“Come on,” Alex said. “Our mother’s chambers are upstairs.”
They tiptoed up a dark, winding staircase—were all the stairways in the fifteenth century like that? Jonah wondered. He thought about what it would be like to be trapped in this dreary building for a month and a half.
“No TV, huh?” he whispered to Alex. “No video games?”
“Are you kidding?” Alex whispered back. “We just got the printing press in England six or seven years ago. We barely have books!”
They reached the top of the stairs and tiptoed into a sparsely furnished room. A blond woman in an elegant black dress and five blond girls—also in black—were all leaning against a bed, their faces buried in the comforter.
All of them were sobbing.
“Uh, Chip?” Jonah whispered. “If that’s your mom and sisters, I think they already know you’re supposedly dead.”
The sobbing was especially hard to watch and listen to because Jonah could see the tracers of the queen and her daughters, the way they would have been if nobody had interfered with time. The tracer queen was seated regally on the bed, silently smiling, laughing, and talking. The tracers of the five girls, who all looked so much like Chip and Alex, were seated beside their mother. One of them flipped a cascade of blond curls over her shoulder and giggled silently.
Wait a minute, Jonah thought. The tracer queen and princesses shouldn’t look so happy. The tracers should be the ones crying. Wouldn’t they be certain that Chip and Alex are dead? Shouldn’t the queen and princesses now, after the tampering, still have some hope that Chip and Alex are okay?
He was confusing himself, getting mixed up between how things should be with and without the tampering.
I’d think a lot more clearly if I had some pizza or spaghetti or lasagna in my stomach, he thought grumpily.
Katherine was tapping him on the shoulder, very annoyingly.
“L-l-look,” she stammered, pointing to the opposite side of the room from the sobbing queen and princesses and their eerily happy tracers.
Jonah turned, ready to tell Katherine not to bug him when he was hungry.
But turning, he saw what Katherine was pointing at.
Two chairs sat on the opposite side of the room from the bed. And two more glowing tracers sat in the chairs, laughing just as uproariously as the tracers of the princesses and queen.
One of the tracers was Alex’s. The other was Chip’s.
Even in the original version of time the prince and the former king had survived.
TWENTY-TWO
“What?” Jonah exploded, loudly enough that the queen stopped sobbing for a moment, lifted her head, and looked around, a mystified expression on her face. Then, seeing nothing, she buried her face in the bedding again and sobbed even harder.
Jonah pushed Katherine back out into the hall. Chip and Alex had just turned and caught their first glimpse of the tracer boys, and now they were leaning toward the tracers, as if they were being pulled in that direction.
“Oh, no,” Jonah muttered. “Don’t even think about it.”
He grabbed the back of Chip’s sweatshirt and the back of Alex’s T-shirt and tugged. It took a lot of effort, but eventually he had them back out in the hallway too. He forced them down toward the ground.
“We’ve got to talk,” he whispered. “How can this be?”
“They didn’t die,” Katherine murmured. “They never died. We were wrong all along.”
“But how did they survive?” Jonah asked. “That was, like, six stories down to the ground.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Chip said. “Don’t you remember, we only climbed down one or two sets of stairs?”
Jonah thought about this. Chip was right—there hadn’t been that many stairs when they were leaving the Tower of London.
“But I looked out the window,” Jonah said. “The ground looked a mile away.”
“Could that be because of the timesickness?” Katherine asked. “Messing us up? When I jumped into the river to swim to the barge, I thought I was going to have to swim forever. But then it only took three or four strokes.”
Through raw sewage, Jonah wanted to add, but he restrained himself.
Were his perceptions so badly off too? He remembered how, when Chip was running toward Richard III’s procession, Jonah had managed to tackle his friend even when he was sure Chip was too far away. He thought about how high and echoey the ceilings had seemed in the tower room, how far he’d had to run to hide behind the tapestry. …
“But … but … Chip and Alex never had timesickness,” Jonah protested, still not convinced. “They saw how far away the ground was.”
“I never looked out the window,” Chip said.
“And I just looked up, toward the stars,” Alex said.
Both of them spoke in dreamy, distracted tones. Both of them were looking back over their shoulders, gazing longingly toward the tracers.
It’s like mind control, Jonah thought. Any time they’re near their tracers.
Did that explain why both Chip and Alex said they felt strange as soon as they got close to Westminster Abbey? Maybe the tracers had been moving right past them, just out of sight, heading toward their reunion with their mother. …
Katherine was focused on a more immediate problem.
“But what do we do now?” she asked. “This changes everything!”
Chip and Alex started to stand up, edging toward their tracers once more.
“No, no, you can’t do that!” Jonah said. “We’ve got to figure this out. Logically.”
“What’s to figure?” Alex asked. “We can stop our family’s sorrow. We can bring joy to our mother’s heart.”
He gestured toward the queen and princesses, who were, indeed, sobbing as though their hearts were broken.
“But they’ll see you change!” Katherine objected. “It’ll look like you just appear out of nowhere. …”
“They’re not looking,” Chip said. “That’s why we’ve got to meld with our tracers now, while they’re all crying on the bed.”