Risked (The Missing ) by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page A

he whispered in Daniella/Anastasia’s ear. “You just keep acting like Anastasia.”
    Daniella nodded, the motion so nearly imperceptible that Jonah barely saw any tracer light.
    Jonah grabbed Chip and Katherine each by an arm and tugged them away from the Romanovs, into the deserted dining room. In a whisper he quickly explained what he’d seen and heard in the guard office.
    “We’ve got to find out how much time we have,” he told the others. “And what other allies we might have. Those guards we went past, coming into the house—they said something about what the commander had planned for tonight. But we don’t know what it is, and—”
    “Jonah, yes we do!” Katherine hissed. “Remember? Daniella said the date today was July 16, 1918. And remember what we saw on the computer back home? About how the entire Romanov family was executed in the early morning hours of July 17, 1918? Don’t you think that’s what the guards were talking about?”
    Jonah had forgotten about seeing that date on the computer. It hadn’t meant that much to him before he’d been in 1918, before he’d met any of the Romanovs. But now he staggered back against the wall.
    Hopeless, he thought. This is just hopeless.
    Even if “early morning hours” meant as late as five or six a.m., that could be less than twelve hours away.
    “But remember, when Gavin looked online the day before you did, it said Alexei and Anastasia escaped,”Chip said. “So isn’t it possible that we could do something so that the next time anyone looks at a computer in the twenty-first century, it says that none of the Romanovs were executed? Because that’s what really happens?”
    Jonah couldn’t tell if Chip was saying that because he really believed it, or if he was just trying to make everyone feel better. Either way, Jonah decided to go along with it.
    “Absolutely,” Jonah said. “Everything is still in flux.”
    He tried not to think about the look on Daniella’s face when she’d said to Gavin, so calmly, “We’re supposed to die, aren’t we?” He tried not to think about how fate had seemed to take over on their last trip through time, to the extent that everything about their friend JB’s life had come to seem preordained.
    As if nothing they might plan to do could possibly matter.
    “So,” Jonah said, a little too brightly, totally faking it. “Where do you think we should start searching for information? Back with the guards or in Alexei’s room? Don’t you think there still might be some information Gavin isn’t telling us?”
    “Maybe we should split up,” Chip said. “We don’t want Gavin to feel like we’re ganging up on him. Who do you think he’d trust the most?”
    “Um, none of us?” Katherine said, rolling her eyes.
    Jonah sighed.
    “I’ll go talk to him,” he said. “You two see if you can find out anything else by hanging out near the guards.”
    Jonah headed toward Alexei’s room, and the other two went back toward the guards’ office.
    I’ll pull Gavin away from his tracer, and maybe he’ll be so grateful to get away from the pain that he’ll tell me all sorts of things, Jonah thought. That is, unless he’s lying to us about not needing immediate medical care, and even as Gavin he’s in a lot of pain.
    But when Jonah stepped into Alexei’s room, the boy’s bed was empty. Instead, Alexei was lying on his stomach on the floor with another boy, playing with the vast lineup of toy soldiers.
    “Boom!” Alexei shouted. “My cannon fire just knocked out your front ranks!”
    He reached out and scattered the first two lines of soldiers on the opposite side.
    “And my artillery just killed your left flank!” the other boy responded, upending twenty or thirty of Alexei’s men.
    “Leonid, you can’t kill that many people at once,” Alexei complained, setting most of his men back into place.
    “How do you know?” the other boy asked.
    “Because I’m the tsarevitch, and you’re just a kitchen