Risked (The Missing ) (7 page)

“So then what did you do?” Katherine asked.

“Well, by then that one guard was dragging you two away, and I knew I had to do something drastic,” Chip said. “I crawled over as close as I could get to Gavin.”

“Wasn’t the other guard taking him and Daniella away too?” Katherine asked.

“No, for some reason he was acting like he needed the first guard to come back and help him,” Chip said. “Like he didn’t think Gavin could walk or something.”

“That’s weird,” Jonah said.

“No, it’s not,” Katherine said. “Alexei Romanov had to use wheelchairs a lot. Because of the hemophilia.”

“What’s that mean, anyway?” Jonah asked.

“Mom told me—it’s something about blood not clotting right,” Katherine said. “So I guess if he got even, like, a little cut, he could bleed to death.”

Jonah didn’t quite get how that was connected to wheelchairs—were Alexei’s parents afraid that if he stood
up and walked on his own, he might fall down and get hurt? Jonah wasn’t going to ask, because he wanted Chip to move along with his story.

But Chip was just staring at Katherine.

“Wait a minute,” Chip said. “You’re saying Gavin, who’s really Alexei Romanov, who’s that kid who was lying on the ground over there a few moments ago—he’s got this disease where he could bleed to death from a little cut?”

“Yeah,” Katherine said.

It didn’t seem possible, given that Chip was already translucent, but he suddenly looked paler. Maybe it was because of the horrified expression on his face.

“Oh, no,” Chip said. “Oh, no. Do you think it’s a problem that I just slam-tackled him?”

“You did
what
?” Katherine asked.

“That was what I had to try next!” Chip said defensively. “I didn’t know the kid had medical problems!”

“But why tackle him?” Jonah asked, still puzzled. “I mean, I know Gavin kind of attacked us first, but—”

“That’s not why I did it,” Chip protested. “It was just logical.”

Jonah waited to hear how this could possibly be logical.

“See, I figured out that if Gavin had an Elucidator, it couldn’t be voice-activated from a distance,” Chip explained. “Since it worked for you before, when you were holding on to Gavin, I thought that you must have been touching the Elucidator without knowing it. The second guard was coming back, and I knew I didn’t have much time, so I just jumped out from the bushes and slammed
Gavin flat on the ground so I was right on top of him and the Elucidator, and then I screamed, ‘Make me invisible!’ ”

In a weird way this did kind of make sense. The Elucidator might have been set up to take voice commands only from someone who was touching it.

“Okay, um, and that worked?” Katherine asked skeptically.

“Yeah!” Chip said. “I’ve been invisible ever since. And then I real quick said, ‘Make Jonah and Katherine invisible too.’ And then the second guard was back and I had to roll out of the way. And since neither of the guards was looking in my direction when I tackled Gavin, and they couldn’t understand English anyway, I was totally safe.”

Jonah couldn’t decide if Chip had been crazy brave, or just crazy.

“Why didn’t you say, ‘Make all five of us invisible’?” Katherine asked. “To protect Gavin and Daniella, too?”

“I thought that might mess up time, since this really is the time they belong in,” Chip said. He winced. “I didn’t know tackling Gavin could kill him.”

There was an eerie silence in the garden around them. Jonah hoped it was just his imagination getting to him.

“You didn’t . . . see any blood, did you?” Katherine asked slowly.

“No, but I don’t think Gavin was conscious when the guard picked him up,” Chip said. “I thought maybe he was just pretending to pass out so they wouldn’t keep yelling at him, but . . . what if he really was dying?”

Having those words hang in the air was even worse than the silence.

“Stop saying things like that,” Jonah said firmly. “Gavin is not going to die from you tackling him. If we mess up history, that’s not going to be the way we do it. Because we are right now going to go find Gavin and Daniella and the Elucidator. And then we’re going to make the Elucidator take us back to the twenty-first century, where Gavin can get good medical care. And everything is going to be
fine.
”

He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. He tried to remember the first-aid training he’d gotten in Boy Scouts. Surely if someone was going to bleed to death just from being tackled, it would take a long time, wouldn’t it? Definitely longer than the fifteen or twenty minutes that might have passed since Chip had tackled Gavin?

Jonah stood up and was relieved to see that Chip and Katherine did the same.

“Did you see where the guards took Daniella and Gavin?” Jonah asked.

“Into that house,” Chip said, pointing toward the
building above the cellar where Jonah and Katherine had been trapped. “I’ll show you which door they used.”

Even as he trailed after Chip, Jonah squinted up at the arches and frills of the imposing house—or was it a mansion? Or a palace?

Probably not a palace,
he decided. If the tsar of Russia had been in charge of a sixth of the entire planet, his palace would probably have been much more impressive than this. Jonah knew kids back home who lived in houses about this big and fancy. But now that Jonah was looking more closely, he started noticing some strange details: Under the soaring arches at the top of the house, all the windows seemed to be whited out from the inside, like in an abandoned factory. And why was there such a crude wooden fence around the whole property? Why were there guardhouses inside the fence—like maybe the danger was inside the fence too?

Chip crouched beside a tree.

“That one,” he said, pointing to a door beside the one Jonah and Katherine had gone through to get to the cellar.

Guards still swarmed in and out the cellar door, undoubtedly continuing to search for Jonah and Katherine. Jonah was more concerned about the two who stood at attention by the second door.

“We’ll have to wait until those guards leave, right?”
Chip asked anxiously. “So we don’t mess up history by making them think a door just opened and shut on its own?”

“No,” Jonah decided. “Not if there’s a chance that Gavin’s in that house bleeding to death.”

“Forget history,” Katherine agreed.

Chip recoiled slightly and gaped at the two of them. If Jonah hadn’t been so worried about Gavin—and their chances of finding the Elucidator and getting home safely—he would have laughed at Chip’s horrified expression. Chip had been on only the first time-travel trip with Jonah and Katherine. Jonah felt like he’d gotten about a million more years’ worth of experience since then.

It made a difference.

“Come on,” Jonah said, taking the lead once more.

He tiptoed right up to the door and twisted the knob. He did try to do it silently, but he let the door swing all the way open so Chip and Katherine could come in with him.

Behind him, he heard the guards let out a string of curses.

“Why didn’t you make sure that door was latched?” one yelled at the other.

“Me? You were the last one through!” the second yelled
back. “Have you been drinking already? If the commander finds out, with what he has planned for tonight—”

What’s planned for tonight?
Jonah wondered.
Never mind—we’ll be gone by then.

The guards didn’t recover from their arguing to shut the door until all three kids were safely inside the house. Jonah turned to Chip and held up his hands in a
See? Wasn’t that easy?
gesture. But as both guards struggled to pull the door closed again, Jonah saw that they separated completely from what seemed to be ghostly doubles of themselves.

Ugh,
Jonah thought.
Tracers.

During his trips through time, Jonah had developed a love-hate relationship with tracers, the eerie, ghostly representations of how time would have gone if time travelers hadn’t intervened. On one of the trips, to 1611, time had gotten so messed up that all the tracers had disappeared. Jonah had missed them then, and he had been delighted when they’d reappeared. But most of the time when tracers showed up, they just seemed like nagging reminders:
You’re messing up time. What if you mess it up so badly that it can never be fixed?

Jonah told himself that two guards arguing and having to shut a door was nothing in the grand scheme of things.

“Think we should go upstairs?” Katherine whispered,
pointing to a nearby staircase. “The guards were taking Gavin and Daniella to their ‘rooms.’ Bedrooms, maybe? Don’t you think bedrooms would be on the second floor?”

This made sense to Jonah. All three kids began tiptoeing up the stairs. Some of the wooden steps creaked, but Jonah didn’t care. He couldn’t see anyone around close enough to hear it.

“Ahh!” Katherine practically shrieked as they approached a landing. “What’s that?”

It looked like a bear rearing up on its hind legs above them.

It
is
a bear,
Jonah told himself.
But it’s stuffed. No worries.

He saw that Chip had flung himself protectively in front of Katherine, as if to make sure that if anyone was going to be mauled, it would be him, not her.

“Stop acting like fools,” Jonah hissed. “It’s dead.”

But the word “dead” seemed to echo in the dim stairwell. And when Jonah stepped up on the landing beside the bear, he saw that there were also stuffed bear cubs hunkered beside the mother bear.

“Creepy,” Katherine whispered. “Who wants to keep dead animals inside the house?”

“Maybe it was just an ordinary thing in this time period,” Chip said defensively. His own time period, the 1400s, had so many weird and creepy things that he was maybe a little
sensitive about anyone criticizing anyone else’s time.

“What’s creepy is all the people looking down here now, because Katherine screamed,” Jonah muttered. He looked up at three more guards clustered beside the railing above him, along with a plump woman who seemed to be wearing a maid’s costume.

Jonah glanced at his own hands and then at Chip and Katherine just to make sure that they were all still invisible—they were.

Move along, people,
Jonah thought, as if he could mentally direct the onlookers.
Nothing to see here. You just imagined you heard a noise. That’s all.

But they all kept staring, seeming unusually rattled when they probably couldn’t have even heard Katherine that well.

And anyhow, why are there so many guards around?
Jonah wondered.

Was it just because they were still looking for him and Katherine, escapees from the cellar? Or was there something else going on?

Jonah pushed those questions to the back of his mind and concentrated on tiptoeing the rest of the way up the stairs. He moved past the tracer of the maid, who looked just as much on edge as the version of the woman who’d heard Katherine shriek. Next, he and
Chip and Katherine entered a large dining room, which held an ornate wooden table beneath a chandelier.

See? This may not be a palace, but it is a mansion,
he thought.
The kind of place royalty might visit on an ordinary day.

But just then two more uniformed guards walked by.

Mansion or prison?
Jonah asked himself.
Which is it?

He glanced into the living room, where a man sat writing in a notebook and four women sat hunched over books or needlepoint. Three sleeping dogs lay at the man’s feet. An abandoned chess game lay by his elbow.

“That’s the tsar, the tsarina, and Anastasia and Alexei’s three older sisters,” Katherine whispered in Jonah’s ear. “Olga, Tatiana, and Maria.”

Jonah would not have figured this out for himself. The tsar looked like a gardener, maybe, in workman’s clothes. The oldest woman—the tsarina, Jonah guessed—sat in a wheelchair, her face gaunt and anguished. The three girls who had looked so beautiful in all the pictures were now distressingly thin, as if they were nearly starving. Instead of lacy white dresses and pearls, they wore plain black dresses. It wasn’t just that they looked older now, grown-ups instead of children. They also looked pinched and desperate and despairing.

It looked like they had given up.

Then one of the sisters glanced up and caught the eye
of one of the guards. She winked at him, then went back to staring down at her sewing.

Okay, maybe that one hasn’t given up,
Jonah thought.
Still . . .

“There are beds back in this other room,” Chip whispered in his ear. “Let’s try this direction.”

Jonah took Katherine’s arm and pulled her away from the living room. They followed Chip back through the dining room and then into a room containing four army-style cots.

Where the guards sleep?
Jonah wondered.

But there were dresses and skirts hanging along the wall, rather than uniforms.

So is this maybe Anastasia’s room? And her sisters’?
Jonah wondered.

He was back to thinking of this house as a prison again.

Another door led out of the room, and Katherine was already pushing through it.

“It’s them!” she whispered back excitedly to Jonah and Chip.

Both boys immediately crowded into the doorway beside her.

Now Jonah could see Daniella—or was it Anastasia?—sitting beside a bed, reading out loud from a book on her lap.

“ ‘If it is our duty to honor our responsibilities, then . . .’
Oh, Alexei, I think you’re asleep now anyway, so I’ll just skip the boring parts,” she was saying. She hit the spine of the book against her leg for emphasis. This made the skirt of her plain black dress flare out.

Dimly Jonah realized that he wouldn’t be seeing or hearing her—the real Anastasia, in her real early-twentieth-century clothes, just like her sisters’—unless Daniella had indeed been brought to this room and joined with the original version of herself. He knew how it worked: Daniella’s sweatshirt and jeans and the rest of her twenty-first-century appearance would have been swallowed up completely when she became Anastasia again. If Daniella were somewhere else, he would see only a ghostly, pale tracer.