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Jonah was busy trying to work something out in his head.

“They’re all going to die anyhow,” he said. “They lived more than five hundred years before we were born.” He remembered that he actually had no idea what time period he’d been born in. “Before you were born, anyway.”

“But can’t you feel it? In that room? The way it seems like really, really bad things are going to happen?” Katherine asked.

Jonah could.
Foreboding
, he wanted to tell Katherine.
That’s what it’s called. What we feel
. But what good did it do just to know the right word? Action was what counted.

“We promised we’d save Chip and Alex,” Jonah muttered. “We promised.”

“Why aren’t we saving the princesses, too?” Katherine asked. “Why didn’t Gary and Hodge kidnap them when they kidnapped Chip and Alex? Just because they’re girls, not boys?”

Jonah was getting sick of Katherine thinking everyone was prejudiced against girls.

“Gary and Hodge kidnapped lots of endangered girls from history,” Jonah argued. “Remember? There were about as many girls as boys in the cave that day. Maybe … maybe the princesses aren’t in any danger. Maybe it’s just Chip and Alex.”

Katherine clenched her fists.

“This is driving me crazy, not knowing what’s going to happen. What’s
supposed
to happen,” she said.

“But this is no different from regular life,” Jonah said. “When have you ever known what’s going to happen in the future?”

Katherine glared at him.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “I’m used to the future being the future, not the past being the future. Or—you know. It’s weird that the future already happened once, but we don’t know what it was. Er—will be.” She was getting so tangled up in verb tenses that she stopped trying.
She gulped. “How can we save Chip and Alex if we don’t know what we’re supposed to be saving them from?”

Especially when we thought we’d already saved them
, Jonah thought dizzily. His stomach churned. What if they’d “haunted” the queen before they noticed Chip’s and Alex’s tracers? What if they’d managed to convince her that her sons were dead? What if King Richard III did something differently because he’d seen the boys’ “ghosts” at the Westminster shrine? How come it seemed like everything they did messed up time?

“Maybe JB was right,” Jonah muttered. “Maybe it is dangerous for us to be here.”

“JB—oh!” Katherine suddenly sat up straight, practically banging her head on the wall. “He didn’t want Chip and Alex dead on the ground after all! He didn’t betray us!”

Jonah stared at her. She was right. They’d been so upset thinking that JB wanted Chip and Alex dead that they hadn’t given JB a chance to explain. Chip had cut him off and kicked the Elucidator across the room. And then they’d muted it.

Jonah dug in his pocket for the Elucidator. He expected it to be completely invisible again or, at best, still stuck on the words
INVISIBILITY? Y/N
. But it held a full sentence now, in tiny, barely glowing type:

WILL YOU LISTEN TO ME NOW?

Jonah immediately felt annoyed for all those hours they’d spent trying to get the Elucidator to say something besides
INVISIBILITY? Y/N
. When JB’s question faded into another one—
SAFE FOR ME TO TALK OUT LOUD? Y/N
—Jonah hit the
Y
with an angry stab of his fingernail.

“Thanks a lot,” he muttered. “So you could have communicated with us all along? You can do anything you want through the Elucidator?”

“Not while you had the Elucidator muted, during the system restore,” JB’s voice came softly out of the mostly transparent “rock” in Jonah’s mostly transparent hand. “You cut off all contact with the outside world.”

Jonah suppressed a shiver at that.

“But ever since the Elucidator reset, back at the cathedral—you could have talked to us then?” Katherine demanded.

“Did you want me to?” JB asked.

Jonah decided to leave that question alone.

“So talk now,” he said brusquely. “Tell us everything.” The word “everything” came out a little mockingly. Jonah was proud that he could make it sound like he didn’t really care whether JB talked to them or not.

“It’s hard with you right there, near the royal family,” JB’s voice was barely a whisper. “Will you give me permission to pull you out of time for a little bit?”

Jonah exchanged glances with his sister.

“
All
of us?” Katherine asked, peeking back toward the room where Chip and Alex were still talking to the queen.

Even across the centuries Jonah could hear JB’s frustrated sigh.

“I can’t pull Chip and Alex out right now,” JB said. “It’d be too … complicated. And they’re not really Chip and Alex at the moment. They’re Edward and Richard, two very critical players in history.”

“You promised we could try to save them!” Katherine’s voice rose a little too high. “Was that all a lie? Is it even possible?”

“It’s possible, it’s possible,” JB said soothingly. “The fact that you’re there proves I’m giving you a chance.”

“But you want to pull us out now,” Katherine said.
“Some chance.” She grimaced. “Sure, Chip and Alex weren’t killed by being thrown out the window—but what happens when King Richard finds out where they are now?”

Jonah hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“I promise you,” JB said, his voice cracking with seeming earnestness. “Nothing bad will happen to Chip and Alex while you’re away.” A hint of steeliness entered his voice. “Now,
please
, before someone hears you—can I pull you out of time?”

Jonah raised an eyebrow at his sister. She frowned back at him.

Jonah wasn’t quite sure what thoughts were tumbling through his sister’s head, but his were a frantic tangle.
Should we say just one of us can go, and the other one stays here to watch out for Chip and Alex? No—that would be too awful, not knowing what the other one was dealing with. Or what was happening with Chip and Alex. So should we refuse and never know anything? That’s not any good either. If JB’s really sure Chip and Alex would be all right without us for a while …

Jonah thought of something else.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “How can you promise they’ll be safe? I thought we weren’t allowed to know the ‘future.’” He said “future” sarcastically, just to let JB know that he and Katherine weren’t nervous at all.

Katherine was biting her lip now. Jonah began tugging on the ragged edge of his left thumbnail.

“You can know more now,” JB said. “Now that you’re not with Chip and Alex.”

“We’re still with them!” Jonah said.

“They’re not within earshot,” JB said with exaggerated patience.

Jonah wanted to pull Katherine over to the side and confer with her, out of JB’s earshot. But if JB could make the Elucidator work again from the distance of centuries away, he could probably hear anything they said, no matter where they were.

Actually, if he wanted to, he could probably just yank them out of time, like he’d done with the Taser. Why wasn’t he doing that? Why was he asking permission? Somehow the fact that JB had given them a choice made Jonah more inclined to trust him. But what if JB knew that and was just asking in order to trick them?

Jonah shook his head, trying to clear it.

“I’m going to ask Chip and Alex what they think,” he said firmly. “Whether it’s okay with them if we leave for a while.”

“You don’t have to do that,” JB said. “Really, that’s not the best—”

And then he broke off because Jonah shoved the Elucidator in his pocket and stood up.

“This should be quick,” he told Katherine with a confidence he didn’t feel. Katherine stared up at him, wide eyed.

“I’m coming with you,” she said.

They tiptoed silently back into the royal family’s room. This was hard to do, since the floor was covered with mats of woven rushes that rustled easily. But Chip and Alex didn’t seem to see or hear them approaching.

Chip and Alex were eating now, scooping up handfuls of berries and grains—maybe the fifteenth-century version of granola. Jonah had never been a granola fan, but it sounded almost as good as pizza right now. Had Chip or Alex thought about how Jonah and Katherine might be starving too? Were they making any attempt to save some food to give to Jonah and Katherine later, when the queen and princesses weren’t watching?

The answer to that, clearly, was no. The boys were tossing strawberries in the air and catching them in their mouths, very dramatically. There was no way to hide food doing that. It was almost as if they were trying to show off how they had food and Jonah and Katherine didn’t.

Jonah stopped a few inches from Chip’s ear.

“Chip, listen,” he whispered quickly. He hoped he could say everything he needed to say before an errant strawberry landed on his head and appeared to bounce off
empty air. “Find some excuse for you and Alex to get away from everyone for a few minutes. Say you have to go to the bathroom or something.”

Chip turned his head toward Jonah, but his blue eyes focused on a point far past Jonah. Chip caught a berry in his mouth and turned his head back in the other direction. He seemed every bit as oblivious as the serving girl and the men with torches back at the Tower of London. He, too, seemed to be looking right through Jonah.

Jonah felt his heart clutch with fear.

“Chip? Can you hear me?” Jonah whispered. “Do something to show you know I’m here. Blink three times, or … or …”

Chip didn’t blink.

“You’re just acting, right?” Jonah pleaded. “Because the queen and the princesses are watching you? That’s okay, I understand, but …”

It was too agonizing to just stand there waiting for Chip to react. Jonah grabbed Chip’s arm. Though Jonah could see Chip’s red sweatshirt faintly, along with his tracer’s fifteenth-century clothes, all Jonah could feel was stiff velvet. Jonah tightened his grip.

Chip didn’t seem to notice.

“Katherine, please, help,” Jonah whispered urgently.

Katherine grabbed Chip’s other arm. Jonah hadn’t
exactly told her what he wanted her to do, but she began tugging, as if she was determined to separate Chip from his tracer. Jonah forgot about the queen and the princesses sitting on the other side of the room. He began yanking on Chip too.

And then suddenly Jonah’s hands held nothing but air.

Chip was gone. So was Alex. So were their chairs. So were the woven rushes on the floor. So were the stone walls. Jonah looked around to see if Katherine had disappeared too, but seeing required light, and in a split second all of that had vanished too.

But a second later—a second or an eternity, who could say?—Jonah felt bathed in light. He wasn’t conscious of moving, but somehow he was sitting down now, his legs dangling from an oddly contoured chair, his back cushioned by soft pillows. He turned his head, and Katherine was there in another chair beside him. He turned his head back because he’d missed something.

JB was standing in front of them.

Jonah had gotten so used to JB as a disembodied voice coming from a rock that he had to blink a few times to
make sure that it really was him. Same dark hair flopping over his forehead. Same intelligent green eyes and handsome face that had made Katherine call him “cute janitor boy”—back when they thought he was only a janitor for the FBI. Same nondescript clothes he’d been wearing the last time they’d seen him. Vaguely Jonah wondered if regular time travelers like JB had special clothes that blended in no matter what century they were in.

“You pulled us out of time, didn’t you?” Katherine accused, blinking in the unexpected glare. “Weren’t you waiting for us to give you permission?”

“I don’t need your permission if you’re caught breaking a time law,” JB said, a slight smirk traveling across his face. “Trying to separate Chip from his tracer right in front of his mother and sisters—that’s a clear violation of Time Code 6843J6. I was just waiting for you to do something like that.”

The smirk turned into a cocky grin.

“We did practically the same thing in front of the murderers at the Tower of London last night,” Jonah said. “Er—last night in 1483.” They could not possibly be in 1483 anymore. The lights were too bright, the room too clean and angular and antiseptic. “Why didn’t you pull us out of time then?”

“That wasn’t a violation because you were in the dark
then, and the so-called murderers didn’t notice anything different,” JB said. “And remember—they weren’t murderers after all. They didn’t kill anyone.”

“Not yet,” Katherine muttered. “How do we know they’re not sneaking up on Chip and Alex right now?”

“You mean, right at the moment you just left?” JB corrected. “Look.”

He pressed a button on the wall beside him, and the wall slid back to reveal a view of Chip and Alex with their mother and sisters. The view was so clear and distinct that it was like looking through a window.

No
, Jonah thought.
Clearer than that. It’s like a window without glass. Just an opening. It looks like I could walk right back into the room with them
.

No, that was wrong too. If the medieval room were really that close, the division between them really that nonexistent, the bright light of the room Jonah was in would be illuminating every corner of the sanctuary room at Westminster. And that room was just as dim and dusky as it had been moments before, lit only by candlelight.

TV
, Jonah concluded.
Really, really, really good TV
.

“One second after you left,” JB said. “Two seconds after you left.” On the screen, or through the window or whatever it was, Chip and Alex continued to eat strawberries. The queen and princesses watched them from across the
room with great relief and love written all over their faces. “Three seconds after you left. Four—”

“Okay, okay! We get it!” Jonah said grumpily. He squinted up at JB. “But why are you here?” The last time they’d seen JB, he’d been in a cave with thirty-two other kids he intended to return to history. “What happened at the cave? What’d you do with the other kids?”

“To your way of thinking, they’re still in the cave,” JB said. “And so am I.”