Sabotaged

16

For a while, Jonah just lay of the floor of the hut. At least the rain wasn’t pounding down on him anymore. But his shoulders ached from fighting the waves and struggling with the branch. His legs felt as if they’d been rubbed raw, walking all that way in wet jeans. His clammy T-shirt clung to his skin, the saltwater that had soaked into it stinging against the dozens of scrapes and cuts he’d gotten scrambling over the rocks.

“Ohh,” Katherine moaned. “I need a hot shower.”

“Dry clothes,” Jonah mumbled.

“Make it a nice warm robe for me,” Katherine said. “And my fluffy bunny slippers.”

“Hot soup,” Jonah said. “Mom’s chili maybe?”

“Stop it!” Andrea said fiercely. “That just makes it worse, wishing for things you can’t have. You know?”

Jonah could tell she wasn’t just talking about clean, dry clothes and hot food.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

Andrea ignored him. She sprang up and began fussing over the unconscious man.

“We put him down on the dirt floor and he’s got cuts all over him, and they’re going to get infected if we’re not careful. But the water’s coming off his clothes and hair, and that’s turning the dirt into mud… how did people do it, hundreds of years ago?” she ranted. “How did they stay clean and healthy?”

A lot of them didn’t, Jonah thought. A lot of them died.

He wasn’t going to say that to Andrea.

She was adjusting the way the sweatshirts were tied around the man’s head and muttering, “At least we can keep the cut on his head up and out of the mud… we should rinse it off, but where are we going to get clean water?”

Jonah noticed that one of the tracer boys had stepped out of the hut-it was a little hard to keep track of someone who was under you and who could move right through you. But the boy was just now coming back in, carrying a tracer version of a hollowed-out gourd in his hand. The boy bent down beside the tracer man and gently lifted the man’s head, so the man could drink out of the gourd.

“I’ll go see where he got that,” Jonah said.

He stepped out of the hut into a stiff wind. Oddly, the rain had stopped-it had lasted just long enough to make the final part of their trip back to the village really, really challenging. But the sky was still dark and ominous, and the dim light made it hard to see where Jonah was going. He practically tripped over the hollowed-out water barrel before he saw it.

The twin of the tracer boy’s gourd was floating about halfway down in the barrel.

Oh… they just used this to catch rainwater, Jonah thought. That’s why there’s not much water in there-there wasn’t much rain.

He filled up the gourd as best he could and stumbled back toward the hut.

The tracer boys had started trying to build a fire while Jonah was away. Jonah handed the gourd over to Andrea and then stood watching the tracers. They piled together sticks and twigs and dried-out leaves; one of the boys was twisting a pointed stick against the groove of a stick below it.

“If those guys can start a fire that way, they’re superheroes,” Jonah said. “We tried that in Boy Scouts, and even the scoutmaster couldn’t get a flame going. It’s impossi…”

The ghost of a flame flared out from the tracer boys’ fire. Moments later, the flames were crackling across the dried-up leaves, spreading to the small twigs.

Katherine snorted.

“Shows how much you learned in Boy Scouts,” she said.

“But… but… I could start a fire with a magnifying glass,” Jonah protested. “Or, I saw this thing online, where you use a Coke can and a chocolate bar-”

“Do you see any of those things lying around here?” Katherine asked.

“Maybe I could try doing it just like the tracers,” Jonah muttered.

He saw that the sticks and twigs and dry leaves that the tracer boys had used were still in the hut. In original time, the way time was supposed to go, they’d been stacked up neatly. But right now they were scattered about, probably by squirrels or badgers or some other animals looking for food.

Jonah began picking up the sticks and laying them in the exact pattern the tracer boys had used. It was eerie reaching into the blazing tracer fire. Jonah kept flinching and bracing for pain. But the tracer flames felt like nothing. Like air. Dust. Empty space. He breathed in tracer smoke-so wispy, like the ghost of a ghost. It didn’t even have an odor.

When all the sticks and chunks of wood were arranged, he tucked in the twigs and leaves as kindling. Then he found the same pointed stick the tracer boy had turned to create enough friction to spark the first flame. Jonah twisted it back and forth in the palms of his hands, the friction warming his hands, at least. He kept the image in his head of the way it had worked for the tracer boy-like magic. One moment the boy had just been rubbing two sticks together, and the next, he had a roaring fire. Jonah tried not to think about how things had worked in his Boy Scout troop: He and his friends had tried and tried and tried, and then the scoutmaster had brought out the matches.

Jonah didn’t have any matches now. There wasn’t a backup plan.

He kept trying, long past the point where he and his Scout friends had given up.

“There!” Katherine shrieked, leaning down close to watch. “You did it!”

Jonah sat back and looked. If there had been a flame, Katherine had just blown it out.

“Stay back!” he ordered.

The two tracer boys were sitting around their fire staring into the flames, cryptic expressions on their faces. They probably didn’t feel cold and wet, even though they were practically naked. They probably weren’t worrying that the man that they’d pulled from the waves might die from infected mud. They definitely weren’t worrying that time had been irreparably harmed or that they’d been set up in some elaborate trap.

Even though Jonah knew that they were staring into their own fire and had no way of knowing that Jonah was there-because he hadn’t been, in their time-Jonah felt like they were watching him. Their cryptic expressions seemed to be hiding scorn at Jonah’s constant failure, trying to start a fire.

“I can so do it!” Jonah muttered, rubbing the sticks together faster than ever.

A leaf crackled and began to smoke-real smoke, not ghostly tracer smoke. A tiny spark leaped from one leaf to another.

“Whoo-hoo!” Jonah cheered. “Take that, Scoutmaster Briggs! That should be the test for Eagle Scout!”

“Oh, good,” Andrea said, flashing a rare smile at Jonah. “Now the man can dry off next to the fire.”

“We can all dry off next to the fire,” Katherine corrected.

The fire was tiny, and there was no more dry wood around for making it bigger. Jonah had never had to solve any math problems where X was the size of a fire; Y was the rate at which water evaporated; and Z was the likelihood that someone would survive after nearly drowning, bashing his head, and lying in germ-infested mud or that three kids would manage to outsmart someone who had sabotaged their trip through time. Jonah knew the fire couldn’t make that big a difference. Still, it felt like the fire was a big deal. It felt like they all had a chance now.

“Here,” Jonah told Andrea. “I’ll help you move the man closer, so he warms up faster.”

Jonah shoved at the man’s waist. Katherine shoved at his shoulders. Andrea gingerly moved his head. Jonah’s main goal was to keep from pushing the man all the way into the fire, so he wasn’t paying attention to much else. He’d forgotten that the tracer boys had placed the tracer man right next to their tracer fire, which was in the same spot as Jonah’s fire. He’d forgotten what happened when a person joined with his own tracer.

Jonah gave the man’s body one final shove, and suddenly the glow of his tracer went out. The man had slipped exactly into the outline of his tracer.

The man’s color instantly improved. His lips moved, even though his eyes remained closed.

“Greedy privateers,” he muttered. “Thinking of naught but money… Coming to Roanoke too late in the season… Dangerous winds, dangerous seas… Help! The rocks! The rocks! Beware the rocks!” He took in a ragged gasp. “No! No! Our ship! We’re doomed! All will perish… It’s happening! Oh, dear God! All have perished but me!”

Jonah jerked the man back away from his tracer.