Sabotaged (15 page)

“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 guy 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.”

She took the melon out of Katherine’s hand and hit it against a rock sticking up in the dust. The melon broke into even halves, revealing five brown pellets where there should have been the fruit and seeds.

“Five?” Katherine muttered.

Andrea flipped over one of the pellets, which was a slightly lighter shade of brown. It had the words, “For Dare,” carved into its surface.

The others weren’t labeled.

“Okay, then, at least test the food on the dog first,” Jonah suggested.

“No, I’ll be the test case,” Andrea said.

She hesitated for a second.

“Don’t do it,” Jonah said. “Please.”

Andrea popped a pellet into her mouth.

Jonah had a sudden image in his mind of the girl in
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
puffing up and turning blue after chewing defective gum.

“Spit it out!” he yelled at Andrea.

Andrea swallowed instead.

“Okay, you guys can watch me for the next couple hours, and then we’ll know if it’s safe to give this to my grandfather,” she said calmly.

Jonah shook his head.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

Andrea shrugged.

“Time will tell, won’t it?” she said, grinning slightly.

“That’s not funny,” Jonah objected.

Andrea scooped the other four pellets out of the melon half and put them in her pocket. Katherine and Jonah watched her warily.

“Look, I feel fine so far,” Andrea said. “Not so hungry anymore, but maybe that’s just my imagination. It couldn’t work
that
fast. Let’s just . . . go on, okay?”

Go on,
Jonah thought dazedly.
What would that mean? Fixing time? Rescuing Andrea?

Those had been his original goals, but everything was so mixed-up now. How could they fix time when it just kept getting more and more messed up? How could they rescue Andrea when she was determined to do crazy things like talk to her grandfather and eat suspicious food?

Right then, out of the corner of his eye, Jonah saw one of the tracer boys pat John White’s shoulder and stand up. The tracer boy was nodding, nodding. . . . Had John White’s tracer just asked him to do something? The old man’s tracer was still speaking, but he kept blinking, as if he was fighting off sleep. He seemed to be struggling to get the words out before he slipped toward unconsciousness, toward joining the real man completely.

The tracer’s eyes closed, and now Jonah could hear what he was saying because the real man was speaking, too.

“Find it,” John White murmured. Clearly the tracer and the real man were thinking the same thing. “Please find it, I beg of you.”

The tracer boy nodded once more and began walking
out of the village.

“Did you hear that?” Jonah asked Katherine and Andrea. “This is a clue! We should follow him, see what he’s looking for!”

Andrea shook her head, firmly.

“I’m staying with my grandfather,” she said.

“But this is something for him!” Jonah said. “Maybe it’s connected to you! Or your tracer!” He turned to his sister. “Katherine?”

Katherine was grimacing.

“You go,” she said. “I’ll stay here with Andrea.”

Her gaze flickered from Jonah to Andrea to John White. She cocked her head and made a face. Jonah could tell what she was thinking:
Andrea’s not going to leave her grandfather, and there’s no way we can trust her alone with him. Who knows how many different ways she might try to ruin time?

“So I should go . . . alone?” Jonah asked. He wasn’t scared—of course he wasn’t scared. But it was a little weird to think that he would be going off on his own without a cell phone, without an Elucidator, without any way to communicate with anyone. “If you two go somewhere before I get back, uh, carve a map on a tree or something, okay?” he said, trying to make a joke of it.

“That didn’t work out so great for the Roanoke colo
nists,” Andrea muttered.

She walked over to Dare, who was still snoring, and gently shook him awake. She held out his pellet of food in her hand and he eagerly gobbled it down.

“Now you’ll have energy to go with Jonah and keep him company,” Andrea told the dog. She pushed him forward. “Hurry! Before you lose the tracer!”

“Um, okay then,” Jonah said. He took off after the tracer, the dog at his heels. He had to stop himself from turning around and saying to Andrea and Katherine,
Are you sure you two don’t want to come too?
Or,
You’ll come after me if I get lost, won’t you?

When he was pretty sure he and Dare were out of earshot of the girls, Jonah turned to the dog.

“Don’t think this means I trust you,” he told Dare. “I am still watching you, to make sure you’re not animatronic or a decoy or a spy or something.”

The dog licked Jonah’s hand.

“I mean it,” Jonah said sternly. He addressed the sky, “And, Second, you can’t fool me either. I am not eating your food, and we are not blindly going along with any of your plans. Got it?”

Jonah hoped that Second had not planned for Jonah and Dare to go off with the one tracer boy while Katherine and Andrea were left behind for . . . what? The danger
Jonah had been fearing all along?

You’re being paranoid,
Jonah told himself.
Just like Katherine said.

To distract himself, he concentrated on looking around, watching everything carefully. The tracer boy seemed to be following the same trail he and the other boy had taken the night before, when they’d dragged John White back to the village on the tree branch. Jonah would have expected the whole trail to be lined with tracers—bent-back grasses, footprints, other dents and gouges in the sandy soil. But the trail ahead was almost completely clear of tracer changes.

Because of the violent storm?
Jonah wondered.
Or . . . because of the branch that Andrea and Katherine and I were dragging behind the tracer boys?

Jonah watched the tracer boy in front of him trample a clump of grasses. A crumpled tracer version of the grasses instantly appeared. Jonah purposely dodged it.

Dare stepped on the grasses instead, tamping them down in the exact same pattern as their tracers.

Jonah found that unless he concentrated very hard, he automatically walked in the exact same footsteps as the tracer boy in front of him, erasing almost all of his tracer prints. Or the dog did it for him. And even though the tracer boy was barefoot and Jonah was wearing sneak
ers—and the dog had paws—they all seemed to leave very similar markings on the trail. It happened again and again, the boy creating a tracer, Jonah or the dog erasing it.