Risked

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Anyhow, how can we win a fight against those big, mean men when we’re so little? Jonah wondered. We couldn’t beat them before. And they’re not surprised anymore that we’re here.

  Jonah wanted to curl up into a little ball and hide his face and pretend that Gary and Hodge didn’t even exist. But he forced himself to keep thinking about Gary and Hodge, to keep remembering what he’d known about them when he was a big thirteen-year-old.

  Is there something else I could surprise them with? Jonah wondered. Something that would scare them more than little kids’ fists?

  “Maybe someone in the group had a second Elucidator we didn’t know about,” Gary said.

  “We would have known,” Hodge muttered. “They would have used it to call that goody-goody JB a long time ago. No, I think we have to consider the possibility that this one is smarter than we thought.”

  He was bending over Jonah now, patting down his sleeves, his chest . . .

  He’s going to find the Elucidator, Jonah thought. That nice toy soldier that told me what he could do before . . .

  Jonah didn’t have time to ask the toy soldier questions again. He wasn’t strong enough to fight with Hodge over the toy soldier. Right now he wasn’t even strong enough to lift his hand and push Hodge’s hand away, just to buy another minute or two.

  Isn’t there anything I can tell the toy soldier to do in the next three seconds before Hodge takes it away? Jonah wondered.

  It was hard to think with his brain still so fuzzy from the timesickness—and still so young, no matter how much he tried to fight it—and with Hodge poking at him. And someone had started moaning beside him. Daniella, maybe?

  “Save . . . ,” she whispered. “Save . . . family . . .”

  Jonah couldn’t think of anything he could do to save himself or the other kids in the next three seconds. But that word Daniella said, “family,” jogged something in his memory. If time started again, Daniella’s family would be in great danger once more, especially since Gary and Hodge had turned the light back on. Jonah had been so proud of protecting the Romanovs by throwing that diamond and breaking the lightbulb before. There was no way he would be capable of throwing anything else all the way up to the lightbulb right now. But he could do something else to protect the Romanovs, something he’d known about the last time he was in 1918, before the timesickness, before he got little-kid brain. . . .

  Oh, yeah, he thought.

  “Make all the Romanovs invisible,” Jonah whispered. “And their servants. And their doctor.”

  He couldn’t remember the doctor’s name anymore, but maybe it didn’t matter.

  “What did you just say?” Hodge asked. He stopped patting down Jonah, and whipped his head back to look at the Romanovs lined up in the center of the room. “Oh, no. Oh, no . . .”

  He instantly scrambled away from Jonah and grabbed Gary by the arm.

  “Restore time after we leave!” Hodge cried. “Restore all the children’s ages, too! Restore—”

  “Don’t worry about any of that!” Gary screamed. “We’ve got to get out of here! Exit now!”

  And then both men vanished.

  Jonah could have sworn he blacked out for a few moments. He woke again in such a haze of timesickness that he was sure of only one thing:

  The sound of gunfire was back.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Jonah had heard Hodge say, Restore all the children’s ages, too! But he still felt like reacting like a little kid. He cringed away from the noise and put his hands over his ears.

  “Stop,” Jonah whispered. “Stop time again. Stop all of this.”

  Time didn’t stop, and neither did the gunfire. Now there were screams and wails and weeping mixed in with the sounds of all the guns going off. A woman’s voice cried, “Nicky! Where did you go? Niii-cky!”

  Rough men’s voices screamed, “Is this a trick? Have they escaped? The light’s back, but we can’t see them!”

  The commander yelled back, “It’s just the smoke from the gunfire blocking your view! They were holding on to me a second ago! Keep shooting!”

  Jonah heard more gunfire.

  “You can’t do this to my family!” Gavin screamed. “Or my friends!”

  Jonah saw Gavin stand up—or, rather, the outline of Gavin, the translucent Gavin who would be invisible to anyone who wasn’t a time traveler. And he was a thirteen-year-old again. Gavin weaved his way toward the guards who were now all lined up along the doorway between the two rooms, their guns raised.

  “Stop!” Gavin screamed, shoving hard against the barrel of the nearest guard’s gun. He pushed it into the gun barrel of the next guard over.

  And then a translucent Daniella was right beside Gavin, screaming along with him, “Don’t shoot our family!”

  Jonah couldn’t see what happened next because of all the smoke. He couldn’t hear what else they said because all the screams and gunshots blurred together into a single echoing roar in Jonah’s ears.

  He closed his eyes. Why did he feel so faint all of a sudden?

  The noise seemed distant now, almost like a dream. Someone was crying, and Jonah couldn’t tell if it was right beside him or barely within earshot.

  “Jonah? Jonah? Can you hear me?”

  It was Katherine. Of course it was Katherine, who’d always been there by his side in all of their time-travel adventures.

  Even if I were dying, she’d probably see it as just another chance to tag along, Jonah thought. He started to chuckle at his own joke but found he couldn’t get a sound out of his throat.

  And then he didn’t feel like laughing anymore.

  What does it feel like when you’re dying? he wondered. What if you get shot? Would you even know it, if you were lying on a floor in a little room with gun after gun after gun going off, and you couldn’t see anyone in particular shooting at you? Or would you just go all numb and floaty like . . . like I feel right now?

  Am I dying, God? God? God?

  Jonah forced himself to open his eyes, because if he was dying, he really wanted to know why.

  And what he saw was the worried face of his friend JB staring straight down at him.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Dreaming, Jonah thought. I’m just dreaming, seeing what I want to see.

  He blinked, and when he opened his eyes again, JB was still there.

  “Hey, buddy,” JB whispered. “We’re getting you out of here.”

  “And the others?” Jonah tried to say. “You’re rescuing all of us, aren’t you? And Daniella and Gavin’s family and friends?”

  He couldn’t actually tell if any of those words came out, because his mouth felt numb and his ears seemed to have stopped working. He also couldn’t tell if JB said anything in reply, or even if JB was trying to say something, because Jonah’s vision was blurring into darkness as well.

  And then Jonah was waking up in a room filled with light. He opened his eyes not to a single twenty-five-watt bulb in a dirty basement at two a.m., but to a place where everything gleamed and glowed, clean and bright.

  And safe. For the first time since he’d sat down with Katherine at the computer in his own home to look up missing children in history, Jonah actually felt safe. He seemed to be lying in some kind of a hospital bed now, but there were no beeping monitors or rushing medical workers anywhere around. Everything was calm and still.

  “Are we in . . . a time hollow now?” Jonah asked. It was a struggle, but he managed to get all the words out, to make his unreliable voice box sound out each syllable.

  But it really is my voice again, he thought. My thirteen-year-old voice, squeaks and all.

  He felt a rush of fondness for his own voice, for being thirteen.

  “He’s awake!” someone squealed beside him. “He’s awake, he’s awake, he’s awake!”

  Katherine, of course. Jonah felt a rush of fondness for her as well, for the way she always stuck by his side, no matter what. At the moment, Jonah didn’t even mind that she seemed to want to turn his
opening his eyes into a reason to make up a cheerleading chant. Jonah blinked, and her face swam into focus—her almost-twelve-year-old face, so familiar, even with a bruise across the right cheekbone and a tangled strand of blond hair hanging down into her eyes.

  We’re both the right ages again, Jonah thought in relief. That proved that everything had worked out, didn’t it?

  Then Jonah remembered that Hodge had wanted all the kids to be their right ages again too.

  “I’ve been thinking and thinking about how we’re going to explain my broken arm and all your wounds to Mom and Dad, and . . . ,” Katherine began.

  Jonah blinked hard, maybe missing some of what she was saying.

  “Broken . . . arm?” he said, latching onto the words that seemed the most understandable.

  Katherine waved something pink above his face. A cast. A cast encasing her right arm, from her elbow to her wrist.

  “It was just the tiniest crack in the bone,” she said, “That’s why it didn’t hurt too bad, except for right after I hit the floor.”

  She means when the guards pushed us into the cellar, back at the beginning, before we turned invisible, Jonah thought. So Katherine must have had a broken arm the whole rest of the time we were in 1918, and she didn’t say a thing about it after . . . after being in the garden with Chip . . .

  Jonah’s brain was so fuzzy. Maybe she’d complained and complained and he just didn’t remember it?

  Katherine was still talking.

  “But the broken arm is no big deal. It’s really your bullet wounds we have to worry about—”

  “Bullet,” Jonah repeated numbly. “Did you say . . . bullet wounds? Was . . . was I shot?”

  Katherine whirled around to talk to someone just outside Jonah’s range of vision.

  “JB, he doesn’t remember anything!” she complained.

  “Yes, I do,” Jonah protested, but he probably didn’t sound very convincing, because he was also scrunching up his face—ouch, why does that hurt?—and trying to figure out what he actually did remember.

  Me and Katherine in the cellar . . . And then me and Katherine and all the Romanovs and . . .

  Now JB hovered over Jonah.

  “Shh, Jonah, you just need to lie still and rest for now. Take it easy,” he told him.

  Jonah ignored this.

  “You came and rescued us,” Jonah muttered, still squinting in confusion. “If I have bullet wounds . . . why didn’t you come and rescue us before I got shot?”

  JB sighed. Jonah realized that the man looked just as battered as Katherine, with a streak of dirt across his face and some sort of powdery dust or ash making his brown hair look gray.

  “Believe me, I wish I could have,” JB said, shaking his head. “But I didn’t even know you were in 1918 until you made the entire Romanov family invisible. That set off alerts at time headquarters, and we rushed in to rescue you as soon as we could. But 1918 is a very damaged year, and Gary and Hodge made it worse with their clumsy attempts to cover up their crime. So we couldn’t get in for five minutes. Five whole minutes of you lying in that shooting gallery . . .”

  Jonah shivered and was a little surprised that this motion didn’t hurt.

  They’ve probably numbed me, wherever the bullets actually hit, he thought.

  He didn’t want to think about bullets being lodged in his own body. He let his brain skip to another question.

  “So if we’d just gone wild and crazy and made the Romanovs invisible earlier in the day, you would have rescued us then?” he asked.

  “No,” JB said solemnly. “If you’d gone wild and crazy and made the Romanovs invisible earlier in the day, that would have altered history so completely that time itself would have collapsed.”

  “Quit saying things like that!” Katherine complained. “You’re just trying to scare us.”

  She sounded as defiant as ever, but behind the bruises her face had gone pale. Evidently this was news to her, too.

  “Yes,” JB said, “I am trying to scare you. Because that is what would have happened. And because, no matter how much I’ve tried to protect you, the two of you keep getting pulled back into the past.”

  “Hey, it’s not our fault!” Jonah said. “Believe me, we didn’t ask Gavin to kidnap us! I didn’t get up this morning—I mean, the last morning I spent in the twenty-first century—and think, ‘Okay, I feel like getting shot today! How about I go back to 1918 and see what it feels like to hang out around a bunch of trigger-happy Russians?’ ”

  “It’s like you’re blaming us for not being able to fight our own fate,” Katherine protested.

  Jonah was surprised that she had used that word “fate.” Was Katherine thinking about destiny and free choice every bit as much as he was?

  “I’m not blaming you,” JB said in an even tone. “I’m blaming Gary and Hodge for putting their own greed ahead of everything else. I’m blaming them for being so eager to escape time prison and continue their nefarious business that they put the fate of the entire space-time continuum in the hands of thirteen-year-olds.”

  “I’m only eleven,” Katherine muttered, which was another surprise, because normally she would have happily accepted credit for being older than she actually was. “That is, when I’m not even younger. . . . How far back did I go when we un-aged going through time? Was I five? Six?”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” JB asked despairingly. “The thought of a five- or six-year-old changing the world?”

  Jonah started trying to sit up, but decided that that would put him at too much risk for fainting. And that wouldn’t help him make his point.

  “But everything turned out okay, right?” he asked. “Sure, we were little kids for a while, but we’re the right ages now. And maybe I have a few bullet wounds, but obviously they’re not that bad, are they?”

  He hoped JB and Katherine couldn’t tell that he felt like fainting just at the thought of bullet wounds. He forced himself to go on.

  “And you’ve probably got me in quarantine or something and Katherine was the only one you let in because she wouldn’t shut up about it, but everyone else is okay, aren’t they?” he asked. “Chip and Daniella and Gavin and . . .”

  His voice faltered, because JB was staring back at him with such an odd expression on his face.

  “Aren’t they okay?” Jonah repeated.

  “You and Katherine will be fine,” JB said. “Are fine, I mean, though as Katherine pointed out, we’re going to have to handle the issue of explaining your bullet wounds to your parents very, very carefully. But the others . . .”

  “You told me you were taking care of them!” Katherine shrieked. “You told me not to focus on anyone but Jonah for right now. Aren’t they okay? Chip? Isn’t Chip okay? Where is he?”

  She grabbed JB’s shirt, and at first Jonah thought she was actually going to try to start hitting him until he told her about Chip. But she was actually reaching into JB’s shirt pocket, as if desperate to find his Elucidator.

  “Take us to Chip!” she cried. “Let us see for ourselves—”

  JB pulled back.

  “I promise, I’ll tell you exactly what’s going on,” he said. “But you can’t do anything rash. I have my Elucidator set on triple security codes, so don’t think for a minute that you can grab it away from me and do whatever you want.”

  “Tell!” Katherine exploded.

  JB pursed his lips grimly.

  “Chip . . . ,” he began slowly. “Chip and the others are still back in 1918. Some things are still up in the air, but . . . I have to prepare you for the possibility that—”

  “That what?” Jonah asked, just as impatient as his sister.

  JB looked down, his voice barely a whisper.

  “It may turn out that you two were the only ones we could rescue.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  “What? You left everyone else behind? That isn’t even Chip’s native time!” Katherine wailed. “Go back and get him! And Gavin and Daniella a
nd—”

  “It’s not that simple,” JB said miserably.

  Katherine gaped at him.

  “But you’re just sitting here doing nothing?” she asked. She’d stopped trying to search for JB’s Elucidator, but now she began reaching toward Jonah instead. “Where’s the dumbed-down Elucidator, then? Hand it to me, Jonah, and I’ll go back and rescue everyone.”

  “That Elucidator will only take you on a one-way trip, remember?” JB reminded her. “Besides, the ‘dumbed-down’ Elucidator, as you call it, was taken away as evidence. Stop trying to manhandle Jonah.”

  Katherine dropped her hands to her side.

  “You’re not even trying,” she moaned.

  “Yes, we are,” JB said quietly. “The entire agency called an emergency session of our top officials. They’ll consider every possibility and—”

  “They called a meeting?” Jonah repeated in disbelief. “Chip and the others are in a tiny room with bullets flying everywhere, and all your agency did was call a meeting? Why didn’t you just grab them when you grabbed me and Katherine?”

  JB closed his eyes momentarily and drew in a deep breath, as if trying to gather the strength to answer Jonah’s question. He exhaled and stared back at Jonah.

  “We had thirty seconds,” JB said. “Just thirty seconds to get in and get out, because all the time around that moment was already so damaged. Gary and Hodge really messed things up, flipping you in and out of time so quickly to readjust your ages, to try to hide what they’d done.”

  “Is that what happened during the time I blacked out?” Jonah asked.

  “You all blacked out, temporarily,” JB said grimly. “Not the safest way to travel through time. And not the safest way to arrive back in the middle of a massacre. . . .”

  He looked like he could hardly bear to talk about it.

  “And anyhow, how much do you know about 1918?” he asked. “The whole world was changing then—you had all the fallout from World War One and the Russian Revolution, the Spanish flu epidemic . . . Did you know that July 17, 1918, was also the day the Carpathia was torpedoed and sank?”