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“No,” JB said disapprovingly.

“Then, they’re still in there,” Jonah said. “The real Chip and Alex.”

“No doubt,” JB said, though he didn’t sound as happy about it as Jonah.

The princesses, who had gathered around Chip and Alex, were shooting them puzzled glances. One girl flipped a long lock of blond hair over her shoulder and whispered to her sisters. Jonah imagined she was saying, “Methinks our brothers have gone crazy. Wherever did they learn those bizarre hand signals?”

“Well,” Jonah said. “Katherine and I had better get Chip and Alex out of there before they corrupt the princesses
with their twenty-first-century habits. You couldn’t have
princesses
starting to do high fives.”

Huh
, Jonah thought.
Maybe I do that double-talk thing too
. He didn’t care about whether or not high fives caught on in the fifteenth century. He just wanted to get everyone home.

“You think you can just snatch them away now?” JB asked harshly. “Just because you want to?” He glowered. “You sound like Gary and Hodge.”

“It’s for their own good,” Jonah said. “Chip and Alex’s.”

“How do you know that?” JB asked. “How do you know that in the twenty-first century they’re not going to step in front of a car tomorrow and be killed instantly? How do you know that Chip’s not going to get his throne back in the fifteenth century and reign for fifty years, in happiness and prosperity?”

“Does he?” Jonah asked. “Is that what’s supposed to happen?”

“Uh, no,” JB said. “Probably not.”

Jonah gaped at JB.

“Probably?” Jonah repeated. “You don’t know for sure?”

JB shrugged.

“Everything’s uncertain now.”

Jonah looked to Katherine for reinforcement. At home
she was usually the one who raged and blustered and told their parents their rules were insane, no kid should be expected to have to do
that …
Jonah could usually count on her to do all the screaming and complaining, so he didn’t have to.

But Katherine was wincing and biting her lip.

“How long?” she asked softly. “How long until we know what’s going to happen? How long do Chip and Alex have to stay in the fifteenth century?”

JB turned and faced Jonah and Katherine squarely.

“You want my best guess?” he asked. “The most likely time span, assuming we haven’t changed events too greatly from the original version?”

Jonah and Katherine both nodded.

JB tilted his head to the side, calculating. Or else delaying delivering the bad news.

“If everything goes the way we hope,” he said, “it’s two years.”

“Two years?” Katherine wailed. “That’s forever! I’ll be fourteen in two years! I’ll miss everything about middle school!”

Jonah considered telling her, “No, you’ll just be a fourteen-year-old sixth grader.” Or, “Don’t you think it might be a good thing to miss middle school?” But he had his own distress to deal with.

Two more years before I get pizza again? I’ll die!
Strangely, he wasn’t hungry right at the moment—
Oh, yeah, people aren’t hungry or thirsty or anything else when they’re in Outer Time
—but if breakfast was any indication, he’d starve with nothing but fifteenth-century food for two years.

JB held up his hand like a traffic cop.

“I didn’t say the two of you were going to stay in the 1400s for two years,” JB said. “Just Chip and Alex.”

“That is
so
not fair,” Katherine ranted. “You promised us they’d be safe. You promised we could rescue them. You—”

“I promised you could
try
to rescue them,” JB corrected her in a steely voice. “There’s a difference. I never promised you’d succeed.”

Katherine gulped, turned pale, and stopped talking for a moment.

“But if they’re stuck in 1483 for two years—or I mean, 1483 and 1484—” she began tentatively.

“The first half of 1485, too,” JB interrupted, though his voice was almost gentle now.

“Okay, they’re there until 1485 … well, isn’t there more danger that they’ll do something to contaminate the time period?” Katherine asked. “Something like high fives, only worse? Or—what if the opposite problem happens? What if Chip and Alex forget the twenty-first century? What if they forget Jonah and me? What if—”

“Katherine,” JB said. “I already told you we were facing a lot of risks.” His expression was severe, then softened. “When we ran our first projections, we thought we had no choice but to let Chip and Alex ultimately meet whatever fate was waiting for them in 1485. I’m a time officer, sworn to uphold the sanctity of history. I
had
to send Chip and Alex back. But we never want to sacrifice
anyone on the altar of authenticity. We never intended to return missing children to history just to see them die. We just … knew that that might be the inevitable outcome, in some cases.”

Now it was Jonah’s turn to gulp. He was a missing child too. What fate waited for him in a foreign time?

“Then you and Jonah grabbed Chip’s elbows back in the cave,” JB said, a hint of amusement creeping into his voice. “You should have seen the panic you caused at time headquarters! If it weren’t strictly forbidden by thirty-two separate time regulations, I’d show you a clip of it someday. But then everyone scrambled to run new projections and … you might have changed things just enough. If the time projections had shown you introducing rap music or the theory of evolution or, I don’t know, Coca-Cola, we would have yanked you out instantly. But they didn’t. They showed you having a chance to rescue your friends.”

JB sounded so earnest it was impossible not to believe him. It was impossible not to believe that he wanted to see Chip and Alex safe just as much as Jonah and Katherine did.

“What do we have to do?” Jonah asked.

“You probably need to know what’s going to happen between 1483 and 1485,” JB said. “We need to make sure that everything goes as projected, anyhow. And then …” He cleared his throat. “How do you feel about wearing armor?”

Jonah felt hideous wearing armor. It was heavy. It was hot. And it smelled like a locker room full of sweaty teenage boys. Trying on the suit of armor JB gave him, Jonah sniffed surreptitiously, almost gagged, and resorted to holding his breath.

JB said this was brand-new armor—could I really be producing that smell all by myself?

Jonah lifted the visor of his armor.

“Look,” he said. “You’re from the future. Can’t you give us something that just
looks
like fifteenth-century armor, but really weighs nothing—and has air-conditioning?”

JB laughed.

“Good idea,” he said. “But no.”

“Why not?” Katherine demanded. She had on armor of her own and was awkwardly trying to walk wearing, essentially, a forty-pound tin can.

“Against time regulations,” JB said curtly, bending over to examine a squeaky knee joint on Katherine’s armor.

“Why?” Katherine said again.

JB sighed. He straightened up but somehow wouldn’t meet Katherine’s gaze.

“Because I’m sending you into a dangerous area. And if … something happens … we can’t take the risk of having anachronistic items discovered,” he said.

“What? You mean if klutzy Katherine trips and loses one of her metal gloves, you couldn’t just yank it out of time, like you did with the Taser?” Jonah asked.

JB gave him a rueful half smile.

“That kind of thing isn’t as easy as it looked from your perspective,” he said. “And … we can’t do it in a battle zone.”

Those words, “battle zone,” just hung in the air.

“We could die, couldn’t we?” Katherine asked quietly. “That’s what you’re talking about. ‘If something happens’—you mean, if we’re killed, and we lie there with all the other dead bodies, in wrong-time armor … that’s the problem, right?”

Why did Katherine always have to say things like that? Jonah would have been perfectly fine not thinking about the fact that people died in battle zones.

“Nothing’s going to happen,” he scoffed. “We’ll be
invisible, remember? JB’s just being crazy overprotective. It’s like Mom and Dad practically making us wear bike helmets just to cross the street.”

JB stared off toward the wall where Chip and Alex’s fifteenth-century life was on display. They were still in sanctuary with their mother and sisters.

“I won’t lie to you,” JB said. “Death rates were high on medieval battlefields.”

“But you wouldn’t send us back there if you really thought we were going to die,” Jonah argued. “Right?” He adopted a joking tone. “Because then that’d ruin our time periods—Katherine and the twenty-first century, and me and, well, whatever time period I’m really from.”

JB winced.

“All the projections show the two of you surviving,” he said. “We wouldn’t risk this otherwise. It’s not worth it to just trade your lives for Chip’s and Alex’s. Or … to lose all of you. But I have to tell you … the projections aren’t always right.”

Jonah gulped and was glad that the armor still covered his throat so no one would see his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously up and down.

“We’re not scared,” he said.

“Speak for yourself,” Katherine said. “I am.”

“You don’t have to do this,” JB said. “Neither of you do.
This is not a moral or an ethical dilemma. Chip and Alex are not entitled to any more time than fate gave them to begin with. They both believe in heaven—or, at least, their fifteenth-century selves both do. So neither of them would blame you if you chose the safe route. You could go home right now.”

Home …

Jonah was ashamed of how tempted he was.

“Chip and Alex are our
friends
,” Katherine said. “We’re not abandoning them.”

She jerked her chin up in the air and was probably trying for a noble pose. But for all those stories about knights’ chivalry and honor and nobility, armor was actually a very difficult thing to wear while striking a noble pose. Jonah heard a muffled
thunk
, then Katherine jerked off the top part of her armor and began rubbing the back of her scalp.

“Ow,” she said sheepishly. “I hit my head on the armor. It’s not bleeding, is it?”

Jonah leaned over to look.

“You’re fine,” he said. And, he vowed, she would be fine. Even if they were in a battle zone. He’d make sure of it.

“So,” he added with studied casualness. “Just what battle are we going to? Does Chip’s army attack Richard
the Third, or does Richard’s army attack Chip?”

“Neither,” JB said. “You’ve got to remember, this is fifteenth-century England. None of their political battles are simple. Here. We’ll get you up to speed.”

He reached up and plucked something out of midair. He ran his right hand over it like a magician revealing his latest trick, and the thing appeared in the palm of his left hand: the Elucidator.

Jonah groaned.

“It was up there the whole time?” he asked. “In midair? That’s not fair. We didn’t know you had antigravity powers too.”

“Defying gravity is actually easier than defying time,” JB said. “But that’s not something I’m going to explain to you. Watch.”

He pointed the Elucidator toward the fifteenth-century scene on the far wall. Instantly, everyone began moving faster, like a DVD on fast-forward. Chip, Alex, the princesses, and the queen zipped around their small room, sleeping, waking, eating, conferring with guests, sleeping, waking, eating. …

“Okay, even I’m starting to feel claustrophobic with that room,” JB muttered. “Wait, wait—here—now the queen’s sending the boys away, to safety.”

The scene slowed momentarily as Chip and Alex were bundled into a cart in the dark of night and hidden
under blankets. Then—quickly—they rattled down rutted roads, out into the countryside. Jonah caught a final glimpse of them joyfully running through a field, playing with wooden swords, before the view blurred.

“They do a lot of that the next several months,” JB said. “Meanwhile, King Richard isn’t having much fun trying to consolidate his power.” The scene shifted to a grim-faced king. “His own friend, Buckingham, betrays him four months after the coronation.”

Jonah watched men hunched over tables, battle plans scattered before them. Soldiers gathered together, whispering plans for treason.

“Supposedly Buckingham is throwing his support to a rival for the throne, Henry Tudor, who’s in exile in France. But is that the point? Or does Buckingham really want to put Chip back in power?” JB asked. “Buckingham’s wife is Chip’s aunt—his mother’s sister.”

The soldiers flocking together, oddly, seemed to be facing disastrous rain and floods rather than a battle.

“In the face of extreme weather the rebellion fails,” JB intoned. “King Richard has Buckingham executed.”

King Richard appeared again, not demanding his friend’s death, not watching his friend’s execution, but sitting stonily at a table, staring off into space. He was completely alone.

The scene shifted to festivities, people dancing and feasting.

“Oh, wait, I’ll back up a little—I missed showing you one of the happiest moments of King Richard’s reign,” JB said. “He had his son named Prince of Wales, heir to the throne.”

A frail-looking blond boy of seven or eight beamed happily at the crowd from the seat of honor at the feast. Eerily, he looked a lot like Chip and Alex, only younger and more fragile. His father stepped up behind him and gave him a hearty, proud slap on the back. The feeble boy lurched dangerously—the slap seemed much too hard for his brittle bones. But he turned back to grin up at Richard.

“Seven months later the sickly boy dies,” JB said. “Richard and his wife have no other children, and his wife is too ill to give him any more heirs.”

Now Jonah saw the king sobbing beside a bed. He was clutching a woman’s thin, bony hand and crying out, “Anne! Anne! Oh, please, no …”

“Richard’s wife dies less than a year after her son,” JB said. “Richard is heartbroken.”

More scenes of Richard sobbing, Richard on his knees praying to God: “Is it because of my sins, O Lord? Is this my punishment? What wouldst Thou have me do? Am I unforgivable?”

“Please,” Katherine interrupted. “Do we have to watch this? I’m starting to feel sorry for him. That kind of makes it hard to keep hating him.”