Caught (Missing) Read online

  “But—if you give it back to us, we could demonstrate some of its powers for you,” Jonah said. Even as he spoke, he could hear the craftiness in his own voice, the deceit. He tried again. “We swear, we wouldn’t do anything bad. Nothing that would hurt you or Lieserl.”

  Katherine made a face at him—a grimace that said either You are a terrible negotiator or even You are a terrible liar.

  Jonah shook his head at her and mouthed back, I’m not lying. But was that quite true? The first thing he’d want to do with the Elucidator was contact JB. And what would JB do? On Jonah and Katherine’s most recent time travel trips, to 1600 and 1611 and 1605, JB’s concern for saving people had edged out his desire to preserve time in its original form, no matter what. But he still wanted to keep time on track. And it seemed pretty clear that time was about to bring Mileva plenty of pain in the near future.

  “I don’t believe I need you to operate the ‘compass,’” Mileva said. She lifted one eyebrow in a way that made her look smug. “I believe I’ve figured out how to use it myself.”

  Jonah and Katherine exchanged glances. Jonah could tell that his sister was as skeptical as he was.

  Sure Mileva knows how to operate the Elucidator, Jonah thought. Just like back home when Mom said she knew how to use her new cell phone, but she spent the whole first week asking Katherine and me, “How do I change the ring tone?” “How do I set the alarm clock?”

  “Voice commands,” Mileva said confidently. “Make them visible again. Katherine and the other one. The boy.”

  Jonah looked at Katherine again, and what registered first was the horrified look on her face. Only then did he realize that he could no longer see trees through her face—instead he could see the freckles on her cheeks, the blue of her eyes, even a leaf stuck in her blond hair.

  She was visible again. And—he looked down at blue jeans, at a gray Ohio State University soccer camp T-shirt—so was he.

  Mileva looked calmly back and forth between the two of them.

  “From the look of your clothes, I’m guessing that you’re not from around here originally,” she said dryly.

  Jonah realized that of course that would be one of the things she’d notice right away. All the females they’d seen so far in Mileva’s time wore skirts or dresses, mostly with aprons and kerchiefs or hats. The males went for baggy shirts and pants—though more in an “I could be Amish” way than an “I’m a hip-hop star” kind of way. Of course blue jeans and T-shirts would look weird to her. But Jonah and Katherine had managed to pass off their fashions in the fifteenth century by saying that they were from another country. Mileva had just given them that excuse to use now, too.

  Mileva glanced to the side, checking on the sleeping Lieserl again.

  “What? There are three of you?” she asked, sounding startled.

  What’s she talking about? Jonah wondered. Or—who?

  Katherine shifted positions, so Jonah had no hope of seeing past her and Mileva. Jonah dashed forward, hoping that somehow JB had managed to come to them—not that Gary or Hodge had returned.

  Jonah caught a glimpse of blue jeans and running shoes. Whoever it was, was lying on the ground and had just rolled toward Mileva.

  Mileva jumped to her feet.

  “Where’s Lieserl?” she screamed. “What happened to my daughter? She was right here! How could she have vanished?”

  Mileva dived past the figure on the ground, feeling around in the twigs and leaves where she’d placed her daughter only moments earlier. Nothing was there.

  Except a tracer.

  Jonah saw a strand of long, dark hair stretching back into the same space as the tracer’s head. He saw Lieserl’s blanket clumped around the blue jeans. And finally he understood.

  Lieserl hadn’t vanished.

  She’d just turned back into Emily.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Where’s my little girl?” Mileva shrieked again, even louder. “What have you done to Lieserl?”

  “Chip and Alex didn’t separate from their tracers that easily,” Katherine said.

  “But if time’s really messed up . . . ,” Jonah began.

  He saw a glint of something on the ground, and realized that Mileva had left the Elucidator behind when she’d jumped up to search for Lieserl. He scrambled toward it, but Mileva did too. Her hand closed over it and she brought it up to her mouth.

  “Bring Lieserl back,” she commanded. “Give me back my daughter. Please. Please. I beg of you . . .”

  Her words turned into wails. Jonah cast a nervous glance back toward Novi Sad. What if someone heard her?

  Emily sat up, looking groggily around.

  “Emily,” Jonah said quickly. “You have to get back together with your tracer. Just until we can get Mileva calmed down.”

  Emily blinked at him. She seemed to be struggling to draw air into her lungs.

  “Couldn’t . . . breathe,” she finally said. “Can’t . . . go back. Felt like I was going to . . . die.”

  “No,” Jonah said. “Not that. Not yet. You can’t . . .”

  He glanced toward the tracer lying on the ground. The light glowing from the tiny figure seemed to be growing dimmer and dimmer.

  “She’s really dying?” he gasped. He’d seen this happen with a tracer deer back in 1600, its glow vanishing completely after a tracer arrow pierced its heart. That’s what happened when tracers died. But that had just been a deer. This was a little girl.

  No, Jonah reminded himself. Lieserl’s not going to die. Just her tracer. Gary and Hodge kidnapped the real girl. She grew up and became Emily. Emily’s right here. She’s fine. She doesn’t even look sick.

  But somehow, even through her own wailing, Mileva had heard the horrible word.

  “Dying?” Mileva moaned. “Where? How? What can I do? How can I stop it? Please! Please! Tell me!”

  She went back to feeling around on the ground again, as if she believed that there’d been some sort of trade—as if she’d lost the ability to see her daughter when she’d gained the ability to see Katherine and Jonah.

  And, in a way, wasn’t that how it happened? Jonah thought. Was it just a coincidence of timing? Or is everything connected? Us becoming visible, talking to Mileva . . . did that mess up time just enough that Emily could easily break free from her tracer?

  And then Jonah couldn’t think, because Mileva’s anguish was too awful to watch. Her hands flailed about through the tracer’s dimming outlines again and again and again.

  Katherine put her hand comfortingly on Mileva’s shoulder.

  “Mileva,” she said. “Lieserl’s not going to die. She’s just . . .” Katherine looked helplessly at Jonah. “Changed,” she finished feebly.

  “Grown up,” Jonah said. He couldn’t watch Mileva’s pain and grief a second longer without trying to help. “You could say it happened through the miracle of science.”

  He put his hands on both sides of Mileva’s head and turned it so she couldn’t help but stare directly into Emily’s eyes.

  “Mileva,” he said firmly, without a hint of squeakiness, his voice carrying the ring of truth, “meet your daughter as a teenager.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jonah instantly had second thoughts.

  For one thing—though, in the scheme of things, it was a really a minor point—did people even use the word “teenager” in the early nineteen hundreds?

  For another thing, there was the way both Katherine and Emily were staring at him: their jaws dropped, their eyes bugging out, their faces drained of color.

  Jonah couldn’t remember Katherine looking that horrified by anything he’d ever done before. Not dropping spiders down her shirt, not putting peanut butter in her hair, not secretly booby-trapping her closet with knotted string . . . They’d been brother and sister for almost a dozen years. They’d traveled through centuries’ worth of time together. He’d shocked and outraged and horrified her plenty.

  Just not ever quite this badly.

  Jonah glance
d around quickly, pretty much expecting the world to be ending around him: the ground shaking, trees collapsing on his head, the Elucidator shrieking out an alarm, perhaps even the voice of God himself proclaiming from the heavens above, “That’s it. Game over. Let there be darkness. . . .”

  Jonah and Katherine had experienced something like that—only without the voice of God—back in 1600 when things really got messed up. They’d experienced the sensation that time itself was splitting in half back in 1611, at the moment that they now worried that Albert Einstein had discovered.

  But the world around Jonah right now didn’t seem to have changed that much. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves high overhead. Otherwise, everything was quiet.

  Quiet? Jonah thought.

  Mileva had stopped shrieking.

  She was staring straight at Emily, her eyes burning with intensity.

  “You look . . . a little like Albert,” Mileva said softly. “Around the mouth. And maybe the nose. And . . .” She laid her hand gently on Emily’s head. “Your hair is just like mine was at your age.” She turned back to Jonah and Katherine. “How? She survived the scarlet fever and then . . . how could this even be possible?”

  “You believe it?” Katherine asked incredulously.

  “Is this any more incredible than invisibility? Or my child, who is too ill to walk, vanishing from my side in the blink of an eye?” Mileva asked. “Or than scientists saying the whole universe is bathed in an invisible ether, which light flows through?”

  “Is that a yes or a no?” Jonah asked.

  Mileva made a sound that might have been a chuckle, if she hadn’t looked so serious.

  “Let’s just say that I am suspending disbelief until I hear all the explanations,” she said. “I will listen with an open mind.”

  Jonah and Katherine both opened their mouths. Then, just as quickly, they both shut them.

  “Well?” Mileva asked, narrowing her eyes. “Explain.”

  “I think,” Emily said slowly, “this is such a strange situation, we are all trying to figure it out. To figure out how to explain.”

  Mileva looked back at Emily again, seeming to drink in the sight of her.

  “She can even speak—was that English?” Mileva asked.

  Jonah realized that Emily hadn’t gotten the translation vaccines that eliminated language problems for him and Katherine. He hadn’t really bothered to think about how many languages and dialects they’d managed to understand since they’d started following Mileva across Europe. He’d barely noticed that they’d been talking with Mileva in German all along. But that would explain part of the reason that Emily kept looking at them with such a dazed expression.

  “I only know as much Serbian as Lieserl would have, at eighteen months,” Emily explained apologetically. “But I do know some German from school. I just don’t speak it very well.”

  Somehow, she’d managed to switch into German to say that.

  “My daughter heard little but Serbian from my family. But—German school?” Mileva asked, looking puzzled all over again. “Where—?”

  “Oh, brother,” Jonah muttered, because this added a whole other layer of complications to explain.

  Mileva seemed to have decided to focus on the emotion of the moment, rather than the explanations. She reached out to touch Emily’s cheek.

  “To think that I agonized over missing so much of your first year and a half,” Mileva murmured. “Your first tooth, your first step, your first word . . . This is better than losing you entirely, but—how much more have I missed? How old are you?”

  “Thirteen,” Emily said softly.

  “Thirteen,” Mileva repeated. “Another eleven and a half years gone . . .” Alarm broke over her face. “Did that much time pass somehow while I thought I spent only moments out in these woods?” She glanced quickly back at Jonah and Katherine. “The two of you did not seem to age, but you are strange beings, perhaps not subject to the rules of time . . .” Her panic seemed to grow. She pressed her hands to her own face in dismay. “Did eleven and a half years pass for the whole rest of the world while I was here? Have I been away from my family that long? Away from my Albert?”

  Jonah saw that she was working out a Rip van Winkle–type theory to explain Emily’s appearance. He couldn’t let her keep thinking that.

  “No,” he assured. “Eleven and a half years didn’t pass for anyone but, uh, Lieserl. And that’s not exactly the right explanation about her but, uh, it’s close enough. Just don’t worry. It’s still nineteen-oh . . .” He realized he still didn’t know exactly which year they were in. “You know,” he said. “It’s still the same year it was when we left your parents’ house and walked out here. It’s still the same day.”

  “It’s 1903, then,” Mileva said, peering at him closely. “It’s still 1903, right?”

  Something bothered him about that date, but he didn’t have time to analyze it. He concentrated on looking truthful and honest and trustworthy as he gazed back at Mileva and said, “Right.”

  “Then . . . ,” Mileva said, her gaze jerking back to Emily once more. “This might make things easier. You can come back to Switzerland and live with me and Albert, and no one would ever suspect. . . . We can say you’re a different relative. A cousin, a niece . . .”

  “Um, well, that’s not quite . . . ,” Jonah began. How did you tell someone that living with her own daughter would probably ruin time forever?

  “Don’t worry,” Mileva said. “If you can’t figure out how to explain any of this, Albert can. He’ll understand it.”

  “No!” Jonah and Katherine said together.

  “You can’t tell any of this to Albert Einstein!” Jonah added for emphasis.

  “But—he is my husband,” Mileva said. “How could I keep this secret? About our own child?”

  “He’s too important,” Jonah tried to explain.

  Mileva’s expression soured.

  “You’re someone else who believes that everything must be sacrificed for the good of a man?” she asked. “Even his own daughter?”

  Jonah squinted at her. That wasn’t what he’d been saying. Was she calling him sexist or something? Did she think he meant it was just because Einstein was male?

  “No, I—,” Jonah began. He shook his head. With that motion and his narrowed eyes, the glow of the Lieserl tracer on the ground seemed to intensify. Was she getting better?

  No, wait, Jonah thought. I’m not just seeing Lieserl’s tracer. I’m seeing Mileva’s, too, bent over her.

  Mileva’s tracer was gathering her daughter into her arms. She held the child tightly against her chest and rocked back and forth. She had her head tilted back, tears streaming down her face. Though Jonah couldn’t hear a sound, he could tell that the tracer was sobbing and wailing and screaming at the top of her lungs.

  Oh, no, Jonah thought. Oh, no. Did Lieserl’s tracer just die?

  No—that wasn’t it. The glow of Lieserl’s tracer was dim, but it was still there. And the tracer child was moving its arms and feebly turning its head and—however soundlessly—crying along with its mother.

  Jonah turned back to the real, flesh-and-blood Mileva.

  “You came out here just to lure me and Katherine away from the house and bargain with us in private, right?” he asked her.

  “Uh, right,” she said, puzzled all over again.

  Now Jonah turned to Katherine.

  “So why are we seeing tracers?” he asked.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “I guess the tracers must mean that Mileva would have brought Lieserl out here even if we hadn’t been around,” Katherine said slowly. “But—why?”

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

  Jonah remembered that this was Emily’s first trip to the past, and so far she’d spent almost all of it as a deathly ill toddler. He glanced at Mileva, then switched to English to explain.

  “Tracers—those glowing versions of Lieserl and Mileva—they show what people would have been d
oing if no time travelers had intervened,” he said. “So what else would Mileva have come here for, besides talking to us?”

  “That tracer person—she was reading a letter to her little girl a minute ago,” Emily said.

  Jonah guessed that Emily must have inherited her mother’s powers of observation rather than her father’s. Jonah himself certainly hadn’t noticed such a tiny detail in the midst of real people yelling and jumping around and, oh yeah, meeting a barely recognizable daughter under very odd circumstances. But the Mileva tracer was indeed clutching a tracer letter against her child’s back. A tracer envelope lay crumpled on the ground.

  “That’s Albert Einstein’s handwriting, isn’t it?” Katherine asked, glancing at it.

  The real Mileva opened her mouth, and Jonah could tell that she was about to complain about them speaking English, which she didn’t understand. She was looking as if she didn’t trust them again.

  “Did you just get a letter from your husband?” Jonah asked her, switching back to German.

  “Yes, the maid brought it to me when the doctor left,” Mileva said. “It’s right here in my pocket.” She patted her skirt, and for the first time Jonah noticed the white edge of an envelope sticking out slightly. “I haven’t read it yet. I was saving it. I think my husband will be happy. I’d just told him that I—”

  Just then Jonah heard a shout from the direction of the road.

  “Mileva! Mileva, where are you?”

  “That’s my father,” Mileva said. She glanced around quickly, as if to remind herself that Jonah and Katherine—and Emily—were fully visible right now, and could easily be discovered. She looked down at the Elucidator still clutched in her hand, then shook her head. She seemed to be deciding that she didn’t want to make them invisible again. Maybe she just didn’t think she had time for that.

  “I’ll go send him away,” she said, struggling to her feet. “All of you—hide!” Her eyes lingered on Emily. “As much as he’d love to see you . . .” She stepped away, holding out the Elucidator for a moment as if to remind them that she still had something they wanted, and they couldn’t just run away.