Sabotaged

32

Jonah dropped a whole handful of sand, sending up a puff of dust.

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “Did you get sunstroke this afternoon? What do you mean, you don’t trust the tracers? They’re tracers! They’re not really there! They don’t know we’re here! They don’t care if we’re looking for a rubber band or not. To them, we don’t even exist!”

The dust floated up to his mouth and nose, making him cough. While he was coughing, he thought of a new argument.

“The way I see it, the tracers might be the only ones we can trust!” he said. “We know they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing because, duh, they’re tracers! They have to be accurate! I like Andrea-”

“You like her too much,” Katherine said.

Jonah ignored this.

“-but she doesn’t care what happens to time,” he continued. “Brendan seems okay, but how can we know for sure that he and Antonio aren’t working for Second?”

“You didn’t see them the first hour or so,” Katherine said. “They were completely clueless and scared out of their wits. They didn’t know anything.”

“Yeah, but as soon as they joined with their tracers, they should have known…” The next word Jonah had intended to say was everything. But he stopped. He remembered Brendan saying he didn’t know if his tracer had done anything great; he didn’t know what the tracer thought about Croatoan Island. He didn’t even know what year it was. And Antonio-maybe he wasn’t just being a jerk when he’d refused to talk about the distance to Croatoan because, “Our tracers aren’t thinking about that right now!”

“You think…,” Jonah began. He had to try again to get the words out. “You think the tracers are keeping secrets?”

Katherine nodded, her eyes huge and frightened. Now that they were away from the other kids, Jonah could see how scared she really was-and how fake her brave face and cheerful chatter had been before.

“Didn’t Chip and Alex know everything their tracers knew, back in the fifteenth century?” Jonah interrupted. “Didn’t they know everything right away, from the first moment they joined with their tracers?”

“I think so,” Katherine said. “That’s how they always acted. Whatever we asked them, they had answers. Unless it was something their tracers didn’t know either.”

“But maybe we only asked them questions about things they’d been thinking about anyway,” Jonah said.

“Yeah,” Katherine agreed. “We never tested them with anything like, ‘What color shirt was your tracer wearing a week ago Monday?’”

“I couldn’t answer that,” Jonah said. “With or without a tracer.”

“Oh, right,” Katherine said. But she didn’t launch into any mocking rant about how he was just a stupid boy, and she could remember every outfit she’d worn since starting sixth grade.

“Do you think the tracers are working for Second?” Jonah asked.

Katherine frowned, considering this.

“I don’t think they could,” she said. “It’s like you said, they’re tracers. They can’t change.” She hesitated. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said I don’t trust them. Maybe that’s not the right way to put it. How could any of this be the tracers’ fault? They’re just what we see, and the problem’s deeper than that. The whole setup is messed up.”

“Because of Second,” Jonah growled. “He’s behind this.”

Katherine nodded.

“He must have done something to keep Brendan and Antonio from melding with their tracers right,” Katherine said.

Jonah struggled to get his aching brain to follow this thought. It seemed every bit as impossible as finding a rubber band buried on a vast beach. Brendan said Second pulled him straight out of time from his room back home-Second didn’t take him to a time cave or time hollow first, Jonah remembered. Could that be the problem? Jonah didn’t know why this would matter. The time hollows had always seemed like conveniences, not essentials. Why couldn’t Brendan and Antonio go straight from the twenty-first century to…

Jonah’s head throbbed, and he saw what he had been missing.

“I bet the problem was the way Brendan and Antonio came back,” Jonah said slowly. “Antonio landing… on top of me.”

This was still hard to talk about. It was like the moment back home when Jonah had first seen a time traveler seem to vanish into thin air, changing dimensions. Jonah’s brain had tried so hard to recast the memory, to turn it into something else-something believable.

Now it felt like Jonah’s brain was trying very hard to get him to forget completely. The memory already seemed distant and hazy, like something from a dream.

Oh, no, Jonah thought. I am not letting go.

“You know, when Antonio… arrived… that felt wrong,” Jonah said. “I bet Second did it that way on purpose.”

Katherine nodded, still deadly serious.

“I was looking right at you,” she said. “And, for a moment, it was like there were three people in the exact same spot-you, Antonio, and the tracer.”

Jonah felt chills again.

“That’s how it felt to me, too,” he admitted. He could bear thinking about that moment only in a roundabout way, as if he had to sneak up on the memory to catch it.

Katherine evidently wasn’t so limited.

“And then for a split second after that, you and the tracer both disappeared,” Katherine said, her voice low and troubled. “Maybe I blinked. Maybe I just missed seeing you fall out of the canoe. But where did the tracer go? Before, anytime we saw someone joined with his tracer-back in the fifteenth century, with Chip or Alex-it was always the tracer we could see, more than Chip or Alex. But with Antonio and his tracer, it was like the tracer blended into Antonio, not the other way around. I could see Antonio’s T-shirt better than his tracer’s back.”

Jonah shook his head, trying to make sense of Katherine’s words.

“But that didn’t last,” he said. “The tracers look normal now.” He glanced back toward the others clustered around the fire. Antonio and Brendan, still joined with their tracers, were very clearly wearing nothing but loincloths. “Well, normal for 1590s Native Americans.” He cleared his throat, trying to get rid of the last of the dust. “When did Antonio and his tracer start looking right again? And do you think Brendan and his tracer were messed up at first too?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said. “I started looking around for you, and when I glanced back at Antonio and his tracer, everything was like…” she gestured toward the two boys, moving completely in concert with their tracers.

“You mean Antonio and his tracer were following all the rules of tracerdom, as we know them,” Jonah said, back to joking a little bit, because he couldn’t stand being so deadly serious all the time. “Except for Antonio-and Brendan-not knowing everything their tracers know, and maybe that’s not that different from the last time. Maybe we just didn’t notice it before. Nobody broke any other tracer rules after that, did they?”

Katherine bit her lip.

“I know you were asleep all afternoon, but… haven’t you been paying attention since then?” she asked. “Haven’t you noticed how easy it is for Antonio and Brendan to move in and out of their tracers?”

Jonah gaped at his sister, his brain finally catching up.

“That’s why kept you shaking your head at me!” he said. “You didn’t want me to notice…”

“No, I didn’t want you to say anything in front of the others,” Katherine said. “Andrea’s already sick with worry about her grandfather, and Brendan and Antonio are plenty freaked out as it is.”

“So you want to protect them, but it’s okay to worry me?” Jonah said jokingly.

“Yeah. Because…,” Katherine took a deep breath, and for a moment Jonah was afraid that she was going to say something sappy like, Because you’re my big brother, or Because we’re in this together. Or even, Because I trust you most of all. Jonah wasn’t sure he’d be able to take it if she did that. Instead, she just frowned and said, “You know how people are supposed to behave with their tracers. You’ve seen it before. You already know something’s wrong with John White and his tracer, even though that might just be because of his head injury.”

“Antonio and Brendan don’t have head injuries,” Jonah said.

“Right,” Katherine said. “So isn’t it weird that they have to try to stay with their tracers? With Chip and Alex it practically took nuclear warfare to keep them away.”

“Yeah,” Jonah agreed. He almost added, Or true love. But this was not the right time to tease Katherine about that.

Katherine hit the palm of her hand against the sand. They’d both given up on pretending to look for a rubber band.

“I hate this,” she said. “We know Second did something wrong again, and we know everything’s messed up, but it’s like we’re boxed in-we don’t know what we can do about it.”

Another trap, Jonah thought. Or is it just another trick?

He looked back at the other kids: Andrea hovering near her grandfather, Brendan banking the fire, and Antonio… well, it looked like Antonio was posing, showing off his six-packs abs in front of Andrea. He was talking to her, too, probably saying, Look at me. Aren’t I hot? Jonah clenched his fists.

“Are you sure it wouldn’t help to punch Antonio?” he asked.

“Would you stop that?” Katherine said. She shoved at Jonah’s fists, knocking them uselessly against the sand. “None of this is Antonio’s fault. Can’t you tell he’s scared out of his mind?”

“Well, yeah, when he heard the wolves.” Jonah snickered. “Did you see how fast he was running?”

“Not just then,” Katherine said. “Ever since he got here, anytime he’s not thinking with his tracer’s brain, he’s terrified. It was like he couldn’t even hear half the things Andrea and I told him in the canoe. That’s why he keeps saying all those mean things, trying to make it so we don’t see how scared he is.”

“Oh, come on, Katherine,” Jonah scoffed. “Have you been listening to too many of those bullying assemblies at school? That’s the kind of thing a guidance counselor would say!”

“That doesn’t mean I’m wrong, does it?” Katherine challenged.

Jonah was about to make a snappy comeback or-to his surprise-maybe to grudgingly agree. But suddenly, across the beach, he heard Andrea scream.

“For real? Are you serious?” she yelled at the top of her lungs.

Jonah was already running toward her when he realized: No matter how loudly she was screaming, she didn’t sound upset.

She sounded delighted.