Sabotaged (8 page)

Andrea’s face fell.

“I thought that was something important,” she mumbled. “I thought I’d figured something out.”

Katherine put her arm around Andrea’s shoulder, somehow managing to pat Andrea’s back comfortingly while she fixed Jonah with an even more scorching glare.

“You did,” Katherine said. “Anything you think of is helpful.”

The two girls began walking again, easily following the trail of tracer lights leading them deeper and deeper into the woods.

Jonah glanced down at the dog waiting patiently beside him.

“Looks like you’re the only one who’s not mad at me now,” he muttered. He tugged on the dog’s collar. “Come on, boy.”

As they walked forward—exiled a few paces behind the girls—Jonah remembered how much he’d wanted to help Andrea from the beginning, how he’d vowed to take care of her.

How can good intentions get so messed up?
he wondered.

Ahead of him, he could hear Katherine murmuring to Andrea, “Well, you know, teenage boys. They don’t always think before they speak. . . .”

Jonah tuned her out.

Hey, JB?
He thought, because it would be comforting to have JB there to talk to.
Why didn’t your brilliant projectionist predict that the mystery man would go visit Andrea? Why didn’t he see that we’d get sent to the wrong time and lose the Elucidator? Why couldn’t he forecast where we are now, so you can come and help us?

But Jonah didn’t know if that was really how the projections worked.

He did know that every minute that went by without JB showing up was a bigger and bigger sign that they were in trouble.

Around them, the tracer lights kept multiplying.

They came upon their second set of ruins in an absolute burst of tracer light.

“Ooh, lots of tracers have been here,” Katherine muttered, seeming to forget that she was too annoyed with Jonah to speak to him anymore. She pointed to tracer vines draped back from a clearing, tracer firewood stacked neatly beside a falling-down hut, still-standing tracer trees that evidently had been chopped down in original time.

“Or—the original two tracer boys have just been here a lot,” Jonah said, because he’d been working out something like a formula for tracers in his head. The absence of one action—say, a boy not slapping a mosquito—could lead to hundreds or thousands of new tracers. Mosquitoes reproduced really fast, didn’t they? So all the tracer lights Jonah had seen—that didn’t
have
to mean that time was
completely messed up or that they were far off from the time they were supposed to be in.

Did it?

To Jonah’s surprise, Katherine didn’t grumble,
Why do you always have to disagree?
She just nodded and said, “You’re right. I didn’t think of that.”

Jonah figured that was the closest thing he was going to get to an apology for her nasty comments about teenage boys.

“Think this is an Indian village?” Andrea said, stepping out into the clearing.

“I think it
was
,” Katherine said, stepping up beside her.

Jonah thought about warning them to be careful, to make sure there were no real live human beings lurking nearby before they went any farther. But what was the point? With or without the glow of tracer lights, this village had clearly been abandoned a long time ago. Granted, it was in much better shape than the Roanoke Colony. Here, about a dozen huts made from curved branches circled an open space—possibly the equivalent of a town square. But many of the branches sagged toward the ground, and a few of the huts were more down than up.

“Do you think some time travelers ruined it?” Andrea asked.

“No, because then we’d see a tracer version of the whole village in good shape,” Jonah said. “And lots of happy tracer villagers . . .”

Katherine touched one of the huts with one finger, and the whole thing swayed perilously. An unmoving tracer version of the hut appeared and then vanished when the real hut stopped swaying and rejoined it. Katherine took a step back.

“Then what did happen here?” she asked. “Where did everyone go?”

“Don’t know,” Jonah said. He was trying not to get too creeped out by the emptiness, the desolation. Maybe there was some perfectly ordinary—even happy—explanation. Maybe the people had just abandoned this village because they’d built a newer, nicer one someplace else. What had Mrs. Rorshas said in fifth-grade Social Studies? Hadn’t it been common for Indians to move around, going from village to village based on the growing seasons or animal habitats or whatever?

Jonah wasn’t sure enough about that to mention it to the girls. Mrs. Rorshas really hadn’t talked that much about the Indians. It’d mostly been the explorers, Jamestown and the Plymouth Colony, the American Revolution . . . all done and over with by Halloween.

Jonah didn’t remember anything in that history about
Indians getting nicer, newer villages. Or happier lives.

“Look,” Andrea said in a hushed voice. “You can tell they had a cornfield over there.” She pointed at a rectangle of cleared land just beyond the last falling-down hut. “We’re going to need food. . . .”

She didn’t add,
if we’re stuck here a long time
. But Jonah could tell by the others’ faces that everyone was thinking that.

Jonah walked over and kicked at a downed dried-out stalk. Dare snuffled along beside him, nosing aside empty husks. This was more like the ghost of a cornfield—Jonah couldn’t imagine how long ago it had last been planted. Years? Decades? Whatever food had once grown here had undoubtedly been carried away long ago, by birds and mice, if not by people.

Jonah’s stomach twisted, but it was more from fear and worry than hunger. For now, anyway.

“When we catch up with the tracer boys, maybe they’ll have some food we can eat,” Jonah said, with more confidence than he felt. The tracer boys weren’t likely to have anything but tracer food.

He began peeking into some of the huts that were in the best shape, just in case. It was dim enough in the huts that the glowing tracer boys would really show up brightly, if they were there. But the enclosed spaces made
Jonah nervous. He didn’t like looking into darkness, in the midst of all this desolation.

The first hut was empty. As was the second. And the third.

In the fourth hut, something leaped out at him.

“AHH!” Jonah jumped back, scrambling to get out of the way. He had a quick impression of hooves and glowing eyes.
What is that—a demon?
he thought.
Where
are
we?

Barking furiously, Dare streaked off into the woods after the creature.

Jonah couldn’t figure out what it was until his heart stopped pounding so hard and he turned around, catching a glimpse of the tracer that remained in the hut: It was only another deer.

Or, no, it could be the very same one that the tracer boys had killed, because that one is really still alive . . . how many tracers of the same deer could there be?
Jonah was picturing the one deer multiplying into dozens of tracer deer, every time it came into contact with some new disruption in time. Then Jonah realized his
leftover panic was making him stupid.
There can be only one tracer of any animal. Because there is only one version of original time, only one way time is supposed to go.

It was ridiculous, but Jonah felt much better knowing that this wasn’t the same deer the tracer boys had killed. He gazed almost fondly at the single tracer version of the deer he’d startled. The tracer deer didn’t even lift its head, but just kept peacefully munching on—what was that? Some sort of rotten melon?

Then Jonah noticed the commotion behind him.

“Dare, no! Come back, boy!” Andrea was calling out after the dog.

Katherine was practically falling on the ground, she was laughing so hard.

“Oh, my gosh! You should have seen your face! You’re white as a ghost. You almost look like a tracer!” she screeched.

“Ha, ha,” Jonah muttered. He leaned weakly against the side of the hut, which bowed dangerously inward. Jonah decided he could stand on his own two feet. He straightened up.

“Dare!” Andrea screamed, her voice echoing off the trees. “Dare!”

“Shh,” Jonah said. His ears were ringing, and he didn’t
think he could blame leftover time sickness anymore. The screaming, the laughter, the dog and deer crashing through the woods—it was all too much noise, too much more change in this silent, deserted, tracer-haunted place. “Be quiet! Somebody will hear us! We really will ruin time!”

How much change was too much? At what point would there be too many tracers to ever fix?

Katherine’s laughter softened to snorts and little bursts of giggling. Andrea called out, “Dare!” once more, but then she turned back to Jonah.

“Really, Jonah,” she said soberly. “I don’t think there’s anyone except us and the tracers on the whole island. Can’t you
feel
it?”

Someone could be hiding,
Jonah wanted to say.
Like your mystery man, coming back to make us do whatever he wants us to do.
But which was worse—bringing up the possibility that dangerous, unknown people could be lurking anywhere? Or acknowledging the emptiness, the desolation, the ruin?
It feels like something bad happened here,
Jonah thought.
And, maybe . . . it’s not over?

Jonah was not going to say that.

Instead, he muttered grumpily, “How do you know we’re on an island?”

“That’s where the Roanoke Colony was,” Andrea said. “On Roanoke Island.”

Jonah threw up his hands.

“Am I the only one who didn’t pay attention in fifth-grade Social Studies?” he asked.

To Jonah’s surprise, Andrea laughed. But it was kind laughter. Not at all like Katherine’s.

“I don’t really remember hearing about the Roanoke Colony at school. I’m not sure my teacher ever mentioned it,” Andrea said. “But remember that day in the cave? When they told us the names of the missing kids stolen from history, even though they wouldn’t say which of us was which kid?”

Jonah nodded and shrugged.

“Yeah. So?”

“So I went home that day and decided I was going to research every single one of the girls’ names I could remember,” Andrea said. “I live with my aunt and uncle now and, well . . . anyhow, it’s good if I can just go in my room and shut the door and have something to do.”

“But—” Katherine began. Jonah could tell by the way she had her eyes all squinted together and her nose wrinkled up, that she was about to ask some really nosy question like,
Don’t you like your aunt and uncle? Why not? What’s wrong with them?

“Wow,” Jonah interrupted quickly. “I just went home that day and ate most of a large pepperoni pizza all by
myself and then went right to sleep.”

Andrea laughed again. It was a nice sound.

“That’s okay—you did have that whole detour to the Middle Ages in between,” she said.

“Yeah, after being in the 1480s, I was . . .” Jonah stopped himself before he got to the last word, which was supposed to be
starving
. It didn’t seem smart to bring that up right now. He shifted gears. “So you really learned everything about all the missing kids from history? All the girls, anyway?”

Andrea shook her head, her eyes very solemn.

“No, and this is kind of weird,” she said. “I started with Virginia Dare, and I meant to move on, but I just . . . kept . . . reading about Virginia Dare.”

“Ooh . . .” Katherine let out a low, spooky-sounding moan. She’d stopped squinting—now her whole face was lit up with excitement. “So you must have known that’s who you were. Did you just have this feeling about Virginia Dare? Like something subconscious, or not so subconscious, telling you, ‘That’s who you are. It has to be!’”

Jonah glared at his sister. Didn’t Katherine remember how Andrea had reacted back in the time hollow with JB, when JB had said she was really Virginia Dare?
That’s not me! That’s not my mother!
she’d screamed. Was Katherine
trying
to upset Andrea again?

But Andrea didn’t scream this time. She just tilted her head thoughtfully to the side, considering Katherine’s questions.