Sabotaged

  But what Andrea wanted to do—that was just reckless. JB would never allow it. So there was no way that JB knew where they were. Nobody knew where they were.

  Except Andrea’s mystery man, Jonah thought.

  It wasn’t a comforting thought.

  “Andrea—” Jonah began.

  “My mind’s made up,” Andrea said. “I’m not going to change it.”

  She leaned down to whisper in John White’s ear, but Jonah could hear every word she said.

  “Tomorrow. We’ll talk tomorrow. . . .”

  Jonah expected to lie awake the rest of the night, worrying and trying to figure out the right argument to make to Andrea, to stop her.

  This is like Risk, he thought. There are too many sides, too many complications. There’s what Andrea wants and there’s whatever her mystery man is trying to do and there’s original time and there’s the historical account. . . .

  It was hard to stay awake in such complete darkness, in such complete despair and confusion. Jonah drifted off, and the next thing he knew, there was sunlight streaming in through the doorway of the hut.

  The sunlight was odd, though: It didn’t seem to filter all the way down to the floor of the hut. Jonah couldn’t make out the lumps that would be Andrea’s sleeping form, and Katherine’s, and John White’s. He couldn’t even see any tracers.

  Jonah sat up quickly. The problem wasn’t with the sunlight. Or his eyes. The problem was that he was the only person left in the hut.

  Jonah was about to give himself over to panic when he heard a snoring sound coming from right outside the hut: It was a deep, masculine sound and had to belong to John White. Jonah couldn’t fathom why the girls had moved the sleeping man out of the hut—was Katherine trying to get him away from his tracer? Or was Andrea trying to keep him with it? But it was so good to hear the man snoring, to know that he was still soundly asleep, to know that nothing irreversible had happened yet. Jonah let himself relax a little, and he went back to thinking of arguments to use on Andrea.

  She doesn’t care about time, but she cares about her grandfather. . . . What if we tell her she can’t talk to him because that might worry him, she might scare him. . . .

  Something tickled at Jonah’s brain—an idea, something he might have thought of the night before, right before he fell asleep, or even in the middle of sleeping. Something important about Andrea. But he wasn’t awake enough; the idea slipped away, just a tease.

  Along with the snoring, Jonah could hear a girl’s muffled voice outside—it was too muted for him to tell if it was Andrea’s or Katherine’s.

  Katherine’s more likely to be talking, but Andrea’s more likely to talk softly, he thought, grinning slightly to himself.

  Then he heard the rumble of a man’s voice in response.

  Jonah froze, straining his ears. It had to be just the man talking in his sleep, right? Talking deliriously again? It couldn’t be John White answering Andrea, who was so disdainful of time that she might have said something like, Hi, Gramps. Long time no see.

  Suddenly Jonah knew the perfect argument to use on Andrea, the idea he’d almost thought of earlier. The idea he should have thought of hours ago, when there was still time to stop Andrea.

  Was there still time now?

  In one motion, Jonah jerked to his feet and crashed out the door of the hut. He almost tripped over Dare, who was stretched out, sound asleep, just outside the doorway—oh, great, it had been the dog snoring. Jonah whipped his head from side to side, looking for Andrea, looking for her grandfather.

  Andrea was sitting right in front of him in the clearing, her back mostly turned to Jonah, her mouth open. What if she was about to say the words that would ruin everything, right now?

  Jonah dived toward Andrea. He thought he would just get close by and whisper in her ear, but he miscalculated. He ended up tackling her, knocking her to the side. He scrambled to right himself, to get his mouth next to her ear, to tell her what he’d just figured out.

  “Andrea, it was only three years!” he hissed. “You said so yourself—Governor White came back to Roanoke after three years! That means . . . he’s looking for a granddaughter who’s only three years old!”

  Andrea didn’t react right.

  In Jonah’s wildest dreams, she might have thrown her arms around him and given him a big kiss and burst out, “Oh, thank you! Thank you! You saved me from ruining my life! And my grandfather’s!”

  Jonah didn’t really expect that.

  But he was kind of hoping for an “Oh, you’re right—I should have thought of that!” Or at least a “Thanks—you stopped me just in time!”

  Andrea just lay in the dust and mumbled, “Whatever.”

  Jonah slid back.

  “You didn’t say anything to him yet, did you?” he whispered.

  Andrea shrugged.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter?” Jonah repeated incredulously. “Of course it . . .”

  Jonah stopped talking, because Katherine came up just then and shoved him back into the dust.

  “Jonah, you are a total idiot! What if John White had seen you?”

  Jonah looked around and replayed everything in his mind. He’d come running out of the hut—and John White was sitting right on the other side of the clearing, in between the two tracer boys.

  Jonah crouched down.

  “He’s looking right at us!” Jonah hissed to Katherine. “What should we do?”

  He’d been so concerned about Andrea ruining time by talking to John White, and now what had he done himself?

  Suddenly he had an idea.

  He jumped up and waved at John White.

  “Aye, matey,” he said, trying to sound like an old-timey sailor. All he could think of was Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. “Sailing out on the sea for a long time, you can get to wearing some mighty strange clothes. And acting strangely too. But it be time to sail again, so I promise you, you will never see us again.”

  He slipped into the woods, gesturing for Andrea and Katherine to follow him.

  Katherine burst out laughing.

  “At least sometimes he’s a funny idiot,” she said to Andrea.

  Andrea gave a halfhearted smile.

  “Shh!” Jonah hissed. “Careful!” He kept motioning for Andrea and Katherine to come into the woods with him, out of John White’s view. “He can see you!”

  “He can’t see us,” Andrea said. “Or hear us.”

  “Of course he can! His eyes are open!” Jonah whispered. “He’s awake.”

  “Come and look for yourself,” Katherine said.

  Jonah hesitated, then inched back into the clearing.

  He could tell John White was joined with his tracer because the tracer boys, on either side of him, were taking turns placing some sort of food in his mouth. They were treating him like an invalid, tearing the food into such tiny morsels he didn’t even have to chew.

  And, just as Jonah had said, John White’s eyes were wide open.

  Er, no, they’re not, Jonah corrected himself.

  Or were they?

  Jonah’s brain seemed to be having a war with itself, trying to decipher what he was seeing. It was almost like the first time he’d seen his friend Chip join with his tracer, when it seemed as if Chip had vanished but he really hadn’t.

  Ohhh, Jonah thought.

  John White had his eyes shut.

  His tracer’s eyes were open.

  Jonah turned to Katherine.

  “How’s that possible?” Jonah asked. “Is he joined with his tracer or not?”

  “You tell me,” Katherine said. She swallowed hard. All the laughter was gone from her voice.

  “It’s not right,” Jonah said. “This isn’t how tracers work.”

  It was unnerving, the old man’s steady gaze and peaceful slumber, simultaneously. It was like double vision, or a double exposure.

  Or a huge time error.

  “It was weird enough watching Chip a
nd Alex join with their tracers, when we could still kind of see their different clothes and their different hair,” Katherine said. “And the fact that, sometimes, they were different ages from their tracers. But this is the same man, in the same clothes, in the same place. . . . Why can’t he meld with his tracer completely?”

  “It must be because the real man hurt his head,” Andrea said glumly.

  “Or . . . maybe it protects him from having to figure out why he can’t see the tracers?” Jonah asked.

  “There were real people around tracers back in the 1500s, and none of them were half awake and half asleep,” Katherine complained.

  John White said something to one of the tracer boys, but even though the real man moved his mouth, he made no sound.

  “We can’t hear him either?” Jonah asked. “But I thought—”

  “We can—sometimes,” Andrea said. “Katherine and I think it’s only when he says something he would be thinking with both his tracer brain and his real brain. A minute ago, he was talking about how hot it is.”

  Jonah shook his head. John White’s eerie gaze bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

  “Andrea, when that mystery man came to your room back in the twenty-first century, and told you to change the Elucidator code, are you sure he didn’t say anything about it making tracers act weird?” Jonah asked.

  “All he talked about was how I could save my parents,” Andrea said in an icy voice. “I told you.”

  Jonah racked his brain for some other explanation.

  “Well . . . maybe this is normal, after all, and we just don’t have enough experience with tracers to know,” Jonah said. He thought hard. “Remember that time in 1483, right when the assassins grabbed Chip and Alex? Alex was kicking and fighting, but his tracer was asleep. That’s sort of the same thing. Just reversed, who’s sleeping and who’s awake.”

  “That was just for a few seconds,” Katherine said. “John White and his tracer have been like this all morning, ever since Andrea and the tracer boys dragged them out here. This feels . . . permanent. Like he’s stuck.”

  Is this something Andrea’s mystery man planned too? Jonah wondered. His plan from the night before for outsmarting the mystery man seemed hopelessly naive. Jonah couldn’t understand anything about their opponent’s strategy.

  Jonah’s stomach growled, reminding him he’d had nothing to eat in, well, centuries.

  “Maybe if we eat some of their food, we’ll be able to think better and figure this all out,” he said.

  “Great idea,” Katherine said. “Except I think that’s the deer they killed yesterday. For us, it’s still alive and running around the woods. Want to go hunting with a bow and arrow?”

  “We don’t have a bow and arrow,” Andrea pointed out. “Just the tracers do.” She slumped down beside John White, sounding completely discouraged. “We don’t have anything.”

  “Oh, hey—there was some melon in that hut where I saw the other deer,” Jonah said, because he had to offer something. The melon had looked slimy and unappealing the day before, but it was the only possible food Jonah could think of.

  Jonah stood and walked into the hut where he’d frightened the deer. The melon vines stretched across the dirt floor, their leaves pale and limp from growing indoors, with the only light coming from broken places in the roof. Jonah bent down to search under the leaves. Every time he lifted a leaf and then let go, it quickly settled back together with its tracer. At least the leaves are obeying all the tracer rules, Jonah thought. He found the remains of the melon the deer had been eating, but it was just a glob of mush that left slime on Jonah’s hand when he brushed it by mistake.

  “Find anything?” Katherine said behind him.

  Jonah wiped his hand on a leaf and discovered a hard green, baseball-size melon underneath.

  “Just this,” he said, holding it up.

  “Better than nothing, I guess,” Katherine said. “We can split it on a rock, divide it three ways.”

  “Four,” Andrea corrected from outside the hut. “My grandfather needs some real food too.”

  Jonah wasn’t sure what the nutrition rules were for someone sort of joined with his tracer, but sort of not. He looked at the melon in his hand. Regardless of whether they each got one-third or one-fourth of it, it wasn’t going to be enough.

  “Are you sure that’s the only one?” Katherine asked.

  Jonah ruffled the pale, anemic-looking leaves before him, setting off a ripple of even paler tracer leaves.

  “See anything I missed?” he asked sarcastically. “Geez, there’s not even a whole tracer melon left anym—” He broke off. He looked back down at the leaves. He lifted the slimy leaf where he’d found the melon.

  The leaf itself instantly developed a tracer, but there was no tracer melon underneath.

  Jonah shoved aside the nearby leaves. He found the remains of the rotten melon the deer had eaten part of. It had just an edge of tracer light along its top, where Jonah had brushed against it and carried some of it away. But there was no tracer of the small green, hard melon in Jonah’s hand.

  “It’s not supposed to be here,” Jonah mumbled, more to himself than Katherine. “Maybe it’s not even from this time. I moved it, and it didn’t leave a tracer.”

  He turned the melon over and over again in his hand. Its surface was rough and ridged, except for one section where the pattern of webbing seemed almost carved into the rind.

  No, Jonah thought. That’s not webbing. Those are letters. Words.

  He flipped the melon over, and this put the letters right side up. Now Jonah could read the words in the crude lettering:

  Eat. Enjoy. You’re doing great.

  Can’t say more.

  —Second

  Jonah dropped the melon.

  “I am not eating this,” he said.

  Katherine was leaning so far over Jonah’s shoulder she was able to catch the melon before it hit the ground.

  “Ooh—words,” she breathed. “Is it an Elucidator?” She brought the melon up toward her mouth and began yelling: “JB? Anyone? Hello? Are you there?”

  Nothing happened.

  “An Elucidator wouldn’t come with instructions to eat it,” Jonah said. “And it’s not from JB.”

  Katherine bent lower over the melon and touched the words with her finger.

  “Second?” she said. “Is that a name?”

  “It has to be,” Jonah said. “Think it’s the same person who told Andrea to change the code on the Elucidator?”

  Katherine looked back over her shoulder.

  “Andrea?” she called. “Look at this.”

  Andrea patted her grandfather’s arm, whispered, “I’ll be right back” in his ear, and came over to look at the melon.

  “Is this . . . typical?” she asked, squinting down at it with a baffled expression on her face. “Did you see anything like this in the fifteenth century? Messages on food?”

  “Oh, no,” Katherine said.

  “I think JB would think it was wrong,” Jonah said. “Interfering too much with time. And dangerous, because someone native to this time period might see it. But this Second guy—who knows what he thinks?”

  Katherine rolled the melon side to side, so Andrea could read the whole message.

  “Does this sound like it might have been written by that guy who came and visited you and told you to change the code on the Elucidator?” Katherine asked her. “Can you analyze the—what do they call it in Language Arts class? The diction?”

  “‘Analyze the diction’?” Jonah said incredulously. “It’s not even ten words! That’s like telling her to analyze a text message!”

  “I don’t know about any of that,” Andrea said. “But the way this is carved? It does look like his handwriting.”

  Jonah and Katherine stared at her.

  “When he gave me the code, he wrote it out, so I could memorize it,” Andrea explained.

  Katherine nodded excitedly.

  “So the g
uy who sabotaged us calls himself Second,” she said, acting like she was Sherlock Holmes making a brilliant deduction. “And he’s the same guy communicating with us now.”

  Jonah didn’t see any reason for excitement.

  “Communicating?” he said bitterly. “That’s not communicating.” He pointed at the melon. “‘You’re doing great’?” He yelled up at the sky, “We are not doing great!”

  He suddenly realized that the melon might be a response to their experiment from the night before—or to Andrea’s deciding to keep John White with his tracer, no matter what. Either way, the message was annoying. Insulting. Patronizing. Jonah threw his head back farther and yelled even louder: “We don’t want to do ‘great’ for you!”

  “Calm down,” Katherine said. “Second. Let’s see. Second place? Second rate? Second-in-command? Second, as in, not a minute or an hour, but a really, really short period of time?”

  “Who cares?” Jonah asked disgustedly.

  “If someone calls himself Second, there’s got to be a reason,” Katherine said.

  “Yeah, maybe his parents didn’t have any imagination with names, and he’s just their second kid,” Jonah said. He shoved at the melon in Katherine’s hands. “I don’t like this guy, and I’m not going to pretend this makes any sense. And I am not doing anything he tells me to do. Eat this? I’d rather starve!”

  Andrea turned to Katherine.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Are you going to eat it?”

  Katherine stared down at the melon, her face scrunched up in concentration.

  “No,” she finally said. “It’s too much like Alice in Wonderland. ‘Eat me,’ and then it’s something that makes you grow or shrink. Or . . . it’s like having a stranger offer you candy. Everybody knows you shouldn’t take that.”

  “This isn’t candy,” Andrea said. “It’s a melon. And we’re hungry.”

  “Do you think we should eat it?” Katherine challenged.

  Andrea bit her lip.

  “You two can do whatever you want,” she said. “But . . . I’m going to.”

  “What?” Jonah said.

  “Look, my grandfather needs to eat, or he’s never going to get better,” she said. “But if there’s a chance this is dangerous, I’m going to try it myself, first.”