Jonah realized that the whole time Antonio and Brendan had been with their tracers, he really hadn’t heard them say much back and forth with John White.
“But back on Roanoke, all the tracers seemed to be talking to each other,” Jonah said. “Making sense. When John White asked the tracer boys to get his treasure chest . . . When he asked to come to Croatoan . . .”
Jonah remembered the slow, deliberate way the tracer boys had nodded. Had they said something before or after that, trying to explain? Jonah hadn’t really been paying attention, because he and Katherine and Andrea had gotten so excited about going to Croatoan Island themselves.
“Everything John White said, he said in both Algonquian and English,” Brendan explained.
“Oh! That’s why I could understand!” Andrea said, as if this was something she’d been wondering about.
“Even though his Algonquian’s like baby talk, our tracers can follow some of it,” Antonio said. “But no matter how much they tried to use easy words, he couldn’t understand much of what they said. So . . . they thought they’d just have to show him.”
Jonah was kind of hoping they’d just keep talking about translations or some other boring, useless topics. But Brendan and Antonio’s tracers had stopped staring silently at the skeletons on Croatoan Island. The two tracer boys set their jaws and clenched their teeth—tiny, almost imperceptible signs that they were bracing themselves for an unpleasant task—and got into position to paddle toward the Croatoan shore.
Brendan and Antonio themselves didn’t move.
“We don’t have to stay with our tracers for this,” Brendan said softly. “They’re not planning to be on Croatoan long. We can just stay in the canoe and wait for them.”
Everyone turned to Andrea, as if they all silently agreed that she deserved to make this decision.
“No, no,” she said in a strangled voice. “We should . . . I should see this. The rest of you can wait with the canoe, but I have to go. . . .”
Without another word, Antonio spun around. With a few deft movements, he’d caught up with his tracer. In the back of the canoe, Jonah could hear Brendan’s paddle dipping quietly into the water.
They reached the shore too quickly, Antonio and Brendan tying the canoe to a tree too efficiently.
I’m not ready to see this, Jonah thought.
“John White wouldn’t be able to tell any difference between Croatoan skeletons and English skeletons, would he?” Andrea asked faintly.
“I don’t . . . think so,” Katherine said, with none of her usual confidence.
“I just wouldn’t want him to look at the skeletons and be able to know, This was my daughter, this was my son-in-law, this was . . . ,” Andrea’s voice shook, but she made herself finish, “. . . this was my granddaughter.”
“Andrea, your skeleton won’t be here,” Jonah said. “Remember? You feel good in this time period, so you’re still alive; Virginia Dare is still alive. Your tracer’s still out there somewhere.”
It was hard thinking ahead, past this island of death. But they were still going to have to look for Andrea’s tracer . . . somewhere.
Even if they were out of clues.
Andrea winced.
“I’m not . . . exactly . . . feeling so good right now,” she said, and made a brave attempt at a smile.
Andrea stepped out of the canoe right behind Brendan and Antonio. Dare jumped out beside her and rubbed against her leg, whimpering, as if he understood that she was facing something awful.
Meanwhile, Antonio bent over and started to pick up John White. Then he stepped back, so it was only his tracer picking up the tracer of John White.
“We’ll leave the real man safe and asleep in the canoe,” he mumbled, and Jonah felt a little guilty for having thought that Antonio was nothing but a jerk.
Antonio rejoined his tracer as soon as the tracer straightened up. Jonah and Katherine climbed out of the canoe too.
“Really, you don’t all have to see this,” Andrea said. “It could just be me and the tracers.”
“We’re all in this together,” Katherine said, and for once Jonah agreed with his sister wholeheartedly. He even forgot to be annoyed that he hadn’t thought to say that himself.
Antonio carried John White’s tracer very gingerly past the animal bones littering the shoreline. The others all stayed close by, picking their way around the bones. Antonio stepped so carefully—and gracefully—that John White’s tracer stayed asleep, snoring gently. No, Jonah corrected himself. Antonio can’t affect the tracer. Antonio couldn’t wake him up if he tried! But Antonio was moving completely in concert with his own tracer, so it looked like the boy really was interacting with the old man’s tracer. Once they reached the row of collapsing huts, Antonio crouched down with the tracer man, seeming to shake him awake and place him in a seated position, facing away from the bones on the shore.
“He’s being so kind,” Andrea marveled. “He’s trying to keep John White from seeing the worst of it!”
No, Jonah wanted to correct Andrea, too. It’s Antonio’s tracer being kind. But right now Antonio and his tracer were one, so it was impossible to think of them separately.
And then Jonah forgot everything else, watching the drama before him. Brendan, also completely joined with his tracer, crouched on the other side of John White’s tracer.
“This Croatoan Island,” Brendan said softly, speaking in his tracer’s voice. Jonah could tell how hard he was trying to speak slowly and simply for the sake of John White’s limited Algonquian skills. “Understand? Everyone gone. Maybe all dead. Maybe just left.”
“Dead?” John White’s tracer repeated numbly. His expression was so stark that, for once, Jonah thought he could read lips accurately. “Dead means . . .”
John White’s tracer struggled to stand up. For a moment it looked like Antonio was going to try to hold him back, but then Brendan said, with his tracer, “He’ll want to see for himself. He won’t believe us otherwise.”
Antonio began helping the old man’s tracer up. He kept his arm around the tracer’s shoulder. Brendan braced the tracer from the other side, and the two boys led him to the nearest hut.
Jonah couldn’t help admiring the way they guided John White’s tracer, keeping him from seeing the animal skeletons. But what good did that do if the tracer was just going to see human skeletons in the hut?
Nervously, Jonah crept up behind Antonio and Brendan and the tracer, trying to see past them into the hut.
“Oh!” Brendan exclaimed, whirling around, away from his tracer. “There aren’t any skeletons here!”
Jonah peeked in—it was just an empty hut.
The next hut was empty, too, as was the third and the fourth. . . . Then they came to a different kind of a building, its walls lined with a sort of wooden scaffolding. Elongated lumps wrapped in animal skins lay on each level of the scaffolding—could the lumps be skeletons?
John White’s tracer nodded, as if he understood. But he didn’t look upset. He opened his mouth and spoke. Jonah wished so badly that he could hear what the tracer was saying. But of course, separated from the real John White, the tracer was completely silent.
“Oh, this is weird—he’s speaking English right now, and my tracer doesn’t understand. But I can understand what my tracer is hearing,” Brendan said. “John White is saying he knows this is the Croatoans’ temple, where the bodies of their important leaders are kept after death. He saw this in other villages, on his previous trips to America. He’s saying it’s like what they do in England, putting their honored dead in crypts in cathedrals.”
Jonah had actually been in one of those crypts, back in the 1400s, on his last trip through time. This village’s temple didn’t seem any creepier than that.
They stepped out of the temple, Jonah and Katherine and Andrea scurrying ahead so they didn’t keep Antonio and Brendan from staying with their tracers. The two boys walked John White’s tracer toward an open field.
“This is
the burial ground for all the other dead,” Antonio said, speaking with his tracer.
John White spoke, and Brendan translated: “He’s asking us, ‘Many, many generations?’”
“No,” Antonio said. “Many died all at once.”
Jonah could tell that John White’s tracer understood, because sorrow crept over his face.
“But some survived,” Antonio said. “Some survived to bury their dead before they left.”
John White’s tracer spoke again, and Jonah could guess at his meaning even without Brendan’s translation: “Where did they go?”
Antonio shrugged.
“We don’t know,” he said softly. “Nobody knows until now, we didn’t know that anybody lived.”
John White’s tracer turned away, his expression sad and thoughtful—but not hopeless. He spoke.
“He’s saying, ‘My search goes on. I knew it would not be easy,’” Brendan whispered.
Andrea let out a gasp. She had tears in her eyes, but she was nodding.
She was still hopeful too.
The others turned back toward the rest of the village. But Jonah walked a little farther into the field.
No different than a cemetery, he thought. Just without creepy tombstones with the names and all. Maybe the Indians weren’t so concerned about how they’d be remembered?
Sunlight streamed down on Jonah’s head; tall grasses waved in the hot summer breeze. Without the piles of human skeletons Jonah had been expecting, this part of Croatoan Island wasn’t horrifying. It was . . . peaceful. Jonah knew there’d been death here—lots of it—but that was a long time ago. The bodies buried beneath this ground had been resting in peace for years.
Hadn’t they?
Jonah noticed a mound toward the back of the field. The soil here was more sand than dirt, and whoever had built this mound had had to pack the soil together tightly to get it to stay in place.
Jonah thought of sand castles on a beach, the way the ones you built at the beginning of a vacation always wore away by the end of the week. How could the sandy soil of this mound still look so tightly packed if it’d been built years ago?
It couldn’t have, Jonah thought.
He stared down at the mound, trying to read messages in grains of sand. They were tightly pressed. Nothing had worn away.
Didn’t that mean this grave, at least, was . . . fresh?
Jonah whirled around and raced back toward the others.
“Hey, guys!” he said. “Come look at this!”
He decided he wouldn’t tell them what he’d figured out—he’d let them look first and see what they concluded.
“Shh,” Katherine hissed at him. “Antonio and Brendan—er, their tracers—they’re trying to decide how to get off the island without letting John White see all the animal bones.”
“We should protect him from knowing the evil that was here,” Antonio was saying, as his tracer would have. “Since it wasn’t as bad as we thought, since he still believes he will find his family, since he’s such an old man . . .”
“But he’s a ghost-man,” Brendan replied, in his tracer’s voice. “Ghost-men don’t know that it is evil to treat our brother animals that way, in death. It will not matter to him.”
Jonah barely listened, because all he could think about was the fresh grave. Who was in it? Who had dug it? Brendan and Antonio had said Indians were afraid to come to Croatoan Island, so it probably wasn’t anyone native. Andrea had said the English never went to Croatoan to look for the Roanoke colonists.
Well, not that history recorded, Jonah corrected himself. John White’s here right now. And that’s not even a change we can blame on Second, because the tracer’s here. . . .
Second! What if Second had killed someone and buried him on Croatoan Island?
Jonah was feeling a little bit dizzy, and it wasn’t just because of the heat.
“Maybe it would worry the old man more to have us cover his eyes than it would to see the desecrated animal bones,” Antonio was concluding. “Let us just leave then and be done with this place.”
“No, wait!” Jonah shouted. “There’s something I have to show you before we go!”
Katherine and Andrea turned toward Jonah—even the dog turned toward Jonah. But Antonio and Brendan were still locked in place with their tracers.
Then the boys’ tracers stiffened. They jerked their heads around, side to side, their faces masks of fear.
“We’ll leave quickly,” Antonio snapped, and Brendan’s tracer nodded.
Brendan pulled back from his tracer to report to the others, “That was so weird! My tracer thinks he heard a ghost, but I didn’t hear a thing.”
It was something that happened in original time, that didn’t happen now? Jonah thought. Because of something time travelers changed? Was it us who did that? Or . . . Second?
Jonah didn’t have time to try these theories on the others—or to show them the grave. Brendan and Antonio were pulling John White’s tracer out of yet another empty hut.
“We go,” Antonio was saying, his tracer slipping back into the simple words he used with John White. “Must leave now. Danger.”
Dazedly John White’s tracer nodded and stepped forward. But Antonio and Brendan were rushing him along too fast.
“Wait—before—shouldn’t—” Jonah couldn’t decide what to tell the others.
Antonio and Brendan and John White’s tracer were already at the edge of the village. John White caught his first glimpse of the piles of animal bones. He turned toward Antonio, horror and disbelief painted across his entire expression.
“He understands exactly what this means,” Andrea whispered. “But they’re in such a hurry they don’t see—Brendan! Antonio! Watch out!”
Brendan and Antonio slowed down and looked around. But their tracers plowed forward, shoving John White’s tracer on.
John White’s tracer stumbled, wobbled—and then plunged straight down to the ground.
Antonio and Brendan immediately rejoined their tracers to huddle over the fallen man.
“Old man! Old man!” Antonio called out, gently shaking John White’s tracer shoulders. “Wake up!”
“Did he faint?” Andrea asked, crouching down with the two boys.
“I think so. And then—” Brendan broke off, because Antonio’s tracer was turning John White’s head side to side, then pushing him to the left, revealing the point of a rock right where his head had been.
“He hit his head!” Katherine cried.
Andrea reached out, as if she’d forgotten that she wouldn’t be able to touch the tracer. She pointed instead, to a gash beneath the man’s hair.
“It’s in the same place,” she whispered, her voice a mix of awe and fear. “It’s exactly where the real man hit his head when he almost drowned. It’s just not . . . bleeding.”
“Get ready—get ready,” Brendan separated from his tracer to tell the others. Then he rejoined his tracer to tell Antonio, “I knew there were still evil spirits here. Make haste!”
Antonio scooped up John White’s tracer and practically ran toward the canoe. Brendan was right behind him. He broke away from his tracer to call back over his shoulder, “Our tracers aren’t going to mess around getting away from here! Get in the canoe as fast as you can!”
Jonah began running through the bones, alongside Katherine and Andrea and Dare.
We’ll just have to come back later to look at that grave, he thought. There’s no way I can tell them about it now!
Antonio reached the canoe and gingerly placed John White’s tracer inside, right on top of the real man. The real man rolled to the side, fitting precisely into the tracer, linking completely. When John White turned his head, Jonah could see that Andrea had been right about the location of the tracer’s injury: The real and tracer wounds matched exactly.
But the tracer’s injury must not be as bad, Jonah thought. Because it matches the other wound after it’s had two days to heal. . . .
Should Jonah tell
Andrea that now or wait until they were out on the water again?
Just then Dare reached the side of the canoe. But he didn’t leap in, the way he always had before. He stopped, then spun around to face the woods that lay beyond the village. He pricked his ears up and seemed to be staring intently at . . . something. And then, barking furiously, he began racing toward the woods.
“No, boy!” Andrea cried, reaching down to stop him. “We’re leaving!”
Dare slipped right through her grasp.
“I’ll get him!” Jonah called.
He dashed off after the dog, but couldn’t quite catch up. This time Jonah made no effort to pick his way around the animal skeletons. He cracked skulls beneath his feet; he splintered brittle bones with practically every step.
I bet I’m leaving a lot of tracers, Jonah thought.
That was hardly his biggest worry right now.
Some vague thought teased at his brain: Tracers . . . tracers . . . were there any signs of tracer lights beside that fresh grave back by the temple? That would have helped me know if Second was the one who dug it. . . .
But Jonah hadn’t thought to look for any sign of tracers back at the burial ground; he didn’t have time to think about it now. He lunged for Dare but the dog streaked away, still barking.
“No, boy!” Jonah called. “Come back!”
And then they were at the edge of the woods, Dare barking even more fervently. The dog plunged into the underbrush and Jonah lurched after him—dodging trees, ducking under branches.
“Jonah!” Katherine called from back at the canoe. “Hurry up!”
“Almost—got—” Jonah yelled. He decided to leap toward the dog rather than saying the last word. His fingers brushed Dare’s fur, and then he grabbed on to the collar. There! He had him.
Dare whined and tried to pull away. He barked again, staring straight ahead, as if to say: Look! Look! You’ve got to see this!
“What? There’s nothing there,” Jonah said disgustedly. He gestured with his free hand, and his hand swiped through something pale and ethereal.