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Fifteenth-century mattresses were not as thick as twenty-first-century mattresses, so he didn’t have much cushioning. Jonah hit hard. His bottom jaw slammed against his top jaw, and he saw stars. When his vision cleared, he saw that Katherine had fallen in the opposite direction, her shoulder striking the stone wall.

If we keep this up, none of us will survive the fifteenth century
, Jonah thought. Chills traveled down his spine that had nothing to do with the pain in his jaw.

“Interesting,” Alex muttered. He was still lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.

“Did you feel like you were someone else?” Chip asked him.

“Yes,” Alex said. He blinked. “No. I was me. I am me. It’s just—I’m not.”

“That’s as clear as mud,” Katherine said. She was rubbing her shoulder where she’d hit the wall.

“I know exactly what you mean!” Chip said excitedly.

Alex nodded and sat up. He stared toward the window, just as Chip had done.

“I could look at the stars and know that they’re light-years away, that they’re red giants or yellow dwarfs, that they’re the products of nuclear fusion—but also think
that they were painted in the sky by God, on a tapestry. I even thought that the stars revolved around the earth!” he said.

Chip nodded.

“Do you know about our uncle?” he asked.

“Lord Rivers, you mean?” Alex asked.

“Gloucester,” Chip said, and just the way he said the name made Jonah shiver again.

Alex kept staring toward the window.

“Mother has a plan,” he said softly. “She’ll take care of us.”

“Whoa, whoa, hold on there,” Katherine said, stepping between Alex and Chip. “Quit talking like you’re
them
.” She gestured toward the tracer boys, who were curled up together on the bed again, the older one patting the younger one’s head. “You’re freaking me out.”

“But we are them,” Chip said. He started to stand up, as if he intended to rejoin his tracer.

Katherine slammed her hands against his chest, holding him back.

“Stop it!” she insisted. “You’re Chip Winston. You live at 805 Greenbriar Court, Liston, Ohio. You’re in seventh grade at Harris Middle School. You’re from the twenty-first century!” She took one hand off Chip’s chest and shoved it against Alex’s shoulder. “And you’re Alex, uh—what’s your last name, Alex?”

Alex seemed to have to think about that for a moment.

“Polchak,” he said.

“What’s your address?”

“Um, 3213 University Boulevard, Upper Tyson, Ohio.”

Katherine nodded.

“What year is it?”

“It’s 1483,” Alex said.

“No, no! What year are we supposed to be in?”

Alex frowned apologetically.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Chip and I really do belong in 1483. This is where we’re supposed to be. I know you’re trying to make sure I remember the twenty-first century. And I do. I just remember 1483 better right now.”

Katherine had the same look on her face that she’d always gotten when she was a little kid preparing to explode into a massive temper tantrum. Jonah didn’t think screaming and pounding her fists on the floor would help.

“Chill,” he told his sister. He slipped off the bed and sat down on the floor with the other kids. “Okay, 1483. That’s what, about the time Christopher Columbus sailed? Maybe we’ll get to be cabin boys on the
Niña
, the
Pinta
, or the
Santa María
. Maybe we shouldn’t worry so much. Just think of this as a big adventure.”

“Columbus was 1492,” Katherine hissed. “Are you forgetting things now too? Remember—it rhymes. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean
blue
.” A panicked look spread across her face. “Oh my gosh. We’re in some godforsaken time when Columbus hasn’t even discovered America yet!”

“Technically, it’s not really accurate to say he ‘discovered’ it, since the Native Americans had been living there for centuries,” Alex said, sounding much more like himself. “And anyhow, Columbus sailed from Spain, and we’re in England, and it’s not like the twenty-first century, where you can just hop on a plane and be in another country in an hour.”

Jonah was delighted to hear Alex sounding logical again.

“And really, Katherine,” Chip said earnestly. Jonah wouldn’t have said that Chip was capable of being earnest. Sarcasm was more his style. But—Jonah peered at his friend carefully—Chip’s face was as smooth and innocent as a choirboy’s. He kept talking. “It’s not fair to say that this time period is godforsaken just because Europeans don’t know about America yet. God is just about all
he
thinks about.” He pointed at his tracer, who now had his head leaned back against the wall. His lips were moving silently. He seemed to be praying again.

“Him, too,” Alex said, gesturing toward his own tracer, who was curled up against his brother’s shoulder and appeared now to be fast asleep. “And it’s so weird, because back in the twenty-first century I thought I was an atheist or an agnostic—I didn’t think it even mattered which one. I didn’t care. But thinking with his brain … well, I could believe. And it wasn’t like thinking that the stars revolved around the earth—thinking something I knew was false. It’s—I don’t know. I can’t explain.”

“It helps,” Chip said simply. “Edward should be terrified out of his skull, he’s that certain that he’s going to be killed, and that there’s nothing he can do about it. But he’s just … fine.”

Jonah considered arguing,
Well, I believe in God too, but I’m still terrified out of my skull—what do you make of that?
But he didn’t think that would be very useful.

Katherine took a deep breath.

“You’re using third person again,” she said.

“Huh?” Chip asked.

“Third person,” Katherine said. “Him. His. He. You’re not talking anymore like you think you’re them.”

She swept her hand dismissively toward the tracers, her fingers swiping through Edward V’s leg. She didn’t even notice.

“It fades a little, doesn’t it?” Alex said speculatively.
“The longer we’re away from them. We could set up an experiment—see if we experience their minds more intensely with a longer stay in the tracers, see how much our memories fade over time—”

“No!” Katherine and Jonah said together. They exchanged glances.

“What if you forget your real selves completely?” Katherine argued. She looked flushed and frantic, still not far away from some childish tantrum. A long strand of hair had escaped from her ponytail and was plastered to her cheek with sweat. Jonah wondered if she was still feeling the effects of timesickness.

“Which are our real selves?” Alex asked quietly. He turned his head, gazing longingly toward the tracers on the bed.

Chip had the same expression on his face. Jonah could just see the thoughts churning in their heads.

Jonah dived to the right. He rose up on his knees and stuck his arms out straight, his best imitation of a traffic cop refusing to let anyone pass.

“You can’t go back to them,” Jonah said. He hoped his body was blocking everyone’s view of the tracers. “How could you? You said yourself, they’re
doomed
.”

“But what if that’s our fate?” Chip said, just as Alex objected, “
I
didn’t say they were doomed.”

Chip looked at Alex in surprise. Jonah wondered why he hadn’t noticed they were brothers from the very beginning: They had the same blond curly hair, the same blue eyes, the same high cheekbones.
Noble
high cheekbones. Royal looking. Even with their hair cut in a twenty-first-century style, now that they were back in the fifteenth century, both of them did look like they could be princes or kings.

“Really?” Chip was saying. “Your guy—Richard—he doesn’t think they’re both going to die?”

“I told you,” Alex said. “He thinks his mother has a plan. He knows.”

“Mother,” Chip repeated, as though he was trying out the word. “The queen. Former queen, I mean. Elizabeth.”

“Queen Elizabeth?” Katherine shrieked. “The old-timey one? Wait a minute—I know about her. The one Cate Blanchett always plays in the movies?”

Chip and Alex considered this.

“No, that’s another Queen Elizabeth,” Chip said. “Later on.”

Katherine looked defeated.

Chip had his head tilted to the side thoughtfully.

“It’s like, I know about the mother’s plan, but I don’t have much confidence in it,” he said. “She’s not … I mean, I barely know her.”

“That’s because you were sent to another estate at a young age,” Alex said. “To be trained to know how to be king.”

Chip bit down on his lip, wonderment traveling across his face.

“I do know how to be king,” he said. “Weird.”

“But you don’t know your own mother?” Katherine asked incredulously.

“I only see her a few times a year,” he said, shrugging. He grinned, looking more like himself. “But I’ve heard things, when people don’t know I’m listening. I think she was supposed to be a real babe when she was younger. There was some sort of a scandal when our father married her—like she wasn’t good enough because she wasn’t a foreign princess who could bring him extra allies, and she’d been married to a Lancaster knight who died, and we’re Yorks, of course, and the Lancasters and the Yorks hate each other. … Our parents got married in secret, so that was even more scandalous.”

“Were people horrified when your mother got pregnant with you? And they didn’t know she was married?” Katherine asked. In spite of herself, she was leaning in now, intrigued, like this was just some juicy celebrity gossip.

“Oh, the news came out a long time before that,” Chip said. “Our father’s advisers were really mad.” He thought
for a minute. “Anyhow, I have three older sisters, so it’s not like I would have been the big surprise, regardless.”

Chip still had a stunned look on his face, like it’d just dawned on him that he really did have siblings.

“What happened to your father?” Jonah asked quietly. He couldn’t shake the feeling he’d had earlier, when he was thinking about
The Lion King
. There was an uncle in the movie, too. Scar. He gasped, remembering the entire plot now.

“Did your uncle kill your father?” he asked in a choked voice.

But both Chip and Alex were shaking their heads.

“Nah,” Chip said. “He just got sick and died.”

“Maybe he was poisoned,” Jonah said.
Scar killed Simba’s father,
he thought. It was awful when remembering Disney movies terrified you.

Alex snorted.

“Nobody had to poison him,” he said. “He was kind of a … a party animal.”

“And bulimic, right?” Chip asked. “Isn’t that what you’d call it?”

“Oh, yeah,” Alex said. “Hundreds of years before anybody came up with that name. Remember Christmas?” As Chip nodded, Alex turned to Jonah and Katherine to explain. “He ate and drank, ate and drank—roast beef and puddings and everything else—and then he
threw it all up to make room to stuff himself again.”

“They have bingeing and purging in the fifteenth century?” Katherine asked, making a disgusted face.

“Oh, yeah. We call it ‘eating in the Roman style,’” Alex said. “It’s a sign of wealth, that someone can afford that much food.”

Strangely, Alex and Chip both had admiring looks on their faces. Katherine looked like Jonah felt: like she wanted to gag.

“That’s just gross!” she said.

Alex and Chip looked insulted.

“But he was a good king,” Chip added quickly. “Don’t forget that.”

“Of course,” Alex agreed, nodding loyally. “Edward the Fourth. Our father.”

Our
, Jonah thought. So much for Katherine’s being excited that they were using third-person pronouns.

The candle by the bedside flickered, as if some new breeze had entered the room. Jonah turned just in time to see the door slowly sliding forward.

“Someone’s coming again!” he hissed. “Hide!”

Jonah scrambled up, ready to rush back to the other room. Katherine was right beside him. But Chip and Alex weren’t moving at all. Wait—yes, they were. They were both leaning toward their tracers.

“This way!” Jonah whispered, grabbing the hood of Chip’s sweatshirt and yanking. “Katherine—get Alex!”

Katherine tugged on Alex’s arm, but all that did was counter his forward momentum. She wasn’t strong enough to pull him backward. Jonah caught a glimpse of her horrified face as she glanced back toward the door, now open a full inch and still moving.

Katherine bent over and blew out the candle.

Jonah could still see—a little, anyway—by the gleaming light of the ghostly tracer boys. They still huddled on the bed, one praying, one sleeping, each still oblivious to the moving door.

Chip and Alex, the modern versions, seemed nearly as oblivious.

“You just changed history!” Chip hissed angrily at Katherine. “Even a single candle extinguished—”

“I had to!” Katherine whispered back. “We have to save you!”

Jonah kept watching the door, still creaking open, slowly, slowly, slowly. … Maybe this would just be another serving girl. Maybe she’d see the darkness, assume both boys were asleep, and tiptoe away.

Or maybe it was the uncle, come to murder them.
Maybe his job would be that much easier in the darkness.

“Mother promised she’d send someone to rescue us!” Alex exulted in a loud whisper.

Jonah clapped his hand over Alex’s mouth. Never mind saving Alex and Chip from history—how could Jonah save them from themselves? How could Jonah keep Alex quiet, pull Chip back into hiding, get Katherine and Alex safely out of sight too … and somehow relight the blown-out candle? All before the door opened another inch wider?

It was impossible. Jonah didn’t even have time to take a breath before the figures of two men appeared in the doorway.

They had a candle of their own.

Fortunately, the puny candle glow barely illuminated the floor directly in front of them, so Jonah didn’t have to worry about being seen yet. He found himself wishing the men carried a slightly stronger light—he wanted to see their faces. It wasn’t that he thought he’d recognize anyone from the fifteenth century. But surely if he could see their expressions, he’d know if they were planning murder or rescue. Wouldn’t he?