Risked

Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. That’s how you negotiate.

  This time it was Gavin repeating Chip’s words in Russian: “Let Leonid go or Yurovsky’s a dead man!”

  The guard holding Leonid looked confused in the dim glow of the lantern light. He took a halting step forward, dragging Leonid with him, bringing the circle of light closer.

  “Show yourself,” the guard said. “How do I know you’re even holding Yurovsky?”

  Jonah saw Katherine rush to Chip’s side and poke her finger against Yurovsky’s chest.

  “You tell the guard you’re being held,” she ordered him. “Tell them you’ve got a gun at your head!”

  Yurovsky just tried to squirm away.

  “P-p-please,” Leonid stammered. It didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore that he was a teenager who already had facial hair. He still sounded terrified out of his wits. “Don’t hurt me. I just came to say good-bye. I heard the fighting out in the mountains and I heard the truck and I figured the guards would be taking the Romanovs somewhere else. . . . Look, this proves I’m telling the truth.”

  He held out a cloth knapsack and said pleadingly, “I just wanted to bring Alexei’s toy soldiers back, so he could take them with him. . . .”

  The toy soldiers! Jonah thought. That means he has the Elucidator here! That means we can get it back!

  He took off running toward Leonid. Halfway there, Jonah realized Katherine was sprinting alongside him. They reached Leonid together and knocked the knapsack from his hand.

  “Let’s divide the pile in half—faster that way,” Katherine hissed at Jonah.

  Before the knapsack even hit the floor, Jonah was already tugging it open, preparing to shove half the toy soldiers toward Katherine and pull half of them toward himself. In the lantern light this was bound to look strange: the knapsack falling, the toy soldiers seeming to move around by themselves. But Jonah was beyond caring about things like that right now.

  Jonah grabbed a handful of toy soldiers and practically threw them at Katherine.

  And that was when he heard the first gunshot.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It sounded close.

  But any gunfire would sound close in this small, enclosed space, so Jonah still had hope as he glanced up.

  It was hard to hold on to that hope as he heard the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth gunshot. They came so rapidly and in such quick succession that they might as well have been machine-gun fire.

  Jonah braced himself for a horrific scene: blood everywhere, the wounded and the dead falling to the floor, just as much chaos and mayhem and screaming as he’d seen (but not heard) when the tracer guards had fired upon the tracer Romanovs.

  Jonah still didn’t hear any screaming this time, which was odd. In fact, he heard nothing after that fifth gunshot. And at first his eyes couldn’t make sense of what he saw: no chaos, no mayhem, no one falling . . . for that matter, no one moving at all. Olga, Tatiana, and Maria were clustered protectively around their mother, frozen in the motion of holding her up. Gavin and Daniella were flat on the ground, but it looked like they’d dived there to get out of the way of the bullets, not that they’d been hit. Chip, Dr. Botkin, and the tsar were still clinging stubbornly to Yurovsky, but he’d stopped fighting against their grasp.

  The guards stood clumped around the doorway between the two rooms. Five of them had their weapons aimed, curls of smoke frozen above the barrels.

  It was only when Jonah saw the bullets themselves frozen in midair that he finally understood what had happened.

  “Who stopped time?” he asked. “Can the Elucidator do that now? Katherine, did you find the Elucidator and say the command that quickly?”

  Katherine squinted up at him—he was relieved to see that she could still move.

  So this is just a normal case of stopped time? Jonah wondered. Where everything’s frozen except the people who have traveled through time?

  Though, what was ever “normal” about time travel or frozen time?

  “I didn’t do anything,” Katherine said, sounding as baffled as she looked. “I don’t have the Elucidator.” She glanced down at her handfuls of unsorted toy soldiers. “At least, not that I know of.”

  Someone behind Jonah made a small noise—maybe a whimper. Jonah looked around and realized that the frozen glow of Leonid’s lantern had reached the tips of the tsar’s boots.

  So the guards knew where he was, and that’s why they started shooting, Jonah thought.

  All five of the bullets suspended in midair had been speeding toward the general vicinity of the tsar. They were various distances away. But—Jonah stood up and looked at the exact angles—only two of them were on course to actually hit him.

  One bullet looked like it was about to hit Dr. Botkin.

  One bullet seemed about to graze Yurovsky’s wrist.

  And one bullet was headed straight for Chip’s heart.

  It was Chip who had whimpered.

  “Chip! Get out of the way!” Jonah screamed. “Before time starts again!”

  “If I do, the bullet will just hit one of the servants behind me!” Chip protested. A trickle of sweat inched down his face.

  “You and your medieval chivalry,” Jonah grumbled. He flicked the bullet toward the floor. It bounced. Jonah stepped on it to keep it from hitting anyone else.

  Katherine zoomed past him and dived for the other four bullets, knocking them toward the floor as well.

  From the direction of the stairs, Jonah heard someone clapping. Somehow it sounded sarcastic—wasn’t clapping almost always sarcastic when only one person clapped?

  “Bravo, bravo!” a voice cried. “It’s always so entertaining to see what you Skidmores will come up with next!”

  “It’s really a shame we can’t let you go on,” a second voice agreed. “But we refuse to let you destroy time completely!”

  Two men stepped out from the shadows.

  “Gary and Hodge?” Jonah asked incredulously.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Before Jonah could say or do anything else, Gavin leaped up from the floor and began racing toward the two men.

  “You lied to me!” he roared.

  At practically the same moment, Chip whipped around to point his gun at the two men.

  “Drop your Elucidators!” he yelled.

  In response, Gary aimed his hand—and probably an Elucidator held within it—directly at Chip. The gun immediately jerked out of Chip’s hand and glided across the room toward Gary. Gary calmly tucked it into his pocket.

  “You think you can fight Elucidators with a twentieth-century gun?” he taunted.

  Almost as quickly, Hodge raised his hand toward Gavin. Gavin instantly froze in the midst of running, both his feet off the ground, his left knee cycled up, his elbows jutting out. But it appeared that he’d only been frozen from the neck down: With his head, he still strained forward, uselessly. And he continued to scream at Gary and Hodge: “What did you do to me?”

  “Relax, all of you,” Gary said lazily. “Well, I guess Gavin can’t relax, really, suspended in midair like that. But be at peace, anyway. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re saving your lives, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah?” Katherine challenged, looking up and over her shoulder from her place sprawled on the floor. “Why should we trust anything the two of you say?”

  “Because we didn’t let time start back up when your brother would have been responsible for killing you,” Hodge said. He aimed his hand toward the wall and a scene began playing back from just a moment earlier: Jonah flicking the bullet toward the floor, the bullet bouncing and spinning. . . . The scene froze at a moment when the bullet was clearly directed toward Katherine.

  Jonah shivered.

  “See what we mean?” Hodge asked. “If we’d just let time start up then . . . Anybody else feel inclined to rush toward us and be frozen like Gavin? Or have their toys taken away from them, like Chip?”

  Nobody moved, but Gavin shouted, “I hate you!”

/>   Hodge shrugged and stepped farther out of the shadows.

  Jonah noticed that Hodge looked a lot older than he had the last time Jonah had seen him. His hair was grayer, and his clothing hung on him as if he’d lost an unhealthy amount of weight.

  Meanwhile, Gary looked even more muscle-bound than before.

  If they’ve come straight from escaping from time prison, he must have been one of those prisoners who spend all their time lifting weights, Jonah thought, staring at the man’s bulging biceps.

  Jonah and Katherine and their friends had been no match for Gary’s muscles before, back in the time cave. Trying to overpower him seemed even more clearly hopeless now. Especially if Gary and Hodge each had an Elucidator, and Gary was holding Chip’s gun.

  But do we have a chance to outthink them? Jonah wondered.

  “What do you want with us?” Jonah asked quietly. “Why are you doing this?”

  Both men turned their attention to Jonah.

  “Ah, young Mr. Skidmore,” Hodge said. “You have matured. Back in the time cave you would have been running for us just as impulsively as Gavin over there.”

  He gestured toward the frozen Gavin.

  Thanks, Jonah thought. Way to make Gavin hate me.

  “Gavin’s just a lot madder at you than I am,” Jonah said evenly. “Because this is his family. His life you’re messing with.”

  Hodge raised an eyebrow.

  “And this isn’t what your life has become?” he asked. “The constant time travel, the constant danger, the constant difficult decisions . . . when all you ever wanted to do was stay in the twenty-first century and stick your head in the sand and pretend none of this has anything to do with you?”

  “Would you just answer Jonah’s questions and stop trying to distract us?” Katherine demanded.

  Gary laughed.

  “Sounds like neither of them is as easy to distract as they used to be,” he said condescendingly.

  “Daniella? Chip?” Hodge called out. “Would either of you like to add your perspective to this discussion?”

  Daniella lifted her head slowly from the floor. She gazed around fearfully at the frozen Romanovs and servants and guards, at the mostly frozen Gavin.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on,” she whispered.

  Katherine went to huddle beside Daniella. Jonah heard his sister starting to explain, “See, sometimes time travelers can stop time, but anyone who’s traveled through time isn’t affected . . . not usually, anyway . . .”

  Chip stepped out slightly from behind Yurovsky.

  “I think,” Chip began, “if your main goal was saving people’s lives, you would have done all this very differently. Why did you even want us in 1918?”

  “Oh, my dear boy—you think we sent you to 1918?” Hodge said mockingly. “Wasn’t it Gavin’s fault? Or maybe Jonah’s? Sometimes it’s so hard to pick out cause and effect, event and consequence.”

  “I didn’t want to come here!” Gavin yelled, uselessly jerking his head back and forth. “You promised me I could go to the future! You told me that’s what would happen if I typed that code you gave me into an Elucidator!”

  “Yes, yes, that is still where you’re headed,” Hodge said, waving his arm dismissively. “We just didn’t tell you there’d be one little detour along the way.”

  Jonah looked from the calmly mocking Gary and Hodge to Gavin with his bottled-up fury.

  “You had to do something to fix 1918, didn’t you?” Jonah asked. He was finally putting it all together. “When you kidnapped Alexei and Anastasia the first time around, you were lazy and did it in the afternoon. You grabbed them from Alexei’s bedroom and took them down to the garden and time-traveled from there, hours before it was safe to take them away. And that’s why we all landed in the wrong place, coming back.”

  “Maybe,” Gary admitted. He looked around at the Romanovs and their servants and the guards, all frozen in anguish and fury and fear and despair. “Who in their right mind wouldn’t try to avoid coming here tonight?”

  “But your laziness must have created too many problems with time, and so to get away with the kidnapping, you had to send Gavin and Daniella back to finish living out the day,” Chip continued for Jonah.

  “But why did you have to get Chip and Jonah and me involved?” Katherine asked plaintively from the floor beside Daniella.

  “You think Daniella and Gavin could have handled this day all by themselves?” Hodge asked. “Of course, we hated to risk any of our investments, especially so many of you all at once. But—”

  He’s talking about us like we’re just “investments”? Jonah thought furiously. Just things he can send wherever he wants?

  He clenched his teeth and tried not to let Gary or Hodge see how mad that made him. Fortunately, Hodge was still talking.

  “But you know, Daniella’s coming into all this cold, without the slightest bit of background in time travel,” he said. “And Gavin . . . well, Gavin’s got that little anger-management problem. . . .”

  “Not after I became Alexei,” Gavin protested. “Not once I saw how he coped—”

  “And that’s why you were trying to attack Hodge and me?” Gary asked.

  Gavin glowered at him.

  “So what’s going to happen now?” Daniella asked.

  Don’t ask that question, Jonah thought. Don’t get them focused on their next step. Keep them talking, so we have time to figure out a plan. . . .

  “No, wait!” Jonah interrupted. “Time’s stopped, anyway, so why don’t you explain a few other things? How did you do it? How did you break out of time prison without JB and the other time agents finding out?”

  “Trade secrets,” Hodge growled.

  “Now, now,” Gary argued. “The boy’s asking us to brag. Don’t you think he needs some new heroes?”

  “Didn’t you just get Gavin to do all your dirty work for you?” Katherine taunted. “Yeah, you guys are some heroes, when you have to trick a poor, sick boy into doing what you want.”

  “I am not some poor, sick boy!” Gavin screamed.

  What’s Katherine’s problem? Jonah wondered. Why’s she trying to get Gavin even more upset? Shouldn’t we be trying to join together as a team against Gary and Hodge?

  Everyone else looked toward Gavin, who was trying to pitch a fit as best he could with his whole body frozen except for his head. But Jonah kept his eyes on his sister.

  Do you have the Elucidator? she mouthed in Jonah’s direction.

  The Elucidator?

  Jonah looked blankly at Katherine and shook his head.

  Get it! she mouthed. Hide it!

  Jonah had no prayer of tackling Gary or Hodge and wrestling their fully working Elucidators away from them. So he guessed she meant the dumbed-down “parental controls” Elucidator that Gavin had brought from the twenty-first century. So much had changed in the last few minutes that Jonah had almost forgotten how frantically he and Katherine had been searching for it in the last instant before time froze.

  But what good is it now? Jonah wondered. We’re already in 1918, so that command is useless. And invisibility? Even if we turn the Romanovs invisible, Gary and Hodge can still see them. They’re the big problem now, not Yurovsky and the guards.

  He hoped Katherine had a plan.

  He scanned the two piles of toy soldiers lying before him. A tracer guard walked by just then carrying a dead tracer body—eww, don’t look to see who that used to be—and in the sudden burst of light, Jonah caught sight of a chipped cap on one of the toy soldiers right beside his knee. Quickly Jonah palmed the soldier and slid it into his pocket. But Gary must have caught a glimpse of the motion out of the corner of his eye, because he turned and peered suspiciously at Jonah.

  Okay, if he’s suspicious, give him something else to be suspicious about, Jonah thought.

  Pretending not to notice Gary’s stare, Jonah snatched up one of the ordinary toy soldiers. Hiding it with one hand, he dug a thumbnail against the
soldier’s cap, hoping the motion would scrape away the paint. Then, pointing the soldier at Gary and Hodge, Jonah cried out, “Make Gary and Hodge invisible! Send them back to time prison!”

  Both men instantly went translucent—because of the Elucidator in Jonah’s pocket, not the toy soldier in his hand. But of course they didn’t go anywhere.

  No, scratch that. Gary was suddenly diving toward Jonah, tackling him and pounding him flat against the floor.

  THIRTY

  Jonah’s face smashed into one of the piles of toy soldiers; the other pile seemed to have scattered enough to jab into every other part of his body from his neck down to his ankles.

  Okay, okay, so I’ll have lots of bruises—just don’t let Gary take away the toy-soldier Elucidator from my pocket, he thought.

  Gary grabbed Jonah’s wrist and twisted it slightly, then yanked away the ordinary toy soldier Jonah held in his hand. Gary tore the soldier in half—he can do that with just his bare hands? Jonah marveled. To solid metal?—then hurled the two halves of the broken soldier into the opposite corner of the room.

  “You’re an idiot!” Gary exclaimed, hitting Jonah’s face and smashing it that much harder into the toy soldiers he was lying on. “Didn’t you remember that Elucidator’s worthless? Time’s stopped! What does it matter if we’re invisible or not?”

  “I—I had to try something,” Jonah mumbled.

  He didn’t have to work too hard to fake disappointment—he was disappointed that he hadn’t thought of some distraction technique that wouldn’t have required Gary tackling him.

  Gary punched him again. But then he backed away without searching for the actual Elucidator.

  Don’t act happy, Jonah told himself. But . . . you can act relieved that Gary didn’t kill you.

  Stiffly he sat up. He felt his face, and was surprised to discover that it wasn’t covered with open sores and gushing blood. It was very tender, but the skin wasn’t broken.

  Next Jonah patted his ribs and arms and legs to make sure none of them were broken. They ached too, but all his bones seemed to be intact.