Sent

  Jonah wondered if Richard and the armored man had said the same words the first time through history. Was Richard refusing to kill Lord Strange because of what he’d talked about with Jonah and Katherine the night before? Had Jonah and Katherine saved Lord Strange’s life? Jonah was at the wrong angle to see if Richard’s mouth separated from his tracer’s, or if he’d simply repeated the same words he’d said the first time. And Jonah hadn’t been watching the other man closely enough to tell if his words had changed either.

  Richard whirled around and stalked out of the tent. The other men in armor followed.

  Jonah and Katherine were left alone.

  “Maybe we should just stay close to Richard,” Jonah whispered. “Remember? JB said we can’t pull Chip and Alex out until after Richard sees them.”

  “I want to talk to Chip and Alex first,” Katherine said stubbornly. “To make sure they’ll be ready to go.”

  Jonah shrugged and muttered, “Okay.” He wasn’t sure if it was lingering timesickness or the inadequacy of eating nothing but pears for breakfast, but he felt light-headed and confused, his thoughts jumbled.

  What if Chip and Alex aren’t ready to go? Jonah wondered. What did JB say to do, again?

  “Come on,” Katherine said, tugging on his arm.

  They stepped back out of the tent. They didn’t have to dodge any guards this time because the guards, like everyone else in sight, were clustered around Richard. He sat high above them on a tall horse, his armor gleaming in the sunlight, his crown perched on the helmet of his armor.

  “Dismiss all fear,” Richard was telling his men, “and like valiant champions, advance your standards!”

  Standards, Jonah remembered, were the flags that represented each leader on the battlefield. Far below, down the hill, Jonah could see a huge flag with a red dragon advancing across the field.

  It was the flag of Henry Tudor, Richard’s enemy. Coming closer.

  Richard glanced over his shoulder and apparently saw the dragon banner too.

  “Everyone give but one sure stroke, and the day is ours!” he proclaimed. “Onward!”

  Richard’s men cheered, and then they began rushing down the hill.

  “That was the pregame pep talk, wasn’t it?” Katherine whispered.

  “Sure,” Jonah said. “Same thing.”

  But it wasn’t. Jonah had played lots of sports—soccer, basketball, even baseball for a few years—and he’d had coaches who really, really wanted to win. But they hadn’t been sending their players out to kill anyone.

  Far down the hill the first man fell. Then the second. The third. All across the field before them men were collapsing. Dying.

  Jonah noticed that Katherine’s lip was trembling. She’d heard the bloodthirstiness in the cheering too. She saw the blood on the field. She knew they weren’t just watching a football game. She knew they weren’t just watching a movie, where all the blood was fake. She turned her head, looking away from the battle.

  “Chip and Alex won’t be near the fighting yet,” Jonah said gently. “Let’s go.”

  They skirted the edge of the battle, walking far behind the archers launching arrow after arrow from their bows. Jonah had done archery at Boy Scout camp one year, and it’d seemed so pointless and silly. He and his friends laughed about how rarely any of their arrows ever hit the targets.

  These archers were grim and serious. Their muscles flexed, their bowstrings sang … and out on the field more men sank to their death.

  Arrows can pierce armor, Jonah thought with a chill.

  Right in front of them one of the archers keeled over, an arrow embedded in his side.

  Jonah didn’t stop to look for the archer who’d sent his arrow so far across the field. He grabbed Katherine’s hand.

  “Run!” he shouted, pulling her along.

  It didn’t matter that they were noisy, rushing down the side of the hill. Out on the battlefield men were screaming, men were crying, swords and lances and knives were crashing. The sounds seemed to burrow deep into Jonah’s bones.

  Beside Jonah, Katherine fell.

  THIRTY-ONE

  “Katherine!” Jonah screamed.

  He crouched beside her, looking for the arrow. Pull it out or leave it in? he asked himself. Why hadn’t JB foreseen this? Why hadn’t he warned them?

  “JB!” he screamed, because surely JB would have to yank them out of 1485 now, surely …

  Katherine lifted her head, her nearly transparent face now covered with nearly transparent mud.

  “Would you shut up?” she asked. “I just slipped. Don’t you see how muddy it is here? It’s like a swamp or something.”

  Jonah hadn’t noticed. It was amazing what you could tune out when you were panicked and scared. He looked down at his feet, caked with mud, and wondered why he hadn’t noticed how hard it was to run. Was he thinking clearly about anything?

  Jonah drew in one unsteady breath. Then another. He forced himself to look around. A thin line of trees stood between them and the archers now. And none of the soldiers were venturing in their direction, probably because of the swamp. As long as Jonah and Katherine stayed low, out of the way of arrows, they weren’t in any more danger than they would be at home, standing in their own front yard.

  “We’ve got to stay calm,” he told Katherine. “There’s no reason to panic.”

  “I wasn’t the one telling you to run,” Katherine complained. “I wasn’t dragging you through the mud.”

  She stood up and began brushing off the rapidly drying mud. In another mood Jonah would have laughed to see how the mud was nearly invisible, along with Katherine, until it fell away from her armor. Then it turned brown and clumpy. Jonah felt like he was watching mud flakes rain from thin air.

  “We better hope no one sees that,” Jonah said, glancing around. “Anyhow, it doesn’t matter what you look like—no one can see you, remember?”

  “Chip and Alex will be able to see me,” Katherine said.

  “Ooh, Chip,” Jonah teased her. “Can’t have Chip see you with a hair out of place.”

  That wasn’t a fair thing to say, since Chip had already seen Katherine with her hair on fire, in the throes of timesickness nausea, and, back home, all sweaty and gross from biking to the library to try to solve the mystery of where Chip and Jonah had come from. Their adventures with time travel hadn’t really made it possible for Katherine to be the prissy, perfect-hair cheerleader type.

  Katherine stopped trying to brush the mud away.

  “What if he can’t see us?” she asked. “What if he and Alex are … totally fifteenth century now? What if they don’t even remember us?”

  “JB said they’ll remember,” Jonah said.

  “But he said they have to choose to come with us,” Katherine said. “We can’t force them. What if we can’t convince them?”

  “We’ll figure out the right thing to say when we get there,” Jonah said impatiently.

  He stepped forward, straining because it took so much effort now just to pull his feet through the mud. This portion of the swamp was even wetter, the mud even deeper.

  What if it’s really quicksand? Jonah wondered. What if we get stuck out here, and we die and nobody discovers our bones for hundreds of years?

  He wasn’t sure why this bothered him so much—not just the dying, but the not being found. What did it matter, if it was going to be hundreds of years before anyone he knew was even born?

  I’d want Mom and Dad to know what happened to us, he thought. I’d want them to know we were trying to be brave, trying to do something good. …

  He felt dizzy and disoriented again. Maybe this was one of those swamps he’d heard about in Boy Scouts where there were swamp gases that could knock you out. Maybe they were doomed no matter what.

  “Jonah?” Katherine said beside him. “Are those the right troops?”

  She pointed at a cluster of silver helmets in the clearing ahead of them.

  Jonah tried to remember the map JB had
drawn.

  “I think so,” he said.

  The cluster of helmets, the bright sunshine, the screams from the battlefield—everything was so much more vivid than it had seemed from the crude pencil drawing JB had shown them. It was hard to get oriented.

  “I’m going to climb this tree and look,” Katherine said, bracing her foot against the trunk of a nearby oak with low-hanging branches.

  Jonah remembered the arrows whizzing through the air not that far away.

  “No! No—I’ll do it,” Jonah said, pushing her out of the way.

  He pushed a little too hard, and Katherine landed on her backside in the mud.

  “Jerk!” she called up to him.

  Jonah didn’t bother answering, or helping her up. He scrambled up the tree—tree climbing was something else that was made much more complicated by armor. He ended up clinging to the thick central branch, peering out through the leaves.

  Hundreds of silver helmets lay before him, worn by hundreds of soldiers fidgeting on the sidelines of the battle.

  “Well?” Katherine called from the ground below. “Do you see Chip and Alex?”

  “I … I don’t know,” Jonah stammered. He hadn’t thought about this being hard too, just finding their friends. Why hadn’t he asked JB exactly what kind of armor Chip and Alex would be wearing, exactly where they’d be standing?

  Why hadn’t he requested a GPS reading, while he was at it?

  “Let me see,” Katherine demanded.

  “No, no—stay where it’s safe …,” Jonah began.

  But Katherine already had a foot on the lowest branch. A second later she was standing beside him, on the other side of the tree trunk. Silently she surveyed the rows and rows of helmets.

  “See?” Jonah said. “It’s not doing any good to stand up here, we’re just putting ourselves in danger. …”

  Katherine opened her mouth—To tell me off, Jonah thought. To argue. But she surprised him by throwing her head back and screaming at the top of her lungs, “Chip Winston! Where are you?”

  That was really stupid, Jonah fumed. No one could hear her over the sounds of the battle. Or if they do hear her, it’ll be the wrong people, soldiers who’ll think we’re spies, maybe. … They might not even look for us, they’ll just, I don’t know, set the tree on fire. …

  At first nothing happened. And then, slowly, slowly, one of the silver helmets began to turn around.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Third row from the back, fourth person in,” Katherine said, jumping down from the tree.

  She landed hard and rolled forward, practically doing a somersault in her armor. Some of her hair dragged out on the ground, collecting more mud to go with the mud on the chest and backside of her armor. She took off running.

  “Wait for me!” Jonah cried.

  He jumped too, his armor clanking as he hit the ground. A few of the soldiers in the back row looked around nervously, but Jonah ignored them.

  Katherine was darting through the rows of soldiers, dodging bulging packs of arrows and jutting-out bows and swords that the soldiers kept at the ready, pointed out, as if they were sure they’d be called into the action at any moment. Jonah did his best to keep up.

  They came upon Alex first, standing quietly and resolutely in the lineup of soldiers. Because of the armor and helmet Jonah could see nothing but Alex’s face, which looked surprisingly like the twenty-first-century Alex’s, rather than the fifteenth-century Prince Richard’s.

  Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. If Chip aged from twelve to fourteen between 1483 and 1485, Alex would have aged from ten to twelve. Not that much different from the thirteen-year-old I knew …

  Chip was just beyond Alex, standing a little apart from the other soldiers. Up close it was even weirder to see him two years older, with facial hair and a more defined jawline and a thick, muscular neck. Did they have steroids in the fifteenth century? Jonah wondered. But it wasn’t really the physical changes that startled Jonah the most—it was the look in Chip’s eyes, a wise, worldly look, as though he knew all sorts of things a thirteen-year-old wouldn’t have learned yet.

  Katherine planted herself exactly between the two boys.

  “Chip? Alex?” she called softly.

  Neither boy moved a muscle. Both continued staring, as if hypnotized, directly out into the battle.

  Jonah began to doubt that it really was Chip who’d turned around when Katherine screamed his name. He stepped back for a moment and counted—Chip was the sixth person in from the edge, not the fourth. The fourth person was an old, whiskery man. They were just lucky that that man had turned around, that he’d been standing so close to Chip and Alex.

  Hopelessness began to sweep over Jonah. What if they couldn’t even get Chip and Alex to acknowledge their presence?

  Jonah stepped forward and tugged on Chip’s arm. Not hard—he wasn’t trying to get Chip completely away from his tracer. It wasn’t time for that yet, and he couldn’t do it in front of all the other soldiers. But he wanted Chip—the real Chip, the twenty-first-century Chip—to come out just for an instant, just long enough that Jonah could tell him what was going to happen.

  Jonah’s fingers seemed to slip right off Chip’s arm.

  “Let me try,” Katherine said.

  She pushed at Chip’s back just as uselessly. She pushed harder. She tugged, she yanked, she stepped back, got a running start, and tried to tackle him.

  “Careful,” Jonah said. “This is what made JB pull us out the last time.”

  “But it’s not working!” Katherine muttered through gritted teeth.

  Jonah sidled up beside Chip and leaned in close to whisper in his ear.

  “Please, Chip,” he begged. “Remember who you are. We’ve got to get you out of here, for your own good. Remember home? Remember cell phones and iPods and TVs and computers and cars and … and pizza! Remember pizza?”

  Chip turned his head. But it was only to look at Alex, only to say, “Watch Norfolk’s men. They’re fighting the hardest.”

  “Hello?” Jonah screamed. But the sound got lost in the cheers and shrieks from the battlefield. Chip continued to look right through Jonah.

  “I have an idea,” Katherine said.

  She shoved past Jonah and put her arm around Chip’s shoulder. She had to reach up high and stand on tiptoes; he was that much taller than her now.

  “Chip,” she said, her lips almost touching his ear, “six boys have asked me to be their girlfriend in the past year.”

  “Katherine, what are you doing?” Jonah fumed. “Nobody cares about that right now!”

  Katherine glared at him for a moment, then went back to whispering to Chip.

  “I told them all no, and do you want to know why?” she asked. “Everybody’s supposed to have a boyfriend or girlfriend in sixth grade, but I didn’t really care about any of those boys—it wouldn’t have meant anything to say that Tyler Crawford was my boyfriend, or that Spencer Rajan was my boyfriend.”

  “Spencer Rajan asked you out?” Jonah asked incredulously. “I didn’t know that.”

  Katherine ignored him.

  “But you know what, Chip?” she said, leaning in closer. “If you’d asked me to be your girlfriend, I would have said yes. That would have meant something.”

  Swaying a little on her tiptoes, weighed down by her mud-covered armor, she turned her head and gave him a timid kiss on the cheek.

  At first nothing happened. But then there was a small flare of light around Chip’s face, the reappearance of his tracer, barely separated from Chip. The tracer continued staring out at the battle, but Chip turned his head to look at Katherine.

  “Really?” Chip said softly, his nearly invisible mouth moving while the tracer’s mouth stayed firmly shut. “You really like me?”

  THIRTY-THREE

  “Well, duh,” Katherine said. “I came all the way to the fifteenth century for you, didn’t I?” She took a step back, as if she was a little stunned that Chip had heard her. She looked him up and do
wn. “And it’s not just because I know now that you’re going to be really hot by the time you’re fifteen.”

  “I am?” Chip said. “Hot? You think so?”

  “Hey, hey—can the romance and hot talk, all right?” Jonah interrupted. Both Chip and Katherine turned toward him, looking annoyed. “Or save it for later,” Jonah amended. “We’ve got a lot of other things to worry about right now.”

  “Aye, the battle,” Chip said. His face started to retract into the older, fifteenth-century version of himself, into his tracer.

  “No, no, Chip—wait,” Jonah said frantically. “Katherine and I came to get you and Alex out of here. So you don’t die in this battle.”

  Chip’s face hovered, barely apart from his tracer’s.

  “I won’t die in battle,” he said confidently. “I’m an expert swordsman. Everyone says so.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Jonah said. “All the time experts say you and Alex are going to die if we don’t take you away.”

  Jonah saw a flash of light—it was Chip’s arm separating from his tracer’s. Chip reached out to grasp Alex’s shoulder.

  “My brother?” Chip asked. “He’ll die?”

  Jonah got an idea.

  “Pull him out of his tracer,” Jonah said. “Let him hear what’s going to happen.” This had worked before, Jonah remembered. Chip had been able to separate Alex from his tracer when Jonah and Katherine failed.

  Chip glanced around, his head separating from his tracer’s head even more dramatically. None of the soldiers around them were watching Chip and Alex. They all had their eyes glued to the battle. Chip jerked on Alex’s shoulder.

  Alex’s head pitched forward, leaving his tracer’s face behind. Dazedly, he peered around, his eyes focusing slowly on Jonah and Katherine.

  “Two years,” he murmured. “I haven’t been able to fully think with this brain for two years.”

  “We’re almost ready to take you back,” Jonah said. “You can think with that brain all the time after this.”

  Alex blinked.

  “I—,” he began.