Risked

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  There on the floor, still lined up neatly, were the rows and rows of Alexei’s toy soldiers. Jonah crashed down on his knees beside them. The light was too dim, and Jonah didn’t have time to methodically pick each one up and examine it for a chipped patch in the painted-on cap. So instead he swept the soldiers aside, five or six at a time, and looked to make sure each one left behind a tracer.

  The Elucidator wouldn’t have a tracer, since it doesn’t belong to this time, Jonah told himself. So as soon as there’s a toy soldier that doesn’t leave a tracer, I’ll know that’s the right one.

  He moved fast, like a wrecking ball through Alexei’s miniature army. Sweep, look, sweep, look, sweep, look . . .

  In seconds all the toy soldiers were in a jumble on the floor.

  And every single one of them left behind a tracer version of itself still standing and looking orderly and alert.

  What? Jonah thought. How could that be? Did I just go too fast? Did Alexei leave behind more soldiers somewhere else?

  Only then did Jonah raise his gaze beyond the piled soldiers to another grouping—not of more toy soldiers, but of their tracers. Tracers of an entire opposing army.

  Jonah’s memory flashed back to that afternoon, to seeing Alexei sprawled on the floor alongside Leonid, to Alexei telling the other boy, Take half of my soldiers. They belong to you now.

  The Elucidator must have been in the group of toy soldiers Leonid took with him when he left.

  And Jonah had no idea where it was now.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jonah wasted time searching back through the pile of toy soldiers, the same slow method he’d been trying to avoid. He was sure it was hopeless. But how could he go back and tell the others that everything was hopeless?

  Chipped paint on the cap, chipped paint on the cap—please let me see chipped paint on some cap, he thought.

  From outside he heard a boom.

  That couldn’t have been gunfire, he told himself. I mean, not a rifle or pistol going off down in the courtyard or in the cellar. It had to be a cannon far away, off in the battle being fought in the mountains around this city. . . .

  It didn’t sound far away.

  Another boom reverberated, sounding even closer.

  Jonah dropped the last of the useless toy soldiers to the floor and scrambled up. He lurched out the door and back through the Romanov sisters’ room, through the dining room, off toward the stairs. Going down, he took the steps four at a time, careening side to side and barely staying upright. He burst out through the door.

  The courtyard outside was empty now, and as far as he could tell, so was the garden beyond.

  The door to the cellar was closed, but Jonah yanked it open. He didn’t bother pulling it shut behind him. He did try to be a little quieter going down these steps, because he could hear voices down below.

  “What? There is not even a chair to sit on down here?” the tsarina was complaining, still sounding imperious in spite of everything that had happened. “You expect us to stand while we wait, when my son and I are both in such pain?”

  “I’ll have a guard get chairs for both of you,” Yurovsky said apologetically. “Aleksander?”

  Jonah was close enough now that he could see a guard break off from the group and head for the stairs. Jonah had to press against the wall to avoid getting in the man’s way.

  “The heir wants to die sitting in a chair?” one of the other guards muttered under his breath. “Let him.”

  But that guard was far back from the Romanovs, so Jonah was sure that none of them heard him.

  “I’ll go watch for the truck, so we can get you out of here quickly,” Yurovsky told the Romanovs.

  “Thank you,” the tsar said stiffly, as if trying to make up for his wife’s rudeness.

  And how can Yurovsky still act like he’s helping the Romanovs, when he’s planning to kill them? Jonah wondered. Another terrible thought struck him: Probably there really was a truck coming, to take away the dead bodies.

  As Yurovsky headed back for the stairs, the rest of the guards stood around awkwardly, mixed in with the Romanovs and their servants. But because of tracers, Jonah could see that in original time everyone had broken off into the two separate rooms, with tracer versions of the double doors shut in between. The tracers of the guards sat against the wall of one room, checking and rechecking their weapons and nervously smoking and passing around a flask.

  They seemed to be trying to get drunk.

  Beyond them, in the second room, the tracer versions of the Romanovs and their servants were clustered around two tracer chairs. They almost looked as if they were posing for a professional photograph, like one of the pictures Jonah and Katherine had seen on the Internet. The tracer tsar stood in the front, with Alexei beside him in a chair and Dr. Botkin on his other side. The tsarina sat on the second chair, beside Alexei, her three oldest daughters clustered around her. Anastasia stood back with the servants, seemingly off in her own little world.

  Jonah veered away from all the tracers and the clumps of people and looked frantically around for Katherine and Chip. They were standing off to the side, in the corner, see-through and out of the way.

  “You found the Elucidator?” Chip whispered eagerly, holding out his hand for it.

  Jonah just shook his head.

  “You don’t have it?” Katherine wailed.

  “Leonid must have taken it away with the other toy soldiers,” Jonah said.

  “Then we’ve got to find Leonid!” Katherine exclaimed.

  “How are we supposed to know where he is?” Jonah asked. “You think we can just ask Yurovsky and he’ll tell us?”

  Katherine opened her mouth to reply, but Jonah didn’t listen. He was suddenly distracted by a burst of tracer light out in the open area of the room. Jonah could see the tracer guards springing to their feet, dropping their flasks and cigarettes. They burst through the tracer double doors, then spread out into a line in the doorway between the two rooms and began firing and firing and firing. Tracer smoke rose with the silent blasts, hiding the tracer bodies that fell: the Romanovs, Dr. Botkin, the servants.

  Meanwhile, in real time, the Romanovs and their servants stood in practically the very same spots, but elbow to elbow with their would-be killers.

  Jonah had to look away. Katherine grabbed his arm and made him look back at her.

  “We can’t let that happen for real!” she whispered fiercely. “We can’t!”

  “What can we do without the Elucidator?” Jonah asked.

  Chip clutched his head.

  “We never should have let the Romanovs be herded down here into the basement,” he groaned, tugging at his own hair. “They’re trapped! There’s no way out!”

  “Chip, you said we had to come down here!” Katherine argued. “You said those guards were looking too trigger-happy with all the arguing up in the courtyard, and everyone got so upset when we could hear the cannon fire so close by . . .”

  Chip was looking down at objects on the floor. No—tracer objects.

  Tracer bullets.

  He touched the wall behind them, which had tracer gouges in it. Jonah saw other tracer bullets embedded in the plaster.

  “If they do start firing the same way as in original time,” Chip muttered, “we won’t be safe here either. Not the way bullets bounce around. . . . Maybe we should get out of the way now.”

  “We can’t leave Gavin and Daniella behind!” Katherine insisted.

  Jonah looked around to make sure none of the real guards were ready to start firing yet. They weren’t, but they had moved away from the Romanovs, into the other room. The doors stood barely cracked between the two rooms, so Jonah could see that now all the guards sat slumped to the floor, their backs against the wall. One was pulling a flask from his pocket; others were lighting up cigarettes. All of them were holding guns.

  Déjà vu, Jonah thought. They look just like their tracers did five minutes ago.

  So how much time did Jonah and h
is friends have before the guards started firing those guns for real? Was there any way to stop them?

  The tracer versions of the guards had stopped firing, but now they carried tracer bayonets into the room with all the fallen Romanovs. In the dimming tracer smoke, Jonah could see that the tracer guards were stabbing at the tracer bodies on the floor. It looked like they feared that the flurry of bullets hadn’t been enough to kill.

  Wait—I guess they weren’t, Jonah thought. He remembered that a tracer stopped glowing at the moment that the person would have died in original time. But Olga’s tracer is still glowing, and so is Tatiana’s, and so is Maria’s . . .

  He couldn’t tell about Anastasia and Alexei, because both Gavin and Daniella had stayed joined to their tracers, sliding down toward the floor.

  Because they feel the link to their dying tracers? Jonah wondered. Or just because they’re giving up?

  The tracer guards weren’t giving up. They viciously stabbed their bayonets into one body after another; they stood inches away from the wounded tracers and shot them in the head, point-blank.

  “Oh, no,” Jonah moaned. “Oh, no. All those jewels the girls sewed into their clothes—they must have worked almost like bulletproof vests, letting the bullets bounce off. So their deaths are going to be even worse. Those tracers are terrified; they’re screaming . . .”

  He turned and walked through one tracer after another—a guard with a bayonet, the dying doctor, the dying maid—and rushed to Anastasia’s side.

  “Daniella!” he whispered in her ear. “We’ve got to pull you and Gavin out now! The Elucidator is missing, but somehow we’ll get you out of here, somehow . . .”

  “Not without the rest of my family!” Daniella whispered back through gritted teeth.

  She had her hands on her hips, her hands probably covering a fortune in diamonds and other jewels.

  And what good is any of it when all those jewels are just going to ensure that she has a horrible death? Jonah wondered.

  It was a shame none of those diamonds could make her invisible.

  Wait—what if one of them can? Jonah wondered.

  “Daniella! Please!” he hissed in her ear. “Give me one of your jewels! I can’t explain, but—quick! This might save you!”

  Daniella didn’t ask questions. Jonah saw her separate from her tracer enough to start picking at the seam along her waist.

  The guard who’d been sent out for chairs came back holding one in each hand. He clattered down the stairs. When Jonah looked up again, Alexei and the tsarina were both seated in the chairs, and somehow the other Romanovs and their servants had stepped into place around them, in the same positions their tracers had held a few minutes earlier, before the bullets started flying.

  Jonah did a double take—Yurovsky was back now too.

  “Daniella! Hurry!” Jonah whispered.

  Outside he could hear a truck revving. The tsar said something that Jonah didn’t quite catch—maybe, “Are you ready for us to get into the truck?”

  “Stand up, everyone,” Yurovsky demanded.

  The tsarina mumbled complaints but did it anyhow; Alexei didn’t move. Yurovsky went to stand directly in front of the tsar and pulled out a sheet of paper.

  “In view of the fact that your friends are attacking Ekaterinburg to try to save you, and your relatives in Europe continue their assault on Soviet Russia,” Yurovsky began reading in a pompous voice, “the presidium of the Ural Regionial Soviet, following the will of the revolution, has decreed you must be shot. . . .”

  The tsar blinked. He turned and looked at his family as if hoping they could explain everything.

  “What?” the tsar asked numbly. “What?”

  The Romanovs and their servants stood frozen in confused terror.

  “So then . . . we’re not being taken anywhere?” Dr. Botkin asked, still not getting it.

  These people, Jonah thought. They knew their lives were in danger. They knew death was coming for them. But they didn’t know it was coming now.

  “I don’t understand. Read it again. . . . ,” the Tsar mumbled. Was he truly that befuddled? Or was he just bargaining for a little more time?

  Yurovsky went back to reading, but Jonah missed the first part of what he said because Daniella hissed at him, “Almost got it—”

  Jonah watched her pull threads from her seam. Yurovsky was reading so loudly now that Jonah couldn’t tune him out anymore: “. . . has decreed that you, the former tsar, Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov, must be shot for your crimes against the people. . . .”

  Jonah turned and saw the tsarina and Olga cross themselves. He saw Chip and Katherine motioning to him and Gavin and Daniella—urgent gestures that undoubtedly meant, Get out of there now! But then Jonah stopped watching, because Daniella shoved a heavy rock into his hand—the diamond.

  “Hope you’ve got a good plan for that,” Daniella muttered.

  “Me too,” Jonah muttered back.

  The gem in his hand was large for a diamond—somewhere between a marble and a golf ball. It was undoubtedly worth millions. But Jonah barely glanced at it.

  Instead he rolled it out to the tips of his fingers, reared his arm back, and hurled the diamond toward the single lightbulb overhead.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Baseball had never been Jonah’s sport. He’d never been good at accurate throws. But maybe his problem had been that he just needed a diamond to throw with, because this one zinged straight and true toward the ceiling. It smashed perfectly into the single lightbulb, giving off a burst of shattering glass.

  The room instantly went dark.

  Thanks to the tracer lights, Jonah could still see fairly well, but he knew that the Romanovs and the guards would see only unending blackness around them. The guards were clustered in the doorway now, their weapons ready, but Yurovsky was screaming, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire! Don’t shoot me by mistake!”

  “Then get out of the way!” one of the guards shouted back.

  Jonah saw the tsar swing a fist and punch Yurovsky in the jaw, while Dr. Botkin grabbed the commander and held the man in front of him like a human shield.

  “I can’t get out of the way! They’ve got me trapped!” Yurovsky screamed.

  But even as he spoke, Yurovsky was reaching into his pocket and slowly pulling his arm back. What was he getting?

  Jonah suddenly understood, but he was too far across the room to do anything but warn the others: “He’s got a gun! Yurovsky’s got his own gun!”

  Jonah’s shouts seemed to get lost in the other shrieks and screams around him. But then Chip was at Yurovsky’s side, yanking the newly revealed gun from the man’s hand. Chip wrapped his own hands around the gun and pressed the barrel against Yurovsky’s temple.

  “Tell your men to stand down!” Chip ordered him. “Tell them to step aside and let the Romanovs leave, or else you’re a dead man too!”

  Chip, of course, could only say that in English, but Dr. Botkin was thinking clearly enough now to shout the same thing after him in Russian.

  Okay! Jonah thought. This is working even better than I expected!

  He hadn’t thought they’d be able to do much more than yell something like Everybody run for the stairs! But now, with Chip taking Yurovsky hostage, this could be orderly and calm. Nobody would get shot even by mistake.

  If we’re really lucky, we might even end up driving away in that truck, Jonah thought a little giddily.

  “Madame Demidova, Mr. Trupp, Mr. Kharitonov, hold on to me, and I’ll lead you out of here,” Anastasia—no, Daniella—was saying in the darkness. She’d separated completely from her tracer.

  Jonah realized that, as a time traveler like him, she would be able to see by the light of the tracers. However, even that light seemed to be growing dimmer and dimmer.

  Because so many of the tracers are dead or dying, Jonah thought.

  Even the tracer version of Anastasia was lying dim and almost lifeless on the floor where Daniella had left her behind.
How horrifying must that be for Daniella to see?

  “You take the servants on out right now,” Jonah told her, hoping she wouldn’t look around. “Katherine and Gavin and I can get everyone else.”

  But Daniella wasn’t making much progress, as the three servants were screaming and crying and praying and maybe hadn’t even heard her. Katherine and Gavin were having the same problem with the tsarina and the oldest Romanov girls. And Dr. Botkin was refusing to let go of Yurovsky and walk away.

  That at least makes sense, Jonah thought. He doesn’t know who Chip is and he can’t see the gun in Chip’s hand—he’s just trying to keep control.

  So maybe none of them would get out of the cellar quickly. But it would still work. Chip still had the gun to Yurovsky’s head.

  Jonah glanced out toward the room where the guards were standing, to find out if they had indeed stepped aside from the doorway. It looked like they had: Jonah couldn’t actually see any of them from this angle. But he could see something else: an additional glow that wasn’t tracer light, coming from the direction of the stairs.

  “Hello?” a thin, reedy voice cried out. “Alexei? Are you down there?”

  A boy came into view, carrying a lantern.

  It was Leonid Sednev, the kitchen boy.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Bonus! Jonah thought. Now he’ll be able to lead us to the Elucidator and we can make the Romanovs invisible and they really will be safe, long-term.

  But in the next moment Jonah saw one of the guards leap toward Leonid, wrap his arm around Leonid’s neck, and point a gun at the boy’s head.

  “Let Yurovsky go or I shoot!” the guard screamed.

  The wails and screams and cries echoed even louder around Jonah. Jonah might have even wailed himself.

  How could we have lost the advantage so quickly? he wondered. There’s not even time to translate for Chip. . . .

  But Chip already understood—and was reacting. He tightened his grip on Yurovsky and yelled back, “Let Leonid go or I’ll shoot!”