Risked (The Missing ) by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page B

but—”
    “That’s not why I did it,” Chip protested. “It was just logical.”
    Jonah waited to hear how this could possibly be logical.
    “See, I figured out that if Gavin had an Elucidator, it couldn’t be voice-activated from a distance,” Chip explained. “Since it worked for you before, when you were holding on to Gavin, I thought that you must have been touching the Elucidator without knowing it. The second guard was coming back, and I knew I didn’t have much time, so I just jumped out from the bushes and slammedGavin flat on the ground so I was right on top of him and the Elucidator, and then I screamed, ‘Make me invisible!’ ”
    In a weird way this did kind of make sense. The Elucidator might have been set up to take voice commands only from someone who was touching it.
    “Okay, um, and that worked?” Katherine asked skeptically.
    “Yeah!” Chip said. “I’ve been invisible ever since. And then I real quick said, ‘Make Jonah and Katherine invisible too.’ And then the second guard was back and I had to roll out of the way. And since neither of the guards was looking in my direction when I tackled Gavin, and they couldn’t understand English anyway, I was totally safe.”
    Jonah couldn’t decide if Chip had been crazy brave, or just crazy.
    “Why didn’t you say, ‘Make all five of us invisible’?” Katherine asked. “To protect Gavin and Daniella, too?”
    “I thought that might mess up time, since this really is the time they belong in,” Chip said. He winced. “I didn’t know tackling Gavin could kill him.”
    There was an eerie silence in the garden around them. Jonah hoped it was just his imagination getting to him.
    “You didn’t . . . see any blood, did you?” Katherine asked slowly.
    “No, but I don’t think Gavin was conscious when the guard picked him up,” Chip said. “I thought maybe he was just pretending to pass out so they wouldn’t keep yelling at him, but . . . what if he really was dying?”
    Having those words hang in the air was even worse than the silence.
    “Stop saying things like that,” Jonah said firmly. “Gavin is not going to die from you tackling him. If we mess up history, that’s not going to be the way we do it. Because we are right now going to go find Gavin and Daniella and the Elucidator. And then we’re going to make the Elucidator take us back to the twenty-first century, where Gavin can get good medical care. And everything is going to be fine. ”
    He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. He tried to remember the first-aid training he’d gotten in Boy Scouts. Surely if someone was going to bleed to death just from being tackled, it would take a long time, wouldn’t it? Definitely longer than the fifteen or twenty minutes that might have passed since Chip had tackled Gavin?
    Jonah stood up and was relieved to see that Chip and Katherine did the same.
    “Did you see where the guards took Daniella and Gavin?” Jonah asked.
    “Into that house,” Chip said, pointing toward thebuilding above the cellar where Jonah and Katherine had been trapped. “I’ll show you which door they used.”
    Even as he trailed after Chip, Jonah squinted up at the arches and frills of the imposing house—or was it a mansion? Or a palace?
    Probably not a palace, he decided. If the tsar of Russia had been in charge of a sixth of the entire planet, his palace would probably have been much more impressive than this. Jonah knew kids back home who lived in houses about this big and fancy. But now that Jonah was looking more closely, he started noticing some strange details: Under the soaring arches at the top of the house, all the windows seemed to be whited out from the inside, like in an abandoned factory. And why was there such a crude wooden fence around the whole property? Why were there guardhouses inside the fence—like maybe the danger was inside the fence too?
    Chip crouched beside a tree.
    “That one,” he said, pointing to a