“Jerk!” she called up to him.
Jonah didn’t bother answering, or helping her up. He scrambled up the tree—tree climbing was something else that was made much more complicated by armor. He ended up clinging to the thick central branch, peering out through the leaves.
Hundreds of silver helmets lay before him, worn by hundreds of soldiers fidgeting on the sidelines of the battle.
“Well?” Katherine called from the ground below. “Do you see Chip and Alex?”
“I … I don’t know,” Jonah stammered. He hadn’t thought about this being hard too, just finding their friends. Why hadn’t he asked JB exactly what kind of armor Chip and Alex would be wearing, exactly where they’d be standing?
Why hadn’t he requested a GPS reading, while he was at it?
“Let me see,” Katherine demanded.
“No, no—stay where it’s safe …,” Jonah began.
But Katherine already had a foot on the lowest branch. A second later she was standing beside him, on the other side of the tree trunk. Silently she surveyed the rows and rows of helmets.
“See?” Jonah said. “It’s not doing any good to stand up here, we’re just putting ourselves in danger. …”
Katherine opened her mouth—To tell me off, Jonah thought. To argue. But she surprised him by throwing her head back and screaming at the top of her lungs, “Chip Winston! Where are you?”
That was really stupid, Jonah fumed. No one could hear her over the sounds of the battle. Or if they do hear her, it’ll be the wrong people, soldiers who’ll think we’re spies, maybe. … They might not even look for us, they’ll just, I don’t know, set the tree on fire. …
At first nothing happened. And then, slowly, slowly, one of the silver helmets began to turn around.
THIRTY-TWO
“Third row from the back, fourth person in,” Katherine said, jumping down from the tree.
She landed hard and rolled forward, practically doing a somersault in her armor. Some of her hair dragged out on the ground, collecting more mud to go with the mud on the chest and backside of her armor. She took off running.
“Wait for me!” Jonah cried.
He jumped too, his armor clanking as he hit the ground. A few of the soldiers in the back row looked around nervously, but Jonah ignored them.
Katherine was darting through the rows of soldiers, dodging bulging packs of arrows and jutting-out bows and swords that the soldiers kept at the ready, pointed out, as if they were sure they’d be called into the action at any moment. Jonah did his best to keep up.
They came upon Alex first, standing quietly and resolutely in the lineup of soldiers. Because of the armor and helmet Jonah could see nothing but Alex’s face, which looked surprisingly like the twenty-first-century Alex’s, rather than the fifteenth-century Prince Richard’s.
Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. If Chip aged from twelve to fourteen between 1483 and 1485, Alex would have aged from ten to twelve. Not that much different from the thirteen-year-old I knew …
Chip was just beyond Alex, standing a little apart from the other soldiers. Up close it was even weirder to see him two years older, with facial hair and a more defined jawline and a thick, muscular neck. Did they have steroids in the fifteenth century? Jonah wondered. But it wasn’t really the physical changes that startled Jonah the most—it was the look in Chip’s eyes, a wise, worldly look, as though he knew all sorts of things a thirteen-year-old wouldn’t have learned yet.
Katherine planted herself exactly between the two boys.
“Chip? Alex?” she called softly.
Neither boy moved a muscle. Both continued staring, as if hypnotized, directly out into the battle.
Jonah began to doubt that it really was Chip who’d turned around when Katherine screamed his name. He stepped back for a moment and counted—Chip was the sixth person in from the edge, not the fourth. The fourth person was an old, whiskery man. They were just lucky that that man had turned around, that he’d been standing so close to Chip and Alex.
Hopelessness began to sweep over Jonah. What if they couldn’t even get Chip and Alex to acknowledge their presence?
Jonah stepped forward and tugged on Chip’s arm. Not hard—he wasn’t trying to get Chip completely away from his tracer. It wasn’t time for that yet, and he couldn’t do it in front of all the other soldiers. But he wanted Chip—the real Chip, the twenty-first-century Chip—to come out just for an instant, just long enough that Jonah could tell him what was going to happen.
Jonah’s fingers seemed to slip right off Chip’s arm.
“Let me try,” Katherine said.
She pushed at Chip’s back just as uselessly. She pushed harder. She tugged, she yanked, she stepped back, got a running start, and tried to tackle him.
“Careful,” Jonah said. “This is what made JB pull us out the last time.”
“But it’s not working!” Katherine muttered through gritted teeth.
Jonah sidled up beside Chip and leaned in close to whisper in his ear.
“Please, Chip,” he begged. “Remember who you are. We’ve got to get you out of here, for your own good. Remember home? Remember cell phones and iPods and TVs and computers and cars and … and pizza! Remember pizza?”
Chip turned his head. But it was only to look at Alex, only to say, “Watch Norfolk’s men. They’re fighting the hardest.”
“Hello?” Jonah screamed. But the sound got lost in the cheers and shrieks from the battlefield. Chip continued to look right through Jonah.
“I have an idea,” Katherine said.
She shoved past Jonah and put her arm around Chip’s shoulder. She had to reach up high and stand on tiptoes; he was that much taller than her now.
“Chip,” she said, her lips almost touching his ear, “six boys have asked me to be their girlfriend in the past year.”
“Katherine, what are you doing?” Jonah fumed. “Nobody cares about that right now!”