Sabotaged

John White opened his mouth.

  “Treachery!” he cried out. “Betrayal! Deceit!”

  Andrea collapsed in despair at his side, hiding her face in the skirt.

  “Andrea!” Jonah called out. “He’s not talking about you! His eyes are still closed! It’s just him and his tracer thinking the same thing—it was random.”

  “The savages betrayed us, and we betrayed them,” John White continued. “And I’ve never met a sea captain I could trust. . . .”

  Jonah patted Andrea on the back.

  “See—this isn’t about you!” Jonah said. “It’s just—you need to be with your tracer! We’ll find it! I promise!”

  “Go away,” Andrea mumbled. “Leave me alone.”

  Brendan crouched beside her, leaving his tracer behind.

  “Andrea?” he said. “I don’t know anything about your tracer, and I don’t know why my tracer hasn’t been thinking about Croatoan Island. But I can tell you—Antonio and me, our tracers—we’re honorable tribesmen . . . er, people. If our tracers told John White we’ll take him to Croatoan Island, then that’s where we’re going. And that’s probably where your tracer is, right?”

  “That’s what . . . we think,” Andrea said, sniffing a little.

  “Jonah?” Katherine said, in a too-loud voice. “Don’t you think we should get back to looking for that rubber band?”

  “Uh, right,” Jonah said.

  They walked together back toward the canoe.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Katherine asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jonah said. “What are you thinking?”

  This could have been part of a comedy routine, but Katherine didn’t have the slightest trace of humor in her voice. And Jonah didn’t feel anything like laughing.

  “Maybe the people who wrote history didn’t know anything about John White’s trip in 1600,” Katherine said. “But time travelers would.”

  “JB knew,” Jonah said grimly.

  “And . . . even before Second got involved . . . JB wouldn’t have sent us back with Andrea if she was just supposed to have a happy little family reunion,” Katherine said. “There’s still something we’ll have to rescue her from.”

  “Well, yeah,” Jonah said. “And then who’s going to rescue us from Second?”

  Jonah woke the next morning to the smell of cooking fish. He groaned and rolled over.

  Andrea was sitting in the sand right beside him, leafing through one of John White’s sketchbooks. She must have been waiting for him to wake up, because she looked up immediately.

  “I was mean to you yesterday,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Jonah said.

  “No,” Andrea shook her head, her hair whipping side to side. “It’s not. I—Do you ever feel like you just have to really, really care about something—or someone—or else you might as well be dead?” She didn’t give Jonah much of a chance to answer. Which was good, because Jonah didn’t know what to say.

  Andrea stared down at the sketchbook and kept talking.

  “Ever since my parents died, I just latch on to things . . . and I forget . . . other people have feelings too.”

  Was there any way Jonah could say something like, Oh, I do have feelings—I have feelings for you? Without having it sound completely cheesy?

  Jonah decided that was impossible.

  “It’s okay,” he said again. “It’s just . . . why do you care so much about your grandfather? You don’t even know him!”

  “I feel like I do,” Andrea said quietly. “What I read about him, what he wrote about trying to get back to his family, it’s kind of how I feel about . . . you know.” She didn’t have to say, my parents. “And just looking at the pictures he drew—they’re so real.”

  She tilted the sketchbook toward Jonah. He sat up so he could get a better look at the picture she was gazing at. It showed another Native American village, but from a different perspective than the other drawing Jonah had seen. It was as if John White had stood in the village square and looked all around: at dogs sleeping in the sunlight, at little boys guarding the cornfield, at women braiding their daughters’ hair.

  “He really was a good artist,” Jonah said, though he didn’t really know anything about art. “That picture makes you feel like you’re right there, and all those people are still alive.”

  And, Jonah realized, they might be.

  “I’m telling myself this is what Croatoan Island is going to be like,” Andrea said. “Except there’s a big group of extra people who came from England right over here”—she pointed to the empty section of paper, off to the side—”who fit right in. And a grandfather/governor/artist who’s totally awake and ready to draw them all. . . .”

  “Andrea,” Jonah began.

  “Just let me have some hope, okay?” Andrea said.

  They set off as soon as they’d cleaned up from their all-fish breakfast. It turned out that Katherine and Andrea had figured out a rhythm to hanging out in the canoe all day. No matter what, everyone had to keep out of the way of Brendan and Antonio, who had to stay with their tracers to paddle, so the real canoe and the tracer canoe stayed precisely together as one—all so John White wouldn’t get separated from his tracer. But sometimes Brendan and Antonio’s tracers would take breaks from paddling, and then the two boys could come out of the tracers enough to talk.

  Jonah decided it was a good time to test Brendan’s and Antonio’s memories, or at least find out a little more information. He’d missed a lot when he was sleeping.

  “Okay,” he said, when the two boys were taking their first break, as the canoe drifted in the gentle current. “I know you said your tracers aren’t letting you know anything about Croatoan Island—”

  “They’re just not thinking about it,” Brendan corrected lazily, stretching in the back of the canoe. “That’s all.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Jonah said. “But do they know anything about what happened to the Roanoke Colony? I mean, they were right there!”

  “Antonio and I have heard rumors in our tribe,” Brendan said, “that there might be a boy with yellow hair living two tribes away. That he might be one of the people-who-look-like-ghosts who came across the waters to Roanoke, many moons ago.”

  “‘Many moons ago?’” Antonio snorted. “Don’t talk like that around them. They’ll laugh.”

  “No we won’t,” Andrea said softly.

  Antonio glowered, but didn’t say anything else.

  “So that means you weren’t on Roanoke Island just waiting for Andrea’s grandfather to show up,” Jonah said, feeling disappointed.

  “No, but”—Brendan shot a glance at Antonio, who was reclining at the front of the canoe—”we were there kind of waiting for white men.”

  “What?” Jonah said. In his surprise, he jolted back against John White’s leg. The old man moaned in his sleep. Dare, who was sleeping beside him, opened one eye, seemed to decide that Jonah wasn’t a threat, and went back to snoring.

  “White men came to Roanoke Island in the waning months of summer—er, August, I guess—every year for several years,” Brendan said. “Several times they killed Indians and burned their villages nearby. Even when they only visited local tribes, acting like they were friendly, they left behind, um—”

  “Do not say, invisible evil spirits!” Antonio commanded. “Or invisible bullets! That’s not what it was!”

  “Really, we’re not going to laugh, no matter what,” Katherine said.

  Antonio ignored her.

  “We were on Roanoke Island as sentries, all right?” Antonio finished for Brendan. “Our tribe sends someone every August. We were watching, so we could alert our tribe if anyone came. They trusted us!”

  “But you saved his life,” Jonah said, touching John White’s leg. “Why did you do that if you thought his people were dangerous?”

  “It’s our tribe’s code,” Brendan said. “He was alone and in trouble, so we saved him. Just like the tribe saved
us.”

  “Brendan was a slave when the tribe took him in,” Katherine said in a hushed voice.

  “So you were right, thinking that he was a runaway,” Jonah said.

  “Oh, no,” Brendan said, and for the first time, he sounded even more bitter and angry than Antonio. “I was just a baby, on a ship carrying slaves. Sir Francis Drake—remember him from Social Studies class? He stopped by Roanoke Island when there were just some English soldiers there, before they sent the colonists. The soldiers were starving—”

  “And the Indians were getting sick of them stealing their food—” Antonio interrupted.

  “So Sir Francis Drake became the big hero,” Brendan said mockingly. “He dumped out hundreds of slaves to make room to take the soldiers home to England.”

  Jonah looked at Katherine.

  “Is this something else I missed hearing about in fifth-grade Social Studies?” he asked.

  “Wasn’t mentioned,” Katherine said, biting off her words.

  “But it’s true!” Brendan said. “Hundreds of slaves, stolen from a Spanish colony, used to being slaves, yes, but also used to being fed—suddenly they’re dumped out on an empty island with no food, no boats to use to get to the mainland. . . . If our tribe hadn’t taken us in, everyone would have died.”

  “Your tribe took in hundreds of people?” Jonah asked. He wondered why that wasn’t something he’d studied at school. These people sounded like saints.

  “No. A lot of the slaves died before the tribe found them,” Brendan said, “including my parents.”

  Now he was glowering every bit as angrily as Antonio. Jonah wanted to say, Look, I’m not related to Sir Francis Drake! I didn’t have anything to do with this!

  Except maybe he did. He didn’t have any idea who he was related to or what time period he’d originally lived in.

  “Sir Francis Drake didn’t even see the slaves as people,” Brendan said bitterly.

  “It’s not just slaves who are treated like that,” Antonio said. “Did Katherine or Andrea tell you my story?” he asked Jonah.

  Jonah shook his head.

  “I was a cabin boy on a Spanish ship,” Antonio said. “Not such a bad life—there are worse places for orphans to live—as long as you’re good at dodging fists. So then, a couple years ago, the captain decided he might make more money trading with tribes way north of Saint Augustine. Only problem was, none of those tribes spoke Spanish. No one on the ship spoke the Indians’ languages. So—leave a little kid behind, come back a year or two later—you, captain, have got yourself a translator.” Antonio seemed to be straining harder and harder to sound as if he didn’t care. “If the kid’s still alive.”

  “You mean, they dropped you off alone?” Jonah asked. “Someplace you didn’t know anyone, where you didn’t even know the language, when you were . . . how old?” He squinted at Antonio. The boy and his tracer were almost exactly the same size, which made the tracer about thirteen too. And Antonio had said before that he’d come to America three years ago. That meant he’d been . . . “Only ten?” Jonah asked.

  “Yeah. But, hey, I survived,” Antonio said, and now there was pride in his voice. “Next year, the ship came back and, baby, I hid. I knew a good thing when I had it. I knew where people treated me like a human being.”

  The lower half of his body was reaching for his paddle again.

  “Back to work,” Antonio said, though he didn’t sound sorry about it. He slid his head back, rejoining his tracer completely. Then he froze.

  “Oh, no,” he moaned.

  At the back of the canoe, Brendan gasped.

  “What?” Jonah asked.

  “So that’s why our tracers didn’t want to think about Croatoan Island,” Antonio muttered.

  “You know now?” Katherine asked excitedly.

  But Antonio didn’t look excited. He—and his tracer—were just sitting there, stunned, staring off into the distance.

  “The evil spirits,” Antonio whispered. “The invisible bullets.”

  “Germs,” Brendan corrected.

  “You’re talking about—what? Bacteria? Some kind of virus?” Jonah asked, looking from one boy to the other. He couldn’t understand why they both looked so horrified. “That doesn’t sound so terrible.”

  Then Antonio pointed.

  And Jonah saw the skulls.

  They were strewn about on the shore of a nearby island. It looked as if so many deaths had occurred there that nobody had been left to pick up the bodies.

  “Our tracers didn’t know we’d drifted so close to Croatoan while we were talking,” Brendan whispered. “And they were trying so hard not to think about it. . . . They blocked it from their minds.”

  “Because it’s too awful,” Antonio agreed.

  “Did Second do this?” Jonah asked, his outrage building. “This massacre—”

  “No, no,” Brendan began.

  Katherine let out a huge gasp of air, as if she’d been holding her breath.

  “They’re not human,” she said. “I thought they were human!”

  Jonah blinked. He could see why Katherine had thought that. He had almost thought it himself. But he didn’t feel any relief as his eyes assured him that there were just animal skeletons before him—skulls and rib cages that must belong to deer, foxes, wolves, beavers . . . not humans. The bones were so numerous that they seemed to whisper, Death, death, everyone died. . . .

  “This is so wrong,” Brendan said in a tight voice. “An abomination.”

  “A desecration,” Antonio said.

  Jonah thought that they’d slipped into Algonquian to say that, as if the English words weren’t quite strong enough.

  “I don’t understand,” Katherine said. “You’ve killed animals. I mean—your tracers did. And not just fish. We saw the tracers back on Roanoke shooting that deer. They . . . slaughtered it.”

  “After asking the deer’s permission,” Brendan said.

  “Stop trying to explain,” Antonio said harshly. “They’re not going to understand!”

  “No—I have to explain,” Brendan said. He looked directly at Katherine. “Our tribe sees itself in balance with nature. When we take a life, we do it with respect. We treat the animal with respect, even in death.” He made a rueful face. “No matter how it might have looked to you, we’re not savages.”

  “The white men are the savages!” Antonio said. “The way they kill—without respect—”

  “Antonio, you’re white too!” Jonah said, because he couldn’t take any more of this.

  “I gave that up,” Antonio said, his face utterly serious. “I am a tribesman now.”

  And then Jonah couldn’t argue with that. He could tell that Antonio wasn’t talking about skin color, but a mind-set, a way of seeing the world.

  “So Europeans did this?” Katherine asked in a puzzled voice. She waved her hand toward the skeletons lining the shore. “Was it the English? The Spanish? Or—”

  “Yes and no,” Brendan said.

  “It was because of my people,” Andrea said in a haunted voice. “The Roanoke colonists. We brought death when we came here. Plagues. I read all about the diseases, but I didn’t understand. . . .”

  Jonah had been so focused on the scene before him that he’d almost forgotten about Andrea. She’d been sitting there so silently. Even now she looked like a statue, her face gone pale beneath the sunburn, her eyes glittering with pain. Jonah knew nothing about art, and didn’t often think about it, but he could imagine someone making a sculpture of Andrea right now.

  The title of the sculpture would be Devastated.

  “You mean, the Roanoke colonists brought some plague, some disease, that killed all these animals?” Katherine asked, still sounding baffled.

  “No, their diseases killed people,” Brendan said. “Lots and lots of people. In some villages, so many people died that the survivors just fled, leaving the bodies where they fell.”

  “And to us, to tribesmen—that’s a terrible sin,” Anto
nio said. “Sacrilege.”

  “Our tracers know to avoid those villages,” Brendan said. “They believe the evil spirits linger.”

  Jonah noticed that Antonio didn’t correct Brendan this time about calling the germs evil spirits.

  “But here, at Croatoan, this is the worst place,” Brendan said. “As people were dying, they put out animal carcasses on the shore, to warn travelers away, to warn of the evil. Because this is evil too, treating dead animals this way.”

  He gestured at the skeletons, the rows and rows of the dead.

  “And all the people died, so their bones are still here too?” Katherine asked, horrified.

  Brendan shrugged helplessly.

  “That’s what our tracers think,” he said.

  “Don’t show my grandfather this,” Andrea burst out. “Please, I’m begging you, don’t let your tracers show my grandfather what happened here.”

  Jonah had stopped thinking about the tracers. It had completely slipped his mind why they’d come here—because John White had asked Walks with Pride and One Who Survives Much to take him to Croatoan Island. Because John White thought he would find his family and friends there.

  Jonah forced himself to look past the skeletons littering the shore. Just beyond the shoreline, rows of native huts were falling in on themselves, clearly abandoned. They looked so much worse than the Indian village back at Roanoke. So much sadder.

  This would not be the scene of the happy family reunion that John White—and Andrea—were longing for.

  “Andrea,” Brendan said apologetically. “We can’t control our tracers. We don’t know how to stop them.”

  Andrea bent down and hugged John White’s shoulders.

  “Oh, Grandfather, I’m so glad you’re not conscious for real!” she said. “I’m so glad you’re going to miss this!”

  For the moment, he was completely joined with his tracer, the tracer’s eyes closed just as tightly as the real man’s.

  “Didn’t the tracer boys tell John White what he’d see here?” Katherine asked. “Didn’t they warn him?”

  Antonio shook his head.

  “They tried, but—they’re not communicating very well,” he said. “Our tracers can’t speak English, and John White doesn’t know much Algonquian.”