Sabotaged

  Jonah couldn’t tell if Antonio was making this up or not.

  “Okay, but Croatoan—” he persisted.

  Katherine caught his eye and shook her head, ever so slightly.

  “Would you stop bugging us about Croatoan?” Antonio snapped. “Our tracers aren’t thinking about that right now!”

  Katherine was shaking her head furiously now.

  “Great fish!” she said, in a too-bright, completely fake voice. “Andrea’s grandfather seems to like it a lot too.”

  Perplexed, Jonah followed her gaze. Brendan and Antonio, both completely joined with their tracers again, were taking turns placing small chunks of fish in John White’s mouth. John White once again had the eerie closed real eyes/open tracer eyes, but he was eating with gusto. Between bites, the old man’s tracer would murmur. Jonah guessed he was just saying thank you, but it was infuriating not to be able to hear.

  “Do your tracers know what John White is saying?” Jonah asked, changing his approach.

  “Why do you care?” Antonio asked, before Brendan could answer.

  All right, then, Jonah thought. That was supposed to be a safe question.

  Antonio opened his mouth again. This time he didn’t separate from his tracer, but spoke as his tracer would have.

  “It is to my great and unutterable joy that this old man shall live to see many more dawns and dusks,” he said.

  Jonah couldn’t help snickering.

  “Did you just say something about ‘unutterable joy’?” he asked.

  Antonio separated from his tracer enough to blush.

  “Hey! I’m speaking Algonquian here,” he said. “You’re not supposed to understand!”

  Andrea blinked at Jonah in amazement.

  “You even understand Algonquian?” she asked.

  “Uh, no—I mean—I didn’t think I did,” Jonah protested. He looked over at Katherine, who had an oddly guilty look on her face. “Wait! Do you think it was because of the translator thingies JB put in our ears before we went to the fifteenth century that last time?”

  Antonio whirled on Katherine.

  “You girls understand too?” he asked. “You mean, all afternoon when we were talking in Algonquian—”

  “I didn’t understand,” Andrea said. “I didn’t get any translator thingies in my ears.”

  Katherine sheepishly wrinkled up her nose.

  “I didn’t want to say anything, because I thought you might be embarrassed,” she admitted. “But what you were saying, it was so poetic . . . so lovely . . . I didn’t want you to stop.” She all but fluttered her eyelashes at Antonio.

  Oh, please, Jonah thought. You think you’re going to get out of this one by acting cute? This guy’s nasty!

  “Well, then, uh,” Antonio stammered.

  He hovered, almost completely relaxing back into his tracer’s face. But suddenly he jumped up, totally leaving his tracer behind.

  “Oh, no!” he hollered. “I am not saying that!”

  His tracer stood up, too, almost as if he intended to chase Antonio down.

  “Stay away from me!” Antonio yelled, darting around the fire to dodge his tracer. “Just stay away from me!” He turned and raced into the woods.

  “Wait!” Andrea called after him. She sprang up.

  Brendan separated from his tracer to put his hand on Andrea’s arm.

  “Leave him alone,” he said. “He’ll be back. There’s not really anywhere for him to go.”

  Antonio’s tracer did nothing but take another fish from the fire and settle back into his seat beside John White.

  “I can take over feeding my grandfather,” Andrea said.

  But her grandfather’s tracer had fallen asleep, just like the real man. Andrea felt his forehead.

  “You think John White is going to be all right, don’t you?” Andrea asked Brendan. “I mean, your tracer thinks so?”

  “Yes,” Brendan said. “He does.”

  Jonah noticed that Brendan had carefully separated his head from his tracer just as his tracer was starting to speak too. Of course, since it was only the tracer speaking, Jonah couldn’t hear what he said. And the translator thingies in his ears hadn’t given him the ability to read lips.

  “Just what was Antonio’s tracer going to say, that Antonio didn’t want to say?” Jonah asked Brendan. “What did your tracer say back to him?”

  “Oh, just lots of lovely poetic stuff,” Brendan said, grinning. He slipped back toward rejoining his tracer completely, stopped, groaned, and then stepped entirely away from it. He stood awkwardly beside his tracer for a moment, then flopped down in the sand a few feet away.

  “I think I’ll be sitting this one out for a while, too,” he said.

  “What are they talking about?” Andrea asked. “More about my grandfather? Something about what they expect to see at Croatoan?”

  “No,” Brendan said, grimacing. He looked over at the two tracer boys, who both wore solemn expressions even as they gestured toward the darkening sky, the water, the woods. “Now they’re discussing . . . um . . . becoming men.”

  Katherine giggled.

  “You mean, they’re talking about puberty?” she asked.

  Jonah wouldn’t want to talk about that in front of Katherine and Andrea either.

  Brendan shrugged.

  “Sort of, but not . . . well, not how we think of it,” he said. “For them, it’s this whole—rite of passage? Is that the right term? They have to prove their bravery and their honor and their loyalty to the tribe. They have to show they’re willing to die if they have to, and kill if they have to, and . . .” He stared into the flames for a moment.

  “And?” Katherine prompted.

  Brendan shook his head.

  “And I can’t really explain. They think about everything differently.”

  “But they aren’t thinking about Croatoan Island?” Jonah asked. “Even though we’re going there?”

  Brendan’s face looked troubled as he shook his head again.

  “No, and . . . I don’t understand why,” he said. He winced. “Not that I understand much of anything right now.”

  “You’re a famous missing kid from history,” Katherine said in a soothing voice, as if this was supposed to help. “JB told you in the time cave that you were going to have to go back to the past.”

  So Brendan had been in the time cave too. Of course he had. He just hadn’t been obnoxious like Antonio, so Jonah hadn’t remembered him.

  “Yeah, but why didn’t JB come and get me himself, like he did Andrea?” Brendan asked. “Who’s this Second guy? Why didn’t he tell me anything? He just shows up in my bedroom one night when I’m listening to my iPod, and the next thing I know, I’m in that canoe, my iPod’s nowhere in sight, and Andrea’s yelling at me to paddle the same way as my tracer. I didn’t even know what a tracer was!”

  “Sorry,” Andrea said. “I was just worried about keeping my grandfather with his tracer.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Brendan said, shrugging. “It’s not your fault.” He looked down at the fish bones in his hand and tossed them into the fire. “You know, I was really hoping to be some great African king who just got lost because he ran off with his girlfriend or something. And it turns out, I’m a not-so-native Native American?” He turned to Jonah and asked plaintively, “Have you ever heard of some famous African American/adopted Indian named One Who Survives Much?” His voice cracked, and he stopped.

  “One Who Survives Much is Brendan’s Indian name,” Katherine explained to Jonah. “Antonio’s other name is Walks with Pride.”

  “Yeah, and we never studied either of those dudes at my school,” Brendan said. Jonah could tell how hard he was trying to sound like he didn’t really care. “Did you at yours?”

  Jonah shook his head.

  “No, but—” He looked over at Katherine and Andrea. “Remember what I was saying about Andrea being Virginia Dare? That maybe she’s famous for things in the future that we don’t know about in t
he twenty-first century? Time travel could make lots of new people famous in history. People who did really brave things that nobody wrote about, but time travelers witnessed with their own eyes. . . .” Jonah was liking this idea more and more. “Especially when it’s someone like you, because, um . . .”

  “Because I’m black?” Brendan asked. “Because people in America weren’t writing down much of anything that black people did in . . . what year did you say this is?”

  “It’s 1590,” Andrea said. “We know, because that was the year that John White came back to Roanoke.”

  “Okay. So I’m supposed to be doing something brave that makes me famous in 1590?” Brendan asked. “Or I already did it, and I’m already famous, and this is the year I’m supposed to disappear?”

  “Or is this just some random year that Second sent you to, because he’s sabotaging you and Antonio the same way he sabotaged Andrea?” Jonah asked bitterly. “You tell us—have you or your tracer already done something that would make you famous hundreds of years in the future?”

  Brendan furrowed his brow.

  “I—don’t know,” he admitted.

  “How can you not know?” Jonah asked. “If your tracer—” Jonah broke off because Katherine kicked him in the leg just then. “Oof!”

  Jonah turned to glare at Katherine, but she was cutting her gaze from Jonah to Brendan to Andrea and back to Jonah. Jonah had seen her do that little trick before: This was just like her, “Let’s not talk about this in front of Mom and Dad” code.

  Great, Jonah thought. Another mystery. Why doesn’t Katherine want me to talk about this in front of Andrea and Brendan? How is this different from what we were talking about a few minutes ago, when she wasn’t kicking me?

  “What song were you listening to on your iPod when Second showed up?” Katherine asked quickly, as if this were urgently important.

  “Cold War Kids—‘Something Is Not Right with Me.’ Fits, huh?” Brendan said. “It’d be funny except”—Brendan gestured at the empty water before them, the dark woods behind them,—”look where we are now.”

  Just then, some sort of animal howled in the woods. Dare stiffened and let out a low growl, deep in his throat. Then he whimpered and backed away.

  “Chicken,” Jonah muttered. But he had chills traveling down his spine as well. The howl was answered by another howl—was it wolves? Coyotes? Bobcats?

  The underbrush rustled at the edge of the woods, a ripple of movement through the shadowy giant leaves.

  Something was running toward them.

  Jonah sprang up and darted to the side, holding his arms out protectively in front of Katherine and Andrea. He didn’t know what was coming toward them, but it seemed like a good idea to stay on the opposite side of the fire.

  The last clump of giant leaves parted, revealing . . .

  Antonio.

  He was sprinting toward them at top speed, hightailing it across the sand.

  “Is something chasing you?” Jonah yelled at him.

  Antonio didn’t answer. He bent his head down, focused only on running. His feet barely touched ground. When he was still several feet away from the other kids, he suddenly leaped, launching himself upward in an amazing arc.

  That’s going to hurt when he lands, Jonah thought. From Jonah’s perspective, it looked like Antonio was trying to dive into the sand.

  No, Jonah realized. Into his tracer.

  Antonio collided with his tracer in mid-air. The tracer had just stood up to carry fish bones toward the fire, so for an odd moment Antonio and his tracer looked like a monster with two heads and four arms and four legs sticking out at strange angles—and with skeletal fish attached to two of his hands. Then Antonio’s body straightened out, twisted around, and completely melded with his tracer.

  “Is something chasing you?” Jonah screamed again at Antonio.

  Almost imperceptibly, Antonio separated from his tracer just enough to shake his head. No. Nothing was chasing him.

  Still, Jonah gazed off into the woods for a few moments, watching for rustling in the undergrowth. Nothing but wind moved the giant leaves.

  “What was that all about?” Katherine demanded.

  Another howl rose up from the woods.

  “Brother Wolf speaks most eloquent—” Antonio-joined-with-his-tracer began. But then Antonio jerked his mouth away from his tracer’s mouth. “Crazy tracer!” he muttered.

  Brendan dipped his head into his tracer’s head, then pulled back again.

  “Our tracers know the wolves won’t come near the fire,” he explained. “The tracers aren’t afraid. But when we’re apart from our tracers, we never know . . .”

  Apart from his tracer, Antonio was terrified of the wolves, Jonah realized. Even now, separated only slightly from his tracer’s head, Antonio had sweat pouring down his face and was panting heavily, gulping in mouthfuls of air. This was a particularly bizarre sight since his chest, still joined with his tracer’s, rose and fell with a calm, even pace.

  “My tracer’s not afraid of anything,” Antonio said. He separated from his tracer a little more, to turn toward Brendan. “Is yours?”

  Brendan shook his head.

  “Not really,” he said slowly. “I mean, he knows terrible things could happen—we could starve, we could be attacked, we could die a million different, horrible ways—but if that happened, he knows it would just be the will of—”

  “Don’t say it!” Antonio ordered. “Don’t say ‘Great Spirit,’ or anything like that, because that’s not how it translates—it doesn’t translate, and they’ll just laugh. . . .” He separated his arm from his tracer’s to gesture angrily at Jonah, Katherine, and Andrea.

  “Us?” Katherine said, with fake innocence. “Say it in Algonquian, and Jonah and I will understand. We’ll help you translate.”

  “Never mind,” Antonio muttered. He turned angrily away. Surreptitiously, he slid his head closer to his tracer’s, so that barely anything except his mouth remained separate. “The tracers are cleaning up and getting ready to camp overnight,” he said gruffly. “Brendan, you’d better get back together with your guy so we can do this the right way.”

  “Okay,” Brendan said, shrugging.

  “Jonah, while they’re doing that, could you help me with something over by the canoe?” Katherine asked.

  “What?” Jonah said.

  “I, uh, think I might have lost a ponytail rubber band,” Katherine said. Jonah glanced at his sister.

  “It’s in your hair,” he said.

  She shook her head, her ponytail flipping side to side.

  “Not that rubber band,” Katherine said. “A different one. It could mess up time forever if we don’t find it.”

  Even though he’d slept all day, Jonah was still really tired. Just the thought of standing up seemed beyond him, not to mention having to walk over to the canoe and search for some stupid little rubber band that was probably buried under three inches of sand by now. How much could one rubber band matter anyway? Second had tossed whole jars of paint into the wrong time period.

  And five kids and a dog.

  “Wouldn’t Andrea do a better job looking?” Jonah said. “She’s a girl. She knows about stuff like ponytail rubber bands.”

  Katherine shot a glance toward the other kids. Antonio and Brendan, completely joined with their tracers now, were bent over the fire. Andrea, with Dare beside her, was gazing down at her sleeping grandfather. None of them was looking toward Jonah and Katherine.

  Katherine jabbed her elbow into Jonah’s side.

  “Ow!” Jonah cried. “What—”

  But Katherine already had a finger poised over her lips. She jerked her head to the right, toward the direction of the canoe. Then she quickly pointed to herself and Jonah, and started thumping the fingers of her right hand against the thumb, like someone operating a puppet.

  “Oh, you mean—” Jonah began.

  Katherine shook her head firmly and pressed her finger against her lips once more
. She grabbed Jonah’s arm and began tugging.

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming!” Jonah muttered.

  They walked several steps, and as soon as they were out of earshot of the others, Katherine burst out, “You are so dense! You would be the world’s worst spy! Any of my friends would have caught on about ten years ago that I wanted to talk to them alone!”

  “Well, duh,” Jonah mumbled. “They actually care about ponytail rubber bands.”

  Katherine rolled her eyes. Then, near the canoe, she dropped to her knees and began sifting sand through her fingers.

  Jonah groaned.

  “Please tell me you didn’t really lose a rubber band,” he said.

  Katherine paused long enough to glare up at him.

  “No, but you need to look like you’re looking for a rubber band,” she reminded him. “In case they’re watching.” She tilted her head, indicating the other three kids.

  Reluctantly, Jonah knelt down beside his sister and began scooping up random handfuls of sand. His knees ached. His shoulders ached. His head was still woozy—the day of sleeping in the sun, having nightmares, hadn’t come even close to curing him. Worst of all, he was getting chills again, the little prickles of fear all along his spine that warned of some approaching danger.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked Katherine, his voice coming out rough and accusing. “Don’t you trust Antonio and Brendan after all?”

  Katherine brushed aside sand, revealing more sand.

  “It’s not that,” she whispered. “It’s—I don’t trust their tracers.”

  Jonah dropped a whole handful of sand, sending up a puff of dust.

  “Are you crazy?” he asked. “Did you get sunstroke this afternoon? What do you mean, you don’t trust the tracers? They’re tracers! They’re not really there! They don’t know we’re here! They don’t care if we’re looking for a rubber band or not. To them, we don’t even exist!”