Jonah leaned back against a damp wall. Since no guards had shown up yet, he was inclined to believe that they were safe. For the moment.
“But why did we stop being invisible?” Alex asked. “What changed? I would have thought it’d be like Newton’s first law of motion—anything in motion will remain in motion, anything at rest will remain at rest, anything invisible will remain invisible. … Jonah, let me see that Elucidator.”
Jonah dug the rocklike object out of his pocket. Now that it was visible too, he could make out a screen full of glowing words: RESTORATION COMPLETE. ALL SYSTEMS RETURNED TO ORIGINAL SETTINGS.
“Oh,” Jonah mumbled, holding the Elucidator out to Alex so he could see the screen too. “Great timing.”
Alex shook his head.
“We should study this,” Alex said, peering down at the Elucidator. “See if we can find some instructions for using it …”
“Don’t you think we should hide first?” Katherine asked. She paused. “Is someone coming?”
Jonah tilted his head back into the stairwell, but the footsteps he heard weren’t coming from above. They were far down the hall, in the shadows.
“Hurry!” Jonah said, pointing in the opposite direction. “That way!”
It was ridiculous to try to combine tiptoeing and running, but that’s what they all attempted as they scurried away. When they’d gone several yards, the hallway branched. Jonah peeked around the corner into the new corridor, which was equally dark and shadowed.
Er—no. Some of those shadows were men in dark robes.
“Hasten your steps!” a voice called far down the hallway. “The king wishes you monks to line his path through the church.”
Jonah threw a glance over his shoulder at the men advancing behind them, then looked down the other corridor again.
“We’re trapped!” Jonah whispered. “We can’t walk past this hallway without those monks seeing us. And we can’t go back. …”
Chip surprised him by dropping down to the ground and half crawling, half wriggling forward.
“Come on!” he whispered. “It’s darker down on the floor. They won’t see us here.”
Jonah, Katherine, and Alex followed his example. None of the monks cried out, “Wait! Who’s that crawling on the floor? And why are they wearing such strange clothes?”
When they were safely on the other side of the corridor, and back on their feet, Jonah leaned over and whispered in Chip’s ear, “How’d you figure that out so quickly?”
Chip snorted.
“Used to do it all the time sneaking out of the nursery when I was a little boy, back at Ludlow Castle,” he muttered. “There are some advantages to bad lighting.”
It was so hard to understand how Chip could have memories of two completely different childhoods, separated by more than five hundred years. Jonah was just as glad that there wasn’t time to think about it. They had to keep rushing forward, turning shadowy corners, advancing from one flickering pool of torchlight to the next.
And then they ran out of hallway.
Stairs lay before them, as dark and winding as the ones they’d used before.
“Should we …?” Katherine asked.
Jonah could hear the footsteps approaching behind them: closer and closer and closer. …
“It’s our only choice,” he decided.
He began scrambling up the stairs tripping on the uneven stones. He fell. He got up. He fell again. He got up again.
“Speed it up!” Alex hissed from the back of the line. “Those monks are moving fast!”
At the top of the stairs Jonah spun around the corner. …
And slammed right into yet another monk.
NINETEEN
“Oof,” the monk said.
He was a large man with a distended belly. Jonah practically bounced back.
“Sorry,” Jonah muttered. He thought that maybe if he kept his head down and brushed on by as quickly as possible, the monk wouldn’t notice his twenty-first-century clothes. It was almost dim enough by the stairs. The monk wouldn’t be able to see the glow of the tracer moving past them, and who could tell, maybe the monk was nearsighted, maybe they hadn’t invented glasses yet. …
Then Jonah saw that there were four other monks behind the first one, all also stopped in their tracks while their tracers glided forward. And all of them were staring, openmouthed, at Jonah.
So much for the possible benefits of myopia.
Alex, Katherine, and Chip rounded the last corner of the stairs behind Jonah and slammed to a halt, each one bumping into the next. The combined forward motion of all three of them shoved Alex against Jonah’s back. Jonah lurched forward and back, trying to keep his balance.
Incredibly enough, the five monks were capable of letting their jaws drop even farther toward the floor.
For a moment everyone just stared at one another. Then Katherine stepped out past Jonah and Alex.
“Hi!” she said, as perky as a beauty contestant. “Uh, greetings! Nice to meet you!”
Five pairs of medieval monk eyes blinked incredulously.
Jonah hadn’t given much thought to what his sister was wearing. It wasn’t something he usually paid attention to, and he’d been a little preoccupied lately. But he noticed now. She was wearing blue jeans with some sort of weird stitching near the bottom, with shiny red thread. She had a sweatshirt knotted around her waist, and a T-shirt with sparkly beading on the front that spelled out CHEER!
She looked completely and utterly wrong next to all those black-robed monks. Jonah still knew almost nothing about the fifteenth century, but even he could tell that not a single part of her outfit would have been possible in 1483.
“Ah …” The big-bellied monk had to clear his throat and try again. “Art thou a female creature or a male creature?” he asked Katherine.
Katherine giggled.
All the monks must have had younger sisters who giggled in the same way, because they seemed to relax a little bit.