Sabotaged (5 page)

Or . . . not exactly a ghost . . .

Jonah grinned and dropped back down with Andrea and Katherine.

“It’s all right,” he whispered. “It’s just a tracer! I bet it’s Andrea’s!”

All three kids peeked over the logs now. Even Dare stopped barking and just watched silently. Now that Jonah knew he was watching a tracer, it made sense that the figure moved without rustling any tree branches, without snapping any twigs underfoot.

“There are two of them!” Katherine whispered.

Jonah scooted over so he could see from the same angle, and she was right—there were two figures gliding silently through the trees.

“Let’s make sure there aren’t any real live human beings with them too,” Jonah whispered back grimly.

But as the figures approached, it became clear that no one else was around. When the tracers stepped into the clearing—becoming a bit more distinct in the brighter light—Katherine began to giggle.

“Uh, Jonah, I don’t think either of those tracers are Andrea’s,” she whispered.

“Why not?” he asked. “. . . oh.”

The tracers were boys—rather scantily clad boys. At first Jonah thought they might even be naked, but then he realized that they had squares of some sort of cloth or animal skin hanging down from their waists.

Katherine kept giggling.

“Oh, grow up,” Jonah muttered. “You’ve seen boys in swimsuits before. Those . . . outfits . . . cover just as much territory. These guys are Indians. Er—Native Americans.”

From some long-ago Social Studies class, Jonah remembered the name for the clothes the two boys were wearing: loincloths.
Couldn’t they have come up with a less embarrassing name?
he wondered.

“Those aren’t Indians,” Andrea whispered, speaking up for the first time since she’d collapsed on the
Croatoan
log. “Look at their hair. The texture. It’s all wrong.”

Jonah squinted. It wasn’t easy to examine the texture of two guys’ hair when those guys were practically see-through, even if they did glow, ever so slightly. But he could kind of see what Andrea meant. Neither of the tracers had long braids or long straight hair trailing down their backs or even a ridged Mohawk on an otherwise shaved scalp—none of the hairstyles Jonah would have expected
for old-timey Native Americans. One tracer boy did have longish hair, but it was very curly long hair. The other tracer boy’s hair was closely cropped and wiry.

“So maybe they come from some tribe that never got its picture into any of our Social Studies books,” Jonah said, shrugging.

“That guy came from Africa,” Andrea said, pointing at the tracer with the shorter hair. “Or his ancestors did.”

She sounded excited about this.

“Why would an African guy pretend to be an Indian?” Jonah asked.

“Hello?” Katherine said. “To get out of being a slave?”

Jonah blushed, because he’d kind of forgotten about that. He always hated it whenever they talked about slavery at school, because the teachers got a weird tone in their voices, as if they were trying really, really hard not to offend anyone. And a lot of the black kids in his class just stared down at their desks, as if they were wishing they were somewhere else.

“No,” Andrea said, her voice rising giddily. “I bet it’s because they’re actors or something. Not very realistic ones. And this is just a movie set, and it’s still the twenty-first century, and we didn’t go back very far in time at all, and . . .”

She broke off because the two tracers were suddenly both lifting bows to their chests and pulling arrows out
of packs that Jonah just now noticed hanging from their shoulders.

Tracer bows and arrows?
Jonah thought.
Oh, yeah, I saw a tracer battle-ax too, on my last trip through time.

That wasn’t a happy memory. Jonah didn’t want to think about what these tracer boys might be shooting at, but he couldn’t keep from watching the arc of the arrows, zipping through the air.

At first it seemed that they’d fallen uselessly to the ground. Something rustled amid the pine branches, but it was only a deer aimlessly strolling away. Then Jonah saw what the deer had left behind: a tracer version of itself, pierced by the tracer arrows. The tracer deer’s glow was fading, growing dimmer and dimmer.

Oh, no,
Jonah thought, horrified.
JB told us before that the tracers of living things stop glowing when they die.

The two tracer Indians—or tracer Indian wannabes—shared none of Jonah’s horror. They were jumping up and down and hollering (though Jonah couldn’t hear anything). Then they took off running toward the tracer deer and . . . attacked it. There was no other way to describe it. Jonah was so glad that he was seeing only the tracer, ghostly version of the action, because otherwise he would have been sick.

“This isn’t a movie set,” Katherine whispered.
“Movies always have that disclaimer, ‘No animals were harmed in the making of this film. . . .’”

“Those guys are hungry, for
real
,” Jonah said, turning his head because he couldn’t watch anymore. The tracer boys seemed to be eating some of the meat raw, and smearing some of the blood on their faces. “Starving. Nobody could
act
that.”

“But then . . . ,” Andrea began. Her face twisted with anguish. She glanced once more at the two tracers, who now were hacking at the dead tracer deer with ghostly tracer knives. “I should have known he was lying. I should have known it wasn’t possible, even with time travel. . . .”

“Who was lying?” Katherine asked. “Do you mean JB? What are you talking about?”

But Andrea didn’t answer. She slumped back to the ground, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. A whimper broke through, and she stifled it, but her whole body was racked by the effort. Even though she was so quiet, Jonah knew this was the most devastated crying he’d ever seen, a million times worse than any of Katherine’s drama. And, like the tracer boys with the tracer deer, this was much too real for Jonah. He couldn’t watch.

But, since he also didn’t want to watch the tracer boys with the tracer deer, he wasn’t quite sure where to look. His gaze fell on Dare—the dog was looking back and
forth between Andrea and the tracers.

Jonah reached over and grabbed Dare’s collar, to hold him in place. Jonah didn’t have the slightest idea how to help Andrea himself, but maybe having the dog nearby would be comforting to her.

“What’s wrong, Andrea?” Katherine demanded, sounding every bit as baffled as Jonah felt. “Are you some big-time animal lover? Let me tell you, a lot more than deer got killed, back in the past—”

“I’m not crying over a
deer
,” Andrea spat back at her.

“Then what are you crying about?”

Jonah knew he should tell Katherine and Andrea to stop being so loud. It was dangerous. But the time sickness, the jolt of losing the Elucidator, the horror of seeing the deer slaughtered, the devastation of Andrea’s sobbing—everything seemed to be catching up with him at once. All he could do was clutch Dare’s collar, which was so nice and sturdy. Jonah’s fingers grazed the little pouch where JB had stashed the Elucidator, so long ago, so far in the future. Even that pouch was sturdily constructed, sturdily fastened, and so firmly attached to the collar. . . .

Wait a minute,
Jonah thought.

He fiddled with the pouch, trying as hard as he could to pull it off. But it must have been connected with some perfect futuristic superstrong glue. Even using all his
strength, Jonah couldn’t get it to budge.

A scene played back in Jonah’s mind.

Hold on—I’m scared the Elucidator is going to fall off,
Andrea had said, back when they were tumbling through time, back when they still
had
the Elucidator. She’d reached over and touched the pouch, in the dark, when Jonah and Katherine couldn’t see her very well.
The strap’s loose,
she’d said.
I’ll just hold the Elucidator myself.

But there
wasn’t
a strap. There wasn’t any reason that Andrea would have needed to take the Elucidator out of the pouch.

Unless she
wanted
to lose it.

Jonah straightened up, letting go of Dare’s collar. Jonah glared at Andrea, his eyes narrowed to slits.

“You’re the one who lied,” he said.

Katherine was the one who reacted first.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, switching her baffled gaze from Andrea to Jonah.

“‘Jonah made me lose the Elucidator,’” Jonah mimicked in a mincing, whiny voice that didn’t actually sound anything like Andrea’s. “‘It’s all Jonah’s fault.’” Okay, she hadn’t exactly said that, but Jonah was mad. “She was lying!”

“Jonah, you bumped into her,” Katherine said. “It was a mistake. You were trying to help. Nobody thinks you meant to do that.”

It was weird to have Katherine acting like the peacemaker—the calm, reasonable one. Somehow that made Jonah madder.

“But I
didn’t
do anything wrong, even by mistake.
It’s all
her
fault,” he accused. He pointed right at Andrea. “She took the Elucidator out and threw it away. On purpose!”

The color drained from Andrea’s face. She began shaking her head from side to side, frantically.

“No,” she wailed. “I didn’t!”

“Who are you working for?” Jonah asked. “Gary? Hodge?”

Those were JB’s enemies, the ones who had kidnapped Andrea and Jonah and all the other missing kids from history in the first place. The ones who were trying to get rich selling famous kids from history to adoptive parents in the future. With Jonah’s help, JB had sent both kidnappers to time prison. But was time prison a place someone could escape from?

“I’m not working for anybody!” Andrea cried. “I just . . .” She kept talking, but Jonah couldn’t understand a single word because she was sobbing too hard now.

“Jonah!” Katherine scolded, hitting him on the shoulder. “You had better have a good excuse for making all those wild accusations. For making her cry!”

For an instant, Katherine sounded just like their mother, making Jonah’s heart ache a little. It was entirely possible that, because of Andrea, he and Katherine would never see their parents again. But Katherine-sounding-
like-Mom also made Jonah feel ashamed. He wasn’t usually the kind of kid who made people cry. And the way Andrea looked so fragile and sad had made him want to help her so much—which made him feel even more stupid, now that he knew she’d double-crossed them. . . .

How could he feel so many different things all at once?

Jonah let out a deep sigh.

“Look,” he told Katherine, pointing to the pouch on Dare’s collar. “This is perfectly secure. There was no reason for Andrea to take the Elucidator out. She must have been planning to get rid of it the whole time. And that’s why she’s been acting weird ever since we got here.” He remembered her silent crying, her hesitation to shake JB’s hand, her insistence that they go back in time without getting debriefed. “Really, ever since we met her.”

Katherine reached down to examine the pouch on the dog’s collar for herself. She pulled it this way and that, tugging on it with every bit as much force as Jonah had used. Dare whined a little—this couldn’t be comfortable for him—and Katherine let go.

“Andrea?” she said doubtfully.

Andrea took a huge breath, one that threatened to turn into just another sob. But then she grimaced, clearly struggling to hold back the tears.

“I didn’t mean to lose the Elucidator,” she said in a
small voice. “Honest. That was a mistake. But—”

“But what?” Jonah asked. He meant his voice to come out sounding cold and hard and self-righteous, like a prosecuting attorney on a TV show. But some of his other, confused emotions slipped into his voice instead.

He mostly sounded sympathetic.

Andrea sniffled. She leaned back against the fallen fence and drew her knees up to her chest, hugging them close with her arms.

“The man came to my house last night,” she said. “Er—the last night before we left. I don’t know his name. I don’t know who he was working for. I don’t think he would have told me the truth if I’d asked. I knew he was from the future. It looked like he walked right out of the wall. And he knew . . . too much. About me.”