“Caitlin Deets? Oh, yeah, in a heartbeat,” Katherine said. “She’d probably start strangling other kids with her bare hands.”
Jonah couldn’t quite remember which girl in Katherine’s class was Caitlin Deets—the really skinny one with the big nose, long blond hair, and triple-pierced ears? The tall girl who always wore platform shoes and pink clothing? He decided, whoever she was, he’d want to avoid her if he ever got back to the twenty-first century.
JB gestured toward the scene before them, King Richard slowly climbing down the winding stairs.
“There’s a lot of blood on the English Crown at this point in history,” JB said. “The York and Lancaster families have been fighting for thirty years over who deserves the throne.”
“But Richard and Chip and Alex are all in the same family, right?” Jonah said. “And anyhow, Chip and Alex aren’t dead. Why didn’t the ‘murderers’ tell the king the boys escaped? Is Richard supposed to think they’re dead? Or does he think they’re dead just because we made him think he saw their ghosts?”
“If you worked for a king who ordered people killed in the middle of the night, would you tell him you’d messed up?” JB asked.
In the scene before them Richard stepped out of the building and nodded curtly at the guards around the front door. Then the scene shifted: Chip and Alex were climbing out of a cupboard of sorts, one that blended neatly into the stone wall. They were grinning triumphantly.
“So they knew to hide,” Katherine said. “Somebody warned them the king was coming.”
“Elizabeth Woodville has very loyal servants,” JB said, nodding. “She may be out of power, but she’s not out of plans.”
As the princesses gathered around them, Chip raised his right hand and smacked Alex’s right hand in a very dramatic high five.
“They had high fives in 1483?” Jonah asked, surprised. Had Chip’s arm separated from his tracer’s arm for just that long?
“No,” JB said disapprovingly.
“Then, they’re still in there,” Jonah said. “The real Chip and Alex.”
“No doubt,” JB said, though he didn’t sound as happy about it as Jonah.
The princesses, who had gathered around Chip and Alex, were shooting them puzzled glances. One girl flipped a long lock of blond hair over her shoulder and whispered to her sisters. Jonah imagined she was saying, “Methinks our brothers have gone crazy. Wherever did they learn those bizarre hand signals?”
“Well,” Jonah said. “Katherine and I had better get Chip and Alex out of there before they corrupt the princesses with their twenty-first-century habits. You couldn’t have princesses starting to do high fives.”
Huh, Jonah thought. Maybe I do that double-talk thing too. He didn’t care about whether or not high fives caught on in the fifteenth century. He just wanted to get everyone home.
“You think you can just snatch them away now?” JB asked harshly. “Just because you want to?” He glowered. “You sound like Gary and Hodge.”
“It’s for their own good,” Jonah said. “Chip and Alex’s.”
“How do you know that?” JB asked. “How do you know that in the twenty-first century they’re not going to step in front of a car tomorrow and be killed instantly? How do you know that Chip’s not going to get his throne back in the fifteenth century and reign for fifty years, in happiness and prosperity?”
“Does he?” Jonah asked. “Is that what’s supposed to happen?”
“Uh, no,” JB said. “Probably not.”
Jonah gaped at JB.
“Probably?” Jonah repeated. “You don’t know for sure?”
JB shrugged.
“Everything’s uncertain now.”
Jonah looked to Katherine for reinforcement. At home she was usually the one who raged and blustered and told their parents their rules were insane, no kid should be expected to have to do that … Jonah could usually count on her to do all the screaming and complaining, so he didn’t have to.
But Katherine was wincing and biting her lip.
“How long?” she asked softly. “How long until we know what’s going to happen? How long do Chip and Alex have to stay in the fifteenth century?”
JB turned and faced Jonah and Katherine squarely.
“You want my best guess?” he asked. “The most likely time span, assuming we haven’t changed events too greatly from the original version?”
Jonah and Katherine both nodded.
JB tilted his head to the side, calculating. Or else delaying delivering the bad news.
“If everything goes the way we hope,” he said, “it’s two years.”
TWENTY-SIX
“Two years?” Katherine wailed. “That’s forever! I’ll be fourteen in two years! I’ll miss everything about middle school!”
Jonah considered telling her, “No, you’ll just be a fourteen-year-old sixth grader.” Or, “Don’t you think it might be a good thing to miss middle school?” But he had his own distress to deal with.
Two more years before I get pizza again? I’ll die! Strangely, he wasn’t hungry right at the moment—Oh, yeah, people aren’t hungry or thirsty or anything else when they’re in Outer Time—but if breakfast was any indication, he’d starve with nothing but fifteenth-century food for two years.
JB held up his hand like a traffic cop.
“I didn’t say the two of you were going to stay in the 1400s for two years,” JB said. “Just Chip and Alex.”
“That is so not fair,” Katherine ranted. “You promised us they’d be safe. You promised we could rescue them. You—”
“I promised you could try to rescue them,” JB corrected her in a steely voice. “There’s a difference. I never promised you’d succeed.”
Katherine gulped, turned pale, and stopped talking for a moment.
“But if they’re stuck in 1483 for two years—or I mean, 1483 and 1484—” she began tentatively.