Rescued by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page A

“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.
    â€œI go there too, then!” he demanded. “I serve him!”
    â€œNot anymore,” Katherine said. “You don’t have to serve anyone ever again.”
    Chip put his hand on Katherine’s arm.
    â€œYou 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?
    â€œWhat—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.”
    â€œI am a servant, not a serf,” Leonid agreed.
    Katherine kept patting his shoulder.
    â€œWell, 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?
    â€œDon’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?
    â€œI’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.
    â€œYou 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