Sent

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  SENT

  ALSO BY MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX

  THE MISSING SERIES

  Found

  THE SHADOW CHILDREN SERIES

  Among the Hidden

  Among the Impostors

  Among the Betrayed

  Among the Barons

  Among the Brave

  Among the Enemy

  Among the Free

  The Girl with 500 Middle Names

  Because of Anya

  Say What?

  Dexter the Tough

  Running Out of Time

  The House on the Gulf

  Double Identity

  Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey

  Leaving Fishers

  Just Ella

  Turnabout

  Takeoffs and Landings

  Escape from Memory

  Uprising

  Palace of Mirrors

  SENT

  MARGARET PETERSON

  HADDIX

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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  Book design by Drew Willis

  The text for this book is set in Weiss.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Haddix, Margaret Peterson.

  Sent / Margaret Peterson Haddix—1st ed.

  p. cm—(The missing; bk. 2)

  Summary: Jonah, Katherine, Chip, and Alex suddenly find themselves in 1483 at the Tower of London, where they discover that Chip and Alex are Prince Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, imprisoned by their uncle, King Richard III, but trying to repair history without knowing what is supposed to happen proves challenging. Author’s note includes historical facts about the princes and king.

  ISBN 978-1-4169-5422-4

  ISBN 978-1-4169-9644-6 (eBook)

  [1. Space and time—Fiction. 2. Edward V, King of England, 1470–1483—Fiction.

  3. Richard, Duke of York, 1472–1483—Fiction. 4. Richard III, King of England, 1452–1485—Fiction.

  5. Great Britain—History—Richard III, 1483–1485—Fiction. 6. Science fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.H1164Sen 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008011552

  For Todd, Tyler, and Austin

  PROLOGUE

  Jonah was falling, tumbling over and over, down and down, through nothingness and absence and void.

  “Noooo …,” JB’s voice echoed around him, even though JB himself had vanished. So had the other adults. So had the other kids. So had everyone and everything familiar.

  Except Chip and Katherine.

  Jonah pressed in closer to his friend and his sister. Both he and Katherine had linked their arms through Chip’s at the very last minute, just as Chip was being sent away. Jonah wished he could hold on with his hands—hold on as tightly as possible—but his hands were full. In his left hand Jonah held a Taser. In his right hand he held the Elucidator.

  Jonah wasn’t even sure what the Elucidator was, but all the grown-ups had acted like it was important. There hadn’t exactly been time to ask for a tutorial, not that JB or Gary or Hodge would have explained anyway. What were they going to say? “Now, this button here, if you press it, you’ll beat us. You’ll win.”

  Yeah, right.

  Still, even without any explanations Jonah had managed to disarm the grown-ups. He’d ended up with all the weapons. He’d foiled Gary and Hodge’s greedy baby-smuggling scheme. He’d, well, at least … interrupted JB’s plan.

  Interrupting wasn’t the same as winning.

  “Jonah, there’s been a mistake,” JB said. His voice was coming from the Elucidator, loud and clear and deeply troubled. “You and Katherine have no business going into the fifteenth century with Chip and Alex. You’re not allowed. You could cause even more damage. And you can’t take the Elucidator or the Taser there—”

  “You should have thought of that before you zapped Chip,” Jonah said. “You should have known that we’d stick together.”

  It was a miracle of teenage defiance that Jonah’s voice could come out sounding so bold and confident. When he’d opened his mouth, it’d been a toss-up what he was going to say. He might have even whimpered, “I want my mommy! I want my daddy! I want to go home!”

  He still might. This nothingness was frightening. And—fifteenth century? Had JB really said “fifteenth”? Was that what they were falling toward?

  Jonah couldn’t think of a single thing that he knew about the fifteenth century. At the moment, he couldn’t even remember how the whole century-numbering thing worked. Was the fifteenth century the 1400s or the 1600s?

  Jonah probably could have figured that one out, if he’d been able to calm down enough to concentrate. But he was distracted by a hand suddenly clutching his shoulder.

  Katherine’s hand.

  Katherine was a sixth grader, just a year behind Jonah and Chip. Since hitting middle school, she’d become one of those stupid giggly girls who talked about hair and makeup and cheerleading tryouts. But Jonah could remember earlier, younger versions of Katherine, even the cute (though he’d never admit it), sweet (not even on pain of death), adoring little sister who would grab his hand when she was scared and blink up at him and whisper trustingly, “You’ll protect me, won’t you, Jonah?”

  Jonah would never in a million years let Katherine do that now. But her hand on his shoulder made him feel like the protective big brother again. If he was frightened, she must be terrified out of her wits.

  “Look, I’ll tell you what to do so you and Katherine can come back,” JB was saying, his voice strained.

  Katherine tightened her grip on Jonah’s shoulder, pulling him closer so that, with Chip, they formed a circle. In the near darkness around them he could barely see her face, but her features seemed to be twisted into a distorted expression. Was she crying? She turned her head—no, she was shaking her head, her jaw jutting out stubbornly. She wasn’t crying. She was mad. Maybe even too mad to speak.

  “No,” Jonah told JB, and somehow his voice came out sounding every bit as fierce as Katherine looked. “Tell us what to do so we can all come back.” Jonah remembered that it wasn’t just the three of them floating through this nothingness. Chip was actually the second kid that JB had tried to zap back into the past. Another boy, Alex, had disappeared first. “Even Alex,” Jonah added.

  The dimness around them was easing a bit. They seemed to be falling toward light. Now Jonah could see Chip’s face clearly, the gratitude in his expression. Jonah felt like he could practically read Chip’s mind: Chip was thinking how much worse it would be
to tumble through this nothingness alone.

  “Jonah,” JB protested. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Certain things have been set in motion. Chip and Alex have to go to the fifteenth century.”

  “Then, Katherine and I are going too,” Jonah said. He didn’t know how it was possible, but he could feel time flowing past him, scrolling backward. He felt like he had only a few more seconds left to convince JB. “What if … what if we could fix the fifteenth century? Make everything right again? Then couldn’t Alex and Chip come back to the twenty-first century with us?”

  Silence.

  Jonah had nervous tremors in his stomach. The hand holding the Elucidator was shaking. He wasn’t even sure what he was asking for. But he couldn’t stop now.

  “You have to let us try,” Jonah argued. “Let us try to save Alex and Chip and time. Or else …” He had to come up with a good threat. Or else what? Oh. “Or else we’ll do our best to mess up time even worse than Hodge and Gary did.”

  The silence from the Elucidator continued. Jonah worried that they’d floated out of range, or that the battery had stopped working, just like a defective cell phone.

  Then JB’s voice came through again, faint but distinct.

  “All right,” he said wearily. “I’ll let you try.”

  ONE

  It was a rough landing. Lights streamed past Jonah’s face, an unbearable glare. Some force that had to be more than just gravity tugged on him, threatening to pull him apart from Chip and Katherine, from the Elucidator and the Taser, from his own self. The image that burned in his mind was of his body being split into individual cells, individual atoms. And then that image broke apart too, and he couldn’t think, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. He could only feel time passing through him, time flipping back on itself, time pressing down, down, down. …

  Then it was over. He lay in darkness, gasping for air. Dimly he heard JB’s voice say, “Welcome to the fifteenth century. Good luck.” But he couldn’t quite make sense of the words. It was like hearing something underwater, sounds from another world.

  “You’re hiding, aren’t you? Staying out of sight?” It was JB’s voice again, hissing and anxious. “You have to stay out of sight.”

  “Darkness,” Jonah mumbled. “Safe.”

  His tongue felt too thick to speak with. Or maybe it was too thin—too insubstantial. He didn’t feel quite real.

  There was movement beside him. Someone sitting up.

  “You’d like to keep us in the dark, wouldn’t you?” Chip accused. “You didn’t tell us anything we’d need to know to survive in the fifteenth century.”

  Whoa. How could Chip manage to sound so normal at a time like this? And so angry (which was pretty much normal for Chip)? Wasn’t his head spinning too? Wasn’t his vision slipping in and out of focus? Didn’t he feel like he might throw up if he had to do anything more strenuous than breathe?

  “You didn’t even tell us who we’re supposed to be,” Chip continued.

  Distantly, as if he was trying to retrieve a memory from centuries ago—no, he corrected himself, centuries ahead—Jonah puzzled over what Chip meant. Who we’re supposed to be … Oh, yeah. The whole reason they were in this mess was that a group of people from the future had gone through history plucking out endangered children. This would have been very noble and kind, except that they began carrying off famous kids, kids whose disappearances were noticed. JB, who seemed to oppose any tampering with history, was convinced that all of time was on the verge of collapse because of these rescues. He and his cohorts had managed to freeze the effects of the rescues—the “ripples,” as they called them—and gone after the missing children. There’d been a battle, and thirty-six kids from history had crash-landed at the very end of the twentieth century.

  Chip was one of those kids.

  So was Jonah.

  For the past thirteen years, though, they’d known nothing about their true identities. They’d been adopted by ordinary American families and grown up in ordinary American suburbs, playing video games and soccer, trading Pokémon cards, shooting hoops in their driveways. They had no way of knowing that their ordinary lives were ordinary only because they were in Damaged Time—time itself, trying to heal, had kept both sides of the battling time travelers out.

  But Damaged Time had ended. And JB and his enemies, Gary and Hodge, immediately swooped in, each side eager to finish what they’d started.

  And that, boys and girls, is how I came to be lying in the dark in the fifteenth century, Jonah thought, his mind working a little better now. That “boys and girls” line was imitating someone, someone on TV probably.

  Someone who wouldn’t be born for another five hundred years.

  A wave of nausea flowed over Jonah. He wasn’t sure if it was because it’d just sunk in that he was hundreds of years out of place, or if it was because his senses were working better now and he’d just realized that the fifteenth century reeked. A smell of mold and decay and—what was that, rotting meat?—surrounded him. And his nose brought him the first fact he was sure of about the fifteenth century: Whatever else was happening then, no one had modern flush toilets yet.

  “Where is that Elucidator?” Chip demanded. He was feeling around on the floor now. “JB, you’ve got to tell me the truth. Who am I?”

  “Well, it’s kind of a delicate situation,” JB hedged. “We shouldn’t be talking at all right now, until you’re sure that no one else can hear us. …”

  His voice trailed off to just a whisper, which Jonah could barely hear. Why was Jonah having so many problems? He’d been holding the Elucidator—he ought to be able to tell Chip where it was. But his hands felt too numb to be sure if he was still clutching anything or not.

  Meanwhile, Chip seemed perfectly capable of sliding his hands all around, groping all along the stones of the floor. He nudged first Jonah, then, apparently, Katherine. Jonah could hear her moaning softly, as if she felt every bit as miserable as Jonah did.

  “So help me, JB. If you don’t tell me who I am, right now,” Chip fumed, “I’ll scream so loud that people will hear me in two centuries!”

  “No, don’t,” JB begged. “I’ll tell you. Just be quiet. You’re … you’re …”

  “Yes?” Chip said, his voice rising threateningly.

  “It’s hard to pinpoint the date, exactly, since the three of you took the Elucidator, and that may have thrown some things off, but I think it’s probably safe to say, given when you should have landed, that you’re … um …”

  “Tell me!”

  “I think, right now, you’re the king of England.”

  TWO

  “The king?” Chip repeated. “The king? Of England?”

  “Shh,” JB shushed him. “Keep your voice down, Chip. I mean, Edward. That’s your real name—Edward the Fifth. I think, technically, at that point in history, the title was King of England and France. That wasn’t precisely accurate, but—”

  “I’m the king!” Chip marveled.

  It was far too dark to see Chip’s face, not that Jonah’s eyes were working very well anyhow. But just from his voice Jonah could tell that Chip was grinning ear to ear.

  “All those times my dad told me I was dumb and stupid and worthless and … and—I’m really the king of England? And France?” Chip laughed. “That’s great!”

  Chip’s glee reminded Jonah of something. Someone crowing about being king … No. About wanting to be king. Simba in the Lion King movie, singing “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.”

  Great, Jonah thought. My mind’s working well enough that I can remember Disney movies. Now I’m as smart as the average three-year-old.

  But he couldn’t remember everything about The Lion King. There was something wrong with Simba singing that song, some twist the little lion cub hadn’t grasped … something like not understanding that for him to be king, his father had to die.

  “Uh, Chip …,” Jonah started to say, but he couldn’t get the rest of the thought out. Somebody
in the movie killed Simba’s father, didn’t they? And tried to kill Simba, too?

  What if it wasn’t such a great thing to be king?

  Before Jonah could get his brain and mouth to work together to form any sort of warning for Chip, another voice spoke out in the darkness.

  “So if he’s the king, who am I?”

  By squinting, Jonah could just barely make out the shape of another boy, sitting against the stone wall. Alex, he realized. The other boy who’d been kidnapped from the fifteenth century. The other kid JB had sent back to the past.

  “You’re his younger brother. Prince Richard,” JB said.

  Alex seemed to be considering this.

  “One of those ‘heir and a spare’ deals, huh?” he asked.

  “You could say that,” JB said, sounding reluctant.

  “So what happens to us?” Alex asked. “Happened, I mean—the first time around?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” JB said. “For you it hasn’t happened yet.”

  Katherine moaned again.

  “Can you all just … stop talking?” she mumbled. “Hurts …”

  With an effort that seemed practically superhuman, Jonah managed to prop himself up on his arms. They trembled horribly.

  “Katherine?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” Katherine groaned. “I think I’m going to die.”

  “Timesickness,” JB diagnosed, his voice slightly smug. “You don’t die from it, but like seasickness or airsickness, sometimes you want to.”

  “Oh … my … gosh,” Katherine moaned. “Is this what it felt like all the time for you guys in the twenty-first century? Being out of place? In the wrong time period?”

  Jonah thought about that. He didn’t know who he was supposed to be in history—the day he’d found out that he had another identity, there’d been a lot of fighting and screaming and scrambling desperately to get the upper hand. It hadn’t exactly been a good time for absorbing life-changing news and thinking through the ramifications and asking good follow-up questions. But if he really did belong in another time, did that mean practically his entire life had been, well … wrong?