In the next burst of light—from a particularly strong squirm by Alex—Jonah saw comprehension flow over Katherine’s face.
The men were walking fast now, directly toward Jonah and Katherine, and toward the dim, practically nonexistent light coming in the window. Jonah reached out cautiously, feeling for Chip’s arm. This time he touched sweatshirt material—surely they didn’t have sweatshirts in the fifteenth century, did they? He squeezed tightly, his fingers circling Chip’s arm. He tugged, trying to pull Chip away from the tracer, away from the man.
In one quick movement the man lifted the tracer/Chip up. He lifted him up and heaved him toward the window.
SEVEN
Jonah saw the glowing tracers fly out the window and plummet toward the ground, one boy after the other. He couldn’t make sense of the sight. Was his mind still slowed by the timesickness? Was he just too flat-out stunned to understand?
They’re glowing head to toe, every inch of them, he thought. Why? They weren’t doing that a minute ago. The only things that glowed were the parts that separated from Chip and Alex—hands, feet, maybe an occasional elbow. …
Jonah was working on a grisly calculation, figuring that maybe Chip and Alex, being heavier than their tracers, had separated while falling toward the ground. No, wait—we studied this at school. Galileo dropping cannonballs—it doesn’t matter how heavy two things are, they fall at the same rate. So … so …
So Chip and Alex must not have gone out the window with their tracers.
So that was why Jonah still had his hand around Chip’s arm.
Relief and understanding washed over Jonah.
He must have pulled Chip away from his tracer at the very last minute, just as the man was trying to fling the boy out the window. Trying to assassinate the king.
Murderer, Jonah thought, his heart pounding faster. Not a rescuer at all.
But Jonah had stopped the assassination attempt. Only empty, glowing tracers had plunged toward the ground, not the real, live human boys, not King Edward V, alias Chip Winston, or Prince Richard, alias Alex Polchak. Chip was right there, Jonah clutching him by both arms now—Jonah’s hands had somehow known to work together, even though his brain hadn’t caught up. And Jonah couldn’t see Alex or Katherine over in the thick darkness on the other side of the men, but Katherine must have succeeded too, since Alex’s tracer had glowed just as much as Chip’s.
Jonah wanted to scream and cheer and beat the air with his fists, as if he’d just scored the winning goal in the last seconds of a soccer game. Childishly, he even wanted to stick out his tongue and taunt the would-be assassins, Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah. You lose! We win!
But more than that, he wanted to make sure that the murderers didn’t know that he and Chip and Katherine and Alex were there. He didn’t want to have saved Chip and Alex, only to ruin everything with a boast. Or a sneeze, cough, or too-loud breath.
He pulled Chip farther back from the window. If he’d dared, Jonah would have slid behind the heavy cloth wall hanging. But his mind was kicking back into gear, projecting what-if scenarios. What if the wall hanging’s attached to the stones by something metal at the top, and that rattles when we’re trying to hide? What if, in the darkness, the men walk right into us, and we can’t see them coming because we’re hiding behind the wall hanging? Jonah froze, paralyzed by all the disasters he could picture in his mind.
The men were both leaning over the edge of the window, their figures nothing but dark silhouettes against the sky outside. Jonah stared at them, watching for the first glow of tracer light, the first hint that they were reacting differently than they had in the original version of history. There wasn’t the slightest gleam about them; they must not have felt the effects of Chip and Alex being pulled away. Probably that was because they had been jerking back too, reacting to the opposite force from hurling the boys out the window.
“Come along,” one of the men growled to the other, both still bathed in darkness. “Hurry. Lest we be seen.”
They pushed away from the window and the faint light of the night sky. Jonah could hear their footsteps—cautious, sneaking back through the room—and his eyes burned trying to make out the slightest glimpse of them. But they were dark figures in darkness, as good as invisible. Then the door at the opposite end of the room swung open, turning the men into silhouettes again. There must have been a torch somewhere far down the hallway, providing just enough light to show the men leaving the room, quietly pulling the door shut behind them.
Jonah waited a few excruciating moments to make sure the men weren’t coming back. He stared at the darkness that had swallowed the door, willing it to stay darkness.
He felt a hand on his arm and had to stifle a scream.
“We did it!” Katherine whispered in his ear. “We saved them!”
“Katherine, you idiot, you just about scared me to death!” he hissed back. “What if I’d yelped or something?”
“You didn’t,” she whispered, her old annoying confidence back. “Listen, do you still have the Elucidator?”
Jonah had forgotten all about the Elucidator. He’d dropped it on the floor eons ago, it seemed, back when the tracers were still curled up safely on the bed. When it had seemed a bit like a game, Alex and Chip melding and separating from their tracers for fun.
“JB?” he whispered into the darkness.
“Shh,” JB replied.
Jonah figured that if it was safe for JB to whisper “Shh,” it was safe for Jonah to crawl across the floor searching for the Elucidator. He let go of Chip’s arms, and Chip sagged helplessly against the wall. Was he in shock or something? Was that why he hadn’t even said thank you yet?
“Don’t worry,” Katherine told Chip soothingly. “Jonah’s going to get us out of here. We can go home now.”