“Sorry,” she said over her shoulder toward the two guards. “My brother’s a bit simple. He doesn’t understand.”
Jonah understood perfectly well what happened next: Both guards now aimed their guns at Katherine.
“Don’t shoot her!” he yelled.
Katherine laughed.
“See?” she said. “He just thinks we’re all playing war.”
The guns stayed trained on Katherine.
“What are you playing?” the first guard growled.
Katherine made a show of looking down at her sweatshirt and jeans.
“Duh,” she said. “Dress-up.”
The guns twitched a little. The guards seemed to be having trouble deciding if they wanted to aim at Katherine, Jonah, Daniella, or Gavin.
Okay, Katherine, Jonah thought. At least you’ve managed to confuse them.
But the guards still had horribly fierce expressions on their faces. They looked like, if they had their preference, they might just end up shooting all of them.
“No outsiders are allowed in here!” the first guard yelled.
“Relax,” Katherine said. “My brother and I are from the convent. We just brought in the day’s shipment of food.”
Where did Katherine come up with this stuff? Maybe she was just making it all up, but at least the guards kept listening to her. Neither of them was squeezing the trigger yet.
“And the nuns sent these dress-up clothes, too, for the, um, grand duchesses and the tsarevitch to use,” Katherine continued. “We were just—”
Katherine must have said something wrong, because suddenly the closest guard swung his gun around and hit her with the butt of it. He must have hit hard—she immediately crumpled to the ground.
“They are no longer the grand duchesses and the tsarevitch!” the guard screamed at her. “They are nothing more than ordinary citizens! No better than anyone else!”
“Okay, okay—sorry!” Katherine protested, holding her hand up to head off any more blows. “I won’t call them that again!”
Jonah realized that Daniella, still sprawled on the ground, had begun letting out frightened wails, and Gavin was crying, “What’s going on? What’s going on?”
“Just—keep calm,” Jonah muttered. “Hold on.”
But that was ridiculous advice, because he himself couldn’t stay calm. Was there anything he could do to help Katherine? And—oh, yeah—where had Chip landed? Was he in danger of being discovered any moment now too?
Before Jonah had a chance to decide anything, the first guard grabbed Katherine by the back of her sweatshirt and pulled her to her feet. Then he reached out and grabbed Jonah by the arm.
“I’ll take care of these two,” the guard said.
“And I’ll take the prisoners back to their rooms,” the other guard agreed, pulling up Gavin and Daniella.
“No, stop!” Gavin cried. “Careful—I bruise easily!”
“Please! Somebody—help!” Daniella screamed.
She was looking right at Jonah. Jonah struggled against the guard’s grip, but either the guard was extraordinarily strong or Jonah was still weak from the timesickness. There was no way for Jonah to break free.
“You’ll be all right,” Jonah said in English to Gavin and Daniella. “They’re just taking you back to your rooms.”
“What rooms?” Daniella demanded. “Where are we? Who are these people?”
But Jonah didn’t have a chance to reply before the guard holding his arm yanked him away. And then Jonah had a more immediate question to worry about:
What was the guard going to do with Jonah and Katherine?
EIGHT
“If we were plotting to help the prisoners escape, why would we bring them weird clothes that make them more noticeable, not less?” Katherine argued, even as the guard dragged her and Jonah toward the imposing white building behind them.
The guard took his hand off Jonah’s arm just long enough to hit Katherine in the head again.
“Shut up!” he commanded.
“I’m just trying to make you see that we deserve a fair trial if you’re going to—” Katherine kept arguing.
“Stop talking!” Jonah yelled at her.
He felt the guard lifting his hand again, and this time Jonah reached out and tried to pull back on the guard’s arm, so at least he wouldn’t hit Katherine so hard. Jonah was rewarded for this: The guard slammed the palm of his hand against Jonah’s head instead of Katherine’s.
Can you get a concussion just from someone hitting your head? Jonah wondered.
The force of the blow was so hard that Jonah couldn’t see or hear for a full minute. When his vision recovered, he saw that the guard had brought them to the top of a staircase leading down into a dim cellar. The guard gave them a shove.
“No, please . . . ,” Jonah cried.
But it was useless. He and Katherine tumbled forward—forward and down. There must have been two dozen stairs before them. Jonah tried to grab on to the edge of the steps or some railing along the wall or something—anything! But the best he could do was just slow his fall. He kept plunging down and down and down . . .
He landed on top of Katherine.
She didn’t move.
“Kath?” he whispered. “Katherine?”
No answer.
Jonah rolled to the side—painfully—and grabbed Katherine’s shoulders.
“Katherine? Are you awake?” he asked, shaking her gently.
Still no answer.
He realized there was something else he should be checking for. His hands shook as he moved one hand from her shoulder to the side of her neck.
Just find a pulse, he told himself. Stay calm and just find her pulse.
His fingertips felt so numb that he brought the other hand up to the other side of her neck. What if the pulse was there but he just couldn’t feel it? He pressed down harder with both hands.
“Gah—now you’re trying to strangle me?” Katherine moaned.
Jonah hugged his sister’s shoulders. Then he scrambled back a little.
“I wasn’t sure you were alive,” he said, the relief making his voice tremble.
“I’m still not sure,” Katherine groaned. “You’re the Boy Scout—how do you tell if a bone’s broken?”
“Does anything hurt?” Jonah asked.
“Does anything not hurt—that would be an easier question,” she grumbled. She gingerly sat up and gasped. Even in the dim light, Jonah could tell that her face went pale. “My arm—”
“We can splint it in place with a sweatshirt until we get out of here,” Jonah said. He quickly pulled his sweatshirt over his head and tied the sleeves together, then slid it around Katherine’s shoulder.
“Better than nothing, I guess,” Katherine said, letting her arm relax into the improvised sling. “But—how do you think we’re going to get out of here?”
Jonah looked back toward the door at the top of the stairs. It was shut now and probably locked or guarded.
“Let’s find some other way out,” he said. “I don’t think we should wait until the guards come back and get us.”
He helped Katherine up, and the two of them inched forward, through an open set of double doors into another room. Jonah saw what seemed to be the only source of light: a single, naked lightbulb burning overhead. Its glow was so feeble that Jonah could barely make out the arch of the ceiling or the frame of another doorway and padlocked doors across from him. But there didn’t seem to be much in the room worth looking at, anyway: It was just bare walls and a bare wooden floor. Jonah squinted, his eyes adjusting. One section of the wall, high overhead, might once have contained a window, but it was filled in now, completely covered. Jonah wished for some sort of furniture—a chair or a small table or something else he could stand on or use to slam through the locked doors or the filled-in window. But there was nothing.
Katherine made a gagging sound.
“That wallpaper!” she groaned.
Jonah squinted, making out
stripes on the opposite wall.
“You want to criticize the decor at a time like this?” Jonah asked. “Sure, it’s ugly, but who cares?”
Katherine clutched his arm with her free hand.
“No, Jonah—I’ve seen that wallpaper before! I recognize it! We’re in the cellar!” she moaned.
Jonah wanted to make a joke to get her to sound less serious—something like, Duh, Katherine, the guard just threw us down twenty-some steps. Of course we’re in a cellar now! The pre-time-travel Jonah would have said that. But now he just said in a calm voice, “What do you mean? What cellar?”
Katherine tightened her grip on his arm.
“Jonah, there were pictures of this room on the computer,” she whispered. “Mom and I saw them after you went to get the door back home. This room . . . this is where the guards are going to kill the entire Romanov family.”
NINE
Jonah felt like his sister had punched him in the gut. Hard. It took him a moment before he could trust himself to say, “But we know it hasn’t happened yet. Because the guards weren’t surprised to see Anastasia and Alexei—I mean, Daniella and Gavin—alive. So we’ve still got time to stop everything.”
“How?” Katherine asked. “We don’t have an Elucidator and we’re trapped here and my arm’s probably broken and, sure, as far as we know Chip’s still safe up there and hasn’t been caught, but he doesn’t understand Russian and neither do Gavin and Daniella and—”
She broke off suddenly because the door at the top of the stairs creaked open.
“Your story was full of lies,” the guard’s voice shouted down at them. “The food delivery was hours ago, and of course nobody new was involved. The commander will be interrogating you soon.”
Jonah and Katherine exchanged terrified glances.
“And it has been determined that you deserve no light,” the guard added. He must have flipped a switch, because the naked lightbulb overhead suddenly blinked out. Then the guard slammed the door, plunging them into darkness.
For a moment Jonah and Katherine could do nothing but stand in shocked silence. Then Jonah heard Katherine taking ragged, gasping breaths, as if she was crying.
Jonah reached out to pat her shoulder in the dark.
“Hey,” he said. “We’ll figure something out. Or—maybe JB will rescue us.”
“How would he even know we’re missing?” Katherine challenged. “How could anyone find us? Even Gary and Hodge—even if they’re the ones who gave Gavin the Elucidator—they wouldn’t have expected him to bring us all here.”
Somehow Jonah could hear more of the fear in her voice in the darkness.
“Yeah, but don’t you think Gary and Hodge could track the Elucidator?” he asked.
“Maybe, but what if they can’t?” Katherine countered. “Or they just don’t bother? Or what if they’re still in time prison and so they can’t do anything, but they won’t tell anyone else where we are because they don’t want to get into more trouble?”
She was right. That did sound like something Gary and Hodge would do.
“It’s all my fault we ended up in 1918,” Jonah muttered, slumping over.
This was worse than the mess-up they’d had trying to return their friend Andrea to her past. Their enemy Second had sabotaged that trip and sent them to the wrong year. But at least JB had known it when they went missing. And he’d known to search for them.
Are Gary and Hodge out of time prison and searching for us right now? They’d want to look for us, too, wouldn’t they? If only to make money, not because they’d actually care . . .
It was horrible that Jonah was now pinning his hopes on the possibility that Gary and Hodge had escaped from time prison. That he was now counting on two of his three worst enemies to save him.
You’ve got to think of something else, he told himself.
“Katherine, let’s at least try feeling along the wall and the floor,” he told his sister. “Maybe we’ll find a key to these padlocked doors, or, I don’t know, a release for a secret passageway out of here. . . .”
Jonah was grateful that Katherine didn’t say, That’s ridiculous or You think this is a fairy tale or something? You think we’re all going to end up happily ever after?
Instead she muttered, “Okay.”
In the absolute darkness Jonah couldn’t see where Katherine went. But he heard her pained, awkward footsteps moving toward the wall, and her fingers trailing against the despised wallpaper. Then the brushing sound stopped.
“Jonah, I’ll feel around on the floor, but I can’t touch that wall,” Katherine said. “I keep seeing it in my mind the way it looked in the pictures on the computer. There are going to be huge chunks of this wall missing, where the bullets hit. . . .”
Thanks a lot for putting that image in my head, Jonah thought. He lifted his own hand from the wall, then resolutely put it back, moving methodically side to side.
“Katherine, it doesn’t have to happen that way,” Jonah said. “It hasn’t happened yet, so there’s still time—”
“Jonah, you didn’t read what I read. The whole family’s going to be herded into this room, and then a bunch of guards are just going to start shooting them—nobody could survive that,” Katherine said. “It’s, like, hopeless.”
Jonah hated the way just that one word made him feel like giving up. Especially with all this unrelenting darkness around him.
“You had, what, five or ten minutes more than I did looking at that stuff on the computer?” he challenged Katherine. “That doesn’t make you an expert! Maybe there’s something you don’t know about, something that’s going to make this all work out.”
Jonah expected her to say something like, Yeah, well, you don’t know anything, so how’s that going to help?
Instead she cleared her throat. It almost sounded like she was embarrassed.
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “It’s like, I shouldn’t have said that thing about being from the convent. I didn’t know it would get us in worse trouble. I just thought I was so smart because I read online about food deliveries from a nearby convent. . . .”
Katherine’s admitting that I’m right and she was wrong? Jonah marveled. Does this mean miracles really are possible?
Jonah didn’t get even a split second to gloat over this turn of events, because the door at the top of the stairs creaked open again.
“The commander will see you now,” the guard announced.
The man was so high above them at the top of the stairs that Jonah could see only boots silhouetted in the doorway. None of that light trickled down to him and Katherine, so Jonah couldn’t see how his sister reacted.
“Should we hide down here and make them come and find us?” Jonah whispered.
“There’s nowhere to hide,” Katherine said hopelessly. “I think that would just make them madder.”
Jonah figured Katherine was right, but it was so hard to force himself to trudge toward the stairs.
You can’t make Katherine be the first one to face that guard, Jonah told himself.
He shuffled forward. Though he couldn’t see her yet, he heard Katherine beside him moving in the same direction. Even when they reached the bottom of the stairs, they still stood in pitch darkness. Jonah cupped his hand over his sister’s ear.
“If there’s just that one guard who came for us, let’s try to overpower him,” Jonah whispered. “We’ll knock him out and run away.”
Jonah felt, rather than saw, Katherine nodding. His heart pounded. It was a crazy plan, but just having something to hope for gave him the courage to start climbing.
First step. Second. Third . . .
Unlike Katherine, Jonah didn’t think he’d broken anything falling down the stairs. But climbing back up them made his muscles scream out about how sore his whole body was. He was hardly in peak fighting condition, and Katherine probably did have a broken arm. And no matter how fierce she was, she wouldn’t come up any higher on the guard than his elbow, and—
>
Eighth. Ninth. Tenth.
Jonah kept climbing.
We are going to fight that guard if he’s alone, Jonah told himself. We’re going to fight him and we’re going to win.
Jonah was on the fifteenth step and peering grimly up to the top when suddenly a hand grabbed him from behind. Jonah teetered, almost falling over backward.
“Do you want me to land on you again and break your other arm?” he muttered, whirling around to confront Katherine. “Focus!”
It annoyed him that he couldn’t see his sister well enough to glare at her. Even this close to the doorway, the pool of darkness behind him seemed so complete he could barely make out Katherine’s shape. It was like she was just an outline.
“I mean it,” he scolded her. “We’ve got to be ready to fight!”
“Look at me!” Katherine whispered back. “Look at yourself!”
Jonah looked.
Outline . . . Katherine’s just an outline. . . . And me? Hey, look at that, there’s a little bit of that light coming in from the door and it’s . . . it’s flowing right through me. I’m see-through! Someone made us invisible!
Jonah made a triumphant fist pump in the air. Behind him he could see Katherine grinning up at him. He knew he was the only one who could see it—when time travelers became invisible, people native to that time could see nothing of them. But other time travelers could make out their invisible colleagues as translucent figures, as if they were made of glass.
Now that he wasn’t expecting Katherine to appear as anything more than a see-through outline, he could easily read the expression on her face.
“This is so great!” he hissed at her.
But even as he watched, her grin vanished.
“No,” she whispered, her eyes wide with horror. “No . . .”
Jonah whirled back to face the guard, to see what she was seeing.
“If you do not come right away to see the commander, we will come to you,” the guard at the top of the stairs shouted down at them.
What seemed like dozens of feet started trampling down the stairs, as guard after guard raced toward Jonah and Katherine. Each of them held a gun aloft—a gun with a gleaming knife strapped alongside its barrel.
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