Jonah was delighted to hear Alex sounding logical again.
“And really, Katherine,” Chip said earnestly. Jonah wouldn’t have said that Chip was capable of being earnest. Sarcasm was more his style. But—Jonah peered at his friend carefully—Chip’s face was as smooth and innocent as a choirboy’s. He kept talking. “It’s not fair to say that this time period is godforsaken just because Europeans don’t know about America yet. God is just about all he thinks about.” He pointed at his tracer, who now had his head leaned back against the wall. His lips were moving silently. He seemed to be praying again.
“Him, too,” Alex said, gesturing toward his own tracer, who was curled up against his brother’s shoulder and appeared now to be fast asleep. “And it’s so weird, because back in the twenty-first century I thought I was an atheist or an agnostic—I didn’t think it even mattered which one. I didn’t care. But thinking with his brain … well, I could believe. And it wasn’t like thinking that the stars revolved around the earth—thinking something I knew was false. It’s—I don’t know. I can’t explain.”
“It helps,” Chip said simply. “Edward should be terrified out of his skull, he’s that certain that he’s going to be killed, and that there’s nothing he can do about it. But he’s just … fine.”
Jonah considered arguing, Well, I believe in God too, but I’m still terrified out of my skull—what do you make of that? But he didn’t think that would be very useful.
Katherine took a deep breath.
“You’re using third person again,” she said.
“Huh?” Chip asked.
“Third person,” Katherine said. “Him. His. He. You’re not talking anymore like you think you’re them.”
She swept her hand dismissively toward the tracers, her fingers swiping through Edward V’s leg. She didn’t even notice.
“It fades a little, doesn’t it?” Alex said speculatively. “The longer we’re away from them. We could set up an experiment—see if we experience their minds more intensely with a longer stay in the tracers, see how much our memories fade over time—”
“No!” Katherine and Jonah said together. They exchanged glances.
“What if you forget your real selves completely?” Katherine argued. She looked flushed and frantic, still not far away from some childish tantrum. A long strand of hair had escaped from her ponytail and was plastered to her cheek with sweat. Jonah wondered if she was still feeling the effects of timesickness.
“Which are our real selves?” Alex asked quietly. He turned his head, gazing longingly toward the tracers on the bed.
Chip had the same expression on his face. Jonah could just see the thoughts churning in their heads.
Jonah dived to the right. He rose up on his knees and stuck his arms out straight, his best imitation of a traffic cop refusing to let anyone pass.
“You can’t go back to them,” Jonah said. He hoped his body was blocking everyone’s view of the tracers. “How could you? You said yourself, they’re doomed.”
“But what if that’s our fate?” Chip said, just as Alex objected, “I didn’t say they were doomed.”
Chip looked at Alex in surprise. Jonah wondered why he hadn’t noticed they were brothers from the very beginning: They had the same blond curly hair, the same blue eyes, the same high cheekbones. Noble high cheekbones. Royal looking. Even with their hair cut in a twenty-first-century style, now that they were back in the fifteenth century, both of them did look like they could be princes or kings.
“Really?” Chip was saying. “Your guy—Richard—he doesn’t think they’re both going to die?”
“I told you,” Alex said. “He thinks his mother has a plan. He knows.”
“Mother,” Chip repeated, as though he was trying out the word. “The queen. Former queen, I mean. Elizabeth.”
“Queen Elizabeth?” Katherine shrieked. “The old-timey one? Wait a minute—I know about her. The one Cate Blanchett always plays in the movies?”
Chip and Alex considered this.
“No, that’s another Queen Elizabeth,” Chip said. “Later on.”
Katherine looked defeated.
Chip had his head tilted to the side thoughtfully.
“It’s like, I know about the mother’s plan, but I don’t have much confidence in it,” he said. “She’s not … I mean, I barely know her.”
“That’s because you were sent to another estate at a young age,” Alex said. “To be trained to know how to be king.”
Chip bit down on his lip, wonderment traveling across his face.
“I do know how to be king,” he said. “Weird.”
“But you don’t know your own mother?” Katherine asked incredulously.
“I only see her a few times a year,” he said, shrugging. He grinned, looking more like himself. “But I’ve heard things, when people don’t know I’m listening. I think she was supposed to be a real babe when she was younger. There was some sort of a scandal when our father married her—like she wasn’t good enough because she wasn’t a foreign princess who could bring him extra allies, and she’d been married to a Lancaster knight who died, and we’re Yorks, of course, and the Lancasters and the Yorks hate each other. … Our parents got married in secret, so that was even more scandalous.”
“Were people horrified when your mother got pregnant with you? And they didn’t know she was married?” Katherine asked. In spite of herself, she was leaning in now, intrigued, like this was just some juicy celebrity gossip.
“Oh, the news came out a long time before that,” Chip said. “Our father’s advisers were really mad.” He thought for a minute. “Anyhow, I have three older sisters, so it’s not like I would have been the big surprise, regardless.”