Sabotaged (26 page)

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.

Pale. Ethereal. See-through. Ghostly.

Glowing.

It was another tracer.

Still clutching the dog’s collar, Jonah took a step back. The dog whimpered.

“I see it, I see it,” Jonah muttered.

The tracer was an Indian girl in a deerskin dress. She had long braids on either side of her head. And even though she was a tracer, Jonah could make out the light tone of her skin, the sad gray of her eyes.

Light skin. Gray eyes. This wasn’t an Indian girl’s tracer.

This was Andrea’s.

The fresh grave,
Jonah thought.
Is this tracer here because Second murdered Virginia Dare?

Jonah realized he was so stunned, he wasn’t even thinking about tracer rules right. Nobody could have murdered Virginia Dare—at least, not yet. Because
Andrea
was Virginia Dare. And Andrea was still alive, back at the canoe, right now calling out, “Jonah?”

Jonah didn’t answer.

This tracer is here because of Gary and Hodge stealing Andrea—Virginia Dare—from history,
Jonah was reminding himself.
And then because Second made sure that Andrea didn’t come back to the right time or place . . .

The tracer girl stood on her tiptoes, peering through the branches, straight out toward the canoe.

She sees them,
Jonah thought.
She sees Walks with Pride and One Who Survives Much. Can she see her grandfather, too?

The tracer girl’s mouth made a little
O
of surprise, and then she looked down—evidently she’d snapped a twig with her bare toes or made some other little noise with her movement.

Back at the canoe, Antonio cried out in his tracer’s voice, “There it is again! The sound of an unsettled spirit! Let’s go!”

That’s why the tracer boys heard sounds that Antonio and Brendan didn’t,
Jonah thought.
Because it was this tracer walking around, moving through the woods.

“Jonah!” Katherine called from behind him. “I’m serious! The tracers aren’t going to wait for you! Get Dare and come on!”

But Jonah wanted to wait. He wanted to wait for Andrea’s tracer to step forward, out of the woods. Then Brendan’s tracer would see her, and Antonio’s tracer would see her, and maybe even John White’s tracer would be awake by now to see her too. And whatever was supposed to happen next—whatever had happened in original time—would happen.

Andrea’s tracer didn’t step forward. She shrank back.

“It’s okay,” Jonah whispered. “We’re friendly.”

But of course the tracer couldn’t hear him. She slid farther back into the woods, deeper into the shadows.

She wasn’t planning to go out and meet the other tracers—Brendan’s and Antonio’s and her grandfather’s. She was afraid of them. She was hiding.

“Jonah, what are you doing?” Katherine called again. “If you don’t come now, you’re going to have to swim!”

What was Jonah supposed to do? They’d come to the past to reunite Andrea with her tracer. It had been such a clear goal. But that was before they knew about Second, before Andrea changed the Elucidator code, before John White showed up, before Brendan and Antonio
appeared out of nowhere—and before they’d discovered that Croatoan was an island of death. What difference did all those changes make? Could they change the need for Andrea to join with her tracer? What if this was the wrong time and the wrong place for it?