Risked (The Missing ) by Margaret Peterson Haddix Read Free Book Online Page B

outline, he could easily read the expression on her face.
    “This is so great!” he hissed at her.
    But even as he watched, her grin vanished.
    “No,” she whispered, her eyes wide with horror. “No . . .”
    Jonah whirled back to face the guard, to see what she was seeing.
    “If you do not come right away to see the commander, we will come to you,” the guard at the top of the stairs shouted down at them.
    What seemed like dozens of feet started trampling down the stairs, as guard after guard raced toward Jonah and Katherine. Each of them held a gun aloft—a gun with a gleaming knife strapped alongside its barrel.
    Invisible or not, if Jonah and Katherine didn’t move immediately, they were both going to be bludgeoned or stabbed to death.

TEN
    “Run!” Jonah screamed, and he didn’t even care if the guards behind him heard.
    He began scrambling back down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Katherine was too close, and he stepped on the back of her shoe, pulling it half off. She bent down to fix it, and he hollered, “No time for that!” She wasn’t reacting fast enough, so he dashed around her, reaching out to pull her along with him at the last minute.
    He got a firm grip on her sweatshirt, and after a moment Katherine clued in and matched his stride. But the staircase was really too narrow for both of them to run practically side by side. With each leap Jonah took it was touch and go whether he would stay upright or fall, knocking both of them down to smash against that hard floor again. How many bones would they break this time?
    Please don’t let us fall, he thought, which was maybe aprayer and maybe just instructions to himself.
    Jonah kept running. But the guards were running faster.
    The frontmost guard was only three steps behind Jonah. Now two. Now—
    Now Jonah leaped for the floor and whirled off to the side, pulling Katherine with him. He flattened his back against the wall, and he saw that she did the same.
    “We just have to wait until the guards are past and then we can escape up those stairs,” Katherine whispered.
    Jonah nodded and put his finger over his lips. It was a great plan, except that the guards were spreading through the cellar, waving those gun-knife contraptions all around.
    Bayonets. His mind came up with the proper name for them. They’re bayonets.
    Jonah was annoyed that his mind wasn’t doing something more useful, like figuring out how to avoid all the bayonets being waved near him. Someone had turned the one solitary lightbulb back on, but its light was so weak that none of the guards seemed to trust it. They were blindly thrusting their bayonets into all the dark corners, toward every wall.
    “Back to the stairs?” Katherine whispered in his ear.
    Jonah nodded.
    “As soon as the last guard’s out of the way,” he whispered back.
    But the whispering had distracted him—Katherinehad to pull him to the side to avoid one of the bayonets.
    He tiptoed back toward the stairs, dodging bayonets right and left.
    This is even worse than dodging torches, he thought, remembering the hazards he and Katherine had faced on one of their earlier trips through time.
    The guards had stopped streaming down the stairs, but two of them stood on the bottom step, guarding the way out. Jonah ducked under the one guard’s elbow in an attempt to slip past him. But just then the guard leaned back, cutting off the space between the wall and the stairs. Jonah could still fit in that space, but he was at such an awkward angle he wasn’t going to be able to launch himself upward. He was bound to fall over backward, crashing into the guard. He wobbled. He wanted to scream for Katherine to help him, to give him a push, but that would just attract the guards’ attention. His mouth opened anyway, involuntarily.
    “H—,” he began.
    But before he could get out the rest of the word “help,” a hand appeared out of nowhere and pulled him up.

ELEVEN
    The hand was translucent. It was