Risked

  Then, surreptitiously, he patted his pants pocket to make sure the real toy-soldier Elucidator was still there.

  It was.

  Katherine raced dramatically across the room to his side.

  “Are you all right, Jonah?” she cried aloud. “Gary didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  Just to Jonah she whispered, “Do you have it?”

  Jonah nodded, hoping she’d understand which question he was answering. Surely she wouldn’t think he could be all right after Gary’s tackle.

  Hoping he wasn’t carrying the charade too far, he hugged Katherine and whispered back to her, “Do you have a plan?”

  “Working on it,” Katherine whispered.

  “Okay, you two, break it up,” Gary said, kicking them apart.

  The kick hurt almost as much as being tackled.

  All that, and Katherine’s just “working” on a plan? Jonah thought bleakly.

  Hodge was frowning and shaking his head at Gary, as if something about Gary’s actions—or maybe Jonah’s—really upset him.

  “Enough fooling around,” he said. “All you kids, gather around Gavin.”

  “What will happen if we don’t?” Daniella asked.

  “Ask Jonah how it felt to have Gary tackle him,” Hodge replied. “And remember, we’ve each got an Elucidator, and Gary’s got a gun. You’ve got nothing.”

  Except a worthless dumbed-down Elucidator and a sister who’s just working on a plan, Jonah thought. Why didn’t I try to steal the gun or Gary’s Elucidator when he tackled me?

  Gary flexed his muscles, and Jonah remembered why.

  So we have to obey Hodge? Jonah wondered. Isn’t there anything else we can do?

  The only ideas he could think of were nothing but delaying tactics.

  “If you’re thinking about sending us somewhere else, Gavin and Daniella are going to want the rest of their family to come along,” Jonah said as he stood up very, very slowly.

  “Oh, yes!” Daniella agreed, scrambling up. “We have to save them!”

  “You care that much about the rest of the Romanovs?” Hodge asked, rolling his eyes.

  “They’re our family!” Gavin argued. “Our real family!”

  “We love them!” Daniella cried out. To Jonah’s surprise, she was blinking back tears.

  “Anyhow, nobody deserves to die this way,” Katherine agreed, gesturing toward a tracer body that had been so brutalized Jonah couldn’t even tell who it was.

  “Maybe the tsar did,” Hodge said. “Do you know what life was like for most of his subjects during the twenty-two years of his rule? Do you know how incompetent he was, even as he believed his position was divinely ordained? Do you know how many opportunities he missed, how devastating World War One and the Russian Revolution were for his country—partly because he was such a terrible leader?”

  “Move it!” Gary said, shoving Jonah forward. “You all want to find out this kind of info, you can look in the history books when you get where you’re going.”

  So Gary and Hodge were planning to send them somewhere. The future?

  Well, fine, we’ll just hunt up JB and get him to help us, Jonah thought.

  Somehow Jonah suspected that Gary and Hodge might have thought of that possibility. And figured out how to prevent it.

  But they don’t know we have the dumbed-down Elucidator. Maybe there’s something we can figure out with that. . . .

  Jonah had delayed as long as he could. He was now standing next to Gavin. So were Chip, Katherine, and Daniella.

  “Move Leonid over too,” Hodge told Gary.

  Gary pulled the lantern out of Leonid’s hand and put it on the ground. He shoved Leonid’s head down, freeing him from the grasp of the guard who was pointing a gun at the teenager. And then, with the stiff, frozen Leonid under his arm, he walked across the room to set him up again beside Gavin and the other four kids.

  “So you are rescuing our family and the servants too?” Daniella asked eagerly.

  “Nope,” Gary said. “Just that one.”

  He jerked his head toward Leonid.

  “But why?” Gavin asked.

  Hodge hovered behind them, grinning.

  “Let’s just say it’s thanks to you, Gavin,” Hodge explained. “When you gave Leonid the toy soldiers this afternoon, that made him think about his buddy Alexei in a different way. So he was brave enough to sneak back over here tonight, hoping to warn you and your family that the guards were out to kill you.”

  “He was just returning my toy soldiers!” Gavin protested.

  “Don’t you think he was smart enough to lie when he saw that the guards already had your family trapped?” Gary asked.

  Leonid didn’t have much of a plan, Jonah thought. But neither did the rest of us.

  “Anyhow, that blind, stupid courage and loyalty—it’s the kind of quality that makes missing children from history quite valuable on the adoption market of the future,” Hodge said.

  “You think Leonid is valuable, but not Olga, Tatiana, or Maria?” Daniella asked incredulously. “Or Mama or Papa or . . .”

  Hodge glanced toward the cluster of frozen Romanov females.

  “How old are your sisters, again?” he asked.

  “Olga’s twenty-two, Tatiana’s twenty-one, and Maria’s nineteen,” Daniella said.

  “That one’s borderline, then,” Gary said, pointing to Maria. “It didn’t seem worth it the last time, but if we’re going to have to fake one more death, we might as well fake two.”

  “Okay, kid,” Hodge told Daniella. “We’ll compromise. You can have one of your sisters.”

  “But, but—,” Daniella sputtered. “The others—”

  It was too late. Gary had already shoved Maria—and only Maria—over beside Daniella. Hodge was already lifting his hand toward them, the glow of his Elucidator shining through his fingers.

  “Meet you there!” he cried.

  And then Jonah felt himself begin spinning through time with the others.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Leonid and Maria both instantly unfroze and started screaming.

  “What happened? Where are we?” Leonid yelled.

  “Are we dead?” Maria asked forlornly. “Did they shoot us all? But—where’s the rest of our family?” She squinted at Daniella and Gavin, then at the still-transparent Chip, Katherine, and Jonah beyond. “Alexei, why do you have purple hair? And who are those people? Ghosts? Angels? Why can I see through them?”

  Oh, yeah, now that she’s traveling through time, she can see other time travelers even if they’ve turned invisible, Jonah thought.

  He wondered what he could do to keep her from going completely hysterical, but Daniella beat him to it.

  “Just think of all this as a dream,” she advised. “That’s how I coped at first.”

  “You mean, they shot you before the rest of us?” Maria asked. “Oh, Lord, please . . .”

  She began reciting a prayer, which seemed to calm both her and Leonid.

  Jonah wanted to ask, Know any good prayers for time travelers who are in big trouble?

  The darkness of Outer Time whirled around them, but somehow the murmured prayer had a calming effect on Jonah, too.

  And Gavin seemed positively giddy.

  “Hey! I can move again!” he hollered, waving his arms and legs as if to prove it.

  “Alexei, you’re healed!” Maria cried out. “Everything Mama said about heaven is true—the lame can walk again!” She looked around. “Except we’re not really walking, are we? Are we flying?”

  Gavin patted his sister on the shoulder and “flew” his way over to talk more quietly with Chip and Jonah and Katherine.

  “This isn’t so bad,” Gavin told the others. “Even if they’re sending us to the future, Gary and Hodge will have to deal with the mess in 1918 before they follow us, so—”

  “So this is time travel, remember?” Katherine interrupted him. “Gary and Hodge can leave hours or days or even years after us, and still get wherever w
e’re going before us.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Gavin said. He let his arms drop to his side.

  “But maybe Gary and Hodge won’t expect us to come out fighting,” Chip said. “If we arrange ourselves in military formation, we can attack as soon as we arrive, and grab their Elucidators and call JB and get him to help with the Romanovs and—”

  “And even if that doesn’t work, we’ll manage to get in touch with JB somehow,” Katherine agreed.

  “Remember, I do have the dumbed-down Elucidator,” Jonah reminded them. “So if we just get away from Gary and Hodge, we can make everyone invisible, not just the three of us, and—”

  “I feel funny,” Leonid moaned, interrupting the planning. “Small. Do people get smaller in heaven?”

  The really odd thing was, his voice squeaked as he said this. Jonah had had problems of his own with that issue, but every other time he’d heard Leonid speak, the older boy’s voice had sounded as deep and assured as a man’s. The kid had facial hair and everything—what was he doing with a squeaky voice?

  “I feel weird too,” Daniella agreed. “Shorter. Hey! Stop that! I was short enough to begin with!”

  “Jonah?” Katherine said, in her I’m trying not to freak out, but I really want to voice. “Remember that tooth I had that took forever to come in after the baby tooth fell out? Now it’s shrinking back into my gum. No—now it’s gone!”

  “What are you talking about?” Jonah asked, and his voice wasn’t squeaky. It had changed completely—in the wrong direction. Now his voice sounded as clear and high-pitched and childish as it had two or three years ago.

  “Oh, no,” Chip moaned. “Oh, no. I know what’s happening!”

  His voice also sounded childish and as clear as a bell. Jonah hadn’t met Chip until right before they’d both turned thirteen—he’d never heard Chip sound so young. He sounded ridiculous.

  But Jonah felt no desire to laugh.

  “This is why Gary and Hodge weren’t worried about us planning any military maneuver or rebelling against them when we get to the future,” Chip moaned. “We’re getting younger and younger by the minute. We’re all going to be babies by the time we land!”

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Not me!” Gavin argued. “Remember, they promised me, they said I wouldn’t have to start over—”

  But his voice too came out sounding childish, more suited for a sweet little elementary-school kid than a middle-school tough with dyed hair. Jonah squinted at the other boy: The purple streak appeared to have vanished, and his hair had shrunk to above his ears.

  None of us should be changing like this! Jonah thought, trying to keep his own panic at bay. People don’t un-age just because they’re traveling through time!

  He’d time-traveled more than a dozen times without changing his age at all.

  Except for that one time . . .

  Gary and Hodge had changed his age on his first trip through time. When they’d kidnapped all the missing children from history in the first place, the two men had un-aged all of the children back to being babies.

  So did they program the Elucidator with the same kind of command this time around? Jonah wondered.

  He could feel the panic starting to surge over him, in spite of his best efforts to hold it off.

  “What are we going to do?” Katherine wailed. “We get to the future, we won’t memember anything.”

  Did she really just say ‘memember’? Jonah wondered. That was one of those little-kid mistakes she used to make all the time. Jonah had seen her once—when? Third grade? Fourth? Fifth?—standing in front of a mirror trying to retrain herself: Remember, it’s “remember.” “Remember.” The other kids will laugh at you if you say it wrong. Remember . . .

  And Jonah had never heard her say it wrong again.

  But now . . .

  “Those bad men didn’t tell you the truth!” Chip was shouting at Gavin. “They lied about everything! We should beat them up! That’s what I want to do!”

  Were they all getting younger at the same speed? How much time did they have while they could still think, before they were down to “goo-goo, gaa-gaa” and sucking their thumbs?

  Memember, you have a magic toy in your pocket, Jonah told himself. You can do stuff with it. You can make people invisible. And that’s fun in comics and cartoons. But this isn’t about fun. This is serious. People could die, so I have to be serious.

  Jonah arranged his face in a very serious expression, so everyone could see that he wasn’t trying to have fun. He felt a little hand brush against his and then grab on to his fingers.

  “Jo-Jo?” Katherine whispered. “I’m scared. Are you scared too?”

  Her blond hair was little-girl wispy now, and her tiny nose was wrinkled up like she was going to cry.

  She’s really little, Jonah thought. He looked around at the other kids. She’s the littlest one of all.

  Jonah was supposed to take care of her. He was always supposed to take care of his little sister. And he got sick of it. But sometimes when she looked up at him like this—like she was so sure he’d be able to fix everything—he kind of liked it. He kind of thought, Well, maybe I can fix everything.

  “I’m royalty, so I’ll get to marry a king or a prince when I grow up,” Maria told him, giggling a little. “Are you a king or a prince?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jonah said. He could have told her he was adopted, so there was no telling what he was. But his mommy had told him he didn’t have to tell people about that unless he felt like it. And right now he didn’t feel like it. Because he needed to be serious. He needed to fix everything.

  Jonah pulled the toy soldier from his pocket. He looked at the toy soldier and the toy soldier looked back at him.

  “What else can you do besides make people invisible?” Jonah asked, because he’d kind of forgotten.

  Words glowed above the toy soldier’s head:

  I CAN:

  - TAKE PEOPLE TO 1918

  - GRANT INVISIBILITY

  - UNDO INVISIBILITY COMMANDS

  - LIST MY LIMITED FUNCTIONS

  The soldier was a toy—why did it have to use such big words? It took Jonah way too long to puzzle out the words “invisibility” and “commands” and “functions.” By the time he looked up again, Katherine was sucking her thumb. Leonid was crying, but trying to hide it. Daniella and Maria were clinging to each other, terrified. Gavin and Chip were fake-punching each other, maybe practicing to fight for real.

  We keep going, we’re all just going to get smaller and smaller and smaller, Jonah thought. It’s hard to win fights when you’re really small.

  “Take us all back,” he told the toy soldier in his hand. “To 1918? Is that what it’s called?”

  Jonah felt like he was in a car where his mommy or daddy hit the brake really hard. His body wanted to keep flying forward. But it couldn’t. Instead he went backward.

  “We turned around!” he yelled to all the others. “Everything’s going to be okay! We’re going back!”

  Leonid started crying harder.

  THIRTY-THREE

  They landed on something hard.

  Floor, Jonah thought. Basement . . . in that old house again. Where those kids lived when they were other people. No . . . their prison.

  Jonah couldn’t tell if he was still a little kid or if he was just confused from timesickness. He blinked hard, trying to bring his vision back into focus as quickly as possible.

  “What the—,” somebody said.

  Gary and Hodge were standing over them, in the same positions they’d been in when Jonah and the others had vanished from 1918.

  “Maybe they’re just decoys,” Hodge said. “A time agency trick.”

  “But nobody knows we’re here!” Gary protested. “And why would the time agency make them look younger?”

  So we’re all still . . . little kids? Jonah wondered.

  He decided there was a trick to thinking with a timesick little-kid brain. He could still remember everyth
ing that had happened to him as a thirteen-year-old, but he had to make himself really, really brave not to hide from those memories.

  Gary and Hodge are bad guys, he thought. Maybe if I don’t move, they’ll think I’m just sleeping and they won’t do anything.

  “Get that lightbulb back,” Hodge said. “Let’s make sure before we panic.”

  Gary turned around, pointing at the light. Then there was a sound like glass shattering—no, un-shattering? The lightbulb glowed overhead once more.

  “What is that, twenty-five watts?” Hodge complained.

  Gary bent over one of the other kids—Leonid, maybe? Gavin? Jonah couldn’t see well enough to tell who it was in the dim light. And he couldn’t tell if they were little kids like him. If they were, would they be braver little kids than Jonah?

  “Feels like real human skin,” Gary reported.

  Hodge snorted.

  “Yeah, and don’t you think there’s a chance the time agency has advanced enough to make that realistic too?” he asked.

  “Hodge, I am not spending another minute in time prison,” Gary said, sounding panicky now. “If they’re onto us, we’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Now, now,” Hodge said soothingly. “We covered all our tracks perfectly. Don’t be hasty giving up so much treasure.” He seemed to be squinting straight down at Jonah. “Remember, that one was holding on to the dumbed-down Elucidator a few moments ago.”

  “And then I destroyed it and threw it to the other side of the room!” Gary protested.

  “We really should remember to pick it up before we go,” Hodge muttered, still staring at Jonah. “Unless . . . maybe that wasn’t the real Elucidator? Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing?”

  Jonah heard a rustling near his head.

  “Fight,” Chip whispered weakly in his ear. “Got to fight while still . . . can surprise them.”

  Jonah turned his head and saw that Chip had managed to squeeze his hands into fists.

  Chip’s brave, Jonah thought. Chip’s thinking like a big kid, even though he’s little too.

  Jonah tried to tighten his own fingers into fists as well, but his hands were so numb he couldn’t tell if it worked or not.