Torn-missing 4 (4 page)

“Then you have to make Katherine invisible,” Jonah demanded. He might tease Katherine like crazy, but he wasn’t going to leave her exposed in plain sight in the midst of a mutiny.

“I’m
trying,
” JB said grimly.

“What do you mean, trying?” Jonah asked.

Then, in the next instant, Katherine became as transparent as a tracer. Jonah had seen his sister—and himself and others—turn invisible before. But it was still bizarre to watch. He knew that anyone from 1611 would be able to look right through Katherine; the ship’s crew wouldn’t know she was there. Only Jonah, as a time traveler, was able to see her faint outline.

To him it looked like she’d turned into glass.

“What about the Elucidator?” Katherine asked, since it was still sitting on the deck, in plain sight.

“Oh, um, right,” JB said, sounding distracted.

For a moment the Elucidator seemed to quiver, but it never quite turned invisible.

“I can’t do it,” JB said. “Jonah, quick—put it in your pocket—”

Can’t do it?
Jonah thought.
Can’t?
First they’d lost John Hudson, now the Elucidator’s invisibility was failing—what else could go wrong?

There wasn’t time to ask. Jonah snatched up the Elucidator and tucked it and the picture of Andrea inside his cloak. Just then the dim glow of John Hudson’s tracer appeared at the top of the stairs. The tracer walked purposefully to a door beyond where Jonah and Katherine were sitting. He lifted his hand as if he were about to knock.

“Should I go stand there and knock?” Jonah asked. “If I’m playing his role …”

He was already standing up. But that was as far as he got. It was hard to keep his balance on the rolling deck. And he had another moment of fear: What if he did knock? What if someone answered the door? What was Jonah supposed to do then?

“Go stand over there, but whatever you do, don’t knock!” JB whispered tensely. “The tracer’s going to chicken out.”

Indeed the tracer had frozen, his hand poised by the door. Then he backed away.

Jonah noticed that the tracer’s lips were moving.

“What’d he just say?” Jonah asked.

“He said, ‘He never likes to hear bad news. And I’m not sure …,’” JB whispered back.

“Should you say that for him? Should I?” Jonah asked.

“No, no—nobody could hear him, so it doesn’t matter what he says,” JB whispered.

Like that whole ‘if a tree falls in a forest …’ question,
Jonah thought.
If no one hears him, who cares if there’s a sound or not?

Jonah was feeling light-headed, and still wasn’t entirely certain that his thoughts were making sense. Was it from the timesickness? The panic? The effort of trying to figure out what he should do as John Hudson?

He stepped carefully into the space that John
Hudson’s tracer occupied. Crazily Katherine stepped up right behind him, as if they both needed to stay within the tracer’s dimensions.

Or maybe she was scared too.

A strangled cry sounded behind them, and both of them whirled around. A man’s head was just dipping down out of sight at the top of the stairs.

Jonah had no clue what the tracer was thinking—Jonah had no idea what to think himself. Had the man slipped on the icy stairs? Had someone attacked him?

The tracer began creeping toward the stairs, stealthily, as if he wanted to see what had happened to the man but didn’t want anyone to see him. Jonah shuffled forward too, not quite getting the rhythm of the tracer’s steps.

Oh, yeah, you kind of have to wait between rolls of the ship. Is the water always this rough?
Jonah wondered, lurching forward, catching his balance, then lurching forward again.

Jonah reached the edge of the stairs only a split second behind the tracer. He peeked down into the—what would it be called? The hold? But he couldn’t really see what had happened, because his eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness below. He squinted, trying to make out shapes.

Then he heard screaming above him.

“No! You are not going to hit my brother! Jonah! Watch out!”

Jonah whipped his head around to see a giant club descending toward him. It was already too close to dodge, but Jonah tried anyway. He hunched his shoulders and brought his arms up to protect his head and rolled to the right and …

And how is it that that club hasn’t hit me yet?

He realized that he’d squeezed his eyes shut, defensively, but now, still rolling, he dared to open one eye partway.

The club was still poised above him, but he was no longer directly in its path. He scooted a little farther to the right. The club still hovered overhead.

It wasn’t moving.

“What the …,” Jonah muttered.

He pulled himself together enough to sit up and look
toward the handle end of the club. A cruel-faced sailor was holding on to it with filthy, infected-looking hands.

The sailor wasn’t moving either.

Looking around—more leisurely now—Jonah realized that John Hudson’s tracer was frozen in place as well, sprawled across the deck in the exact spot where Jonah had been only seconds before. The tracer seemed completely unaware of the man above him. And his head was directly below the club, the perfect target.

The tracer wasn’t moving at all, not even with the rolling of the ship.

For that matter the ship wasn’t rolling anymore, either. It was also frozen in place, at the peak of a swell lifting its right side up and plunging its left side down.

“So, JB,” Jonah said, calmly taking the Elucidator out of his cloak. “Why’d you decide to freeze time?”

“I’ve got to stop Katherine from screaming over every little thing,” JB complained from the Elucidator. “Or else—”

“Little?” Katherine shrieked, darting out from behind the club-wielding sailor. “Jonah, that man was going to kill you!”

Jonah saw that she’d been tugging on the sailor’s arms, trying to hold them back.

“Bulletproof! Stabproof!” Katherine sputtered. She
grabbed the Elucidator out of her brother’s hands and yelled directly at it. “You made it sound like Jonah was going to be safe! How’s a lousy costume supposed to protect him against being clubbed to death?”

“Katherine,” JB said. “Jonah. Look at the man holding that club.”

Jonah looked.

The only thing Jonah had noticed before was the filth and the cruel expression. Now he studied the sailor’s face: the eyes even more sunken than the tracer’s, the cheeks pitted with sores, the cheekbones and chin jutting out sharply, as though they could break right through the papery skin.

“I’ve seen skeletons in better health,” JB said. “He can barely even lift that club.”

It was true: Even frozen in place, the man’s arms looked as though they’d been trembling with the exertion of holding the club in the air.

“He couldn’t have really hurt Jonah,” JB said. “But John Hudson—the tracer—he isn’t in very good shape himself. One little tap, and he would have been out of the action until he’s on the rowboat.”

“So I’m supposed to go through a whole mutiny pretending to be unconscious?” Jonah asked. Sure, he’d been worried about what he was supposed to do and say. But
wasn’t this a little … insulting? “Couldn’t you just have used a dummy to play this role, and left me out of it?”

“Wouldn’t have worked,” JB said, the tension back in his voice. “There wasn’t time; we didn’t have enough control….” Jonah felt an icy blast of air, and the ship lurched slightly to the left, before locking into position again, still seriously tilted. “Hurry! I can only hold this for so long! Jonah, get back into place!”

Jonah shot a glance at his sister. Generally Jonah was a pretty obedient kid. Life was easier that way, he thought. Spend two minutes taking the trash out to the curb, and then you didn’t have to listen to a forty-five minute lecture about how “everyone in the family has responsibilities; everyone has to pull his own weight” and “Jonah, we’re just trying to prepare you for adulthood, when you’ll have to take care of yourself and other people too….” And on and on and on.

But Jonah had also always been around grown-ups—parents, teachers, coaches—who were big on explaining everything. “The reason you have to clean your room is …” “You have to show all your work on that math problem because …” “If you pass the ball instead of trying to take the shot on goal yourself, then …”

Jonah wanted to yank Katherine aside—was there a way to doubly pull someone out of time? He wanted
to be able to confer with her privately, somewhere JB couldn’t hear them. What if obeying JB was a really, really bad idea? What if they couldn’t trust JB after all? What if he was lying? Should Jonah and Katherine be staging a mutiny of their own?

Jonah tried to convey all of those questions in one quick glance. He didn’t know if Katherine understood any of them, but she scrunched up her face into an agonized expression.

Then she shoved the Elucidator back into his cloak and muttered, “Go ahead. I’ll watch out for you.”

Jonah thought about throwing back a sarcastic comment like,
You and what army? You’re barely five feet tall! And do you even weigh eighty-five pounds?
But really, she probably was strong enough to overpower the skeletal sailor.

Cautiously, Jonah lay down on the deck, awkwardly trying to fit his body into the space occupied by the tracer. At the last minute he turned his head back, defiantly. Maybe he was stupid enough to let himself be hit in the head by a club, but he wasn’t going to do it blindly.

Wham!

The club slammed into Jonah’s forehead. Jonah reeled back.

Okay, maybe the sailor wasn’t strong enough to swing that very hard himself,
Jonah thought.
But … gravity! Wasn’t
anybody thinking about how gravity would pull the club down? That was a hard hit!

Automatically Jonah lifted his hand to his head, to rub the sore spot.

“Jonah, you had better pretend you conked out, just like the tracer, or else he’ll hit you again,” JB whispered, very, very softly.

Jonah dropped his hand and let his body go limp.

“Jonah!” Jonah heard Katherine wail, as she flung herself down to crouch over him.

The sailor who’d hit Jonah had to have heard her too.

“Witchcraft? Bedevilment?” he muttered in a frightened voice.

Jonah opened one eye just a crack, just enough to see the sailor looking side to side, his eyes bulging in terror.

“Katherine, shut up! Jonah’s fine! He’s just acting, the way he’s supposed to,” JB hissed, again so softly that Jonah was fairly sure the sound couldn’t travel up to the sailor’s ears.

Jonah couldn’t see what Katherine was doing, but the sailor shrugged, as if deciding he had other things to worry about than devils and witches.

“I found the pup,” the sailor called down into the hold. “I gave ’im what was coming for ’im, I did.”

As far as Jonah could tell, nobody answered. But the
sailor began tugging on Jonah’s legs, pulling him toward the side of the ship.

If he lifts me up like he’s about to toss me overboard, I am not lying still for that,
Jonah thought.
I don’t care what JB wants me to do.

It was hard enough lying still while being dragged. The sheen of ice on the rough deck probably made Jonah’s body slide more smoothly, but it stung the bare skin of his face.

So much for the protective mask,
Jonah thought. He didn’t want to think the next thought, but it came anyway:
What if there isn’t a protective mask? What if it’s just ordinary makeup?

The sailor stopped tugging on Jonah’s feet—now he was wrapping a rough rope around Jonah’s ankles, looping the rope around Jonah’s wrists, and tying all of them together. Then he shoved Jonah’s body into the dim area behind a row of barrels.

“And that’s where you’ll stay,” the sailor muttered. “Cur!”

A big watery blob hit Jonah’s cheek.

One huge droplet from a melting icicle? Jonah wondered. Spray splashing in from the sea?

“Jonah!” Katherine’s urgent whisper sounded right beside Jonah’s ear. “That man just spit on you!”

“Eww, sick!” Jonah barely remembered that he had to whisper, barely remembered to open his eye halfway and make sure that the sailor had turned away before Jonah brought his hand up to his face and rubbed away the spittle. Because his wrists and ankles were tied together, he had to jerk his feet up at the same time.

“Loosen the rope, will you?” he asked Katherine. “Just in case …”

Katherine bent near him, picking at the knots.

“Ow—broke a fingernail,” she muttered, with an exaggerated pout.

“You’ll
live
,” Jonah muttered back.

“Shh!” JB hissed at both of them. “Don’t change anything!”

Katherine paused for a second, glared down at the spot in Jonah’s cloak where he’d tucked the Elucidator, and then went back to picking at the knots.

“Nobody’s going to know,” she muttered. “And this way, we’ll be able to protect ourselves if we have to.”

She pulled the end of the rope back. Jonah spread his wrists and ankles apart, making room to slip the ropes off if he had to.

Footsteps sounded on the other side of the barrels, and Jonah shut his eyes and let his head loll back, just in case.