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“Huh?” Jonah said at the same time that Katherine muttered, “What?”

JB laughed.

“If you’re going to do much time traveling, you’re going to have to stop thinking of time as a line,” he said.

Jonah thought about telling JB how many time lines he’d had to draw in school over the years—all his social studies teachers had certainly acted like time was a line.

“And,” JB continued, “you’ve got to stop thinking of your experience of events as the only sequence.”

Jonah knew the expression on his face was dead blank.

“Come again?” Katherine said.

“Exactly!” JB congratulated her. Then he did a double take. “Er—you weren’t demonstrating your understanding of the Principle of Simultaneous Time?”

Katherine rolled her eyes and shook her head.

“I knew I should have spent more time boning up on bizarre twenty-first-century American expressions,” JB muttered to himself. He cleared his throat. “Look. To your way of thinking, you were in the cave. Then you were in the Tower of London. Then you were on the barge. Then you were at the coronation. Then you were in sanctuary at Westminster. Then you came here. Right?”

Jonah shrugged.

“Sure,” Katherine said.

“But if you remove the element of time, then you could be in all those places in any order, even simultaneously,” JB said. “To quote: ‘Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.’ And if you mix up time with time travel, it can seem like everything
is
happening at once. I stayed in the cave with the other kids. But I also left the cave to contact my fellow time protectors, and we’ve been doing everything we can behind the scenes to keep the fifteenth century on course.”

“So you, like, stopped time in the cave to deal with us?” Katherine asked doubtfully.

“Time wasn’t moving in the cave anyhow. Remember?” JB said. “What actually happened, if you want to be technical, is—”

“Can we just think of it this way if it makes us feel
better?” Katherine asked. “Because I want to talk about the really important questions. And then we can get back to Chip and Alex before they completely forget who they are.”

“But …” JB stopped and seemed to be reconsidering. “Okay. Fine. I’ll dispense with the technicalities for now.”

Jonah shifted in his chair. Oddly, the chair seemed to shift with him. It figured that he’d have a funky, futuristic chair to go with the futuristic TV in front of them.
Focus
, he thought.
Past, not future
. He narrowed his eyes, watching the queen on the screen watching her sons so carefully.

“So, what’s the deal with 1483?” Jonah asked. “You say Chip and Alex are safe right now, but … I know they weren’t when we first got here. I mean, there. To that time.” He pointed at the dim scene in front of him. “Those guys who came into Chip and Alex’s room in the Tower of London—you can’t tell me they were some brave heroes who the queen sent in to rescue her little boys. You can’t tell me Chip and Alex would have been fine if we hadn’t intervened. I don’t believe it.”

JB nodded slowly.

“That’s very astute of you,” he said. “You’re right about that. Somewhat.”

Jonah stared at JB. Now he was confused.

“But Chip and Alex were supposed to survive being
thrown out that window?” Katherine asked, sounding baffled too.

“Oh, yeah,” JB said. “Which made it a big problem that Gary and Hodge did some rather incomplete historical research and yanked them out of time shortly before the—shall we call them window-throwers, for lack of a better term?—before the window-throwers stepped into the Tower of London. It turns out that you four kids arrived almost exactly at the same moment that Edward and Richard vanished, the first time around.”

Jonah was trying to picture this in his mind. Gary and Hodge, the unethical time travelers from the future, had probably arrived in the same dark room that Jonah and his friends had landed in. They’d probably been very gleeful when they snatched Edward/Chip and Richard/Alex, because they had two famous members of British royalty to carry off to the future, to be adopted by families who could then brag about their children’s lineage. Gary and Hodge just hadn’t known how far JB and his friends would go to stop them.

“So if Chip and Alex hadn’t come back, the … the window-throwers would have rushed into an empty room? They wouldn’t have found anyone to throw?” Katherine asked, grimacing.

“Exactly,” JB said.

“So what?” Jonah said.

JB and Katherine both whirled on him, mouths agape, brows furrowed. Jonah wondered if he sounded heartless or just stupid.

“I mean,” Jonah hurried to explain, “if Chip and Alex were going to disappear either way, why does it matter if they disappeared from their room or from the courtyard down below?”

“Ah,” JB said. “That’s a very good question.”

Katherine rolled her eyes.

“You have to understand how complicated everything was in the room that night, and in the courtyard down below,” JB said. “There were five or six different layers of plots being carried out simultaneously—you’d practically need a graph to map out all the conflicting interests.”

Jonah sincerely hoped JB wasn’t going to produce a graph. Or a map.

“Shall I just give you the headlines?” JB asked.

Jonah and Katherine both nodded.

“It was about a week ago,” JB began, “when the queen heard that Richard had been proclaimed king and was planning his coronation—”

“What?” Jonah interrupted. “You told us last night that Chip was king—I mean, that Edward was. You told us!”

“Were you lying to us?” Katherine accused.

JB held his hands up in a show of innocence.

“Would you let me explain?” he asked. “I told you what Edward would have believed about his own identity, at that point in time, the first time through history. It wasn’t exactly a lie—things were very much in flux. Edward didn’t know what Richard was saying out in public. And Edward/Chip still believes he’s king, don’t you think, even now, even though Richard is wearing the crown?”

Jonah glanced at the screen, at the superior expression on Chip/Edward’s face, even as he tossed strawberries in his mouth.

“But the guards last night said they were looking for princes, as if Chip and Alex had the same rank,” Katherine said. Jonah was impressed that she’d noticed that, since she’d been dodging flames at the time.

“The serving girl this morning said ‘princes’ too,” Jonah added. He’d been too distracted to really think about that before. “Does that mean even the servants were on Richard’s side?”

“That means they thought it was safest to act like they were,” JB said grimly. “Now, can I please get back to my story?”

Jonah shrugged. Katherine nodded.

“When the queen heard that Richard had claimed the throne for himself, she knew that her sons’ lives were in
danger,” JB said. He pointed to the regal woman in the scene before them, her head held high and proud. “Queen Elizabeth Woodville—now, there’s another person whose talents were never fully appreciated by history! To think what she could have done in a time when women had equal rights …”

“What did she do?” Jonah asked quickly, before Katherine could get started on this topic. “In real history?”

JB seemed to shake himself back from gazing adoringly at the queen, who was, now that Jonah thought about it, much prettier than anyone else he’d seen in the fifteenth century. For a mom, anyway.

“Oh, yes … she had her people infiltrate the plot against her sons’ lives,” JB said. “In the room that night, those men you saw? The window-throwers? One of them thought there was another man on the ground waiting to bash the boys’ brains in, to make it look like they died trying to escape.”

“I knew it!” Katherine said, sounding much too triumphant about such a grisly theory.

“The other window-thrower thought that there was a man waiting below to spirit the boys away to safety,” JB said. “But he knew he had to act like a murderer, to convince his partner.”

“And
were
there men on the ground?” Jonah asked.

JB nodded grimly.

“Two were there, planning to catch the boys, if they could, or bind up their broken limbs and carry them off if they hit the ground and were injured,” JB said. “You see how desperate the queen was, that she would agree to such a dangerous plot?”

“I guess it’s better than letting your sons be killed,” Katherine muttered.

“But there were other men on the ground whose job it was to claim that they’d seen the boys jump and innocently discovered the bodies afterward,” JB said. “They were the ones who mistakenly called out, ‘Where are the bodies?’ when they didn’t see the boys—they were so stunned they forgot that
that
wasn’t information they should broadcast.”

“So in the original version of history …?” Jonah asked.

JB chuckled.

“In the original version of history both boys landed in bushes and took off running before any of the men on the ground saw them, friend or foe,” he said. “This left both sides in confusion. The officials in the tower pretended for quite some time that the princes were still there—but they were also systematically interviewing everyone who might have heard or seen anything. So, as you can imagine, rumors began to fly.”

“Rumors that the boys were dead?” Jonah asked.

“That they were dead, that they were alive, that they’d sprouted wings like angels and flown away … name the theory, and somebody was trying to pass it off as gospel truth,” JB said. He shook his head in amusement. “Meanwhile, the boys were being quite resourceful evading capture—it was one of the greatest adventures of their lives. I feel rather bad for Chip and Alex that they missed it.”

“Sor-ry,” Katherine muttered, stretching out the word so she didn’t sound apologetic at all. “Call me crazy, but when you don’t know what’s
supposed
to happen, and you see someone trying to throw your friends out a window, it’s just kind of natural instinct to want to stop it.”

“If you didn’t want us to save Chip and Alex, you should have told us,” Jonah said grumpily. Though he wasn’t sure what he would have done if JB had commanded, “
You’re going to see two guys who act like murderers come in and throw Chip and Alex out the window—but don’t worry. They’ll be fine. As long as you stand back and watch and don’t do a thing.”

“No, no,” JB said. “You don’t understand. The two of you saving Chip and Alex was the best outcome. We ran computer models on this. If the boys had landed just a fraction of an inch differently, they could have been maimed or killed. Or been caught by the murderers on the ground. Or been found by the rescuers, who were then caught by
the murderers, who would have killed everyone. Or—”

Jonah didn’t want to hear any other ways everything could have gone wrong.

“So why didn’t you tell us ahead of time what we had to do?” he asked.

“If you’d known that those men were going to try to throw Chip and Alex out the window, would you have been able to wait until the last possible second to try to save them?” JB asked. “Or would you have jumped the gun a little, grabbing them too soon because you
really
didn’t want to wait until you were too late? And then the men throwing them out the window would have noticed the difference, and …”

JB didn’t have to finish his sentence. Jonah felt breathless just thinking about it. He and Katherine had had a split second to save Chip and Alex. A fraction of a second either way and they would have failed.

Jonah turned toward Katherine, expecting her to look as awestruck as he felt. But her expression was gripped with rage.

“And you didn’t even want me and Jonah to come!” she spit out. “How could you! What did you think was going to happen?”

“We thought history would repeat itself,” JB said. “We thought Chip and Alex and time itself would proceed
exactly as they and it had the first time around.”

Katherine continued scowling at him.

“You were taking a lot of chances, weren’t you?” she said. “Chip and Alex are bigger than their tracers. That could have thrown things off. They were struggling a lot more than their tracers did. Flailing about. Couldn’t that have made them land differently? And—”

JB cut her off.

“We’re doing the best we can, all right?” he said. “This is the first time we’ve ever tried to return missing children to history. It’s not easy trying to account for every possible variable. We weren’t expecting the two of you to go jumping into the past, for example, so we had to rerun all our calculations. And you saw for yourselves what a dicey time 1483 was. …”

He gestured toward the scene of the royal family, the queen and her children holed up in sanctuary. But then his voice trailed off and his eyes goggled out slightly.

“No,” he moaned. “That’s not supposed to happen yet.”

Jonah immediately looked toward Chip and Alex, or where they’d been. The scene before him had changed. He no longer had a clear view of the queen and princes and princesses sitting in their private chambers. Instead he could see the outside of their sanctuary building, where
guards stood forbiddingly on either side of the front door. Some of the guards held torches, waving them out into the night as if they were trying to ward off evil. In the dim torchlight Jonah could see a lone man approaching the guards.

The man moved briskly, authoritatively—he didn’t seem the type to be frightened off by guards or torches. At first Jonah could see only his shoulder-length brown hair, the tip of his strong nose, his long, swinging dark cape. The man walked right past the guards and the torches, unimpeded. Then the man turned, his hand on the door, and Jonah could see his face.

It was King Richard III.

“No!” Jonah screamed.

He sprang up and raced toward the king. Jonah would have to tackle him and then yell loudly enough that Chip and Alex would hear and have time to hide, up in their sanctuary room. Or no, maybe Jonah wouldn’t be strong enough to knock down the king—maybe Jonah would have to settle for grabbing the king’s cape and hollering at the guards, “Don’t you know who this is? Aren’t you supposed to be protecting the queen and her kids from this man?”