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“I didn’t know it was Richard the Third,” Alex said. “I didn’t know who he was.”

“Because he’s
not
Richard the Third,” Chip said cuttingly. “He’s only Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Our
uncle
. Stealing the throne for himself.” He glared at Alex. “You knew his first name was Richard.”

“But not the
Third
.”

“So?” Jonah asked quickly, before Chip had a chance to interrupt again.

“Because Richard the Third—that’s Shakespeare,” Alex explained, grimacing. “There’s a whole play about him. He’s, like, one of the worst villains in literature.”

Jonah suppressed a shiver.
Literature
, he told himself.
Not history
.

“We already know he’s a villain,” Chip complained. “He tried to have us killed! He’s usurping the throne!”

“Wait a minute,” Katherine said. “Shakespeare wrote a play about this guy, and Alex remembers it? That’s great! Now we’ll know what’s supposed to happen in reality!”

The light from the prayer candles glowed through her.

“Well … um … that is … er …,” Alex stammered.

“What?” Katherine demanded.

Alex winced.

“My mom’s a high school English teacher, okay?” he said. “She
loves
Shakespeare. She’s always trying to get me to read the plays or go to the plays or just listen to her quoting the plays. But—they’re all really boring, all right? I never pay any attention. I just know Richard the Third’s an awful villain, because she always says, ‘You’d think I was raising Richard the Third, the way you’re acting!’ any time I do something wrong.” He frowned. “Is Richard the Third the one where there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark?”

“We’re in England,” Jonah said flatly.

“Oh, right … I think that’s
Hamlet
,” Alex said. He made his hands into fists and pounded them against his forehead. “Think, think, think. …” He took his fists away from his forehead for a moment. “I can recite all of Einstein’s greatest formulas. Would that help?”

“Not right now,” Jonah said. “Not unless you can use those formulas to get us out of here.”

“And then Einstein probably wouldn’t ever exist because of us,” Katherine said gloomily.

“No, wait, I do have a plan,” Jonah said.

He’d kind of hoped that everyone would turn to him and fall silent, in awe. But Alex was pounding his fists against his forehead again, muttering, “Is ‘winter of our discontent’ from
Richard III
? Doesn’t matter, it’s summer now. ‘Parlous youth’? Maybe, but that’s no help. …” Katherine was frowning and watching Alex. Chip was staring off into the distance, toward the light coming from the open door. His eyes were narrowed to slits now, as if he was listening to the ongoing cheers outside: “Long live the king!” “Long live Richard the Third!”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Chip muttered.

“
What
doesn’t make sense?” Jonah asked, giving up on announcing his plan for the moment.

“It was just last night that someone tried to kill me, the real king,” Chip said. “They didn’t even succeed. There’s no proof of it, anyway. So how could they be having Richard’s coronation today?”

Jonah shrugged.

“Fast planning?” he suggested. “Overconfidence?”

“It takes a long time to plan a coronation,” Chip said.
“That’s why I hadn’t been crowned yet. They were still working on all the details, all the invitations. …”

“Are you sure you were king?” Jonah asked, then flinched because he thought that might set Chip off again. “Can you be the king before you’re coronated—or whatever it’s called?”

“Crowned,” Chip said emphatically but without anger. “And I
am
the king, regardless. A coronation’s just a formality. A show, for everyone to see. I was supposed to have a grand one. But I was already king. I became king the minute my father died.”

“Oh,” Jonah said. “So how do you explain …” He gestured weakly toward the hubbub coming from outside.

“I
can’t
,” Chip said. “Did you see how much cloth of gold our evil uncle was wearing—the shimmery stuff, with real gold woven into it? And that purple velvet cape—I bet there was at least eight yards of it trailing behind him. …”

“So?” Jonah asked. He wouldn’t have expected Chip to care about fashion at a time like this.

“So—it all had to be woven and sewn by hand,” Chip said.

Jonah still didn’t understand.

“We haven’t had the Industrial Revolution yet. No mechanical looms or sewing machines,” Alex contributed
before going back to muttering, “And I know it’s not ‘
Et tu, Brute?
’ because that’s
Julius Caesar
. …”

“Oh,” Jonah said. He thought it had been only about twelve hours since the mysterious intruders tried to throw Chip and Alex out the window.
Maybe
a team of seamstresses, sewing through the night, could produce eight yards of velvet cape that quickly. But Jonah couldn’t quite imagine the murderers coming back from their job, rushing into a roomful of seamstresses, and announcing, “Okay! That job’s done! Get to sewing!”

And coronation clothes made to fit Chip definitely wouldn’t have fit his uncle. Chip’s uncle—the guy Jonah had seen in a purple cape, anyway—was taller than Chip, more muscular.

More grown-up.

“You think he had everything planned and arranged ahead of time?” Jonah asked.

“He must have!” Chip snapped. “But how did he convince everyone to go along with him? All the knights and nobles in that procession with him … all those people cheering in the crowd …”

It was pain and sorrow that filled his expression now, not just hurt pride and outrage.

“No wonder you wanted to grab his crown,” Jonah said grudgingly.

“Yeah. Probably not the best idea, right? Not in front of hundreds of people, anyway,” Chip said. “I don’t know what came over me. I felt different again, kind of like I did when I was around the tracers last night. I wasn’t thinking like myself at all.”

“That’s weird,” Alex said, finally giving up on Shakespeare. “I wasn’t feeling like myself either when we were standing outside. But for me it just felt like I, uh, missed my mother.”

He sounded embarrassed.

“Fifteenth-century mother the queen, or twenty-first-century mother the Shakespeare teacher?” Katherine asked.

Alex didn’t have time to answer because the coronation procession had arrived at the threshold of the cathedral now. The royal horns were almost deafening; the cheers of the crowd overwhelming.

“You said you had a plan?” Chip said.

Jonah leaned over to whisper it in his ear.

Chip smiled.

“I’ll really enjoy that,” he said.

Jonah barely had time to whisper his plan to Alex and Katherine, too, before the procession was streaming toward their dark hallway.

“This is perfect!” Chip said. “They’ll go to the shrine of the saints first. It’s right over there. Come on!”

He began rushing toward an opening between pillars, several yards down. It was lucky that Jonah, Katherine, and Alex followed him quickly, because seconds later royal pages were shaking out wide swaths of finely woven cloth for the royal party to walk on. One bolt of the cloth landed right where the four kids had been standing.

“They take their shoes off to be respectful to the saints,” Chip explained. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

He walked on through the opening into the saints’
shrine, a grottolike enclosure with a row of statues and an altar at the front.

“We can stand by the statues while they’re coming in,” Chip said. “Richard will come to the front and kneel, and everyone else will stay behind him.”

Jonah moved back between two statues with equally fierce expressions on their stone faces. He thought they looked more like soldiers than saints.

“Hi. How you doing?” Jonah muttered to the statues. “Do you know you’re missing a nose?”

Katherine shot him a look that clearly said,
How can you make jokes at a time like this?
Jonah shrugged.

The royal procession began entering the shrine. Richard—Duke of Gloucester, King of England, whichever he was—did indeed have the most luxurious clothes. Even in the dim candlelight everything about him shimmered. Only a small number of the noblemen followed him into the shrine—probably the highest-ranking ones. The man carrying the crown on the pillow was one of them.

“That’s Buckingham,” Chip whispered. “His good friend. And fellow traitor.”

A woman came into the shrine too, followed by another nobleman with a smaller crown on a pillow.

“Richard’s having his wife crowned today too?” Chip muttered. “That’s different.”

The queen—or queen-to-be—was a frail, sickly-looking woman with thinning hair and deep lines in her face. But the way she smiled at her husband almost made Jonah feel bad about what they were about to do to him.

Some guys in robes—priests?—began chanting, and then Richard and his wife went to kneel at the altar.

“Maybe you shouldn’t …,” Jonah began in a soft voice.

Chip flashed him a dirty look and went to crouch beside Richard. From his position by the statues Jonah could hear every word Chip said.

“You do not deserve to be king,” Chip hissed directly into his uncle’s ear. “After what you had done to your nephews, you don’t deserve to live. All this pomp and ceremony—bah! It is for naught. The crowd may cheer you now, but they will jeer when they know your sins. …”

Richard stayed on his knees, but he jerked to attention. Separating from a calm, devout-looking tracer, he peered around, something like panic on his face.

“Oh, yes, you
will
be found out,” Chip murmured. “And then … then you will die a terrible death, as terrible as the death you gave your nephews.”

“Begone!” Richard muttered through clenched teeth, glancing around again. “Plague me not!”

“I will plague you anytime I want!” Chip said, his voice rising.

Jonah thought maybe a few of the priests had heard him too, because they stopped in the middle of their chanting, creating more tracers.

Richard looked back at them.

“Leave me,” he commanded. “I require time to pray. Alone.”

The priests and the nobles exchanged baffled glances. This was evidently an unusual request.

“I … I am adding a new part to the coronation ceremony,” Richard said. “I was inspired, kneeling here, to know that a king needs time alone in communion with God.”

“But—,” a priest ventured timidly.

“Go!” Richard ordered.

At that they began filing out of the shrine, leaving their tracers behind. Only the man with the crown remained.

“You, too, Buckingham!” Richard commanded.

“Oh, er, I thought I …”

Richard pointed at the door, and Buckingham scurried out with the others.

Jonah wasn’t sure what he expected Richard to do next. But as soon as everyone else was gone, he threw himself against the stone altar, completely apart from all the ghostly tracers.

“Dear Father,” he moaned. “Thou knowest—”

“God knoweth everything you’ve ever done!” Chip interrupted.

“Please! I am a godly man!” Richard begged.

“Do godly men kill children?” Chip sneered.

Richard slowly raised his head, his brown hair splaying out on his shoulders.

“I didn’t … it was not I who …” He was almost weeping now, deep in anguish. “What wouldst Thou have me do?”

“Renounce the throne!” Chip commanded.

Richard froze. When he spoke again, he sounded like he was trying very hard to control his voice.

“Renounce it in whose favor?” he asked. “Who else could protect England so well as I? All I have done, I have done for the good of my country.”

“That’s what traitors always tell themselves,” Chip said scornfully.

Jonah was amazed that Chip could sound so strong and authoritative. Anytime Jonah tried to sound like that, his voice cracked. In a weird way Chip was even starting to seem less see-through.

It makes sense
, Jonah thought.
If someone sounds strong, your brain and your eyes start thinking that they look strong too. A nearly transparent kid just couldn’t look that powerful
.

“But that is the truth!” Richard protested.

“Your version of truth,” Chip scoffed. “God will judge you based on, uh, the true truth.”

Jonah hoped that Richard wouldn’t notice that Chip had faltered. “True truth” didn’t sound authoritative. It just sounded stupid.

But Richard was staring up, right at the place where Chip was standing. A look of horror was spreading over his face.

“I see you,” he whispered.

It was hard to tell who looked more stunned now, Richard or Chip.

“I … I …,” Chip stammered, looking helplessly down at his hands.

Katherine started to bolt toward Chip, almost knocking over one of the stone statues in her haste. Jonah reached out his arm to stop her.

It’s just an illusion
, he wanted to assure her.
A trick of the eye. I thought I was seeing things too, just because Chip is doing such a great job. … Richard can’t see Chip. Chip’s invisible to everyone in the fifteenth century. Remember? So are we
.

But Richard’s eyes followed Katherine’s motion, and Jonah’s.

“There are more of you?” he murmured. “Children? And in such strange garb …”

Now it was Jonah’s turn to look down at himself. He wasn’t see-through anymore. He wasn’t translucent. His hands were flesh colored again, not crystal. He could even see that the
H
of the
HARRIS MIDDLE SCHOOL
on his sweatshirt was starting to peel off. A thread stuck out from a worn place on the knees of his blue jeans. The glow-in-the-dark green stripes on his tennis shoes gleamed.

Jonah felt paralyzed.

How could we not be invisible anymore?
he wondered in agony.
We shouldn’t be standing here in twenty-first-century clothes in the middle of the fifteenth century. It’s too dangerous to time. And … to us
.

Richard half turned, like he was about to call for his guards.

But Katherine stepped forward, calmly now.

“This is what people wear in heaven,” she said. “Don’t you … I mean, do you not recognize your own nephews?” She pointed first at Chip, then Alex, who was standing among the statues as still as if he, too, were made of stone. “They were changed by, uh, what they went through. Dying so tragically … they were transformed. That’s how it works.” She lowered her voice and glared at Richard. “Not that you’ll ever get to see heaven, after what you did.”