“Well,” Jonah said. “Katherine and I had better get Chip and Alex out of there before they corrupt the princesses with their twenty-first-century habits. You couldn’t have princesses starting to do high fives.”
Huh, Jonah thought. Maybe I do that double-talk thing too. He didn’t care about whether or not high fives caught on in the fifteenth century. He just wanted to get everyone home.
“You think you can just snatch them away now?” JB asked harshly. “Just because you want to?” He glowered. “You sound like Gary and Hodge.”
“It’s for their own good,” Jonah said. “Chip and Alex’s.”
“How do you know that?” JB asked. “How do you know that in the twenty-first century they’re not going to step in front of a car tomorrow and be killed instantly? How do you know that Chip’s not going to get his throne back in the fifteenth century and reign for fifty years, in happiness and prosperity?”
“Does he?” Jonah asked. “Is that what’s supposed to happen?”
“Uh, no,” JB said. “Probably not.”
Jonah gaped at JB.
“Probably?” Jonah repeated. “You don’t know for sure?”
JB shrugged.
“Everything’s uncertain now.”
Jonah looked to Katherine for reinforcement. At home she was usually the one who raged and blustered and told their parents their rules were insane, no kid should be expected to have to do that … Jonah could usually count on her to do all the screaming and complaining, so he didn’t have to.
But Katherine was wincing and biting her lip.
“How long?” she asked softly. “How long until we know what’s going to happen? How long do Chip and Alex have to stay in the fifteenth century?”
JB turned and faced Jonah and Katherine squarely.
“You want my best guess?” he asked. “The most likely time span, assuming we haven’t changed events too greatly from the original version?”
Jonah and Katherine both nodded.
JB tilted his head to the side, calculating. Or else delaying delivering the bad news.
“If everything goes the way we hope,” he said, “it’s two years.”
TWENTY-SIX
“Two years?” Katherine wailed. “That’s forever! I’ll be fourteen in two years! I’ll miss everything about middle school!”
Jonah considered telling her, “No, you’ll just be a fourteen-year-old sixth grader.” Or, “Don’t you think it might be a good thing to miss middle school?” But he had his own distress to deal with.
Two more years before I get pizza again? I’ll die! Strangely, he wasn’t hungry right at the moment—Oh, yeah, people aren’t hungry or thirsty or anything else when they’re in Outer Time—but if breakfast was any indication, he’d starve with nothing but fifteenth-century food for two years.
JB held up his hand like a traffic cop.
“I didn’t say the two of you were going to stay in the 1400s for two years,” JB said. “Just Chip and Alex.”
“That is so not fair,” Katherine ranted. “You promised us they’d be safe. You promised we could rescue them. You—”
“I promised you could try to rescue them,” JB corrected her in a steely voice. “There’s a difference. I never promised you’d succeed.”
Katherine gulped, turned pale, and stopped talking for a moment.
“But if they’re stuck in 1483 for two years—or I mean, 1483 and 1484—” she began tentatively.
“The first half of 1485, too,” JB interrupted, though his voice was almost gentle now.
“Okay, they’re there until 1485 … well, isn’t there more danger that they’ll do something to contaminate the time period?” Katherine asked. “Something like high fives, only worse? Or—what if the opposite problem happens? What if Chip and Alex forget the twenty-first century? What if they forget Jonah and me? What if—”
“Katherine,” JB said. “I already told you we were facing a lot of risks.” His expression was severe, then softened. “When we ran our first projections, we thought we had no choice but to let Chip and Alex ultimately meet whatever fate was waiting for them in 1485. I’m a time officer, sworn to uphold the sanctity of history. I had to send Chip and Alex back. But we never want to sacrifice anyone on the altar of authenticity. We never intended to return missing children to history just to see them die. We just … knew that that might be the inevitable outcome, in some cases.”
Now it was Jonah’s turn to gulp. He was a missing child too. What fate waited for him in a foreign time?
“Then you and Jonah grabbed Chip’s elbows back in the cave,” JB said, a hint of amusement creeping into his voice. “You should have seen the panic you caused at time headquarters! If it weren’t strictly forbidden by thirty-two separate time regulations, I’d show you a clip of it someday. But then everyone scrambled to run new projections and … you might have changed things just enough. If the time projections had shown you introducing rap music or the theory of evolution or, I don’t know, Coca-Cola, we would have yanked you out instantly. But they didn’t. They showed you having a chance to rescue your friends.”
JB sounded so earnest it was impossible not to believe him. It was impossible not to believe that he wanted to see Chip and Alex safe just as much as Jonah and Katherine did.
“What do we have to do?” Jonah asked.
“You probably need to know what’s going to happen between 1483 and 1485,” JB said. “We need to make sure that everything goes as projected, anyhow. And then …” He cleared his throat. “How do you feel about wearing armor?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Jonah felt hideous wearing armor. It was heavy. It was hot. And it smelled like a locker room full of sweaty teenage boys. Trying on the suit of armor JB gave him, Jonah sniffed surreptitiously, almost gagged, and resorted to holding his breath.
JB said this was brand-new armor—could I really be producing that smell all by myself?
Jonah lifted the visor of his armor.
“Look,” he said. “You’re from the future. Can’t you give us something that just looks like fifteenth-century armor, but really weighs nothing—and has air-conditioning?”
JB laughed.
“Good idea,” he said. “But no.”
“Why not?” Katherine demanded. She had on armor of her own and was awkwardly trying to walk wearing, essentially, a forty-pound tin can.
“Against time regulations,” JB said curtly, bending over to examine a squeaky knee joint on Katherine’s armor.
“Why?” Katherine said again.
JB sighed. He straightened up but somehow wouldn’t meet Katherine’s gaze.
“Because I’m sending you into a dangerous area. And if … something happens … we can’t take the risk of having anachronistic items discovered,” he said.
“What? You mean if klutzy Katherine trips and loses one of her metal gloves, you couldn’t just yank it out of time, like you did with the Taser?” Jonah asked.
JB gave him a rueful half smile.
“That kind of thing isn’t as easy as it looked from your perspective,” he said. “And … we can’t do it in a battle zone.”
Those words, “battle zone,” just hung in the air.
“We could die, couldn’t we?” Katherine asked quietly. “That’s what you’re talking about. ‘If something happens’—you mean, if we’re killed, and we lie there with all the other dead bodies, in wrong-time armor … that’s the problem, right?”
Why did Katherine always have to say things like that? Jonah would have been perfectly fine not thinking about the fact that people died in battle zones.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” he scoffed. “We’ll be invisible, remember? JB’s just being crazy overprotective. It’s like Mom and Dad practically making us wear bike helmets just to cross the street.”
JB stared off toward the wall where Chip and Alex’s fifteenth-century life was on display. They were still in sanctuary with their mother and sisters.
“I w
on’t lie to you,” JB said. “Death rates were high on medieval battlefields.”
“But you wouldn’t send us back there if you really thought we were going to die,” Jonah argued. “Right?” He adopted a joking tone. “Because then that’d ruin our time periods—Katherine and the twenty-first century, and me and, well, whatever time period I’m really from.”
JB winced.
“All the projections show the two of you surviving,” he said. “We wouldn’t risk this otherwise. It’s not worth it to just trade your lives for Chip’s and Alex’s. Or … to lose all of you. But I have to tell you … the projections aren’t always right.”
Jonah gulped and was glad that the armor still covered his throat so no one would see his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously up and down.
“We’re not scared,” he said.
“Speak for yourself,” Katherine said. “I am.”
“You don’t have to do this,” JB said. “Neither of you do. This is not a moral or an ethical dilemma. Chip and Alex are not entitled to any more time than fate gave them to begin with. They both believe in heaven—or, at least, their fifteenth-century selves both do. So neither of them would blame you if you chose the safe route. You could go home right now.”
Home …
Jonah was ashamed of how tempted he was.
“Chip and Alex are our friends,” Katherine said. “We’re not abandoning them.”
She jerked her chin up in the air and was probably trying for a noble pose. But for all those stories about knights’ chivalry and honor and nobility, armor was actually a very difficult thing to wear while striking a noble pose. Jonah heard a muffled thunk, then Katherine jerked off the top part of her armor and began rubbing the back of her scalp.
“Ow,” she said sheepishly. “I hit my head on the armor. It’s not bleeding, is it?”
Jonah leaned over to look.
“You’re fine,” he said. And, he vowed, she would be fine. Even if they were in a battle zone. He’d make sure of it.
“So,” he added with studied casualness. “Just what battle are we going to? Does Chip’s army attack Richard the Third, or does Richard’s army attack Chip?”
“Neither,” JB said. “You’ve got to remember, this is fifteenth-century England. None of their political battles are simple. Here. We’ll get you up to speed.”
He reached up and plucked something out of midair. He ran his right hand over it like a magician revealing his latest trick, and the thing appeared in the palm of his left hand: the Elucidator.
Jonah groaned.
“It was up there the whole time?” he asked. “In midair? That’s not fair. We didn’t know you had antigravity powers too.”
“Defying gravity is actually easier than defying time,” JB said. “But that’s not something I’m going to explain to you. Watch.”
He pointed the Elucidator toward the fifteenth-century scene on the far wall. Instantly, everyone began moving faster, like a DVD on fast-forward. Chip, Alex, the princesses, and the queen zipped around their small room, sleeping, waking, eating, conferring with guests, sleeping, waking, eating. …
“Okay, even I’m starting to feel claustrophobic with that room,” JB muttered. “Wait, wait—here—now the queen’s sending the boys away, to safety.”
The scene slowed momentarily as Chip and Alex were bundled into a cart in the dark of night and hidden under blankets. Then—quickly—they rattled down rutted roads, out into the countryside. Jonah caught a final glimpse of them joyfully running through a field, playing with wooden swords, before the view blurred.
“They do a lot of that the next several months,” JB said. “Meanwhile, King Richard isn’t having much fun trying to consolidate his power.” The scene shifted to a grim-faced king. “His own friend, Buckingham, betrays him four months after the coronation.”
Jonah watched men hunched over tables, battle plans scattered before them. Soldiers gathered together, whispering plans for treason.
“Supposedly Buckingham is throwing his support to a rival for the throne, Henry Tudor, who’s in exile in France. But is that the point? Or does Buckingham really want to put Chip back in power?” JB asked. “Buckingham’s wife is Chip’s aunt—his mother’s sister.”
The soldiers flocking together, oddly, seemed to be facing disastrous rain and floods rather than a battle.
“In the face of extreme weather the rebellion fails,” JB intoned. “King Richard has Buckingham executed.”
King Richard appeared again, not demanding his friend’s death, not watching his friend’s execution, but sitting stonily at a table, staring off into space. He was completely alone.
The scene shifted to festivities, people dancing and feasting.
“Oh, wait, I’ll back up a little—I missed showing you one of the happiest moments of King Richard’s reign,” JB said. “He had his son named Prince of Wales, heir to the throne.”
A frail-looking blond boy of seven or eight beamed happily at the crowd from the seat of honor at the feast. Eerily, he looked a lot like Chip and Alex, only younger and more fragile. His father stepped up behind him and gave him a hearty, proud slap on the back. The feeble boy lurched dangerously—the slap seemed much too hard for his brittle bones. But he turned back to grin up at Richard.
“Seven months later the sickly boy dies,” JB said. “Richard and his wife have no other children, and his wife is too ill to give him any more heirs.”
Now Jonah saw the king sobbing beside a bed. He was clutching a woman’s thin, bony hand and crying out, “Anne! Anne! Oh, please, no …”
“Richard’s wife dies less than a year after her son,” JB said. “Richard is heartbroken.”
More scenes of Richard sobbing, Richard on his knees praying to God: “Is it because of my sins, O Lord? Is this my punishment? What wouldst Thou have me do? Am I unforgivable?”
“Please,” Katherine interrupted. “Do we have to watch this? I’m starting to feel sorry for him. That kind of makes it hard to keep hating him.”
JB froze the action on the scene of the grief-stricken king. Jonah could see each individual tear rolling down his face, each deeply etched furrow in his anguished brow. Katherine was right: It was impossible not to feel sorry for someone in such obvious pain.
“Why is it necessary to hate him?” JB asked quietly.
“He’s the enemy, isn’t he?” Katherine asked.
“Is he?” JB replied, raising an eyebrow. “Shall I also show you the queen’s conniving and plotting during this same time period?” Scenes flickered past quickly: the queen meeting again and again with clusters of solemn men. “Would you like to consider how much she’s willing to endanger her children in order to regain political power? Nobody in this story has pure motives. Not even your friends.”
Once again the scene changed. Now they were back to Chip and Alex, parrying back and forth with wooden swords in a meadow. Chip swung hard, knocking the sword from Alex’s hand. Then Chip used the broad side of his sword to push his brother down; he thrust the sword’s point against Alex’s chest to pin him to the ground. Chip threw back his head and laughed.
“They’re playing,” Jonah said. “They’re just playing.”
“Of course,” JB said. But he looked like he wanted to say something else.
Jonah stared hard at his friends, trying to discern any hint of an Einstein T-shirt showing through Alex’s tunic, any trace of a Nike swish on Chip’s black shoes. He couldn’t. He stared at their faces: Were they thinking fifteenth-century thoughts or twenty-first-century thoughts? It was impossible to tell.
Then he noticed something else.
“Is that hair on Chip’s lip?” Jonah asked. “Has he started growing a mustache just in the couple of days he’s been there?”
JB glanced down at the Elucidator, checking the date.
“That’s 1485 you’re watching,” he said. “Summertime again. Chip and Alex have been there two full years. Chip’s fourteen and a half now—closing in on fifteen.�
��
Jonah fingered his own lip. Back home sometimes he’d lock the bathroom door and stand there staring into the mirror, searching for his first signs of facial hair. If he stood in just the right light, at just the right angle, it was possible to see at least six faint hairs on his upper lip. He would have said Chip’s crop of mustache hair was about the same.
This new, 1485-era Chip had enough hair on his lip that it showed up at any angle, in both sunlight and shadow.
“Chip’s the same age as me,” Jonah argued. “Thirteen.”
“If you pull Chip away from the tracer, he’ll be thirteen again,” JB corrected. “But right now …”
Chip lifted his sword triumphantly in the air, and the sleeve of his tunic slid back on his arm, revealing well-defined biceps. His hair streamed back in the breeze—somehow the shoulder-length blond curls didn’t look girly at all anymore.
“Wow,” Katherine whispered. “He looks like he could be in high school. On the football team. Varsity.”
On the ground Alex started to sit up. In a flash Chip had the wooden sword back down, aimed at his brother’s throat.
They aren’t playing after all, Jonah realized, chills traveling down his spine. They’re practicing.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“You have a very narrow window of opportunity,” JB said.
“Really?” Katherine said sarcastically. “You never mentioned that before.”
They were finally ready to go rescue Chip and Alex. JB had been through their instructions a million times, repeating again and again how important it was that Jonah and Katherine separate the boys from their tracers at exactly the right moment. Too soon and they’d mess up time.
Too late and Chip and Alex could die.
It was that possibility that made Jonah’s stomach churn, his skin prickle, his mustacheless face break out in a cold sweat.
I’m a thirteen-year-old kid, he thought. Katherine’s not quite twelve. Why would anyone trust us with life-or-death decisions?
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