Risked (The Missing ) (22 page)

Is it still on voice commands?
Jonah wondered.
If she touches it, if she even grabs ahold of Katherine while she’s saying stuff like that . . . what will happen? Is she going to take Katherine and everyone else back into danger?

As quickly as he could, Jonah shoved his chair back and tried to rush toward the front of the room, toward Katherine and Daniella. But “quickly” for him was now an old man’s pace. Just lifting his feet was like trying to raise weights tied to his legs.

Before he’d gone two steps, Jonah saw that the bearded man had already grabbed Daniella and was jerking her back from Katherine.

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “That’s pointless. It’ll only get you killed with the rest of them. There’s nothing you can do.”

Daniella turned and tried to shove him away. He held on even more tightly, pulling her close.

“Why can’t we save them?” she wailed into his chest. “Why? Why do they have to die?” She lifted her head, a gleam of hope in her teary eyes. “I know! We’ll go back and try from the beginning, all over again! Send us back a second time, starting in the afternoon, and this time we’ll work it all out, we’ll save everyone, we’ll bring them
all
here. . . .”

Jonah expected the bearded man to start lecturing
her, to unleash the sarcasm he’d used so scathingly on Katherine.

Instead the man hugged Daniella and gently patted her on the head.

“Oh, my dear child,” he said. “I’m so sorry. It just doesn’t work that way. Not in the real world. You just got the closest thing anyone can have to a second chance, without endangering the rest of humanity. You’re still alive. Your brother’s alive. One of your sisters is alive. I’m so sorry about everyone else.”

Daniella collapsed and kept sobbing.

By now Jonah had reached the front of the room. Someone had had the sense to stop showing the continuing scene from 1918 on the wall. It had been replaced by a column of words:

REST IN PEACE

Nicholas Romanov

Alexandra Romanova

Olga Romanova

Tatiana Romanova

Evgeny Sergeevich Botkin

Anna Demidova

Alexei Trupp

Ivan Kharitonov

Jonah couldn’t stand to look at those names.

The ones we failed,
he thought.
Maybe if I had been able to go back with Katherine . . . If I hadn’t been shot . . .

He wanted to see Katherine for himself, to make sure that she wasn’t hurt. Why wasn’t she popping up as quickly as Daniella had?

She was still on the floor beside Chip. She had her hand stretched out, touching Chip’s face.

“And see? This time I saved you,” she was murmuring.

“Thank you,” Chip whispered back.

Oh, no,
Jonah.
Ugh, ugh, ugh.

It looked like the two of them were about to kiss.

Jonah did not need to watch his little sister kissing his best friend.

Maybe that should make him my former best friend?
he wondered disgustedly.

Jonah didn’t want to see or think about any of it, especially when he already felt so woozy and nauseated.

Besides, someone was tugging on the right leg of his jeans.

Jonah looked down and saw Gavin on the floor below him.

“Please,” Gavin moaned.

Weakly, he motioned for Jonah to bend down beside him. On unsteady legs, Jonah crouched down.

“Please, I’m . . . I’m bleeding to death,” Gavin said.

Jonah looked up, a motion that made the room spin. But he managed to scream: “Help! Gavin needs a doctor! Quick!”

Now others were bending down alongside Jonah, by Gavin’s side. Jonah started to scoot back out of the way to make room for someone who would know more than just basic first aid. But Gavin clamped his hand on Jonah’s arm. He had a surprisingly strong grip. And, just as surprisingly, none of the grown-ups were shoving Jonah away.

“I’m going to die, and there’s nothing anyone can do to save me,” Gavin said. His face was frighteningly pale, as if most of the blood in his body had already drained away. “So you have to listen to my last words and tell my family. My other family, I mean, my parents who raised me. I’m squared away with the Romanovs. But tell Mom and Dad I’m sorry. I’m not mad at Mom anymore for trying to protect me all the time. I love them and—”

“Young man,” a voice said from behind Jonah. “You are in no danger whatsoever of bleeding to death.”

“Yes, I am!” Gavin hissed through gritted teeth. He almost sounded angry that anyone could doubt him. “Don’t you know I have hemophilia? I have an internal bleed going in my hip that started back in 1918—if you
just touch it, you’ll feel how warm it is, how much blood is there. And I just got shot three—no”—he looked down at himself—“four times. I’m dying! Quit making me spend my last moments fighting with you! I have important things to say!”

“Yes, you do.” This was JB’s voice. “And we’re going to make sure you have time to say them all. You’re not dying. No one has ever died in a time hollow. You’re not even getting much blood on the carpet.”

Gavin’s head lolled forward. Jonah followed his gaze. There was, indeed, no pool of blood forming around Gavin, and no one seemed to be in any rush to treat him.

“How can this be?” Gavin asked, sounding stunned.

“Things don’t change in a time hollow,” JB explained patiently. “You can’t lose any more blood. Of course, you also can’t heal, so after we operate and get the bullets out, like we did for Jonah, we’ll have to take you somewhere else. But Gavin, I can assure you—you’re going to
live
.”

Gavin seemed to be struggling very hard to accept this.

“Why?” he finally asked. “How can I deserve that? Why would you help me? After I forced the other kids to go back to 1918, after I put their lives in danger . . . after I sided with Gary and Hodge . . .”

“You get another chance,” JB said. “How about if you
help us catch Gary and Hodge and we call it even?”

Gavin’s eyes glowed. Maybe it was Jonah’s imagination, but it even seemed like some of the color came back to his cheeks.

“Deal,” he said.

Jonah struggled out of his hospital bed and picked up a basketball lying on the floor. Standing unsteadily—and swaying slightly—he began bouncing the ball up and down. He started to bend a little, dribbling lower and lower.

That’s progress,
he told himself.
Yesterday that probably would have popped a stitch or two.

He heard a sigh from the next bed over.

“If you’re going to bounce that thing anyway,” Gavin said resignedly, “you might as well bounce it back and forth with me.”

“Okay,” Jonah said, dribbling the ball gradually toward the end of the beds, where there was more space. “I mean, as long as you’re sure you won’t get hurt.”

Gavin made a face at Jonah, then slid out of his own bed and walked toward the open area.

“You know, I’m tougher than you are,” Gavin said. “I survived being hit by four bullets. You only took two.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jonah retorted. “If you’d wanted, you could have taken my two bullets along with your own. Wouldn’t have bothered me.”

“What, you really wanted me to die?” Gavin asked.

“Not
then
,” Jonah said.

That came out sounding completely wrong. Jonah had been trying for the same kind of jokey tough-guy talk that kids did all the time at school. But somehow it was different when death had been so close for both of them.

Jonah stopped the ball.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “Really, Gavin, there wasn’t ever a time that I wanted you dead. You know that, don’t you?”

“Would you just shut up and bounce the ball?” Gavin asked roughly.

Jonah gave the ball a gentle toss. Gavin swatted it back to him. They kept going, back and forth and back and forth, in silence.

Jonah and Gavin had been in this hospital room for two weeks, waiting for their wounds to heal enough that nobody would notice anything out of the ordinary when they returned home. Technically, Jonah knew, they were living in the future—the distant future, so far beyond
the early twenty-first century that it was long after any moment they’d reach even as very, very old men. But they’d been absolutely forbidden to see any of the actual future. Their room was a perfect replica of a twenty-first-century hospital room, and guards stationed outside their room monitored everyone and everything going in or out.

At one time, such a setup would have driven Jonah crazy with curiosity.

But for now he was fine with sitting in a hospital room that looked like any hospital room back in twenty-first-century Ohio. He was fine with doing nothing more exciting than bouncing a ball back and forth with Gavin.

“Do you actually
care
about basketball?” Gavin asked, finally breaking the silence. “You’re trying out for your school team, right? Is that, like,
important
to you?”

Jonah bounced the ball back and forth twice, considering this.

“I don’t
care
care,” Jonah said. “I think I can make the team—I mean, after I heal. And that would be nice, but it’s not that big a deal. It’s just for fun. You win a basketball game, great. You lose, so what?”

“It’s not life or death,” Gavin said.

“Yeah,” Jonah agreed. He was surprised that Gavin understood so well. “Yeah, I think maybe that’s why I like it.”

The laptop computer sitting on Jonah’s bedside table began to ring.

“Two o’clock Skype call, right on schedule,” Gavin said. “Dude, the others must really miss us.”

It wasn’t really Skype they were using to talk back and forth with Chip, Katherine, Daniella, Maria, and Leonid in another room. But it was set up to look that way. To Jonah’s surprise, even after Katherine’s arm had healed, JB still kept all the other kids together in a time-hollow room while Jonah and Gavin were recuperating.

Katherine was the one who’d figured out why.

“Duh, Jonah,” she’d whispered during one of their daily calls. “You and Gavin still need to heal medically, but all of us need to heal psychologically. We saw eight people gunned down in cold blood. We actually kind of saw it twice, if you count the first time with the tracers. We’ve probably all got—what’s that thing called? PTSD?”

Jonah could have pointed out that he and Katherine had seen plenty of awful things in other centuries and then just gone back to their normal lives.

But Katherine knew that too.

“I think . . . I think all the time agents are learning from their mistakes,” Katherine had continued. “Doesn’t it seem like they’re doing things differently now?”

Jonah was still thinking about that one.

Gavin had gone to answer the Skype call.

“Really?” he was saying. “Really? That’s great!”

“What are you talking about?” Jonah asked, dropping the basketball to go join Gavin with the call.

“Daniella says JB figured everything out about what to do with Maria and Leonid,” Gavin told him. “They’ll be in the twenty-first century with us. They’re going to live with your friend Angela. Leonid’s already set to enroll in high school, and Maria’s looking at college classes.”

“That is great,” Jonah said. “But—isn’t JB worried about messing up time? Doesn’t that throw things off, with the way the twenty-first century is supposed to go?”

On the computer screen, Daniella shrugged.

“No one
here
was worried about that,” she said. “But JB’s on his way over to talk to you about it.”

“To me?” Jonah repeated.

Just then the door opened, and JB stepped into the room. Jonah left the Skype conversation and went over to talk to the time agent.

“You’re using doors now?” Jonah joked. “No more just appearing out of thin air?”

“Nobody can zap themselves in and out of this room,” JB explained. “We’ve got it set up as a dead zone in time. To protect you and Gavin. Because—”

“Because you haven’t caught Gary and Hodge yet,” Jonah finished for him.

Jonah had been out of bed for a while, and though he was getting better, he still got dizzy easily. He leaned against the wall and then, a moment later, slid down to sit on the floor.

JB sat down beside him.

“We’re trying,” JB said.

“Why wasn’t the time prison a dead zone in time?” Jonah asked. “Why wasn’t it a place that nobody could zap in or out of? Why did you let Gary and Hodge escape in the first place?”

“Jonah, we didn’t think they could,” JB said. “It’s complicated, but we’re trying as hard as we can to find them and lock them away for good. And to figure out how to make sure they can’t ever escape again, this time around.”

Jonah pressed down on the edge of a piece of bandage tape that had come undone on his right ankle. It held down the gauze covering one of his two bullet wounds.

“JB, when all this started, I thought you and the other time agents knew everything,” Jonah said. “Remember how upset you were just because you thought Angela was supposed to marry a plumber and have five kids? And time travelers messed that up?”

“We see the early twenty-first century differently now,”
JB admitted. “Our attitude before was that every part of the past was set in concrete. But now . . .”

“What?” Jonah asked. “Now it’s quicksand?”

JB didn’t laugh the way Jonah wanted him to.

“One of our greatest time experts just made that same analogy,” JB said. “I prefer to use the word ‘malleable.’ Some parts of the past are malleable. It’s almost like they’re begging to be changed.”

This reminded Jonah of something Gavin had said back in 1918 about giving the toy soldiers to Leonid:
It’s not like I
changed
things, exactly. It’s more like I fixed things to the way they should have gone. It’s like . . . improving on original time. Like time itself wants something different. Don’t you feel it? I think those are the only things you can do anything about.

How could there be some things that were supposed to be changed, and some things that were dangerous to change? How was anyone supposed to know the difference?

“It’s like we’re back to talking about fate,” Jonah complained. “Why don’t you just tell me everything I’m supposed to do, and I’ll just do it, and that’ll be that?”