Risked Read online

  “Think we should go upstairs?” Katherine whispered, pointing to a nearby staircase. “The guards were taking Gavin and Daniella to their ‘rooms.’ Bedrooms, maybe? Don’t you think bedrooms would be on the second floor?”

  This made sense to Jonah. All three kids began tiptoeing up the stairs. Some of the wooden steps creaked, but Jonah didn’t care. He couldn’t see anyone around close enough to hear it.

  “Ahh!” Katherine practically shrieked as they approached a landing. “What’s that?”

  It looked like a bear rearing up on its hind legs above them.

  It is a bear, Jonah told himself. But it’s stuffed. No worries.

  He saw that Chip had flung himself protectively in front of Katherine, as if to make sure that if anyone was going to be mauled, it would be him, not her.

  “Stop acting like fools,” Jonah hissed. “It’s dead.”

  But the word “dead” seemed to echo in the dim stairwell. And when Jonah stepped up on the landing beside the bear, he saw that there were also stuffed bear cubs hunkered beside the mother bear.

  “Creepy,” Katherine whispered. “Who wants to keep dead animals inside the house?”

  “Maybe it was just an ordinary thing in this time period,” Chip said defensively. His own time period, the 1400s, had so many weird and creepy things that he was maybe a little sensitive about anyone criticizing anyone else’s time.

  “What’s creepy is all the people looking down here now, because Katherine screamed,” Jonah muttered. He looked up at three more guards clustered beside the railing above him, along with a plump woman who seemed to be wearing a maid’s costume.

  Jonah glanced at his own hands and then at Chip and Katherine just to make sure that they were all still invisible—they were.

  Move along, people, Jonah thought, as if he could mentally direct the onlookers. Nothing to see here. You just imagined you heard a noise. That’s all.

  But they all kept staring, seeming unusually rattled when they probably couldn’t have even heard Katherine that well.

  And anyhow, why are there so many guards around? Jonah wondered.

  Was it just because they were still looking for him and Katherine, escapees from the cellar? Or was there something else going on?

  Jonah pushed those questions to the back of his mind and concentrated on tiptoeing the rest of the way up the stairs. He moved past the tracer of the maid, who looked just as much on edge as the version of the woman who’d heard Katherine shriek. Next, he and Chip and Katherine entered a large dining room, which held an ornate wooden table beneath a chandelier.

  See? This may not be a palace, but it is a mansion, he thought. The kind of place royalty might visit on an ordinary day.

  But just then two more uniformed guards walked by.

  Mansion or prison? Jonah asked himself. Which is it?

  He glanced into the living room, where a man sat writing in a notebook and four women sat hunched over books or needlepoint. Three sleeping dogs lay at the man’s feet. An abandoned chess game lay by his elbow.

  “That’s the tsar, the tsarina, and Anastasia and Alexei’s three older sisters,” Katherine whispered in Jonah’s ear. “Olga, Tatiana, and Maria.”

  Jonah would not have figured this out for himself. The tsar looked like a gardener, maybe, in workman’s clothes. The oldest woman—the tsarina, Jonah guessed—sat in a wheelchair, her face gaunt and anguished. The three girls who had looked so beautiful in all the pictures were now distressingly thin, as if they were nearly starving. Instead of lacy white dresses and pearls, they wore plain black dresses. It wasn’t just that they looked older now, grown-ups instead of children. They also looked pinched and desperate and despairing.

  It looked like they had given up.

  Then one of the sisters glanced up and caught the eye of one of the guards. She winked at him, then went back to staring down at her sewing.

  Okay, maybe that one hasn’t given up, Jonah thought. Still . . .

  “There are beds back in this other room,” Chip whispered in his ear. “Let’s try this direction.”

  Jonah took Katherine’s arm and pulled her away from the living room. They followed Chip back through the dining room and then into a room containing four army-style cots.

  Where the guards sleep? Jonah wondered.

  But there were dresses and skirts hanging along the wall, rather than uniforms.

  So is this maybe Anastasia’s room? And her sisters’? Jonah wondered.

  He was back to thinking of this house as a prison again.

  Another door led out of the room, and Katherine was already pushing through it.

  “It’s them!” she whispered back excitedly to Jonah and Chip.

  Both boys immediately crowded into the doorway beside her.

  Now Jonah could see Daniella—or was it Anastasia?—sitting beside a bed, reading out loud from a book on her lap.

  “ ‘If it is our duty to honor our responsibilities, then . . .’ Oh, Alexei, I think you’re asleep now anyway, so I’ll just skip the boring parts,” she was saying. She hit the spine of the book against her leg for emphasis. This made the skirt of her plain black dress flare out.

  Dimly Jonah realized that he wouldn’t be seeing or hearing her—the real Anastasia, in her real early-twentieth-century clothes, just like her sisters’—unless Daniella had indeed been brought to this room and joined with the original version of herself. He knew how it worked: Daniella’s sweatshirt and jeans and the rest of her twenty-first-century appearance would have been swallowed up completely when she became Anastasia again. If Daniella were somewhere else, he would see only a ghostly, pale tracer.

  And, oh yeah, she was speaking Russian now. That was proof.

  “You’re right—there’s Daniella/Anastasia. But what about Gavin?” Jonah whispered back to Katherine as he tiptoed past her and Chip, on into the room.

  And then Jonah gasped.

  Gavin/Alexei lay on the bed in an old-fashioned nightshirt, his covers kicked off to reveal a swollen, bandaged knee. One of his elbows hung at a painfully awkward angle, also swollen and engorged. Even in sleep his face was twisted in pain.

  If the rest of his family had looked defeated, Alexei looked completely destroyed.

  Behind Jonah, Chip murmured in dismay, “Is that what I did to him? Is he going to die?”

  THIRTEEN

  Chip had spoken too loudly—Anastasia/Daniella glanced up at the sound of his voice.

  No, Jonah corrected his own perceptions. It’s just Daniella looking this way. Not Anastasia. See the tracer?

  The original version of Anastasia continued peering down at the book, her lips still moving in what seemed to be the even cadence of reading aloud. But Jonah couldn’t hear anything she was saying now, and her lips glowed with tracer light. Daniella’s face pulled away from the tracer’s ever so slightly, bafflement spreading across her expression.

  “We’ve got to pull her out,” Katherine muttered. “What do you bet she’s confused beyond belief?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Katherine went over and tugged on Anastasia/Daniella’s shoulders. A moment later Daniella lay sprawled on the floor, once again looking like a twenty-first-century girl in her jeans and Michigan sweatshirt. The Anastasia tracer, meanwhile, continued silently reading, sedate in her simple dress.

  “What in the world is going on?” Daniella thundered.

  Jonah dived toward her and clapped his hand over her mouth.

  “Shh!” he hissed. “We’ll tell you, but you have got to keep your voice down. You don’t want those guards coming back, do you?”

  Daniella’s eyes got big, and she quickly shook her head no.

  “I’ll be quiet,” she whispered from underneath Jonah’s hand.

  Jonah moved his hand back.

  “And I thought moving to Ohio was a nightmare,” Daniella groaned, in a much softer voice. “Wait—that’s what all of this is, right? A nightmare? You’re all practically invisible, and everyt
hing’s freaky, so of course this is just one big bizarre dream, and all I’ve got to do is wake up and then—”

  Her voice was inching upward again. But all Jonah had to do was scowl at her and she stopped.

  “Daniella, I’m sorry there’s not more time to explain, but all of this is real,” Katherine whispered, leaning down to pat the other girl’s shoulder sympathetically.

  “Of course it is,” Daniella said sarcastically. “Oh, I get it . . . if this isn’t a dream, then I’ve gone totally nuts. I told my parents I wouldn’t be able to stand the move, and I was right. I’m crazy now.”

  “You’re not crazy,” Chip said softly.

  “How else do you explain the fact that it’s like I’m two people at once now?” Daniella challenged. “Everything Anastasia would know, everything she would do, I—” She turned around, getting her first glimpse of her own tracer. “Eek! Th—that’s me! It’s her! It’s me!”

  Her voice was a little too loud again, but Jonah thought it would only make things worse if he grabbed her once more.

  “Let’s just get out of here and then tell her everything,” Jonah said. He moved toward Gavin/Alexei. The boy moaned in his sleep.

  “But do you think Gavin is safe to travel?” Chip asked.

  Jonah hesitated. He turned to Daniella.

  “What do you know . . . I mean, what does Anastasia know about her brother’s hemophilia?” he asked.

  Daniella clenched her jaw.

  “We don’t talk to outsiders about Alexei’s problems,” she snapped. “We don’t even acknowledge they exist . . . Gah! It’s like she’s inside my brain, thinking for me!”

  She began hitting the palm of her hand against her forehead, as if that could knock the Anastasia identity out of her mind.

  “Daniella, it’s okay to tell us,” Katherine suggested.

  Daniella kept her mouth shut.

  “Can you at least tell us how long Gavin’s looked this bad?” Chip asked. “Gavin, not Alexei?”

  Daniella squinted at Chip, confusion playing across her face.

  “Only since . . . he and Alexei became the same person?” she said hesitantly. “Like Anastasia and I kind of became the same person? The guards put us in this room, and then, I don’t know, it was like I had to walk into that ghost-person Anastasia, and I did, and suddenly it was like I was Anastasia, and I knew everything she knew, even Russian. And Gavin just kind of fell onto the bed and became Alexei, and . . . that doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?”

  “Yes, it does,” Chip said comfortingly. “I know exactly what you’re talking about. Because I went through exactly the same thing more than four hundred years ago.”

  Daniella just gave him another confused look.

  “Do you think maybe that means it’s Alexei who’s in such terrible shape, and it’d be safe to pull Gavin out?” Katherine asked.

  “I think we have to try it,” Jonah muttered.

  He put his hands on Alexei/Gavin’s shoulders and gently pulled upward. The boy on the bed winced and moaned. But after a moment Gavin was sitting upright, apart from the Alexei tracer. He once again had the black sweatshirt on; his hair was slightly longer than Alexei’s, with a dyed dark-purple streak on one side. He blinked and looked around.

  “Have a heart,” he begged. “Pull me the rest of the way out.”

  Jonah tugged, and Gavin rolled over onto the floor, landing on top of Jonah. Gavin instantly pushed away. He stood up and massaged first his elbow, then his knees.

  “I didn’t know it could feel that bad,” he muttered. “What that kid puts up with on a daily basis . . .”

  He shook his head in seeming disbelief.

  His joints were all normal-size now, no longer swollen, no longer bandaged.

  “You’re not bleeding?” Chip asked. “You’re not going to bleed to death because I tackled you?”

  “You thought I was going to bleed to death?” Gavin sneered. “Do you see any blood on me?”

  He held his elbows out at odd angles, as if inviting Chip and the others to look. Then a flash of fear spread across his face.

  “Is it happening?” Daniella asked. “Are you getting that feeling?”

  Gavin whirled toward Daniella.

  “You know about that?” he asked.

  “I think . . . I think we really are brother and sister,” Daniella said. “It’s like I’ve known you practically my whole life. This whole life. . . . Er, are you okay?”

  Gavin didn’t sneer at her.

  “It’s not that bad,” he said.

  “What are you two talking about?” Katherine asked.

  “If you must know, I think Chip might have started an internal bleed in my hip when he tackled me,” Gavin snarled. “I’m really good at sensing these things.” He punched Chip’s arm. “Thanks a lot!”

  So, it’s a problem for Chip to tackle Gavin but okay for Gavin to punch Chip? Jonah thought.

  He decided against saying that out loud.

  “Oh, well, bleeding inside isn’t as bad, is it?” Katherine asked. “If the blood doesn’t actually leave the body . . .”

  “Idiot, internal bleeds can cause even worse problems, if you don’t get treatment,” Gavin said, sounding even surlier. “So, yeah, I could die from your stupid friend over there tackling me!”

  Jonah stepped up between Gavin and Chip.

  “Stop arguing,” he said. “Let’s just get out of here. So you won’t die.”

  He was about to ask Gavin to just hand him the Elucidator, but then he remembered that Gavin might still want to go to the future. So Jonah went with Chip’s strategy: He slammed into Gavin, matching his arms and legs against Gavin’s, and called out: “Take all five of us back to the twenty-first century! To the time where Katherine belongs!”

  Katherine and Chip must have had the same thought, because they also rushed toward Gavin.

  Chip cried, “Take us all back where we were when Gavin grabbed us to begin with!”

  And Katherine called out simply, “Take us home.”

  Out of the three of them, one of them had to be touching the spot where Gavin had hidden the Elucidator, somewhere in his clothes.

  But absolutely nothing happened. The world around them stayed firmly, stubbornly 1918.

  FOURTEEN

  Angrily, Gavin pushed Jonah and the others away.

  “You think I didn’t try that?” he snarled. “You think I didn’t try to escape the minute I figured out where we are? Especially when I found out the date?”

  “The date?” Daniella repeated, glancing back toward her tracer, who was still calmly reading. “What’s wrong with July 16, 1918?”

  Gavin looked at her, and for the first time his expression softened.

  “Nothing,” he said, almost sounding kind for once. “Don’t worry about it. Nothing happens today.”

  Daniella kept staring back at him. Jonah couldn’t tell what was passing between them without a single other word being spoken. He lost patience with trying to guess.

  “Well, we know the Elucidator worked before, when it brought us here and made Chip and Katherine and me invisible,” Jonah said, trying to sound calm and reasonable. “Can you at least let us see the Elucidator? Katherine and I have used Elucidators a lot—maybe we can get it to work again.”

  “Fine,” Gavin said, snarly again.

  He reached inside his sweatshirt, maybe into a pocket of his T-shirt underneath. He pulled out . . .

  A metal toy soldier.

  “What the . . . ,” Gavin muttered. He patted his sweatshirt, all along his chest. “Is this a joke? I had the Elucidator right there. It looked like a cell phone. Did one of you just steal it?”

  “Alexei loves his toy soldiers,” Daniella murmured, as if trying to explain her brother to everyone. “He always carries a handful in his pockets—and bits of paper and chalk and string, anything for his little games. . . . Did you just carry that off from when you stopped being Alexei?”

  “It doesn’t work t
hat way!” Gavin snapped at her. “Does it?”

  He was appealing to Jonah and Katherine and Chip for the answer.

  “No,” Jonah assured him. “I bet that really is still the Elucidator. It’s just, the Elucidator changes shape to fit in with the time period. So it won’t look out of place.”

  “It is really freaky,” Katherine said soothingly. “Our Elucidator looked like a compass in 1903.”

  “And a rock in 1483,” Chip said, making a face.

  “But how would you program it like this?” Gavin asked frantically, poking at the metal base of the soldier with one hand, the painted-on cap with the other. His efforts did nothing but chip off a tiny fleck of paint from the cap, exposing the bare metal underneath.

  “Let me try,” Jonah said, taking the toy soldier from Gavin. He was a little surprised that Gavin let him. Jonah squeezed his hand around the Elucidator and demanded: “Take all of us back to the twenty-first century!”

  Nothing happened.

  “Make me invisible!” Jonah tried again.

  “You already are invisible,” Katherine reminded him.

  “Oh, right,” Jonah said, feeling foolish. He already felt silly enough, talking to a little toy soldier. “Make Gavin invisible!”

  He looked up just in time to see Gavin blink out of sight: The black sweatshirt, the purple streak in his hair, the surly expression on his face—all of it went see-through, all at once.

  “It works!” Katherine cheered.

  “Wh—what—?” Daniella stammered. “Are you sure this isn’t all a dream?”

  “Make Gavin visible again,” Jonah commanded.

  In a flash the other boy was back to normal. Daniella looked like she might faint, but Jonah decided this wasn’t the time to worry about that.

  “Let me talk to JB!” Jonah said into the Elucidator. “JB, are you there?”

  No answer.

  “JB? JB?” Jonah called.

  Nothing. Jonah might as well have been trying to talk into an ordinary toy soldier, one that was nothing but solid metal all the way through.

  “Let me try,” Katherine said.