Sabotaged

7

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.