Caught (Missing) Read online

  Jonah decided he didn’t care that much about figuring out the sequence of what had already happened. He just wanted to know what came next.

  “Hi, Emily. Did JB come back in time with you?” Jonah asked eagerly. “Or—is he going to?”

  Emily glanced around the room. She still looked calm, but her bafflement seemed to be growing.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “He said I’d be alone, but . . . now you two are here, right?” She didn’t quite seem certain that they were real. “Everything happened so fast, and it was so confusing. He said there wasn’t time to explain. He said I’d know exactly what to do when I got here.”

  Jonah heard the doorknob rattle, and someone saying, “Is Lieserl awake now? Is that her talking? She’s well enough to talk?”

  Jonah realized they should have been whispering more softly, or not talking at all.

  And he realized that Mileva was on the verge of seeing her daughter as a twenty-first-century American thirteen-year-old rather than a twentieth-century Serbian toddler.

  “Lie down on top of that tracer,” Jonah said. “Hurry!”

  Emily only looked at him blankly.

  “The glowing light on the bed—”

  The door was opening.

  Jonah took two quick steps toward Emily and gave her a push. His friends who’d seen their own tracers had told him they felt an almost irresistible pull tugging them in. Undoubtedly, JB had been counting on that pull working on Emily, too. And it probably would have, if Jonah and Katherine hadn’t distracted her. But Jonah remembered what she’d been like back in the time cave. She wasn’t someone who’d jump into anything without thinking about it first. He’d had to push her.

  But had he pushed her too late?

  Jonah looked down and saw Emily lying down on the bed, drawing her knees up into the same pose as Lieserl’s tracer. But Emily was practically adult-sized, and Lieserl’s tracer wasn’t even half as tall. Emily’s arms hung over the side of the bed.

  “My poor baby,” Mileva was whispering, advancing toward the bed, a cluster of other women and girls behind her.

  Jonah stepped aside, reminding himself, They won’t have the tracer lights to see by. Only time travelers can see the tracer lights. So it will be a few minutes before anyone realizes that something’s wrong . . .

  And then he realized that he couldn’t see the tracer lights anymore, either.

  He peered down at the bed, and Emily was gone, the tracer was gone . . .

  “Somebody give me a lamp,” Mileva begged.

  One of the other women handed her a softly glowing lantern, and now Jonah could see well too. He heard Katherine gasp softly in his ear.

  For just a second, Jonah thought he could see evidence of Emily’s twenty-first-century, thirteen-year-old self ever so dimly in the toddler on the bed. There was just the slightest hint of blue jeans encircling her legs, just the barest suggestion of tangled strands of long, dark hair across her face. And then that evidence faded away—or maybe Jonah stopped noticing it, because other details stood out so much more: the flushed, feverish face; the sandpapery rash on every bit of exposed skin on her arms and legs; the way the little child’s chest rose and fell so laboriously, as if every breath were a struggle. Even in sleep Emily/Lieserl kept wincing, the pain and agony seeming to mount until she screwed up her face and let out a tortured-sounding “Waaaaah . . .”

  Jonah remembered the words Hodge had spoken only moments before: A kid this sick, no way she’d survive if we left her here.

  They hadn’t left her, but JB had put her back. And Jonah had given her the final push.

  Had he truly helped Emily? Or had he just condemned her to die?

  TWENTY

  Jonah stumbled back away from the bed, and Katherine caught him.

  “We’ve got to pull her back out,” Jonah whispered. “We’ve got to!”

  “Not with all these people gathered around,” Katherine whispered back.

  Jonah didn’t care if Mileva or any of the other women heard them talking. Maybe the women would think there were ghosts and they’d run away, and then Jonah and Katherine could do what they needed to do.

  “Maybe she’s not as sick as she looks,” Katherine whispered. “I took that babysitting class, remember? With little kids, sometimes they can look terrible and then the next day they’re running around and perfectly fine. Or—was it the other way around? That they can be really sick and not look that bad?”

  Mileva wasn’t acting as if she thought Lieserl would be running around and perfectly fine anytime soon. She was scooping the little girl into her arms and moaning, “Oh, my poor little baby. My poor dear girl.” Tears streamed down her face. “How could it come to this? Haven’t we been punished enough? And—why should you be the one in pain? Poor, dear, innocent baby . . .”

  She was sobbing so hard, Jonah wasn’t sure he’d understood all her words correctly.

  Punished? What does that have to do with anything?

  “I promise you,” Mileva wailed into her daughter’s short, wispy curls—such a contrast to Emily’s wealth of thick hair. “I promise you that I’ll do everything in my power to help you recover. Please, God, let there be a way. Please, please, don’t take my baby away to punish me . . .”

  Now the other women in the room were clustering around Mileva, comforting her. They patted her head and arms and Lieserl’s head and arms with equal sympathy.

  “Don’t worry. They’ll give her medicine,” Katherine whispered to Jonah. “Antibiotics, like Hodge was talking about. Remember all those bottles of pink stuff we had to take when we were little? What was it called? Amoxi—something?”

  Jonah frowned at his sister.

  “I don’t think that’s been invented yet,” he said.

  He had a vague memory of watching a TV show last year in science class about the invention of antibiotics: something about moldy bread (some of the kids in his class had made gagging noises over that) and then a scientist dude looking down at a petri dish, going, “Hey, this kills bacteria! Is that great or what?” And then the medicine being used for rows and rows of injured soldiers in hospital beds during some big war.

  World War I? World War II?

  Jonah thought about the cars and tanks and airplanes they’d shown in the war. There’d been swastikas on the enemy’s equipment.

  Definitely World War II.

  Definitely after 190-whatever-year-this-was.

  Jonah grabbed his sister’s arm and pulled her out into the deserted hallway, away from the crowd of women keening over Mileva and Lieserl Einstein.

  “JB, you’ve got to be watching this,” he hissed. “This has to be as important as Einstein thinking about the wrong things. Why aren’t you here helping us? What are we supposed to do now?”

  Jonah’s whispering echoed around him, his own words coming back to taunt him. The hallway stayed empty and dim.

  JB didn’t answer.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Mileva refused to leave Lieserl’s side. She sat in the dim room for hours on end, barely eating, barely sleeping, barely even glancing away from her daughter.

  Outside the August sun shone brightly—and then maybe the September sun too? How many days were passing? Had it been a week? Even more than that?

  Jonah wasn’t sure. He felt too lightheaded and stupid to keep track. He and Katherine were surviving only on the food they thought they could filch from sickroom trays without being noticed. After a while, even Katherine didn’t bother complaining about wearing the same clothes day after day, washing up in quick sponge baths just to keep themselves from reeking, and making hurried bathroom trips, always in fear of being discovered.

  If we walked just a little distance from Mileva’s parents’ house, we could probably find lots of food that no one would see us taking, Jonah thought. We might pull fresh clothes from a clothesline, we might find a lake to completely cool off in, we might use the train station bathrooms and lock the doors and nobody would think it was st
range . . .

  But he didn’t suggest any of those ideas to Katherine, and she didn’t suggest any of them to him.

  Neither of them wanted to leave Lieserl/Emily’s side, either.

  A man with a black bag showed up to examine Lieserl—was he a doctor? When he finished, he just shook his head and muttered, “Yes, it’s a very bad case. There’s nothing else to be done. Only time will tell . . .”

  Jonah and Katherine invisibly trailed the doctor to the front door and heard him tell Mileva’s father, “Six more died last night.”

  Mileva’s father blanched under his dark beard.

  “Will Novi Sad have any children left when this is over?” he asked mournfully.

  “Only the strongest ones,” the doctor said wearily. “The strongest and the luckiest and the most blessed . . .”

  Mileva’s father tensed.

  “My granddaughter is a blessing,” he said. “She is a gift from God.”

  “I didn’t say otherwise,” the doctor replied, which wasn’t the same as agreeing.

  “Good day,” Mileva’s father said, and practically shoved him out the door.

  Now, what was that all about? Jonah wondered.

  He looked at Katherine, who shrugged. They went back to Lieserl’s room, where Mileva and a servant girl were trying to bring down the little girl’s fever by sponging her forehead with a cool cloth. It was clear that no pink bottles of amoxicillin were going to materialize. The most advanced medicine Jonah had seen anyone use was honey thinned with water.

  The last time Jonah had watched Mileva put a wet cloth against her daughter’s flushed face, the little girl had screamed and squirmed fitfully away. But now she didn’t move, didn’t make a peep. Was she just sleeping? Or was she so close to death she’d stopped feeling anything?

  “Jonah,” Katherine whispered. “We can’t just stand here and watch her die. We’ve got to pull Emily out. No matter who sees us. No matter what it does to time.”

  Jonah nodded.

  But before he or Katherine could move, Mileva turned to the servant girl and said in a choked voice, “Leave us.”

  The girl looked startled, but backed away.

  Jonah heard the door click softly behind the girl, and then he saw Mileva reach into her pocket. Her hand emerged with the Elucidator tightly in her grip. She turned, revealing the Elucidator to every corner of the room like a lawyer showing evidence to a jury.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  She put the Elucidator back in her pocket and scooped up Lieserl’s limp body from the bed.

  Struggling with the child’s weight and her usual unbalanced gait, Mileva made her way through the door and down the hallway.

  “We have to follow, don’t we?” Katherine asked in a wavering voice.

  Jonah nodded.

  By the time they caught up with Mileva, she was weaving her way down an unfamiliar corridor. She went out a door at the back of the house and kept walking.

  Outside, the bright sunshine of earlier in the day had faded to dusk. Shadows stretched across the alleys Mileva walked through. Dimly, Jonah wondered if Mileva had chosen this time of day on purpose—a time when streets would be deserted and no one would see her because everyone had gone home to eat the evening meal.

  Or would the streets be deserted anyway? Jonah wondered. Deserted because the children of Novi Sad are dying? Deserted because nobody wants to go out and risk being exposed to a deadly disease?

  Mileva kept limping along, Jonah and Katherine right behind her.

  Finally they reached the outskirts of the city. Mileva stumbled into a stand of trees. She braced herself against one of them, pausing to catch her breath. Then, very, very gently, she rearranged the blankets wrapped around Lieserl and laid the child on the ground. She pulled the Elucidator out of her pocket once more.

  “You will save my daughter’s life,” she announced, turning her face from tree to tree. But Jonah knew she was really talking to him and Katherine.

  “You will save my daughter’s life,” she repeated, her voice gaining strength. It was steely and firm and unyielding. “You will make it so that she and Albert and I can live together happily for the rest of our lives. Or—” Now she bent over, placing the Elucidator beneath the heel of her boot. She began to lower her heel. “Or I will destroy your treasure.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Stop!” Jonah hollered. “Don’t!”

  Katherine turned and glared at him.

  She’s only bluffing! Don’t let her know we’re here! she seemed to be thinking at him. Or maybe she was really just thinking, That’s not the best way to react when someone threatens you! Don’t sound so panicky! Because she opened her mouth and started talking, too.

  “We want your daughter to live just as much as you do,” Katherine said. “But if you destroy our, uh, compass, we may not be able to succeed.”

  She seemed to be trying to make her voice sound as steely as Mileva’s. But she mostly just sounded like she did when she was bargaining with Mom and Dad to get to stay up late, or to invite more friends to her birthday parties, or to watch a TV show that Mom and Dad thought was “inappropriate.” It wasn’t exactly the right tone for negotiating about a matter of life and death.

  “Katherine, didn’t you hear what she’s asking for?” Jonah asked. “Everything she’s asking for? We can’t—” Katherine clapped her hand over Jonah’s mouth, but it was a moment too late. Jonah’s voice had squeaked upward on the word “can’t.”

  Mileva sagged to the ground, falling beside her motionless child.

  “You’re just children,” she moaned. “I’m begging children to save my daughter’s life, when the best doctor in Novi Sad couldn’t do it.”

  “Well, we actually can,” Katherine said in an offended voice. “If—”

  Now it was Jonah’s turn to put his hand over Katherine’s mouth. Had she thought through anything she was saying? Unless JB was suddenly going to airlift bottles and bottles of antibiotics into Novi Sad—which Jonah did not expect to happen—then the best he and Katherine could hope for was to save Emily, the thirteen-year-old version of Mileva’s daughter. Mileva wouldn’t even recognize Emily.

  And as for Mileva and Albert and Lieserl living together happily the rest of their lives?

  If Emily/Lieserl is a missing child of history, that didn’t happen, Jonah told himself. It won’t.

  Did that mean it couldn’t?

  Jonah hadn’t had to worry about this with the other missing kids he’d seen returned to time. Either they’d been orphans, or the circumstances of their lives hadn’t left Jonah feeling very sorry for the parents they’d left behind in the past.

  But here was Mileva, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing beside her dying daughter . . .

  She snatched up the Elucidator from beneath her shoe and held it up, squeezing it too tightly.

  “I’m warning you,” she said. “I will destroy this if I have to. I will.”

  Katherine shoved Jonah’s hand away from his mouth just as he shoved her hand away from his. Both of them lunged for the Elucidator in Mileva’s hand. In a flash, Mileva tucked the Elucidator under her knee and began blindly waving her arms about, grabbing at air, trying to catch . . .

  Jonah and Katherine.

  Jonah instantly reversed course, scrambling away over a downed tree. Mileva’s hand brushed his shirt sleeve, but he pulled back, diving past her. This was like being back in elementary school, playing tag or sharks and minnows. Jonah almost wanted to say, Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah. You can’t catch me!

  Then he looked back.

  Mileva wasn’t chasing him.

  She’d already caught Katherine.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Mileva had her fingers circled around Katherine’s wrist. With her other hand, she was feeling her way up Katherine’s arm, patting her hair, touching her face.

  “You are an invisible child,” Mileva was saying. “A little girl.”

  “Not that little,” Katherine mutt
ered.

  When she saw Jonah looking back at her, she mouthed other words: What am I supposed to do?

  Katherine probably could have just yanked her arm away. Certainly Jonah and Katherine together could have overpowered Mileva and escaped. For that matter, Jonah could have swooped in, snatched up the sleeping Lieserl, and threatened to carry her away if Mileva didn’t let Katherine go.

  The problem was, second by second, Jonah and Katherine could feel time changing. No matter what they did now, they could see by the expression on Mileva’s face that her whole understanding of the universe had been rearranged.

  It is possible for people to walk around invisibly.

  It is possible for a child to have a solid body, with skin that feels like anyone else’s, and yet have light flow right through her, as if she isn’t even there.

  What else is possible?

  “Please,” Katherine whimpered. “Let me go. You can’t know too much. It’ll ruin time.”

  “Time,” Mileva said thoughtfully. “My husband has been quite preoccupied of late thinking about time.”

  “Katherine, that was the exact wrong thing to say!” Jonah complained.

  Mileva glanced toward Lieserl, making sure she was safe. Then Mileva looked back and forth between the spot where Katherine sat, invisibly trapped, and where Jonah stood, just as invisibly frozen in indecision.

  “I have a theory,” Mileva said, and now she sounded calm and analytical—like a scientist, not a distraught mother. “Last night, when I could hear both of you breathing deeply, as if asleep, I studied your ‘compass’ once again. And it is my hypothesis that that is the device by which you are able to render yourselves visible or invisible. It is not that you possess magical powers, but that you have harnessed the magic of science.”

  “Uh . . . possibly,” Jonah said slowly, looking at Katherine to see if she thought it was safe to admit this. She shrugged helplessly.

  “Are you asking us to tell you if you’re right or wrong?” Katherine asked. “What good would that do? You’re hiding the ‘compass’ under your knee. We can’t do anything with it right now.”