Sabotaged (21 page)

That was exactly the kind of thing Jonah’s mother would have said. Jonah didn’t want to think about what his mom would have said if she’d seen him trying to punch someone. To distract himself, he looked down at his fish.

The fish looked right back at him—or seemed to. Its little beady eye was still attached. So were all its scales and fins.

“Don’t go asking for fish sticks instead,” Antonio said sneeringly.

Jonah swallowed hard.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“I’m sure it’s delicious,” Katherine said faintly. She poked at her own fish and seemed relieved that it didn’t move. She looked as if she’d almost expected it to jump off the leaf, flop over to the water, and swim away.

“But it’s not what you’re used to, right?” Brendan said. “Sorry. We were trying to stay with our tracers—we didn’t know how to cook the fish any other way but how they would cook it.” He expertly pulled away some bones and put a chunk of fish into his own mouth. “It really is good.”

Again, there was something about the way Brendan talked about staying with his tracer that bothered Jonah. Jonah looked at Katherine, who shook her head warningly. Now, what did that mean?

“At least they got a fire started,” Andrea said, taking a fish-on-a-leaf for herself and Dare, before going back to sit near her grandfather. “At least we don’t have to eat it raw.”

I managed to get a fire started back on Roanoke Island,
Jonah wanted to protest.
These guys aren’t so great!

But he wouldn’t have known to use the rakelike paddle to catch fish. He wouldn’t have known how to build the wooden rack that held the fish over the flames. He wouldn’t have known the way to Croatoan Island . . . assuming Brendan and Antonio did.

Jonah took a bite of fish—it really was okay, as long
as he didn’t think about it having a face. And as long as he spit out the bones. He chewed carefully and tried to think about how to ask all the questions churning in his mind without once again ending up on the brink of a fight with Antonio.

“Are we close to Croatoan Island?” he finally said, trying to sound casual, even unconcerned. He looked around. They seemed to be in some sort of cove, sheltered from the water and wind. A thick woods started several feet behind them. “It feels like we’re a million miles away from anything. Like maybe nobody’s ever been here before.”

Antonio snorted and separated from his tracer enough to say, “Shows what you know. People camp here all the time. You can tell, just by looking.” He pointed behind him, toward some vague indentations in the sand. “There was a war party over there, back in the spring.” He pointed to the right, to a darker patch of sand. “A smaller group camped there, but they’d had a good day of hunting, so they took up a lot of space.”

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 the 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.