“No,” Leonid said, clipping off the word more than he meant to. “Nobody told me that.”
Chip shook his head and rolled his eyes a little.
“I guess there wasn’t really time when we first met you to say things like, ‘Hello, my name is Chip Winston. I’m thirteen years old, and I live in Liston, Ohio. Who are you?’” he said.
Leonid had not known that Chip had a last name. Liston, Ohio, sounded like a disease to Leonid, but he guessed it was probably the name of a place in America.
“And it’s like there’s too much time in a time hollow,” Chip went on. “You think of things you should say or do, but then you’re like, Eh, I can do that later. What’s it going to matter? Now, later, it’s all the same.”
Leonid had had that problem too. He’d thought it was just because he had seen people die, just because he had lost his homeland and his home time.
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Leonid asked Chip.
A shadow crossed Chip’s face.
“I grew up thinking I was an only child in the twenty-first century,” he said. “Then when I went back in time, I met my brother and five sisters. My brother, Alex, was rescued with me, and I talk to him every day. I never knew my sisters very well, but . . . I miss them. They would have loved the twenty-first century. There was so much that wasn’t possible for them in the 1400s. . . .”
Leonid braced himself for Chip to say, What about you? Leonid planned to say, It was just me and my uncle, because it would not do to talk about the happy little family he’d been part of at the palace: not just his uncle, but his aunt Manya and the three little cousins as well.
But before Chip could say anything else, Alexei and Jonah appeared on the wall. It looked like they were just on the other side of a window—an open window. Maria reached out as if she planned to touch Alexei’s face; she jumped back when her fingers brushed only solid wall.
“It’s so good to see all of you!” Alexei exclaimed.
“We’re not going to get you out of trouble if you’ve been misbehaving,” Maria said. She seemed to be trying hard to sound like a stern, reproving older sister, even as she gazed adoringly at her brother.
Alexei lifted his hand like he was taking a pledge.
“God’s honest truth,” he said. “I’m so grateful just to be alive. I’ve turned over a new leaf.”
“What if we kind of miss the bad old Alexei?” Anastasia teased. “I don’t want you tricking me into going back in time ever again. But something like a toad slipped in my bed wouldn’t be so awful.”
“Because that would mean we were together again,” Maria added. “And . . . that you were healthy enough to make trouble. You look good, Alyosha.”
“I feel good,” Alexei said. “Those bullets were nothing.”
For a moment, he looked like the same old Alexei who bragged that his toy soldiers could beat Leonid’s toy soldiers every time. But then his face turned more serious. It was like watching him become an entirely different person.
“You’re going to have to start calling me Gavin, not Alexei,” he said. “And I promise, I’m going to live as Gavin in a way that makes me worthy of how Katherine risked her life to save me.”
Leonid saw Chip squeeze Katherine’s hand; he saw Maria and Anastasia nodding, too overcome to speak.
“He’s even promised to stop snoring at night!” Jonah said, rolling his eyes and giving Alexei/Gavin a light, joking shove.
Alexei/Gavin did not even wince at the touch. He just shoved Jonah back and threw his hands in the air in mocking surrender.
Even though Alexei/Gavin was wearing a loose-fitting cotton shirt, Leonid could tell by the way it hung and by the way Alexei/Gavin moved that the boy no longer had huge, bulbous, painfully swollen joints; his elbows and wrists were shaped just like anyone else’s.
“They did cure you, Alexei,” Leonid blurted out. “Praise be to God!”
“No, they—” Alexei/Gavin glanced down at his normal-looking body, and seemed to understand what Leonid meant. “This is how I have always looked as Gavin. Even in the twenty-first century, they have treatment for my hemophilia. I still have the disease, but I don’t suffer from it like I did when I was Alexei. I understand the difference now.”
“Oh,” Leonid said. “That’s good.”
Jonah and Katherine and Chip started talking then, something about trying to figure out how they could “call” each other regularly every day when Jonah and Alexei/Gavin were part of normal time and all the others were outside it. The time-travel concepts were far beyond what Leonid could grasp. He wasn’t really paying attention, anyhow.
Because all he could think was, Alexei won’t need me in the twenty-first century. Nobody will need me there.
Of course it had been worth it for Katherine to risk her life to go back in time and save Alexei, Anastasia, Maria, and Chip. They were royalty; they were important. History would remember them forever.
But what could Leonid do that made it worth saving him?
* * *
JB came back.
One minute there was nothing in the center of the room; the next moment the man from the future stood there as solid and real as anyone.
“JB!” Katherine exclaimed, jumping up and running over to hug him.
Chip also rose to shake JB’s hand. Anastasia, Maria, and Leonid hung back.
JB looked around, raising an eyebrow at the screens everyone had been clustered around.
“Interesting choices,” he observed.
Chip had been showing Katherine scenes from England in the 1400s—all his pretty blond princess sisters looked happy enough with their lives. One had even become queen.
Maria and Anastasia had been watching their parents’ courtship back in the late 1800s, and Leonid had been timidly hovering behind them, trying to decide whether he needed to hide the fact that he was watching too. It was so strange to see the tsar and tsarina as young people shyly gazing into each other’s eyes. It was so strange to see the tsarina smiling and untroubled with pain; to see the tsar unburdened and unstooped.
“So often royal marriages are only for political reasons, bringing together a husband and wife who have nothing in common,” Maria said. “It is . . . comforting . . . to see how our parents always had more than that. To see how much they loved each other from the start.”
“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 fo
r 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 booms and crashes and thuds 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.”