Risked (The Missing ) (6 page)

Jonah expected her to say something like,
Yeah, well, you don’t know anything, so how’s that going to help?

Instead she cleared her throat. It almost sounded like she was embarrassed.

“I guess you’re right,” she said. “It’s like, I shouldn’t have said that thing about being from the convent. I didn’t know it would get us in worse trouble. I just thought I was so smart because I read online about food deliveries from a nearby convent. . . .”

Katherine’s admitting that I’m right and she was wrong?
Jonah marveled.
Does this mean miracles really are possible?

Jonah didn’t get even a split second to gloat over this turn of events, because the door at the top of the stairs creaked open again.

“The commander will see you now,” the guard announced.

The man was so high above them at the top of the stairs that Jonah could see only boots silhouetted in the doorway. None of that light trickled down to him and Katherine, so Jonah couldn’t see how his sister reacted.

“Should we hide down here and make them come and find us?” Jonah whispered.

“There’s nowhere to hide,” Katherine said hopelessly. “I think that would just make them madder.”

Jonah figured Katherine was right, but it was so hard to force himself to trudge toward the stairs.

You can’t make Katherine be the first one to face that guard,
Jonah told himself.

He shuffled forward. Though he couldn’t see her yet, he heard Katherine beside him moving in the same direction. Even when they reached the bottom of the stairs, they still stood in pitch darkness. Jonah cupped his hand over his sister’s ear.

“If there’s just that one guard who came for us, let’s try to overpower him,” Jonah whispered. “We’ll knock him out and run away.”

Jonah felt, rather than saw, Katherine nodding. His heart pounded. It was a crazy plan, but just having something to hope for gave him the courage to start climbing.

First step. Second. Third . . .

Unlike Katherine, Jonah didn’t think he’d broken anything falling down the stairs. But climbing back up them made his muscles scream out about how sore his whole body was. He was hardly in peak fighting condition, and Katherine probably did have a broken arm. And no matter how fierce she was, she wouldn’t come up any higher on the guard than his elbow, and—

Eighth. Ninth. Tenth.

Jonah kept climbing.

We are going to fight that guard if he’s alone,
Jonah told himself.
We’re going to fight him and we’re going to win.

Jonah was on the fifteenth step and peering grimly up to the top when suddenly a hand grabbed him from behind. Jonah teetered, almost falling over backward.

“Do you want me to land on you again and break your other arm?” he muttered, whirling around to confront Katherine. “Focus!”

It annoyed him that he couldn’t see his sister well enough to glare at her. Even this close to the doorway, the pool of darkness behind him seemed so complete he could barely make out Katherine’s shape. It was like she was just an outline.

“I mean it,” he scolded her. “We’ve got to be ready to fight!”

“Look at me!” Katherine whispered back. “Look at yourself!”

Jonah looked.

Outline . . . Katherine’s just an outline. . . . And me? Hey, look at that, there’s a little bit of that light coming in from the door and it’s . . . it’s flowing right through me. I’m see-through! Someone made us invisible!

Jonah made a triumphant fist pump in the air. Behind him he could see Katherine grinning up at him. He knew he was the only one who could see it—when time travelers became invisible, people native to that time could see nothing of them. But other time travelers could make out
their invisible colleagues as translucent figures, as if they were made of glass.

Now that he wasn’t expecting Katherine to appear as anything more than a see-through outline, he could easily read the expression on her face.

“This is so great!” he hissed at her.

But even as he watched, her grin vanished.

“No,” she whispered, her eyes wide with horror. “No . . .”

Jonah whirled back to face the guard, to see what she was seeing.

“If you do not come right away to see the commander, we will come to you,” the guard at the top of the stairs shouted down at them.

What seemed like dozens of feet started trampling down the stairs, as guard after guard raced toward Jonah and Katherine. Each of them held a gun aloft—a gun with a gleaming knife strapped alongside its barrel.

Invisible or not, if Jonah and Katherine didn’t move immediately, they were both going to be bludgeoned or stabbed to death.

“Run!” Jonah screamed, and he didn’t even care if the guards behind him heard.

He began scrambling back down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Katherine was too close, and he stepped on the back of her shoe, pulling it half off. She bent down to fix it, and he hollered, “No time for that!” She wasn’t reacting fast enough, so he dashed around her, reaching out to pull her along with him at the last minute.

He got a firm grip on her sweatshirt, and after a moment Katherine clued in and matched his stride. But the staircase was really too narrow for both of them to run practically side by side. With each leap Jonah took it was touch and go whether he would stay upright or fall, knocking both of them down to smash against that hard floor again. How many bones would they break this time?

Please don’t let us fall,
he thought, which was maybe a
prayer and maybe just instructions to himself.

Jonah kept running. But the guards were running faster.

The frontmost guard was only three steps behind Jonah. Now two. Now—

Now Jonah leaped for the floor and whirled off to the side, pulling Katherine with him. He flattened his back against the wall, and he saw that she did the same.

“We just have to wait until the guards are past and then we can escape up those stairs,” Katherine whispered.

Jonah nodded and put his finger over his lips. It was a great plan, except that the guards were spreading through the cellar, waving those gun-knife contraptions all around.

Bayonets.
His mind came up with the proper name for them.
They’re bayonets.

Jonah was annoyed that his mind wasn’t doing something more useful, like figuring out how to avoid all the bayonets being waved near him. Someone had turned the one solitary lightbulb back on, but its light was so weak that none of the guards seemed to trust it. They were blindly thrusting their bayonets into all the dark corners, toward every wall.

“Back to the stairs?” Katherine whispered in his ear.

Jonah nodded.

“As soon as the last guard’s out of the way,” he whispered back.

But the whispering had distracted him—Katherine
had to pull him to the side to avoid one of the bayonets.

He tiptoed back toward the stairs, dodging bayonets right and left.

This is even worse than dodging torches,
he thought, remembering the hazards he and Katherine had faced on one of their earlier trips through time.

The guards had stopped streaming down the stairs, but two of them stood on the bottom step, guarding the way out. Jonah ducked under the one guard’s elbow in an attempt to slip past him. But just then the guard leaned back, cutting off the space between the wall and the stairs. Jonah could still fit in that space, but he was at such an awkward angle he wasn’t going to be able to launch himself upward. He was bound to fall over backward, crashing into the guard. He wobbled. He wanted to scream for Katherine to help him, to give him a push, but that would just attract the guards’ attention. His mouth opened anyway, involuntarily.

“H—,” he began.

But before he could get out the rest of the word “help,” a hand appeared out of nowhere and pulled him up.

The hand was translucent. It was attached to an equally translucent wrist and arm, covered in what seemed to be the translucent sleeve of a sweatshirt.

“Chip!” Jonah started to scream. At the last minute he turned it into a mere mouthing of the word. But he grinned at his friend to let him know how completely relieved he was to see him. Or, well, to see
through
him.

For Chip had also evidently been granted time-traveler invisibility.

Get Katherine and let’s get out of here,
Chip mouthed back at him, pointing past Jonah as if he didn’t trust Jonah to get the message otherwise.

Jonah nodded and turned to pull Katherine through the gap between the guard and the wall. Now all three kids stood on the stairs above the guards. The guard nearest
them turned around and gazed suspiciously in their direction. Had he sensed Jonah and Katherine brushing past him? Had he heard Jonah’s barely breathed “H—”?

It didn’t matter. He couldn’t see them, so he didn’t start climbing toward them or waving a bayonet up at them.

Chip tugged on Jonah’s arm and made a
C’mon
motion with his hand, gesturing toward the open door above them.

Before someone decides to shut the door,
he mouthed.

Jonah nodded, and all three kids began tiptoeing up the stairs.

Jonah almost felt like giggling.

Ha, ha, ha,
he wanted to shout down at all the guards scanning the cellar so thoroughly.
Thrust your bayonets anywhere you want—you’re not going to catch us! You’d have to be able to see us to find us!

They escaped into the sunshine outside the cellar door. They looked around and, by silent agreement, tiptoed on out toward the wooden fence at the far side of the garden, where no one would hear them.

“Great timing!” Jonah congratulated Chip as they both flopped to the ground. Katherine eased down beside them.

“I was terrified that I might be too late,” Chip said. Even though he used modern words, he still sounded vaguely medieval. His face grew serious as he turned toward Katherine. “Oh, no—
was
I too late?”

Jonah looked at his sister. She still had his sweatshirt tied as an impromptu sling around her arm and neck. One of the bayonets must have connected, because the sleeve of her own sweatshirt had a gaping hole in it now, right over her bicep. But no blood stained the sweatshirt, so maybe the bayonet had only gone through the cloth, not her arm.

Also, her frown looked more annoyed than pained at the moment.

“Chip, I am not some damsel in distress you had to rescue!” she protested. “Jonah and I were doing fine by ourselves!”

“No, we weren’t,” Jonah said. “Katherine may not be grateful, but I’m glad you rescued us!”

Chip looked confused. He reached out and gingerly touched Katherine’s elbow.

“But your arm—”

“Is fine,” Katherine said quickly. She tugged off the improvised sling made from Jonah’s sweatshirt and handed it back to her brother. “It just hurt a little at first, and you know, Jonah’s a Boy Scout, so he had to prove he was prepared and all. . . . It’s nothing.”

What was this—Katherine actually downplaying an injury, rather than acting like breaking a fingernail might kill her?

Jonah would never figure out his sister. Unless . . . was this all for Chip’s sake?

Chip was still peering anxiously at Katherine.

“I was so afraid you would think I was a coward when I didn’t jump up and fight when the guards started dragging you away,” he said. He shoved back his hair—an odd sight, given that it looked crystalline and see-through now, as if each of his normally blond curls had been turned into glass. “I didn’t want you thinking me a coward, but—”

“But what you did was perfect,” Jonah interrupted.

He thought he kind of saw what Chip and Katherine’s problem was, but the last thing Jonah wanted was to become their relationship coach.

“Look,” he told them. “We don’t have time right now for the two of you to work out your ‘I want to be your knight in shining armor’ / ‘Oh, no, you don’t; I can take care of myself; this isn’t 1483 anymore’ issues.”

He imitated them in such ridiculous, mincing voices that Chip and Katherine both protested: “We don’t sound like that!” Then, realizing that they’d each said the exact same thing, they stopped and gazed into each other’s eyes.

Oh, brother,
Jonah thought.
Young love. Ick.

Jonah grabbed each of them by the arm to get them to look at him. Katherine winced slightly.

Oops,
Jonah thought.
Guess I grabbed the sore one.

But she didn’t say anything, so he ignored it.

“Help me out here,” he said. “Let’s just figure out what we need to do next—as a team. Don’t you think we should rescue Gavin and Daniella? Chip, if you were able to make us all invisible, that must mean you got Gavin’s Elucidator away from him after all. So why don’t you pull that out, and—”

“Jonah, I don’t have Gavin’s Elucidator,” Chip said, shaking his head so hard it made his curly hair bounce up and down.

“Then how’d we all end up invisible?” Katherine asked.

Chip tilted his head to one side.

“I thought I made it happen, but now that you question me, mayhap I could be wrong,” he began slowly.

This was something else that made Chip’s medieval moments particularly maddening: He could take forever thinking through things.

“Just tell us what happened,” Katherine said.

“With twenty-first-century words,” Jonah added. “And speed.”

Chip got the hint.

“I was behind a bush when we landed here, so I was pretty sure that none of the guards would see me,” he began. “I couldn’t understand what anyone was shouting about, but I thought if Gavin had an Elucidator with him
and it was voice activated, then maybe I could just whisper, ‘Make me invisible,’ and it would happen.”

Jonah wished he’d thought of that himself, before he’d jumped up and started yelling at the guards.

“But that didn’t work,” Chip said.

See?
Jonah told himself.
It doesn’t actually matter that I was stupid.