Sent

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  But Chip wasn’t watching the boy’s face. He was extending his right arm to match the tracer boy’s right arm. Dreamily he spread his fingers so each one occupied the exact same space as the tracer boy’s fingers. Chip’s hand was bigger, his fingers longer, but that difference seemed to disappear as soon as the two hands joined.

  “Whoa,” Chip said, a dazed look on his face.

  Then he sat down, his legs overlapping the tracer boy’s legs, his chest leaning back into the tracer boy’s chest, his face melding with the tracer boy’s face.

  Instantly the tracer boy stopped glowing.

  And Chip disappeared.

  FOUR

  “Chip!” Katherine shrieked.

  Chip’s face lurched forward, momentarily separating from the tracer boy’s.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t worry. This is so cool!”

  Then he leaned his head back, joining the tracer boy’s exact dimensions again.

  Now Jonah saw that Chip hadn’t completely vanished. Jonah could still see, faintly, Chip’s blue jeans and Ohio State sweatshirt and Nikes, coexisting with the tracer boy’s black tunic and tights and elflike shoes. And in the boy’s blond curls Jonah could see the bristles of Chip’s shorter hair. Even Chip’s face seemed to be a mix of his own jubilant awe and the tracer boy’s more solemn expression. Jonah didn’t know how his eyes could see two different things in the exact same space at the exact same time, but they did.

  “It’s like the mirrors,” Katherine whispered.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jonah muttered. He knew exactly which mirrors she meant. One time when they were on vacation, their parents had taken them to a science museum that had a pair of special one-way mirrors rigged up, back to back, so two people could sit on either side and, by adjusting the lighting, see what their faces looked like blended together. Katherine had loved it, dragging total strangers over to sit opposite her. “So that’s what I would look like if I were African American. … That’s what I would look like Asian,” she kept saying. When their parents finally pulled her away, she was scheming: “When I fall in love and want to get married, I’m going to bring my boyfriend here so we can see what our kids will look like. …”

  “Do you look like Mom’s and Dad’s faces put together?” Jonah had asked grumpily.

  “Fortunately, she didn’t get my big ears,” Dad had joked, while Mom shook her head warningly at Katherine and pulled her aside to have a little talk. Jonah didn’t have to hear the words “Jonah … sensitive … adoption” to know what the talk was about. And he hadn’t even been thinking about being adopted—about how he’d never know which of his features came from which birth parent. He’d just thought that Katherine was acting stupid.

  But watching Chip and the tracer boy was like watching a perfect version of those mirrors, ones that completely combined two people.

  The tracer boy/Chip began patting the younger brother on his back.

  “Forsooth,” the tracer/Chip said, his voice coming out loud and strong. “Our father would be proud of us, should we be so brave. And God will reward our courage.”

  Actually, that might not have been exactly what the tracer/Chip said. That was what Jonah thought he heard, but the words were distorted, oddly inflected.

  The king of England is bound to have an English accent, Jonah reminded himself. But even that didn’t seem like enough of an explanation.

  “Did people really talk like that in the fifteenth century?” Katherine asked. “Is that, like, Old English?”

  Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. Foreign-country accent and foreign time accent.

  “Actually, at this time people were speaking Middle English, transitioning toward early modern English,” JB’s voice came softly from the Elucidator in Jonah’s hand.

  “Can’t you give us a translation?” Katherine asked.

  “What you just heard, that was the translation,” JB said. “The Elucidator does it automatically for time travelers. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t have understood a thing.”

  “‘Forsooth’? That’s the translation?” Jonah asked incredulously.

  “The Elucidator translates only up to the nearest time period that could be understandable. Time travelers need to remember they’re out of place,” JB said. “You’re not going to hear King Edward the Fifth saying in his rightful time and place, ‘Dude! This sucks!’”

  “Chip would say that,” Jonah said, anxiously watching his friend’s face, blended with the tracer of the king’s.

  “Shh!” Alex said. “The other boy’s speaking. …”

  But the younger boy’s response was soundless because he was still just a ghostly tracer.

  Chip shoved his face away from his tracer boy’s for a moment and said, “You guys try it!”

  Katherine sat down in the younger tracer boy’s lap. Jonah was impressed—he wasn’t sure he wanted to be that brave.

  But Katherine didn’t blend in with the tracer the way Chip did. It was comical how hard she was trying and how badly she was failing: The tracer would lean forward, and a second later she’d lean too. Or the tracer would wave his arm, and Katherine, trying to keep up, would lift her arm just as the tracer was putting his down.

  Then the tracer stood up and walked away.

  Katherine didn’t try to follow.

  “That didn’t work,” she said, casting an envious glance at Chip and his tracer, who were still moving completely in sync.

  “That’s because you don’t have any connection to the tracer,” Alex said. “He’s not you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Katherine said. “You try.”

  Alex didn’t have to. Because, just then, the tracer walked into him. It was like watching magnets meet, bonding instantly. Alex melded with the tracer just as completely as Chip had.

  The tracer/Alex kept walking, toward a window at the far side of the room. He leaned out the window, his elbows braced against the thick stones of the wall.

  “God bless Mother, in sanctuary at Westminster,” he said, his voice plaintive and sweet.

  Jonah tiptoed over behind the tracer/Alex—somehow tiptoeing seemed to be appropriate. Out the tall window he could see little except inky blackness. It was like being at Boy Scout camp, out in the woods, miles away from streetlights. Wait—was that a torch down there near the ground?

  Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. No electricity. Indoors or out.

  Somehow all that vast darkness was scarier than timesickness, scarier than the tracer boys, scarier than watching Chip and Alex merge with their past selves. This was real. This wasn’t just some really good special effects in a dark room, maybe a TV show where someone like Ashton Kutcher would burst out in a few moments, crying, “Fooled you! You’ve been punk’d!”

  Something rattled at the opposite end of the room. Jonah noticed for the first time that there was another door besides the one they’d walked through when they discovered the tracer boys. It was the handle of that door that was rattling.

  Someone was coming in.

  “We’re supposed to hide!” Jonah hissed.

  It was five steps from the window back to the first door, back to the completely dark room they’d arrived in at the beginning. Jonah covered that distance with amazing speed. He spun around to see that Katherine was cramming herself under the bed. But Alex and Chip hadn’t budged. They were still joined with their tracers, Alex at the window, Chip perched on the bed.

  Jonah considered racing back and jerking Alex away at least, but there wasn’t time. The door was already opening.

  A girl stood in the doorway.

  “Esteemed sirs,” she said—or something like that—and dropped into a curtsy, sweeping her plain, roughly woven skirt off the floor. “I’ve come for thy tray.”

  “Another servant already took the tray,” the combination Chip/tracer boy said, his tone as haughty as a king’s. “It’s late. My brother couldst have been sleeping.”

  “Thou mightest not wish to sleep this night,” the girl said.

  She winke
d.

  And then she backed away, pulling the door shut behind her.

  Jonah waited in his hiding place, holding his breath. When nothing else happened, he dared to step out and hiss, “Didn’t she see Chip and Alex? She was looking right at them! And what was that winking about? Why shouldn’t the tracer boys sleep?”

  Katherine rolled out from under the bed.

  “I couldn’t see a thing,” she complained. “Who was it? What do you mean, winking?”

  Jonah looked to Chip and Alex for backup—they’d been directly in line for the winking; they would have seen it better. Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing. He also might have just imagined that the conversation of oddly inflected, archaic words made sense. Probably Chip and Alex could understand everything better, since this was their time period.

  Chip and Alex gave no sign that they’d heard Katherine or Jonah. They were still completely intact with the tracer boys.

  “Come,” the Chip/tracer boy said, patting the bedding beside him. “’Tis barely past midsummer, but this night shall be long. Thou mayest sleep. I shall keep watch.”

  The Alex/tracer boy reluctantly pulled away from the window.

  “Good night, Mother,” he said, blowing a kiss out into the darkness.

  He crossed the room and curled up on the bed beside his brother.

  “Chip? Alex?” Jonah called, a note of panic entering his voice. “Come out of there!”

  Was it also his imagination that the tracer boys’ images seemed to be growing stronger as his view of Chip and Alex faded away? Jonah could no longer make out the familiar Nike swishes on Chip’s tennis shoes, or the wild-haired picture of Einstein on Alex’s T-shirt.

  “We’re going to have to grab them!” Katherine exclaimed.

  She took hold of the Chip/tracer boy’s arm and began pulling.

  “That’s not going to work,” Jonah scoffed.

  But it was working. A second later Chip slipped off the bed, leaving the tracer boy behind. Unfortunately, Katherine had tugged a little too hard—Chip landed on top of her in the middle of the floor.

  “This is how you thank me for rescuing you?” Katherine joked, pushing him away. Then, crouching beside him, she stopped pushing and impulsively wrapped her arms around him, hugging him close. “Oh, Chip, I was so scared—I thought maybe you’d disappeared forever.”

  Chip squinted at her, as if profoundly puzzled. He sat up and glanced from her to the tracer boy and back again.

  “Chip?” Katherine said, sitting back on her heels. “Are you all right?”

  “Um,” Chip said. He shook his head, like he was trying to clear it. “That was so weird. When we were together, it was like I had his brain. I could think his thoughts.”

  “So, what does the king of England think about?” Jonah asked. He wanted to make this into a joke. He didn’t like the way Chip sounded so serious. He didn’t like how scared he still felt, even with Chip away from his tracer.

  Chip looked up at Jonah. His expression was more serious than ever.

  “He’s not sure he’s going to stay king,” Chip said solemnly. “He thinks his uncle is going to kill him.”

  FIVE

  “No!” Katherine gasped.

  “What didst thou expect?” Chip asked. His eyes goggled out a bit. He stopped, pounded the palm of his hand against the side of his head, and tried again. “I mean, what’d you think was going to happen? Weren’t you listening when JB and Gary and Hodge said we were all endangered children in history? It’s pretty clear that being kidnapped saved our lives. So sending us back means …” He got a faraway look in his eyes. He peered out, not at Katherine or Jonah, but toward the dark window at the opposite end of the room. “It means we’re supposed to die.”

  There was a bitter twist to his words, but his face was strangely calm. Accepting.

  Jonah crouched beside his sister. He reached out and grabbed Chip’s shoulders, and began shaking him, hard.

  “Don’t say that,” Jonah said. “JB promised he’d give us a chance to save history and you and Alex. Didn’t you hear that?”

  “I did,” Chip said, still maddeningly placid. “But did you hear him telling us how to do that?”

  “I …” Jonah realized he’d dropped the Elucidator when he’d reached for Chip’s shoulders. He felt around on the dim floor to find it again. His fingers slid over something that felt like a thin rock, maybe the kind you’d skip across a lake. “JB?”

  “Yes?”

  The voice had definitely come from the rock.

  Oooh, Jonah thought. The Elucidator acts like a chameleon. It tries to blend in with whatever time period it’s in.

  The fact that blending in in the fifteenth century meant impersonating a rock was not very comforting. Jonah wanted buttons to push, gadgets and gizmos, high-tech whizzing and whirring.

  “We could use a little information,” Jonah said. “And advice. Is Chip’s uncle—I mean, Edward the Fifth’s uncle—is he going to try to kill him? What should we do?”

  “I can’t tell you the future,” JB said.

  “It’s not the future! It’s the past!” Jonah said. “It’s already happened!”

  “Not from where you’re sitting,” JB said.

  Jonah considered flinging the rock out the window. He wanted to, badly.

  “I’m not trying to be mean,” JB continued. “I just don’t want any of you burned at the stake as witches and warlocks for knowing too much.”

  Was burning at the stake one of the things that went on in the fifteenth century? Jonah shivered and was glad that JB couldn’t see him.

  “None of you are trained at time travel,” JB continued. “You have to be very, very careful.”

  “What if we’d already known everything about Edward the Fifth?” Jonah argued. “What if we’d learned all about him at school?”

  “Did you?” JB asked.

  “No,” Jonah admitted. The only English king Jonah could remember learning about was George III, the one who’d been king during the American Revolution. Taxation without representation, and all that. But that would have been in, what, 1776? Long after the fifteenth century.

  “George the Third!” Jonah gasped. “And—and Queen Elizabeth. Prince Charles. And William and Harry. See, I already know the future. They’re probably Chip’s great-great-great—times a lot—great-grandchildren. Right?”

  “Not if I die at age twelve,” Chip said quietly.

  Oh.

  “Jonah,” JB said, his voice stern again. “I can still yank you and Katherine out of the fifteenth century if I have to. If you insist on being difficult.”

  “Why don’t we get Alex away from his tracer and see what he has to say?” Katherine suggested quickly. She rolled her eyes and frowned at Jonah, one of those annoying girl looks that seemed to say, Boys! Don’t they think before they speak?

  Just for that, Jonah let Katherine approach Alex on her own. If she was so superior, let her pull Alex over on herself too.

  Katherine began tugging on Alex’s arm, but she seemed to be struggling more than she had with Chip. Maybe Jonah’s eyes were playing tricks on him, but it looked like her fingers were sliding right through Alex’s arm.

  “Can’t … someone … help?” Katherine grunted.

  Reluctantly Jonah stood up and joined her beside the tracer/Alex. He pushed against Alex’s back. It was such a weird sensation—too cold and too hot, too prickly and too sticky, everything all at once.

  “The timesickness,” Katherine mumbled. “I …”

  “Here,” Chip said. From the floor, he tugged on Alex’s feet. Alex slid out of the tracer feetfirst and banged his head on the floor. Once Alex moved, Jonah fell forward, straight through the tracer, and jammed his chin against the edge of the bed.

  Fifteenth-century mattresses were not as thick as twenty-first-century mattresses, so he didn’t have much cushioning. Jonah hit hard. His bottom jaw slammed against his top jaw, and he saw stars. When his vision cleared, he saw that Kathe
rine had fallen in the opposite direction, her shoulder striking the stone wall.

  If we keep this up, none of us will survive the fifteenth century, Jonah thought. Chills traveled down his spine that had nothing to do with the pain in his jaw.

  “Interesting,” Alex muttered. He was still lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Did you feel like you were someone else?” Chip asked him.

  “Yes,” Alex said. He blinked. “No. I was me. I am me. It’s just—I’m not.”

  “That’s as clear as mud,” Katherine said. She was rubbing her shoulder where she’d hit the wall.

  “I know exactly what you mean!” Chip said excitedly.

  Alex nodded and sat up. He stared toward the window, just as Chip had done.

  “I could look at the stars and know that they’re light-years away, that they’re red giants or yellow dwarfs, that they’re the products of nuclear fusion—but also think that they were painted in the sky by God, on a tapestry. I even thought that the stars revolved around the earth!” he said.

  Chip nodded.

  “Do you know about our uncle?” he asked.

  “Lord Rivers, you mean?” Alex asked.

  “Gloucester,” Chip said, and just the way he said the name made Jonah shiver again.

  Alex kept staring toward the window.

  “Mother has a plan,” he said softly. “She’ll take care of us.”

  “Whoa, whoa, hold on there,” Katherine said, stepping between Alex and Chip. “Quit talking like you’re them.” She gestured toward the tracer boys, who were curled up together on the bed again, the older one patting the younger one’s head. “You’re freaking me out.”

  “But we are them,” Chip said. He started to stand up, as if he intended to rejoin his tracer.

  Katherine slammed her hands against his chest, holding him back.

  “Stop it!” she insisted. “You’re Chip Winston. You live at 805 Greenbriar Court, Liston, Ohio. You’re in seventh grade at Harris Middle School. You’re from the twenty-first century!” She took one hand off Chip’s chest and shoved it against Alex’s shoulder. “And you’re Alex, uh—what’s your last name, Alex?”