Risked (The Missing ) (15 page)

It’s a good thing the tsar is taking this so quietly. Now Gavin will
be able to explain to Olga and his mother, instead of Katherine or me having to do it,
Jonah thought.

He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Gavin would be ready. Just then, a beam of light shone through the cracks in the wood fence—maybe from a car or truck driving by. The light fell directly on the tsar and Alexei/Gavin, glowing all around them.

But—not glowing through them. They weren’t see-through. They were solid and whole and normal, a man and a boy in tunics and caps, looking just as they had before Chip called out the Elucidator command.

The invisibility hadn’t worked.

Alexei/Gavin must have noticed this at the same time as Jonah, because he began yelling, “It didn’t work! It didn’t work!”

He jumped down from his father’s arms—or, rather, Gavin jumped down, suddenly appearing as a healthy, able-bodied kid with a streak of purple in his hair, but still in Alexei’s tunic and pants. He grabbed Chip and yanked the Elucidator from his hands.

“Make my family invisible!” Gavin screamed. “Make my entire family invisible!”

Nothing happened.

At least, no one turned invisible.

One of the lead guards cocked a rifle in Gavin’s direction. The tsarina leaped toward the gun, knocking it aside. The gun went off, but the bullet zinged uselessly out into the garden.

Somehow the tsarina was unafraid.

“See what you’ve done, putting my son under this strain in the middle of the night?” she accused. “You’ve threatened his sanity now! Alexei, baby, go back to your father. He’ll take care of you! Everything will be all right. . . .”

But she was sprawled on the ground now, the guard pointing the rifle at her.

Gavin threw the Elucidator down and scrambled over to the tsarina.

“Don’t shoot her,” he cried.

Olga, Tatiana, and Maria raced out the door and joined Gavin by their mother’s side. Tracer lights were glowing all around now: the tracer Romanovs still obediently following the tracer guards toward the basement while the real Romanovs huddled together and the real guards looked toward Yurovsky to see what they were possibly supposed to do now.

Daniella split from her Anastasia tracer as well, but dived for the toy-soldier Elucidator that Gavin had dropped.

“Make my family invisible! Make my family invisible!” she demanded. Nothing happened. She thrust the Elucidator at Jonah and Chip and Katherine and wailed, “Why won’t it work now? It’s like it’s just an ordinary toy soldier again!”

Ordinary toy soldier,
Jonah thought.
Ordinary toy soldier . . .

He grabbed the toy soldier from Daniella’s hand. In the glow of all the tracer lights, Jonah looked closely at the toy soldier: same khaki-green uniform, same fierce stance, same tilted cap, except . . . where was the tiny patch of bare metal where Gavin had chipped off the paint?

“Jonah!” Chip cried, horror racing across his face as he came to the same conclusion as Jonah. “What if I picked up the wrong toy soldier back in Alexei’s room?”

“I can find it!” Jonah cried. “I know what to look for!”

His cries got lost in the sound of all the Romanovs and the guards—and now Dr. Botkin and the servants, too—screaming and shouting and pleading. But at least no one had been shot, so maybe there was still time. . . .

Jonah shoved his way past the last servant coming out the door—the cook? The footman? The man gasped and looked instantly mystified, but Jonah figured that was the least of their worries right now. Jonah dashed back to the stairs and leaped up them three at a time. He raced to Alexei’s room and hit the lights.

There on the floor, still lined up neatly, were the rows and rows of Alexei’s toy soldiers. Jonah crashed down on his knees beside them. The light was too dim, and Jonah didn’t have time to methodically pick each one up and examine it for a chipped patch in the painted-on cap. So
instead he swept the soldiers aside, five or six at a time, and looked to make sure each one left behind a tracer.

The Elucidator wouldn’t have a tracer, since it doesn’t belong to this time,
Jonah told himself.
So as soon as there’s a toy soldier that doesn’t leave a tracer, I’ll know that’s the right one.

He moved fast, like a wrecking ball through Alexei’s miniature army. Sweep, look, sweep, look, sweep, look . . .

In seconds all the toy soldiers were in a jumble on the floor.

And every single one of them left behind a tracer version of itself still standing and looking orderly and alert.

What?
Jonah thought.
How could that be? Did I just go too fast? Did Alexei leave behind more soldiers somewhere else?

Only then did Jonah raise his gaze beyond the piled soldiers to another grouping—not of more toy soldiers, but of their tracers. Tracers of an entire opposing army.

Jonah’s memory flashed back to that afternoon, to seeing Alexei sprawled on the floor alongside Leonid, to Alexei telling the other boy,
Take half of my soldiers. They belong to you now.

The Elucidator must have been in the group of toy soldiers Leonid took with him when he left.

And Jonah had no idea where it was now.

Jonah wasted time searching back through the pile of toy soldiers, the same slow method he’d been trying to avoid. He was sure it was hopeless. But how could he go back and tell the others that
everything
was hopeless?

Chipped paint on the cap, chipped paint on the cap—please let me see chipped paint on some cap,
he thought.

From outside he heard a boom.

That couldn’t have been gunfire,
he told himself.
I mean, not a rifle or pistol going off down in the courtyard or in the cellar. It had to be a cannon far away, off in the battle being fought in the mountains around this city. . . .

It didn’t sound far away.

Another boom reverberated, sounding even closer.

Jonah dropped the last of the useless toy soldiers to the floor and scrambled up. He lurched out the door and
back through the Romanov sisters’ room, through the dining room, off toward the stairs. Going down, he took the steps four at a time, careening side to side and barely staying upright. He burst out through the door.

The courtyard outside was empty now, and as far as he could tell, so was the garden beyond.

The door to the cellar was closed, but Jonah yanked it open. He didn’t bother pulling it shut behind him. He did try to be a little quieter going down these steps, because he could hear voices down below.

“What? There is not even a chair to sit on down here?” the tsarina was complaining, still sounding imperious in spite of everything that had happened. “You expect us to
stand
while we wait, when my son and I are both in such pain?”

“I’ll have a guard get chairs for both of you,” Yurovsky said apologetically. “Aleksander?”

Jonah was close enough now that he could see a guard break off from the group and head for the stairs. Jonah had to press against the wall to avoid getting in the man’s way.

“The heir wants to die sitting in a chair?” one of the other guards muttered under his breath. “Let him.”

But that guard was far back from the Romanovs, so Jonah was sure that none of them heard him.

“I’ll go watch for the truck, so we can get you out of here quickly,” Yurovsky told the Romanovs.

“Thank you,” the tsar said stiffly, as if trying to make up for his wife’s rudeness.

And how can Yurovsky still act like he’s helping the Romanovs, when he’s planning to kill them?
Jonah wondered. Another terrible thought struck him: Probably there really was a truck coming, to take away the dead bodies.

As Yurovsky headed back for the stairs, the rest of the guards stood around awkwardly, mixed in with the Romanovs and their servants. But because of tracers, Jonah could see that in original time everyone had broken off into the two separate rooms, with tracer versions of the double doors shut in between. The tracers of the guards sat against the wall of one room, checking and rechecking their weapons and nervously smoking and passing around a flask.

They seemed to be trying to get drunk.

Beyond them, in the second room, the tracer versions of the Romanovs and their servants were clustered around two tracer chairs. They almost looked as if they were posing for a professional photograph, like one of the pictures Jonah and Katherine had seen on the Internet. The tracer tsar stood in the front, with Alexei beside him in a chair and Dr. Botkin on his other side. The tsarina sat on the second chair, beside Alexei, her three oldest daughters
clustered around her. Anastasia stood back with the servants, seemingly off in her own little world.

Jonah veered away from all the tracers and the clumps of people and looked frantically around for Katherine and Chip. They were standing off to the side, in the corner, see-through and out of the way.

“You found the Elucidator?” Chip whispered eagerly, holding out his hand for it.

Jonah just shook his head.

“You don’t have it?” Katherine wailed.

“Leonid must have taken it away with the other toy soldiers,” Jonah said.

“Then we’ve got to find Leonid!” Katherine exclaimed.

“How are we supposed to know where he is?” Jonah asked. “You think we can just ask Yurovsky and he’ll tell us?”

Katherine opened her mouth to reply, but Jonah didn’t listen. He was suddenly distracted by a burst of tracer light out in the open area of the room. Jonah could see the tracer guards springing to their feet, dropping their flasks and cigarettes. They burst through the tracer double doors, then spread out into a line in the doorway between the two rooms and began firing and firing and firing. Tracer smoke rose with the silent blasts, hiding the tracer bodies that fell: the Romanovs, Dr. Botkin, the servants.

Meanwhile, in real time, the Romanovs and their servants stood in practically the very same spots, but elbow to elbow with their would-be killers.

Jonah had to look away. Katherine grabbed his arm and made him look back at her.

“We can’t let that happen for real!” she whispered fiercely. “We can’t!”

“What can we do without the Elucidator?” Jonah asked.

Chip clutched his head.

“We never should have let the Romanovs be herded down here into the basement,” he groaned, tugging at his own hair. “They’re trapped! There’s no way out!”

“Chip, you said we had to come down here!” Katherine argued. “You said those guards were looking too trigger-happy with all the arguing up in the courtyard, and everyone got so upset when we could hear the cannon fire so close by . . .”

Chip was looking down at objects on the floor. No—tracer objects.

Tracer bullets.

He touched the wall behind them, which had tracer gouges in it. Jonah saw other tracer bullets embedded in the plaster.

“If they do start firing the same way as in original time,” Chip muttered, “
we
won’t be safe here either. Not the way
bullets bounce around. . . . Maybe we should get out of the way now.”

“We can’t leave Gavin and Daniella behind!” Katherine insisted.

Jonah looked around to make sure none of the real guards were ready to start firing yet. They weren’t, but they had moved away from the Romanovs, into the other room. The doors stood barely cracked between the two rooms, so Jonah could see that now all the guards sat slumped to the floor, their backs against the wall. One was pulling a flask from his pocket; others were lighting up cigarettes. All of them were holding guns.

Déjà vu,
Jonah thought.
They look just like their tracers did five minutes ago.

So how much time did Jonah and his friends have before the guards started firing those guns for real? Was there any way to stop them?

The tracer versions of the guards had stopped firing, but now they carried tracer bayonets into the room with all the fallen Romanovs. In the dimming tracer smoke, Jonah could see that the tracer guards were stabbing at the tracer bodies on the floor. It looked like they feared that the flurry of bullets hadn’t been enough to kill.

Wait—I guess they weren’t,
Jonah thought. He remembered that a tracer stopped glowing at the moment that
the person would have died in original time.
But Olga’s tracer is still glowing, and so is Tatiana’s, and so is Maria’s . . .

He couldn’t tell about Anastasia and Alexei, because both Gavin and Daniella had stayed joined to their tracers, sliding down toward the floor.

Because they feel the link to their dying tracers?
Jonah wondered.
Or just because they’re giving up?

The tracer guards weren’t giving up. They viciously stabbed their bayonets into one body after another; they stood inches away from the wounded tracers and shot them in the head, point-blank.

“Oh, no,” Jonah moaned. “Oh, no. All those jewels the girls sewed into their clothes—they must have worked almost like bulletproof vests, letting the bullets bounce off. So their deaths are going to be even worse. Those tracers are terrified; they’re screaming . . .”

He turned and walked through one tracer after another—a guard with a bayonet, the dying doctor, the dying maid—and rushed to Anastasia’s side.

“Daniella!” he whispered in her ear. “We’ve got to pull you and Gavin out
now
! The Elucidator is missing, but somehow we’ll get you out of here, somehow . . .”

“Not without the rest of my family!” Daniella whispered back through gritted teeth.

She had her hands on her hips, her hands probably
covering a fortune in diamonds and other jewels.

And what good is any of it when all those jewels are just going to ensure that she has a horrible death?
Jonah wondered.

It was a shame none of those diamonds could make her invisible.

Wait—what if one of them can?
Jonah wondered.

“Daniella! Please!” he hissed in her ear. “Give me one of your jewels! I can’t explain, but—quick! This might save you!”