Risked (The Missing ) (12 page)

Or even who got killed?

Jonah pulled his head back into the office. The fresh air was no longer any comfort.

Chip pulled back from the window as well.

“I’m no expert on twentieth-century warfare, but doesn’t it sound like there’s some kind of battle going on not too far away from here?” Chip asked. “Maybe over in those mountains?”

Jonah listened. Now he could hear distant booms.

“Artillery fire,” he said, repeating the words he’d heard Alexei and Leonid say in their game. “Cannons.”

“Is the Russian Revolution still going on, or is that just World War One?” Chip asked.

It felt almost comical not to know the answer.

Katherine came over to the side of the desk nearest the window, so she could join the conversation.

“
I
think it’s soldiers fighting their way here, to come and rescue the Romanovs,” she said. “Maybe we just have to make sure the family stays alive an extra day or two, and then their army will save them.”

It was amazing that Katherine could still look for the happiest possibility. But Jonah knew it was also ridiculous.

“Oh, yeah?” Jonah argued. “And how are we supposed to keep them alive for that extra day or two? Remember, the Elucidator’s no good, and the guards all have three or four weapons apiece, and anyhow it sounds like some
of the Romanovs don’t even
want
to be saved . . .”

“We can make them all invisible,” Katherine said.

Jonah stared at her. Chip was the expert in military strategy—well, 1400s-style—but somehow it was Katherine who’d come up with a plan.

Chip seemed to be taking her idea seriously.

“We already know the Elucidator can do that much,” he said. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. Back in the 1400s he’d gotten old enough to actually have a little facial hair, and he seemed to have forgotten that he’d lost it when he went back to being thirteen. He just looked silly now. But Katherine was still gazing at him adoringly.

“You’re talking about doing this at the last possible moment, so we do the least amount of damage to time, right?” Chip asked.

“Yeah, and so the Romanovs will trust us, because they’ll see they don’t have a choice,” Katherine said.

Jonah could think of a lot of problems with this plan—how would they know when the “last possible moment” arrived? Even if they made the tsarina invisible, what would they do about her needing a wheelchair? How would the Romanovs react to suddenly being invisible? What would the guards do? How could Jonah and Chip and Katherine possibly make an entire royal family invisible without ruining time?

Jonah was just trying to figure out which argument to use first when Katherine clutched his arm and pointed warningly behind him. Jonah turned around. He’d had his back to the door, and now he saw that a uniformed man was walking into the office. Behind him all the loitering guards had snapped to attention.

“Commander Yurovsky!” they cried. “Sir!”

Yurovsky breezed past them into the office. Another officer followed him and shut the door. Jonah, Chip, and Katherine squeezed themselves over against the wall, trying to stay out of the way. But it didn’t matter. Yurovsky and the other officer stopped beside the desk.

“We sent the telegram to Lenin,” Yurovsky said.

Katherine dug her elbow into Jonah’s side.

I think that’s the leader of Russia now!
Katherine mouthed at him.

Jonah frowned and nodded.

The officer with Yurovsky actually took a step back.

“What exactly did the telegram say?” he asked.

Yurovsky wasn’t looking at the other man. He was gazing out the window, even though the only thing he might possibly see was the double row of wooden fences.

“It said we can’t wait any longer,” he said. “We can’t put this off another day.”

“Then it’s tonight,” the other officer said.

Jonah staggered back against the wall. It was one thing to read on a computer screen about an entire family being slaughtered on a date almost a hundred years earlier. It was another thing to stand three feet away from the killers as they planned for that slaughter.

Katherine gripped his arm. She was hurriedly translating for Chip, since he didn’t know Russian. In an instant, his face took on the same grim expression as Katherine’s. Then they both moved in close, their heads touching Jonah’s.

“What about my plan?” Katherine half whispered, half mouthed, the sound barely reaching Jonah’s ears.

Chip peeled back the edge of his jeans pocket, showing just the barest glimpse of the toy-soldier Elucidator’s metal base.

“Think we should use this or not?” Chip asked, just as quietly.

Jonah stared at his see-through sister and his see-through friend, so grateful for the invisibility that protected them from the killers nearby and all the guards lurking beyond with their overload of guns and grenades and bayonets. How could he and Chip and Katherine
not
try to share that invisibility with the Romanovs, to save their lives?

All the arguments he’d thought of before seemed like nothing.

“We’ll do it,” he whispered back. “We have to.”

When Jonah focused on Yurovsky and the other man again, they were bending over the desk, discussing details.

“Collect all the guns from the exterior guards this evening,” Yurovsky was saying. “The execution squad may need the extras. And that team we’ve got on exterior duty spent the most time with the family. We can’t be sure of their loyalties.”

Possible allies!
Jonah thought.
Or at least men who won’t work too hard searching for the Romanovs if they hear that they’ve escaped.

Jonah looked at Chip and Katherine. Katherine had done a quick translation this time, and they seemed to be thinking the same thing as Jonah. Katherine’s eyebrows were raised so high they were practically up to her hairline, and Chip was almost grinning.

“Now, come with me to inspect the cellar,” Yurovsky
added. “The guards’ story about vagrants escaping is disturbing.”

“Don’t you think that was just an excuse? An outright lie?” the other man said. “I say we interrogate all the guards involved, then—”

“We don’t have time for that,” Yurovsky interrupted impatiently. “Let’s just make sure the cellar is secure. That’s all that matters right now. We can’t have anyone escaping tonight.”

Both men walked back out of the office.

“He’s worried about vagrants escaping from the cellar?” Katherine whispered, translating again for Chip. “Does he mean Jonah and me?”

“Has to be,” Chip whispered back.

Jonah looked toward the desk.

“But they didn’t leave any tracers behind, so they would have left the office at this moment anyhow,” he said. “One of us needs to follow them and see what they do and what they’re saying.”

“I’ll go,” Katherine said.

“I’ll head down that way, too, and see if I can figure out the best route for getting the Romanovs away from the guards once they’re invisible,” Chip said.

Jonah wondered if Chip was just partly trying to make sure he could protect Katherine if he needed to. But Jonah
wasn’t going to ask about it in front of his sister.

“Then I’ll go tell Alexei and Anastasia—I mean, Gavin and Daniella—what we’re planning,” Jonah said.

He crossed back over to the Romanovs’ side of the house. The scene in the living room seemed to have barely changed: The tsar was still smoking; Maria was still reading the Bible to her mother. Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia were still sewing in their bedroom. But when Jonah slipped past through the doorway into Alexei’s room, he found the boy alone again, lying across his bed and staring up at the ceiling.

Jonah eased the bedroom door all the way shut, hoping that anyone who saw the movement from the outside would think that Alexei had done that himself. Then Jonah went over to the bed and gently tugged Gavin away from his tracer.

“Oof,” Gavin said, shaking out his arms and legs. Woozily, he sat down on the edge of the bed. He rubbed his forehead.

“Are you okay?” Jonah asked.

“Better than him,” Gavin said, gesturing back toward the ghostly tracer behind him. “Or, I don’t know. I don’t have the
pain
he lives with all the time, but—”

“So you’re not having that—what’s it called? Internal bleeding?—the way you thought?” Jonah asked, easing
down onto the end of the bed. This could be a long conversation.

“Don’t worry about it, okay?” Gavin said, just as snarly as he’d been every other time anyone had asked about it. But then his face softened. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . that doesn’t matter as much as some other things right now. Really. It’s not a big deal.”

His voice was almost gentle now.

Whoa,
Jonah thought.
What’s gotten into Gavin?

“Yeah, about some of those other things . . . ,” Jonah began.

“In a minute,” Gavin said. “I want to tell you what a brave kid that is.” He pointed at his tracer again. “Sure, in some ways he’s a spoiled brat, but when you think about what he puts up with, day in and day out . . . If I die here and you get out, will you tell people how great Alexei was?”

“You’re not going to die,” Jonah said.

Gavin fixed his gaze on the wall.

“One thirty in the morning,” he said. “Commander Yurovsky is going to wake up our friend Dr. Botkin and tell him that our whole family needs to move out of this house because the fighting is getting too close. They’re going to herd us all down to the cellar and tell us to wait there. And then the execution squad is going to shoot us all.”

“But—,” Jonah began.

“Isn’t that what you and Katherine saw online?” Gavin asked. “Isn’t that what I guaranteed would happen when I trusted Gary and Hodge and set things in motion to come back here?”

Jonah wanted to ask a little more about Gary and Hodge and how all of that had worked. But even more than that, he wanted to tell Gavin he was wrong.

“It doesn’t matter what Katherine and I saw online,” Jonah argued. “Because right now, that’s still the future, and nothing’s guaranteed about the future! Anything could happen in the next twenty-four hours! Anything!”

He wanted so badly to believe that himself.

“But only one possible future
will
happen,” Gavin said. “And that’s the one where I die.”

Jonah was so furious at Gavin now that he couldn’t sit still. He got up and paced, accidentally kicking aside some of the toy soldiers lined up on the floor. He squinted down at them. Tracer toy soldiers stood in the place of the metal figures he’d knocked aside, and in the place of the entire opposing army—an army’s worth of soldiers that Alexei had given to his friend Leonid.

“Look!” Jonah said, pointing down at the soldiers. “Right there I changed something! And you changed something too, giving Leonid all those toy soldiers! Alexei didn’t do that in original time!”

“He would have if he’d known he was going to die tonight,” Gavin said. “If he’d known he was never going to see Leonid again. It’s not like I
changed
things, exactly. It’s more like I fixed things to the way they should have gone. It’s like . . . improving on original time. Like time itself wants something different. Don’t you feel it? I think those are the only things you can do anything about.”

Gavin’s words chilled Jonah.

“Yeah, well, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Jonah said. “Chip and Katherine and I figured out how to fix everything tonight. Even though we only have a limited Elucidator, we can still use it to make your whole family invisible. And then we’ll rescue you all from the guards. So
none
of you are going to die.”

Gavin started to shake his head at Jonah, but then he looked toward the door and dived back into the tracer Alexei sprawled across the bed.

A split second later the door creaked open, and Tatiana stood there looking anxiously toward Alexei.

“Were you arguing with someone in here, baby?” she asked in a baffled tone.

“Just using different voices for the soldiers in my battle,” Alexei said, weakly lifting his hand to gesture toward the toy army on the floor.

Both Alexei’s words and his movement produced bursts
of tracer lights, so none of it was what he would have said or done in original time. Jonah peeked past Tatiana—yes, she’d left a tracer behind too. Her glowing ghostly outline still sat sewing on the floor with Anastasia and Olga. So Jonah and Gavin’s argument had disturbed time.

“You’re lying on the bed and playing with the soldiers halfway across the room?” Tatiana asked teasingly.

“I’m
imagining
the way the battle would go,” Alexei said. “Because . . . it hurts my knee to lie on the floor for very long.”

“That’s some imagination you’ve got,” Tatiana said, still in a light voice. “Looks like it took out these brave men.” She pointed at the soldiers Jonah had kicked. “Want me to set them back up so they can fight another day?”

“Sure,” Alexei said. “Sounds like a good idea.”

Tatiana walked over and picked up the toppled soldiers. This was her native time, so of course she couldn’t see any of the toys’ tracers, any more than she could see invisible time travelers.

And yet she put every single toy soldier back in the exact same place as its tracer.

That’s not fate,
Jonah told himself.
It’s not destiny. It doesn’t have anything to do with our chances for saving the Romanovs tonight.

Why did he feel like he was just trying to fool himself?

He reminded himself that he’d seen the same phenomenon—where tracers seemed to be pulling time back to its original path—in 1600 and in 1611, and yet his enemy Second Chance had been able to dramatically reshape time in those years and split it into a totally new direction.

Yeah, and he almost ruined time completely,
Jonah reminded himself.

Second was not exactly the best role model.

Jonah got disgusted with himself for thinking in circles so much. He backed out of Alexei’s room and turned around to see if it was a good time to talk to Anastasia/Daniella.