Mine, too, Jonah wanted to say. Except it wasn’t. He remembered that he and Chip and Alex had traveled through time as infants, before their crash landing. He didn’t know exactly how Gary and Hodge had arranged the trip. Maybe Jonah had been all through time as a baby, stopping in one century after another, while the “rescuers” picked up the other kids. Maybe he was like this kid he knew at school who’d circled the globe but didn’t remember any of it because he’d done it all before his first birthday.
“The other kind of timesickness comes from being in the wrong time period,” JB continued. “It’s very technical and difficult to explain, but … I think this would be an appropriate way to explain it to twenty-first-century kids. Do you know where your bodies came from?”
“You want to give us the birds-and-the-bees talk?” Katherine screeched. “Now? At a time like this?”
In her indignation she seemed at least temporarily capable of overcoming timesickness. She even lurched up from the floor a little.
“No, no—maybe I’m a little off with my view of your time period—I meant the building blocks of your bodies,” JB hastily corrected.
“Are you trying to get at the fact that the stuff we’re made of—the carbon atoms and the oxygen atoms and so on—all of it’s been hanging around the universe since the big bang?” Alex asked.
“Cleopatra breathed my air,” Katherine muttered.
“She’s delirious!” Chip said.
“No, she’s right,” Alex said. “Haven’t you heard that thing about how, at any given moment, at least one atom of the air in your lungs was probably once in Cleopatra’s lungs? Or George Washington’s or Albert Einstein’s or Martin Luther King’s, or whoever you want to pick from history?”
“So Katherine just has the wrong air in her lungs right now?” Chip asked. Jonah couldn’t really see very well, but he thought Chip was crouching beside Katherine now, pounding on her back. “Breathe it out!”
Katherine coughed weakly.
“It’s not just the air,” JB said. “Every atom that made up her body in the twenty-first century was, shall we say, otherwise occupied in the fifteenth century. The same is true for Jonah, who also doesn’t belong there.”
“Then, anyone traveling through time would be out of place and disruptive in the other time,” Alex objected. “And Chip and I surely have some future atoms in our bodies too, since we were there for thirteen years. What happens? Do the atoms duplicate, so the same atom can be in my body at the same time that it’s, I don’t know, part of this wall?” He thumped the stone wall beside him. “How could that work? How is time travel even possible?”
JB was silent for a moment.
“Alex, you were severely underrated by history,” he said. “And I mean that in the nicest possible way.” He cleared his throat. “I can’t answer those questions for you in any terms you could understand. Even the best minds of the twenty-first century don’t have the right vocabulary to understand time travel, so how could I explain it to kids?”
Jonah wanted to object to that, but he figured Katherine would speak up first. She hated it when people used that “You’re just a kid” excuse. And Katherine did seem to be struggling to sit up and talk. But she was coughing again, practically choking.
Chip wasn’t pounding on her back anymore.
“Um, Katherine, if you’re going to spew, turn the other way, okay?” he said. “Or just go somewhere else. … Here. I’ll help you.”
Chip and Alex both seemed to be trying to lift Katherine. Jonah kind of wished it were light enough that he could see Katherine’s face, because he was sure she was shooting really nasty looks at both boys.
And Chip thinks she’d want to be his queen … ha! Jonah thought.
Somehow Chip and Alex managed to get her to a standing position.
“Leave me alone,” she growled, shaking off their grip. She wobbled toward the door—Jonah could see now, by the thin light that glowed around the edges, that there was a large door leading out of their dark room. He was amazed that Katherine was apparently strong enough to grab the doorknob and yank. The door creaked open a few inches.
Katherine gasped.
“What’s wrong?” Chip asked, and there was an edge of fear in his voice. Nobody seemed to be worried anymore about Katherine vomiting. Even Katherine seemed to have forgotten why she’d struggled toward the door.
“I think … I think JB must have sent us to the wrong time,” Katherine whispered, clinging to the door. Whatever she could see in the next room had her mesmerized.
“What are you talking about?” Alex demanded. “This time feels right.”
“Yeah,” Chip echoed.
Katherine glanced over her shoulder. Even in the dim light filtering in from the next room her face shone with horror.
“But … it looks like … both of you … the original versions … you’re already dead,” she said.
“How could you know that?” Alex scoffed.
Katherine looked back toward the other room again and gulped. Either Jonah’s ears were overamplifying noises now, or her gulp was so loud that it sounded like a gunshot.
“I see your ghosts,” she said.
THREE
It turned out that Jonah was capable of scrambling up from the floor—even scrambling up quickly. But he wasn’t sure that his brain was working properly yet. Wouldn’t it make more sense to run away from ghosts, not toward them?
Then Jonah stopped worrying about his brain. Chip and Alex were also rushing to join Katherine by the door. Jonah got there last, so he had to stand on his tiptoes, trying to see. Chip’s head was in his way, but if Jonah weaved to either side, the door or the wall blocked his view. He stumbled forward, jostling against Katherine, whose shoulder slammed sideways into the door. The door creaked open wider.
Now Jonah could see.
The room beyond was very dim. As far as Jonah could tell, it was lit only by a single candle. And if these were royal accommodations, fifteenth-century style, the whole interior-decorating industry was still years in the future. There was a plain, colorless rug on the floor, a single bed shoved against the wall.
Two boys sat on the bed.
No, Jonah corrected himself. Not boys exactly.