Sabotaged (22 page)

The last clump of giant leaves parted, revealing . . .

Antonio.

He was sprinting toward them at top speed, hightailing it across the sand.

“Is something chasing you?” Jonah yelled at him.

Antonio didn’t answer. He bent his head down, focused only on running. His feet barely touched ground. When he was still several feet away from the other kids, he suddenly leaped, launching himself upward in an amazing arc.

That’s going to hurt when he lands,
Jonah thought. From Jonah’s perspective, it looked like Antonio was trying to dive into the sand.

No,
Jonah realized.
Into his tracer.

Antonio collided with his tracer in mid-air. The tracer had just stood up to carry fish bones toward the fire, so for an odd moment Antonio and his tracer looked like a monster with two heads and four arms and four legs sticking out at strange angles—and with skeletal fish attached to two of his hands. Then Antonio’s body straightened out, twisted around, and completely melded
with his tracer.

“Is something chasing you?” Jonah screamed again at Antonio.

Almost imperceptibly, Antonio separated from his tracer just enough to shake his head. No. Nothing was chasing him.

Still, Jonah gazed off into the woods for a few moments, watching for rustling in the undergrowth. Nothing but wind moved the giant leaves.

“What was that all about?” Katherine demanded.

Another howl rose up from the woods.

“Brother Wolf speaks most eloquent—” Antonio-joined-with-his-tracer began. But then Antonio jerked his mouth away from his tracer’s mouth. “Crazy tracer!” he muttered.

Brendan dipped his head into his tracer’s head, then pulled back again.

“Our tracers know the wolves won’t come near the fire,” he explained. “The tracers aren’t afraid. But when we’re apart from our tracers, we never know . . .”

Apart from his tracer, Antonio was terrified of the wolves, Jonah realized. Even now, separated only slightly from his tracer’s head, Antonio had sweat pouring down his face and was panting heavily, gulping in mouthfuls of air. This was a particularly bizarre sight since his chest,
still joined with his tracer’s, rose and fell with a calm, even pace.

“My tracer’s not afraid of anything,” Antonio said. He separated from his tracer a little more, to turn toward Brendan. “Is yours?”

Brendan shook his head.

“Not really,” he said slowly. “I mean, he knows terrible things could happen—we could starve, we could be attacked, we could die a million different, horrible ways—but if that happened, he knows it would just be the will of—”

“Don’t say it!” Antonio ordered. “Don’t say ‘Great Spirit,’ or anything like that, because that’s not how it translates—it doesn’t translate, and they’ll just laugh. . . .” He separated his arm from his tracer’s to gesture angrily at Jonah, Katherine, and Andrea.

“Us?” Katherine said, with fake innocence. “Say it in Algonquian, and Jonah and I will understand. We’ll help you translate.”

“Never mind,” Antonio muttered. He turned angrily away. Surreptitiously, he slid his head closer to his tracer’s, so that barely anything except his mouth remained separate. “The tracers are cleaning up and getting ready to camp overnight,” he said gruffly. “Brendan, you’d better get back together with your guy so we can do this the
right way.”

“Okay,” Brendan said, shrugging.

“Jonah, while they’re doing that, could you help me with something over by the canoe?” Katherine asked.

“What?” Jonah said.

“I, uh, think I might have lost a ponytail rubber band,” Katherine said. Jonah glanced at his sister.

“It’s in your hair,” he said.

She shook her head, her ponytail flipping side to side.

“Not
that
rubber band,” Katherine said. “A different one. It could mess up time forever if we don’t find it.”

Even though he’d slept all day, Jonah was still really tired. Just the thought of standing up seemed beyond him, not to mention having to walk over to the canoe and search for some stupid little rubber band that was probably buried under three inches of sand by now. How much could one rubber band matter anyway? Second had tossed whole jars of paint into the wrong time period.

And five kids and a dog.

“Wouldn’t Andrea do a better job looking?” Jonah said. “She’s a girl. She knows about stuff like ponytail rubber bands.”

Katherine shot a glance toward the other kids. Antonio and Brendan, completely joined with their tracers now,
were bent over the fire. Andrea, with Dare beside her, was gazing down at her sleeping grandfather. None of them was looking toward Jonah and Katherine.

Katherine jabbed her elbow into Jonah’s side.

“Ow!” Jonah cried. “What—”

But Katherine already had a finger poised over her lips. She jerked her head to the right, toward the direction of the canoe. Then she quickly pointed to herself and Jonah, and started thumping the fingers of her right hand against the thumb, like someone operating a puppet.

“Oh, you mean—” Jonah began.

Katherine shook her head firmly and pressed her finger against her lips once more. She grabbed Jonah’s arm and began tugging.

“Okay, okay, I’m coming!” Jonah muttered.

They walked several steps, and as soon as they were out of earshot of the others, Katherine burst out, “You are so dense! You would be the world’s worst spy! Any of my friends would have caught on about ten
years
ago that I wanted to talk to them alone!”

“Well, duh,” Jonah mumbled. “They actually care about ponytail rubber bands.”

Katherine rolled her eyes. Then, near the canoe, she dropped to her knees and began sifting sand through her fingers.

Jonah groaned.

“
Please
tell me you didn’t really lose a rubber band,” he said.

Katherine paused long enough to glare up at him.

“No, but you need to
look
like you’re looking for a rubber band,” she reminded him. “In case they’re watching.” She tilted her head, indicating the other three kids.

Reluctantly, Jonah knelt down beside his sister and began scooping up random handfuls of sand. His knees ached. His shoulders ached. His head was still woozy—the day of sleeping in the sun, having nightmares, hadn’t come even close to curing him. Worst of all, he was getting chills again, the little prickles of fear all along his spine that warned of some approaching danger.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked Katherine, his voice coming out rough and accusing. “Don’t you trust Antonio and Brendan after all?”

Katherine brushed aside sand, revealing more sand.

“It’s not that,” she whispered. “It’s—I don’t trust their tracers.”

Jonah dropped a whole handful of sand, sending up a puff of dust.

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “Did you get sunstroke this afternoon? What do you mean, you don’t trust the tracers? They’re tracers! They’re not really there! They don’t know we’re here! They don’t care if we’re looking for a rubber band or not. To them, we don’t even exist!”

The dust floated up to his mouth and nose, making him cough. While he was coughing, he thought of a new argument.

“The way I see it, the tracers might be the only ones we
can
trust!” he said. “We know they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing because, duh, they’re tracers! They have to be accurate! I like Andrea—”

“You like her too much,” Katherine said.

Jonah ignored this.

“—but she doesn’t care what happens to time,” he continued. “Brendan
seems
okay, but how can we know for sure that he and Antonio aren’t working for Second?”

“You didn’t see them the first hour or so,” Katherine said. “They were completely clueless and scared out of their wits. They didn’t know anything.”

“Yeah, but as soon as they joined with their tracers, they should have known . . .” The next word Jonah had intended to say was
everything.
But he stopped. He remembered
Brendan saying he didn’t know if his tracer had done anything great; he didn’t know what the tracer thought about Croatoan Island. He didn’t even know what year it was. And Antonio—maybe he wasn’t just being a jerk when he’d refused to talk about the distance to Croatoan because, “Our tracers aren’t thinking about that right now!”

“You think . . . ,” Jonah began. He had to try again to get the words out. “You think the tracers are keeping secrets?”

Katherine nodded, her eyes huge and frightened. Now that they were away from the other kids, Jonah could see how scared she really was—and how fake her brave face and cheerful chatter had been before.

“Didn’t Chip and Alex know everything their tracers knew, back in the fifteenth century?” Jonah interrupted. “Didn’t they know everything right away, from the first moment they joined with their tracers?”

“I
think
so,” Katherine said. “That’s how they always acted. Whatever we asked them, they had answers. Unless it was something their tracers didn’t know either.”

“But maybe we only asked them questions about things they’d been thinking about anyway,” Jonah said.

“Yeah,” Katherine agreed. “We never tested them with anything like, ‘What color shirt was your tracer wearing a week ago Monday?’”

“
I
couldn’t answer that,” Jonah said. “With or without a tracer.”

“Oh, right,” Katherine said. But she didn’t launch into any mocking rant about how he was just a stupid boy, and she could remember every outfit she’d worn since starting sixth grade.

“Do you think the
tracers
are working for Second?” Jonah asked.

Katherine frowned, considering this.

“I don’t think they could,” she said. “It’s like you said, they’re tracers. They can’t change.” She hesitated. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said I don’t trust them. Maybe that’s not the right way to put it. How could any of this be the tracers’ fault? They’re just what we see, and the problem’s deeper than that. The whole setup is messed up.”

“Because of Second,” Jonah growled. “He’s behind this.”

Katherine nodded.

“He must have done something to keep Brendan and Antonio from melding with their tracers right,” Katherine said.

Jonah struggled to get his aching brain to follow this thought. It seemed every bit as impossible as finding a rubber band buried on a vast beach.
Brendan said Second pulled him straight out of time from his room back home—Second didn’t take him to a time cave or time hollow first,
Jonah remembered.
Could that be the problem?
Jonah didn’t know why this would matter. The time hollows had always seemed like conveniences, not essentials. Why couldn’t Brendan and Antonio go straight from the twenty-first century to . . .

Jonah’s head throbbed, and he saw what he had been missing.

“I bet the problem was the way Brendan and Antonio came back,” Jonah said slowly. “Antonio landing . . . on top of me.”

This was still hard to talk about. It was like the moment back home when Jonah had first seen a time traveler seem to vanish into thin air, changing dimensions. Jonah’s brain had tried so hard to recast the memory, to turn it into something else—something believable.

Now it felt like Jonah’s brain was trying very hard to get him to forget completely. The memory already seemed distant and hazy, like something from a dream.

Oh, no,
Jonah thought.
I am not letting go.

“You know, when Antonio . . . arrived . . . that felt wrong,” Jonah said. “I bet Second did it that way on purpose.”

Katherine nodded, still deadly serious.

“I was looking right at you,” she said. “And, for a
moment, it was like there were three people in the exact same spot—you, Antonio, and the tracer.”

Jonah felt chills again.

“That’s how it felt to me, too,” he admitted. He could bear thinking about that moment only in a roundabout way, as if he had to sneak up on the memory to catch it.

Katherine evidently wasn’t so limited.

“And then for a split second after that, you and the tracer both disappeared,” Katherine said, her voice low and troubled. “Maybe I blinked. Maybe I just missed seeing you fall out of the canoe. But where did the tracer go? Before, anytime we saw someone joined with his tracer—back in the fifteenth century, with Chip or Alex—it was always the tracer we could see, more than Chip or Alex. But with Antonio and his tracer, it was like the tracer blended into Antonio, not the other way around. I could see Antonio’s T-shirt better than his tracer’s back.”

Jonah shook his head, trying to make sense of Katherine’s words.

“But that didn’t last,” he said. “The tracers look normal now.” He glanced back toward the others clustered around the fire. Antonio and Brendan, still joined with their tracers, were very clearly wearing nothing but loincloths. “Well, normal for 1590s Native Americans.” He cleared his throat, trying to get rid of the last of the dust.
“When did Antonio and his tracer start looking right again? And do you think Brendan and his tracer were messed up at first too?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said. “I started looking around for you, and when I glanced back at Antonio and his tracer, everything was like . . .” she gestured toward the two boys, moving completely in concert with their tracers.