Rescued

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  Rescued

  They said the rest of the world was not like Russia.

  They said the rest of time was not like 1918.

  And that, the strangers said, was why they’d rescued Leonid.

  They said he should be grateful.

  * * *

  Leonid opened his eyes to a room without windows or doors. It was just four blank walls, a ceiling, and a floor. Nothing else.

  “Another prison,” he whispered.

  Katherine, the girl from the future, shook her head so hard that strands of her blond hair tangled together. If Leonid squinted, he could see her hair as a sort of golden crown, almost like the ones the grand duchesses used to wear.

  “No, no,” Katherine said. “This isn’t a prison. It’s a time hollow. A place away from time where we’ll be safe.”

  “We’re trapped. There’s no way out,” Leonid observed, even though he thought that should be obvious.

  “Sure there is,” Katherine said. “You get in and out with an Elucidator. It’s like a cell phone that lets you travel through time.”

  Leonid didn’t know what a cell phone was. And he didn’t have an Elucidator, whatever that was.

  So doesn’t that make this a prison for me? he wondered.

  The others in the room were sorting themselves out, untangling arms and legs from the heap they’d landed in. Besides Katherine, there were two others from the future, a man and a boy. Leonid had heard names for them, but surely those were fake. The boy was called Chip, and the man had only initials, JB.

  Was the future such a strange place that adults—even adults powerful enough to travel through time—had only random letters to call their own? What could have happened to the patronymics, the way your father’s name was built into yours, always identifying you as your father’s son and showing your exact place in the world?

  Being people from the future who were used to traveling through time, JB, Chip, and Katherine were already springing to their feet. Katherine bounced up and down on her toes, a motion that made her seem more familiar, like some young girl Leonid might have known back in his own time. Up until now she had seemed completely alien: She wore dungaree pants like a boy and a bizarre item of clothing he’d heard someone call a “sweatshirt”; she interrupted men while they were talking, even old men whose gray beards should have earned them respect.

  And, everyone said, she had saved Leonid’s life. His and Chip’s and the grand duchesses’ and the tsarevitch’s, the most important one of all.

  How could a mere girl have saved them?

  Leonid turned his attention to the others who had traveled with him from 1918: two of the grand duchesses, Maria and Anastasia, and . . .

  And where was the tsarevitch?

  “His Royal Majesty!” Leonid cried, slipping in his panic and using a proper term for the boy, even though he thought he’d managed to break that habit months ago. The Bolshevik guards in Ekaterinburg beat anyone who referred to the royal family as royalty. Still, Leonid had never gotten comfortable with calling the boy his familiar name, Alyosha, or even the slightly more formal Alexei or Nikolaevich. Using any of those names was like claiming there were no barriers between Leonid and the tsarevitch, and there were. There were. So mostly Leonid had referred to Alexei as “you” or “he” or “him.”

  Somehow, everyone back in 1918 always knew who he was talking about.

  “Where is he?” Leonid shouted now.

  Katherine reached over and patted Leonid’s shoulder. (Girls in Leonid’s time also did not pat older boys’ shoulders. Not unless they were betrothed, or about to be. And Leonid had gotten the impression that Katherine belonged to Chip. He’d seen them kiss.)

  “Don’t worry about Gavin—I mean, Alexei,” Katherine said, using yet another name for the tsarevitch. “Didn’t you understand what was going on? Jonah and Ga—Alexei—were taken to a hospital to heal. Because they got shot when we were all escaping from that basement.”

  An emotion crossed her face that seemed wrong with her elfin features—it was more like the sorrow and grief and fear Leonid had seen on the faces of the very aged. Or on the faces of virtually everyone back in 1918 Russia.

  Leonid struggled to bring himself to his feet. He made it only halfway up, to his knees.

  “I go there too, then!” he demanded. “I serve him!”

  “Not anymore,” Katherine said. “You don’t have to serve anyone ever again.”

  Chip put his hand on Katherine’s arm.

  “You think you’re being nice, telling him that, but maybe you shouldn’t go there yet,” Chip told her. “You probably mean, ‘You’re free! You’re in charge of your own destiny now!’ But maybe he only hears, ‘Your life is without purpose.’”

  Leonid remembered hearing that Chip was somehow from the past and the future, both. Somehow he had been both a king in the Middle Ages and an ordinary boy in the twenty-first century.

  So he presumed to think he could understand Leonid?

  “What—was there still slavery in Russia in 1918?” Katherine asked, sounding horrified. “Was Leonid a slave?”

  From the floor, the Grand Duchess Maria mumbled, “Our great-grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, freed the serfs in 1861. Two years before your Lincoln freed the American slaves.”

  “I am a servant, not a serf,” Leonid agreed.

  Katherine kept patting his shoulder.

  “Well, you can still be Ga—er, Alexei’s friend,” she said, in a voice she probably thought of as kind. “He still needs you to be that.”

  Leonid didn’t think he could ever claim such a role. But he argued anyway, “Wouldn’t a friend be at the hospital with him? What if the doctors don’t know he has—?”

  He broke off, because how could he talk in front of these strangers about the tsarevitch’s secret? About how just the smallest pinch or paper cut could set the tsarevitch to bleeding like a stuck pig?

  I’ve seen him bleed for days from a scratch that should have healed in the blink of an eye, Leonid thought. How could gunshot wounds do anything but kill him?

  “Don’t worry, Leonid,” the Grand Duchess Anastasia said, sitting up beside her sister. “Everyone taking care of Alexei knows about his hemophilia. Where he is now, I bet they could even cure it.”

  The man, JB, shut the small object he’d been staring at. The snapping noise made Leonid jump. It sounded nothing like a gunshot, but Leonid had heard gunfire too recently not to be on guard.

  That’s just a . . . pocketwatch, isn’t it? Leonid wondered.

  Or was it the mysterious time-travel device Katherine had mentioned—an Elucidator?

  “I’m sorry, but we need to get some facts straight,” JB said. “As much as we would love to cure Gavin’s hemophilia, that’s not feasible. It would ruin time to send him on to the twenty-first century in perfect health, when there isn’t a cure there. It would raise too many questions. The doctors there would want to study him endlessly, in hopes of passing his cure on to everyone else with his disease.”

  Leonid finally managed to make it to his feet—slowly. He wanted to lunge at JB and grab the man by his collar, but he was afraid he would only throw himself off balance, and end up falling to the floor. Leonid instead put all his
anger into his voice.

  “You have a cure but you will not share it?” Leonid demanded. “That’s . . . that’s . . .”

  He wanted to say, treason; he wanted to say, inhuman cruelty. But they were speaking English, not Russian, and Leonid had only a servant’s grasp of English; he knew it only because the royal family spoke it sometimes.

  Not surprisingly, they hadn’t taught him the word for “treason.”

  “Leonid, it’s not JB’s fault,” Anastasia said. “He’s not being mean. Time travel messes up everything.”

  “But remember, all of us would be dead if it weren’t for time travel,” Chip said. He glanced at his girlfriend, with her tangled crown of blond hair. “Well, except for Katherine. She’s the only one of us who was safe in her own native time.”

  Leonid did not want to talk about death. He looked around the blank, bland room. Somehow it seemed well lit, even though he could see no sign of any light fixtures.

  Maybe there were other things here he couldn’t see?

  “Show me the kitchen, and I will make us all a meal,” he said. “It’s time to eat.”

  Leonid had no idea what time it was. It had been the middle of the night when he’d sneaked down into the basement to look for Alexei. Since then, there’d been so many gunshots and so much zooming back and forth through time—surely it was long past time for breakfast.

  Katherine giggled, a startlingly girlish sound.

  “There’s no kitchen here,” she said. “There’s no time, either. And as long as we’re here, we’ll never get hungry or thirsty. That’s how time hollows work.”

  Leonid could not imagine not being hungry. His uncle had always been a little vague about exactly when Leonid was born, but the royal cook, Ivan Kharitonov, said it was clear Leonid was somewhere in his teen years by the way Leonid could eat and eat and eat, and then be hungry five minutes later.

  But—this was odd—Leonid actually didn’t feel any hunger pangs right now. He couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t felt hungry.

  Before Ekaterinburg, before Tobolsk . . . probably when the tsar was still in power? he thought.

  “Wounds can’t heal in a time hollow either,” Chip said, as if he was trying hard to make sure Leonid understood. “That’s why Alexei and Jonah have to be treated in a hospital in the future, apart from us, while we’re all waiting here.”

  Katherine raised one of her elbows, as if showing it off.

  “I’m just lucky the future medicine could cure my broken arm so quickly, and I didn’t have to stay in the hospital too,” she said.

  Leonid had not even known about Katherine’s broken arm. There’d been so much danger, pain, and death in the basement they’d all left, it was impossible to keep track of everyone’s wounds.

  JB slid the item that might be an Elucidator into his pocket.

  “I have to go straighten some things out,” he said. “The five of you will be perfectly safe here. Chip and Katherine, can you take care of everyone? And, um, be careful about how much you reveal. We’re still double-checking the best placement for Maria and Leonid. What if we’re wrong about everything working out for them to go to the twenty-first century with the rest of you?”

  Anastasia put her arm around Maria’s shoulder.

  “Maria goes to the exact same time period as me!” she cried. “She’s my sister! She’s the only sister I have left!”

  Because Olga and Tatiana are dead, Leonid thought with an ache.

  He could barely allow himself to think the names of the two grand duchesses no one had been able to rescue. They’d died alongside the tsar and the tsarina and the cook and the doctor and the maid and the valet. . . .

  Stop! he told himself. Stop!

  “And Leonid—Leonid was almost like a brother to Alexei,” Anastasia continued. “They need each other!”

  Leonid never would have claimed such a relationship.

  “Daniella,” JB said with a grimace, using Anastasia’s other name. “We’re doing our best. But . . . original time was not kind to your family. Or to your loyal servants. Can’t you see how many limitations we face? Can’t you see that anything we manage is going to be better than what happened originally?”

  Anastasia’s glare was fierce.

  “I just lost my parents and two of my three sisters, and you say there’s no way we can go back to rescue them,” she said, narrowing her eyes at JB. “Don’t you dare say anything else about limitations. Wherever Maria and I go from here, we go together.”

  She tightened her grip on Maria’s shoulder and clasped Maria’s hand as if she were joining together some unbreakable chain.

  Doesn’t she remember how weak flesh and bone really are? Leonid wondered. How easily people she loves can be destroyed? Didn’t she see . . . ?

  Leonid didn’t let himself remember anything else.

  Tears started rolling down Maria’s face, but there was nothing any of them could do about that.

  “Ahem,” JB said, his gaze darting away. “Katherine and Chip—you two are in charge. You’ll find viewing screens on the walls, but right now they’re set to show nothing that took place after July 17, 1918. We won’t authorize anything else until we’re sure it’s safe for Leonid and Maria to see it.”

  “How will we contact you if anything happens?” Katherine asked.

  “You’ll find a link through the screens,” JB said. “But you’re in a time hollow. You’re totally safe and protected. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  Leonid didn’t believe the man. It was impossible to believe a promise like that with the sound of gunfire still echoing in his ears.

  * * *

  “Leo,” Katherine said after JB left. It might have been just a moment after he vanished, or an hour or two. Maybe even a day. Leonid was having almost as much trouble keeping track of time in this blank, empty, quiet room as he’d had in the basement when the bullets were flying.

  Leonid waited politely for her to say the rest of his name, but she didn’t.

  “Uh . . . ,” Leonid began.

  “I was just thinking that’s what you should call yourself in the twenty-first century,” Katherine said. “Because I’m sure it will work out that you’ll get to come with us, and live close by, like this other girl we know, Andrea, who got to have her grandfather come from the 1600s with her. And so you’ll be in the United States. And Leo is a much more common name there than Leonid, so . . .”

  She glanced at Chip, who was frowning.

  “He’s Leonid,” Maria said sternly. “Le-o-nid. Or Lenka, if you know him well.”

  She glared, making it clear that she didn’t think Katherine would ever be entitled to call Leonid that.

  Katherine darted her gaze back and forth between Chip and Maria.

  “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” Katherine asked. “Thinking Leonid would see things the same way as me? Really, Leonid, you can call yourself anything you want when we go to the twenty-first century. You could be Trevor, Josh, Zach . . .”

  “Or Leonid,” Chip said, in the manner of someone putting his foot down.

  All five of them were quiet for a moment. Or maybe an hour. Then Maria began to sniffle again.

  “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing to do!” she complained. “And with nothing to do, all I can do is think about . . .”

  The dead, Leonid thought. The horror we all just escaped.

  He was having the same problem. But it was surprising that Maria would be the one on the verge of tears, because she had always seemed the strongest of the four Romanov sisters. She was the one who carried fourteen-year-old Alexei up and down the stairs when he was in too much pain to walk; she was the one who comforted her mother when the woman screamed with headache and backache and pleas to God to deliver her from her agony. Leonid himself could handle the most petulant of Alexei’s childish demands, b
ut he’d sooner meet the devil than be in the same room with the tsarina when the tsarina was in pain.

  And Maria sits with her mother like that for hours. . . . Leonid caught his mistake. She used to do that before her mother died. . . .

  “Funny cat videos,” Anastasia said, easing her arm around her sister once again. “Maria, that’s what you need. Didn’t that JB guy say something about screens? Is there Wi-Fi? Can we watch YouTube? Maria, you’ll see when you get to the twenty-first century, funny cat videos are the best way to cheer yourself up. There’s this one where the cat plays ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano and then . . . well, you have to see it. Chip, Katherine—how do we make that happen?”

  Leonid knew what a cat was. He knew what a piano was. Pretty much everything else Anastasia said might as well have been in yet another foreign language, one he’d never heard before. He remembered that Anastasia, like Chip, had somehow lived two lives, in two different times. She’d had one childhood as Anastasia in the early twentieth century and another one as someone named Daniella in the early twenty-first century.

  “I don’t think that . . . ,” Chip began hesitantly.

  “You know YouTube didn’t exist in 1918,” Katherine said scornfully. “Remember, JB has the screens set to block out everything after that.”

  Anastasia’s face fell, showing entirely too much grief for someone simply being denied the chance to see a cat on a piano. Katherine must have noticed, because she continued in a much kinder voice, “But were there movies back in the early 1900s? Funny movies? Anything you laughed at back then that you want us to call up now?”

  “Charlie Chaplin!” Anastasia cried. “Oh, Maria, remember the time we pretended we were in a Charlie Chaplin movie? And I put on a fake moustache and did that walk like a wobbling duck . . .”

  As she spoke, Chip and Katherine both moved toward one of the walls, feeling around as if they were looking for something—a hidden knob, maybe, or a secret lever. They must have hit some kind of switch, because suddenly an image sprang up on the wall, as immediate as looking out a window. And somehow it showed exactly the moment from the past that Anastasia was describing: Anastasia at perhaps thirteen or fourteen, out in the garden back at Tsarkoe Selo, with the grand columns of the Catherine Palace towering behind her. It had to be spring or early summer, because the roses were in bloom. Anastasia was wearing a lacy white dress with a lovely blue sash—Leonid had forgotten how beautiful all the grand duchesses used to be before the war, before the measles, before the shaved heads, before the worry and fear of Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg and that very last, terrible day and night. It was cruel to think, but Anastasia had always been the shortest and the dumpiest of the sisters; the ongoing debate about which of the four girls was the prettiest always veered between Olga, Tatiana, and Maria. Anastasia was never mentioned.