Risked

  She took the soldier from Jonah’s hand and started trying out all sorts of commands: “Call JB!” “Call anyone you can reach!” “Tell us how to get home!” Jonah could tell by her disappointed snort after each command that none of it was working. Chip and Daniella joined her in bending over the toy, throwing out more commands, some ridiculous, some down-to-earth.

  “Bring me a Snickers bar!” (This was from Daniella.) “Show how much battery life you have left!” (From Chip.) “Wave at me and blink your eyes!” (Daniella again.)

  As far as Jonah could tell, the Elucidator wasn’t doing any of it. He turned his attention back to Gavin.

  “Where did you get that Elucidator anyway?” he asked.

  “What’s it to you?” Gavin retorted.

  “I just thought that might help explain—”

  Gavin grabbed the front of Jonah’s shirt.

  “I don’t have to explain anything to you!” he sneered. “Anything! Got it?”

  “Not even how to save your life if you’ve got internal bleeding that could kill you?” Jonah asked.

  Gavin’s surly expression slipped for only an instant.

  “I can handle my own bleeds,” he said. “Back home, sometimes I don’t even bother telling my parents for hours. And I’m fine! It’s just so annoying to deal with.”

  “But you can get good treatment in the twenty-first century, right?” Daniella interrupted quietly, looking up from the Elucidator. “Here, remember, it’s just ice and bed rest and—”

  “I’m fine!” Gavin protested.

  Jonah could hear Chip and Katherine’s requests to the Elucidator getting more and more desperate.

  “Well, if you can’t do any of that stuff, can you at least tell us what you can do for us?” Katherine asked, sounding totally exasperated.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jonah saw a sudden glow of digital light near the toy-soldier Elucidator. He immediately crowded in beside Chip, staring at it.

  Above the soldier’s head, red computer-style letters had appeared, as if on an invisible screen. They spelled out a single word: YES.

  Then that word vanished, replaced by a short list:

  I CAN:

  - TAKE PEOPLE TO 1918

  - GRANT INVISIBILITY

  - UNDO INVISIBILITY COMMANDS

  - LIST MY LIMITED FUNCTIONS

  “That’s all?” Katherine moaned.

  YES glowed again over the soldier’s head.

  “But why? Why not anything else?” Chip asked.

  Evidently, answering that question was outside this Elucidator’s “limited functions,” because the glow instantly disappeared and the Elucidator looked like an ordinary toy soldier again.

  “This is like . . . like those cell phones people buy for little kids, where they’re only set up to call Mommy and Daddy, and nobody else,” Katherine complained. “It’s useless!”

  Gavin stared at her.

  “You think this Elucidator was designed that way?” he asked.

  “Well, yeah,” Katherine said, with a defeated shrug. “Or programmed that way, or something. Have you gotten this Elucidator to do anything else for you?”

  Jonah waited to see what surly comeback Gavin would give Katherine. But Gavin just kept peering at her. He was squinting now, clearly puzzled.

  “Yes, I did,” Gavin muttered. “But that was before . . .”

  A change came over his face, disbelief and confusion slipping away into fury.

  “Oh, no,” Gavin said. “Oh, no. Gary and Hodge tricked me!”

  FIFTEEN

  “I knew it!” Jonah exclaimed. “Gary and Hodge gave you this Elucidator, didn’t they?”

  “Who are Gary and Hodge?” Daniella asked.

  Gavin sank back onto the bed, where his own tracer still lay in pained sleep. His hand slid over top of his tracer’s hand, and he winced, as if the pain could flow from the tracer’s body into his.

  He jerked his hand back.

  “I might as well tell everything,” he muttered. He switched his gaze to Daniella. “Gary and Hodge rescued us. You and me, we were Alexei and Anastasia, and we were trapped here with our family, and they came and took us away. They wanted to take us to another time period, where we’d be safe and I wouldn’t be sick. And then—”

  “He means Gary and Hodge kidnapped you,” Katherine interrupted. “They took you away from where you belonged, and they were reckless and could have ruined history—”

  “We’re supposed to die, aren’t we?” Daniella asked

  She spoke so calmly that everyone stopped and stared at her.

  After a moment Gavin said, “You know that’s what Mama and Papa believe?”

  Jonah could tell he was talking about their 1918 parents, the Romanovs, not anyone from the twenty-first century.

  Daniella nodded.

  “I know everyone thinks I’m just the little jokester, and I can’t be serious for a minute, but—I’ve seen the kind of letters Mama writes,” she said. “She believes this is our fate. ‘Life here is nothing—eternity is everything, and what we are doing is preparing our souls for the kingdom of heaven.’ She expects the guards to kill us. Soon. Papa hides it better, but he thinks that too. I think . . . I think they want us all to die together. They believe that would be better than going into exile in some other country.”

  Jonah realized he’d been foolish all this time, trying to think of this house as anything other than a prison. The Russian Revolution must have already happened; the tsar was no longer in charge.

  And his entire family was being held prisoner.

  “We’re not supposed to die,” Gavin told Daniella. “You and me. I saw it online. Alexei and Anastasia aren’t killed and buried with the rest of their family. They’re missing. So, see,” he said, turning to Jonah, “doesn’t it seem like, maybe, what Gary and Hodge did was actually right? Like this is how history is really supposed to go?”

  “When did you see that online?” Katherine demanded. “Jonah and I were just looking today—I mean, today back home—and it said none of the Romanovs survived!”

  Gavin gaped at her.

  “What?” he said. “No—I just looked it up yesterday—yesterday when I was in the twenty-first century—”

  “So what changed from one day to the next?” Chip asked.

  “Did Gary and Hodge find a way out of time prison and mess everything up?” Jonah asked.

  Gavin actually began to moan.

  “What’s wrong?” Daniella demanded.

  “It was me!” Gavin wailed. “It’s all my fault! I made it so we all have to die!”

  And with that he plunged back onto the bed, rejoining his anguished tracer.

  SIXTEEN

  Jonah, Chip, and Katherine all moved together to pull Gavin back out.

  “Churlish knave, you cannot just give up like that,” Chip said, and Jonah hardly minded the medieval language, because Chip was trying so hard to separate Gavin from his tracer.

  “At least tell us what you did before you hide behind Alexei!” Katherine insisted, tugging on Gavin’s shoulders.

  Jonah had the feeling that Gavin was fighting them, trying as hard as he could to stay Alexei.

  “Look, we’ve been in plenty of impossible situations before, and we’ve found a way out,” Jonah told him. “Sure, we don’t have much of an Elucidator. Sure, we don’t have any way to contact anyone. Sure, your family’s in danger here.” Jonah was depressing himself, listing all these obstacles. “But—we’ll find a way out! I know we will!”

  Jonah’s hands kept slipping from Gavin/Alexei’s arms.

  Daniella perched on the edge of the bed, watching them intently. She looked completely baffled about what she might do to help.

  “Even if you don’t care anymore about trying to save yourself, don’t you want to save your sister?” Jonah asked.

  And suddenly Jonah could feel Gavin slipping away from his tracer, coming back. The dyed purple streak in his hair reappeared, then the black sweatsh
irt, then the unswollen joints.

  “Save his sisters. Plural,” Daniella corrected Jonah. “And his parents. How could Gavin or I try to save ourselves without helping the rest of our family escape too? I’m not going anywhere without the others!”

  You’re nuts! Jonah wanted to shout at her. Didn’t she understand how difficult it was going to be just to save her and Gavin? Especially when they didn’t even have a decent Elucidator? And now Daniella wanted to add five more people to the rescue mission—including a woman in a wheelchair? That was like asking to make their failure that much more devastating.

  And what would it do to time if we rescued the former tsar of Russia? Jonah wondered.

  Since the very beginning of his time-travel trips, Jonah had had trouble caring as much as his friend JB did about preserving time. Jonah cared a lot more about saving people’s lives. Even though JB, as a time agent, was sworn to protect time, he had mostly come around to that viewpoint too. But Jonah had also seen that there were limits to how much time could be changed—and he’d seen the consequences of pushing those limits.

  But how could he tell Gavin and Daniella that, when they were gazing at each other so hopefully?

  Jonah sighed.

  “Can you just give us some background here, before we figure out any plans?” he asked. “How did Gary and Hodge trick you? I’m guessing they broke out of time prison, gave you that dumbed-down Elucidator, and—”

  “Oh, no,” Gavin said, shaking his head emphatically. “I’m the one who broke them out of prison. I took control of things!” He sounded so proud of himself, but then his expression turned sheepish. “And—I guess I was the one who programmed that Elucidator to be worthless.”

  He took the toy soldier from Katherine’s hand and flipped it across the room, where it crashed into an entire army’s worth of similar-looking toy soldiers massed on the floor.

  Chip went over to pick it up.

  “Let’s not be hasty,” he said. “Mayhap this could still be useful, even despite its limitations.”

  Jonah expected Gavin to make fun of the medievalisms creeping back into Chip’s speech, but Gavin just sat on the edge of the bed, glowering down at his knees.

  Chip carefully tucked the toy-soldier Elucidator into his jeans pocket.

  “Gavin, could you please just explain everything from the very beginning?” Katherine asked. “I’m confused, and I bet Daniella has no idea what we’re talking about.”

  Daniella rolled her eyes.

  “I told my parents everything would be strange for me if we moved to Ohio,” she said. “Little did I know . . .”

  Then she giggled, and Katherine actually giggled with her. Chip gave a snort-laugh. Jonah guessed that, if they weren’t in such a dangerous, confusing situation, Daniella would probably be one of those kids who kept everyone else laughing constantly.

  Under normal circumstances, she probably wouldn’t have had any trouble at all moving to a new town and a new school.

  But none of this was normal.

  “Okay,” Gavin began. “Remember back at the time cave?”

  “What time cave?” Daniella asked. “And what’s a time cave, anyway?”

  Katherine began giving Daniella a long explanation of everything that had happened after Gary and Hodge kidnapped her: the time crash, the thirty-six babies on the plane, the adoptions, the return of Gary and Hodge and JB to fight over all of them once again, after they were all thirteen.

  “Wow, sounds like I missed a really great time!” Daniella joked. But she looked a little dazed—Jonah wasn’t sure how much she’d actually absorbed.

  “So anyhow,” Gavin said, “in the time cave, all of us kids managed to overpower the adults.”

  Jonah opened his mouth to object—he was the one who’d managed to overpower the adults, no thanks to Gavin or any of Gavin’s friends. Of course, Jonah had had some behind-the-scenes help from the one adult they’d known they could trust, a woman named Angela.

  Katherine kicked Jonah while no one else was looking. Then she glared and shook her head, and Jonah could tell that she was trying to say, Don’t interrupt or he might stop talking. Just let him finish his story!

  “So we all split up the adults and kind of, like, interrogated them,” Gavin continued. “I was in charge of talking to this one rescuer, Gary. Gary told me I couldn’t trust JB, and he said that if I set him free, he would take me to the future, where I was supposed to go in the first place.”

  “You wanted that?” Katherine exploded. Clearly she’d forgotten about not interrupting. “You wanted Gary and Hodge to make you into a baby again, so you’d forget all your friends and your family and your whole life?”

  “Yeah, my adopted family, who hate me,” Gavin said. “And my sucky life . . . who cares about all that? Anyhow, Gary said he’d make me a special deal. I wouldn’t have to go back to being a baby again. Just the other kids.”

  Now it was Chip who interrupted.

  “You’d do something like that to other kids?” he asked. “Kids you don’t even know?”

  Gavin wouldn’t meet Chip’s eye.

  “Gary said they’d cured hemophilia in the future. Cured—one hundred percent!” he said. “So kids with hemophilia are no different than anyone else. They can play football just like anyone else, instead of having their moms say they can only do swimming, like mine always does. They don’t have to have injections every third day, just to be ‘normal.’ They never get bleeds in spite of the injections. They are normal!”

  Jonah noticed that Daniella was peering at Gavin with the saddest expression on her face. He didn’t want another distraction.

  “So you set Gary free, that day in the time cave,” Jonah said, trying to sum up. “But he didn’t stay free. JB sent him and Hodge to time prison right after that. So what’s this story have to do with anything?”

  Gavin smirked.

  “Gary was really smart,” he said. “He knew everything was risky and he might not beat JB that day. So before I even set Gary free that first time, he gave me this code, just in case he got caught again. He said if he and Hodge ended up in time prison, I should lay low for a while, then find an Elucidator somewhere and type in the code. And then, he said, I’d get everything I wanted.”

  “Yeah, how’s that working out for you?” Katherine said sarcastically.

  Gavin flushed.

  “Look, now I know that Gary tricked me!” he protested. “Now I know he was lying when he said, ‘This will get me out of prison and set you up fine!’ But I believed it then. I thought he and Hodge were going to meet me in the future and treat me like a prince!”

  He is treating you like a prince, Jonah thought. A prince whose father’s been forced out of power and is about to be killed.

  “Okay, let’s back up,” Jonah said. “Where did you find the Elucidator? It’s not like they’re just lying around for anyone to take, back home.”

  Gavin’s face turned even redder.

  “I kind of, um, borrowed it,” he said. “Okay—I stole it! Remember that woman, Angela, who was in the time cave with us? I kind of spied on her afterward, because as far as I could tell, she was the only adult who stayed in the twenty-first century. And I saw this other time traveler, Hadley Correo, give her an Elucidator.”

  Jonah exchanged glances with Katherine and Chip. He wasn’t sure how much of Gavin’s story he could trust, but this part checked out. The time travelers from the future had given Angela an Elucidator so she could protect Jonah and Katherine.

  Yeah, that was a great idea, Jonah thought.

  This was the second time that that particular Elucidator had sent them into danger.

  “So, I get why you would want to go to the future,” Daniella said, peering intently at Gavin. “But why’d you grab the rest of us? What did we ever do to you?”

  “Look, if we’d really ended up in the future, like I thought, you would have loved it too,” Gavin said. “Remember how you’ve always hated being short? I bet in the fu
ture kids can arrange to grow to whatever height they want!”

  Daniella narrowed her eyes at him.

  “I don’t hate being short,” she said. “That’s just how Anastasia feels. And anyhow, you grabbed us before you knew anything about her or me!”

  Gavin grimaced.

  “I know,” he said softly. “Before I joined with my tracer and started thinking like Alexei, I . . . I didn’t really care how you would feel about changing to a different time. I was just doing what Gary told me to do. I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Anyhow, Gary said I’d have an Elucidator and I could go back home anytime I wanted, if I didn’t like the future. I guess I thought that would work for you, too.”

  And you believed that? Jonah wanted to taunt him. How stupid are you?

  He bit his tongue, because he didn’t think he could say anything else to Gavin without sounding really mean.

  Daniella was squinting hard at Gavin.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “Did Gary and Hodge want us here in 1918 or in the future? Why is 1918 the only choice on the Elucidator if they promised you the future?”

  She’s right, Jonah thought. Was it maybe that Gary and Hodge had wanted them back in 1918 from the very start? Did that mean that it wasn’t Jonah’s fault that they’d landed here?

  But why would Gary and Hodge want Gavin and Daniella back in the time period where they were in danger of dying? Wasn’t their whole business based on taking famous kids from the past and making a lot of money adopting them out to families in the future?

  “And—,” Daniella said, as if she had lots of other questions she wanted to ask. But then she froze at the sound of footsteps coming from the next room.

  “What should we do now?” she whispered.

  Gavin didn’t even ask. He just threw himself back together with the tracer Alexei.

  “Oh, I see,” Daniella muttered.

  She leaped off the edge of the bed. She must have been aiming to land directly on the chair—squarely in her own tracer’s lap. But she landed crooked, and the chair slipped out from under her. She hit the floor with a thud.

  Quickly Jonah and Chip yanked her back up by the arms. Katherine slid the chair back into place and Daniella slipped into position just as the door opened.