They reached the top of the stairs and tiptoed into a sparsely furnished room. A blond woman in an elegant black dress and five blond girls—also in black—were all leaning against a bed, their faces buried in the comforter.
All of them were sobbing.
“Uh, Chip?” Jonah whispered. “If that’s your mom and sisters, I think they already know you’re supposedly dead.”
The sobbing was especially hard to watch and listen to because Jonah could see the tracers of the queen and her daughters, the way they would have been if nobody had interfered with time. The tracer queen was seated regally on the bed, silently smiling, laughing, and talking. The tracers of the five girls, who all looked so much like Chip and Alex, were seated beside their mother. One of them flipped a cascade of blond curls over her shoulder and giggled silently.
Wait a minute, Jonah thought. The tracer queen and princesses shouldn’t look so happy. The tracers should be the ones crying. Wouldn’t they be certain that Chip and Alex are dead? Shouldn’t the queen and princesses now, after the tampering, still have some hope that Chip and Alex are okay?
He was confusing himself, getting mixed up between how things should be with and without the tampering.
I’d think a lot more clearly if I had some pizza or spaghetti or lasagna in my stomach, he thought grumpily.
Katherine was tapping him on the shoulder, very annoyingly.
“L-l-look,” she stammered, pointing to the opposite side of the room from the sobbing queen and princesses and their eerily happy tracers.
Jonah turned, ready to tell Katherine not to bug him when he was hungry.
But turning, he saw what Katherine was pointing at.
Two chairs sat on the opposite side of the room from the bed. And two more glowing tracers sat in the chairs, laughing just as uproariously as the tracers of the princesses and queen.
One of the tracers was Alex’s. The other was Chip’s.
Even in the original version of time the prince and the former king had survived.
TWENTY-TWO
“What?” Jonah exploded, loudly enough that the queen stopped sobbing for a moment, lifted her head, and looked around, a mystified expression on her face. Then, seeing nothing, she buried her face in the bedding again and sobbed even harder.
Jonah pushed Katherine back out into the hall. Chip and Alex had just turned and caught their first glimpse of the tracer boys, and now they were leaning toward the tracers, as if they were being pulled in that direction.
“Oh, no,” Jonah muttered. “Don’t even think about it.”
He grabbed the back of Chip’s sweatshirt and the back of Alex’s T-shirt and tugged. It took a lot of effort, but eventually he had them back out in the hallway too. He forced them down toward the ground.
“We’ve got to talk,” he whispered. “How can this be?”
“They didn’t die,” Katherine murmured. “They never died. We were wrong all along.”
“But how did they survive?” Jonah asked. “That was, like, six stories down to the ground.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Chip said. “Don’t you remember, we only climbed down one or two sets of stairs?”
Jonah thought about this. Chip was right—there hadn’t been that many stairs when they were leaving the Tower of London.
“But I looked out the window,” Jonah said. “The ground looked a mile away.”
“Could that be because of the timesickness?” Katherine asked. “Messing us up? When I jumped into the river to swim to the barge, I thought I was going to have to swim forever. But then it only took three or four strokes.”
Through raw sewage, Jonah wanted to add, but he restrained himself.
Were his perceptions so badly off too? He remembered how, when Chip was running toward Richard III’s procession, Jonah had managed to tackle his friend even when he was sure Chip was too far away. He thought about how high and echoey the ceilings had seemed in the tower room, how far he’d had to run to hide behind the tapestry. …
“But … but … Chip and Alex never had timesickness,” Jonah protested, still not convinced. “They saw how far away the ground was.”
“I never looked out the window,” Chip said.
“And I just looked up, toward the stars,” Alex said.
Both of them spoke in dreamy, distracted tones. Both of them were looking back over their shoulders, gazing longingly toward the tracers.
It’s like mind control, Jonah thought. Any time they’re near their tracers.
Did that explain why both Chip and Alex said they felt strange as soon as they got close to Westminster Abbey? Maybe the tracers had been moving right past them, just out of sight, heading toward their reunion with their mother. …
Katherine was focused on a more immediate problem.
“But what do we do now?” she asked. “This changes everything!”
Chip and Alex started to stand up, edging toward their tracers once more.
“No, no, you can’t do that!” Jonah said. “We’ve got to figure this out. Logically.”
“What’s to figure?” Alex asked. “We can stop our family’s sorrow. We can bring joy to our mother’s heart.”
He gestured toward the queen and princesses, who were, indeed, sobbing as though their hearts were broken.
“But they’ll see you change!” Katherine objected. “It’ll look like you just appear out of nowhere. …”
“They’re not looking,” Chip said. “That’s why we’ve got to meld with our tracers now, while they’re all crying on the bed.”
“No, wait!” Jonah called out.
It was too late. Chip and Alex broke away from Jonah’s grasp. In four quick strides they were beside their own tracers.
“It’s okay!” Katherine hissed in Jonah’s ear. “They’re invisible, remember? They’ll just stay invisible! They’ve just got to find that … out. …”
Her voice trailed off because she was wrong. As soon as Chip and Alex sat down on the chairs, occupying the same space as their tracers, their forms sprang back into living color.
“It must be like multiplying negative numbers,” Jonah muttered. “Two negatives make a positive. So, invisible tracer, invisible time traveler—fully visible boy.”
“What are you talking about?” Katherine demanded.
“Never mind,” Jonah mumbled.
Chip pulled away from his tracer long enough to grin broadly at Alex. Alex grinned back. And then he called out in a high, sweet, pure voice that sounded a lot younger than his usual voice, “Mother?”
The sobbing queen on the bed—and all five of the sobbing princesses—jerked to attention and whirled around.
“Oh, no, their clothes!” Katherine moaned. “They look all wrong!”
But the queen and the princesses didn’t seem to notice that Chip and Alex were a strange blend of fifteenth century and twenty-first century. They must not be able to see the jeans and the Nikes and the short hair, Jonah thought. Maybe just time travelers can see that. The serving girl back at the Tower of London didn’t notice anything weird either. …
And then Jonah forgot to wonder about clothes or hair or anything else. The queen let out a shriek of pure joy and cried out, “My sons! Oh, my sons! I thought you were lost to me forever!”
She sprang up and dashed across the room, burying both boys in a hug. The princesses raced after her, their arms outstretched. They grabbed their brothers too. They were all so overjoyed that their laughing, giggling tracers back on the bed seemed downright solemn by comparison.
“But how did you get here?” the queen asked when Chip and Alex finally pulled back from the embrace. “My faithful servants said something went wrong with our plan, and you vanished. I thought we’d been betrayed, and you’d been carried away by the enemy. …”
“We thought you were surely dead,” the tallest princess added.
“We hid and came here on our own,” Chip said. “We distracted the guards and tiptoed up the stairs. We … we knew you had
a plan, but we weren’t sure who we could trust.”
The queen gave a most unladylike snort.
“Is not that the story of our time?” she asked, and a hint of sadness crept into her voice. “Whom do we have left to trust?”
“Lord Rivers will come to us now, will he not?” Chip asked. “We can mount a campaign against Gloucester. We will defeat him.”
But the queen was peering over Chip’s head now. The sadness had taken over her face again.
“You do not know,” she murmured.
“Know what?” Alex asked.
“We know that Gloucester had himself crowned king,” Chip said in a hard voice. “We know that he is spreading slander about … about …”
The queen waved this news away, as though it was inconsequential. Or as if she had much worse problems to worry about.
“He had Rivers beheaded,” she said in a numb voice. “Rivers, and Grey, and Vaughan … he had Hastings executed too, because he said he was plotting against him.”
Jonah had no idea who any of those people were, except the Rivers guy—wasn’t he Chip’s uncle? The one on his mother’s side that Chip liked? As soon as the queen said “beheaded,” Chip slumped in his chair and clutched his face in shock and horror.
“No …,” he moaned.
Beside him, Alex was shaking his head in disbelief. With each name the queen recited, both boys gasped. Finally Chip dropped his hands from his face and peered up at his mother.
“Has he left us no one?” he whispered.
“He has left us ourselves,” the queen said with great dignity. “My daughters. My sons. Myself.”
Chip’s face showed what he thought of princesses and a queen as their only allies. Jonah hoped Katherine didn’t notice.
“Some of this conversation … it must have partly been what they were talking about anyway,” Katherine whispered.
Jonah noticed that the tracers on the bed had stopped laughing and giggling and rolling about. The queen’s tracer had the same expression of sorrowful nobility as the queen herself.
“But we shall prevail,” the queen said, her head held high. “We are in the right.”
Like an echo, the tracer queen on the bed mouthed the same words. The tracer princesses sat like statues beside her.
“I missed you, Mother,” Alex said, throwing his arms around his mother’s waist. “I missed how you always know the right thing to do.”
Alex couldn’t have seen his mother’s expression because he had his face buried in her skirt. But Jonah saw how the corners of her mouth trembled, how the pain and fear settled deep in her eyes.
“I can’t watch this,” Katherine murmured. “It’s like watching Holocaust movies, where you know everyone’s going to die.”
She pulled Jonah away from the doorway into the room so he couldn’t see either.
Jonah was busy trying to work something out in his head.
“They’re all going to die anyhow,” he said. “They lived more than five hundred years before we were born.” He remembered that he actually had no idea what time period he’d been born in. “Before you were born, anyway.”
“But can’t you feel it? In that room? The way it seems like really, really bad things are going to happen?” Katherine asked.
Jonah could. Foreboding, he wanted to tell Katherine. That’s what it’s called. What we feel. But what good did it do just to know the right word? Action was what counted.
“We promised we’d save Chip and Alex,” Jonah muttered. “We promised.”
“Why aren’t we saving the princesses, too?” Katherine asked. “Why didn’t Gary and Hodge kidnap them when they kidnapped Chip and Alex? Just because they’re girls, not boys?”
Jonah was getting sick of Katherine thinking everyone was prejudiced against girls.
“Gary and Hodge kidnapped lots of endangered girls from history,” Jonah argued. “Remember? There were about as many girls as boys in the cave that day. Maybe … maybe the princesses aren’t in any danger. Maybe it’s just Chip and Alex.”
Katherine clenched her fists.
“This is driving me crazy, not knowing what’s going to happen. What’s supposed to happen,” she said.
“But this is no different from regular life,” Jonah said. “When have you ever known what’s going to happen in the future?”
Katherine glared at him.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “I’m used to the future being the future, not the past being the future. Or—you know. It’s weird that the future already happened once, but we don’t know what it was. Er—will be.” She was getting so tangled up in verb tenses that she stopped trying. She gulped. “How can we save Chip and Alex if we don’t know what we’re supposed to be saving them from?”
Especially when we thought we’d already saved them, Jonah thought dizzily. His stomach churned. What if they’d “haunted” the queen before they noticed Chip’s and Alex’s tracers? What if they’d managed to convince her that her sons were dead? What if King Richard III did something differently because he’d seen the boys’ “ghosts” at the Westminster shrine? How come it seemed like everything they did messed up time?
“Maybe JB was right,” Jonah muttered. “Maybe it is dangerous for us to be here.”
“JB—oh!” Katherine suddenly sat up straight, practically banging her head on the wall. “He didn’t want Chip and Alex dead on the ground after all! He didn’t betray us!”
Jonah stared at her. She was right. They’d been so upset thinking that JB wanted Chip and Alex dead that they hadn’t given JB a chance to explain. Chip had cut him off and kicked the Elucidator across the room. And then they’d muted it.
Jonah dug in his pocket for the Elucidator. He expected it to be completely invisible again or, at best, still stuck on the words INVISIBILITY? Y/N. But it held a full sentence now, in tiny, barely glowing type:
WILL YOU LISTEN TO ME NOW?
TWENTY-THREE
Jonah immediately felt annoyed for all those hours they’d spent trying to get the Elucidator to say something besides INVISIBILITY? Y/N. When JB’s question faded into another one—SAFE FOR ME TO TALK OUT LOUD? Y/N—Jonah hit the Y with an angry stab of his fingernail.
“Thanks a lot,” he muttered. “So you could have communicated with us all along? You can do anything you want through the Elucidator?”
“Not while you had the Elucidator muted, during the system restore,” JB’s voice came softly out of the mostly transparent “rock” in Jonah’s mostly transparent hand. “You cut off all contact with the outside world.”
Jonah suppressed a shiver at that.
“But ever since the Elucidator reset, back at the cathedral—you could have talked to us then?” Katherine demanded.
“Did you want me to?” JB asked.
Jonah decided to leave that question alone.
“So talk now,” he said brusquely. “Tell us everything.” The word “everything” came out a little mockingly. Jonah was proud that he could make it sound like he didn’t really care whether JB talked to them or not.
“It’s hard with you right there, near the royal family,” JB’s voice was barely a whisper. “Will you give me permission to pull you out of time for a little bit?”
Jonah exchanged glances with his sister.
“All of us?” Katherine asked, peeking back toward the room where Chip and Alex were still talking to the queen.
Even across the centuries Jonah could hear JB’s frustrated sigh.
“I can’t pull Chip and Alex out right now,” JB said. “It’d be too … complicated. And they’re not really Chip and Alex at the moment. They’re Edward and Richard, two very critical players in history.”
“You promised we could try to save them!” Katherine’s voice rose a little too high. “Was that all a lie? Is it even possible?”
“It’s possible, it’s possible,” JB said soothingly. “The fact that you’re there proves I’m giving you a chance.”
“But you wa
nt to pull us out now,” Katherine said. “Some chance.” She grimaced. “Sure, Chip and Alex weren’t killed by being thrown out the window—but what happens when King Richard finds out where they are now?”
Jonah hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“I promise you,” JB said, his voice cracking with seeming earnestness. “Nothing bad will happen to Chip and Alex while you’re away.” A hint of steeliness entered his voice. “Now, please, before someone hears you—can I pull you out of time?”
Jonah raised an eyebrow at his sister. She frowned back at him.
Jonah wasn’t quite sure what thoughts were tumbling through his sister’s head, but his were a frantic tangle. Should we say just one of us can go, and the other one stays here to watch out for Chip and Alex? No—that would be too awful, not knowing what the other one was dealing with. Or what was happening with Chip and Alex. So should we refuse and never know anything? That’s not any good either. If JB’s really sure Chip and Alex would be all right without us for a while …
Jonah thought of something else.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “How can you promise they’ll be safe? I thought we weren’t allowed to know the ‘future.’” He said “future” sarcastically, just to let JB know that he and Katherine weren’t nervous at all.
Katherine was biting her lip now. Jonah began tugging on the ragged edge of his left thumbnail.
“You can know more now,” JB said. “Now that you’re not with Chip and Alex.”
“We’re still with them!” Jonah said.
“They’re not within earshot,” JB said with exaggerated patience.
Jonah wanted to pull Katherine over to the side and confer with her, out of JB’s earshot. But if JB could make the Elucidator work again from the distance of centuries away, he could probably hear anything they said, no matter where they were.
Actually, if he wanted to, he could probably just yank them out of time, like he’d done with the Taser. Why wasn’t he doing that? Why was he asking permission? Somehow the fact that JB had given them a choice made Jonah more inclined to trust him. But what if JB knew that and was just asking in order to trick them?
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