Risked (The Missing ) Read Free Page A

hall and yanked the door open.
    It wasn’t JB. But it was someone Jonah recognized.
    There, on the Skidmores’ porch, stood Anastasia Romanov.

THREE
    To his credit, Jonah did not blurt out, Aren’t you supposed to be dead?
    He did consider it. His mind tried out and discarded several other possible things to say, but most of them sputtered away after an initial What . . . ? How . . . ? Why . . . ?
    Maybe you could figure out a few things before you say anything, he told himself.
    He blinked a few times, and his eyes kept assuring him that this was the exact same Anastasia Romanov he’d seen on the computer screen only a moment earlier. She had the same rounded face, the same impish gleam in her eyes, the same long, flowing hair. But this wasn’t like seeing a black-and-white picture colorized and come to life. The Anastasia standing before him wasn’t wearing a strand of pearls around her neck. She didn’t have her dark blondhair pulled back in some puffy old-fashioned style; it was parted on the side and tucked behind her ears. The long, lacy white dress from the picture had been replaced with blue jeans and a University of Michigan sweatshirt.
    So it’s not Anastasia zapped straight from the early 1900s to our front porch, Jonah thought. It’s modern Anastasia, Anastasia who’s grown up in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, just like me.
    So if Anastasia was standing on Jonah’s front porch, why did the Internet say DNA tests proved she had died in 1918?
    And if she was one of the kidnapped/time-crashed missing children from history, like Jonah, why didn’t Jonah remember seeing her at the time cave when almost all of them had been gathered together? Especially since, now that he was looking right at her, he could tell that even in blue jeans and a sweatshirt Anastasia Romanov looked 100 percent like Anastasia Romanov?
    Jonah realized that he’d been standing there for a ridiculously long time staring at Anastasia without saying anything. The only thing he’d done was blink and maybe open and close his mouth a few times like a fish.
    “Okay, okay,” Anastasia burst out. She crossed her arms defensively across her chest. “I get it that people in Ohio hate the University of Michigan, and I’m making everyoneI meet hate me by wearing this shirt. But get over it. All my other clothes are in boxes being carried off the moving van right now. I’ll wear something different tomorrow. Sheesh.”
    University of Michigan, Jonah thought. The University of Michigan was in Michigan, of course. Jonah even knew what city it was in: Ann Arbor. And there was something important about Ann Arbor, Michigan, something that had to do with someone moving . . .
    Jonah’s brain couldn’t quite make the shift from thinking about people moving from one time period to another, to thinking about people moving from one state to another.
    He was still squinting stupidly at Anastasia when he noticed his friend Chip jogging up the sidewalk.
    “Daniella insisted on meeting you,” Chip said. “Posthaste.”
    Jonah frowned at Chip and shook his head warningly. Chip had been back from his trip to the 1400s for a couple of weeks now, but he still sometimes acted and sounded like he was stuck in the Middle Ages. He’d lived the years 1483 to 1485 as Edward V, an English king who’d mysteriously vanished from history. Jonah could see how it would be a little hard to just snap back into normal life. But Chip really needed to be more careful.
    “Er . . . remember Daniella McCarthy?” Chip asked, trying to cover his mistake. He gestured toward Anastasia.Evidently, Daniella was her twenty-first-century name. “Remember how I talked to her on the phone before she moved down here?”
    That was the hint Jonah needed. It was a first step, anyhow. Way back when Chip and Jonah and Katherine were just starting to figure out that something very, very weird was going on, they’d come across two lists of names,