Sabotaged

34

Jonah woke the next morning to the smell of cooking fish. He groaned and rolled over.

Andrea was sitting in the sand right beside him, leafing through one of John White’s sketchbooks. She must have been waiting for him to wake up, because she looked up immediately.

“I was mean to you yesterday,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Jonah said.

“No,” Andrea shook her head, her hair whipping side to side. “It’s not. I-Do you ever feel like you just have to really, really care about something-or someone-or else you might as well be dead?” She didn’t give Jonah much of a chance to answer. Which was good, because Jonah didn’t know what to say.

Andrea stared down at the sketchbook and kept talking.

“Ever since my parents died, I just latch on to things… and I forget… other people have feelings too.”

Was there any way Jonah could say something like, Oh, I do have feelings-I have feelings for you? Without having it sound completely cheesy?

Jonah decided that was impossible.

“It’s okay,” he said again. “It’s just… why do you care so much about your grandfather? You don’t even know him!”

“I feel like I do,” Andrea said quietly. “What I read about him, what he wrote about trying to get back to his family, it’s kind of how I feel about… you know.” She didn’t have to say, my parents. “And just looking at the pictures he drew-they’re so real.”

She tilted the sketchbook toward Jonah. He sat up so he could get a better look at the picture she was gazing at. It showed another Native American village, but from a different perspective than the other drawing Jonah had seen. It was as if John White had stood in the village square and looked all around: at dogs sleeping in the sunlight, at little boys guarding the cornfield, at women braiding their daughters’ hair.

“He really was a good artist,” Jonah said, though he didn’t really know anything about art. “That picture makes you feel like you’re right there, and all those people are still alive.”

And, Jonah realized, they might be.

“I’m telling myself this is what Croatoan Island is going to be like,” Andrea said. “Except there’s a big group of extra people who came from England right over here”-she pointed to the empty section of paper, off to the side-”who fit right in. And a grandfather/governor/artist who’s totally awake and ready to draw them all…”

“Andrea,” Jonah began.

“Just let me have some hope, okay?” Andrea said.

They set off as soon as they’d cleaned up from their all-fish breakfast. It turned out that Katherine and Andrea had figured out a rhythm to hanging out in the canoe all day. No matter what, everyone had to keep out of the way of Brendan and Antonio, who had to stay with their tracers to paddle, so the real canoe and the tracer canoe stayed precisely together as one-all so John White wouldn’t get separated from his tracer. But sometimes Brendan and Antonio’s tracers would take breaks from paddling, and then the two boys could come out of the tracers enough to talk.

Jonah decided it was a good time to test Brendan’s and Antonio’s memories, or at least find out a little more information. He’d missed a lot when he was sleeping.

“Okay,” he said, when the two boys were taking their first break, as the canoe drifted in the gentle current. “I know you said your tracers aren’t letting you know anything about Croatoan Island-”

“They’re just not thinking about it,” Brendan corrected lazily, stretching in the back of the canoe. “That’s all.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Jonah said. “But do they know anything about what happened to the Roanoke Colony? I mean, they were right there!”

“Antonio and I have heard rumors in our tribe,” Brendan said, “that there might be a boy with yellow hair living two tribes away. That he might be one of the people-who-look-like-ghosts who came across the waters to Roanoke, many moons ago.”

“‘Many moons ago?’” Antonio snorted. “Don’t talk like that around them. They’ll laugh.”

“No we won’t,” Andrea said softly.

Antonio glowered, but didn’t say anything else.

“So that means you weren’t on Roanoke Island just waiting for Andrea’s grandfather to show up,” Jonah said, feeling disappointed.

“No, but”-Brendan shot a glance at Antonio, who was reclining at the front of the canoe-”we were there kind of waiting for white men.”

“What?” Jonah said. In his surprise, he jolted back against John White’s leg. The old man moaned in his sleep. Dare, who was sleeping beside him, opened one eye, seemed to decide that Jonah wasn’t a threat, and went back to snoring.

“White men came to Roanoke Island in the waning months of summer-er, August, I guess-every year for several years,” Brendan said. “Several times they killed Indians and burned their villages nearby. Even when they only visited local tribes, acting like they were friendly, they left behind, um-”

“Do not say, invisible evil spirits!” Antonio commanded. “Or invisible bullets! That’s not what it was!”

“Really, we’re not going to laugh, no matter what,” Katherine said.

Antonio ignored her.

“We were on Roanoke Island as sentries, all right?” Antonio finished for Brendan. “Our tribe sends someone every August. We were watching, so we could alert our tribe if anyone came. They trusted us!”

“But you saved his life,” Jonah said, touching John White’s leg. “Why did you do that if you thought his people were dangerous?”

“It’s our tribe’s code,” Brendan said. “He was alone and in trouble, so we saved him. Just like the tribe saved us.”

“Brendan was a slave when the tribe took him in,” Katherine said in a hushed voice.

“So you were right, thinking that he was a runaway,” Jonah said.

“Oh, no,” Brendan said, and for the first time, he sounded even more bitter and angry than Antonio. “I was just a baby, on a ship carrying slaves. Sir Francis Drake-remember him from Social Studies class? He stopped by Roanoke Island when there were just some English soldiers there, before they sent the colonists. The soldiers were starving-”

“And the Indians were getting sick of them stealing their food-” Antonio interrupted.

“So Sir Francis Drake became the big hero,” Brendan said mockingly. “He dumped out hundreds of slaves to make room to take the soldiers home to England.”

Jonah looked at Katherine.

“Is this something else I missed hearing about in fifth-grade Social Studies?” he asked.

“Wasn’t mentioned,” Katherine said, biting off her words.

“But it’s true!” Brendan said. “Hundreds of slaves, stolen from a Spanish colony, used to being slaves, yes, but also used to being fed-suddenly they’re dumped out on an empty island with no food, no boats to use to get to the mainland… If our tribe hadn’t taken us in, everyone would have died.”

“Your tribe took in hundreds of people?” Jonah asked. He wondered why that wasn’t something he’d studied at school. These people sounded like saints.

“No. A lot of the slaves died before the tribe found them,” Brendan said, “including my parents.”

Now he was glowering every bit as angrily as Antonio. Jonah wanted to say, Look, I’m not related to Sir Francis Drake! I didn’t have anything to do with this!

Except maybe he did. He didn’t have any idea who he was related to or what time period he’d originally lived in.

“Sir Francis Drake didn’t even see the slaves as people,” Brendan said bitterly.

“It’s not just slaves who are treated like that,” Antonio said. “Did Katherine or Andrea tell you my story?” he asked Jonah.

Jonah shook his head.

“I was a cabin boy on a Spanish ship,” Antonio said. “Not such a bad life-there are worse places for orphans to live-as long as you’re good at dodging fists. So then, a couple years ago, the captain decided he might make more money trading with tribes way north of Saint Augustine. Only problem was, none of those tribes spoke Spanish. No one on the ship spoke the Indians’ languages. So-leave a little kid behind, come back a year or two later-you, captain, have got yourself a translator.” Antonio seemed to be straining harder and harder to sound as if he didn’t care. “If the kid’s still alive.”

“You mean, they dropped you off alone?” Jonah asked. “Someplace you didn’t know anyone, where you didn’t even know the language, when you were… how old?” He squinted at Antonio. The boy and his tracer were almost exactly the same size, which made the tracer about thirteen too. And Antonio had said before that he’d come to America three years ago. That meant he’d been… “Only ten?” Jonah asked.

“Yeah. But, hey, I survived,” Antonio said, and now there was pride in his voice. “Next year, the ship came back and, baby, I hid. I knew a good thing when I had it. I knew where people treated me like a human being.”

The lower half of his body was reaching for his paddle again.

“Back to work,” Antonio said, though he didn’t sound sorry about it. He slid his head back, rejoining his tracer completely. Then he froze.

“Oh, no,” he moaned.

At the back of the canoe, Brendan gasped.

“What?” Jonah asked.

“So that’s why our tracers didn’t want to think about Croatoan Island,” Antonio muttered.

“You know now?” Katherine asked excitedly.

But Antonio didn’t look excited. He-and his tracer-were just sitting there, stunned, staring off into the distance.

“The evil spirits,” Antonio whispered. “The invisible bullets.”

“Germs,” Brendan corrected.

“You’re talking about-what? Bacteria? Some kind of virus?” Jonah asked, looking from one boy to the other. He couldn’t understand why they both looked so horrified. “That doesn’t sound so terrible.”

Then Antonio pointed.

And Jonah saw the skulls.