“I told you!” Alex whispered.
The men seemed not to hear him, because they were speaking themselves—Jonah missed their words—and then they bowed low, their flickering candle dipping down, their boots scraping back against the stone floor.
“They’re going to walk to the bed,” Chip whispered, pulling away from Jonah’s grasp. “They’re going to walk to the bed, and if we’re not there—if they can’t see the tracers—they’ll …”
He was already rising toward the glowing figures on the bed.
“Wait!” Jonah whispered back. “Can’t you wait to see if they’re really going to rescue you? Are they friends? Or murderers?”
“I can’t know that unless I’m in my tracer!” Chip hissed. “Alex, come on!”
The two men were approaching the bed, the glow of their candle growing dangerously near.
Alex was jerking away from Jonah too.
“Let them go!” Katherine whispered in Jonah’s ear. “They’ll know in a minute if it’s safe or not—we can pull them out. …”
Quickly Alex and Chip scrambled onto the bed, matching their poses with their tracers’.
Jonah had forgotten that the tracers would stop glowing. He blinked at the sudden darkening. The shadowy men in their little circle of candlelight were advancing faster, rushing toward the bed.
Do you know yet? Jonah wanted to scream at Alex and Chip. Are they rescuers or murderers? He reached blindly toward the bed, his fingers brushing fabric. It felt like something more stiff and formal than sweatshirt material—was it velvet, maybe?—but he tugged anyway. If the men really were friends, wouldn’t Chip and Alex have recognized them by now? Couldn’t Chip separate from his tracer long enough to let Jonah know if he was safe or not?
Before Jonah could get a good grip, Katherine started pulling him back. The circle of candlelight was almost at Jonah’s feet. Before he moved away, the plastic tip of his shoelace gleamed dully in the light.
Jonah prayed that neither of the men was looking in his direction.
They weren’t. They had their eyes fastened on the tracer/Chip and tracer/Alex, both boys bathed in the light from the candle. It seemed like a 100-watt glow to Jonah right now—it was much too bright for Jonah or Katherine to dart in and pull either boy away.
The men bowed before the tracer/Chip and tracer/Alex, the light dipping only briefly.
“Your Highnesses,” the first man murmured.
The second man reached his candle toward the candle Katherine had blown out, and a second flame sprang to life. The intensified glow of the two candles, plus the glow of the man’s tracer, still hunched in a bow, sent Katherine and Jonah scurrying backward, desperate not to be seen. Just as the man blew out the first candle and rejoined his tracer—dimming the light again—Jonah’s head hit something soft. He reached his hands behind him and found that some sort of cloth wall hanging covered the stones near the window, reaching practically down to the ground. Somewhere else to hide if we have to, he told himself.
Back by the bed the two men were straightening up from their bows. Then they reached out and grabbed the two boys.
“No!” the tracer boy/Chip screamed.
The man holding him crammed his hand over Chip’s face.
“Shh! Someone will hear!” the man hissed. “This is for thine own good! We’re helping you!”
Chip struggled against the man’s grasp. He seemed to be fighting harder than the tracer boy—his arms and legs lashed out, leaving the tracer’s glowing limbs behind. But he couldn’t break the man’s hold.
Alex was faring no better, and glowing even more. The tracer boy still seemed to be sleeping, even as Alex squirmed, momentarily separating, rejoining the tracer, separating, rejoining. …
“What should we do?” Katherine whispered urgently in Jonah’s ear.
Jonah watched the men and the struggling boys. Even in the dim, flickering light Jonah could see that both of the men were tall and strong and muscular—he and Katherine could never overpower them.
But maybe they wouldn’t have to.
“You try to grab Alex, and I’ll get Chip,” Jonah whispered back. “They’re starting to separate from their tracers already—just pull them away. …”
“Without being seen?” Katherine asked incredulously. “Without them noticing? That’s impossible!”
She was right. They could either rescue Chip and Alex, or they could stay out of sight and keep up the illusion that history was proceeding along its normal path.
What if that’s our fate? Chip had asked just a few moments earlier. The words still seemed to be echoing in Jonah’s mind.
“No,” Jonah muttered to himself. “We have choices. …”
He started to step out of the shadows.
At that exact moment the tracer/Chip gave a particularly hard kick, knocking against his bedside table, toppling the candle off the edge.
The flame vanished, snuffed by the fall to the floor.
Instantly the room was plunged into darkness, except for the dim glow of the night sky outside the window, and the occasional bursts of tracer lights when Chip and Alex briefly separated from their fifteenth-century selves. The candle must have been extinguished in the original version of history too, because no tracers of the men appeared.
“Shall I—,” one of the men began.
“Leave it,” the other growled back. “It matters not. What we have to do, we can do in darkness.”
“So can we!” Jonah whispered delightedly to Katherine. “This is our chance!”
She only stared at him stupidly.
“The men can’t see the tracer lights!” Jonah hissed.