Risked (The Missing ) (16 page)

Daniella didn’t ask questions. Jonah saw her separate from her tracer enough to start picking at the seam along her waist.

The guard who’d been sent out for chairs came back holding one in each hand. He clattered down the stairs. When Jonah looked up again, Alexei and the tsarina were both seated in the chairs, and somehow the other Romanovs and their servants had stepped into place around them, in the same positions their tracers had held a few minutes earlier, before the bullets started flying.

Jonah did a double take—Yurovsky was back now too.

“Daniella! Hurry!” Jonah whispered.

Outside he could hear a truck revving. The tsar said something that Jonah didn’t quite catch—maybe, “Are you ready for us to get into the truck?”

“Stand up, everyone,” Yurovsky demanded.

The tsarina mumbled complaints but did it anyhow; Alexei didn’t move. Yurovsky went to stand directly in front of the tsar and pulled out a sheet of paper.

“In view of the fact that your friends are attacking Ekaterinburg to try to save you, and your relatives in Europe continue their assault on Soviet Russia,” Yurovsky began reading in a pompous voice, “the presidium of the Ural Regionial Soviet, following the will of the revolution, has decreed you must be shot. . . .”

The tsar blinked. He turned and looked at his family as if hoping they could explain everything.

“What?” the tsar asked numbly. “What?”

The Romanovs and their servants stood frozen in confused terror.

“So then . . . we’re not being taken anywhere?” Dr. Botkin asked, still not getting it.

These people,
Jonah thought.
They knew their lives were in danger. They knew death was coming for them. But they didn’t know it was coming now.

“I don’t understand. Read it again. . . . ,” the Tsar mumbled. Was he truly that befuddled? Or was he just bargaining for a little more time?

Yurovsky went back to reading, but Jonah missed the first part of what he said because Daniella hissed at him, “Almost got it—”

Jonah watched her pull threads from her seam. Yurovsky was reading so loudly now that Jonah couldn’t tune him out anymore: “. . . has decreed that you, the former tsar, Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov, must be shot for your crimes against the people. . . .”

Jonah turned and saw the tsarina and Olga cross themselves. He saw Chip and Katherine motioning to him and Gavin and Daniella—urgent gestures that undoubtedly meant,
Get out of there now!
But then Jonah stopped watching, because Daniella shoved a heavy rock into his hand—the diamond.

“Hope you’ve got a good plan for that,” Daniella muttered.

“Me too,” Jonah muttered back.

The gem in his hand was large for a diamond—somewhere between a marble and a golf ball. It was undoubtedly worth millions. But Jonah barely glanced at it.

Instead he rolled it out to the tips of his fingers, reared his arm back, and hurled the diamond toward the single lightbulb overhead.

Baseball had never been Jonah’s sport. He’d never been good at accurate throws. But maybe his problem had been that he just needed a diamond to throw with, because this one zinged straight and true toward the ceiling. It smashed perfectly into the single lightbulb, giving off a burst of shattering glass.

The room instantly went dark.

Thanks to the tracer lights, Jonah could still see fairly well, but he knew that the Romanovs and the guards would see only unending blackness around them. The guards were clustered in the doorway now, their weapons ready, but Yurovsky was screaming, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire! Don’t shoot me by mistake!”

“Then get out of the way!” one of the guards shouted back.

Jonah saw the tsar swing a fist and punch Yurovsky in the jaw, while Dr. Botkin grabbed the commander and held the man in front of him like a human shield.

“I can’t get out of the way! They’ve got me trapped!” Yurovsky screamed.

But even as he spoke, Yurovsky was reaching into his pocket and slowly pulling his arm back. What was he getting?

Jonah suddenly understood, but he was too far across the room to do anything but warn the others: “He’s got a gun! Yurovsky’s got his own gun!”

Jonah’s shouts seemed to get lost in the other shrieks and screams around him. But then Chip was at Yurovsky’s side, yanking the newly revealed gun from the man’s hand. Chip wrapped his own hands around the gun and pressed the barrel against Yurovsky’s temple.

“Tell your men to stand down!” Chip ordered him. “Tell them to step aside and let the Romanovs leave, or else you’re a dead man too!”

Chip, of course, could only say that in English, but Dr. Botkin was thinking clearly enough now to shout the same thing after him in Russian.

Okay!
Jonah thought.
This is working even better than I expected!

He hadn’t thought they’d be able to do much more
than yell something like
Everybody run for the stairs!
But now, with Chip taking Yurovsky hostage, this could be orderly and calm. Nobody would get shot even by mistake.

If we’re really lucky, we might even end up driving away in that truck,
Jonah thought a little giddily.

“Madame Demidova, Mr. Trupp, Mr. Kharitonov, hold on to me, and I’ll lead you out of here,” Anastasia—no, Daniella—was saying in the darkness. She’d separated completely from her tracer.

Jonah realized that, as a time traveler like him, she would be able to see by the light of the tracers. However, even that light seemed to be growing dimmer and dimmer.

Because so many of the tracers are dead or dying,
Jonah thought.

Even the tracer version of Anastasia was lying dim and almost lifeless on the floor where Daniella had left her behind. How horrifying must that be for Daniella to see?

“You take the servants on out right now,” Jonah told her, hoping she wouldn’t look around. “Katherine and Gavin and I can get everyone else.”

But Daniella wasn’t making much progress, as the three servants were screaming and crying and praying and maybe hadn’t even heard her. Katherine and Gavin were having the same problem with the tsarina and the oldest
Romanov girls. And Dr. Botkin was refusing to let go of Yurovsky and walk away.

That at least makes sense,
Jonah thought.
He doesn’t know who Chip is and he can’t see the gun in Chip’s hand—he’s just trying to keep control.

So maybe none of them would get out of the cellar quickly. But it would still work. Chip still had the gun to Yurovsky’s head.

Jonah glanced out toward the room where the guards were standing, to find out if they had indeed stepped aside from the doorway. It looked like they had: Jonah couldn’t actually see any of them from this angle. But he could see something else: an additional glow that wasn’t tracer light, coming from the direction of the stairs.

“Hello?” a thin, reedy voice cried out. “Alexei? Are you down there?”

A boy came into view, carrying a lantern.

It was Leonid Sednev, the kitchen boy.

Bonus!
Jonah thought.
Now he’ll be able to lead us to the Elucidator and we can make the Romanovs invisible and they really will be safe, long-term
.

But in the next moment Jonah saw one of the guards leap toward Leonid, wrap his arm around Leonid’s neck, and point a gun at the boy’s head.

“Let Yurovsky go or I shoot!” the guard screamed.

The wails and screams and cries echoed even louder around Jonah. Jonah might have even wailed himself.

How could we have lost the advantage so quickly?
he wondered.
There’s not even time to translate for Chip. . . .

But Chip already understood—and was reacting. He tightened his grip on Yurovsky and yelled back, “Let Leonid go or I’ll shoot!”

Oh, yeah,
Jonah thought.
That’s how you negotiate.

This time it was Gavin repeating Chip’s words in Russian: “Let Leonid go or Yurovsky’s a dead man!”

The guard holding Leonid looked confused in the dim glow of the lantern light. He took a halting step forward, dragging Leonid with him, bringing the circle of light closer.

“Show yourself,” the guard said. “How do I know you’re even holding Yurovsky?”

Jonah saw Katherine rush to Chip’s side and poke her finger against Yurovsky’s chest.

“You tell the guard you’re being held,” she ordered him. “Tell them you’ve got a gun at your head!”

Yurovsky just tried to squirm away.

“P-p-please,” Leonid stammered. It didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore that he was a teenager who already had facial hair. He still sounded terrified out of his wits. “Don’t hurt me. I just came to say good-bye. I heard the fighting out in the mountains and I heard the truck and I figured the guards would be taking the Romanovs somewhere else. . . . Look, this proves I’m telling the truth.”

He held out a cloth knapsack and said pleadingly, “I just wanted to bring Alexei’s toy soldiers back, so he could take them with him. . . .”

The toy soldiers!
Jonah thought.
That means he has the Elucidator here! That means we can get it back!

He took off running toward Leonid. Halfway there, Jonah realized Katherine was sprinting alongside him. They reached Leonid together and knocked the knapsack from his hand.

“Let’s divide the pile in half—faster that way,” Katherine hissed at Jonah.

Before the knapsack even hit the floor, Jonah was already tugging it open, preparing to shove half the toy soldiers toward Katherine and pull half of them toward himself. In the lantern light this was bound to look strange: the knapsack falling, the toy soldiers seeming to move around by themselves. But Jonah was beyond caring about things like that right now.

Jonah grabbed a handful of toy soldiers and practically threw them at Katherine.

And that was when he heard the first gunshot.

It sounded close.

But any gunfire would sound close in this small, enclosed space, so Jonah still had hope as he glanced up.

It was hard to hold on to that hope as he heard the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth gunshot. They came so rapidly and in such quick succession that they might as well have been machine-gun fire.

Jonah braced himself for a horrific scene: blood everywhere, the wounded and the dead falling to the floor, just as much chaos and mayhem and screaming as he’d seen (but not heard) when the tracer guards had fired upon the tracer Romanovs.

Jonah still didn’t hear any screaming this time, which was odd. In fact, he heard nothing after that fifth gunshot. And at first his eyes couldn’t make sense of what he saw:
no chaos, no mayhem, no one falling . . . for that matter, no one moving at all. Olga, Tatiana, and Maria were clustered protectively around their mother, frozen in the motion of holding her up. Gavin and Daniella were flat on the ground, but it looked like they’d dived there to get out of the way of the bullets, not that they’d been hit. Chip, Dr. Botkin, and the tsar were still clinging stubbornly to Yurovsky, but he’d stopped fighting against their grasp.

The guards stood clumped around the doorway between the two rooms. Five of them had their weapons aimed, curls of smoke frozen above the barrels.

It was only when Jonah saw the bullets themselves frozen in midair that he finally understood what had happened.

“Who stopped time?” he asked. “Can the Elucidator do that now? Katherine, did you find the Elucidator and say the command that quickly?”

Katherine squinted up at him—he was relieved to see that she could still move.

So this is just a normal case of stopped time?
Jonah wondered.
Where everything’s frozen except the people who have traveled through time?

Though, what was ever “normal” about time travel or frozen time?

“I didn’t do anything,” Katherine said, sounding as
baffled as she looked. “I don’t have the Elucidator.” She glanced down at her handfuls of unsorted toy soldiers. “At least, not that I know of.”

Someone behind Jonah made a small noise—maybe a whimper. Jonah looked around and realized that the frozen glow of Leonid’s lantern had reached the tips of the tsar’s boots.

So the guards knew where he was, and that’s why they started shooting,
Jonah thought.

All five of the bullets suspended in midair had been speeding toward the general vicinity of the tsar. They were various distances away. But—Jonah stood up and looked at the exact angles—only two of them were on course to actually hit him.

One bullet looked like it was about to hit Dr. Botkin.

One bullet seemed about to graze Yurovsky’s wrist.

And one bullet was headed straight for Chip’s heart.

It was Chip who had whimpered.

“Chip! Get out of the way!” Jonah screamed. “Before time starts again!”

“If I do, the bullet will just hit one of the servants behind me!” Chip protested. A trickle of sweat inched down his face.

“You and your medieval chivalry,” Jonah grumbled. He flicked the bullet toward the floor. It bounced. Jonah
stepped on it to keep it from hitting anyone else.

Katherine zoomed past him and dived for the other four bullets, knocking them toward the floor as well.

From the direction of the stairs, Jonah heard someone clapping. Somehow it sounded sarcastic—wasn’t clapping almost always sarcastic when only one person clapped?

“Bravo, bravo!” a voice cried. “It’s always so entertaining to see what you Skidmores will come up with next!”

“It’s really a shame we can’t let you go on,” a second voice agreed. “But we refuse to let you destroy time completely!”

Two men stepped out from the shadows.

“Gary and Hodge?” Jonah asked incredulously.

Before Jonah could say or do anything else, Gavin leaped up from the floor and began racing toward the two men.

“You lied to me!” he roared.

At practically the same moment, Chip whipped around to point his gun at the two men.