Sabotaged

39

Andrea/Virginia raced forward, across the shoreline littered with bones. Jonah whipped his head around in disbelief. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something pale in the spot where Andrea’s tracer had been standing only a moment before. Jonah turned his head-a tracer still stood there. But this one was even dimmer, even less substantial, fading away even as Jonah watched. Jonah looked from this tracer back to Andrea: Yes, Andrea was still wearing the deerskin dress and braids. She was still joined with her tracer.

A tracer in the wrong place, the other tracer disappearing… I thought tracers couldn’t change, Jonah marveled. Does that mean… Andrea completely changed time? Even original time? Is that possible?

Out on the water, an equally ghostly tracer canoe slipped silently away from the island, paddled by barely visible tracers of Walks with Pride and One Who Survives Much. Squinting, Jonah could just make out the translucent hand of John White’s tracer clutching the side of the canoe.

And then the entire tracer canoe vanished too.

Yet, when Jonah stepped forward a bit and shifted his view back to the shoreline, he could see Antonio/Walks with Pride and Brendan/One Who Survives Much-both in loincloths-standing by the real canoe. The Brendan figure bent down and crouched beside John White.

“He is hurt and sick and does not wake,” Brendan said.

“He has seen many troubles,” Andrea said. “It is written on his face.”

Jonah had stopped thinking of her as Andrea/Virginia. She still looked like the tracer-and was still completely joined. But Andrea was in control.

She bent down and stroked her grandfather’s forehead, smoothed back his hair.

“Your troubles are over now,” she said.

Jonah could see John White’s eyelids flutter-his real eyelids.

“Grandfather?” Andrea whispered. She had called him that before, but it sounded different now. Jonah could hear a trace of an accent in her voice-not English, but Algonquian. It sounded… right.

John White’s eyelids weren’t just fluttering now. They were blinking.

And then the eyelids stopped moving and his eyes focused. Even at this distance, Jonah could tell that John White’s eyes were focused on Andrea’s face.

“Oh, my child,” he whispered, “My child. You look just like my daughter, Eleanor.”

“Eleanor was my mother,” Andrea said. She touched her grandfather’s cheek. “She always said that you would come back.”

Jonah saw Katherine stumble out of the canoe. At first Jonah thought she was just making room for Andrea and her grandfather to talk, now that he could actually see her, now that he wasn’t just talking in his sleep. But Katherine kept walking, past the litter of bones, toward Jonah.

She seemed to run out of energy a few steps away. She clutched a tree as if she needed the help to stand up.

“What just happened?” she asked. “What was that?”

Jonah opened his mouth, even though he didn’t have the slightest idea what to tell her.

“Excellent question, my dear,” a voice said from behind Jonah. “I would call that a second chance. Which also happens-not so coincidentally-to be my name.”

Katherine gaped; her eyes seemed to double in size.

“Then, you’re… Second?” she whispered.