Jonah waited in his hiding place, holding his breath. When nothing else happened, he dared to step out and hiss, “Didn’t she see Chip and Alex? She was looking right at them! And what was that winking about? Why shouldn’t the tracer boys sleep?”
Katherine rolled out from under the bed.
“I couldn’t see a thing,” she complained. “Who was it? What do you mean, winking?”
Jonah looked to Chip and Alex for backup—they’d been directly in line for the winking; they would have seen it better. Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing. He also might have just imagined that the conversation of oddly inflected, archaic words made sense. Probably Chip and Alex could understand everything better, since this was their time period.
Chip and Alex gave no sign that they’d heard Katherine or Jonah. They were still completely intact with the tracer boys.
“Come,” the Chip/tracer boy said, patting the bedding beside him. “’Tis barely past midsummer, but this night shall be long. Thou mayest sleep. I shall keep watch.”
The Alex/tracer boy reluctantly pulled away from the window.
“Good night, Mother,” he said, blowing a kiss out into the darkness.
He crossed the room and curled up on the bed beside his brother.
“Chip? Alex?” Jonah called, a note of panic entering his voice. “Come out of there!”
Was it also his imagination that the tracer boys’ images seemed to be growing stronger as his view of Chip and Alex faded away? Jonah could no longer make out the familiar Nike swishes on Chip’s tennis shoes, or the wild-haired picture of Einstein on Alex’s T-shirt.
“We’re going to have to grab them!” Katherine exclaimed.
She took hold of the Chip/tracer boy’s arm and began pulling.
“That’s not going to work,” Jonah scoffed.
But it was working. A second later Chip slipped off the bed, leaving the tracer boy behind. Unfortunately, Katherine had tugged a little too hard—Chip landed on top of her in the middle of the floor.
“This is how you thank me for rescuing you?” Katherine joked, pushing him away. Then, crouching beside him, she stopped pushing and impulsively wrapped her arms around him, hugging him close. “Oh, Chip, I was so scared—I thought maybe you’d disappeared forever.”
Chip squinted at her, as if profoundly puzzled. He sat up and glanced from her to the tracer boy and back again.
“Chip?” Katherine said, sitting back on her heels. “Are you all right?”
“Um,” Chip said. He shook his head, like he was trying to clear it. “That was so weird. When we were together, it was like I had his brain. I could think his thoughts.”
“So, what does the king of England think about?” Jonah asked. He wanted to make this into a joke. He didn’t like the way Chip sounded so serious. He didn’t like how scared he still felt, even with Chip away from his tracer.
Chip looked up at Jonah. His expression was more serious than ever.
“He’s not sure he’s going to stay king,” Chip said solemnly. “He thinks his uncle is going to kill him.”
FIVE
“No!” Katherine gasped.
“What didst thou expect?” Chip asked. His eyes goggled out a bit. He stopped, pounded the palm of his hand against the side of his head, and tried again. “I mean, what’d you think was going to happen? Weren’t you listening when JB and Gary and Hodge said we were all endangered children in history? It’s pretty clear that being kidnapped saved our lives. So sending us back means …” He got a faraway look in his eyes. He peered out, not at Katherine or Jonah, but toward the dark window at the opposite end of the room. “It means we’re supposed to die.”
There was a bitter twist to his words, but his face was strangely calm. Accepting.
Jonah crouched beside his sister. He reached out and grabbed Chip’s shoulders, and began shaking him, hard.
“Don’t say that,” Jonah said. “JB promised he’d give us a chance to save history and you and Alex. Didn’t you hear that?”
“I did,” Chip said, still maddeningly placid. “But did you hear him telling us how to do that?”
“I …” Jonah realized he’d dropped the Elucidator when he’d reached for Chip’s shoulders. He felt around on the dim floor to find it again. His fingers slid over something that felt like a thin rock, maybe the kind you’d skip across a lake. “JB?”
“Yes?”
The voice had definitely come from the rock.
Oooh, Jonah thought. The Elucidator acts like a chameleon. It tries to blend in with whatever time period it’s in.
The fact that blending in in the fifteenth century meant impersonating a rock was not very comforting. Jonah wanted buttons to push, gadgets and gizmos, high-tech whizzing and whirring.
“We could use a little information,” Jonah said. “And advice. Is Chip’s uncle—I mean, Edward the Fifth’s uncle—is he going to try to kill him? What should we do?”
“I can’t tell you the future,” JB said.
“It’s not the future! It’s the past!” Jonah said. “It’s already happened!”
“Not from where you’re sitting,” JB said.
Jonah considered flinging the rock out the window. He wanted to, badly.
“I’m not trying to be mean,” JB continued. “I just don’t want any of you burned at the stake as witches and warlocks for knowing too much.”
Was burning at the stake one of the things that went on in the fifteenth century? Jonah shivered and was glad that JB couldn’t see him.
“None of you are trained at time travel,” JB continued. “You have to be very, very careful.”
“What if we’d already known everything about Edward the Fifth?” Jonah argued. “What if we’d learned all about him at school?”
“Did you?” JB asked.
“No,” Jonah admitted. The only English king Jonah could remember learning about was George III, the one who’d been king during the American Revolution. Taxation without representation, and all that. But that would have been in, what, 1776? Long after the fifteenth century.