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It didn’t matter. The men’s faces were cloaked in shadow thicker than beards, their eye sockets like dark holes.

Then one of the men spoke.

“I thought the young prince always had to have a candle burning at night,” he said softly. “Afraid of the dark, they say.”

And for a split second there was a bit of light around his mouth, the same kind of light that glowed from the tracer boys on the bed.

That isn’t what he said in the original version of history
, Jonah thought.
That’s the only reason I can see his mouth. It’s moving differently just because Katherine blew out that candle. …

The other man shrugged and laid a finger on his lips. This must have been the same thing he’d done the first time around, because no tracer light glowed on him.

“Hush,” he whispered. “If we can do this whilst they slumber, ’twill be easier.”

“I slumber not,” Chip spoke up, loudly, boldly.

Oh, no! Why hadn’t Jonah put his hand over Chip’s mouth too?

Jonah froze. Should he inch back from Chip and Alex—save himself now that he couldn’t save them? Maybe grab Katherine, too …

Katherine dug her elbow into Jonah’s ribs. She pointed, a hard motion to follow in the near-total darkness. But Jonah saw that she wanted him to look at the bed, where Chip’s tracer was sitting up straight, his mouth moving precisely
in sync with Chip’s next words: “Who goes there?”

“Friends,” the man replied in a hushed voice. “Your mother, the fair Queen Elizabeth, sent us to rescue you. …”

“I told you!” Alex whispered.

The men seemed not to hear him, because they were speaking themselves—Jonah missed their words—and then they bowed low, their flickering candle dipping down, their boots scraping back against the stone floor.

“They’re going to walk to the bed,” Chip whispered, pulling away from Jonah’s grasp. “They’re going to walk to the bed, and if we’re not there—if they can’t see the tracers—they’ll …”

He was already rising toward the glowing figures on the bed.

“Wait!” Jonah whispered back. “Can’t you wait to see if they’re really going to rescue you? Are they friends? Or murderers?”

“I can’t know that unless I’m in my tracer!” Chip hissed. “Alex, come on!”

The two men were approaching the bed, the glow of their candle growing dangerously near.

Alex was jerking away from Jonah too.

“Let them go!” Katherine whispered in Jonah’s ear. “They’ll know in a minute if it’s safe or not—we can pull them out. …”

Quickly Alex and Chip scrambled onto the bed, matching their poses with their tracers’.

Jonah had forgotten that the tracers would stop glowing. He blinked at the sudden darkening. The shadowy men in their little circle of candlelight were advancing faster, rushing toward the bed.

Do you know yet?
Jonah wanted to scream at Alex and Chip.
Are they rescuers or murderers?
He reached blindly toward the bed, his fingers brushing fabric. It felt like something more stiff and formal than sweatshirt material—was it velvet, maybe?—but he tugged anyway. If the men really were friends, wouldn’t Chip and Alex have recognized them by now? Couldn’t Chip separate from his tracer long enough to let Jonah know if he was safe or not?

Before Jonah could get a good grip, Katherine started pulling him back. The circle of candlelight was almost at Jonah’s feet. Before he moved away, the plastic tip of his shoelace gleamed dully in the light.

Jonah prayed that neither of the men was looking in his direction.

They weren’t. They had their eyes fastened on the tracer/Chip and tracer/Alex, both boys bathed in the light from the candle. It seemed like a 100-watt glow to Jonah right now—it was much too bright for Jonah or
Katherine to dart in and pull either boy away.

The men bowed before the tracer/Chip and tracer/Alex, the light dipping only briefly.

“Your Highnesses,” the first man murmured.

The second man reached his candle toward the candle Katherine had blown out, and a second flame sprang to life. The intensified glow of the two candles, plus the glow of the man’s tracer, still hunched in a bow, sent Katherine and Jonah scurrying backward, desperate not to be seen. Just as the man blew out the first candle and rejoined his tracer—dimming the light again—Jonah’s head hit something soft. He reached his hands behind him and found that some sort of cloth wall hanging covered the stones near the window, reaching practically down to the ground.
Somewhere else to hide if we have to
, he told himself.

Back by the bed the two men were straightening up from their bows. Then they reached out and grabbed the two boys.

“No!” the tracer boy/Chip screamed.

The man holding him crammed his hand over Chip’s face.

“Shh! Someone will hear!” the man hissed. “This is for thine own good! We’re helping you!”

Chip struggled against the man’s grasp. He seemed to be fighting harder than the tracer boy—his arms and legs
lashed out, leaving the tracer’s glowing limbs behind. But he couldn’t break the man’s hold.

Alex was faring no better, and glowing even more. The tracer boy still seemed to be sleeping, even as Alex squirmed, momentarily separating, rejoining the tracer, separating, rejoining. …

“What should we do?” Katherine whispered urgently in Jonah’s ear.

Jonah watched the men and the struggling boys. Even in the dim, flickering light Jonah could see that both of the men were tall and strong and muscular—he and Katherine could never overpower them.

But maybe they wouldn’t have to.

“You try to grab Alex, and I’ll get Chip,” Jonah whispered back. “They’re starting to separate from their tracers already—just pull them away. …”

“Without being seen?” Katherine asked incredulously. “Without them noticing? That’s impossible!”

She was right. They could either rescue Chip and Alex, or they could stay out of sight and keep up the illusion that history was proceeding along its normal path.

What if that’s our fate?
Chip had asked just a few moments earlier. The words still seemed to be echoing in Jonah’s mind.

“No,” Jonah muttered to himself. “We have choices. …”

He started to step out of the shadows.

At that exact moment the tracer/Chip gave a particularly hard kick, knocking against his bedside table, toppling the candle off the edge.

The flame vanished, snuffed by the fall to the floor.

Instantly the room was plunged into darkness, except for the dim glow of the night sky outside the window, and the occasional bursts of tracer lights when Chip and Alex briefly separated from their fifteenth-century selves. The candle must have been extinguished in the original version of history too, because no tracers of the men appeared.

“Shall I—,” one of the men began.

“Leave it,” the other growled back. “It matters not. What we have to do, we can do in darkness.”

“So can we!” Jonah whispered delightedly to Katherine. “This is our chance!”

She only stared at him stupidly.

“The men can’t see the tracer lights!” Jonah hissed.

In the next burst of light—from a particularly strong squirm by Alex—Jonah saw comprehension flow over Katherine’s face.

The men were walking fast now, directly toward Jonah and Katherine, and toward the dim, practically nonexistent light coming in the window. Jonah reached out cautiously, feeling for Chip’s arm. This time he touched
sweatshirt material—surely they didn’t have sweatshirts in the fifteenth century, did they? He squeezed tightly, his fingers circling Chip’s arm. He tugged, trying to pull Chip away from the tracer, away from the man.

In one quick movement the man lifted the tracer/Chip up. He lifted him up and heaved him toward the window.

Jonah saw the glowing tracers fly out the window and plummet toward the ground, one boy after the other. He couldn’t make sense of the sight. Was his mind still slowed by the timesickness? Was he just too flat-out stunned to understand?

They’re glowing head to toe, every inch of them
, he thought.
Why? They weren’t doing that a minute ago. The only things that glowed were the parts that separated from Chip and Alex—hands, feet, maybe an occasional elbow. …

Jonah was working on a grisly calculation, figuring that maybe Chip and Alex, being heavier than their tracers, had separated while falling toward the ground.
No, wait—we studied this at school. Galileo dropping cannonballs—it doesn’t matter how heavy two things are, they fall at the same rate. So … so …

So Chip and Alex must not have gone out the window with their tracers.

So that was why Jonah still had his hand around Chip’s arm.

Relief and understanding washed over Jonah.

He must have pulled Chip away from his tracer at the very last minute, just as the man was trying to fling the boy out the window. Trying to assassinate the king.

Murderer
, Jonah thought, his heart pounding faster.
Not a rescuer at all
.

But Jonah had stopped the assassination attempt. Only empty, glowing tracers had plunged toward the ground, not the real, live human boys, not King Edward V, alias Chip Winston, or Prince Richard, alias Alex Polchak. Chip was right there, Jonah clutching him by both arms now—Jonah’s hands had somehow known to work together, even though his brain hadn’t caught up. And Jonah couldn’t see Alex or Katherine over in the thick darkness on the other side of the men, but Katherine must have succeeded too, since Alex’s tracer had glowed just as much as Chip’s.

Jonah wanted to scream and cheer and beat the air with his fists, as if he’d just scored the winning goal in the last seconds of a soccer game. Childishly, he even wanted to stick out his tongue and taunt the would-be assassins,
Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah. You lose! We win!

But more than that, he wanted to make sure that the murderers didn’t know that he and Chip and Katherine and Alex were there. He didn’t want to have saved Chip and Alex, only to ruin everything with a boast. Or a sneeze, cough, or too-loud breath.

He pulled Chip farther back from the window. If he’d dared, Jonah would have slid behind the heavy cloth wall hanging. But his mind was kicking back into gear, projecting what-if scenarios.
What if the wall hanging’s attached to the stones by something metal at the top, and that rattles when we’re trying to hide? What if, in the darkness, the men walk right into us, and we can’t see them coming because we’re hiding behind the wall hanging?
Jonah froze, paralyzed by all the disasters he could picture in his mind.

The men were both leaning over the edge of the window, their figures nothing but dark silhouettes against the sky outside. Jonah stared at them, watching for the first glow of tracer light, the first hint that they were reacting differently than they had in the original version of history. There wasn’t the slightest gleam about them; they must not have felt the effects of Chip and Alex being pulled away. Probably that was because they had been jerking back too, reacting to the opposite force from hurling the boys out the window.

“Come along,” one of the men growled to the other, both still bathed in darkness. “Hurry. Lest we be seen.”

They pushed away from the window and the faint light of the night sky. Jonah could hear their footsteps—cautious, sneaking back through the room—and his eyes burned trying to make out the slightest glimpse of them. But they were dark figures in darkness, as good as invisible. Then the door at the opposite end of the room swung open, turning the men into silhouettes again. There must have been a torch somewhere far down the hallway, providing just enough light to show the men leaving the room, quietly pulling the door shut behind them.

Jonah waited a few excruciating moments to make sure the men weren’t coming back. He stared at the darkness that had swallowed the door, willing it to stay darkness.

He felt a hand on his arm and had to stifle a scream.

“We did it!” Katherine whispered in his ear. “We saved them!”

“Katherine, you idiot, you just about scared me to death!” he hissed back. “What if I’d yelped or something?”

“You didn’t,” she whispered, her old annoying confidence back. “Listen, do you still have the Elucidator?”

Jonah had forgotten all about the Elucidator. He’d dropped it on the floor eons ago, it seemed, back when the tracers were still curled up safely on the bed. When it had
seemed a bit like a game, Alex and Chip melding and separating from their tracers for fun.

“JB?” he whispered into the darkness.

“Shh,” JB replied.

Jonah figured that if it was safe for JB to whisper “Shh,” it was safe for Jonah to crawl across the floor searching for the Elucidator. He let go of Chip’s arms, and Chip sagged helplessly against the wall. Was he in shock or something? Was that why he hadn’t even said thank you yet?

“Don’t worry,” Katherine told Chip soothingly. “Jonah’s going to get us out of here. We can go home now.”

I am?
Jonah thought.
We can?

But now that Katherine had planted the idea in his head, it seemed brilliant. (Not that he would ever admit that to Katherine.) Getting away from the murderers, getting away from this alien time when Columbus hadn’t even discovered America yet, getting away from this place where blowing out a candle could ruin history forever—Jonah couldn’t wait.

He dropped to his knees and began advancing toward the center of the room, sweeping his hands out in front of him. The floor was made of stone—maybe the same kind of stones as the walls—so it wasn’t easy feeling around for something that was essentially impersonating a large pebble. But luck was with him. He’d barely left Katherine
and Chip behind when his hand landed on something flat and round. He lifted it toward his mouth so he didn’t have to speak so loudly.

“JB!” he whispered into the rock. “You can bring us all back now! Back home! We saved Chip and Alex, and nobody noticed! We saved them and time, just like we said we would!”

“Are you sure?” JB hissed back.

“Oh, yeah,” Jonah said. He didn’t even have to think about his answer. “Chip and Alex are fine.”