Sabotaged (32 page)

Remembering how he’d had to brush away pine needles when he’d first arrived on Roanoke Island, Jonah
clumsily groped his left hand up toward his face. It took three tries, but he managed to grab on to something: a piece of paper. There was a ripping sound. Jonah didn’t really have enough energy even to rip paper, so he froze, clutching the paper.

“Jonah? Katherine? Please answer! Please!”

Absently, Jonah noticed that this was JB’s voice again, coming from JB’s Elucidator.

Good,
Jonah thought.
That’s how it’s supposed to be. Not Second on JB’s Elucidator. That’s too confusing.

“Please answer! Are you there? Can you hear me?”

“—uh?” Jonah said.

He’d been trying for
Huh?
but evidently that was beyond him right now.

“We’re on emergency backup power—I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to talk to you,” JB continued. “This is what I have to tell you. Second escaped—”

“Escaped?” Katherine repeated. She was apparently recovering more quickly than Jonah, if she was able to say a whole two-syllable word. And sound outraged, all at once.

“Yes . . . I don’t know how he did it—he must have been prepared for me to hit him with that time smack. He must have just been faking it, when he passed out,” JB
said. “And then he knocked me out and vanished. I should have been prepared for that, just in case. . . .”

Jonah blanked out for a moment. He wasn’t worried about Second just then. There was something else . . . someone else. . . .

“Andrea?” he whispered, with great effort. “How’s Andrea?”

“Jonah, she’s fine for now,” JB said. “We’re all fine. She’s buried the bones; Brendan and Antonio are doing their artwork. . . . We’re coping. But listen—” The urgency was back in his voice. “Everything depends on you and Katherine.”

Jonah couldn’t hear what JB said after that. Maybe the Elucidator shorted out for a few minutes.

“Feel like . . . John White,” he muttered to Katherine.

“What are you talking about?” Katherine asked.

“Him, us . . . had to leave everyone . . . go . . . help . . . ” Jonah had it worked out much better in his mind, better than what he could say. He meant that now he could understand how John White felt, how heart-wrenching it must have been for the old man to sail away from the people he loved, thinking that their very survival depended on him.

Katherine slugged Jonah’s arm. She was definitely recovering faster than he was.

“How can you say that?” she asked. “Look what hap
pened to John White!”

“He made it back,” Jonah protested. “Found . . . granddaughter, at least.”

“
Did
he?” Katherine asked. “How can we know which version of history really happened?”

Jonah waved his arm warningly at her. He was trying to look threatening, trying to keep her from slugging him again. But he’d forgotten that he was still clutching the paper that had blown against his face. Moving the paper back a little meant that his eyes could focus on it now.

It was a page torn from a book. The top of the page had the words
NEW VIEWS OF THE NEW WORLD
printed in old-fashioned type. Below that was a drawing of a girl in a deerskin dress and a white-haired man standing in the midst of a crowd of Native Americans. The old man was shaking hands with a dark-skinned boy who was wearing a loincloth.

Below the drawing was the caption:
John White and Virginia Dare joining a native tribe, welcomed by One Who Survives Much. Drawn by Walks with Pride.

“This happened,” Jonah whispered.

Katherine stared at the paper.

“Then—the ripple,” she said. “It’s here.”

Jonah thought about that. He thought about how he’d landed and then the paper had come fluttering down onto
his face.

“We got here first,” he said confidently. “That’s good, don’t you think?”

The Elucidator crackled to life again.

“Jonah, Katherine, I have to tell you what to do,” JB shouted.

Jonah was still looking at the drawing on the page before him. He saw the way Virginia Dare/Andrea held her grandfather’s arm, the peacefulness that shone from her face.

“Not if it means undoing 1600,” Jonah said. “I won’t do that to Andrea.”

Time travel was so confusing—making it hard to see what was right and what was wrong, who was a friend and who was an enemy, even which events followed which, and which led to something else. But this was one fact Jonah was sure of: He didn’t want to do anything to erase the joy on Andrea’s face in this picture.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” JB said grimly. “Believe me, nobody can undo anything about 1600 now.”

Katherine gasped.

“Then you’re all stuck there?” she asked. “You, Brendan, Antonio, Andrea—none of you can ever get back to the twenty-first century? None of you will ever see your families again, ever—”

“I didn’t say that,” JB said, his voice tense. “The year 1600 is sealed off now, all but carved in stone. But we’re living
through
it. We’re not in any imminent danger, and there are still some possible escape routes up ahead.”

“Then why can’t we just come back and get you?” Jonah asked. “Meet you at one of those escape routes, maybe. At the bottom of the exit ramp, or whatever you’d call it for time travel.”

“Because those escape routes will work only if you and Katherine fix things in 1611,” JB said. “Everything’s connected.”

“That kind of sounds like what Second told us,” Katherine whispered.

“You have to keep 1611 stable!” JB yelled, speaking quickly now, as if he was running out of time. “You’re our only hope! You’re time’s only hope! Or else—”

The Elucidator went dead again.

Jonah didn’t mind too much. He wasn’t quite ready to think about
or else
’s. He went back to staring at the drawing of Andrea, soaking in the peace and joy in her expression.

I did help her,
he thought.
And she helped me. It worked in both directions.

“I can see why some old people just want to think about their pasts,” Jonah muttered. “Where they know
how things turned out.”

“We know some things about the future, too,” Katherine reminded him. “We know, no matter what, that we’re going to do everything we can to fix time and rescue our friends. Second was wrong—some things are always predictable.”

Second was wrong,
Jonah thought.
He was wrong about a lot of things.

It was dizzying to think about how much Second had manipulated them—had manipulated even JB. And though the projectionist had made Andrea happy, Jonah knew that Second had been too reckless, too dangerous, too much of a threat to time.

There would be consequences.

Jonah lowered the picture of Andrea and squinted out toward the world beyond. It was all still just a big gray blur, but he knew that everything would come into focus soon.

Maybe they hadn’t exactly outsmarted Second in 1600. But they’d held their own: Everyone was still safe for now. And 1611 wasn’t just another dangerous year.

It was also another chance.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

If you go to Roanoke Island in North Carolina right now, in the twenty-first century, you can get there by driving across Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge. And, when you arrive, you’ll be in Dare County. Go a little farther east, to the islands that make up the Outer Banks, and you can drive along Virginia Dare Trail. Go north, to Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia, and you can take a cruise on a ship called the
Virginia Dare
. Or, if you just want to stay home, you could bake a cake using Virginia Dare vanilla or listen to music by a band called Virginia Dare.

Virginia Dare is incredibly famous for someone we know so little about. History records only two events from her actual life: She was born to Ananias and Eleanor Dare on August 18, 1587. And she was baptized six days later, on August 24, 1587. And that’s it. That’s all we know for sure. Both of those details come from accounts written by Virginia’s grandfather, John White, who was the governor of the Roanoke Colony. And he left Roanoke on August 27, when Virginia was only nine days old. After that, Virginia’s life is a complete unknown. Everything else about her is speculation, myth, and mystery.

I first became intrigued by the Roanoke Colony story when I was a kid. I can even remember reading a biogra
phy of Virginia Dare—
Virginia Dare: Mystery Girl—
in the Childhood of Famous Americans series. (You would think that that would have been a really, really short book, but it wasn’t.) When I first began thinking about The Missing series, I knew right away that I wanted to include Virginia Dare as one of the missing kids from history. But when I began doing research about the Roanoke Colony, I discovered a much more complicated story than the one I thought I knew.

As far as anyone can tell, Virginia Dare truly was the first English child born in the Western Hemisphere. But even the Roanoke Colony’s claim to being the first English settlement in the Americas is a little suspect. As early as 1583, a group of Englishmen tried to start a settlement in Newfoundland. But they gave up after just a few weeks because of a lack of supplies.

When I was a kid thinking about the early Europeans coming to the Americas, I pictured it as being comparable to people in the late twentieth century landing on the moon. But that really isn’t the best comparison. First of all, unlike the moon, the Americas already had people living there. Secondly, in a forty-year time span, humans have made exactly nine manned trips to the moon. During the 1500s, Europeans made hundreds of trips back and forth from the Americas. English fishermen, along with
those of other nationalities, were routinely sailing to the waters off Newfoundland, fishing during the warmer months, and then taking their catch home to sell. The Spanish, who had gotten a huge head start and already had numerous settlements in the Western Hemisphere, were routinely crossing the Atlantic with ships full of treasure from Central and South America.

When the English looked at that imbalance—we’re getting fish; they’re getting gold—they didn’t like it. They considered the Spanish their enemies, anyhow, for a variety of reasons, including religion. (Spain was a Catholic country; by the late 1500s, England was Protestant.) Spain seemed to have all the power and was expanding its influence across Europe as well as in the Americas. One of England’s main ways of fighting back was to have English ships attack Spanish ships and steal everything they could. This sounds like piracy—or outright acts of war—but the English had another name for it: privateering. All that meant is that the English didn’t feel they were doing anything wrong. The English government and its leaders not only allowed the theft of Spanish treasure—they encouraged it. And Queen Elizabeth got a cut of the profits.

Sir Walter Raleigh, one of the queen’s favorite courtiers, was also one of the men most heavily involved with
privateering. (You probably remember Raleigh’s name from some Social Studies class, if you were paying more attention than Jonah.) Raleigh thought that starting a colony in North America would be a way to counter Spain’s power in the Western Hemisphere—especially if it served as a base and hiding place for English privateers.

Raleigh himself didn’t plan to go to the new colony he envisioned; he stayed in England and sent others out on his behalf. It’s hard to know what motivated the actual Roanoke colonists to leave everything they knew and try to set up new homes in an unfamiliar place. Some historians think some or all of the colonists might have wanted to separate from the Church of England and practice their own religion, like the Pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts thirty-three years later. Other historians think the financial incentives might have been more important: Each male colonist was supposed to receive five hundred acres of land.

One of the things I didn’t remember about the Roanoke Colony—or had never known—was that there were a few trials runs before John White, the Dares, and more than a hundred other men, women, and children showed up on Roanoke Island at the end of July 1587. Various all-male groups of English explorers and soldiers inhabited the island on and off beginning in 1584. In many ways,
these trial runs were disasters and planted the seeds of more disaster. The Englishmen expected the local people to supply them with food—never mind that there was a drought and the natives had barely enough food for themselves. And never mind that the English acted almost schizophrenic, alternately befriending and killing their new neighbors. When the English thought an Indian might have stolen a silver communion cup, they burned an entire Indian village and destroyed the villagers’ corn. Later, they stole and ate dogs belonging to other Indians. They also kidnapped a prominent Indian leader’s young son. None of this could have endeared the English to the natives. When Virginia Dare’s parents and their fellow Roanoke colonists arrived in the summer of 1587, they expected to find fifteen soldiers who had been left to guard an English fort. Instead, they found a skeleton, presumably belonging to a soldier who’d been killed by Indians. Nobody knows what happened to the other fourteen soldiers.

That first discovery must have been disheartening, but there was plenty of bad news to come. Six days after they arrived, one of the colonists, George Howe, was killed by Indians while he was out alone looking for crabs. He left behind his young son, now an orphan. When the colonists decided to retaliate for Howe’s murder and attack a
nearby Indian village, they discovered partway into the attack that they’d made a huge mistake: The village was occupied by Native Americans who were friendly toward the English, not the enemies they expected to find.

Amazingly, those Indians seem to have been willing to look past that error. But the Roanoke colonists still had plenty of other problems. For a variety of reasons, they’d failed to load up on necessary supplies—including food—on their way to America. And because the captains of the ships bringing them to America had wanted to spend as much of the sailing season as they could privateering (a common theme in the history of the English on Roanoke Island), the colonists didn’t arrive until late summer, when it was too late to plant any crops. Finally, one of the things the English had learned from their previous trial runs was that Roanoke Island was actually a
lousy
place for the English to try to settle. This time around, the colonists intended to settle farther north, in the Chesapeake Bay area. But Simon Fernandez, the pilot leading their fleet of ships, reportedly refused to take them anywhere else. Much of the speculation about the Roanoke Colony’s fate has been directed at Simon Fernandez. Was he intentionally sabotaging the colony? If so, who told him to do that? And why? Was he secretly working for Spain? Or was he taking bribes from some enemy of Raleigh’s within the
English court?