Free Sent by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page A

Christopher Columbus!” But he didn’t really feel like making jokes right now. In the darknessKatherine sniffled. Great. Was she
crying
? Why did girls do that? Now what was he supposed to do?
    Then Jonah heard Chip murmuring, “It’s okay. We’re all right.”
    It was too dark to see anything, of course, but Jonah had the really weird feeling that Chip had just put his arm around Katherine’s shoulder.
    “Alex?” Jonah said softly, to distract himself from thinking about Chip and Katherine. “Are you all right?”
    “Oh, yeah. Blindman’s bluff with torches is my
favorite
game,” Alex said sarcastically. “Aren’t most games better with the threat of total immolation? Instant death? Gotta
love
that adrenaline rush.”
    Jonah wasn’t really sure what “immolation” meant, but he could guess.
    “Well,” he said, “we all survived.”
    “Barely,” Alex said. “This time. We can’t do this anymore—just react to one crisis after another. We’ve got to take charge. Be proactive, not reactive. Make a plan.”
    “Okay,” Jonah said. “What do you suggest?”
    “Um …,” Alex said.
    “Er …,” Chip said.
    Katherine just sniffled—louder this time, and much more miserably.
    What were they going to do?

TWELVE
    They fell asleep.
    This was ridiculous, of course, because they were still in danger. They were clustered, essentially, in the middle of a crime scene. They were invisible, but they didn’t know how that worked—or how long it would last. They’d already messed up time, and fixing it seemed impossible.
    But somehow, after traveling back more than five hundred years in time, coping with timesickness, witnessing what appeared to be two murders, being betrayed by JB, and barely escaping being burned to death or discovered, they didn’t seem to be capable of doing anything but sleeping. One minute Jonah was slumped against the wall, thinking desperate thoughts (
We need a plan, I can’t think of a plan, this is impossible, but, oh, we need a plan. …
), and the next thing he knew, it was morning and sunlight was streaming in the window.
    The sunlight was also streaming through him.
    “Weird,” Jonah mumbled.
    By daylight, being almost invisible meant that he didn’t cast a shadow, that the sunlight from the window illuminated the stone floor directly underneath him—and under Chip, Alex, and Katherine—just as much as it did the bare floor beside them. It was like being made of glass.
    Jonah touched his glasslike leg with his glasslike hand. Everything
felt
normal, just like blue-jean material and—he slid his hand down to touch the gap between the bottom of his pant leg and the top of his sock—like ordinary skin. But looking at his own see-through clothes and body made him feel queasy and dizzy again, like the worst of the timesickness was back.
    “Chip?” he whispered. “Katherine? Alex?”
    The others didn’t budge. Deep in sleep, they looked like crystal figurines, finely crafted, with such incredible attention to detail that they each had minuscule crystal eyelashes. Each one of Katherine’s long hairs was also individually defined, tangled around her face now that the rubber band around her ponytail had slipped down. Jonah thought maybe he could even make out one strand that was shorter than all the others—the strand that had been on fire.
    He closed his eyes dizzily. Last night he hadn’t hadtime to be scared, but now it was coming back to him: the crackling flames, the swinging torches, the danger. …
    The sound of footsteps brought him back to the present. His eyes sprang open: A serving girl with a tray had pushed open the door and was approaching a table across the room.
    “Breakfast, Your Highnesses,” she said, then stopped, looking toward the empty bed. The blanket on the top was mussed, part of it hanging off the mattress and dragging down to the floor. The pillows were lumps half covered by the blanket, but too small to make it look like two boys were