Risked (The Missing ) (20 page)

“Hey, it’s not our fault!” Jonah said. “Believe me, we didn’t ask Gavin to kidnap us! I didn’t get up this morning—I mean, the last morning I spent in the twenty-first century—and think, ‘Okay, I feel like getting shot today! How about I go back to 1918 and see what it feels like to hang out around a bunch of trigger-happy Russians?’ ”

“It’s like you’re blaming us for not being able to fight our own fate,” Katherine protested.

Jonah was surprised that she had used that word “fate.” Was Katherine thinking about destiny and free choice every bit as much as he was?

“I’m not blaming you,” JB said in an even tone. “I’m blaming Gary and Hodge for putting their own greed ahead of everything else. I’m blaming them for being so eager to escape time prison and continue their nefarious business that they put the fate of the entire space-time continuum in the hands of thirteen-year-olds.”

“I’m only eleven,” Katherine muttered, which was another surprise, because normally she would have happily accepted credit for being older than she actually was.
“That is, when I’m not even younger. . . . How far back did I go when we un-aged going through time? Was I five? Six?”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” JB asked despairingly. “The thought of a five- or six-year-old changing the world?”

Jonah started trying to sit up, but decided that that would put him at too much risk for fainting. And that wouldn’t help him make his point.

“But everything turned out okay, right?” he asked. “Sure, we were little kids for a while, but we’re the right ages now. And maybe I have a few bullet wounds, but obviously they’re not
that
bad, are they?”

He hoped JB and Katherine couldn’t tell that he felt like fainting just at the thought of bullet wounds. He forced himself to go on.

“And you’ve probably got me in quarantine or something and Katherine was the only one you let in because she wouldn’t shut up about it, but everyone else is okay, aren’t they?” he asked. “Chip and Daniella and Gavin and . . .”

His voice faltered, because JB was staring back at him with such an odd expression on his face.

“Aren’t they okay?” Jonah repeated.

“You and Katherine will be fine,” JB said. “
Are
fine, I mean, though as Katherine pointed out, we’re going to have to handle the issue of explaining your bullet wounds
to your parents very, very carefully. But the others . . .”

“You told me you were taking care of them!” Katherine shrieked. “You told me not to focus on anyone but Jonah for right now. Aren’t they okay? Chip? Isn’t Chip okay? Where is he?”

She grabbed JB’s shirt, and at first Jonah thought she was actually going to try to start hitting him until he told her about Chip. But she was actually reaching into JB’s shirt pocket, as if desperate to find his Elucidator.

“Take us to Chip!” she cried. “Let us see for ourselves—”

JB pulled back.

“I promise, I’ll tell you exactly what’s going on,” he said. “But you can’t do anything rash. I have my Elucidator set on triple security codes, so don’t think for a minute that you can grab it away from me and do whatever you want.”

“Tell!” Katherine exploded.

JB pursed his lips grimly.

“Chip . . . ,” he began slowly. “Chip and the others are still back in 1918. Some things are still up in the air, but . . . I have to prepare you for the possibility that—”

“That what?” Jonah asked, just as impatient as his sister.

JB looked down, his voice barely a whisper.

“It may turn out that you two were the only ones we could rescue.”

“What? You left everyone else behind? That isn’t even Chip’s native time!” Katherine wailed. “Go back and get him! And Gavin and Daniella and—”

“It’s not that simple,” JB said miserably.

Katherine gaped at him.

“But you’re just sitting here doing nothing?” she asked. She’d stopped trying to search for JB’s Elucidator, but now she began reaching toward Jonah instead. “Where’s the dumbed-down Elucidator, then? Hand it to me, Jonah, and
I’ll
go back and rescue everyone.”

“That Elucidator will only take you on a one-way trip, remember?” JB reminded her. “Besides, the ‘dumbed-down’ Elucidator, as you call it, was taken away as evidence. Stop trying to manhandle Jonah.”

Katherine dropped her hands to her side.

“You’re not even trying,” she moaned.

“Yes, we are,” JB said quietly. “The entire agency called an emergency session of our top officials. They’ll consider every possibility and—”

“They called a meeting?” Jonah repeated in disbelief. “Chip and the others are in a tiny room with bullets flying everywhere, and all your agency did was call a meeting? Why didn’t you just grab them when you grabbed me and Katherine?”

JB closed his eyes momentarily and drew in a deep breath, as if trying to gather the strength to answer Jonah’s question. He exhaled and stared back at Jonah.

“We had thirty seconds,” JB said. “Just thirty seconds to get in and get out, because all the time around that moment was already so damaged. Gary and Hodge really messed things up, flipping you in and out of time so quickly to readjust your ages, to try to hide what they’d done.”

“Is
that
what happened during the time I blacked out?” Jonah asked.

“You
all
blacked out, temporarily,” JB said grimly. “Not the safest way to travel through time. And not the safest way to arrive back in the middle of a massacre. . . .”

He looked like he could hardly bear to talk about it.

“And anyhow, how much do you know about 1918?” he asked. “The whole world was changing then—you
had all the fallout from World War One and the Russian Revolution, the Spanish flu epidemic . . . Did you know that July 17, 1918, was also the day the
Carpathia
was torpedoed and sank?”

Jonah had never heard of the
Carpathia.

“But in thirty seconds—,” he began.

“In thirty seconds I had just enough time to grab you and Katherine and get out,” JB said. “We knew you’d been shot, so we had to get you. I was just lucky that Katherine was right beside you, so I could grab her, too. I only have two hands.”

Jonah didn’t want to think about how much worse he’d feel if Katherine had been left behind too.

“So why didn’t six or seven other time agents go in with you so there’d be twelve or fourteen more hands? Why didn’t you send enough people to save everyone?” Katherine argued.

JB sighed.

“That would have caused so much additional damage that none of us would have escaped,” JB said. “There were some in the agency who didn’t even think it was safe for me to go. I’m, uh, probably facing a reprimand as it is, for not waiting to follow proper protocol before going in.”

“But waiting, having a meeting, when there are bullets flying—” Jonah was so angry he couldn’t get the words out.

“The meeting’s not happening in the same time frame as the flying bullets, remember?” JB said. “Look, does this make you feel any better?”

He pulled out his Elucidator, which looked like the great-great-great-grandson of the most up-to-date iPhone Jonah had ever seen. JB seemed to be typing in password after password, and then he projected an image onto the wall. It showed the cellar room JB had rescued Jonah and Katherine from, evidently only a split second after they’d all left. Amid the clouds of smoke from all the gunfire, Jonah could barely make out the crystalline figures of his friends and the others. Probably the Elucidator’s viewpoint was enhanced somehow, and he would be able to see nothing but smoke if he were actually back in the room. But he could tell that Leonid and Maria had baffled expressions on their faces, gazing down at the floor where Jonah and Katherine had been lying. Gavin and Daniella were still standing by the lineup of guards in the doorway, trying to get them to stop shooting. Chip had apparently just stood up, seemingly ready to go help Gavin and Daniella.

Beyond them, the room was in chaos. The tsar was slumped to the floor and Dr. Botkin was bent over him, maybe trying to shield him from the guards’ guns. The tsarina was screaming and reaching toward the tsar, but it looked like she had already been hit too. Olga and Tatiana
were clustered beside her, motionless with horror and shock. Behind them the maid, the footman, and the cook were equally motionless, but it looked like they had all been writhing on the floor in agony only a moment earlier.

Motionless . . . ,
Jonah thought.

“You froze time again?” he asked JB.

“No,” JB said, shaking his head. “That would have damaged time too. I’m just showing you the next moment after we left that isn’t damaged time. Technically speaking, from our perspective, that’s the first moment that wouldn’t be off-limits to change.”

“So change it!” Katherine insisted.

JB ignored her and typed in another command on his Elucidator. A second image appeared on the wall beside the first. This was like watching video rather than looking at a photograph: It was some kind of assembly or legislative body, deliberating in a huge meeting room.

The UN, maybe,
Jonah thought, because there were people with all different skin colors and a variety of different clothing.

Then he noticed that everyone in that room was staring toward and pointing at and talking about a huge image on their wall: the same image of the cellar room that JB had called up for Jonah and Katherine to see.

“They’re meeting in a time hollow,” JB said. “They
could talk for days or months or years about what to do in 1918, and meanwhile not another instant would pass in that cellar room. So there is time for them to consider every possibility, every ramification. They’re not, I don’t know, sipping coffee and eating doughnuts and waiting for a colleague to second their motions, while back in the cellar someone else is dying with each minute that goes by.”

Looking at the two scenes—one moving forward, one still and stopped and waiting—Jonah understood what JB was trying to say. But somehow it didn’t make him feel any better. Some of the delegates in the conference room did indeed seem to be sipping coffee and eating doughnuts—or at least some futuristic version of doughnuts that looked like they might have been made out of bean sprouts.

Okay, so I get it that they have all the time in the world to eat and drink and talk and talk and talk and try to come to the best decision,
Jonah thought.
But how can they when they’re watching all those people in front of them on the verge of death? How can they stand not acting instantly?

Katherine pointed toward the image of the huge meeting.

“That’s where all the decisions are being made?” she asked. “That’s where they’re meeting right now?”

JB nodded.

“To the extent that anything can be said to happen ‘right now’ in a time hollow . . . ,” he began.

Katherine waved away that distinction.

“Then take us there,” she said. “Let us talk to them.”

“Yeah!” Jonah agreed.

JB looked closely at both of them, narrowing his eyes, clearly thinking hard.

“All right,” he finally said. “Fine.”

The bright, artificial room around them disappeared.

In the next moment Jonah felt such an intense burst of pain he couldn’t resist screaming.

“Sorry, Jonah, forgot to warn you that coming out of that time hollow you’d get hit with all the pain from your injuries,” JB said, patting Jonah’s back. “But we’ll be in the other time hollow in nothing flat. . . .”

And then they were, and Jonah felt much better.

The three of them landed in the back of the huge assembly room, in chairs that might as well have been pulled out from the table and arranged just for them.

Spectators’ seats,
Jonah thought.
Just for watching.

But almost as soon as they landed, JB was already standing up and addressing the crowd.

“The children,” he said, “would like to speak.”

Um, now, you mean?
Jonah thought.
If everyone else gets all
the time in the world to think and talk and everything, shouldn’t we get a few moments to figure out what we actually want to say?

Katherine didn’t seem to need that.

“Thanks,” she said, bouncing up out of her chair.

She walked toward the front of the room so she was positioned right in front of the image of the cellar. She pointed up at it.

“How can you not want to help those people?” she asked. She started gesturing at each individual person. “That’s Chip Winston right there, who survived the 1480s and is only in 1918 because he was kidnapped a second time. It wouldn’t be fair to him to just let him die there!” She moved her hand slightly to the right. “That’s Daniella McCarthy, who was originally Anastasia Romanov—”

“Romanova,”
a snooty-looking woman in the front row corrected her. “With Russian names at that point in time, when it’s a female, you add an
a
at the end.”

“Okay, sorry. Whatever,” Katherine said, rolling her eyes. “That doesn’t matter that much right now, does it? What I started to say was, Daniella didn’t even know about her original identity until she was in 1918. But wow, was she brave! Doesn’t she deserve a chance to live out the rest of her life in the twenty-first century? Doesn’t her adoptive family deserve a chance to get her back? And—”

“Little girl,” someone interrupted in an annoyed tone.
It was a bearded man standing to the side. “You’re wasting our time. We’re the experts. I’ll warrant that every single one of us in this room already knows more about the people in the Ipatiev House at that moment than you ever will.”

Ipatiev House?
Jonah thought.
Is that the actual name of the house where the Romanovs were staying? Is beard guy just calling it that to make Katherine and me feel ignorant?

“And, sure,” the bearded man continued, “in an ideal world, if everything were sunbeams and rainbows and butterflies, of course we’d save everyone we could. The past would be completely empty, because how could we bear to keep anyone from enjoying the best life they could possibly have?”