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“No, no,” Alex said. “Not that kind of sanctuary. She’s in
political
sanctuary. After Gloucester—Richard—had her brother arrested and took control, she moved in there, where she’d be safe. Where he couldn’t arrest her.”

“But—she’s his own sister-in-law,” Jonah objected. “Right?”

“So?” Chip said.

Jonah decided he didn’t like Chip’s fifteenth-century family any better than he liked Chip’s twenty-first-century parents.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Katherine objected. “Why would staying in that building make any difference if someone wanted to arrest her?”

“Because it’s sacred ground,” Chip said. “Church property. Even a king has to bow to church authority.”

Jonah was about to say, “What about the separation of church and state?” Then he realized that that would sound really, really stupid. This wasn’t America. This wasn’t the twenty-first century.

“I was staying there with her,” Alex said softly. “Until Gloucester came and said he wanted me to be with Chip for Chip’s coronation.”

“So he tricked her into letting you go?” Jonah asked.

Alex shook his head slowly.

“No,” he said. “She’s really smart. She knew what she was doing. That’s why I was sure she had a plan to rescue us. Me and Chip both.”

“Well, let’s go pay her a visit,” Katherine said grimly.

They tiptoed across a stone path, though there was no one nearby to hear them if any of their shoes squeaked. They rounded the corner of the stone fortress and discovered two guards in front of the only door.

“Now, how are we going to get past them?” Jonah muttered.

“I have an idea,” Alex said.

He tiptoed close to the guards, but Jonah couldn’t really tell what he did after that. He seemed to be lifting his arms over the guards’ shoulders. Was he dropping something on them? What good would that do?

Moments later a cluster of large black crows swooped down from a nearby tree and began to peck at the guards.

“Begone!” the guards screamed. “Shoo!”

The birds flapped their wings in the guards’ faces; the
guards separated from their tracers to wave their arms and spin around, trying to shove the birds away.

“Now!” Alex whispered. “Hurry!”

While the guards were fighting with the crows, Alex shoved in through the door. Jonah walked right behind him, with Chip and Katherine on his heels.

Once the door creaked shut, they found themselves in a small alcove outside a dark chapel.

“How did you know that would work?” Jonah asked.

“Think about it,” Alex said. “I was stuck in this building with my mother and sisters for a month and a half. Don’t you think I had to figure out a way to get in and out?”

“But what did you put on the guards?”

“Bread crumbs,” Alex said, grinning triumphantly.

Jonah thought about asking why Alex was carrying bread crumbs around in his pockets, but that reminded him of food, which he really shouldn’t be thinking about, because it made him too hungry. He wished he’d thought to bring some of the bread crumbs in his own pocket. He wouldn’t have wasted it on birds.

“Come on,” Alex said. “Our mother’s chambers are upstairs.”

They tiptoed up a dark, winding staircase—were all the stairways in the fifteenth century like that? Jonah wondered. He thought about what it would be like to be
trapped in this dreary building for a month and a half.

“No TV, huh?” he whispered to Alex. “No video games?”

“Are you kidding?” Alex whispered back. “We just got the printing press in England six or seven years ago. We barely have books!”

They reached the top of the stairs and tiptoed into a sparsely furnished room. A blond woman in an elegant black dress and five blond girls—also in black—were all leaning against a bed, their faces buried in the comforter.

All of them were sobbing.

“Uh, Chip?” Jonah whispered. “If that’s your mom and sisters, I think they already know you’re supposedly dead.”

The sobbing was especially hard to watch and listen to because Jonah could see the tracers of the queen and her daughters, the way they would have been if nobody had interfered with time. The tracer queen was seated regally on the bed, silently smiling, laughing, and talking. The tracers of the five girls, who all looked so much like Chip and Alex, were seated beside their mother. One of them flipped a cascade of blond curls over her shoulder and giggled silently.

Wait a minute
, Jonah thought.
The tracer queen and princesses shouldn’t look so happy. The tracers should be the ones crying
.
Wouldn’t they be certain that Chip and Alex are dead? Shouldn’t the queen and princesses now, after the tampering, still have some hope that Chip and Alex are okay?

He was confusing himself, getting mixed up between how things should be with and without the tampering.

I’d think a lot more clearly if I had some pizza or spaghetti or lasagna in my stomach
, he thought grumpily.

Katherine was tapping him on the shoulder, very annoyingly.

“L-l-look,” she stammered, pointing to the opposite side of the room from the sobbing queen and princesses and their eerily happy tracers.

Jonah turned, ready to tell Katherine not to bug him when he was hungry.

But turning, he saw what Katherine was pointing at.

Two chairs sat on the opposite side of the room from the bed. And two more glowing tracers sat in the chairs, laughing just as uproariously as the tracers of the princesses and queen.

One of the tracers was Alex’s. The other was Chip’s.

Even in the original version of time the prince and the former king had survived.

“What?” Jonah exploded, loudly enough that the queen stopped sobbing for a moment, lifted her head, and looked around, a mystified expression on her face. Then, seeing nothing, she buried her face in the bedding again and sobbed even harder.

Jonah pushed Katherine back out into the hall. Chip and Alex had just turned and caught their first glimpse of the tracer boys, and now they were leaning toward the tracers, as if they were being pulled in that direction.

“Oh, no,” Jonah muttered. “Don’t even think about it.”

He grabbed the back of Chip’s sweatshirt and the back of Alex’s T-shirt and tugged. It took a lot of effort, but eventually he had them back out in the hallway too. He forced them down toward the ground.

“We’ve got to talk,” he whispered. “How can this be?”

“They didn’t die,” Katherine murmured. “They never died. We were wrong all along.”

“But how did they survive?” Jonah asked. “That was, like, six stories down to the ground.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Chip said. “Don’t you remember, we only climbed down one or two sets of stairs?”

Jonah thought about this. Chip was right—there hadn’t been that many stairs when they were leaving the Tower of London.

“But I looked out the window,” Jonah said. “The ground looked a mile away.”

“Could that be because of the timesickness?” Katherine asked. “Messing us up? When I jumped into the river to swim to the barge, I thought I was going to have to swim forever. But then it only took three or four strokes.”

Through raw sewage
, Jonah wanted to add, but he restrained himself.

Were his perceptions so badly off too? He remembered how, when Chip was running toward Richard III’s procession, Jonah had managed to tackle his friend even when he was sure Chip was too far away. He thought about how high and echoey the ceilings had seemed in the tower room, how far he’d had to run to hide behind the tapestry. …

“But … but … Chip and Alex never had timesickness,”
Jonah protested, still not convinced. “They saw how far away the ground was.”

“I never looked out the window,” Chip said.

“And I just looked
up
, toward the stars,” Alex said.

Both of them spoke in dreamy, distracted tones. Both of them were looking back over their shoulders, gazing longingly toward the tracers.

It’s like mind control
, Jonah thought.
Any time they’re near their tracers
.

Did that explain why both Chip and Alex said they felt strange as soon as they got close to Westminster Abbey? Maybe the tracers had been moving right past them, just out of sight, heading toward their reunion with their mother. …

Katherine was focused on a more immediate problem.

“But what do we do now?” she asked. “This changes everything!”

Chip and Alex started to stand up, edging toward their tracers once more.

“No, no, you can’t do that!” Jonah said. “We’ve got to figure this out. Logically.”

“What’s to figure?” Alex asked. “We can stop our family’s sorrow. We can bring joy to our mother’s heart.”

He gestured toward the queen and princesses, who were, indeed, sobbing as though their hearts were broken.

“But they’ll see you change!” Katherine objected. “It’ll look like you just appear out of nowhere. …”

“They’re not looking,” Chip said. “That’s why we’ve got to meld with our tracers now, while they’re all crying on the bed.”

“No, wait!” Jonah called out.

It was too late. Chip and Alex broke away from Jonah’s grasp. In four quick strides they were beside their own tracers.

“It’s okay!” Katherine hissed in Jonah’s ear. “They’re invisible, remember? They’ll just stay invisible! They’ve just got to find that … out. …”

Her voice trailed off because she was wrong. As soon as Chip and Alex sat down on the chairs, occupying the same space as their tracers, their forms sprang back into living color.

“It must be like multiplying negative numbers,” Jonah muttered. “Two negatives make a positive. So, invisible tracer, invisible time traveler—fully visible boy.”

“
What
are you talking about?” Katherine demanded.

“Never mind,” Jonah mumbled.

Chip pulled away from his tracer long enough to grin broadly at Alex. Alex grinned back. And then he called out in a high, sweet, pure voice that sounded a lot younger than his usual voice, “Mother?”

The sobbing queen on the bed—and all five of the sobbing princesses—jerked to attention and whirled around.

“Oh, no, their clothes!” Katherine moaned. “They look all wrong!”

But the queen and the princesses didn’t seem to notice that Chip and Alex were a strange blend of fifteenth century and twenty-first century.
They must not be able to see the jeans and the Nikes and the short hair
, Jonah thought.
Maybe just time travelers can see that. The serving girl back at the Tower of London didn’t notice anything weird either. …

And then Jonah forgot to wonder about clothes or hair or anything else. The queen let out a shriek of pure joy and cried out, “My sons! Oh, my sons! I thought you were lost to me forever!”

She sprang up and dashed across the room, burying both boys in a hug. The princesses raced after her, their arms outstretched. They grabbed their brothers too. They were all so overjoyed that their laughing, giggling tracers back on the bed seemed downright solemn by comparison.

“But how did you get here?” the queen asked when Chip and Alex finally pulled back from the embrace. “My faithful servants said something went wrong with our plan, and you vanished. I thought we’d been betrayed, and you’d been carried away by the enemy. …”

“We thought you were surely dead,” the tallest princess added.

“We hid and came here on our own,” Chip said. “We distracted the guards and tiptoed up the stairs. We … we knew you had a plan, but we weren’t sure who we could trust.”

The queen gave a most unladylike snort.

“Is not that the story of our time?” she asked, and a hint of sadness crept into her voice. “Whom do we have left to trust?”

“Lord Rivers will come to us now, will he not?” Chip asked. “We can mount a campaign against Gloucester. We will defeat him.”

But the queen was peering over Chip’s head now. The sadness had taken over her face again.

“You do not know,” she murmured.

“Know what?” Alex asked.

“We know that Gloucester had himself crowned king,” Chip said in a hard voice. “We know that he is spreading slander about … about …”

The queen waved this news away, as though it was inconsequential. Or as if she had much worse problems to worry about.

“He had Rivers beheaded,” she said in a numb voice. “Rivers, and Grey, and Vaughan … he had Hastings executed too, because he said he was plotting against him.”

Jonah had no idea who any of those people were, except the Rivers guy—wasn’t he Chip’s uncle? The one on his mother’s side that Chip liked? As soon as the queen said “beheaded,” Chip slumped in his chair and clutched his face in shock and horror.

“No …,” he moaned.

Beside him, Alex was shaking his head in disbelief. With each name the queen recited, both boys gasped. Finally Chip dropped his hands from his face and peered up at his mother.

“Has he left us no one?” he whispered.

“He has left us ourselves,” the queen said with great dignity. “My daughters. My sons. Myself.”

Chip’s face showed what he thought of princesses and a queen as their only allies. Jonah hoped Katherine didn’t notice.

“Some of this conversation … it must have partly been what they were talking about anyway,” Katherine whispered.

Jonah noticed that the tracers on the bed had stopped laughing and giggling and rolling about. The queen’s tracer had the same expression of sorrowful nobility as the queen herself.

“But we shall prevail,” the queen said, her head held high. “We are in the right.”

Like an echo, the tracer queen on the bed mouthed the same words. The tracer princesses sat like statues beside her.

“I missed you, Mother,” Alex said, throwing his arms around his mother’s waist. “I missed how you always know the right thing to do.”

Alex couldn’t have seen his mother’s expression because he had his face buried in her skirt. But Jonah saw how the corners of her mouth trembled, how the pain and fear settled deep in her eyes.

“I can’t watch this,” Katherine murmured. “It’s like watching Holocaust movies, where you know everyone’s going to die.”

She pulled Jonah away from the doorway into the room so he couldn’t see either.