Risked

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Oh, wait, didn’t Katherine and I see a birth year listed for Alexei on the Internet? Jonah wondered. Nineteen-oh . . . something.

  That didn’t help.

  Alexei stretched to reach the last soldier. He gritted his teeth, as if this simple movement took incredible effort. Or caused incredible pain.

  “I’ll help you advance your men in the next battle,” Leonid offered.

  Oh, Jonah thought, watching the older boy’s face. Leonid is just humoring Alexei. Like a babysitter or something. He wouldn’t be playing with toy soldiers on his own.

  Alexei looked up at Leonid, and for the first time since coming back into this room, Jonah saw a glow of tracer light.

  “You’re a good friend, Leonid,” Alexei said. “You’ve been very loyal, both at Tobolsk and here in Ekaterinburg. When you leave today, you should . . . should take half of my soldiers with you. They belong to you now.”

  This was completely different from whatever Alexei had said in original time. Jonah could tell by the sudden burst of tracer lights around his mouth.

  “And then I’ll have to carry them back and forth when we play again tomorrow?” Leonid complained, creating his own glow of tracer lights.

  Tomorrow, Jonah thought. Alexei knows they won’t be playing toy soldiers together tomorrow. Because, thanks to Gavin’s memories, he knows when everybody is supposed to die.

  Did this also mean that Alexei—and Gavin—had given up on fighting fate?

  NINETEEN

  Jonah found that he couldn’t bear to stay in this dim room anymore, watching teenagers play with toy soldiers like little kids. Anyhow, as long as Leonid was around, there was no way Jonah could pull Gavin out of his tracer and interrogate him.

  Jonah backed out of the room. He was surprised to find that Anastasia and her two oldest sisters—Olga and Tatiana, if he remembered right—had moved their sewing projects into their own bedroom. They sat awkwardly in a circle on the floor, pushing needles in and out of piles of frilly girl clothes.

  Corsets? Jonah wondered. His knowledge of old-fashioned women’s clothing didn’t go much further than “dress” and “skirt,” so he was kind of proud of himself for coming up with the other word.

  Oooh, he realized. Maybe that’s why they’re in here sewing now, instead of out in the other room with their father. Maybe there’s some rule about not working on clothes like that around men. Like, maybe it’s considered underwear?

  “Do you have all your medicines arranged properly?” one of the older sisters asked Anastasia.

  “Yes, Tatiana,” Anastasia said with a knowing grin. “All arranged and secure as soon as I finish here.”

  Jonah couldn’t understand. Medicines? Was Anastasia sick somehow too?

  He stepped forward, and the floorboard squeaked beneath his foot.

  All three girls glanced up, giving off tiny bursts of tracer light. Olga and Tatiana looked down again immediately, as if they thought they’d just imagined the noise. But Anastasia—or Daniella, really—met Jonah’s eye. This made sense: He was still completely invisible to her sisters, of course, but she could see his translucent outline because she’d traveled through time.

  Medicines? he mouthed at Daniella/Anastasia. What medicines?

  Holding her hand off to the side where the sisters couldn’t see, Daniella bent and unbent her finger at Jonah, signaling, Come here.

  Jonah went and knelt beside her, his ear close to her mouth.

  “We’re sewing all our jewels into our camisoles, just in case,” Daniella whispered. “We call it ‘arranging our medicines’ as a code so the guards don’t know what we’re doing. There’s probably several million dollars’ worth of diamonds in my lap right now. Is that . . . is that something that could be useful, do you think? For bribing someone when we all escape?”

  Jonah shrugged, and turned his head so his mouth was next to her ear.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “We’ll figure out what to do. I’m going to catch up with Chip and Katherine now, okay?”

  Daniella nodded.

  “Did you say something, Anastasia?” the third sister, Olga, asked.

  “Oh, just humming,” Daniella said. Or, no—Jonah should think of her as Anastasia again, since she had completely joined with her tracer once more.

  “Music. What a splendid idea. Let’s all sing together,” Olga suggested. She began in a clear, beautiful voice, “With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the soul of your servant, where there is neither pain, nor sorrow, nor suffering . . .”

  Jonah shivered, without quite knowing why.

  “Can’t we sing something else besides the prayer for the dead?” Anastasia asked.

  “It’s what I feel most like singing right now,” Olga said.

  Jonah backed away to watch the two sisters staring each other down: Olga pale and gaunt and as distant as if she were already dead, Anastasia flushed and little-girl perturbed and very much alive.

  Still, a moment later all three sisters began singing together: “With the saints, give rest, O Christ . . .”

  Jonah tiptoed out of the room.

  He made his way through the empty dining room and the smoky living room. The tsar was smoking yet another cigarette; the tsarina was staring off into space as Maria read to her from the Bible.

  Jonah went on into the guards’ section of the house, and into the office. He had to maneuver past a cluster of guards lounging around the doorway, but the office itself had cleared out. Only Chip and Katherine were in there now. Katherine was standing beside a huge desk with papers spread over the top, poking at them in a way that made Jonah remember how challenging it had been to look through Albert Einstein’s papers on their last trip through time.

  “This is useless,” she muttered as Jonah walked past.

  He kept going, to the spot where Chip was leaning out one of the two office windows. After the smoke-filled living room and all the claustrophobic, dim rooms with whitewashed windows, Jonah was just overjoyed to see an open window. He stopped beside Chip and put his head out the window as well.

  “That was quick,” Chip whispered. “Did you find out anything good?”

  “No,” Jonah whispered back. He explained why he hadn’t been able to ask Gavin a single question. He decided not to mention Alexei giving his toys away or Anastasia and her sisters singing a song about death. It all seemed too creepy. Even sewing the jewels into the clothes seemed like it could be a hopeless thing to do—intended to make sure that the jewels would be buried with the Romanovs’ bodies, more than anything else.

  Jonah focused on the view ahead of him. By craning his neck, he could just barely see over the wooden fence surrounding the house. And beyond it was . . .

  Another wooden fence.

  How paranoid are these guards that they had to put up two tall fences to hold in four girls, a sick old woman in a wheelchair, a defenseless old man, and a boy who’s in too much pain to walk? Jonah wondered.

  “Can you see anything past the fences?” Jonah asked Chip. Chip had had a growth spurt after coming back from the 1400s, and now he was a couple inches taller than Jonah.

  “There’s a church steeple over there where someone’s set up . . . well, my military knowledge isn’t much good in this time period, but I think that’d be a good place to stash a man with a bow and arrows,” Chip said. “Looks to me like they’ve got a sniper’s nest there with—would it be machine guns? Do they have machine guns in 1918?”

  Jonah stood on his tiptoes and squinted, but it did no good.

  “What are the snipers aiming at?” Jonah asked.

  “This house,” Chip said. He tilted his head, as if that would help him figure out angles. “Looks like the main gun is pointed at the bedroom where Alexei is right now. Did you notice there were other beds in there? And it’s the nicest bedroom? I think that’s where the parents sleep. So someone could be planning to assassinate the tsar in his own room.”

  Chip had spent two and a half years steeped i
n the bloodthirsty 1400s, so he was able to say that almost casually. But Jonah had to tell himself, Katherine said the Romanovs were killed in that basement, not in their beds. So there’s no danger to anyone as long as we’re hanging out on this second floor.

  Of course, if he and Chip and Katherine thought they could alter fate and time to save the Romanovs’ lives, wasn’t it possible to alter the place where everyone was killed?

  Or even who got killed?

  Jonah pulled his head back into the office. The fresh air was no longer any comfort.

  Chip pulled back from the window as well.

  “I’m no expert on twentieth-century warfare, but doesn’t it sound like there’s some kind of battle going on not too far away from here?” Chip asked. “Maybe over in those mountains?”

  Jonah listened. Now he could hear distant booms.

  “Artillery fire,” he said, repeating the words he’d heard Alexei and Leonid say in their game. “Cannons.”

  “Is the Russian Revolution still going on, or is that just World War One?” Chip asked.

  It felt almost comical not to know the answer.

  Katherine came over to the side of the desk nearest the window, so she could join the conversation.

  “I think it’s soldiers fighting their way here, to come and rescue the Romanovs,” she said. “Maybe we just have to make sure the family stays alive an extra day or two, and then their army will save them.”

  It was amazing that Katherine could still look for the happiest possibility. But Jonah knew it was also ridiculous.

  “Oh, yeah?” Jonah argued. “And how are we supposed to keep them alive for that extra day or two? Remember, the Elucidator’s no good, and the guards all have three or four weapons apiece, and anyhow it sounds like some of the Romanovs don’t even want to be saved . . .”

  “We can make them all invisible,” Katherine said.

  Jonah stared at her. Chip was the expert in military strategy—well, 1400s-style—but somehow it was Katherine who’d come up with a plan.

  Chip seemed to be taking her idea seriously.

  “We already know the Elucidator can do that much,” he said. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. Back in the 1400s he’d gotten old enough to actually have a little facial hair, and he seemed to have forgotten that he’d lost it when he went back to being thirteen. He just looked silly now. But Katherine was still gazing at him adoringly.

  “You’re talking about doing this at the last possible moment, so we do the least amount of damage to time, right?” Chip asked.

  “Yeah, and so the Romanovs will trust us, because they’ll see they don’t have a choice,” Katherine said.

  Jonah could think of a lot of problems with this plan—how would they know when the “last possible moment” arrived? Even if they made the tsarina invisible, what would they do about her needing a wheelchair? How would the Romanovs react to suddenly being invisible? What would the guards do? How could Jonah and Chip and Katherine possibly make an entire royal family invisible without ruining time?

  Jonah was just trying to figure out which argument to use first when Katherine clutched his arm and pointed warningly behind him. Jonah turned around. He’d had his back to the door, and now he saw that a uniformed man was walking into the office. Behind him all the loitering guards had snapped to attention.

  “Commander Yurovsky!” they cried. “Sir!”

  Yurovsky breezed past them into the office. Another officer followed him and shut the door. Jonah, Chip, and Katherine squeezed themselves over against the wall, trying to stay out of the way. But it didn’t matter. Yurovsky and the other officer stopped beside the desk.

  “We sent the telegram to Lenin,” Yurovsky said.

  Katherine dug her elbow into Jonah’s side.

  I think that’s the leader of Russia now! Katherine mouthed at him.

  Jonah frowned and nodded.

  The officer with Yurovsky actually took a step back.

  “What exactly did the telegram say?” he asked.

  Yurovsky wasn’t looking at the other man. He was gazing out the window, even though the only thing he might possibly see was the double row of wooden fences.

  “It said we can’t wait any longer,” he said. “We can’t put this off another day.”

  “Then it’s tonight,” the other officer said.

  Jonah staggered back against the wall. It was one thing to read on a computer screen about an entire family being slaughtered on a date almost a hundred years earlier. It was another thing to stand three feet away from the killers as they planned for that slaughter.

  Katherine gripped his arm. She was hurriedly translating for Chip, since he didn’t know Russian. In an instant, his face took on the same grim expression as Katherine’s. Then they both moved in close, their heads touching Jonah’s.

  “What about my plan?” Katherine half whispered, half mouthed, the sound barely reaching Jonah’s ears.

  Chip peeled back the edge of his jeans pocket, showing just the barest glimpse of the toy-soldier Elucidator’s metal base.

  “Think we should use this or not?” Chip asked, just as quietly.

  Jonah stared at his see-through sister and his see-through friend, so grateful for the invisibility that protected them from the killers nearby and all the guards lurking beyond with their overload of guns and grenades and bayonets. How could he and Chip and Katherine not try to share that invisibility with the Romanovs, to save their lives?

  All the arguments he’d thought of before seemed like nothing.

  “We’ll do it,” he whispered back. “We have to.”

  TWENTY

  When Jonah focused on Yurovsky and the other man again, they were bending over the desk, discussing details.

  “Collect all the guns from the exterior guards this evening,” Yurovsky was saying. “The execution squad may need the extras. And that team we’ve got on exterior duty spent the most time with the family. We can’t be sure of their loyalties.”

  Possible allies! Jonah thought. Or at least men who won’t work too hard searching for the Romanovs if they hear that they’ve escaped.

  Jonah looked at Chip and Katherine. Katherine had done a quick translation this time, and they seemed to be thinking the same thing as Jonah. Katherine’s eyebrows were raised so high they were practically up to her hairline, and Chip was almost grinning.

  “Now, come with me to inspect the cellar,” Yurovsky added. “The guards’ story about vagrants escaping is disturbing.”

  “Don’t you think that was just an excuse? An outright lie?” the other man said. “I say we interrogate all the guards involved, then—”

  “We don’t have time for that,” Yurovsky interrupted impatiently. “Let’s just make sure the cellar is secure. That’s all that matters right now. We can’t have anyone escaping tonight.”

  Both men walked back out of the office.

  “He’s worried about vagrants escaping from the cellar?” Katherine whispered, translating again for Chip. “Does he mean Jonah and me?”

  “Has to be,” Chip whispered back.

  Jonah looked toward the desk.

  “But they didn’t leave any tracers behind, so they would have left the office at this moment anyhow,” he said. “One of us needs to follow them and see what they do and what they’re saying.”

  “I’ll go,” Katherine said.

  “I’ll head down that way, too, and see if I can figure out the best route for getting the Romanovs away from the guards once they’re invisible,” Chip said.

  Jonah wondered if Chip was just partly trying to make sure he could protect Katherine if he needed to. But Jonah wasn’t going to ask about it in front of his sister.

  “Then I’ll go tell Alexei and Anastasia—I mean, Gavin and Daniella—what we’re planning,” Jonah said.

  He crossed back over to the Romanovs’ side of the house. The scene in the living room seemed to have barely changed: The tsar was still smoking; Maria was still reading the Bible to
her mother. Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia were still sewing in their bedroom. But when Jonah slipped past through the doorway into Alexei’s room, he found the boy alone again, lying across his bed and staring up at the ceiling.

  Jonah eased the bedroom door all the way shut, hoping that anyone who saw the movement from the outside would think that Alexei had done that himself. Then Jonah went over to the bed and gently tugged Gavin away from his tracer.

  “Oof,” Gavin said, shaking out his arms and legs. Woozily, he sat down on the edge of the bed. He rubbed his forehead.

  “Are you okay?” Jonah asked.

  “Better than him,” Gavin said, gesturing back toward the ghostly tracer behind him. “Or, I don’t know. I don’t have the pain he lives with all the time, but—”

  “So you’re not having that—what’s it called? Internal bleeding?—the way you thought?” Jonah asked, easing down onto the end of the bed. This could be a long conversation.

  “Don’t worry about it, okay?” Gavin said, just as snarly as he’d been every other time anyone had asked about it. But then his face softened. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . that doesn’t matter as much as some other things right now. Really. It’s not a big deal.”

  His voice was almost gentle now.

  Whoa, Jonah thought. What’s gotten into Gavin?

  “Yeah, about some of those other things . . . ,” Jonah began.

  “In a minute,” Gavin said. “I want to tell you what a brave kid that is.” He pointed at his tracer again. “Sure, in some ways he’s a spoiled brat, but when you think about what he puts up with, day in and day out . . . If I die here and you get out, will you tell people how great Alexei was?”

  “You’re not going to die,” Jonah said.

  Gavin fixed his gaze on the wall.

  “One thirty in the morning,” he said. “Commander Yurovsky is going to wake up our friend Dr. Botkin and tell him that our whole family needs to move out of this house because the fighting is getting too close. They’re going to herd us all down to the cellar and tell us to wait there. And then the execution squad is going to shoot us all.”