Sabotaged

21

Andrea didn’t react right.

In Jonah’s wildest dreams, she might have thrown her arms around him and given him a big kiss and burst out, “Oh, thank you! Thank you! You saved me from ruining my life! And my grandfather’s!”

Jonah didn’t really expect that.

But he was kind of hoping for an “Oh, you’re right-I should have thought of that!” Or at least a “Thanks-you stopped me just in time!”

Andrea just lay in the dust and mumbled, “Whatever.”

Jonah slid back.

“You didn’t say anything to him yet, did you?” he whispered.

Andrea shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Jonah repeated incredulously. “Of course it…”

Jonah stopped talking, because Katherine came up just then and shoved him back into the dust.

“Jonah, you are a total idiot! What if John White had seen you?”

Jonah looked around and replayed everything in his mind. He’d come running out of the hut-and John White was sitting right on the other side of the clearing, in between the two tracer boys.

Jonah crouched down.

“He’s looking right at us!” Jonah hissed to Katherine. “What should we do?”

He’d been so concerned about Andrea ruining time by talking to John White, and now what had he done himself?

Suddenly he had an idea.

He jumped up and waved at John White.

“Aye, matey,” he said, trying to sound like an old-timey sailor. All he could think of was Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. “Sailing out on the sea for a long time, you can get to wearing some mighty strange clothes. And acting strangely too. But it be time to sail again, so I promise you, you will never see us again.”

He slipped into the woods, gesturing for Andrea and Katherine to follow him.

Katherine burst out laughing.

“At least sometimes he’s a funny idiot,” she said to Andrea.

Andrea gave a halfhearted smile.

“Shh!” Jonah hissed. “Careful!” He kept motioning for Andrea and Katherine to come into the woods with him, out of John White’s view. “He can see you!”

“He can’t see us,” Andrea said. “Or hear us.”

“Of course he can! His eyes are open!” Jonah whispered. “He’s awake.”

“Come and look for yourself,” Katherine said.

Jonah hesitated, then inched back into the clearing.

He could tell John White was joined with his tracer because the tracer boys, on either side of him, were taking turns placing some sort of food in his mouth. They were treating him like an invalid, tearing the food into such tiny morsels he didn’t even have to chew.

And, just as Jonah had said, John White’s eyes were wide open.

Er, no, they’re not, Jonah corrected himself.

Or were they?

Jonah’s brain seemed to be having a war with itself, trying to decipher what he was seeing. It was almost like the first time he’d seen his friend Chip join with his tracer, when it seemed as if Chip had vanished but he really hadn’t.

Ohhh, Jonah thought.

John White had his eyes shut.

His tracer’s eyes were open.

Jonah turned to Katherine.

“How’s that possible?” Jonah asked. “Is he joined with his tracer or not?”

“You tell me,” Katherine said. She swallowed hard. All the laughter was gone from her voice.

“It’s not right,” Jonah said. “This isn’t how tracers work.”

It was unnerving, the old man’s steady gaze and peaceful slumber, simultaneously. It was like double vision, or a double exposure.

Or a huge time error.

“It was weird enough watching Chip and Alex join with their tracers, when we could still kind of see their different clothes and their different hair,” Katherine said. “And the fact that, sometimes, they were different ages from their tracers. But this is the same man, in the same clothes, in the same place… Why can’t he meld with his tracer completely?”

“It must be because the real man hurt his head,” Andrea said glumly.

“Or… maybe it protects him from having to figure out why he can’t see the tracers?” Jonah asked.

“There were real people around tracers back in the 1500s, and none of them were half awake and half asleep,” Katherine complained.

John White said something to one of the tracer boys, but even though the real man moved his mouth, he made no sound.

“We can’t hear him either?” Jonah asked. “But I thought-”

“We can-sometimes,” Andrea said. “Katherine and I think it’s only when he says something he would be thinking with both his tracer brain and his real brain. A minute ago, he was talking about how hot it is.”

Jonah shook his head. John White’s eerie gaze bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

“Andrea, when that mystery man came to your room back in the twenty-first century, and told you to change the Elucidator code, are you sure he didn’t say anything about it making tracers act weird?” Jonah asked.

“All he talked about was how I could save my parents,” Andrea said in an icy voice. “I told you.”

Jonah racked his brain for some other explanation.

“Well… maybe this is normal, after all, and we just don’t have enough experience with tracers to know,” Jonah said. He thought hard. “Remember that time in 1483, right when the assassins grabbed Chip and Alex? Alex was kicking and fighting, but his tracer was asleep. That’s sort of the same thing. Just reversed, who’s sleeping and who’s awake.”

“That was just for a few seconds,” Katherine said. “John White and his tracer have been like this all morning, ever since Andrea and the tracer boys dragged them out here. This feels… permanent. Like he’s stuck.”

Is this something Andrea’s mystery man planned too? Jonah wondered. His plan from the night before for outsmarting the mystery man seemed hopelessly naive. Jonah couldn’t understand anything about their opponent’s strategy.

Jonah’s stomach growled, reminding him he’d had nothing to eat in, well, centuries.

“Maybe if we eat some of their food, we’ll be able to think better and figure this all out,” he said.

“Great idea,” Katherine said. “Except I think that’s the deer they killed yesterday. For us, it’s still alive and running around the woods. Want to go hunting with a bow and arrow?”

“We don’t have a bow and arrow,” Andrea pointed out. “Just the tracers do.” She slumped down beside John White, sounding completely discouraged. “We don’t have anything.”

“Oh, hey-there was some melon in that hut where I saw the other deer,” Jonah said, because he had to offer something. The melon had looked slimy and unappealing the day before, but it was the only possible food Jonah could think of.

Jonah stood and walked into the hut where he’d frightened the deer. The melon vines stretched across the dirt floor, their leaves pale and limp from growing indoors, with the only light coming from broken places in the roof. Jonah bent down to search under the leaves. Every time he lifted a leaf and then let go, it quickly settled back together with its tracer. At least the leaves are obeying all the tracer rules, Jonah thought. He found the remains of the melon the deer had been eating, but it was just a glob of mush that left slime on Jonah’s hand when he brushed it by mistake.

“Find anything?” Katherine said behind him.

Jonah wiped his hand on a leaf and discovered a hard green, baseball-size melon underneath.

“Just this,” he said, holding it up.

“Better than nothing, I guess,” Katherine said. “We can split it on a rock, divide it three ways.”

“Four,” Andrea corrected from outside the hut. “My grandfather needs some real food too.”

Jonah wasn’t sure what the nutrition rules were for someone sort of joined with his tracer, but sort of not. He looked at the melon in his hand. Regardless of whether they each got one-third or one-fourth of it, it wasn’t going to be enough.

“Are you sure that’s the only one?” Katherine asked.

Jonah ruffled the pale, anemic-looking leaves before him, setting off a ripple of even paler tracer leaves.

“See anything I missed?” he asked sarcastically. “Geez, there’s not even a whole tracer melon left anym-” He broke off. He looked back down at the leaves. He lifted the slimy leaf where he’d found the melon.

The leaf itself instantly developed a tracer, but there was no tracer melon underneath.

Jonah shoved aside the nearby leaves. He found the remains of the rotten melon the deer had eaten part of. It had just an edge of tracer light along its top, where Jonah had brushed against it and carried some of it away. But there was no tracer of the small green, hard melon in Jonah’s hand.

“It’s not supposed to be here,” Jonah mumbled, more to himself than Katherine. “Maybe it’s not even from this time. I moved it, and it didn’t leave a tracer.”

He turned the melon over and over again in his hand. Its surface was rough and ridged, except for one section where the pattern of webbing seemed almost carved into the rind.

No, Jonah thought. That’s not webbing. Those are letters. Words.

He flipped the melon over, and this put the letters right side up. Now Jonah could read the words in the crude lettering:

Eat. Enjoy. You’re doing great.

Can’t say more.

– Second