Torn-missing 4 (18 page)

Prickett pulled his hand back, though he kept it cupped, ready to slap over Jonah’s mouth again at any moment if he had to.

“Smart boy,” Prickett said. “You know no one’s going to believe some crazy story told by a boy in the stocks. Certainly not when he maligns the man who saved the ship’s captain from almost-certain death this morning.”

He was holding the papers slightly off to the side. Jonah saw Katherine reach for them, but it was uncanny—Prickett
chose that exact moment to move them over in front of his face.

“Now, Wydowse—everyone might believe Wydowse,” Prickett mused, looking down at the papers. “As long as his writing’s more lucid than his talking’s been, these past few hours.”

“You—,” Jonah began, and caught himself. What he’d wanted to do was shout,
You killed him!
But even if he hadn’t just agreed to be silent, it didn’t seem like a good idea to remind Prickett he was capable of murder. Not when the deck was so dark and deserted. Not when Jonah was trapped in the stocks.

Jonah remembered the axe the sailor with the rope had left by the mast.

It would be so easy for Prickett to kill
me, Jonah thought, hiding a shiver.
And Katherine couldn’t stop him. She couldn’t even grab the papers away from him.

Prickett was still studying the papers.

“Tsk, tsk,” he said. “Such awful accusations Wydowse makes. …” He looked up again at Jonah. “And how is it that you got those papers, when you’ve been trapped in the stocks all day? Who gave them to you?”

Jonah opened his mouth. Did he want to lie, and cast blame on someone who’d done nothing? Did he want to try to clear someone’s name? Even if he said,
It wasn’t Staffe!
that would just make it sound as if Staffe were guilty.

“Never mind. I wouldn’t expect a reprobate like you to answer me honestly,” Prickett said. “You got them from
someone.
I’ll find him out, whoever he is.”

Jonah glared at Prickett. But in the dim candlelight Prickett probably couldn’t even see his face.

“My informants tell me that Wydowse left hidden testimony all over the ship,” Prickett continued in a leisurely tone. “The other ship’s boy, Nicholas Symmes—poor thing, like so many others on this ship he can’t even read—he admitted that he hid papers up in the top for Wydowse.”

Numbly, Jonah remembered that “top” was what people on the ship called the crow’s nest.

Prickett kept talking.

“Symmes didn’t even know what he was hiding. But to truly silence Wydowse, perhaps I should destroy those papers when I destroy these? Don’t you agree?” Prickett leered triumphantly at Jonah. “Oh, that’s right—I’ve silenced you as well.”

The leer turned into a smirk, as Prickett’s eyebrows darted upward.

That expression—he looks like somebody, and it’s not Billy Rivoli back home
, Jonah thought.

It was crazy, thinking about how Prickett looked at a time like this.

“Don’t!” Jonah choked out. “You can’t—”

“What? Are you going to stop me?” Prickett asked.

He laughed and whirled around, heading toward the rigging that led to the crow’s nest.

“I’ll stop him!” Katherine hissed, racing behind him.

“No, Katherine—not alone! Set me free! I’m coming with you!” Jonah called after her.

For a moment Jonah thought Katherine would ignore him. She kept running. But then she half turned in the darkness.

“People will know,” she said, still poised to run. “I can’t get you out without leaving evidence—”

“That doesn’t matter!” Jonah hissed. “Quick! The axe!”

Katherine looked around. There was so little light—would she have to waste a lot of time groping around just trying to find the axe? No—she had it. She picked it up and swung it at the lock holding the stocks together. Jonah heard the wood splintering.

“Didn’t quite work … one more time,” Katherine whispered.

Prickett’s candle was so far away now that Jonah couldn’t even see Katherine swinging the axe. It was too dark. But he felt the vibration in the wood when the axe
hit. And then Katherine was lifting the top part of the stocks off his neck and wrists.

“Come
on
!” Katherine whispered.

Both of them took off running.

Jonah’s legs were stiff after spending so many hours in the stocks. Katherine reached the bottom of the rigging far ahead of him.

“Wait!” he called to her. “We’ll go up together!”

“But Prickett’s getting away!” Katherine called over her shoulder, as she started climbing.

She was right. They could see Prickett’s progress easily, since he was carrying the candle. He was several yards above them, and the light kept swinging steadily upward.

Is he holding it in his teeth?
Jonah wondered.
Does he have it tied to his arm somehow?

Jonah was annoyed with his brain, that it would worry about such unnecessary details at a time like this. What he really needed to do was concentrate on bringing his sore muscles back to life, coordinating his arms and legs into
top climbing form. He needed to go fast, to catch up with Katherine, to catch up with Prickett.

He grabbed the bottom of the rigging with his right hand and tried to pull himself up. His arms wobbled.

Okay,
he thought.
Spending the whole day in the stocks made my arm muscles feel terrible too.

He shook out his arms and tried again. It didn’t help that the rigging was so cold and wet. He’d warned Henry Hudson about the ropes being icy hours ago, when the sun was still up. Probably they really were by now.

Jonah’s fingers turned numb so quickly that he couldn’t tell if there was ice on the ropes or not.

Slow and steady,
his brain advised him.
You start trying to go fast, you’ll fall.

How was it that Prickett wasn’t falling, going so fast, so far ahead?

Jonah’s mind supplied him with an image of the man plummeting straight down to the deck, screaming all the way.

And then Jonah froze, because his mind started seeing himself fall, rather than Prickett.

If I get much higher—it’d be high enough to kill me when I hit the deck,
Jonah thought.

But he had to stop Prickett from burning those papers!

Jonah’s muscles still refused to move. Above him Prickett
and Katherine were getting farther and farther ahead.

So I’m going to leave Katherine to deal with a murderer all by herself?
Jonah wondered.

That got his arms and legs working again. His fingers were still numb, his muscles were still stiff, but he fell into a rhythm. He picked up speed. He lost track of how much farther it was to the crow’s nest. In some ways it was easier to climb in the darkness—he couldn’t see the deck receding below him. All he had to focus on was the light bobbing above him. He was actually closing in on it now. He was closing in on—

He ran into Katherine’s foot.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

“Shh,” she whispered back. “We’re close enough he could hear us.”

Not with the wind,
Jonah thought. Because it was eerie—Jonah could barely feel the wind around him, but he could hear it shrieking like a horrible storm. Maybe it was just because of the altitude they’d reached.

No, don’t think that,
Jonah told himself.

He heard a thump above them, and the light stopped rising.

“He’s in the crow’s nest now!” Jonah hissed at Katherine. “Go grab those papers from him—try to do it so he just thinks they blew away in the wind!”

Katherine started climbing faster, closer and closer to Prickett and the crow’s nest and the light. Prickett had hung the candleholder on some sort of hook high on the mast, so the light shone down through the gaps in the crow’s nest. It glowed right through Katherine.

Good thing she’s translucent,
Jonah thought.
Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see a thing.

He wanted to call out some kind of warning to his sister—something like,
Don’t let him see you!
—but that was ridiculous, because of course she was completely invisible to Prickett. He and everyone else who truly belonged in 1611 had looked straight through her hundreds of times that day.

“Careful,” Jonah whispered anyway.

Prickett chose that moment to lean out slightly over the railing of the crow’s nest, looking down. But of course he couldn’t have heard Jonah, because of the wind; he couldn’t see Jonah, because the light was so dim.

Jonah stopped climbing.

I’ll only go on up to the crow’s nest if Katherine needs me,
he thought.
If she can’t get the papers, can’t make it look like they’ve flown off into the wind …

Katherine was at the top of the rigging now, at the place where she’d have to flip over into the crow’s nest.

Then grab the papers; then hide them in your clothes; then start
climbing back down,
Jonah thought, as if he could direct his sister’s actions by telepathy.

He was so focused on what she was going to do, what was supposed to happen, that he almost couldn’t make sense of what his eyes told him was happening right that moment:

Katherine’s hand slipped.

She teetered over backward, and Jonah actually screamed, “No! Grab on!” Because nothing else mattered in that moment but Katherine being safe, Katherine holding on, Katherine not falling. …

No! No! No!
Jonah’s brain screamed.

Because she
was
falling. She tried to get her grip again. But both her hands slid off the ropes, slid off the railing. Her feet slipped too, and then she was tumbling down, the flickering candlelight making everything seem as if it were happening in slow motion. But in a second it would speed up, she would plunge into the darkness below, and—

Prickett reached out and grabbed Katherine by the wrist. Then he yanked her over into the crow’s nest.

Jonah’s brain stopped working.

What he’d just seen was impossible. Prickett couldn’t have grabbed Katherine and rescued her. He couldn’t have
seen
her to rescue her, because Katherine was completely invisible to everyone but time travelers. And Prickett wasn’t a time traveler; he belonged in 1611. He looked just as starved and scarred and scurvy-ridden as everyone else on the ship; everyone knew him and acted as if he’d been there all along.

Of course, Jonah also looked just as starved and scarred and scurvy-ridden as everyone else on the ship; everyone recognized him as John Hudson and acted as if he’d been there all along.

If Jonah was a time traveler disguised as a 1611 boy, couldn’t Prickett be a time traveler disguised as a 1611 man?

How else could he have seen Katherine to rescue her?

Jonah realized his brain was working, after all. It was just working slowly.

Even as he clung to the rigging, all but paralyzed in place, his brain lurched on to the next question:

If Prickett was actually a time traveler, not a 1611 sailor, who was he for real? Was he somebody Jonah knew?

Prickett leaned out over the railing.

“You might as well climb on up here too, Jonah,” he called out softly.

So,
Jonah thought.
Whether or not I know him, he knows me.

He had to peel his numb fingers from the rope he’d been clinging to.

Maybe I should be climbing down—running away,
Jonah thought.
Whoever he is, Prickett murdered Wydowse.

But Prickett had also rescued Katherine.

And—he still had Katherine in the crow’s nest with him.

Jonah took a deep breath and started climbing up. He reached the crow’s nest just as Katherine was blinking up at Prickett and murmuring, “If that’s really you, JB, I’m going to be so mad that you didn’t tell us you were on the ship with us this whole time.”

Prickett shook his head.

“You know JB’s stuck in the past,” he said. “He can’t even talk to you.”

“Hadley?” Jonah guessed, stepping gingerly over the railing. “Hadley Correo?”

Hadley was another time traveler who’d worked with JB and had helped them out on one of their previous trips through time, back in the 1400s. That time he’d kept his identity secret until a particularly dangerous moment. If this was Hadley, Jonah wished he’d revealed himself a lot sooner. But it would still be so good to see him, to know that someone who knew a lot about time was there to help them.