Sabotaged

10

They set off into the deep woods on the other side of the clearing. Andrea and the dog didn’t run ahead this time, but stayed right beside Jonah and Katherine. All of them, even the dog, kept glancing around, peering ahead before every step, as if some unknown danger could be lurking behind every tree.

“Anyone traveling through time can create a tracer, right?” Andrea asked in a hushed voice, when they’d gone just a few steps. “You just have to knock someone off his normal path?”

“Yeah,” Jonah said. He was concentrating on trying to figure out which way the tracer boys had gone. Had it been this tree or that tree they’d stepped behind?

“Then couldn’t it have been us who created those tracers?” Andrea asked. “Like, if the real versions of those boys saw us fall from the sky, got scared, and ran away? That could have made tracers, couldn’t it?”

“Ergh. She’s right,” Katherine said, sagging against a tree.

“So following those tracers, maybe we’re like a dog chasing its own tail,” Andrea said.

Jonah wasn’t fully listening. He was watching the tree behind Katherine. It shook slightly, giving off a quick glow of tracer light before returning to normal. Clumps of pine needles showered to the ground, along with a few broken twigs. But the ghostly tracer versions of the pine needles and twigs remained on the tree.

Jonah turned around. The three of them had left an entire trail of tracer destruction behind them: dropped twigs, bent branches, scattered needles… It was hard to notice unless you were looking for it, but now Jonah could see the exact path he and Katherine and Andrea had followed: careening to the right a bit to avoid a downed log, swerving to the left to avoid a cloud of gnats, some of which they’d killed, leaving behind tiny tracer dots.

Wish the tracer boys had left a trail like that, Jonah thought. Then he realized: They would have. Not because the tracers were time travelers, but because there was a ripple effect to disrupted time. Because the tracer boys weren’t really there, everything they weren’t there to do would have resulted in a tracer. It wasn’t just the deer they should have killed-it was also mosquitoes they would have swatted away, leaves they would have trampled underfoot, branches they would have bent back as they walked through the woods. And so the deer, the mosquitoes, the leaves, and the branches were all tracers now too-along with any objects the deer, the mosquitoes, and the branches should have affected.

And all of those things that were alive would glow.

Jonah squinted, peering all around. There-a line of glowing ants on the ground. There-a bird perched high overhead. There-a vine swung back out of the way. And there and there and there-dozens of glowing lights that Jonah had previously taken for glints of sunlight filtered through the trees or blurry glitches in his vision because of time sickness.

The woods were full of tracers.

“We didn’t create those tracer boys,” Jonah whispered. “Or, if we did, there were other tracers here first.”

“Now, how could you know that?” Katherine asked mockingly.

“Because of that,” Jonah said, pointing to the glowing vine. “And that.” The line of ants. “And that.” The bird in the tree.

Katherine gasped and put her hand over her mouth, as if she’d just discovered the entire woods were radioactive.

“They’re-they’re everywhere,” Andrea whispered.

“Right,” Jonah said. “And how long do you think we’ve been here? Half an hour? An hour? No way could there be so many tracers created just in that time, just because of us.”

Katherine was still looking around, her eyes huge and dismayed.

“Something’s really, really wrong here,” she whispered. “That’s what this means.”

As they stood watching, a real bird landed right on top of the glowing tracer bird, melding completely. The glow instantly vanished. Now it was just an ordinary bird on an ordinary tree branch.

“Well, there,” Jonah said. “That’s one bit of time that’s been fixed.”

He didn’t want to admit how relieved he felt-or how much he wished all the other tracers glowing before him would go back to normal too.

“JB told me that people-and, I guess, animals, too-can’t see tracers unless they’ve traveled through time,” Andrea said. “How did that bird know its own tracer was there? How did it know to land in that exact spot?”

“Chip and Alex said they felt this almost magnetic pull to their tracers,” Katherine said. “The bird must have felt it too.”

“They why aren’t all the other tracers disappearing?” Andrea asked. “One by one, the lights blinking out, everything going back to normal…”

Jonah realized he was holding his breath, watching. The lights were not going out. If anything, their numbers were increasing: new pinpricks of light where insects were supposed to be flying, where seeds were supposed to be falling, where squirrels were supposed to be scampering.

“Something’s holding all those tracers in place,” Katherine whispered. “Something won’t let time go back the way it’s supposed to.”

“Is it-is it my fault?” Andrea stammered. “Did I ruin everything because I didn’t come back at the right time, at the exact moment that JB thought I should come back? Is this what happened when I messed up all those variables the projectionist set up so carefully?” She sniffled and waved her hand toward all the glowing remnants of tracer branches and vines and insects and ants. Her hand shook. “Does this mean I destroyed time forever?”

Jonah and Katherine exchanged glances. Jonah decided not to say, Shouldn’t you have thought of that before you changed the code on the Elucidator? But he didn’t know what to say instead.

“Well, no offense, Andrea, but how could you be that important?” Katherine asked, her voice gentler than her words. “You weren’t royalty, like Chip and Alex. You were just the first English kid born in North America, and then you disappeared. That’s all anybody knows about you.”

“Knew,” Jonah corrected automatically. “That’s all anybody knew about Virginia Dare in our time.”

Katherine glared at him.

Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. I guess I’m not helping her argument. But Jonah was working on a new idea, one he’d never thought of before.

And he thought it was important.

“Nobody knew what happened to Virginia Dare because nobody wrote down what happened to her the rest of her life,” he said. “Well, not that we know of. But once there was time travel-time travelers could have known every single thing she did, every moment of her life.”

Andrea was actually blushing now.

“And I bet you did something great,” Jonah said. “I bet that’s why it mattered so much that you had to be returned to time.”

Katherine’s glare had turned into the kind that could vaporize enemies.

“And-and-we’ll make sure you get to do that thing. Whatever it is,” Jonah finished lamely. “And whenever. We’ll get you to the right time. I promise.”

Andrea sniffed. If anything, she looked more discouraged than ever. She crossed her arms and clutched the sleeves of her T-shirt, as if she was desperate for something to hold on to.

“Maybe we should keep walking?” Katherine suggested.

Jonah started to turn back around, facing toward the greatest number of tracer lights. But Andrea, beside him, didn’t turn at the same time, the way he expected her to. He bumped against her.

“Sorry,” Jonah muttered.

Still clutching her sleeves, Andrea stared at him.

I said I was sorry, Jonah thought. What’s she waiting for?

“Oh!” she said, a baffled look traveling across her face. “Do that again. Wait a minute.” She bent down and picked up a small rock, holding it out slightly from her body. “Now.”

Puzzled but obedient, Jonah jostled her shoulder.

Andrea jerked back and forth, but tightened her grip on the rock. A second later, she crouched down and carefully put the rock back exactly as it had been before, eliminating its tracer. Then she straightened up.

“I was wrong,” she said. “It wasn’t Jonah’s fault that I lost the Elucidator.”

“Isn’t that what I said all along?” Jonah said indignantly.

Andrea nodded.

“You were right. I’m sorry. It was just the timing of things… You bumped me right after I hit ENTER on the Elucidator, so I got confused about cause and effect.”

“You’re losing me,” Jonah said.

“There are different ways to lose things,” Andrea explained. “I didn’t think about how it felt different, until you bumped into me just now, when I was holding on to my sleeves. I didn’t let go. And I didn’t let go of the Elucidator when you ran into me the first time. It was me holding on, holding on-and then suddenly the Elucidator just wasn’t there.”

She collapsed her fingers against the palm of her hand, showing what it’d been like to clutch something that had vanished.

“So?” Katherine said, sounding as baffled as Jonah felt. “Why does it matter?”

“Because of the code,” Andrea said. “The code I typed in myself-that’s what made the Elucidator vanish. That man who came to visit me in secret? It wasn’t just that he wanted us to go to the wrong time. He really didn’t want us telling JB about it.”

“Well, duh,” Jonah said, completely frustrated now. “Because he knew JB would put us back in the right time! All that proves is that JB wasn’t your mystery man-and we already knew that!”

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.