Risked (The Missing ) (11 page)

“Oops,” Anastasia said with a giggle, quickly covering her mistake. “Stabbed myself with the needle. Silly me.”

“Don’t get blood on that blouse,” her mother scolded.

“Oh, I’m not bleeding,” Anastasia said, holding up a clear, unpricked finger. “I promise.”

Jonah had to admire her skill at lying. But he saw that the sleeve of a dark blue sweatshirt—Daniella’s Michigan sweatshirt—appeared briefly around her wrist when she deviated from what Anastasia would have done in original time.

No one else seemed to notice, though, and the roomful of Romanovs settled back into their silent reading and sewing. All the tracer lights blinked out quickly, returning the room to its smoky gloom.

Jonah didn’t know how any of them could bear to just sit there.

“Chip, Katherine, and I are going to scout around, see what else is going on,” he whispered in Daniella/Anastasia’s ear. “You just keep acting like Anastasia.”

Daniella nodded, the motion so nearly imperceptible that Jonah barely saw any tracer light.

Jonah grabbed Chip and Katherine each by an arm and tugged them away from the Romanovs, into the deserted dining room. In a whisper he quickly explained what he’d seen and heard in the guard office.

“We’ve got to find out how much time we have,” he told the others. “And what other allies we might have. Those guards we went past, coming into the house—they said something about what the commander had planned for tonight. But we don’t know what it is, and—”

“Jonah, yes we do!” Katherine hissed. “Remember? Daniella said the date today was July 16, 1918. And remember what we saw on the computer back home? About how the entire Romanov family was executed in the early morning hours of July 17, 1918? Don’t you think that’s what the guards were talking about?”

Jonah had forgotten about seeing that date on the computer. It hadn’t meant that much to him before he’d been in 1918, before he’d met any of the Romanovs. But now he staggered back against the wall.

Hopeless,
he thought.
This is just hopeless.

Even if “early morning hours” meant as late as five or six a.m., that could be less than twelve hours away.

“But remember, when Gavin looked online the day before you did, it said Alexei and Anastasia escaped,”
Chip said. “So isn’t it possible that we could do something so that the next time anyone looks at a computer in the twenty-first century, it says that none of the Romanovs were executed? Because that’s what really happens?”

Jonah couldn’t tell if Chip was saying that because he really believed it, or if he was just trying to make everyone feel better. Either way, Jonah decided to go along with it.

“Absolutely,” Jonah said. “Everything is still in flux.”

He tried not to think about the look on Daniella’s face when she’d said to Gavin, so calmly, “We’re supposed to die, aren’t we?” He tried not to think about how fate had seemed to take over on their last trip through time, to the extent that everything about their friend JB’s life had come to seem preordained.

As if nothing they might plan to do could possibly matter.

“So,” Jonah said, a little too brightly, totally faking it. “Where do you think we should start searching for information? Back with the guards or in Alexei’s room? Don’t you think there still might be some information Gavin isn’t telling us?”

“Maybe we should split up,” Chip said. “We don’t want Gavin to feel like we’re ganging up on him. Who do you think he’d trust the most?”

“Um, none of us?” Katherine said, rolling her eyes.

Jonah sighed.

“I’ll go talk to him,” he said. “You two see if you can find out anything else by hanging out near the guards.”

Jonah headed toward Alexei’s room, and the other two went back toward the guards’ office.

I’ll pull Gavin away from his tracer, and maybe he’ll be so grateful to get away from the pain that he’ll tell me all sorts of things,
Jonah thought.
That is, unless he’s lying to us about not needing immediate medical care, and even as Gavin he’s in a lot of pain.

But when Jonah stepped into Alexei’s room, the boy’s bed was empty. Instead, Alexei was lying on his stomach on the floor with another boy, playing with the vast lineup of toy soldiers.

“Boom!” Alexei shouted. “My cannon fire just knocked out your front ranks!”

He reached out and scattered the first two lines of soldiers on the opposite side.

“And my artillery just killed your left flank!” the other boy responded, upending twenty or thirty of Alexei’s men.

“Leonid, you can’t kill that many people at once,” Alexei complained, setting most of his men back into place.

“How do you know?” the other boy asked.

“Because I’m the tsarevitch, and you’re just a kitchen boy,” Alexei said. He paused, then added, “I know people
say
that I’m not the tsarevitch anymore and that I’ll never be tsar, but they’re wrong. You’ll see.”

The other boy didn’t say anything, but just lay there watching Alexei cheat.

Jonah couldn’t remember ever playing with toy soldiers like this—well, who would want to in the twenty-first century, when there were video games to play instead? And anyhow, his mom had always kind of had a hang-up about letting him play games that involved pretend guns and killing people. But it seemed like Leonid and Alexei were acting like seven- or eight-year-olds, and they both looked a lot older than that. Leonid had the beginnings of dark beard stubble along his jaw—was he fifteen? Sixteen?
Seventeen?
It was even harder to tell how old Alexei was, since he was so thin and seemed to be in such constant pain. But Gavin and his tracer seemed about the same height, so Alexei must be at least thirteen.

Oh, wait, didn’t Katherine and I see a birth year listed for Alexei on the Internet?
Jonah wondered.
Nineteen-oh . . . something
.

That didn’t help.

Alexei stretched to reach the last soldier. He gritted his teeth, as if this simple movement took incredible effort. Or caused incredible pain.

“I’ll help you advance your men in the next battle,” Leonid offered.

Oh,
Jonah thought, watching the older boy’s face.
Leonid is just humoring Alexei. Like a babysitter or something. He
wouldn’t be playing with toy soldiers on his own.

Alexei looked up at Leonid, and for the first time since coming back into this room, Jonah saw a glow of tracer light.

“You’re a good friend, Leonid,” Alexei said. “You’ve been very loyal, both at Tobolsk and here in Ekaterinburg. When you leave today, you should . . . should take half of my soldiers with you. They belong to you now.”

This was completely different from whatever Alexei had said in original time. Jonah could tell by the sudden burst of tracer lights around his mouth.

“And then I’ll have to carry them back and forth when we play again tomorrow?” Leonid complained, creating his own glow of tracer lights.

Tomorrow,
Jonah thought.
Alexei knows they won’t be playing toy soldiers together tomorrow. Because, thanks to Gavin’s memories, he knows when everybody is supposed to die.

Did this also mean that Alexei—and Gavin—had given up on fighting fate?

Jonah found that he couldn’t bear to stay in this dim room anymore, watching teenagers play with toy soldiers like little kids. Anyhow, as long as Leonid was around, there was no way Jonah could pull Gavin out of his tracer and interrogate him.

Jonah backed out of the room. He was surprised to find that Anastasia and her two oldest sisters—Olga and Tatiana, if he remembered right—had moved their sewing projects into their own bedroom. They sat awkwardly in a circle on the floor, pushing needles in and out of piles of frilly girl clothes.

Corsets?
Jonah wondered. His knowledge of old-fashioned women’s clothing didn’t go much further than “dress” and “skirt,” so he was kind of proud of himself for coming up with the other word.

Oooh,
he realized.
Maybe that’s why they’re in here sewing now, instead of out in the other room with their father. Maybe there’s some rule about not working on clothes like that around men. Like, maybe it’s considered underwear?

“Do you have all your medicines arranged properly?” one of the older sisters asked Anastasia.

“Yes, Tatiana,” Anastasia said with a knowing grin. “All arranged and secure as soon as I finish here.”

Jonah couldn’t understand. Medicines? Was Anastasia sick somehow too?

He stepped forward, and the floorboard squeaked beneath his foot.

All three girls glanced up, giving off tiny bursts of tracer light. Olga and Tatiana looked down again immediately, as if they thought they’d just imagined the noise. But Anastasia—or Daniella, really—met Jonah’s eye. This made sense: He was still completely invisible to her sisters, of course, but she could see his translucent outline because she’d traveled through time.

Medicines?
he mouthed at Daniella/Anastasia.
What medicines?

Holding her hand off to the side where the sisters couldn’t see, Daniella bent and unbent her finger at Jonah, signaling,
Come here.

Jonah went and knelt beside her, his ear close to her mouth.

“We’re sewing all our jewels into our camisoles, just in case,” Daniella whispered. “We call it ‘arranging our medicines’ as a code so the guards don’t know what we’re doing. There’s probably several million dollars’ worth of diamonds in my lap right now. Is that . . . is that something that could be useful, do you think? For bribing someone when we all escape?”

Jonah shrugged, and turned his head so his mouth was next to her ear.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “We’ll figure out what to do. I’m going to catch up with Chip and Katherine now, okay?”

Daniella nodded.

“Did you say something, Anastasia?” the third sister, Olga, asked.

“Oh, just humming,” Daniella said. Or, no—Jonah should think of her as Anastasia again, since she had completely joined with her tracer once more.

“Music. What a splendid idea. Let’s all sing together,” Olga suggested. She began in a clear, beautiful voice, “With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the soul of your servant, where there is neither pain, nor sorrow, nor suffering . . .”

Jonah shivered, without quite knowing why.

“Can’t we sing something else besides the prayer for the dead?” Anastasia asked.

“It’s what I feel most like singing right now,” Olga said.

Jonah backed away to watch the two sisters staring each other down: Olga pale and gaunt and as distant as if she were already dead, Anastasia flushed and little-girl perturbed and very much alive.

Still, a moment later all three sisters began singing together: “With the saints, give rest, O Christ . . .”

Jonah tiptoed out of the room.

He made his way through the empty dining room and the smoky living room. The tsar was smoking yet another cigarette; the tsarina was staring off into space as Maria read to her from the Bible.

Jonah went on into the guards’ section of the house, and into the office. He had to maneuver past a cluster of guards lounging around the doorway, but the office itself had cleared out. Only Chip and Katherine were in there now. Katherine was standing beside a huge desk with papers spread over the top, poking at them in a way that made Jonah remember how challenging it had been to look through Albert Einstein’s papers on their last trip through time.

“This is useless,” she muttered as Jonah walked past.

He kept going, to the spot where Chip was leaning out one of the two office windows. After the smoke-filled living room and all the claustrophobic, dim rooms with
whitewashed windows, Jonah was just overjoyed to see an open window. He stopped beside Chip and put his head out the window as well.

“That was quick,” Chip whispered. “Did you find out anything good?”

“No,” Jonah whispered back. He explained why he hadn’t been able to ask Gavin a single question. He decided not to mention Alexei giving his toys away or Anastasia and her sisters singing a song about death. It all seemed too creepy. Even sewing the jewels into the clothes seemed like it could be a hopeless thing to do—intended to make sure that the jewels would be buried with the Romanovs’ bodies, more than anything else.

Jonah focused on the view ahead of him. By craning his neck, he could just barely see over the wooden fence surrounding the house. And beyond it was . . .

Another wooden fence.

How paranoid are these guards that they had to put up two tall fences to hold in four girls, a sick old woman in a wheelchair, a defenseless old man, and a boy who’s in too much pain to walk?
Jonah wondered.

“Can you see anything past the fences?” Jonah asked Chip. Chip had had a growth spurt after coming back from the 1400s, and now he was a couple inches taller than Jonah.

“There’s a church steeple over there where someone’s set up . . . well, my military knowledge isn’t much good in this time period, but I think that’d be a good place to stash a man with a bow and arrows,” Chip said. “Looks to me like they’ve got a sniper’s nest there with—would it be machine guns? Do they have machine guns in 1918?”

Jonah stood on his tiptoes and squinted, but it did no good.

“What are the snipers aiming at?” Jonah asked.

“This house,” Chip said. He tilted his head, as if that would help him figure out angles. “Looks like the main gun is pointed at the bedroom where Alexei is right now. Did you notice there were other beds in there? And it’s the nicest bedroom? I think that’s where the parents sleep. So someone could be planning to assassinate the tsar in his own room.”

Chip had spent two and a half years steeped in the bloodthirsty 1400s, so he was able to say that almost casually. But Jonah had to tell himself,
Katherine said the Romanovs were killed in that basement, not in their beds. So there’s no danger to anyone as long as we’re hanging out on this second floor.

Of course, if he and Chip and Katherine thought they could alter fate and time to save the Romanovs’ lives, wasn’t it possible to alter the place where everyone was killed?