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  Invisible or not, if Jonah and Katherine didn’t move immediately, they were both going to be bludgeoned or stabbed to death.

  TEN

  “Run!” Jonah screamed, and he didn’t even care if the guards behind him heard.

  He began scrambling back down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Katherine was too close, and he stepped on the back of her shoe, pulling it half off. She bent down to fix it, and he hollered, “No time for that!” She wasn’t reacting fast enough, so he dashed around her, reaching out to pull her along with him at the last minute.

  He got a firm grip on her sweatshirt, and after a moment Katherine clued in and matched his stride. But the staircase was really too narrow for both of them to run practically side by side. With each leap Jonah took it was touch and go whether he would stay upright or fall, knocking both of them down to smash against that hard floor again. How many bones would they break this time?

  Please don’t let us fall, he thought, which was maybe a prayer and maybe just instructions to himself.

  Jonah kept running. But the guards were running faster.

  The frontmost guard was only three steps behind Jonah. Now two. Now—

  Now Jonah leaped for the floor and whirled off to the side, pulling Katherine with him. He flattened his back against the wall, and he saw that she did the same.

  “We just have to wait until the guards are past and then we can escape up those stairs,” Katherine whispered.

  Jonah nodded and put his finger over his lips. It was a great plan, except that the guards were spreading through the cellar, waving those gun-knife contraptions all around.

  Bayonets. His mind came up with the proper name for them. They’re bayonets.

  Jonah was annoyed that his mind wasn’t doing something more useful, like figuring out how to avoid all the bayonets being waved near him. Someone had turned the one solitary lightbulb back on, but its light was so weak that none of the guards seemed to trust it. They were blindly thrusting their bayonets into all the dark corners, toward every wall.

  “Back to the stairs?” Katherine whispered in his ear.

  Jonah nodded.

  “As soon as the last guard’s out of the way,” he whispered back.

  But the whispering had distracted him—Katherine had to pull him to the side to avoid one of the bayonets.

  He tiptoed back toward the stairs, dodging bayonets right and left.

  This is even worse than dodging torches, he thought, remembering the hazards he and Katherine had faced on one of their earlier trips through time.

  The guards had stopped streaming down the stairs, but two of them stood on the bottom step, guarding the way out. Jonah ducked under the one guard’s elbow in an attempt to slip past him. But just then the guard leaned back, cutting off the space between the wall and the stairs. Jonah could still fit in that space, but he was at such an awkward angle he wasn’t going to be able to launch himself upward. He was bound to fall over backward, crashing into the guard. He wobbled. He wanted to scream for Katherine to help him, to give him a push, but that would just attract the guards’ attention. His mouth opened anyway, involuntarily.

  “H—,” he began.

  But before he could get out the rest of the word “help,” a hand appeared out of nowhere and pulled him up.

  ELEVEN

  The hand was translucent. It was attached to an equally translucent wrist and arm, covered in what seemed to be the translucent sleeve of a sweatshirt.

  “Chip!” Jonah started to scream. At the last minute he turned it into a mere mouthing of the word. But he grinned at his friend to let him know how completely relieved he was to see him. Or, well, to see through him.

  For Chip had also evidently been granted time-traveler invisibility.

  Get Katherine and let’s get out of here, Chip mouthed back at him, pointing past Jonah as if he didn’t trust Jonah to get the message otherwise.

  Jonah nodded and turned to pull Katherine through the gap between the guard and the wall. Now all three kids stood on the stairs above the guards. The guard nearest them turned around and gazed suspiciously in their direction. Had he sensed Jonah and Katherine brushing past him? Had he heard Jonah’s barely breathed “H—”?

  It didn’t matter. He couldn’t see them, so he didn’t start climbing toward them or waving a bayonet up at them.

  Chip tugged on Jonah’s arm and made a C’mon motion with his hand, gesturing toward the open door above them.

  Before someone decides to shut the door, he mouthed.

  Jonah nodded, and all three kids began tiptoeing up the stairs.

  Jonah almost felt like giggling.

  Ha, ha, ha, he wanted to shout down at all the guards scanning the cellar so thoroughly. Thrust your bayonets anywhere you want—you’re not going to catch us! You’d have to be able to see us to find us!

  They escaped into the sunshine outside the cellar door. They looked around and, by silent agreement, tiptoed on out toward the wooden fence at the far side of the garden, where no one would hear them.

  “Great timing!” Jonah congratulated Chip as they both flopped to the ground. Katherine eased down beside them.

  “I was terrified that I might be too late,” Chip said. Even though he used modern words, he still sounded vaguely medieval. His face grew serious as he turned toward Katherine. “Oh, no—was I too late?”

  Jonah looked at his sister. She still had his sweatshirt tied as an impromptu sling around her arm and neck. One of the bayonets must have connected, because the sleeve of her own sweatshirt had a gaping hole in it now, right over her bicep. But no blood stained the sweatshirt, so maybe the bayonet had only gone through the cloth, not her arm.

  Also, her frown looked more annoyed than pained at the moment.

  “Chip, I am not some damsel in distress you had to rescue!” she protested. “Jonah and I were doing fine by ourselves!”

  “No, we weren’t,” Jonah said. “Katherine may not be grateful, but I’m glad you rescued us!”

  Chip looked confused. He reached out and gingerly touched Katherine’s elbow.

  “But your arm—”

  “Is fine,” Katherine said quickly. She tugged off the improvised sling made from Jonah’s sweatshirt and handed it back to her brother. “It just hurt a little at first, and you know, Jonah’s a Boy Scout, so he had to prove he was prepared and all. . . . It’s nothing.”

  What was this—Katherine actually downplaying an injury, rather than acting like breaking a fingernail might kill her?

  Jonah would never figure out his sister. Unless . . . was this all for Chip’s sake?

  Chip was still peering anxiously at Katherine.

  “I was so afraid you would think I was a coward when I didn’t jump up and fight when the guards started dragging you away,” he said. He shoved back his hair—an odd sight, given that it looked crystalline and see-through now, as if each of his normally blond curls had been turned into glass. “I didn’t want you thinking me a coward, but—”

  “But what you did was perfect,” Jonah interrupted.

  He thought he kind of saw what Chip and Katherine’s problem was, but the last thing Jonah wanted was to become their relationship coach.

  “Look,” he told them. “We don’t have time right now for the two of you to work out your ‘I want to be your knight in shining armor’ / ‘Oh, no, you don’t; I can take care of myself; this isn’t 1483 anymore’ issues.”

  He imitated them in such ridiculous, mincing voices that Chip and Katherine both protested: “We don’t sound like that!” Then, realizing that they’d each said the exact same thing, they stopped and gazed into each other’s eyes.

  Oh, brother, Jonah thought. Young love. Ick.

  Jonah grabbed each of them by the arm to get them to look at him. Katherine winced slightly.

  Oops, Jonah thought. Guess I grabbed the sore one.

  But she didn’t say anything, so he ignored it.

  “Help me out here,” he said. �
�Let’s just figure out what we need to do next—as a team. Don’t you think we should rescue Gavin and Daniella? Chip, if you were able to make us all invisible, that must mean you got Gavin’s Elucidator away from him after all. So why don’t you pull that out, and—”

  “Jonah, I don’t have Gavin’s Elucidator,” Chip said, shaking his head so hard it made his curly hair bounce up and down.

  “Then how’d we all end up invisible?” Katherine asked.

  Chip tilted his head to one side.

  “I thought I made it happen, but now that you question me, mayhap I could be wrong,” he began slowly.

  This was something else that made Chip’s medieval moments particularly maddening: He could take forever thinking through things.

  “Just tell us what happened,” Katherine said.

  “With twenty-first-century words,” Jonah added. “And speed.”

  Chip got the hint.

  “I was behind a bush when we landed here, so I was pretty sure that none of the guards would see me,” he began. “I couldn’t understand what anyone was shouting about, but I thought if Gavin had an Elucidator with him and it was voice activated, then maybe I could just whisper, ‘Make me invisible,’ and it would happen.”

  Jonah wished he’d thought of that himself, before he’d jumped up and started yelling at the guards.

  “But that didn’t work,” Chip said.

  See? Jonah told himself. It doesn’t actually matter that I was stupid.

  “So then what did you do?” Katherine asked.

  “Well, by then that one guard was dragging you two away, and I knew I had to do something drastic,” Chip said. “I crawled over as close as I could get to Gavin.”

  “Wasn’t the other guard taking him and Daniella away too?” Katherine asked.

  “No, for some reason he was acting like he needed the first guard to come back and help him,” Chip said. “Like he didn’t think Gavin could walk or something.”

  “That’s weird,” Jonah said.

  “No, it’s not,” Katherine said. “Alexei Romanov had to use wheelchairs a lot. Because of the hemophilia.”

  “What’s that mean, anyway?” Jonah asked.

  “Mom told me—it’s something about blood not clotting right,” Katherine said. “So I guess if he got even, like, a little cut, he could bleed to death.”

  Jonah didn’t quite get how that was connected to wheelchairs—were Alexei’s parents afraid that if he stood up and walked on his own, he might fall down and get hurt? Jonah wasn’t going to ask, because he wanted Chip to move along with his story.

  But Chip was just staring at Katherine.

  “Wait a minute,” Chip said. “You’re saying Gavin, who’s really Alexei Romanov, who’s that kid who was lying on the ground over there a few moments ago—he’s got this disease where he could bleed to death from a little cut?”

  “Yeah,” Katherine said.

  It didn’t seem possible, given that Chip was already translucent, but he suddenly looked paler. Maybe it was because of the horrified expression on his face.

  “Oh, no,” Chip said. “Oh, no. Do you think it’s a problem that I just slam-tackled him?”

  TWELVE

  “You did what?” Katherine asked.

  “That was what I had to try next!” Chip said defensively. “I didn’t know the kid had medical problems!”

  “But why tackle him?” Jonah asked, still puzzled. “I mean, I know Gavin kind of attacked us first, but—”

  “That’s not why I did it,” Chip protested. “It was just logical.”

  Jonah waited to hear how this could possibly be logical.

  “See, I figured out that if Gavin had an Elucidator, it couldn’t be voice-activated from a distance,” Chip explained. “Since it worked for you before, when you were holding on to Gavin, I thought that you must have been touching the Elucidator without knowing it. The second guard was coming back, and I knew I didn’t have much time, so I just jumped out from the bushes and slammed Gavin flat on the ground so I was right on top of him and the Elucidator, and then I screamed, ‘Make me invisible!’ ”

  In a weird way this did kind of make sense. The Elucidator might have been set up to take voice commands only from someone who was touching it.

  “Okay, um, and that worked?” Katherine asked skeptically.

  “Yeah!” Chip said. “I’ve been invisible ever since. And then I real quick said, ‘Make Jonah and Katherine invisible too.’ And then the second guard was back and I had to roll out of the way. And since neither of the guards was looking in my direction when I tackled Gavin, and they couldn’t understand English anyway, I was totally safe.”

  Jonah couldn’t decide if Chip had been crazy brave, or just crazy.

  “Why didn’t you say, ‘Make all five of us invisible’?” Katherine asked. “To protect Gavin and Daniella, too?”

  “I thought that might mess up time, since this really is the time they belong in,” Chip said. He winced. “I didn’t know tackling Gavin could kill him.”

  There was an eerie silence in the garden around them. Jonah hoped it was just his imagination getting to him.

  “You didn’t . . . see any blood, did you?” Katherine asked slowly.

  “No, but I don’t think Gavin was conscious when the guard picked him up,” Chip said. “I thought maybe he was just pretending to pass out so they wouldn’t keep yelling at him, but . . . what if he really was dying?”

  Having those words hang in the air was even worse than the silence.

  “Stop saying things like that,” Jonah said firmly. “Gavin is not going to die from you tackling him. If we mess up history, that’s not going to be the way we do it. Because we are right now going to go find Gavin and Daniella and the Elucidator. And then we’re going to make the Elucidator take us back to the twenty-first century, where Gavin can get good medical care. And everything is going to be fine.”

  He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. He tried to remember the first-aid training he’d gotten in Boy Scouts. Surely if someone was going to bleed to death just from being tackled, it would take a long time, wouldn’t it? Definitely longer than the fifteen or twenty minutes that might have passed since Chip had tackled Gavin?

  Jonah stood up and was relieved to see that Chip and Katherine did the same.

  “Did you see where the guards took Daniella and Gavin?” Jonah asked.

  “Into that house,” Chip said, pointing toward the building above the cellar where Jonah and Katherine had been trapped. “I’ll show you which door they used.”

  Even as he trailed after Chip, Jonah squinted up at the arches and frills of the imposing house—or was it a mansion? Or a palace?

  Probably not a palace, he decided. If the tsar of Russia had been in charge of a sixth of the entire planet, his palace would probably have been much more impressive than this. Jonah knew kids back home who lived in houses about this big and fancy. But now that Jonah was looking more closely, he started noticing some strange details: Under the soaring arches at the top of the house, all the windows seemed to be whited out from the inside, like in an abandoned factory. And why was there such a crude wooden fence around the whole property? Why were there guardhouses inside the fence—like maybe the danger was inside the fence too?

  Chip crouched beside a tree.

  “That one,” he said, pointing to a door beside the one Jonah and Katherine had gone through to get to the cellar.

  Guards still swarmed in and out the cellar door, undoubtedly continuing to search for Jonah and Katherine. Jonah was more concerned about the two who stood at attention by the second door.

  “We’ll have to wait until those guards leave, right?” Chip asked anxiously. “So we don’t mess up history by making them think a door just opened and shut on its own?”

  “No,” Jonah decided. “Not if there’s a chance that Gavin’s in that house bleeding to death.”

  “Forget history,” Katherine agreed.

  Chip re
coiled slightly and gaped at the two of them. If Jonah hadn’t been so worried about Gavin—and their chances of finding the Elucidator and getting home safely—he would have laughed at Chip’s horrified expression. Chip had been on only the first time-travel trip with Jonah and Katherine. Jonah felt like he’d gotten about a million more years’ worth of experience since then.

  It made a difference.

  “Come on,” Jonah said, taking the lead once more.

  He tiptoed right up to the door and twisted the knob. He did try to do it silently, but he let the door swing all the way open so Chip and Katherine could come in with him.

  Behind him, he heard the guards let out a string of curses.

  “Why didn’t you make sure that door was latched?” one yelled at the other.

  “Me? You were the last one through!” the second yelled back. “Have you been drinking already? If the commander finds out, with what he has planned for tonight—”

  What’s planned for tonight? Jonah wondered. Never mind—we’ll be gone by then.

  The guards didn’t recover from their arguing to shut the door until all three kids were safely inside the house. Jonah turned to Chip and held up his hands in a See? Wasn’t that easy? gesture. But as both guards struggled to pull the door closed again, Jonah saw that they separated completely from what seemed to be ghostly doubles of themselves.

  Ugh, Jonah thought. Tracers.

  During his trips through time, Jonah had developed a love-hate relationship with tracers, the eerie, ghostly representations of how time would have gone if time travelers hadn’t intervened. On one of the trips, to 1611, time had gotten so messed up that all the tracers had disappeared. Jonah had missed them then, and he had been delighted when they’d reappeared. But most of the time when tracers showed up, they just seemed like nagging reminders: You’re messing up time. What if you mess it up so badly that it can never be fixed?

  Jonah told himself that two guards arguing and having to shut a door was nothing in the grand scheme of things.