Sent (7 page)

“But their originals, the tracers …”

“Um, well, I don’t think they’re going to be having any more impact on history,” Jonah said. He found he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell JB exactly what had happened. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t know exactly how far off the ground they were, but it had looked a long way down. Far enough to kill. Far enough that no one could survive a fall like that.

“Why not?” JB asked sharply.

Jonah swallowed hard.

“Look,” he said. “They’re dead. The murderers are still close by. So get us out of here!”

“Can you still see the tracers?” JB persisted.

Jonah stood up, still holding on to the Elucidator. He tiptoed over to the window and looked straight down,
into darkness. Then he crouched low again, out of sight.

“No,” he told JB. “Is that what happens when someone’s tracer dies? The tracer just disappears?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Then, there’s your proof!” Jonah said. All this talk of death was making him uncomfortable. He didn’t want to think about how close Chip and Alex had come to dying, about what the murderers might have done if they’d seen Jonah and Katherine. “Please! It’s time! Get us away from here!”

“You really think Chip and Alex can leave without changing history?” JB asked.

“Of course!” Jonah said, raising his voice a bit. Why wouldn’t JB listen? Didn’t he trust them?

Outside he heard someone shouting.

“What’d he say?” he asked Katherine, who was standing closer to the window. Katherine shrugged, the motion barely detectable in the darkness.

Another voice joined the first. This was the kind of hubbub Jonah would have expected from people discovering dead bodies on the ground. Maybe JB was wrong; maybe tracer corpses were visible.

The shouts grew louder, and finally Jonah could make out the words.

“Where are the bodies?” the voices were shouting. “Where did they go?”

Oh
, Jonah thought, suddenly feeling so faint he had to brace himself against the stone floor for support.
We already did change history. …

In the original version of history, Jonah realized, anyone looking for the prince and the king would have found them crushed on the ground. Their bodies would have been seen. There would have been proof that they’d died. There would have been bodies to bury; probably hundreds of people had seen the dead boys at their funeral.

Because of us, none of that will happen
, Jonah thought dizzily.
Because of us, there’s no proof of anything. The boys just vanished. So …

Before Jonah could follow that thought to its logical conclusion, he felt Chip grabbing the Elucidator out of his hand.

“Get us out of here! Now!” Chip demanded. He
sounded
like a king giving orders, a king who expected to be obeyed.

“No,” JB said.

Chip hurled the Elucidator toward the floor.

“You wanted us to die from the beginning,” he snarled. “That’s the only outcome you’ll accept! You won’t be happy until we’re dead on the ground out there!”

Jonah’s stomach gave a sickening lurch at the word “dead.”
He’s right
, Jonah thought, horrified.
No matter what we do, as long as there are no bodies out there, we can’t fix time. And JB knew that
.

“JB!” Jonah moaned. “You’re as bad as the murderers!”

“No,” JB said. “Listen! History—”

“I don’t want to listen! I don’t care about history!” Chip screamed.

He kicked at the Elucidator—Jonah could feel the breeze from the force of Chip’s leg, kicking hard—and the Elucidator skittered across the floor. Then Jonah heard it hit the wall across the room.

Instantly a soft glow appeared in that area.

“JB?” Jonah whispered.

No answer.

Jonah rushed across the room and scooped up the glowing Elucidator. It had a screen now; it wasn’t just a
rock. The words
EMERGENCY REPAIR NEEDED
glowed in soft green letters.

EMERGENCY REPAIR NEEDED
faded into different words:
PRESS RESTORE.

“But where’s …”

A bluish button labeled
RESTORE
suddenly appeared on the Elucidator. Jonah pushed against it. The Elucidator seemed to change shapes in Jonah’s hand. It looked like a cell phone again—no, it looked like a pocket watch. A club. A pair of dice. A spoon. A book. Jonah blinked, and might have missed a couple of changes, because the Elucidator was zipping in and out of shapes so quickly it blurred.

Then it was a rock again.

The screen still glowed faintly in the center of the rock, holding the words
CONSERVATION OF ENERGY NEEDED DURING RESTORATION—CHOOSE OPTIONS
and then
CONTINUE TRANSLATIONS? Y/N.

“Not that it does much good,” Jonah muttered, but he hit the
Y
.

Those words faded, and now the Elucidator offered him a new choice:
MUTE? Y/N.

“You bet we want to mute it,” Chip said, peering suddenly over Jonah’s shoulder.

“But then we won’t be able to talk to JB,” Jonah said.

“Exactly,” Chip said.

“No! Wait …,” JB’s voice came from the Elucidator.

Jonah thought about the glowing tracers plunging toward the ground. He thought about how JB had wanted that to be Chip and Alex. He stabbed his finger at the
Y
.

The Elucidator was just a silent rock in Jonah’s hand.

“So there,” Chip said.

“I thought you were all for fate,” Jonah said. “A few minutes ago you sounded like you were on JB’s side. Like you thought you were supposed to die.”

“Yeah …,” Chip said. His voice trailed off. “I don’t know. It was weird how I felt. But now—”

“Um, guys?” Katherine hissed nervously from across the room. She was still standing by the window, peering out at the men in the courtyard below. “I don’t think we have time to talk about fate and feelings right now.”

Jonah raced over to the window beside her. He looked out cautiously, hunched down so that only his eyes showed over the bottom edge of the window. Down below, he could make out four torches now, flickering in the wind. The men, whoever they were, appeared to have organized search parties. Jonah squinted, trying to make out which of the figures in the courtyard were tracers and which were actual men. But the courtyard was too far away, the light too uncertain.

The first time around, the courtyard probably would have been empty and dark
, he thought.
Someone would have secretly dragged the bodies away … or left them there to be discovered in the morning. …

He shivered, not wanting to follow those thoughts any further. Two of the torches down below separated from the others. Jonah couldn’t see where they went.

“They wouldn’t come back up here, would they?” Katherine whispered anxiously. Her teeth seemed to be chattering, but Jonah didn’t know if it was from timesickness or fear.

Down below, the men were shouting again.

“Search the chambers!”

Chambers. Chambers were rooms.
The
chambers would undoubtedly be the rooms the prince and the king had been in. …

Katherine grabbed Jonah’s arm, almost making him drop the Elucidator.

“You’ve got to turn the sound back on,” she said frantically. “JB can tell us what to do. No matter what, he wouldn’t want them to find us.” She choked back a hysterical sob. “We don’t have to listen to him later, but … they’re coming up here now!”

Indeed, Jonah could hear footsteps echoing outside the door, footsteps that sounded like a whole pack of men
tromping up the stairs. They weren’t even trying to be quiet.

He crouched down and began stabbing blindly at the Elucidator.

“Where’s the unmute?” he hissed.

Words glowed on the screen:
CHANGING MUTE STATUS NOT ALLOWED DURING RESTORATION PROCESS.

“Then, stop restoring!” Alex said over Jonah’s shoulder.

Jonah was glad to have his help.

“Uh … uh,” Jonah stammered, trying to feel for a button on the Elucidator—any button, but preferably one labeled
ESCAPE
.

RESTORATION CANNOT BE INTERRUPTED
appeared the screen.

“Can’t we do anything?” Alex moaned.

DESIRE TO SEE LIST OF ACCEPTABLE ACTIONS DURING RESTORATION PROCESS? Y/N
appeared now.

Four kids at once shoved fingers toward the
Y
. Katherine and Chip were now crouching beside Jonah and Alex, all four of them huddled around the Elucidator.

Jonah could hear the footsteps coming closer. They couldn’t have more than a few seconds before the door would burst open and men with torches would swarm into the room.

Words flooded across the Elucidator screen, moving
so quickly that Jonah could barely read them. Or, if he read them, he barely understood. What in the world were “cogency rules”? Or “subtleties of vowel pronunciations”? Why would anyone need “theological arguments” in an emergency like this?

“That one!” Alex said, shoving Jonah’s hand aside so he could press a single word glowing in the long list on the screen. Jonah didn’t even see the word Alex had chosen until Alex pulled his hand back, letting go.

Jonah could hear the footsteps out in the hallway, so close now. He read the word on the Elucidator screen:
INVISIBILITY
.

The entire Elucidator instantly disappeared, even though Jonah could still feel its rocklike form in his palm.

“Was that just invisibility for the Elucidator?” Jonah asked. “Or are we all …”

He held his hand up in front of his face. He couldn’t see it, but it was so dark in the room that without the Elucidator’s glow he wouldn’t have been able to see his hand regardless. He thought about standing up, to check in the tiny amount of light coming in through the window. But that didn’t seem like a very intelligent plan with the men’s footfalls sounding just outside the door.

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Alex groaned. “I just thought—we had to hide the evidence of advanced civilization, even if we can’t save ourselves. …”

“Well, duh! Try to save yourself, too!” Katherine muttered. “Quick! Behind the tapestry!”

Jonah wasn’t really sure what a tapestry was, but his sister was already yanking him up, toward the huge wall hanging beside the window.
Okay, tapestry, wall hanging, whatever …
His mind didn’t seem capable of cranking out anything but short, jerky thoughts. Behind him he heard Chip whispering, “What about the tapestry?” like Chip hadn’t figured out the plan either. Jonah crammed the Elucidator in his pocket so he’d have a free hand to reach back and grab Chip’s arm.

“This way!” Jonah said, the words barely audible. He pressed in close, into the tight space between the tapestry and the wall, between Katherine and Chip. He hoped that Chip had grabbed Alex, or that Alex was the type of kid who’d taken home ec along with all his science classes.
Is home ec where you’d learn about stuff like tapestry?

How could he be thinking about home ec at a time like this?

Er, no, Alex would know about tapestry because he can think with his fifteenth-century brain. So Alex ought to be safe. Oh, please, let us all be safe. …

On the other side of the room Jonah heard a door slam—slamming open, not shut, he guessed, because suddenly the whole room was flooded with torchlight.

Actually, “flooded” was an overstatement, because Jonah looked down instantly, at the first hint of light, and he still couldn’t tell if he was looking down at his own shoes or if he might be able to see straight to the floor—if he and his shoes were invisible. But the contrast between the total darkness and any glow at all made Jonah’s heart pound with fear.

They’re going to be able to hear me, even if they can’t see me!
Jonah thought in a panic.

He felt just like he always did in language arts, his hardest class in school, when Mrs. Bodette started passing out tests. He’d get that sinking feeling that he should have studied more, should have been better prepared, but now he was out of time, there was nothing he could do. …
If only we’d studied all the options on the Elucidator before we started messing around with the tracers, before the murderers showed up … if only we’d scoped out the truly foolproof hiding places … if only we’d had time to make sure that these tapestries went all the way down to the floor, that they could hide us completely …

Well, he wasn’t going to risk looking down now. If the men searching for the king and prince could see his sneakers peeking out below the tapestry, he’d find that out soon enough.

The glow through the thick tapestry was getting brighter, which meant that the torches were getting closer.
He could hear the searching men muttering to one another: “Seek ye under the bed. …” “Aye, and here’s another door. …” The distorted words were even harder to understand through the sound of his pulse pounding in his ears. This was so much worse than waiting for Mrs. Bodette to slide two or three stapled sheets of paper onto his desk. At least at school he was always able to see Mrs. Bodette coming toward him, instead of just imagining, with every second that passed, that he was only an instant away from staring into the hairy face of some appallingly cruel medieval soldier. Though come to think of it, Mrs. Bodette herself could probably pass for some appallingly cruel medieval soldier. …

Oh, no! That thought was going to make him giggle!

Panicked all over again, Jonah bit down hard, trapping the insides of his cheeks between his teeth. The pain barely stopped a laugh.

Think about something that isn’t funny!
he commanded himself.
Oh, yeah. Impending death. Ruining history for all time. Being burned at the stake for wearing weird clothing …

At that exact moment the tapestry jerked back from in front of his face. The violent motion sent it crashing toward the floor. Torchlight flickered directly into his eyes, from a torch right before him.

Jonah and the others were completely exposed.

Nightmarishly, the torch kept coming toward Jonah, the flames leaping mere inches from his face.