Sent

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Jonah shook his head, trying to clear it.

  “I’m going to ask Chip and Alex what they think,” he said firmly. “Whether it’s okay with them if we leave for a while.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” JB said. “Really, that’s not the best—”

  And then he broke off because Jonah shoved the Elucidator in his pocket and stood up.

  “This should be quick,” he told Katherine with a confidence he didn’t feel. Katherine stared up at him, wide eyed.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said.

  They tiptoed silently back into the royal family’s room. This was hard to do, since the floor was covered with mats of woven rushes that rustled easily. But Chip and Alex didn’t seem to see or hear them approaching.

  Chip and Alex were eating now, scooping up handfuls of berries and grains—maybe the fifteenth-century version of granola. Jonah had never been a granola fan, but it sounded almost as good as pizza right now. Had Chip or Alex thought about how Jonah and Katherine might be starving too? Were they making any attempt to save some food to give to Jonah and Katherine later, when the queen and princesses weren’t watching?

  The answer to that, clearly, was no. The boys were tossing strawberries in the air and catching them in their mouths, very dramatically. There was no way to hide food doing that. It was almost as if they were trying to show off how they had food and Jonah and Katherine didn’t.

  Jonah stopped a few inches from Chip’s ear.

  “Chip, listen,” he whispered quickly. He hoped he could say everything he needed to say before an errant strawberry landed on his head and appeared to bounce off empty air. “Find some excuse for you and Alex to get away from everyone for a few minutes. Say you have to go to the bathroom or something.”

  Chip turned his head toward Jonah, but his blue eyes focused on a point far past Jonah. Chip caught a berry in his mouth and turned his head back in the other direction. He seemed every bit as oblivious as the serving girl and the men with torches back at the Tower of London. He, too, seemed to be looking right through Jonah.

  Jonah felt his heart clutch with fear.

  “Chip? Can you hear me?” Jonah whispered. “Do something to show you know I’m here. Blink three times, or … or …”

  Chip didn’t blink.

  “You’re just acting, right?” Jonah pleaded. “Because the queen and the princesses are watching you? That’s okay, I understand, but …”

  It was too agonizing to just stand there waiting for Chip to react. Jonah grabbed Chip’s arm. Though Jonah could see Chip’s red sweatshirt faintly, along with his tracer’s fifteenth-century clothes, all Jonah could feel was stiff velvet. Jonah tightened his grip.

  Chip didn’t seem to notice.

  “Katherine, please, help,” Jonah whispered urgently.

  Katherine grabbed Chip’s other arm. Jonah hadn’t exactly told her what he wanted her to do, but she began tugging, as if she was determined to separate Chip from his tracer. Jonah forgot about the queen and the princesses sitting on the other side of the room. He began yanking on Chip too.

  And then suddenly Jonah’s hands held nothing but air.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Chip was gone. So was Alex. So were their chairs. So were the woven rushes on the floor. So were the stone walls. Jonah looked around to see if Katherine had disappeared too, but seeing required light, and in a split second all of that had vanished too.

  But a second later—a second or an eternity, who could say?—Jonah felt bathed in light. He wasn’t conscious of moving, but somehow he was sitting down now, his legs dangling from an oddly contoured chair, his back cushioned by soft pillows. He turned his head, and Katherine was there in another chair beside him. He turned his head back because he’d missed something.

  JB was standing in front of them.

  Jonah had gotten so used to JB as a disembodied voice coming from a rock that he had to blink a few times to make sure that it really was him. Same dark hair flopping over his forehead. Same intelligent green eyes and handsome face that had made Katherine call him “cute janitor boy”—back when they thought he was only a janitor for the FBI. Same nondescript clothes he’d been wearing the last time they’d seen him. Vaguely Jonah wondered if regular time travelers like JB had special clothes that blended in no matter what century they were in.

  “You pulled us out of time, didn’t you?” Katherine accused, blinking in the unexpected glare. “Weren’t you waiting for us to give you permission?”

  “I don’t need your permission if you’re caught breaking a time law,” JB said, a slight smirk traveling across his face. “Trying to separate Chip from his tracer right in front of his mother and sisters—that’s a clear violation of Time Code 6843J6. I was just waiting for you to do something like that.”

  The smirk turned into a cocky grin.

  “We did practically the same thing in front of the murderers at the Tower of London last night,” Jonah said. “Er—last night in 1483.” They could not possibly be in 1483 anymore. The lights were too bright, the room too clean and angular and antiseptic. “Why didn’t you pull us out of time then?”

  “That wasn’t a violation because you were in the dark then, and the so-called murderers didn’t notice anything different,” JB said. “And remember—they weren’t murderers after all. They didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Not yet,” Katherine muttered. “How do we know they’re not sneaking up on Chip and Alex right now?”

  “You mean, right at the moment you just left?” JB corrected. “Look.”

  He pressed a button on the wall beside him, and the wall slid back to reveal a view of Chip and Alex with their mother and sisters. The view was so clear and distinct that it was like looking through a window.

  No, Jonah thought. Clearer than that. It’s like a window without glass. Just an opening. It looks like I could walk right back into the room with them.

  No, that was wrong too. If the medieval room were really that close, the division between them really that nonexistent, the bright light of the room Jonah was in would be illuminating every corner of the sanctuary room at Westminster. And that room was just as dim and dusky as it had been moments before, lit only by candlelight.

  TV, Jonah concluded. Really, really, really good TV.

  “One second after you left,” JB said. “Two seconds after you left.” On the screen, or through the window or whatever it was, Chip and Alex continued to eat strawberries. The queen and princesses watched them from across the room with great relief and love written all over their faces. “Three seconds after you left. Four—”

  “Okay, okay! We get it!” Jonah said grumpily. He squinted up at JB. “But why are you here?” The last time they’d seen JB, he’d been in a cave with thirty-two other kids he intended to return to history. “What happened at the cave? What’d you do with the other kids?”

  “To your way of thinking, they’re still in the cave,” JB said. “And so am I.”

  “Huh?” Jonah said at the same time that Katherine muttered, “What?”

  JB laughed.

  “If you’re going to do much time traveling, you’re going to have to stop thinking of time as a line,” he said.

  Jonah thought about telling JB how many time lines he’d had to draw in school over the years—all his social studies teachers had certainly acted like time was a line.

  “And,” JB continued, “you’ve got to stop thinking of your experience of events as the only sequence.”

  Jonah knew the expression on his face was dead blank.

  “Come again?” Katherine said.

  “Exactly!” JB congratulated her. Then he did a double take. “Er—you weren’t demonstrating your understanding of the Principle of Simultaneous Time?”

  Katherine rolled her eyes and shook her head.

  “I knew I should have spent more time boning up on bizarre twenty-first-century American expressions,” JB muttered to himself. He cleared his throat. “Look. To your way of thi
nking, you were in the cave. Then you were in the Tower of London. Then you were on the barge. Then you were at the coronation. Then you were in sanctuary at Westminster. Then you came here. Right?”

  Jonah shrugged.

  “Sure,” Katherine said.

  “But if you remove the element of time, then you could be in all those places in any order, even simultaneously,” JB said. “To quote: ‘Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.’ And if you mix up time with time travel, it can seem like everything is happening at once. I stayed in the cave with the other kids. But I also left the cave to contact my fellow time protectors, and we’ve been doing everything we can behind the scenes to keep the fifteenth century on course.”

  “So you, like, stopped time in the cave to deal with us?” Katherine asked doubtfully.

  “Time wasn’t moving in the cave anyhow. Remember?” JB said. “What actually happened, if you want to be technical, is—”

  “Can we just think of it this way if it makes us feel better?” Katherine asked. “Because I want to talk about the really important questions. And then we can get back to Chip and Alex before they completely forget who they are.”

  “But …” JB stopped and seemed to be reconsidering. “Okay. Fine. I’ll dispense with the technicalities for now.”

  Jonah shifted in his chair. Oddly, the chair seemed to shift with him. It figured that he’d have a funky, futuristic chair to go with the futuristic TV in front of them. Focus, he thought. Past, not future. He narrowed his eyes, watching the queen on the screen watching her sons so carefully.

  “So, what’s the deal with 1483?” Jonah asked. “You say Chip and Alex are safe right now, but … I know they weren’t when we first got here. I mean, there. To that time.” He pointed at the dim scene in front of him. “Those guys who came into Chip and Alex’s room in the Tower of London—you can’t tell me they were some brave heroes who the queen sent in to rescue her little boys. You can’t tell me Chip and Alex would have been fine if we hadn’t intervened. I don’t believe it.”

  JB nodded slowly.

  “That’s very astute of you,” he said. “You’re right about that. Somewhat.”

  Jonah stared at JB. Now he was confused.

  “But Chip and Alex were supposed to survive being thrown out that window?” Katherine asked, sounding baffled too.

  “Oh, yeah,” JB said. “Which made it a big problem that Gary and Hodge did some rather incomplete historical research and yanked them out of time shortly before the—shall we call them window-throwers, for lack of a better term?—before the window-throwers stepped into the Tower of London. It turns out that you four kids arrived almost exactly at the same moment that Edward and Richard vanished, the first time around.”

  Jonah was trying to picture this in his mind. Gary and Hodge, the unethical time travelers from the future, had probably arrived in the same dark room that Jonah and his friends had landed in. They’d probably been very gleeful when they snatched Edward/Chip and Richard/Alex, because they had two famous members of British royalty to carry off to the future, to be adopted by families who could then brag about their children’s lineage. Gary and Hodge just hadn’t known how far JB and his friends would go to stop them.

  “So if Chip and Alex hadn’t come back, the … the window-throwers would have rushed into an empty room? They wouldn’t have found anyone to throw?” Katherine asked, grimacing.

  “Exactly,” JB said.

  “So what?” Jonah said.

  JB and Katherine both whirled on him, mouths agape, brows furrowed. Jonah wondered if he sounded heartless or just stupid.

  “I mean,” Jonah hurried to explain, “if Chip and Alex were going to disappear either way, why does it matter if they disappeared from their room or from the courtyard down below?”

  “Ah,” JB said. “That’s a very good question.”

  Katherine rolled her eyes.

  “You have to understand how complicated everything was in the room that night, and in the courtyard down below,” JB said. “There were five or six different layers of plots being carried out simultaneously—you’d practically need a graph to map out all the conflicting interests.”

  Jonah sincerely hoped JB wasn’t going to produce a graph. Or a map.

  “Shall I just give you the headlines?” JB asked.

  Jonah and Katherine both nodded.

  “It was about a week ago,” JB began, “when the queen heard that Richard had been proclaimed king and was planning his coronation—”

  “What?” Jonah interrupted. “You told us last night that Chip was king—I mean, that Edward was. You told us!”

  “Were you lying to us?” Katherine accused.

  JB held his hands up in a show of innocence.

  “Would you let me explain?” he asked. “I told you what Edward would have believed about his own identity, at that point in time, the first time through history. It wasn’t exactly a lie—things were very much in flux. Edward didn’t know what Richard was saying out in public. And Edward/Chip still believes he’s king, don’t you think, even now, even though Richard is wearing the crown?”

  Jonah glanced at the screen, at the superior expression on Chip/Edward’s face, even as he tossed strawberries in his mouth.

  “But the guards last night said they were looking for princes, as if Chip and Alex had the same rank,” Katherine said. Jonah was impressed that she’d noticed that, since she’d been dodging flames at the time.

  “The serving girl this morning said ‘princes’ too,” Jonah added. He’d been too distracted to really think about that before. “Does that mean even the servants were on Richard’s side?”

  “That means they thought it was safest to act like they were,” JB said grimly. “Now, can I please get back to my story?”

  Jonah shrugged. Katherine nodded.

  “When the queen heard that Richard had claimed the throne for himself, she knew that her sons’ lives were in danger,” JB said. He pointed to the regal woman in the scene before them, her head held high and proud. “Queen Elizabeth Woodville—now, there’s another person whose talents were never fully appreciated by history! To think what she could have done in a time when women had equal rights …”

  “What did she do?” Jonah asked quickly, before Katherine could get started on this topic. “In real history?”

  JB seemed to shake himself back from gazing adoringly at the queen, who was, now that Jonah thought about it, much prettier than anyone else he’d seen in the fifteenth century. For a mom, anyway.

  “Oh, yes … she had her people infiltrate the plot against her sons’ lives,” JB said. “In the room that night, those men you saw? The window-throwers? One of them thought there was another man on the ground waiting to bash the boys’ brains in, to make it look like they died trying to escape.”

  “I knew it!” Katherine said, sounding much too triumphant about such a grisly theory.

  “The other window-thrower thought that there was a man waiting below to spirit the boys away to safety,” JB said. “But he knew he had to act like a murderer, to convince his partner.”

  “And were there men on the ground?” Jonah asked.

  JB nodded grimly.

  “Two were there, planning to catch the boys, if they could, or bind up their broken limbs and carry them off if they hit the ground and were injured,” JB said. “You see how desperate the queen was, that she would agree to such a dangerous plot?”

  “I guess it’s better than letting your sons be killed,” Katherine muttered.

  “But there were other men on the ground whose job it was to claim that they’d seen the boys jump and innocently discovered the bodies afterward,” JB said. “They were the ones who mistakenly called out, ‘Where are the bodies?’ when they didn’t see the boys—they were so stunned they forgot that that wasn’t information they should broadcast.”

  “So in the original version of history …?” Jonah asked.

  JB chuckled.

 
; “In the original version of history both boys landed in bushes and took off running before any of the men on the ground saw them, friend or foe,” he said. “This left both sides in confusion. The officials in the tower pretended for quite some time that the princes were still there—but they were also systematically interviewing everyone who might have heard or seen anything. So, as you can imagine, rumors began to fly.”

  “Rumors that the boys were dead?” Jonah asked.

  “That they were dead, that they were alive, that they’d sprouted wings like angels and flown away … name the theory, and somebody was trying to pass it off as gospel truth,” JB said. He shook his head in amusement. “Meanwhile, the boys were being quite resourceful evading capture—it was one of the greatest adventures of their lives. I feel rather bad for Chip and Alex that they missed it.”

  “Sor-ry,” Katherine muttered, stretching out the word so she didn’t sound apologetic at all. “Call me crazy, but when you don’t know what’s supposed to happen, and you see someone trying to throw your friends out a window, it’s just kind of natural instinct to want to stop it.”

  “If you didn’t want us to save Chip and Alex, you should have told us,” Jonah said grumpily. Though he wasn’t sure what he would have done if JB had commanded, “You’re going to see two guys who act like murderers come in and throw Chip and Alex out the window—but don’t worry. They’ll be fine. As long as you stand back and watch and don’t do a thing.”

  “No, no,” JB said. “You don’t understand. The two of you saving Chip and Alex was the best outcome. We ran computer models on this. If the boys had landed just a fraction of an inch differently, they could have been maimed or killed. Or been caught by the murderers on the ground. Or been found by the rescuers, who were then caught by the murderers, who would have killed everyone. Or—”

  Jonah didn’t want to hear any other ways everything could have gone wrong.

  “So why didn’t you tell us ahead of time what we had to do?” he asked.

  “If you’d known that those men were going to try to throw Chip and Alex out the window, would you have been able to wait until the last possible second to try to save them?” JB asked. “Or would you have jumped the gun a little, grabbing them too soon because you really didn’t want to wait until you were too late? And then the men throwing them out the window would have noticed the difference, and …”