that caused me to go to your house the morning this all started—which was obviously before I knew Jordan existed."

Angela felt her jaw drop a little more with each new thing he said. "That's a lot of near-paradoxes," she finally managed to say.

"And… that's what caused all the dimensions to meld together," Shen spoke up. "The amount of energy created by all those near misses, it sort of… reversed the splitting process somehow."

They were all quiet for a moment, as Angela processed everything she had just learned. "Has the baby version of Second been re-aged yet?" she finally asked. "Is that still the plan?"

The time agents all exchanged glances. "That was the original plan," JB responded. "But every time we've tried to re-age him, the Elucidator tells us, 'Changing chronophysiological age is not a task I can accomplish.' We've attempted it with several different Elucidators, and they all say the same thing."

"Does that mean time still isn't completely fixed?" Angela asked, remembering when her Elucidator had refused to revert her to her real age back in 1932.

"We don't know what it means," Kylin replied. "Our research team is going through all the possibilities. Right now the top theory is that it has to do with the latent energy from the blending of the dimensions, but no one knows for sure."

Angela looked down at the baby in her arms, who was contentedly sucking on his fingers. "So where's he staying right now? While he's a baby, I mean?"

"Here and there," said JB. "Everyone's curious about him, so he's been bouncing around to a lot of people's offices. Most recently he's been with Ario, our age specialist."

Angela was about to ask what an age specialist was, when she thought of something more important. "What about all the other babies?" she asked. "Wasn't there one dimension in which Lindbergh flew the babies on to the future just like Gary and Hodge wanted? What happened to them?"

It was Hadley who answered. "That was what we all thought was going to happen, at first. We were scrambling around trying to figure out exactly what time period Gary and Hodge had sent them to, and what we were going to do once we found them. But it turned out we didn't need to worry."

"Why not?" Angela wanted to know.

"The reason the time travel device manifested as an airplane when it landed in your time period is because traveling through time is, in a manner of speaking, similar to traveling by airplane," JB picked up the explanation. "To get from one time to another, you have to pass over all of the times in between. That's why it takes longer to get to times that are chronologically farther away."

Angela couldn't resist cracking a smile. "So you're saying that, theoretically, I could figure out what time period we're in right now by calculating exactly how long it took to get here and comparing that to samples of how long it takes me to get to other, known time periods?"

Hadley snorted. JB grinned ruefully. "Guess I should've known better than to mention that to a physicist. It's a little more complicated than that, because of relativity and exponential temporal acceleration and things like that, but yes, there is a mathematical formula that could help you figure that out. Back to the matter at hand, though. Jonah appeared on the plane before it took off—thus duplicating himself, since he was already in the airport terminal at that time. He began talking to Lindbergh once the plane was in transit, and it took a while for him to convince Lindbergh to trust him. At some point while they were talking, the plane passed over the moment when the dimensions blended, and the two versions of the plane blended together too. So there was only one version of the plane flying onward, and Lindbergh ended up turning it around and going back to 1932 to meet Jonah."

"Ohhhhh." Angela was glad, for the children's sake and the sake of the time agency, that there was no planeload of kids from history that had ended up in the future. "So is everything finally sorted out with all the kids from the plane? Are they all set to live out their normal lives in the twenty-first century?"

"We believe so," said JB. "Obviously, their presence will continue to create ripples, since none of them were there in original time, but now that their dimension has blended with the dimension in which time proceeded on its original path, things are a lot more stable than they were before. And hey, we've all seen how sometimes things end up working out properly only because time travelers intervened." He shook his head in disbelief. "I can't believe I just said that."

Angela grinned. "It's true, though. You wouldn't be here without time travel." Her gaze returned again to the baby in her arms. "How long do you think it'll be before the time agency comes to a decision about these two?"

"Central Office is planning to schedule a hearing to take place in a few weeks," Kylin answered. "We're trying to take care of all the Interchronological Rescue messes first, to make sure we haven't overlooked anything."

"How's that nanny search going?" Shen asked Hadley.

Hadley sighed. "Not well. Several people have said they're interested, but I just don't trust their motives. I'm not about to turn over the care of two defenseless babies to someone who for all I know might try to do something awful just because of who they once were."

Once again, Angela felt a warmth in her heart at how much Hadley cared about those babies. "You're looking for a nanny?" she asked him.

He nodded glumly. "Several agents have been complaining about me having them here, saying they impede my work. Which is—"

"True," JB, Kylin, and Shen all interjected in unison.

"Oh, all right," Hadley admitted. "Maybe a little bit true. But because their situation hasn't been resolved yet, we aren't allowed to turn them over to a civilian foster family, and because everyone at the time agency knows who they are, I would only trust those I know very well to take care of them. Unfortunately, everyone I trust is just as needed for the Interchronological Rescue investigations as I am. If I could do it safely, I'd just skip them forward to the day of the hearing, but with their predisposition for brain damage, I don't want to risk time traveling with them unless it's absolutely necessary."

A strange idea began budding in Angela's mind. She mulled it over for a moment, making sure she was absolutely certain before saying, "What about me? I could be their nanny."

The four time agents stared at her, shock written across their faces, but Angela plowed on. "I could stay here in the future until the day of the hearing, taking care of Gregory and Henry. You know I wouldn't do anything to hurt them, and that way you could all focus on your work and know they're being well cared for. It wouldn't even affect my life in the twenty-first century, since you could just send me right back to the moment I left."

Hadley, JB, Kylin, and Shen all exchanged glances. "You really would be willing to do that?" asked Hadley.

"Of course," said Angela.

"You could stay at my house," offered Kylin. "I have an extra room. It's pretty small, and you'd have to be okay with dog hair everywhere, but we can make it work."

"You know the Time Council would never allow that," said Shen regretfully. "Too much exposure to futuristic technologies and events."

"I think we could work around that, though," JB said thoughtfully. "When Jonah and Gavin were recovering from their bullet wounds, we set up a room for them that mimicked a twenty-first century hospital room. We could probably do something similar for Angela somewhere."

"You're sure you want to take on the responsibility of being full-time nanny to two four-month-olds? For an unspecified amount of time?" Hadley checked with Angela again.

Angela knew it would be difficult. She knew it would be a lot of responsibility. But she also knew it was right.

"Absolutely," she said.