Sent

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “Well,” JB said. “There was the matter of a certain Shakespeare quote being widely used more than a hundred years ahead of time. …”

  “Oops,” Alex said.

  JB shrugged.

  “In the scheme of things that was nothing,” he said. “Otherwise … everyone who heard Richard offer Chip the throne died on that battlefield. So did everyone who saw you separate from your tracers, saw the princes vanish into thin air. The way everything worked, it almost seemed … preordained.”

  He seemed embarrassed saying the word, which seemed out of place on this sunny autumn day, in twenty-first-century America.

  “Still,” Alex said. He looked around, as if suddenly scared. “You can’t tell me nobody else thought of this. I’m not ruining anything talking about this—”

  “What?” Katherine demanded. “Would you just spit it out?”

  Alex looked down, biting his lip. Then he peered back up at JB.

  “Chip and me, we still don’t belong in the twenty-first century,” Alex said. “Okay, so it didn’t mess up the fifteenth century to have Jonah and Katherine rescuing us—that’s great. Whatever. But anything we do here, now, aren’t we changing this time period? Should we plan never to come up with any brilliant scientific discoveries, never to have a job, never to get married and have kids, never to have an impact at all?” He looked over at Chip, whose jaw had dropped. “Sorry. I had to say it.”

  JB stepped forward and crouched down before both boys.

  “Alex, I can see where you would think that,” he said gently. “But you’re proceeding from a flawed hypothesis. Or … incomplete information. You don’t have to worry about trying to stay invisible in this time. Live. Use your brain to make all the discoveries you want, scientific or otherwise. Fall in love, marry, have children—well, years from now, I mean. Have an impact. There are time experts who would have agreed with your assessment, before. But we’re all seeing things a little differently now. This time period is much more in flux than we thought. It’s starting to seem like … well, like maybe the time crash was supposed to happen. Like maybe it’s supposed to be part of history.” He chuckled. “We’re not even worried anymore that Angela DuPre is never going to marry that plumber we thought she was supposed to marry. Which would be a relief for Hadley …” He muttered this almost to himself, then looked back up at the kids. “All sorts of things are changing. And that’s okay.”

  If Jonah were making any bets about which of them was most likely to make the scientific discoveries of the future, he’d put his money on Alex. Even Katherine always did better in science at school than Jonah ever did. But Jonah had a thought about time travel that nobody else seemed to have figured out.

  What if all those changes are because of us too? he wondered. What if we had an even bigger impact than we’ll ever know?

  “Speaking of changes …,” JB began, putting his knee down and turning slightly so he could look at all of the kids at once. “I really didn’t come here just to talk.”

  Katherine put her hands on her hips.

  “I knew it!” she said. “You’re still going to try to get Jonah to take his turn now, aren’t you? I told you, I am not going to let that happen!” She whirled toward the house as if she was about to let out a huge bellow: Mom! Mom! Come quick! Call 911! Someone’s trying to kidnap Jonah!

  “Will you just let me explain?” JB interrupted. “Before you start panicking?”

  Katherine looked confused for a moment, then let the air fizzle out of her lungs.

  “Explain fast,” she muttered.

  “We are ready to send the next kid back in time—but it’s not Jonah,” JB added quickly. “It’s Andrea Crowell. Remember her?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jonah said. “The really quiet girl with the braids?”

  “That’s right,” JB said. He began toying with a twig that had landed on the driveway. He pushed it one way, then the other. He looked back up, directly at Jonah. “We’ve run all sorts of projections, like we always do. And we keep finding unbelievable odds against success. Unless …”

  “Unless what?” Katherine said suspiciously, glaring down at JB.

  “Unless she has help from people who aren’t time travel experts,” JB said.

  “Us?” Alex gasped.

  JB nodded.

  “Partially. It’s Jonah, Katherine, and …” He grimaced, as if he found what he was about to say preposterous. “This dog.” He lifted the leash toward Katherine’s hand. “Don’t ask me why that combination works. I don’t know. I don’t even know why the analyst thought to include the dog in the projection. But … sending the two of you and the dog with Andrea gives us our best chance of success.”

  Katherine pointedly did not take the leash from JB’s hand. She looked like she was in shock.

  “You want us to go back in time again,” Jonah said numbly. “And not even to my own time. To help someone else.”

  “I thought we were done.” Katherine spoke as if she was in a trance, staring off past the basketball hoop, past the neighbor’s chrysanthemums. “I thought all I had to do was make sure you didn’t take Jonah away. … Do you know I have nightmares about the fifteenth century? Every night I’m back there on the battlefield. Every night I’m invisible, and I can’t get Chip and Alex to listen to me, to hear what they have to do. …”

  “Are you refusing?” JB asked.

  “Oh, I didn’t say that …,” Katherine mumbled dazedly.

  JB didn’t pressure them. He didn’t say, “You do realize that all of history is depending on you, don’t you?” He didn’t say, “You don’t really have a choice.” Jonah almost wished he would pressure them and try to boss them around—because then it would be easier to say no. Then it would be all about standing up for himself, about defending his rights. Defending his life.

  This was something else. This was leaving him free to imagine another kid, Andrea, going back in time all by herself, having no one at all to help her through. This was forcing him to be all mature and self-sacrificing and responsible—and choosing it for himself.

  He sighed.

  “I’ll do it,” he said.

  “Really?” Katherine stared at him. “Well, that’s just great. It’s horrible having you for a big brother, always trying to set a good example. Because now I have to do it too!” Despite her words, there was a note of excitement in her voice now. “Please, can’t Chip and Alex come too?”

  “No,” JB said. “Sorry. After their experiences they’d be just a little bit too trigger happy. Er—arrow happy.”

  Another time period with bows and arrows? Jonah thought. Great. I bet they won’t have decent food then, either.

  “Katherine,” Chip said. “Please …”

  Katherine glanced at him, and it was almost like watching Mom and Dad communicate silently. It was like she was telling Chip, Don’t get all mushy or macho-boy protective on me now. Don’t make this harder than it already is.

  “To you it’ll be like they’re just gone an instant,” JB assured Chip.

  “But I’ll know,” Chip retorted. “I’ll know that they’ll really be gone much, much longer. They’ll be so far away. …”

  He was gazing toward Katherine, but Katherine dived down toward the dog’s head, burying her face in the fur.

  “So if the dog’s coming with us, we need to know his name,” Katherine said, speaking almost directly into the fur.

  “It’s Dare,” JB said softly. “The dog’s name is Dare.”

  Jonah knew he should be asking about the exact time period they were going to, and Andrea Crowell’s other identity, and his own identity and time period as well. But for a moment he just sat there in the grass peering around his neighborhood: at the peaked roofs of his neighbors’ houses, at the wide street where he’d ridden his bike so many times, at the mailboxes and garage doors and sewer drains. … If he didn’t stop himself, he’d start blubbering about how much he was going to miss the fire hydrant across the street.

  It
’s incredible how precious everything looks when you know you’re about to lose it, Jonah thought. He wondered if Richard III had felt that way in his last moments on the battlefield at Bosworth; he wondered if Chip and Alex had felt that way leaving their tracers behind, leaving their fifteenth-century lives forever. Someday he’d have to ask them. Someday after he’d met his own tracer. But for now …

  “So, we’re going with Andrea Crowell, huh?” Jonah said, trying to sound cocksure and confident, like going back in time again was no big deal. “Does she know what we’re all getting into?”

  “No,” JB said. “Nobody does, really. To quote a famous philosopher revered in my time, ‘But this is no different from regular life. When have you ever known what’s going to happen in the future?’”

  Wait a minute, Jonah thought. I said that. Back at Westminster, with Katherine. Does that mean I’m going to be a famous philosopher in the future? Does that mean I’m going to be revered?

  There wasn’t time to ask.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  People have been trying to figure out what really happened to Edward V and his brother Richard ever since the fifteenth century. Here are the facts that everyone seems to agree on:

  Edward IV, the king of England, died on April 9, 1483, and his twelve-year-old son, Edward, was named as his successor. Edward V’s coronation was scheduled but never held. Instead, after accusations about the boy’s parents, his uncle was proclaimed king and crowned on July 6, 1483.

  Edward and his younger brother were known to be in the Tower of London during the summer of 1483. Then they vanished.

  And already, writing that last sentence—“Then they vanished”—I have to resort to extreme vagueness to avoid adding qualifiers like “and most people think that …” or “at some point within the next year or two …” Most people seem to think that the boys were murdered—but were they? If they were, who did it? When? How? Why?

  I did my best in this book not to fudge or change any facts that are irrefutable. Chip’s description of what happened to Edward V during the spring of 1483 is as historically accurate as I could make it. (So are his and Alex’s descriptions of Edward IV’s eating habits—and I bet you thought bulimia was only a modern problem!) Fortunately for my job as a fiction writer, the historical record regarding Edward and Richard is full of gaps and disputed details, so that left me lots of room to fill in with my own imagination.

  Historians studying an event like the disappearance of Edward and Richard look for accounts written by people living at the same time, who were close enough to the action to know what they were talking about, but not so close that they were overly biased and might be lying. In this case, the perfect account just doesn’t exist—or hasn’t been found. When I was researching this book, I had to laugh at the many, many times I would read, “The Croyland Chronicle was surely right about this detail, but probably wrong about …,” or, “Though Sir Thomas More was accurate about this part of the story, he must have been confused about …” And then I’d put down that research book, pick up another one, and discover that the author of the second book totally reversed which details of which versions were surely or probably right or wrong.

  For centuries Richard III was painted as the villain of the story. One notable account says that, years later, a man who’d worked for Richard III confessed to killing the boys on Richard’s orders. But that account rather conveniently came out during the reign of Henry VII—a.k.a., Henry Tudor, the man who defeated Richard and took the Crown at the Battle of Bosworth. And Henry had every reason to want to discredit Richard as much as possible to make his own claim to the throne look stronger. (By then Henry was also married to Edward V’s sister—yes, this is a very tangled tale—and so it also helped him to make sure everyone believed Edward V had deserved to be king but was very certainly dead.) Almost a century later William Shakespeare—writing when Henry’s granddaughter Elizabeth I was on the throne—based his play about Richard III on the earlier account. In Shakespeare’s version Richard III is a complete monster, the kind of villain audiences love to hate.

  More than three hundred years later a group of Richard supporters began trying fervently to change Richard’s reputation. The Richard III Society, founded in 1924, now claims nearly 3,500 members worldwide. Richard’s defenders offer very different views of history. Some blame Richard’s onetime friend the Duke of Buckingham or even Henry VII for killing Edward V and his brother. Others give credence to accounts that say the boys survived, in hiding or in exile in another country. In the 1490s a man showed up in England claiming to be the younger brother, Richard, seeking the throne for himself. His claim was convincing enough (or useful enough) that other European rulers supported him, and he raised a rebel army to fight Henry. His efforts failed, though, and he was eventually hanged for plotting against the king.

  One piece of evidence that is almost always cited in this story is the fact that workmen renovating the Tower of London in 1674 found skeletons in a spot that could fit a description of where the boys’ bodies were once buried. (However, the same account that describes that burial place also says a priest later dug them up and moved them.) The skeletons were assumed to be Edward’s and Richard’s; they were moved to Westminster Abbey. In 1933 scientists got permission to unearth the skeletons again to study them closely. Even though the scientists couldn’t actually be sure if the bones belonged to males or females, they concluded that the bones were the right size and age to belong to Edward and Richard if they had been killed in 1483. Everything I read about that study made me wonder what the scientists would have concluded if they hadn’t known ahead of time whose skeletons they were supposedly looking at. And I wonder what scientists now would be able to discover examining the same bones with more-modern techniques—especially DNA testing. (So far, no one’s been allowed to do such tests.) But even if scientists could prove conclusively that those skeletons were Edward’s and Richard’s, we still wouldn’t know how they died.

  That pretty much leaves time travel as the only way to completely solve the mystery. And if we could travel back in time to begin solving all the mysteries of history, how could we resist wanting to save all the victims?