Caught

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “I guess they don’t have vaccines yet in 1903,” Jonah said. “It wasn’t that long ago, but—”

  “Everything was different,” Emily said bitterly. “Everything is.”

  We can’t condemn Emily to being stuck in 1903, Jonah thought. We can’t.

  But what if that meant that he and Katherine were stuck there themselves?

  They got back to the home of Mileva’s parents, and somehow the entire house seemed darker than ever before. As soon as they got close to the front door, they heard the same kind of keening they’d heard back at Senka’s. Jonah peeked in a window: Mileva’s mother was hugging Mileva’s father and sobbing into his shoulder. Other family members and servants clustered around them, sobbing just as hard.

  “This just isn’t right,” Jonah mumbled.

  He reached over and scratched against the door—a sound that might have been made by a branch blowing in the breeze, or might have been someone working up the courage to knock.

  A servant strode over to the door and opened it, peering out curiously.

  “Tracers!” Katherine hissed in Jonah’s ear.

  Jonah nodded to show he understood. The servant had left a tracer version of himself huddled against a wall and rubbing his eyes. Several other people looked toward the door, creating a glow of other tracers as Jonah’s knock interrupted their mourning.

  So everybody would have been crying like this in original time, Jonah thought. So—Lieserl is supposed to be dead.

  He glanced back at Emily, reassuring himself that she was still alive. He felt unsettled. Every other time he and Katherine had been involved with returning missing children to history, they’d pulled out and left the foreign time immediately after the original child would have died. They’d had only the briefest moments of having to watch people mourn someone who wasn’t actually dead.

  So—stop watching, Jonah told himself. Get out of here as soon as you can. Go find Mileva.

  “Come on!” he whispered to Katherine and Emily. “Let’s get in there while the door’s still open!”

  The three of them barely managed to brush past the servant before he pulled the door shut and went back to huddling sadly against the wall. But once Jonah and the two girls were inside the house, it was easy to maneuver around all the mourners. Their actions were slow and ponderous, as if time were stopping for them, too.

  No, it’s because of their grief, Jonah told himself.

  He’d never been to a funeral, never had anyone close to him die. So it was unnerving to be in a room so filled with sorrow. He really wanted to jump up on one of the chairs and scream, “Stop crying! She’s not dead!”

  You can’t, he told himself. Just focus on looking for Mileva.

  She wasn’t anywhere among the mourners gathered in the front room. Jonah silently pointed down the hallway, and Katherine nodded. Emily trailed behind them.

  All the doors lining the hall were shut, so they had to gently push open each door and peek in.

  Darkness.

  Darkness.

  Darkness.

  “If we ever get out of here, on my next trip through time I’m bringing night-vision goggles,” Jonah muttered.

  “That doesn’t do us much good now, does it?” Katherine asked. She bit her lip. “If every room turns out to be dark, do you think it’d be okay to light a candle and come through here again? Or will we have to wait until morning when the sun comes up to look for Mileva?”

  “I don’t want to wait,” Emily whispered. “Don’t you feel like . . . like time is locking into place? Like our chance to change anything is ending?”

  “Don’t say stuff like that,” Katherine scolded.

  “Even if it’s true?” Emily asked.

  Nobody answered. Jonah turned to open the next door. And, this time, there was actually a soft glow in the room, from a lamp turned down low on a bedside table. Jonah tiptoed in.

  Mileva lay on the bed. Her eyes were closed, and the light blanket draped over her rose and fell with a regular rhythm, but Jonah couldn’t believe that she was truly sleeping peacefully.

  He stepped closer to the bed.

  “You’re faking, aren’t you?” he whispered.

  In a flash Mileva had the Elucidator out from under the covers, and was crying into it, “Make them visible again!” She dived across the bed and grabbed Emily, wrapping her arms tightly around her daughter’s waist.

  “Papa!” she screamed. “Papa, come quick!”

  THIRTY-TWO

  There was no time.

  To the extent that Jonah had planned anything about how to deal with Mileva, he’d expected a long, careful conversation, inching toward getting the Elucidator back without giving away any more information. But now he had only a matter of seconds before Mileva’s father—and possibly a lot of other people too—would come bursting in the door.

  “Papa!” Mileva screamed again.

  Emily was struggling to get away, but Mileva’s grip was too tight. Katherine rushed to help, trying to peel Mileva’s fingers back to let Emily escape. Jonah thought about joining in.

  Wouldn’t matter, he thought. We wouldn’t have time to get completely away, out of this room.

  But he didn’t run away to hide. He stepped closer to Mileva.

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t do this.”

  Mileva didn’t even look at him. She was entirely focused on holding on to Emily. She had a wild look in her eyes; her hair stood out crazily; she had her teeth clenched in utter determination.

  Well, isn’t that how my mom would look if she was afraid she might lose me and Katherine? he thought.

  “Please,” he whispered again. “What do you care about the most? Making sure your dad sees Em—er, Lieserl? Or doing what’s best for your daughter?”

  Mileva looked at him this time. And then she let go of Emily.

  “Hide,” she said. “Quick. Crouch down by the other side of the bed. But—don’t go away.”

  She picked up the lamp and hurried toward the door just as it opened wide, her father storming in.

  “Mileva, what—”

  “Bad dream,” Mileva said, looking convincingly dazed.

  Jonah crouched down on the opposite side of the bed, safely away from the light. He huddled with Katherine and Emily, who seemed to be shaking with fear.

  “Oh, Mileva, the bad dream is real,” her father moaned.

  Jonah dared to raise his head to see past the tangled blanket, just to make sure that they weren’t coming back toward the bed. Mileva and her father still stood in the doorway, hugging each other.

  “Nothing about her life went the way it was supposed to,” Mileva mumbled. She was acting as if she couldn’t even bear to say Lieserl’s name.

  “But she was such a gift while we had her,” Mileva’s father said. “A gift we still want to honor—”

  “I’m going back to bed,” Mileva said abruptly.

  “I’ll send a servant girl in to sit with you,” her father said.

  “No!” Mileva said, her tone sulky now. “I need to be alone! Please, just let me stay alone!”

  Her father hesitated, clearly wanting his daughter to change her mind. But finally he murmured, “As you wish.”

  Mileva eased her father out the door and gently shut it behind him. She stood at the door with her ear pressed against the wood for a few moments—probably listening to make sure he really did walk away. Then she brought the lamp back toward the bed and slumped against the pillows.

  “Everyone thinks I have gone mad with grief,” she said. “They think my child is dead and I took her body out into the countryside to hide it. So—so that I could deny that she’s not still alive.”

  Jonah had to keep himself from perking up and grinning triumphantly over at Katherine. He was thinking, Hey, that would be a good cover story to explain why Lieserl/Emily just disappears. Why didn’t we think of that?

  But then Emily asked, in the gentlest of voices in her halting German, “They wouldn’t arrest you
, would they? Are they accusing you of any crime?”

  Okay, Jonah thought. Maybe that’s not such a great idea, after all.

  Mileva was staring so intently at Emily that it seemed as if she were trying to develop X-ray vision.

  “Where have you grown up, child?” Mileva asked. “Here—or in some foreign land? What do you know of our customs and laws?” She gave a sad laugh. “And how can I know so little about my own daughter?”

  Jonah wondered if Mileva really had gone mad with grief. Or, at least, crazy from the strain of having invisible people follow her around and then seeing them become visible and then having her own daughter seem to age eleven and a half years in a single moment . . . .

  Emily just kept steadily looking back at Mileva.

  “I didn’t grow up here,” she said simply. “I grew up someplace . . . safer.”

  “When I was a child, I thought my home was the safest place on the face of the Earth,” Mileva said, but now she seemed mostly to be speaking to herself. “And the most limited. I wanted to go out into the greater world, into the world of ideas and knowledge and learning. I was always so excited to leave. I never knew I could become so . . . trapped.”

  Jonah heard Katherine gulp beside him.

  “Then they are going to arrest you?” she asked, sounding indignant. “That’s not fair! We could testify for you, if you want—”

  Mileva snorted.

  “I’d like to see what story you’d come up with, that anyone around here would believe,” she said. She shook her head. “No one is going to arrest me. Not when my father is Milos Maric, one of the most important men in town. Not when Lieserl was . . . born the way she was born.”

  Jonah looked at Emily. As far as he could tell, she looked like a perfectly normal thirteen-year-old girl. Why was Mileva making it sound as if there was something strange about her? Something shameful?

  “How was I born?” Emily asked softly. “What do you mean?”

  Mileva gaped at her.

  “You don’t know?” Mileva asked. “You’ve lived to the age of thirteen without the shame following you, without the whispers . . . Where did we send you, Albert and I? What have we done?”

  Emily squinted at Mileva.

  “Where do you think that I came from?” she whispered.

  Mileva waved this question aside.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she asked. “My daughter, now, is not supposed to be even two years old yet. You are thirteen. So, of course. You come from the future. Or—some alternative future, from a split in time. My husband knows all about that.”

  Jonah glanced quickly toward Katherine. Did Einstein know that much?

  “What if you are the proof of my husband’s theories?” Mileva asked, still staring at Emily. “Was he the one who sent you back from the year nineteen . . . 1915?” She held up the Elucidator. “Did he invent this? Did I help?”

  The way Mileva talked, Jonah could almost picture everything she described. It seemed likely—probable, even. More probable than Emily being kidnapped from time, growing up a century out of place, then returning as a teenager when she was supposed to still be a toddler.

  A dead toddler, Jonah reminded himself, giving himself chills.

  “So,” Mileva continued in an even tone. “How are we all doing in 1915? How did we manage to escape the shame?”

  There was that word again.

  Jonah cleared his throat.

  “If you’ve helped your husband with his time experiments, then you understand that it’s dangerous to know too much about the future,” he said.

  Mileva ignored Jonah and kept staring at Emily.

  Emily stared back.

  “Shame,” she repeated. “What shame? What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing,” Mileva said sharply. “Nothing at all. It’s what I did, what your father and I did . . . .” She clenched her fists. “If only . . . No, no, I can’t tell you, can’t let you think for an instant that you should be ashamed.”

  “What did you and Albert do?” Katherine asked. “Kill someone?”

  “No,” Mileva said, shaking her head violently. “No. It was just—”

  She broke off, because someone was tapping on the door.

  “Mileva,” her father called softly. “Can I come in? I have some good news.”

  Jonah and Katherine and Emily exchanged quick glances. At once, all three of them began to scramble away from the light, toward the shadows in the corners of the room.

  Good news? Jonah thought. Good?

  For a moment he wondered if they’d misunderstood everything. What good news was possible?

  Mileva scrambled up from the bed, carrying the lamp back toward the door.

  “Yes?” she said, swinging the door open.

  “We sent word to Albert,” Mileva’s father said. “We just got his reply—he’s coming to comfort you. He’s on his way now. You and your husband can grieve together.”

  At that exact moment a tracer version of Mileva came dashing into the room and threw herself across the bed, sobbing. She clutched a thin, official-looking piece of paper. Jonah dared to inch close enough to read the boldface words on the paper:

  No. I can’t come –Albert

  Jonah looked back and forth between the ghostly, sobbing tracer Mileva on the bed and the slightly more hopeful real version standing by the door. His head spun.

  Albert isn’t supposed to come here to mourn his daughter, Jonah thought.

  Maybe in original time Albert hadn’t thought there was anything he could do when he heard his daughter was dead. But circumstances were different now—now Albert had undoubtedly been told that Lieserl had vanished and was only presumed dead. And Mileva had supposedly gone mad with grief, and maybe wouldn’t be capable of traveling back to Switzerland by herself. . . .

  So those changes were enough to change Albert’s plans? Jonah thought. Is it because he’s so worried about his wife and daughter? Or . . . is it because Albert is thinking about time travel now, instead of whatever he was supposed to be thinking about? Has he figured out that Lieserl’s “disappearance” is connected to time travel too?

  Jonah felt prickles of dread. He remembered the long, long trip from Switzerland to Novi Sad. It seemed too far for Albert Einstein to travel out of place, out of the path of original time.

  Every time he pictured Albert making that journey, he pictured him falling off the globe completely, falling out of history.

  Or falling into a completely different history and taking the whole rest of the world with him.

  “This isn’t right,” Katherine whispered behind him. “This can’t happen.”

  “But what can we do to stop it?” Jonah whispered back.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “You can’t tell Albert the truth,” Jonah said to Mileva as soon as her father left the room again.

  “Of course I’ll tell him the truth,” Mileva said, glaring back at Jonah. She swayed slightly, looking dizzy and nauseated and pale. She clutched the bed frame and eased herself back into a seated position, mostly blocking Jonah’s view of her sobbing tracer. Now she looked strong enough to keep arguing. “This isn’t like with my father . . . This is my husband we’re talking about. Lieserl’s father. We tell each other everything. We’ll figure out what to do about all this, together. He’ll understand even the details that my brain keeps tripping over.”

  She waved her hand vaguely, in a way that seemed to indicate Emily and the Elucidator and even the keening of the mourners still out in the front room of the house.

  “But he’s not supposed to understand,” Jonah said. “He’s not supposed to know about any of this. It could ruin everything.”

  “Oh, piffle,” Mileva said. She seized the blanket on her bed and shook it out. “You’re a child—an amazing child, even, who’s known invisibility and . . . and time travel? Have you traveled through time along with my daughter?” She gazed speculatively at Jonah, but didn’t wait for an answer. “You’ve seen and done these amazi
ng things, and yet you sound like some of the old men in my village, who claim that humans are not meant to know the miracles of science, not meant to see by electric lights, not meant to move about by automobile, not meant to see the bones of their own hands revealed to them by X-rays . . . It’s only ignorance and fear that make you think that way! Once people learn more, once people understand—you’ll see! Knowledge and science will bring us such enlightenment!”

  Jonah squinted at Mileva. She looked the same as she had before: a somber, plain woman who was probably more than twice Jonah’s age. She was definitely a grown-up, and he was still definitely a kid. But for a moment he felt a million years older than her.

  Doesn’t she know about nuclear weapons? He wondered. Doesn’t she know that cars brought pollution, and even X-rays can give you cancer if you have too many of them?

  No. She wouldn’t know about any of those problems. In 1903, Mileva Einstein was still living in an age where people could believe that scientific advances would bring nothing but good.

  How could Jonah tell her any different when her own husband was going to come up with ideas that helped cause some of those very advances—and problems?

  Jonah looked desperately toward Emily and Katherine.

  “We know your husband is a genius at science,” Katherine said soothingly. “He’ll do what he thinks is best for science. But are you sure he’ll do what’s best for your daughter?”

  “He will!” Mileva said, but now her voice was shrill and defensive.

  Katherine began drawing something out of the pocket of her blue jeans. Jonah realized it was the letter from Albert to Mileva that they’d read out in the woods. The letter Mileva was supposed to read and cry over with her dying daughter.

  “You probably forgot about Albert’s letter, with everything else that’s been going on,” Katherine said. Now she sounded almost apologetic, as if she regretted bringing it up. “But we saw it, and, well, he doesn’t really sound like he cares that much about Lieserl.”