Risked (The Missing ) (19 page)

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.

Anyhow, how can we win a fight against those big, mean men when we’re so little?
Jonah wondered.
We couldn’t beat them before. And they’re not surprised anymore that we’re here.

Jonah wanted to curl up into a little ball and hide his face and pretend that Gary and Hodge didn’t even exist. But he forced himself to keep thinking about Gary and Hodge, to keep remembering what he’d known about them when he was a big thirteen-year-old.

Is there something else I could surprise them with?
Jonah wondered.
Something that would scare them more than little kids’ fists?

“Maybe someone in the group had a second Elucidator we didn’t know about,” Gary said.

“We would have known,” Hodge muttered. “They would have used it to call that goody-goody JB a long time ago. No, I think we have to consider the possibility that this one is smarter than we thought.”

He was bending over Jonah now, patting down his sleeves, his chest . . .

He’s going to find the Elucidator,
Jonah thought.
That nice toy soldier that told me what he could do before . . .

Jonah didn’t have time to ask the toy soldier questions again. He wasn’t strong enough to fight with Hodge over the toy soldier. Right now he wasn’t even strong enough to lift his hand and push Hodge’s hand away, just to buy another minute or two.

Isn’t there anything I can tell the toy soldier to do in the next three seconds before Hodge takes it away?
Jonah wondered.

It was hard to think with his brain still so fuzzy from
the timesickness—and still so young, no matter how much he tried to fight it—and with Hodge poking at him. And someone had started moaning beside him. Daniella, maybe?

“Save . . . ,” she whispered. “Save . . . family . . .”

Jonah couldn’t think of anything he could do to save himself or the other kids in the next three seconds. But that word Daniella said, “family,” jogged something in his memory. If time started again, Daniella’s family would be in great danger once more, especially since Gary and Hodge had turned the light back on. Jonah had been so proud of protecting the Romanovs by throwing that diamond and breaking the lightbulb before. There was no way he would be capable of throwing anything else all the way up to the lightbulb right now. But he could do something else to protect the Romanovs, something he’d known about the last time he was in 1918, before the timesickness, before he got little-kid brain. . . .

Oh, yeah,
he thought.

“Make all the Romanovs invisible,” Jonah whispered. “And their servants. And their doctor.”

He couldn’t remember the doctor’s name anymore, but maybe it didn’t matter.

“What did you just say?” Hodge asked. He stopped patting down Jonah, and whipped his head back to look
at the Romanovs lined up in the center of the room. “Oh, no. Oh, no . . .”

He instantly scrambled away from Jonah and grabbed Gary by the arm.

“Restore time after we leave!” Hodge cried. “Restore all the children’s ages, too! Restore—”

“Don’t worry about any of that!” Gary screamed. “We’ve got to get out of here! Exit now!”

And then both men vanished.

Jonah could have sworn he blacked out for a few moments. He woke again in such a haze of timesickness that he was sure of only one thing:

The sound of gunfire was back.

Jonah had heard Hodge say,
Restore all the children’s ages, too!
But he still felt like reacting like a little kid. He cringed away from the noise and put his hands over his ears.

“Stop,” Jonah whispered. “Stop time again. Stop all of this.”

Time didn’t stop, and neither did the gunfire. Now there were screams and wails and weeping mixed in with the sounds of all the guns going off. A woman’s voice cried, “Nicky! Where did you go? Niii-cky!”

Rough men’s voices screamed, “Is this a trick? Have they escaped? The light’s back, but we can’t see them!”

The commander yelled back, “It’s just the smoke from the gunfire blocking your view! They were holding on to me a second ago! Keep shooting!”

Jonah heard more gunfire.

“You can’t do this to my family!” Gavin screamed. “Or my friends!”

Jonah saw Gavin stand up—or, rather, the outline of Gavin, the translucent Gavin who would be invisible to anyone who wasn’t a time traveler. And he was a thirteen-year-old again. Gavin weaved his way toward the guards who were now all lined up along the doorway between the two rooms, their guns raised.

“Stop!” Gavin screamed, shoving hard against the barrel of the nearest guard’s gun. He pushed it into the gun barrel of the next guard over.

And then a translucent Daniella was right beside Gavin, screaming along with him, “Don’t shoot our family!”

Jonah couldn’t see what happened next because of all the smoke. He couldn’t hear what else they said because all the screams and gunshots blurred together into a single echoing roar in Jonah’s ears.

He closed his eyes. Why did he feel so faint all of a sudden?

The noise seemed distant now, almost like a dream. Someone was crying, and Jonah couldn’t tell if it was right beside him or barely within earshot.

“Jonah? Jonah? Can you hear me?”

It was Katherine. Of course it was Katherine, who’d always been there by his side in all of their time-travel adventures.

Even if I were dying, she’d probably see it as just another chance to tag along,
Jonah thought. He started to chuckle at his own joke but found he couldn’t get a sound out of his throat.

And then he didn’t feel like laughing anymore.

What does it feel like when you’re dying?
he wondered.
What if you get shot? Would you even know it, if you were lying on a floor in a little room with gun after gun after gun going off, and you couldn’t see anyone in particular shooting at you? Or would you just go all numb and floaty like . . . like I feel right now?

Am I dying, God? God? God?

Jonah forced himself to open his eyes, because if he was dying, he really wanted to know why.

And what he saw was the worried face of his friend JB staring straight down at him.

Dreaming,
Jonah thought.
I’m just dreaming, seeing what I want to see.

He blinked, and when he opened his eyes again, JB was still there.

“Hey, buddy,” JB whispered. “We’re getting you out of here.”

“And the others?” Jonah tried to say. “You’re rescuing all of us, aren’t you? And Daniella and Gavin’s family and friends?”

He couldn’t actually tell if any of those words came out, because his mouth felt numb and his ears seemed to have stopped working. He also couldn’t tell if JB said anything in reply, or even if JB was trying to say something, because Jonah’s vision was blurring into darkness as well.

And then Jonah was waking up in a room filled with
light. He opened his eyes not to a single twenty-five-watt bulb in a dirty basement at two a.m., but to a place where everything gleamed and glowed, clean and bright.

And safe. For the first time since he’d sat down with Katherine at the computer in his own home to look up missing children in history, Jonah actually felt safe. He seemed to be lying in some kind of a hospital bed now, but there were no beeping monitors or rushing medical workers anywhere around. Everything was calm and still.

“Are we in . . . a time hollow now?” Jonah asked. It was a struggle, but he managed to get all the words out, to make his unreliable voice box sound out each syllable.

But it really is my voice again,
he thought.
My thirteen-year-old voice, squeaks and all.

He felt a rush of fondness for his own voice, for being thirteen.

“He’s awake!” someone squealed beside him. “He’s awake, he’s awake, he’s awake!”

Katherine, of course. Jonah felt a rush of fondness for her as well, for the way she always stuck by his side, no matter what. At the moment, Jonah didn’t even mind that she seemed to want to turn his opening his eyes into a reason to make up a cheerleading chant. Jonah blinked, and her face swam into focus—her almost-twelve-year-old face, so familiar, even with a bruise across the right
cheekbone and a tangled strand of blond hair hanging down into her eyes.

We’re both the right ages again,
Jonah thought in relief. That proved that everything had worked out, didn’t it?

Then Jonah remembered that Hodge had wanted all the kids to be their right ages again too.

“I’ve been thinking and thinking about how we’re going to explain my broken arm and all your wounds to Mom and Dad, and . . . ,” Katherine began.

Jonah blinked hard, maybe missing some of what she was saying.

“Broken . . . arm?” he said, latching onto the words that seemed the most understandable.

Katherine waved something pink above his face. A cast. A cast encasing her right arm, from her elbow to her wrist.

“It was just the tiniest crack in the bone,” she said, “That’s why it didn’t hurt too bad, except for right after I hit the floor.”

She means when the guards pushed us into the cellar, back at the beginning, before we turned invisible,
Jonah thought.
So Katherine must have had a broken arm the whole rest of the time we were in 1918, and she didn’t say a thing about it after . . . after being in the garden with Chip . . .

Jonah’s brain was so fuzzy. Maybe she’d complained and complained and he just didn’t remember it?

Katherine was still talking.

“But the broken arm is no big deal. It’s really your bullet wounds we have to worry about—”

“Bullet,” Jonah repeated numbly. “Did you say . . .
bullet
wounds? Was . . . was I shot?”

Katherine whirled around to talk to someone just outside Jonah’s range of vision.

“JB, he doesn’t remember anything!” she complained.

“Yes, I do,” Jonah protested, but he probably didn’t sound very convincing, because he was also scrunching up his face—
ouch, why does that hurt?—
and trying to figure out what he actually did remember.

Me and Katherine in the cellar . . . And then me and Katherine and all the Romanovs and . . .

Now JB hovered over Jonah.

“Shh, Jonah, you just need to lie still and rest for now. Take it easy,” he told him.

Jonah ignored this.

“You came and rescued us,” Jonah muttered, still squinting in confusion. “If I have bullet wounds . . . why didn’t you come and rescue us
before
I got shot?”

JB sighed. Jonah realized that the man looked just as battered as Katherine, with a streak of dirt across his face and some sort of powdery dust or ash making his brown hair look gray.

“Believe me, I wish I could have,” JB said, shaking his head. “But I didn’t even know you were in 1918 until you made the entire Romanov family invisible. That set off alerts at time headquarters, and we rushed in to rescue you as soon as we could. But 1918 is a very damaged year, and Gary and Hodge made it worse with their clumsy attempts to cover up their crime. So we couldn’t get in for five minutes. Five whole minutes of you lying in that shooting gallery . . .”

Jonah shivered and was a little surprised that this motion didn’t hurt.

They’ve probably numbed me, wherever the bullets actually hit,
he thought.

He didn’t want to think about bullets being lodged in his own body. He let his brain skip to another question.

“So if we’d just gone wild and crazy and made the Romanovs invisible earlier in the day, you would have rescued us then?” he asked.

“No,” JB said solemnly. “If you’d gone wild and crazy and made the Romanovs invisible earlier in the day, that would have altered history so completely that time itself would have collapsed.”

“Quit saying things like that!” Katherine complained. “You’re just trying to scare us.”

She sounded as defiant as ever, but behind the bruises
her face had gone pale. Evidently this was news to her, too.

“Yes,” JB said, “I am trying to scare you. Because that
is
what would have happened. And because, no matter how much I’ve tried to protect you, the two of you keep getting pulled back into the past.”