“A prisoner someone tried to kill last night,” Alex reminded him.
That word, “kill,” lingered in the air. Jonah, trying to avoid thinking about it, realized something else.
“The serving girl this morning, the one who brought the tray,” he said. “She wasn’t acting like she thought the boys had vanished. Or been killed. And I didn’t see her tracer, so she wasn’t doing anything different.”
“Or her tracer was in some other room entirely,” Alex said.
“Oh. Yeah.”
Jonah frowned. The more he thought about all of this, the more confused he was. Chip’s story only made things worse, because it just showed how much Edward V and his brother hadn’t known. Where was that Lord Rivers guy now? Was he really so wonderful? And was Gloucester so terrible, or did it just seem that way because Chip had listened to his mother’s side of the family?
Maybe all of this is just a misunderstanding, Jonah thought. A mistake.
Which was really stupid, because it was pretty much impossible to mistakenly throw two boys out a window.
“Maybe if we check the Elucidator …,” Alex suggested slowly.
Chip whirled on him.
“You want to talk to JB again? Somebody we know betrayed us? No!”
“Not to talk to JB,” Alex corrected himself. “For other stuff. JB wasn’t the one who made us invisible. We figured that out all by ourselves. Maybe there’s some other function like that, that can help us. Or maybe there’s, like, some explanation of history on the Elucidator, some button we can click and find out everything.”
Jonah wished he’d thought of that.
“Do you still have the Elucidator, Jonah?” Katherine asked.
“Um, uh …” Jonah dug in the front pocket of his jeans. You’d think he’d remember something like that, but there’d been so much else to think about. “Here it is.” He pulled out a thin, flat disk.
A completely invisible, thin, flat disk. Even though he could feel it, hard against his hand, he couldn’t see the slightest shadow of anything in his open palm. He held it up, into the sunlight.
Still nothing.
“Very funny, Jonah.” Katherine scrunched up her face in disgust. “This isn’t the time for practical jokes.”
“No, really,” Jonah said. “It’s in my hand. It’s just … even more invisible than we are.”
He ran his fingers over the Elucidator, groping for some sort of button, something to use to give it directions. The surface of the Elucidator was completely smooth. The others gathered around him and felt it too.
“Maybe it has an audio activation in this mode?” Alex suggested calmly. “Elucidator, view screen.”
Nothing happened.
“Show screen,” Katherine said.
“End invisibility mode,” Chip said.
“Help?” Jonah tried. “Show help menu?”
The Elucidator stayed invisible.
“Maybe if I throw it again?” Chip asked. “That made it light up.”
“Or you might break it completely,” Alex said.
Don’t panic, Jonah thought. Don’t panic. It wouldn’t help to panic. … But it was hard not to when they were all clustered together staring at nothing, and that same invisible nothing was their only link with the outside world, maybe their only hope of ever escaping the fifteenth century.
“Um,” Jonah said, his voice cracking. “Anybody got a plan B?”
“I do, but I don’t want to do it,” Katherine said in a small voice.
Oh, great, now Katherine wasn’t making any sense either. No, wait—Jonah hadn’t been able to understand her about half the time back in the twenty-first century, anyway, so this was just normal. It was good to have something be normal right now.
“Well?” Jonah said mockingly—mocking was often the best tone to use with Katherine. “What is it?”
Katherine looked carefully at Chip and Alex.
“I think the only way we can get out of here is to fix time,” she said. “Even if we can’t do anything with the Elucidator, you saw how JB yanked the Taser out of here. Maybe he’d do that with us, too, if we can somehow make it so it doesn’t matter that the king and the prince disappeared last night.”
“You mean, you’re on JB’s side. You think Alex and I have to die,” Chip said bitterly. “Thanks a lot!”
“No!” Katherine said. She grabbed Chip by the shoulder, steadying him. “I mean, we need to find out how to make it look like you did die, and make the people who wanted you dead think that you are. I want to fake your death. But first we need to figure out who tried to kill you, and why. And how they reacted to your disappearance. And for that …” She swallowed hard, uncharacteristically hesitant. “For that we have to leave this room.”
“You’re right,” Alex said, sounding surprised. “That’s a good plan.” He tilted his head, puzzled. “Why did you say you didn’t want to do it?”
Katherine bit her lip.
“You’re going to think I’m being a real girl here,” she began.
“Katherine, you are a girl,” Jonah reminded her.
Katherine ignored him.
“Not that kind of girl. Not the kind in the movies who’s always screaming over every little thing, the kind that everyone else has to rescue.” She flipped her long hair disdainfully over her shoulder. “You know I’m not like that.”
She was appealing to Jonah now, like she really cared about his opinion.
“Okay,” Jonah said grudgingly. “You’re not.”
“But I’m terrified now at the thought of walking out that door,” she said. “I know we need to do it, I’m pretty sure it’s the best thing, but … maybe timesickness makes you agoraphobic? Or maybe it’s just because I’ve already seen murderers, I’ve already almost been burned to death—and that’s without going out into the rest of the fifteenth century. …”
Jonah didn’t like this. She was scaring him now too.
“Katherine,” Chip said soothingly. “We’re invisible! We’ll be fine.”
“Will we?” Katherine asked. “Can you promise that? You’re the king here, and you’re not even safe!”
Jonah thought maybe Alex was rolling his eyes, but it was hard to tell when his eyes were so close to being invisible.
“Then, maybe you could stay here—see what happens in our chambers the rest of the day—while Chip and Jonah and I go out,” Alex said.
Jonah decided that Alex must not have a younger sister back home in the twenty-first century. Otherwise he’d know that that was exactly the kind of thing that would set Katherine off.
It did.
“And that would be even worse!” Katherine said. “I’d be sitting here with no idea what was happening to the rest of you, with nothing to do except imagine all the worst possibilities. … We don’t even have cell phones to use to stay in touch!”
“We could …,” Jonah started to say. “Or if …”
But Katherine was right. It was amazing how hard not having a phone made everything.
“Maybe if we promise to come back within an hour?” Alex offered.
Katherine shoved against him.
“No!” she said. “Quit trying to get rid of me! I’m going too!”
And Alex, who seemed to understand scientific concepts so well, just sat there mystified by Katherine.
FOURTEEN
They all took turns using the privy room before they left. This made Jonah feel oddly homesick, because of all those times when he and Katherine were little kids and Mom or Dad would insist, “Make sure you go before we go!”
But the privy bore very little resemblance to a twenty-first-century bathroom. The “toilet” was just a single hole in the stones of the wall. And Chip and Alex had a little too much fun telling Katherine, “Instead of toilet paper there’s moss that you can use. See? It’s really useful!”
They also delayed a bit, looking around the room, trying to make sure that nothing was out of place.
“You didn’t leave
the Elucidator lying around anywhere, did you?” Alex asked.
“It’s back in my pocket,” Jonah assured him.
“Should we hang the tapestry up again, or just leave it?” Katherine asked. “It was the soldiers or guards or whatever those guys were who pulled it down, but probably they wouldn’t have done that if it hadn’t been for us. …”
The hooks for the tapestry were high above their heads, about twelve feet off the ground.
“Never mind!” Jonah said impatiently. “Let’s just go!”
He grabbed the door and jerked it open—and found himself staring right into the startled face of yet another serving girl, in the hall outside.
“Wh-wh-who’s there?” she called, darting so quickly to peer into the room that Jonah barely managed to step out of the way.
She looked right through Jonah, right through Katherine, right through Chip and Alex. Her eyes didn’t focus on any of them.
“Must have been the wind,” she muttered. “And the princes must already be outside playing. …”
She stepped back into the hall and pulled the door firmly shut behind her.
Jonah stood frozen, his heart pounding in his chest.
“Maybe … you were … right …, Katherine,” he whispered after a few moments, after he was sure the serving girl would have moved on. “Maybe it is too dangerous out there.”
Katherine reached past him for the door handle.
“Silly,” she scoffed. “You just need to be careful.”
She pushed the door open a crack, peeked out, and then slipped out into the empty hall. The others followed.
The hall was dim, with little sunlight reaching in from the high windows. Katherine pointed left, then right, then held her hands up questioningly. When everybody else shrugged, she turned to the right. After a few twists and turns in the hall they found a rounded staircase and tiptoed down. Reaching the door at the bottom, Katherine made a dramatic show of peeking out again, looking around carefully before slipping out.
I guess she’s not so scared if she can make me look like a fool, Jonah thought. But he was just as glad not to be the first one out this time.
He stepped out into the sunshine behind Katherine and Chip, and blinked a few times to let his eyes adjust. The other three looked even dimmer and harder to see in bright light, and as long as he didn’t think about it too much, he found that reassuring.
Beyond them he could see a large courtyard of sorts: grass and greenery and flowering trees. And beyond that he could see soldiers—or maybe guards—standing around. They didn’t look like they thought they had anything to worry about; they weren’t standing at attention. One or two of them even had caps pulled down over their faces, as if they might be sleeping.
“My soldiers never behaved so sloppily,” Chip muttered.
“Maybe if the commanders were away …,” Alex whispered back.
Here was another puzzle, Jonah thought. If the soldiers thought the king and the prince had disappeared last night, shouldn’t they be running around searching everywhere? Shouldn’t they be extra alert, not … comatose?
Jonah stepped through an archway to look for other soldiers, other people who might be more awake and more likely to be discussing last night’s events.
Two men in fancier clothes walked past, one saying to the other, “Hurry! The last barge is leaving for the coronation!”
Coronation?
Jonah peered back at Chip to see if Chip had heard the man too. Chip’s face had gone rock hard with fury.
“So that’s how it is,” he hissed. “They were trying to kill me or kidnap me, and replace me with another boy at the coronation. One who would probably do whatever Gloucester told him to do. …”
“Um,” Jonah said softly, because he thought the men were out of earshot now, but he wasn’t completely sure. “Wouldn’t people notice?”
Alex shook his head.
“It’s not like they have TV,” he said. “Maybe a few people have seen paintings of me and Chip, maybe a few other people know what’s going on. …”
Chip had already spun past them.
“I’m getting on that barge,” he announced, and stalked away without a backward glance.
“Come on!” Katherine said in a panicky voice, pulling on Jonah’s sleeve and reaching back for Alex, too. “We can’t lose him!”
Chip was already rushing after the two men, dodging servants with platters and soldiers with pikes and a stray-looking dog that raised his nose and sniffed suspiciously as Chip dashed past.
Jonah felt some of Katherine’s panic. What if we lose Chip? What if he makes it on the barge and we don’t? What if he does something really stupid? Jonah began almost running.
“Jonah!” Katherine whispered. “You’re kicking up dust!”
“It’s windy,” Jonah whispered back. “Who cares?”
Ahead of them Chip had reached a wharf extending out into a river—the Thames? Jonah wondered. He thought that the social studies teacher he’d had in sixth grade (a much, much nicer woman than Katherine’s Mrs. Hatchett) would be very proud of him for remembering the name of a foreign waterway at a time like this.
And then there was no time to think, because Chip was jumping from the wharf onto the back of a low boat.
“That idiot!” Alex whispered.
“No, no, he’s all right—he’ll catch that pole …,” Jonah said.
Alex shot him a disgusted look.
“What?” Jonah said.
The answer was instantly clear. Chip did indeed grab on to a pole holding up a canopy over the well-dressed people crowding onto the boat. But he had landed on the outer edge of the boat, throwing everything off balance. The canopy wobbled; his corner of the boat dipped low in the water. Women in ridiculously elaborate skirts fell against elegant men, all of them separating from calm, unaffected tracers. It was eerie how the number of people on the boat seemed to instantly double, as Chip’s one action changed everyone’s movements. People laughed and shrieked—and stared. A man holding an oar left his tracer behind to creep toward Chip, a mystified expression on his face.
Katherine peered in distress from Alex to Jonah.
“Well?” she whispered. “Do I have to do everything?”
Jonah just looked at her blankly.
Katherine took off running. She broke through the crowd like a star basketball player determined to score the winning point before the buzzer. Then, at the wharf’s edge, behind the loading area, she eased down into the water and—Jonah craned his neck to watch—disappeared with only a small ripple. Seconds later she resurfaced at the far side of the boat, climbed up, and clutched the pole on the opposite side from Chip.
Instantly the boat righted itself.
The man with the oar shrugged and went back to his position, rejoining his tracer.
“Oh,” Jonah whispered. “I would have figured that out. Eventually,” he told Alex.
Alex grinned.
“When should we tell her that people dump their sewage into the Thames?” he whispered.
“Never,” Jonah whispered back.
One by one, all the tracers vanished from the barge, as everyone settled down. Jonah and Alex waited until the rest of the people had crowded on, and then, just before the barge pulled away, they gingerly stepped down to grab other poles. They were careful to balance their weight, so the barge barely swayed.
And then they were gliding along the river.
FIFTEEN
It wasn’t bad on the barge. Clinging to the pole, balanced on the outer edge of the boat, Jonah was at least certain that he wouldn’t accidentally jostle into someone. And Jonah could hear bits and pieces of the conversation under the canopy.
Mostly people seemed to be talking about the weather.
“What a lovely day …”
“Perfect for the coronation …”
Jonah noticed that, although the people in the boat all had on fancy clothes, a lot of them were missing teeth or had pockmarked skin or bad
scars. One man was even missing both an eye and a hand, like he was an extra for one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Jonah started thinking about how in movies about old times it was only the pirates and the outlaws who ever had any deformities or blemishes, while the heroes and heroines all had perfect teeth and perfect skin and perfect hair and bodies—as if they all had time-traveling plastic surgeons and orthodontists and hair stylists and personal trainers to take care of them. While in real life …
Oh, my gosh, Jonah thought. Some of these people are hideous!
A woman had turned toward him, exposing a cheek eaten up with some sort of infection, with pus oozing copiously from the side of her face. And she hadn’t even bothered to cover it up, hadn’t even bandaged it. Flies hovered above the pus.
Jonah turned his head to see how the others were reacting. Chip and Alex were staring straight ahead, completely unfazed.
Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. They’d be used to it.
Katherine had her jaw clenched and looked like she was trying very hard not to throw up. But really, she’d looked like that ever since they arrived in the fifteenth century, because of the timesickness.
Huh, Jonah thought. As long as I don’t look at Lady Pus Face, I don’t feel sick at all anymore.
Maybe twelve hours of breathing fifteenth-century air had cured him. Maybe eating the fifteenth-century bread had helped. Jonah remembered a little bit of a Greek myth his sixth-grade social studies teacher had told his class—she’d been really into Greek myths. This one was something about someone going to the underworld and being offered food. And the food was really important because …
Suddenly Jonah got chills. He’d remembered the rest of the myth.
Because once you ate the food, you could never leave.
Jonah started practically hyperventilating, breathing much too loudly. A man turned toward him, a puzzled expression on his pockmarked face. Jonah clamped his teeth together, trying to hold his breath instead. But this only made him dizzy.
He tilted his head back and stared up at a single wispy cloud in the bright blue sky. What a lovely day … lovely day … lovely day … Nice weather was something to focus on, to distract yourself with, when all your other thoughts were dangerous.
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