“Do you look like Mom’s and Dad’s faces put together?” Jonah had asked grumpily.
“Fortunately, she didn’t get my big ears,” Dad had joked, while Mom shook her head warningly at Katherine and pulled her aside to have a little talk. Jonah didn’t have to hear the words “Jonah … sensitive … adoption” to know what the talk was about. And he hadn’t even been thinking about being adopted—about how he’d never know which of his features came from which birth parent. He’d just thought that Katherine was acting stupid.
But watching Chip and the tracer boy was like watching a perfect version of those mirrors, ones that completely combined two people.
The tracer boy/Chip began patting the younger brother on his back.
“Forsooth,” the tracer/Chip said, his voice coming out loud and strong. “Our father would be proud of us, should we be so brave. And God will reward our courage.”
Actually, that might not have been exactly what the tracer/Chip said. That was what Jonah thought he heard, but the words were distorted, oddly inflected.
The king of England is bound to have an English accent, Jonah reminded himself. But even that didn’t seem like enough of an explanation.
“Did people really talk like that in the fifteenth century?” Katherine asked. “Is that, like, Old English?”
Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. Foreign-country accent and foreign time accent.
“Actually, at this time people were speaking Middle English, transitioning toward early modern English,” JB’s voice came softly from the Elucidator in Jonah’s hand.
“Can’t you give us a translation?” Katherine asked.
“What you just heard, that was the translation,” JB said. “The Elucidator does it automatically for time travelers. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t have understood a thing.”
“‘Forsooth’? That’s the translation?” Jonah asked incredulously.
“The Elucidator translates only up to the nearest time period that could be understandable. Time travelers need to remember they’re out of place,” JB said. “You’re not going to hear King Edward the Fifth saying in his rightful time and place, ‘Dude! This sucks!’”
“Chip would say that,” Jonah said, anxiously watching his friend’s face, blended with the tracer of the king’s.
“Shh!” Alex said. “The other boy’s speaking. …”
But the younger boy’s response was soundless because he was still just a ghostly tracer.
Chip shoved his face away from his tracer boy’s for a moment and said, “You guys try it!”
Katherine sat down in the younger tracer boy’s lap. Jonah was impressed—he wasn’t sure he wanted to be that brave.
But Katherine didn’t blend in with the tracer the way Chip did. It was comical how hard she was trying and how badly she was failing: The tracer would lean forward, and a second later she’d lean too. Or the tracer would wave his arm, and Katherine, trying to keep up, would lift her arm just as the tracer was putting his down.
Then the tracer stood up and walked away.
Katherine didn’t try to follow.
“That didn’t work,” she said, casting an envious glance at Chip and his tracer, who were still moving completely in sync.
“That’s because you don’t have any connection to the tracer,” Alex said. “He’s not you.”
“Oh, yeah?” Katherine said. “You try.”
Alex didn’t have to. Because, just then, the tracer walked into him. It was like watching magnets meet, bonding instantly. Alex melded with the tracer just as completely as Chip had.
The tracer/Alex kept walking, toward a window at the far side of the room. He leaned out the window, his elbows braced against the thick stones of the wall.
“God bless Mother, in sanctuary at Westminster,” he said, his voice plaintive and sweet.
Jonah tiptoed over behind the tracer/Alex—somehow tiptoeing seemed to be appropriate. Out the tall window he could see little except inky blackness. It was like being at Boy Scout camp, out in the woods, miles away from streetlights. Wait—was that a torch down there near the ground?
Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. No electricity. Indoors or out.
Somehow all that vast darkness was scarier than timesickness, scarier than the tracer boys, scarier than watching Chip and Alex merge with their past selves. This was real. This wasn’t just some really good special effects in a dark room, maybe a TV show where someone like Ashton Kutcher would burst out in a few moments, crying, “Fooled you! You’ve been punk’d!”
Something rattled at the opposite end of the room. Jonah noticed for the first time that there was another door besides the one they’d walked through when they discovered the tracer boys. It was the handle of that door that was rattling.
Someone was coming in.
“We’re supposed to hide!” Jonah hissed.
It was five steps from the window back to the first door, back to the completely dark room they’d arrived in at the beginning. Jonah covered that distance with amazing speed. He spun around to see that Katherine was cramming herself under the bed. But Alex and Chip hadn’t budged. They were still joined with their tracers, Alex at the window, Chip perched on the bed.
Jonah considered racing back and jerking Alex away at least, but there wasn’t time. The door was already opening.
A girl stood in the doorway.
“Esteemed sirs,” she said—or something like that—and dropped into a curtsy, sweeping her plain, roughly woven skirt off the floor. “I’ve come for thy tray.”
“Another servant already took the tray,” the combination Chip/tracer boy said, his tone as haughty as a king’s. “It’s late. My brother couldst have been sleeping.”
“Thou mightest not wish to sleep this night,” the girl said.
She winked.
And then she backed away, pulling the door shut behind her.