Sabotaged

28

“Hey!” Andrea screamed, waving her arms uselessly. “Wait for us!”

The tracer boys kept paddling.

“Jonah! Hurry up with that canoe!” Katherine yelled.

“There isn’t a canoe!” Jonah yelled back. “Not a real one!”

“What?” Katherine hollered back.

Both girls scrambled out toward the water’s edge, to look up and down the shoreline for themselves.

“Maybe the branch would work better than we think?” Jonah said.

The branch was already sagging down into the water. A wave hit it, and Andrea reached back just in time to keep her grandfather from toppling over. He would have fallen in if they’d been out on the open water.

“Or we could swim?” Jonah revised his suggestion. “I carried John White yesterday…”

Katherine fixed him with a withering glare. She didn’t have to say, Are you crazy? Do you want us all to drown? Can’t you see how far away the nearest land is?

The nearest land was just a sliver on the horizon. Everything was so flat, Jonah wasn’t even sure it was land. The thin layer of green and brown might have just been a trick of the eye.

And who knew how far it might be to Croatoan Island?

“Second!” Andrea screamed at the sky. “If you really want to help us, give us a canoe! A canoe! That’s all we need!”

Nothing happened. No canoe floated down from the sky.

Andrea slumped against her grandfather’s side.

“It figures,” she muttered. “Second’s just been toying with us all along. And now look at my grandfather!”

John White’s skin looked clammier than ever. A pained expression covered his face, as if he was being poked in the back by various twigs and other sharp, pointy offshoots of the branch.

“Maybe the stuff I thought was paint is actually medicine?” Jonah suggested.

“Wouldn’t Second tell us that if he really wanted to help?” Katherine asked. “So we wouldn’t poison Andrea’s grandfather by mistake?”

“If Second really wanted to help, he’d tell us something besides, ‘With my compliments’ and ‘You’re doing great,’” Andrea muttered. “And-oh, yeah, ‘Here’s how you can save your parents’-and it’s all a lie.”

Jonah gazed at Andrea. He could see the tears welling in her eyes.

“Forget Second,” he told her. “We are going to get off this island. We’re going to get away from Second’s plans, and we’re going to catch up with the tracer boys, and we’re going to find your tracer-even if we have to make our own canoe out of this…”

Log, he was going to say. There was a downed log floating in the water right at the shoreline. It had been there from the first moment that Jonah had begun looking for a canoe. But a breeze blew some dead leaves away just then, and Jonah saw that the log was actually tied to a tree with some sort of primitive braided rope.

Why would someone tie up a log? Was the log maybe not just a log?

Jonah glanced up at the tracer boys in their tracer canoe, paddling off into the distance. He squinted, trying to think what the underside of the canoe might look like, the part submerged in the water. He remembered something from Boy Scout camp, the year the water sports instructor had gone on and on during orientation about “respecting the history.” The instructor had seemed like a crazy old man, but hadn’t he said something about how Native Americans used to make canoes by burning out the insides of logs? Wouldn’t that mean that the outside of a canoe would still look like a log?

Jonah nudged the side of the log with his foot, rolling it back a bit. Jonah hadn’t pushed hard enough to completely flip the log over, so when it settled back into place, it displaced a huge wave of water. Jonah jumped back too late to avoid getting soaked.

But he’d seen enough. He’d seen that the other side of the log was hollowed out.

“I found the canoe!” he screamed. “I found the canoe!”

“Well, get it over here!” Katherine said. “Before we lose sight of the tracers!”

“You have to help!” Jonah yelled back. “I can’t do everything!”

Which was unfair, because Katherine and Andrea had worked just as hard as Jonah had, pushing John White on the tree branch. But Jonah was wet and tired and hungry and sore, and he knew he was going to have to jump into the water to turn the canoe over.

They were all wet and tired and sore-and irritable-by the time they got the canoe untied, turned over, emptied of water, and loaded with John White and his chest. It took all three of them trying five times before they managed to flip the canoe. They might have succeeded on the fourth try, except that just as they were heaving the canoe up, Katherine said, “Wait a minute! What are we going to use for paddles?”

Jonah lost his grip on the side of the canoe, and it smashed down on his shoulder, knocking him under the water. He surfaced in the air pocket under the canoe.

Oh, yeah, he thought, remembering something else from the crazy water sports instructor at Boy Scout camp. This is how you’re supposed to turn over a canoe. From underneath.

Something was banging against his head, so he grabbed hold of it as he dipped down, kicked to the right, and resurfaced outside the canoe.

“I figured out how we should do this!” he told the girls, lifting his arms high in the air, triumphantly. He decided not to mention that he should have known all along.

“And you found a paddle!” Andrea exclaimed.

Jonah looked at the thing in his hand. It was a carved piece of wood, vaguely paddle-shaped. Huh. Maybe the crazy water sports instructor at Boy Scout camp had said that was the best place to store paddles, under an overturned canoe.

In the end, once all three of them had dived under the canoe and heaved it into the air, they also found another paddle and a wooden object that looked like a rake. They didn’t have time to figure out what that was for-the tracer boys were paddling farther and farther away-so they just tossed the rake into the canoe. Even after they added John White and his chest, there was plenty of room left for all three kids and Dare.

Didn’t the guy at Boy Scout camp say that sometimes these canoes could hold as many as twenty men? Jonah thought. Or was that something that Mrs. Rorshas told us about the Indians? He wasn’t sure. He felt too dizzy and disoriented and exhausted to think clearly. And now he and one of the girls were going to have a paddle a canoe that was supposed to be powered by twenty men?

He decided not to mention that to the girls.

“I’ll take the front,” Jonah offered, stepping into the canoe. “Can one of you push off?”

“I’ll do it,” Andrea volunteered. “Hurry!”

The tracer boys and their canoe were getting smaller and smaller off in the distance.

Once Jonah and Katherine had settled into position, Andrea was surprisingly quick pushing off from the shore.

“Go!” she yelled.

“You paddle-opposite side from me!” Jonah yelled back over his shoulder. He wished there’d been time to review canoeing strategy. “Katherine, tell Andrea-”

“She knows!” Katherine yelled forward, from where she was crouched beside John White and his chest. “She’s already doing it. Just go faster.”

Jonah paddled desperately. The shoulder the canoe had slammed down on ached with every stroke, but it helped when he switched sides.

“Switch!” he yelled back to Andrea.

“She already did!” Katherine yelled forward.

Jonah kept paddling.

At first, it seemed that they were going only fast enough to keep the tracers from lengthening the distance between them. But then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, Jonah realized that they were gaining on the tracers.

Am I paddling that much faster? Jonah wondered, feeling rather proud that he could outpace the muscular tracers. Then he took a quick glance over his shoulder and realized: He wasn’t the one doing such an awesome job paddling. It was Andrea.

She was paddling frantically, her paddle re-entering the water only a split second after she’d pulled it out. And she pulled the paddle through the water at exactly the right angle to create the most force, to propel the canoe forward as quickly as possible.

Oh, yeah, Jonah remembered. Andrea went to camp too. And she ate that food pellet, so she should have more energy than me. Maybe it had steroids in it? Maybe the pellet made Dare peppier, too?

Jonah didn’t have time to follow that thought.

“Good job!” he yelled back to Andrea.

“Just keep paddling!” Katherine screamed at him.

The paddling was starting to feel grim to Jonah, like punishment. As long as they kept the tracers in sight, did it really matter if John White was joined with his tracer every single second?

He dared to glance back at John White again. How could it be? How could the man look even paler than before? And-was he shivering? Shivering in all this heat, when Jonah himself had just gotten out of the water and was already sweating again?

Jonah went back to focusing on nothing but digging his paddle into the water, shoving it back, pulling it out. Digging, shoving, pulling; digging, shoving, pulling…

With great effort, they drew close to the tracer canoe. The tip of the kids’ canoe touched the end of the tracer version.

“All right!” Katherine cheered. “Almost there!”

Jonah’s arms felt like they were almost ready to fall off. He’d been holding on to the paddle so tightly, for so long, that he couldn’t even feel his hands-which was a good thing, because they had blisters now. He thought he could put on a final burst of speed and draw even with the tracers. But how was he supposed to keep paddling after that?

The canoe lurched forward-Andrea was paddling harder than ever. This shamed Jonah into paddling harder too.

Jonah slipped through the body of the first tracer boy. He drew even with the tracer John White’s feet, with his stomach, with his head. The canoe wavered-losing ground, gaining, losing, gaining-and then with one last yank of his paddle, Jonah ensured that the real canoe and the tracer canoe occupied the exact same space.

Jonah glanced at the second tracer boy, who paddled alongside Jonah.

“Hey,” Jonah mumbled. “Isn’t it time for your coffee break? Er-venison break?”

This seemed hilarious to Jonah in his thirsty, hungry, exhausted state. He couldn’t really see the tracer boy except as an echo of himself: an arm separating every now and then from Jonah’s own, an extra nose leaning forward occasionally from Jonah’s face. It was like talking to his own shadow, like slipping through fog.

And then, quite suddenly, the tracer stopped seeming like a shadow or fog. It stopped seeming like a tracer, too-it seemed like an actual boy, with actual arms and legs and a torso and head, trying to take up the same space as Jonah himself. It was like having someone fall on him from out of the sky and leap up at him from underneath and dive into him from every other side, all at once. And like time and space had hiccupped and the other person somehow had a stronger claim to the place where Jonah was sitting than Jonah did.

Jonah immediately fell out of the canoe.