Risked

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Jonah had never heard of the Carpathia.

  “But in thirty seconds—,” he began.

  “In thirty seconds I had just enough time to grab you and Katherine and get out,” JB said. “We knew you’d been shot, so we had to get you. I was just lucky that Katherine was right beside you, so I could grab her, too. I only have two hands.”

  Jonah didn’t want to think about how much worse he’d feel if Katherine had been left behind too.

  “So why didn’t six or seven other time agents go in with you so there’d be twelve or fourteen more hands? Why didn’t you send enough people to save everyone?” Katherine argued.

  JB sighed.

  “That would have caused so much additional damage that none of us would have escaped,” JB said. “There were some in the agency who didn’t even think it was safe for me to go. I’m, uh, probably facing a reprimand as it is, for not waiting to follow proper protocol before going in.”

  “But waiting, having a meeting, when there are bullets flying—” Jonah was so angry he couldn’t get the words out.

  “The meeting’s not happening in the same time frame as the flying bullets, remember?” JB said. “Look, does this make you feel any better?”

  He pulled out his Elucidator, which looked like the great-great-great-grandson of the most up-to-date iPhone Jonah had ever seen. JB seemed to be typing in password after password, and then he projected an image onto the wall. It showed the cellar room JB had rescued Jonah and Katherine from, evidently only a split second after they’d all left. Amid the clouds of smoke from all the gunfire, Jonah could barely make out the crystalline figures of his friends and the others. Probably the Elucidator’s viewpoint was enhanced somehow, and he would be able to see nothing but smoke if he were actually back in the room. But he could tell that Leonid and Maria had baffled expressions on their faces, gazing down at the floor where Jonah and Katherine had been lying. Gavin and Daniella were still standing by the lineup of guards in the doorway, trying to get them to stop shooting. Chip had apparently just stood up, seemingly ready to go help Gavin and Daniella.

  Beyond them, the room was in chaos. The tsar was slumped to the floor and Dr. Botkin was bent over him, maybe trying to shield him from the guards’ guns. The tsarina was screaming and reaching toward the tsar, but it looked like she had already been hit too. Olga and Tatiana were clustered beside her, motionless with horror and shock. Behind them the maid, the footman, and the cook were equally motionless, but it looked like they had all been writhing on the floor in agony only a moment earlier.

  Motionless . . . , Jonah thought.

  “You froze time again?” he asked JB.

  “No,” JB said, shaking his head. “That would have damaged time too. I’m just showing you the next moment after we left that isn’t damaged time. Technically speaking, from our perspective, that’s the first moment that wouldn’t be off-limits to change.”

  “So change it!” Katherine insisted.

  JB ignored her and typed in another command on his Elucidator. A second image appeared on the wall beside the first. This was like watching video rather than looking at a photograph: It was some kind of assembly or legislative body, deliberating in a huge meeting room.

  The UN, maybe, Jonah thought, because there were people with all different skin colors and a variety of different clothing.

  Then he noticed that everyone in that room was staring toward and pointing at and talking about a huge image on their wall: the same image of the cellar room that JB had called up for Jonah and Katherine to see.

  “They’re meeting in a time hollow,” JB said. “They could talk for days or months or years about what to do in 1918, and meanwhile not another instant would pass in that cellar room. So there is time for them to consider every possibility, every ramification. They’re not, I don’t know, sipping coffee and eating doughnuts and waiting for a colleague to second their motions, while back in the cellar someone else is dying with each minute that goes by.”

  Looking at the two scenes—one moving forward, one still and stopped and waiting—Jonah understood what JB was trying to say. But somehow it didn’t make him feel any better. Some of the delegates in the conference room did indeed seem to be sipping coffee and eating doughnuts—or at least some futuristic version of doughnuts that looked like they might have been made out of bean sprouts.

  Okay, so I get it that they have all the time in the world to eat and drink and talk and talk and talk and try to come to the best decision, Jonah thought. But how can they when they’re watching all those people in front of them on the verge of death? How can they stand not acting instantly?

  Katherine pointed toward the image of the huge meeting.

  “That’s where all the decisions are being made?” she asked. “That’s where they’re meeting right now?”

  JB nodded.

  “To the extent that anything can be said to happen ‘right now’ in a time hollow . . . ,” he began.

  Katherine waved away that distinction.

  “Then take us there,” she said. “Let us talk to them.”

  “Yeah!” Jonah agreed.

  JB looked closely at both of them, narrowing his eyes, clearly thinking hard.

  “All right,” he finally said. “Fine.”

  The bright, artificial room around them disappeared.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  In the next moment Jonah felt such an intense burst of pain he couldn’t resist screaming.

  “Sorry, Jonah, forgot to warn you that coming out of that time hollow you’d get hit with all the pain from your injuries,” JB said, patting Jonah’s back. “But we’ll be in the other time hollow in nothing flat. . . .”

  And then they were, and Jonah felt much better.

  The three of them landed in the back of the huge assembly room, in chairs that might as well have been pulled out from the table and arranged just for them.

  Spectators’ seats, Jonah thought. Just for watching.

  But almost as soon as they landed, JB was already standing up and addressing the crowd.

  “The children,” he said, “would like to speak.”

  Um, now, you mean? Jonah thought. If everyone else gets all the time in the world to think and talk and everything, shouldn’t we get a few moments to figure out what we actually want to say?

  Katherine didn’t seem to need that.

  “Thanks,” she said, bouncing up out of her chair.

  She walked toward the front of the room so she was positioned right in front of the image of the cellar. She pointed up at it.

  “How can you not want to help those people?” she asked. She started gesturing at each individual person. “That’s Chip Winston right there, who survived the 1480s and is only in 1918 because he was kidnapped a second time. It wouldn’t be fair to him to just let him die there!” She moved her hand slightly to the right. “That’s Daniella McCarthy, who was originally Anastasia Romanov—”

  “Romanova,” a snooty-looking woman in the front row corrected her. “With Russian names at that point in time, when it’s a female, you add an a at the end.”

  “Okay, sorry. Whatever,” Katherine said, rolling her eyes. “That doesn’t matter that much right now, does it? What I started to say was, Daniella didn’t even know about her original identity until she was in 1918. But wow, was she brave! Doesn’t she deserve a chance to live out the rest of her life in the twenty-first century? Doesn’t her adoptive family deserve a chance to get her back? And—”

  “Little girl,” someone interrupted in an annoyed tone. It was a bearded man standing to the side. “You’re wasting our time. We’re the experts. I’ll warrant that every single one of us in this room already knows more about the people in the Ipatiev House at that moment than you ever will.”

  Ipatiev House? Jonah thought. Is that the actual name of the house where the Romanovs were staying? Is beard guy just calling it that to make Katherine and me feel ignorant?

  “And, sure,” the bearded man contin
ued, “in an ideal world, if everything were sunbeams and rainbows and butterflies, of course we’d save everyone we could. The past would be completely empty, because how could we bear to keep anyone from enjoying the best life they could possibly have?”

  “But—,” Katherine began.

  The bearded man cut her off.

  “This is reality,” he said. “Every action has consequences. Let me just show you . . . oh, I don’t know. How about scenario three thousand four hundred eighty-two? Roll it, Humphrey.”

  Whoever was controlling the image at the front of the room—Humphrey?—must have followed the order, because suddenly the word “simulation” appeared across the image, and the action began to move forward. A shadowy figure appeared next to Gavin and Daniella and clasped a hand over each of their mouths. Then the figure and both kids vanished.

  “Looked fine to me,” Katherine said.

  “Of course,” the bearded man said sarcastically. “Now zoom in and slo-mo it.”

  The scene replayed, but this time the view was changed so that the focus was on Gavin’s right elbow. Right when the shadowy figure put his hand over Gavin’s face, Gavin’s elbow jolted out, knocking the barrel of the nearest gun sideways. In excruciatingly slow motion, the gun went off, sending a bullet up and then into the neck of a nearby guard. The image froze on that guard’s anguished face.

  “So,” the bearded man said, “we kill this man in 1918—and, believe me, that is a fatal wound—and this is what happens during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963.”

  Jonah saw a quick flash of people dying: soldiers, men in suits, women in silly-looking netted hats, children sitting at school desks, hunched over books about kids named Dick, Jane, and Sally. Hundreds of people died before Jonah’s eyes—no, thousands. Millions.

  The word “simulation” stamped across all those deaths didn’t exactly make Jonah feel any better.

  “That’s only one scenario,” Katherine said, and Jonah could tell that she was trying to hide the tremble in her voice. “One out of—what was that number? Three thousand something? I bet, from that many possibilities, there’s got to be at least one or two where nothing bad happens.”

  “The problem is, in the original setup, you just can’t tell for sure what is going to lead to disaster and what is going to be fine,” a kinder-looking man explained from the opposite side of the room. “Things were so dicey in 1918 that everything’s a huge risk. We’d have to have a very experienced time agent on the ground, guiding the events. We’ve run the projections thousands of ways, and there’s just too much of a disruption, because of the time it would take any of us to get Chip and the others to see us and trust us and leave with us. . . .”

  “Then what if you just send Jonah and me back?” Katherine asked.

  “What? You think children can fix this problem?” the bearded, sarcastic man exploded.

  Jonah heard others gasping and exclaiming, but the noise seemed to come from far away. He was mostly just aware of his own heart, pounding dangerously hard. He had to press his hand against his head just to keep himself sitting up.

  Hope nobody’s looking at me, he thought. Hope they’re all just listening to Katherine.

  She was still arguing. Jonah forced himself to focus on her words.

  “Chip and Daniella and Gavin already trust us,” she was saying. “And Leonid and Maria at least met us already, and they could tell the rest of the Romanovs—”

  “You want to see what happens if we send you and your brother?” This was the bearded man again. He seemed to have dialed up his sarcasm to its highest level. “Fine. Go sit down and we’ll set up the projection.”

  Jonah hoped that he was the only one who could see that Katherine was shaking as she returned to the chair between Jonah and JB.

  Or maybe the problem was that Jonah’s vision was still a little messed up?

  “Katherine,” he whispered to his sister. “I’m not sure that I—”

  “Shh. It’s starting,” Katherine whispered back.

  This time the simulation in front of them showed Jonah and Katherine suddenly appearing beside Gavin and Daniella. The Jonah figure collapsed to the floor as soon as he landed, and a pool of red blood circled his body. The Katherine figure turned and began screaming. Just at that sound—even though Jonah and Katherine were invisible, even though they were hidden in the smoke anyway—the guards pointed their guns in their direction and began shooting.

  The image froze and faded into black.

  “Surely you don’t want to see more,” the bearded man said.

  “Maybe you should show us a projection where you don’t put me in the path of a bullet in the first second,” Jonah said angrily.

  He felt dizzy and sick to his stomach. It really wouldn’t help his argument if he fainted or threw up right now.

  “My dear boy,” the bearded man said, as if he were talking down to a toddler. “We stopped that before any bullets struck you. All that blood? That’s just from the injuries you already have, reopened by the strain of time travel.”

  The injuries I already have are that bad? Jonah thought. And then he couldn’t focus on anything anymore, because he was too busy telling himself, Don’t vomit. Don’t faint. Please, don’t let them see how awful I feel. . . .

  “Then wait until Jonah heals,” Katherine argued.

  “He can’t heal as long as he’s in this time hollow,” the bearded man answered. “He’d have to go back into regular time for that. And none of us can leave this time hollow until we have a decision.”

  Jonah was ashamed of the relief that flowed through him. But Katherine scraped back her chair and stood up and kept arguing.

  “All right then,” she said. “Show what happens if you send me all by myself.”

  Jonah peered at his sister in dismay.

  No, no . . . That wouldn’t be safe. . . .

  He tried to catch Katherine’s eye, to get her to understand without him having to say anything. But she had her chin held high and all her attention focused on staring defiantly at the bearded man.

  “Very well,” the bearded man said. “Humphrey?”

  He looked up, possibly toward someone at a control panel at the back of the room. Jonah turned around just in time to see a young woman shaking her head at the bearded man.

  “No—you know what? Forget that,” the bearded man said. “That would just be ridiculous. Young lady, of course we appreciate your concern, but truly, you must leave this matter to the grown-ups. I don’t even know why JB brought the two of you here.”

  Jonah noticed that all the grown-ups in the room, including JB, instantly dug into their pockets and pulled out Elucidators. Even as the life-size frozen image of the 1918 cellar reappeared at the front of the room, all the grown-ups peered intently down at their miniature screens. JB seemed to have to poke at his Elucidator a little longer than the others—turning off the triple security coding? Jonah wondered. JB didn’t seem to have time to turn the security back on, because mere seconds later he and all the other adults were looking back up, their expressions a mixture of thoughtfulness and worry and . . .

  Hope? Jonah thought. Is there any reason why any of them should be feeling hope right now?

  What was going on?

  “My apologies,” JB said, standing up to address the bearded man. “Of course there’s no reason to run a projection with just Katherine going. It’d be too dangerous. She’d have to carry a modern, fully functioning Elucidator, and in such a dicey situation, that’s directly prohibited by about fifty different regulations. And she’d have to leave it on voice-command mode—again, totally forbidden under the circumstances. And she’d have to get in and out in the thirty seconds before damaged time resumes. And of course she’d have to be prepared for the possibility that her presence would short out some of our controls, and the likely result would be that all the Romanovs would become visible once more. . . .”

  “I’m glad you’re actually being sensible for once,” the bearded man
said.

  Jonah turned to glare at JB—what a traitor! Jonah didn’t want Katherine going back to 1918 by herself either, but he hated how all the time agents acted like he and Katherine were incompetent just because they were kids.

  JB wasn’t looking toward Jonah, so the glare was pointless. JB seemed to be concentrating very hard on taking his seat again, aligning the legs of the chair very precisely with the table in front of him. Evidently this was a harder process than JB had expected, because he moved the chair, gave a frustrated sigh, and then put his Elucidator down on the table so he could use both hands to pull the chair into place.

  As soon as JB let go of the Elucidator, Katherine snatched it up.

  “Voice commands!” she screamed. “Take me back to 1918! Take me there!”

  She pointed to the frozen image at the front of the room.

  A split second later Katherine was gone.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Instantly Katherine reappeared in the scene at the front of the room.

  “No!” Jonah screamed.

  He frantically looked around, desperate to find somebody else’s Elucidator so he could go rescue his sister. But the nearest Elucidator had just disappeared into an old man’s pocket three seats away.

  In his current condition, it would take Jonah more than thirty seconds just to get over to that old man.

  He whipped his head back to the scene at the front of the room.

  As far as Jonah could tell, no bullets had hit Katherine yet.

  “If you want to live, grab on to me!” Katherine screamed.

  Then she dived down to the floor, flattening her body against the wood planks. Chip and Leonid hit the floor beside her, each of them clutching Katherine’s shirt. It took Jonah a moment to realize that Chip had pulled Daniella along with him, and that Leonid had a grip on Maria’s hand.

  Numbers appeared at the bottom of the projected scene: a countdown.

  18 . . .

  17 . . .