“The serving girl this morning, the one who brought the tray,” he said. “She wasn’t acting like she thought the boys had vanished. Or been killed. And I didn’t see her tracer, so she wasn’t doing anything different.”
“Or her tracer was in some other room entirely,” Alex said.
“Oh. Yeah.”
Jonah frowned. The more he thought about all of this, the more confused he was. Chip’s story only made things worse, because it just showed how much Edward V and his brother hadn’t known. Where was that Lord Rivers guy now? Was he really so wonderful? And was Gloucester so terrible, or did it just seem that way because Chip had listened to his mother’s side of the family?
Maybe all of this is just a misunderstanding, Jonah thought. A mistake.
Which was really stupid, because it was pretty much impossible to mistakenly throw two boys out a window.
“Maybe if we check the Elucidator …,” Alex suggested slowly.
Chip whirled on him.
“You want to talk to JB again? Somebody we know betrayed us? No!”
“Not to talk to JB,” Alex corrected himself. “For other stuff. JB wasn’t the one who made us invisible. We figured that out all by ourselves. Maybe there’s some other function like that, that can help us. Or maybe there’s, like, some explanation of history on the Elucidator, some button we can click and find out everything.”
Jonah wished he’d thought of that.
“Do you still have the Elucidator, Jonah?” Katherine asked.
“Um, uh …” Jonah dug in the front pocket of his jeans. You’d think he’d remember something like that, but there’d been so much else to think about. “Here it is.” He pulled out a thin, flat disk.
A completely invisible, thin, flat disk. Even though he could feel it, hard against his hand, he couldn’t see the slightest shadow of anything in his open palm. He held it up, into the sunlight.
Still nothing.
“Very funny, Jonah.” Katherine scrunched up her face in disgust. “This isn’t the time for practical jokes.”
“No, really,” Jonah said. “It’s in my hand. It’s just … even more invisible than we are.”
He ran his fingers over the Elucidator, groping for some sort of button, something to use to give it directions. The surface of the Elucidator was completely smooth. The others gathered around him and felt it too.
“Maybe it has an audio activation in this mode?” Alex suggested calmly. “Elucidator, view screen.”
Nothing happened.
“Show screen,” Katherine said.
“End invisibility mode,” Chip said.
“Help?” Jonah tried. “Show help menu?”
The Elucidator stayed invisible.
“Maybe if I throw it again?” Chip asked. “That made it light up.”
“Or you might break it completely,” Alex said.
Don’t panic, Jonah thought. Don’t panic. It wouldn’t help to panic. … But it was hard not to when they were all clustered together staring at nothing, and that same invisible nothing was their only link with the outside world, maybe their only hope of ever escaping the fifteenth century.
“Um,” Jonah said, his voice cracking. “Anybody got a plan B?”
“I do, but I don’t want to do it,” Katherine said in a small voice.
Oh, great, now Katherine wasn’t making any sense either. No, wait—Jonah hadn’t been able to understand her about half the time back in the twenty-first century, anyway, so this was just normal. It was good to have something be normal right now.
“Well?” Jonah said mockingly—mocking was often the best tone to use with Katherine. “What is it?”
Katherine looked carefully at Chip and Alex.
“I think the only way we can get out of here is to fix time,” she said. “Even if we can’t do anything with the Elucidator, you saw how JB yanked the Taser out of here. Maybe he’d do that with us, too, if we can somehow make it so it doesn’t matter that the king and the prince disappeared last night.”
“You mean, you’re on JB’s side. You think Alex and I have to die,” Chip said bitterly. “Thanks a lot!”
“No!” Katherine said. She grabbed Chip by the shoulder, steadying him. “I mean, we need to find out how to make it look like you did die, and make the people who wanted you dead think that you are. I want to fake your death. But first we need to figure out who tried to kill you, and why. And how they reacted to your disappearance. And for that …” She swallowed hard, uncharacteristically hesitant. “For that we have to leave this room.”
“You’re right,” Alex said, sounding surprised. “That’s a good plan.” He tilted his head, puzzled. “Why did you say you didn’t want to do it?”
Katherine bit her lip.
“You’re going to think I’m being a real girl here,” she began.
“Katherine, you are a girl,” Jonah reminded her.
Katherine ignored him.
“Not that kind of girl. Not the kind in the movies who’s always screaming over every little thing, the kind that everyone else has to rescue.” She flipped her long hair disdainfully over her shoulder. “You know I’m not like that.”
She was appealing to Jonah now, like she really cared about his opinion.
“Okay,” Jonah said grudgingly. “You’re not.”
“But I’m terrified now at the thought of walking out that door,” she said. “I know we need to do it, I’m pretty sure it’s the best thing, but … maybe timesickness makes you agoraphobic? Or maybe it’s just because I’ve already seen murderers, I’ve already almost been burned to death—and that’s without going out into the rest of the fifteenth century. …”
Jonah didn’t like this. She was scaring him now too.
“Katherine,” Chip said soothingly. “We’re invisible! We’ll be fine.”
“Will we?” Katherine asked. “Can you promise that? You’re the king here, and you’re not even safe!”
Jonah thought maybe Alex was rolling his eyes, but it was hard to tell when his eyes were so close to being invisible.