Caught (Missing) (11 page)

“We want your daughter to live just as much as you do,” Katherine said. “But if you destroy our, uh, compass, we may not be able to succeed.”

She seemed to be trying to make her voice sound as steely as Mileva’s. But she mostly just sounded like she did when she was bargaining with Mom and Dad to get to stay up late, or to invite more friends to her birthday parties, or to watch a TV show that Mom and Dad thought
was “inappropriate.” It wasn’t exactly the right tone for negotiating about a matter of life and death.

“Katherine, didn’t you hear what she’s asking for?” Jonah asked. “
Everything
she’s asking for? We can’t—” Katherine clapped her hand over Jonah’s mouth, but it was a moment too late. Jonah’s voice had squeaked upward on the word “can’t.”

Mileva sagged to the ground, falling beside her motionless child.

“You’re just children,” she moaned. “I’m begging children to save my daughter’s life, when the best doctor in Novi Sad couldn’t do it.”

“Well,
we
actually can,” Katherine said in an offended voice. “If—”

Now it was Jonah’s turn to put his hand over Katherine’s mouth. Had she thought through anything she was saying? Unless JB was suddenly going to airlift bottles and bottles of antibiotics into Novi Sad—which Jonah did
not
expect to happen—then the best he and Katherine could hope for was to save Emily, the thirteen-year-old version of Mileva’s daughter. Mileva wouldn’t even recognize Emily.

And as for Mileva and Albert and Lieserl living together happily the rest of their lives?

If Emily/Lieserl is a missing child of history, that didn’t happen,
Jonah told himself.
It won’t.

Did that mean it couldn’t?

Jonah hadn’t had to worry about this with the other missing kids he’d seen returned to time. Either they’d been orphans, or the circumstances of their lives hadn’t left Jonah feeling very sorry for the parents they’d left behind in the past.

But here was Mileva, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing beside her dying daughter . . .

She snatched up the Elucidator from beneath her shoe and held it up, squeezing it too tightly.

“I’m warning you,” she said. “I will destroy this if I have to. I will.”

Katherine shoved Jonah’s hand away from his mouth just as he shoved her hand away from his. Both of them lunged for the Elucidator in Mileva’s hand. In a flash, Mileva tucked the Elucidator under her knee and began blindly waving her arms about, grabbing at air, trying to catch . . .

Jonah and Katherine.

Jonah instantly reversed course, scrambling away over a downed tree. Mileva’s hand brushed his shirt sleeve, but he pulled back, diving past her. This was like being back in elementary school, playing tag or sharks and minnows. Jonah almost wanted to say,
Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah. You can’t catch me!

Then he looked back.

Mileva wasn’t chasing him.

She’d already caught Katherine.

Mileva had her fingers circled around Katherine’s wrist. With her other hand, she was feeling her way up Katherine’s arm, patting her hair, touching her face.

“You
are
an invisible child,” Mileva was saying. “A little girl.”

“Not that little,” Katherine muttered.

When she saw Jonah looking back at her, she mouthed other words:
What am I supposed to do?

Katherine probably could have just yanked her arm away. Certainly Jonah and Katherine together could have overpowered Mileva and escaped. For that matter, Jonah could have swooped in, snatched up the sleeping Lieserl, and threatened to carry her away if Mileva didn’t let Katherine go.

The problem was, second by second, Jonah and
Katherine could feel time changing. No matter what they did now, they could see by the expression on Mileva’s face that her whole understanding of the universe had been rearranged.

It is possible for people to walk around invisibly.

It is possible for a child to have a solid body, with skin that feels like anyone else’s, and yet have light flow right through her, as if she isn’t even there.

What else is possible?

“Please,” Katherine whimpered. “Let me go. You can’t know too much. It’ll ruin time.”

“Time,” Mileva said thoughtfully. “My husband has been quite preoccupied of late thinking about time.”

“Katherine, that was the exact wrong thing to say!” Jonah complained.

Mileva glanced toward Lieserl, making sure she was safe. Then Mileva looked back and forth between the spot where Katherine sat, invisibly trapped, and where Jonah stood, just as invisibly frozen in indecision.

“I have a theory,” Mileva said, and now she sounded calm and analytical—like a scientist, not a distraught mother. “Last night, when I could hear both of you breathing deeply, as if asleep, I studied your ‘compass’ once again. And it is my hypothesis that that is the device by which you are able to render yourselves visible or invisible.
It is not that you possess magical powers, but that you have harnessed the magic of science.”

“Uh . . . possibly,” Jonah said slowly, looking at Katherine to see if she thought it was safe to admit this. She shrugged helplessly.

“Are you asking us to tell you if you’re right or wrong?” Katherine asked. “What good would that do? You’re hiding the ‘compass’ under your knee. We can’t do anything with it right now.”

“But—if you give it back to us, we could demonstrate some of its powers for you,” Jonah said. Even as he spoke, he could hear the craftiness in his own voice, the deceit. He tried again. “We swear, we wouldn’t do anything bad. Nothing that would hurt you or Lieserl.”

Katherine made a face at him—a grimace that said either
You are a terrible negotiator
or even
You are a terrible liar.

Jonah shook his head at her and mouthed back,
I’m not lying.
But was that quite true? The first thing he’d want to do with the Elucidator was contact JB. And what would JB do? On Jonah and Katherine’s most recent time travel trips, to 1600 and 1611 and 1605, JB’s concern for saving people had edged out his desire to preserve time in its original form, no matter what. But he still wanted to keep time on track. And it seemed pretty clear that time was about to bring Mileva plenty of pain in the near future.

“I don’t believe I need you to operate the ‘compass,’” Mileva said. She lifted one eyebrow in a way that made her look smug. “I believe I’ve figured out how to use it myself.”

Jonah and Katherine exchanged glances. Jonah could tell that his sister was as skeptical as he was.

Sure Mileva knows how to operate the Elucidator,
Jonah thought.
Just like back home when Mom said she knew how to use her new cell phone, but she spent the whole first week asking Katherine and me, “How do I change the ring tone?” “How do I set the alarm clock?”

“Voice commands,” Mileva said confidently. “Make them visible again. Katherine and the other one. The boy.”

Jonah looked at Katherine again, and what registered first was the horrified look on her face. Only then did he realize that he could no longer see trees through her face—instead he could see the freckles on her cheeks, the blue of her eyes, even a leaf stuck in her blond hair.

She was visible again. And—he looked down at blue jeans, at a gray Ohio State University soccer camp T-shirt—so was he.

Mileva looked calmly back and forth between the two of them.

“From the look of your clothes, I’m guessing that you’re not from around here originally,” she said dryly.

Jonah realized that of course that would be one of the things she’d notice right away. All the females they’d seen so far in Mileva’s time wore skirts or dresses, mostly with aprons and kerchiefs or hats. The males went for baggy shirts and pants—though more in an “I could be Amish” way than an “I’m a hip-hop star” kind of way. Of course blue jeans and T-shirts would look weird to her. But Jonah and Katherine had managed to pass off their fashions in the fifteenth century by saying that they were from another country. Mileva had just given them that excuse to use now, too.

Mileva glanced to the side, checking on the sleeping Lieserl again.

“What? There are three of you?” she asked, sounding startled.

What’s she talking about?
Jonah wondered.
Or—who?

Katherine shifted positions, so Jonah had no hope of seeing past her and Mileva. Jonah dashed forward, hoping that somehow JB had managed to come to them—not that Gary or Hodge had returned.

Jonah caught a glimpse of blue jeans and running shoes. Whoever it was, was lying on the ground and had just rolled toward Mileva.

Mileva jumped to her feet.

“Where’s Lieserl?” she screamed. “What happened to
my daughter? She was right here! How could she have vanished?”

Mileva dived past the figure on the ground, feeling around in the twigs and leaves where she’d placed her daughter only moments earlier. Nothing was there.

Except a tracer.

Jonah saw a strand of long, dark hair stretching back into the same space as the tracer’s head. He saw Lieserl’s blanket clumped around the blue jeans. And finally he understood.

Lieserl hadn’t vanished.

She’d just turned back into Emily.

“Where’s my little girl?” Mileva shrieked again, even louder. “What have you done to Lieserl?”

“Chip and Alex didn’t separate from their tracers that easily,” Katherine said.

“But if time’s really messed up . . . ,” Jonah began.

He saw a glint of something on the ground, and realized that Mileva had left the Elucidator behind when she’d jumped up to search for Lieserl. He scrambled toward it, but Mileva did too. Her hand closed over it and she brought it up to her mouth.

“Bring Lieserl back,” she commanded. “Give me back my daughter. Please. Please. I beg of you . . .”

Her words turned into wails. Jonah cast a nervous glance back toward Novi Sad. What if someone heard her?

Emily sat up, looking groggily around.

“Emily,” Jonah said quickly. “You have to get back together with your tracer. Just until we can get Mileva calmed down.”

Emily blinked at him. She seemed to be struggling to draw air into her lungs.

“Couldn’t . . . breathe,” she finally said. “Can’t . . . go back. Felt like I was going to . . . die.”

“No,” Jonah said. “Not that. Not yet. You can’t . . .”

He glanced toward the tracer lying on the ground. The light glowing from the tiny figure seemed to be growing dimmer and dimmer.

“She’s really dying?” he gasped. He’d seen this happen with a tracer deer back in 1600, its glow vanishing completely after a tracer arrow pierced its heart. That’s what happened when tracers died. But that had just been a deer. This was a little girl.

No,
Jonah reminded himself.
Lieserl’s not going to die. Just her tracer. Gary and Hodge kidnapped the real girl. She grew up and became Emily. Emily’s right here. She’s fine. She doesn’t even look sick.

But somehow, even through her own wailing, Mileva had heard the horrible word.

“Dying?” Mileva moaned. “Where? How? What can I do? How can I stop it? Please! Please! Tell me!”

She went back to feeling around on the ground again, as if she believed that there’d been some sort of trade—as
if she’d lost the ability to see her daughter when she’d gained the ability to see Katherine and Jonah.

And, in a way, wasn’t that how it happened?
Jonah thought.
Was it just a coincidence of timing? Or is everything connected? Us becoming visible, talking to Mileva . . . did that mess up time just enough that Emily could easily break free from her tracer?

And then Jonah couldn’t think, because Mileva’s anguish was too awful to watch. Her hands flailed about through the tracer’s dimming outlines again and again and again.

Katherine put her hand comfortingly on Mileva’s shoulder.

“Mileva,” she said. “Lieserl’s not going to die. She’s just . . .” Katherine looked helplessly at Jonah. “Changed,” she finished feebly.

“Grown up,” Jonah said. He couldn’t watch Mileva’s pain and grief a second longer without trying to help. “You could say it happened through the miracle of science.”

He put his hands on both sides of Mileva’s head and turned it so she couldn’t help but stare directly into Emily’s eyes.

“Mileva,” he said firmly, without a hint of squeakiness, his voice carrying the ring of truth, “meet your daughter as a teenager.”

Jonah instantly had second thoughts.

For one thing—though, in the scheme of things, it was a really a minor point—did people even use the word “teenager” in the early nineteen hundreds?

For another thing, there was the way both Katherine and Emily were staring at him: their jaws dropped, their eyes bugging out, their faces drained of color.

Jonah couldn’t remember Katherine looking that horrified by anything he’d ever done before. Not dropping spiders down her shirt, not putting peanut butter in her hair, not secretly booby-trapping her closet with knotted string . . . They’d been brother and sister for almost a dozen years. They’d traveled through centuries’ worth of time together. He’d shocked and outraged and horrified her plenty.

Just not ever quite this badly.

Jonah glanced around quickly, pretty much expecting the world to be ending around him: the ground shaking, trees collapsing on his head, the Elucidator shrieking out an alarm, perhaps even the voice of God himself proclaiming from the heavens above, “That’s it. Game over. Let there be darkness. . . .”

Jonah and Katherine had experienced something like that—only without the voice of God—back in 1600 when things really got messed up. They’d experienced the sensation that time itself was splitting in half back in 1611, at the moment that they now worried that Albert Einstein had discovered.

But the world around Jonah right now didn’t seem to have changed that much. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves high overhead. Otherwise, everything was quiet.