Sabotaged

Hut . . . we’re still in the hut . . . I don’t see any battle anywhere. . . .

  The man they’d saved from drowning was thrashing about on the floor. He seemed caught in the grip of some unceasing agony.

  “These are the wrong savages!” he screamed. “They aren’t the ones who killed George Howe! They’re Manteo’s people! Oh, Lord, forgive us—forgive us this blood on our hands!”

  Dare whimpered at the loud shouting. Jonah saw that Andrea and Katherine were awake now too. Andrea sat up and reached over to pat the man’s shoulder.

  “Shh,” she said soothingly. “You’re okay. It’s just a dream.”

  “Andrea, stop talking to him!” Jonah hissed. He tried to stay back in the shadows, out of sight. “He’ll see you!”

  “Don’t worry—he’s talking in his sleep again,” Andrea whispered back. “He doesn’t have his eyes open.”

  Jonah thought about rushing forward and pulling Andrea away, just in case. But it seemed as if that would be even more disruptive.

  And just then, the man began to sob.

  “Oh, Eleanor, we were star-crossed from the start,” he wailed. “What Fernandez did . . . the enmity Lane left behind . . . killing over a communion cup . . . Oh, how can I leave you now? With the wee babe . . . in this wilderness, under constant threat from mine enemies . . .”

  Even in the dim light, Jonah could see Andrea stiffen. For a moment she sat completely frozen, a shadowed silhouette. Then she moved her hand. She wrapped her fingers around the man’s hand and held on tight.

  “Oh, Father,” she whispered. Her voice broke. Jonah saw her lower her head, gulping for control. After a moment, she raised her head and went on. “You are the only one who can go. You must talk to Sir Raleigh. He’ll listen to you. Only you can save us.”

  Sir Raleigh? Jonah thought. What’s Andrea talking about?

  The man seemed to know.

  “What if Sir Raleigh thinks I abandoned my duty?” the man moaned. “Oh, ‘tis a dreadful choice. To stay, to go . . . I see evil encroaching, either way. If evil befalls you—”

  “It won’t be your fault,” Andrea said firmly.

  “But ’twas I who brought you here! My child! And I will not be here to protect you!”

  The man seemed to be getting more and more upset. Across the hut, the tracer boys were stirring now. One propped himself up on his elbow, to stare over at the man. He spoke.

  Of course Jonah could hear nothing, but he thought he could almost get the gist of the boy’s words from his expression, from the clipped way he opened and shut his mouth. His words would be something like, You. Sleep now. No more noise.

  “Oh, no,” Katherine moaned.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jonah muttered.

  “The tracer boy’s talking to our guy. Which means . . .”

  “The man we saved joined with his tracer again,” Andrea finished for her, quite calmly.

  Jonah looked back at the tracers again. He’d never been good at waking quickly and instantly thinking clearly. He squinted, counting and recounting the tracers. One. Two. Clear enough. But there should have been three tracers in the hut—even without counting any random tracer bugs or other tiny tracer detritus. Maybe he’d miscounted. One. Two. Two tracer boys.

  No tracer man.

  “Our guy could have just rolled over in his sleep, and, boom, that was it, he was with his tracer again,” Katherine was speculating.

  Like the smoke, like the flames, Jonah thought. I knew tracers worked like that.

  “We need to pull him away from his tracer again,” Jonah said, sighing. “Then one of us should sleep between him and his tracer.”

  Wearily, Jonah moved toward the man and reached for his arm. But Andrea blocked Jonah’s way.

  “Leave him alone!” she commanded.

  Jonah blinked, even more confused. He’d just had trouble counting to two—and now he was supposed to figure out Andrea?

  “Andrea, remember the experiment we’re doing?” Katherine said softly. “Jonah’s plan?”

  Jonah himself was having a hard time remembering.

  Oh, yeah—we’re not going to be used. Not going to fall for any tricks or traps. Not going to put the man with his tracer . . . going to do the opposite of what anyone would expect . . .

  Andrea laughed, a little wildly.

  “Isn’t this weird?” she asked. “You don’t want to be manipulated, so you’re going to manipulate this man? Use him as a pawn, to keep from being pawns yourself?”

  Jonah winced at the bitterness in her words.

  “That’s not how I meant it,” he muttered. He guessed he should explain everything all over again, but he was so tired. It was the middle of the night. Jonah just wanted to pull the man away from his tracer and go back to sleep.

  He started to reach for the man once more, but this time Andrea actually shoved him away.

  “I won’t let you,” she said. “I’ll stop you, no matter what.”

  “Andrea, this isn’t a game,” Jonah said, bewildered. “Just—”

  “You’re right,” Andrea interrupted. “It isn’t a game. But you’re the one treating it like one. Chess! Stratego!” Her voice arced wildly again. “This is this man’s life. This is his dearest dream, what he’s been working toward for years. . . .”

  “What are you talking about?” Katherine asked.

  “We have to keep this man with his tracer,” Andrea said. “He has to see me. I have to talk to him.”

  “What?” Jonah said. “But that could really ruin time!”

  “Oh, time,” Andrea said scornfully. “What has it ever done for me? Besides taking away my parents . . .”

  “Andrea,” Katherine began. “You can’t blame—”

  “I can,” Andrea said. “And I do. And I don’t care.” She bent over the unconscious man as if she was going to try to shake him awake.

  Now it was Jonah’s turn to reach out and try to pull her back.

  “Did your mystery man come back and tell you more lies?” he asked. “Is that why you’re acting like this?”

  “No!” Andrea said, struggling against Jonah’s grasp.

  “Then what changed?” Jonah asked, holding on. “You agreed with Katherine and me before. Why do you care so much about keeping this man with his tracer?”

  Andrea lifted her head, so her chin jutted out. Even in the near-total darkness, Jonah could see how determined she was. Her eyes glistened.

  “Because,” she whispered. “Now I know who he is.”

  Jonah let go of Andrea’s arms. He was too stunned to say or do anything else. For once, he was glad that Katherine was so rarely at a loss for words.

  “Andrea, I really don’t think you do understand,” Katherine said, almost snippily. “How could you know? Who could this man possibly be, that would—”

  “He’s my grandfather,” Andrea said. “John White.”

  Katherine gasped.

  Jonah was struggling to catch up. Andrea’s grandfather . . . had they somehow missed the chance to save her parents’ lives, but zoomed back instead to rescue her grandfather? No, her real grandfather—her twenty-first-century, adoptive grandfather—wouldn’t be from Virginia Dare’s lifetime. This would have to be Virginia Dare’s grandfather, the one Andrea had read so much about. The one who had captured her interest in the Virginia Dare story in the first place.

  I think it was because of the grandfather coming back, Andrea had said. How hard he tried to get back to his family, and how many times he failed, and then when he finally made it to Roanoke . . .

  Jonah gasped now too, only a little after Katherine.

  “How can you tell it’s him?” he asked.

  “He keeps talking about Eleanor, which was his daughter’s name—my . . . mother’s name. My birth mother’s, I mean.” Andrea sounded defensive.

  “I bet a lot of women were named Eleanor back then,” Katherine said.

  “The other names he said were people at Roanoke too—Fernandez, Lane, George H
owe . . . And what he was saying about a battle with Manteo’s people? That was this really stupid sneak attack the Roanoke colonists made on an Indian village. They figured out in the middle of it that they’d attacked their own friends,” Andrea said.

  “John White wouldn’t have been the only colonist in that battle,” Jonah pointed out, proud that he could come up with something logical.

  “But John White was the only colonist who left Roanoke to sail back to England to talk to Sir Walter Raleigh to get supplies,” Andrea said. “He didn’t want to. The other colonists had to beg him. They told him he was their only chance.”

  “And he was talking about a baby,” Katherine said thoughtfully. “That would be . . .”

  “Virginia Dare,” Andrea said. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Me.”

  She gently patted the man’s shoulder again, and it was almost as if she was claiming him, agreeing to be his granddaughter. Jonah blinked, trying to see better in the nearly nonexistent light. He knew something important had just happened. Did Andrea want to be Virginia Dare now? Was this something else that Andrea’s mystery man had manipulated her toward?

  When we got back to 1483, Chip and Alex wanted to be Edward V and Prince Richard, too, Jonah remembered. But that was after we found their tracers.

  Andrea might have found her grandfather, but they still didn’t have a clue where her tracer was. Jonah glanced across the hut to the glowing tracer boys, sprawled out flat again, looking soundly asleep. Those tracers were even more proof that time and history were out of whack.

  “I thought you said the grandfather didn’t find anybody when he came back to Roanoke,” Jonah said accusingly. “Just the word Croatoan carved into wood. Not two Indian boys.” He gestured toward the tracers. “Er—two boys dressed like Indians.”

  “Something must have changed,” Andrea said. “Even without us interfering. Or maybe the historical accounts are wrong?”

  She looked down at the man—John White?—who had settled back into a peaceful sleep again. He was even smiling slightly, and it seemed as though he was responding to Andrea’s voice. As if he knew her. But how could that be? Sure, he’d seen her as a baby, but not after that—not in any version of history—until she and Jonah had fished the man out of the waves.

  Jonah shook his head. Really, history was complicated enough without there being multiple versions.

  “What was supposed to happen when John White came back to Roanoke?” Jonah asked. “In the accounts you read?”

  “It was three years before he made it back,” Andrea said. “That wasn’t just because of the Spanish Armada—he had all sorts of bad luck. It was like nobody cared about Roanoke but him. He was on one ship that was attacked by pirates, and he got cut up in a sword fight. And then, when he finally found a ship that would take him to Roanoke, he wanted to bring a bunch of new colonists with him, but the captain wouldn’t let him.”

  “Why not?” Jonah asked.

  “The captain didn’t want all those extra people taking up space on his ship. He was hoping to make a fortune privateering, and he wanted the room for all his treasures.” Andrea’s voice was bitter, as if the ship’s captain had personally offended her.

  “What’s privateering?” Katherine asked.

  Jonah was glad that she’d asked the question, that she was the one who looked dumb.

  “The man—Mr. White?—didn’t he say something about privateering?” Jonah asked.

  “Governor White,” Andrea corrected. “He was governor of the Roanoke Colony. Though”—she grinned, seeming almost cheerful now,—”the colony was just a hundred and sixteen people, so it’s not that big a deal.”

  “But, privateering . . . ,” Katherine reminded her.

  “Oh, yeah.” Andrea shrugged. “It was like being a pirate, only legal. English ships would go out and attack Spanish ships and steal all their treasure. And then they’d just pay a certain percentage to the English government, like taxes, and everyone thought it was okay. It was patriotic.”

  “That’s crazy!” Jonah said.

  “Yeah, I bet there weren’t any Boy Scouts involved in that,” Katherine said.

  “Well, there wouldn’t be, because Boy Scouts weren’t founded until . . .” Jonah realized that Katherine was teasing him. And he’d fallen for it. He cleared his throat. Maybe if he pretended he hadn’t said anything, nobody else would notice. “Why didn’t Mr.—er—Governor White get on a ship that wasn’t doing that privateering stuff?”

  Andrea tilted her head to the side, considering this.

  “I think, back then, pretty much all the English ships going to America were privateering,” Andrea said. “One of the reasons the English wanted the Roanoke Colony in the first place was so they could stash stolen treasures there, and hide from the Spanish, and get food and water.”

  “They never told us that in school!” Katherine protested.

  “Yeah, well, it doesn’t sound very noble,” Andrea said. “Who wants to hear that your ancestors were a bunch of thieves?”

  Jonah kind of did. He might have remembered the Roanoke Colony better if Mrs. Rorshas had talked about pirates and stolen treasure.

  Katherine looked down at the sleeping man.

  “But this guy wasn’t bringing a bunch of treasure with him to Roanoke,” she said. “He was alone in a rowboat.”

  “He wasn’t supposed to be,” Andrea said grimly, her voice low. “It was supposed to be several men who rowed from their ship to Roanoke Island. And then after they saw the word Croatoan, Governor White wanted to go on to Croatoan Island and look for the colonists there. But this horrible storm blew up—a hurricane, I think—and caused lots of problems. So they had to leave. And that was it. Nobody ever looked for the colonists on Croatoan Island.”

  Andrea was practically whispering by the end of her story. She was probably just trying to keep from disturbing her grandfather, but the effect was creepy. Jonah shivered, almost as if he was one of the colonists abandoned on the opposite side of an ocean from everyone he knew.

  What if it’s like that for me and Katherine and Andrea? he wondered. What if we’re abandoned in the past, the way the colonists were abandoned in America?

  Jonah had an image in his head of JB hunched over some sort of computer monitor, desperately searching for the three of them. JB would search. Jonah was certain of it. But time was—well—endless, wasn’t it? What if JB never found them?

  What if that’s part of the plan? Jonah wondered. What if Andrea’s mystery man wants us to stay lost forever?

  “Are you sure you remember the story right?” Jonah asked Andrea. His voice came out too harsh and accusing, almost as if he was mad at her again. “If this is John White, he didn’t even make it to Roanoke Island before the storm hit. I think that could have been a hurricane we rescued him from!”

  Andrea twisted her hands together, an agonizing gesture.

  “There are a lot of things that don’t fit,” she admitted.

  “The shipwreck, too,” Katherine said. “There wasn’t a shipwreck in the original story, where everyone died but John White, and he escaped in a rowboat.” Her face turned white. “Do you think Andrea’s mystery man caused the shipwreck?”

  “No, because John White’s tracer was talking about the shipwreck too,” Jonah said. “That was part of original time.”

  “Some of the details must be a little off in the historical accounts,” Andrea said. “Maybe the historians lied?” She brushed a lock of hair from her grandfather’s forehead. “We can get the real story tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll wake up then, and I can talk to him. . . .”

  And they were back to that, to Andrea’s determination to talk to the man-joined-with-his-tracer, no matter what.

  “Andrea,” Katherine began, “you can’t do that. Especially now that we know who this is, that he’s connected to you . . . We know we aren’t in the right time. We know your tracer isn’t here. We know these tracers are here”—she gestured toward the boys on the o
ther side of the fire,—”and so we know two kids are missing. There’s too much that’s already messed up! We can’t risk—”

  “I. Don’t. Care,” Andrea said.

  Jonah started to say, “But—” and Katherine started to say, “Listen—”

  Andrea shook her head at both of them and kept talking.

  “You listen,” she said. “I know what you’re going to say. I know you think your plans and your strategies are important, and it really, really matters to outsmart the man who lied to me, and to protect time, like it’s some perfect, priceless jewel. But it isn’t. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters. Life isn’t like a game. You’ll see. When you lose the people you love most in all the world—when you lose everything . . .” She was getting choked up. Jonah could hear the tears in her voice. She gingerly touched John White’s sleeve. “This man came all the way across the ocean to find his family. He risked his life for that. So if I’m one of the people he’s looking for—and I am—I’m not going to hide from him. I’m going to tell him who I am!”

  There had been a moment on Jonah and Katherine’s last trip through time when they had come so close to violating a sacred rule of time travel that JB had yanked them out of the fifteenth century in nothing flat. Jonah found himself hoping that that would happen to Andrea right now. Wasn’t she threatening to upset everything about time? Didn’t she need to be yanked out of the past?

  Nothing happened. Andrea sniffed once, defiantly. Her grandfather let out a soft moan. One of the tracer boys turned over in his sleep, his arm disappearing in Dare’s fur. And the fire that Jonah had worked so hard to build flickered out.

  There’s proof then, Jonah thought grimly. He realized, in spite of everything, he’d been holding on to just a bit of hope that JB knew exactly where they were and that, somehow, everything was going according to plan. If JB’s projectionist really was the best ever, couldn’t he have predicted that Andrea would change the Elucidator code, that the Elucidator would vanish, and that Jonah and the others would save the drowning man? Wasn’t it possible that the three kids might do something on their own that was better than what they could do with JB bossing them around? It had kind of worked that way in the fifteenth century.