Free Risked (The Missing ) by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page A

you won’t die.”
    He was about to ask Gavin to just hand him theElucidator, but then he remembered that Gavin might still want to go to the future. So Jonah went with Chip’s strategy: He slammed into Gavin, matching his arms and legs against Gavin’s, and called out: “Take all five of us back to the twenty-first century! To the time where Katherine belongs!”
    Katherine and Chip must have had the same thought, because they also rushed toward Gavin.
    Chip cried, “Take us all back where we were when Gavin grabbed us to begin with!”
    And Katherine called out simply, “Take us home.”
    Out of the three of them, one of them had to be touching the spot where Gavin had hidden the Elucidator, somewhere in his clothes.
    But absolutely nothing happened. The world around them stayed firmly, stubbornly 1918.

FOURTEEN
    Angrily, Gavin pushed Jonah and the others away.
    “You think I didn’t try that?” he snarled. “You think I didn’t try to escape the minute I figured out where we are? Especially when I found out the date?”
    “The date?” Daniella repeated, glancing back toward her tracer, who was still calmly reading. “What’s wrong with July 16, 1918?”
    Gavin looked at her, and for the first time his expression softened.
    “Nothing,” he said, almost sounding kind for once. “Don’t worry about it. Nothing happens today.”
    Daniella kept staring back at him. Jonah couldn’t tell what was passing between them without a single other word being spoken. He lost patience with trying to guess.
    “Well, we know the Elucidator worked before, whenit brought us here and made Chip and Katherine and me invisible,” Jonah said, trying to sound calm and reasonable. “Can you at least let us see the Elucidator? Katherine and I have used Elucidators a lot—maybe we can get it to work again.”
    “Fine,” Gavin said, snarly again.
    He reached inside his sweatshirt, maybe into a pocket of his T-shirt underneath. He pulled out . . .
    A metal toy soldier.
    “What the . . . ,” Gavin muttered. He patted his sweatshirt, all along his chest. “Is this a joke? I had the Elucidator right there . It looked like a cell phone. Did one of you just steal it?”
    “Alexei loves his toy soldiers,” Daniella murmured, as if trying to explain her brother to everyone. “He always carries a handful in his pockets—and bits of paper and chalk and string, anything for his little games. . . . Did you just carry that off from when you stopped being Alexei?”
    “It doesn’t work that way!” Gavin snapped at her. “Does it?”
    He was appealing to Jonah and Katherine and Chip for the answer.
    “No,” Jonah assured him. “I bet that really is still the Elucidator. It’s just, the Elucidator changes shape to fit in with the time period. So it won’t look out of place.”
    “It is really freaky,” Katherine said soothingly. “Our Elucidator looked like a compass in 1903.”
    “And a rock in 1483,” Chip said, making a face.
    “But how would you program it like this?” Gavin asked frantically, poking at the metal base of the soldier with one hand, the painted-on cap with the other. His efforts did nothing but chip off a tiny fleck of paint from the cap, exposing the bare metal underneath.
    “Let me try,” Jonah said, taking the toy soldier from Gavin. He was a little surprised that Gavin let him. Jonah squeezed his hand around the Elucidator and demanded: “Take all of us back to the twenty-first century!”
    Nothing happened.
    “Make me invisible!” Jonah tried again.
    “You already are invisible,” Katherine reminded him.
    “Oh, right,” Jonah said, feeling foolish. He already felt silly enough, talking to a little toy soldier. “Make Gavin invisible!”
    He looked up just in time to see Gavin blink out of sight: The black sweatshirt, the purple streak in his hair, the surly expression on his face—all of it went see-through, all at once.
    “It works!” Katherine cheered.
    “Wh—what—?”