Rescued (4 page)

“We like seeing them happy,” Anastasia said. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No,” JB said, and his eyes seemed to twinkle a bit. “But I've brought you news that I believe will make you even happier. Everything is set for Maria and Leonid to go to the twenty-first century when it's time to move on. We've double-checked all the possible repercussions, and there are no obstacles.”

“Hurray!” Anastasia exclaimed, throwing her arms around Maria.

Katherine and Chip thumped Leonid on the back as if he'd just won some sort of athletic endeavor.

“Angela agreed to let the two of them move in with her for a while,” JB continued.

“And then I'll tell my parents I've found my long-lost birth sister, and they'll let Maria move in with
us
,” Anastasia said fiercely.

“Yes, we did see that as a possible outcome,” JB said, laughing. “If you emphasize how having Maria around will make you more responsible and studious, it might even work.”

And then I will be left alone with a stranger?
Leonid wondered.

“Who's Angela?” he asked.

“Oh, she's great,” Katherine assured him. She patted his back even harder. “She's the only grown-up in the twenty-first century who knows about all the time travel. She'll take good care of you and Maria.”

“Exactly,” JB said, nodding.

He held a small boxlike device close to the wall where the impossibly young tsar and the impossibly young tsarina stood holding hands for the very first time.

“I'm updating the controls on the screens so that everyone can see everything that happened up until the exact moment in the twenty-first century when Gavin, Daniella, Chip, Jonah, and Katherine left to go to 1918,” JB added. “That way, you guys can prepare Maria and Leonid for what to expect. I'm counting on the rest of you to be very
gentle
explaining all the events of the twentieth century.”

For some reason, Katherine started bouncing up and down once again.

“The screens will show us
everything
?” she squealed. “Does that mean we can finally find out Jonah's other identity? Who was he in original time?”

The screens—the one showing 1400s royalty and the one showing 1800s royalty—both froze, making the tsar and the tsarina and the blond English princesses seem stricken and stuck in time.

JB shook his head.

“I should clarify,” he said. “The screens will show you everything that's appropriate for you to know going back to the time you left. In regards to Jonah's original identity, that is something that would be interpreted very narrowly. So no, Katherine, you're not going to find that out in this time hollow.”

Katherine shrugged and grinned.

“You can't blame me for trying, can you?”

JB shook his head and turned to Leonid.

“You are the one who may require the most explanations,” JB said. “You were the person we had to do the most checking on. Because you were never supposed to die in that basement massacre.”

It took a moment for JB's words to sink in. Then Leonid exploded with questions.

“What?” he said. “I wasn't supposed to die? Then why did I need to be saved? How could I have not died, when the guards were killing everyone?”

Didn't they think I was worth killing?
he wondered.

JB put a steadying hand on Leonid's shoulder.

“In original time you were never in that cellar that night to begin with,” JB said.

“But—I went down those stairs!” Leonid protested. “I heard the truck from across the street and I heard the fighting in the mountains, and I thought the family was in danger, and they were going to be moved, or—”

Leonid was with people from the future who seemed to know everything, but he still found it hard to explain anything about that night. Maybe he still didn't quite understand what he'd done.

JB was regarding Leonid with the kindest of expressions.

“I have the monitors set up so you will be able to see what happened originally, if you want,” he said. “You were supposed to live into the 1920s, and we had to make absolutely certain there would be no long-term damage to time, having you vanish a decade early.”

“And there won't be any damage,” Katherine said firmly, as if she still thought she needed to persuade JB. “Leonid will be so much better off in the twenty-first century.”

JB sighed.

“That part's indisputable,” he said. “Russia between 1918 and the late 1920s was an awful place for Leonid. We knew that from the start. It was just all the other issues with time we were worried about. So you may want to say, ‘I told you so,' Katherine, but I'm not going to give you that satisfaction.”

Katherine just made a mocking face at him—clearly she and JB were fond of each other, no matter how much they seemed to argue.

But Leonid was thinking,
I was supposed to live a decade more, and none of that time meant anything? Was I really that worthless?

*    *    *

“Why do I look like a ghost?” Leonid asked Chip.

After JB left, Leonid had gotten up the nerve to watch the portion of his life that would never happen now. He was trying to do it privately, in secret; he wanted to be the only one who saw his own worthlessness. But he'd been baffled right away. One moment he'd seen himself on the screen looking terrified as he lay in a makeshift bed on the floor. Around him, the
boom
s and
crash
es and
thud
s of artillery fire seemed to be getting closer and closer, perhaps even coming from the next street over. The next moment, his body had seemed to separate in two: one normal-looking version of himself suddenly stood up; another see-through version continuing to cower in his blankets.

“That's your tracer,” Chip said, pointing to the ghostly figure when Leonid drew him over to the screen. “Tracers show what you would have done in original time if your life hadn't been changed by time travelers.”

Leonid squinted back and forth between the screen and Chip.

“But I hadn't met any time travelers then,” Leonid said. “I didn't meet any time travelers until I was suddenly flying through time with you, Katherine, and Jonah.”

“Things had already changed for you because of time travel,” Chip said. “You just didn't know it. Look.” He turned to the screen and gave it an instruction: “Show Leonid that afternoon, when he was playing toy soldiers with Alexei. When the changes started for the two of them.”

“I remember what happened then!” Leonid protested. But both Chip and the screen ignored him.

On the screen, Leonid saw himself lying on his stomach on the floor with Alexei, several battalions' worth of toy soldiers lined up between them. Alexei once again looked horribly ill, with one knee swollen and bandaged and one of his elbows nearly as engorged. It was painful just to look at the boy, but Leonid-on-the-wall gazed steadily at him.

“You're a good friend, Leonid,” Alexei said on the wall. “You've been very loyal, both at Tobolsk and here in Ekaterinburg. When you leave today, you should . . . should take half of my soldiers with you. They belong to you now.”

“See how his mouth lights up a little when he speaks?” Chip asked. “That's a sign that he didn't say that in original time. But this time around, it was like he was really Gavin and Alexei both, at the same time, and Gavin knew the guards were planning to kill all the Romanovs that night. At that point it didn't look like there was any chance of rescue, and that was the only way Gavin could think of to thank you for everything you'd done. I mean, toy soldiers—kind of stupid, right? But it set events in motion that made it possible for JB to save Jonah, and for Katherine to save the rest of us. And one of those events was you getting up that night instead of staying across the street and hearing the Romanovs being killed.”

Leonid winced. On the screen, he wasn't even acting grateful for Alexei's gift.

“And then I'll have to carry them back and forth when we play again tomorrow?” he complained, sounding peevish. It had always been hard not to sound peevish after an hour or two of trying to entertain Alexei. Leonid thought he usually did a better job of hiding his annoyance.

“It's weird that something so small can change everything, isn't it?” Chip asked.

“You're saying I would have been a coward without those toy soldiers?” Leonid asked.

“You tell me,” Chip said. “You're the one who decided to walk down into that basement. Why did you do it?”

Did Chip actually expect an answer?

“I want to see what I would have done for the next ten years of my life,” Leonid said stiffly. “What would have happened to me if I hadn't been killed or rescued.”

“Go for it,” Chip said with a shrug.

The scene on the wall changed, back to showing Leonid's ghost-self cowering through a sleepless night. The way he tossed and turned and shook, Leonid could tell that his ghost-self heard every gunshot, every rev of the truck engine across the street, every continuing
boom
of the artillery fire growing ever nearer. In the morning, he saw his ghost-self eavesdropping on guards who spoke of bayonets sliding through bodies, of finding jewels hidden in the clothing of the dead.

And he saw his ghost-self staying silent, still cowering, not confronting anybody about the evil they'd done.

Leonid's ghost-self was sent to live with distant relatives more than a thousand miles away. He saw himself go as though he had no choice in the matter. Perhaps he didn't.

Finally he saw his ghost-self join the counter-revolutionaries—the people fighting against those who'd wanted the tsar and his family dead. But it was hard to see what he actually accomplished before he was caught and executed.

Nothing,
Leonid told himself.
You know you accomplished nothing. Otherwise, you would have been forced to live your ghost-self's life. It would have mattered too much for you to miss it.

Why couldn't he just be glad that he'd escaped?

*    *    *

Time passed—or would have passed, if they hadn't been in a time hollow. The grand duchesses, Chip, Katherine, and Leonid spoke to Jonah and Gavin/Alexei at what might have been regular intervals, if there had been any way to measure time. Chip, Katherine, and Daniella/Anastasia tried to teach Maria and Leonid what to expect from the twenty-first century. Leonid let the words flow over him without even trying to understand: “computer,” “iPod,” “video game,” “refrigerator.” “Smartphones,” “suburbs,” “rap.” “PlayStation,” “text message,” “Instagram.”

Only once did Leonid rouse himself to ask a question.

“And does everyone just automatically have their own Elucidator?” he murmured, in one of those rare moments when Katherine and Anastasia stopped chattering. “Will the Grand Duchess Maria and I get ours as soon as we arrive?”

“Oh, no,” Katherine exclaimed, after gaping at him for what could have been a full minute, if there'd been any time passing. “You thought you were going to a time period with Elucidators? No, no, no. How could you have thought that?”

“When you only know the past, everything in the future seems equally outlandish,” Maria defended Leonid. She turned to face him directly. “Anastasia—I mean, Daniella—already explained this to me, but I guess nobody told you. Elucidators haven't been invented yet where we're going in the twenty-first century. JB is from a time even farther off into the future. That's why he has an Elucidator and the rest of us won't.”

Leonid remembered how he'd felt arriving in the time hollow, when he'd seen it as just another prison. It seemed even more like a prison now—one with a dwindling supply of air.

“But . . . Jonah had an Elucidator in that basement in 1918,” Leonid protested. “Katherine had an Elucidator when she came back to the basement and screamed, ‘If you want to live, grab on to me!'”

“I
wish
those had been our Elucidators to keep!” Katherine said. “But they weren't. I'm pretty sure Jonah has at least one more trip to the past he'll have to take—and JB had better let me go with him. But after that, I probably won't get to travel through time ever again.”

She sounded both wistful and terrified, all at once.

“
I'll
be okay with never traveling to the past again,” Anastasia said with a shiver.

“Me too,” Maria agreed.

Will I?
Leonid wondered.

*    *    *

JB was coming back to retrieve them all. In their hospital room in the distant future, Jonah and Gavin/Alexei had healed enough that no one in the twenty-first century would be able to tell that they'd been shot. They were being sent home—to their twenty-first-century homes—and so was everyone in the time hollow.

“You have to remember to call Anastasia and Alexei only Daniella and Gavin from now on,” Katherine reminded the others as they stood waiting for JB to arrive. “
Please
don't anybody do anything that makes JB reconsider, and decide we need to wait here longer.”

“I thought we were just waiting here for Jonah and, uh, Gavin to heal,” Leonid said. “I thought we were just . . . killing time.”

“Don't you think JB wanted
us
to heal, too?” Katherine asked. “From all the horrible things we saw?”

Was that possible? Even though they'd been in a time hollow where people couldn't heal?

Leonid had seen even more horrors while he was in the time hollow. He'd watched his uncle being shot; he'd watched the execution of his own ghost-self. He'd watched entirely too many battles in the cataclysmic events he now knew to call World War I and the Russian Revolution; he'd watched every last moment because he'd been curious about men and boys he'd once known who had gone off to fight.