Sabotaged

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  This is impossible, he wanted to say. I give up. But how could he say that when Andrea and Katherine were still pushing and pulling and tugging and yanking, even as water streamed into their eyes, twigs stabbed into their arms, and mud slipped against their shoes? So he kept trying too.

  The tracers were just a dim glow ahead of him. And then, suddenly, they were out of sight.

  “No! I can’t—” Jonah screamed. Rain pounded against his face, drowning out anything he tried to say.

  “Let’s go into the same hut,” Katherine said, speaking directly into his ear.

  The same hut? Oh . . . The Indians went into one of the huts in the village, Jonah realized. That’s why I can’t see them.

  He got a final burst of energy, pulling the branch even harder. Then he dropped the branch and tugged the man into the dim but dry hut. All three kids collapsed in a heap, not even caring that they had fallen right on top of the tracer boys.

  For a while, Jonah just lay of the floor of the hut. At least the rain wasn’t pounding down on him anymore. But his shoulders ached from fighting the waves and struggling with the branch. His legs felt as if they’d been rubbed raw, walking all that way in wet jeans. His clammy T-shirt clung to his skin, the saltwater that had soaked into it stinging against the dozens of scrapes and cuts he’d gotten scrambling over the rocks.

  “Ohh,” Katherine moaned. “I need a hot shower.”

  “Dry clothes,” Jonah mumbled.

  “Make it a nice warm robe for me,” Katherine said. “And my fluffy bunny slippers.”

  “Hot soup,” Jonah said. “Mom’s chili maybe?”

  “Stop it!” Andrea said fiercely. “That just makes it worse, wishing for things you can’t have. You know?”

  Jonah could tell she wasn’t just talking about clean, dry clothes and hot food.

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  Andrea ignored him. She sprang up and began fussing over the unconscious man.

  “We put him down on the dirt floor and he’s got cuts all over him, and they’re going to get infected if we’re not careful. But the water’s coming off his clothes and hair, and that’s turning the dirt into mud . . . how did people do it, hundreds of years ago?” she ranted. “How did they stay clean and healthy?”

  A lot of them didn’t, Jonah thought. A lot of them died.

  He wasn’t going to say that to Andrea.

  She was adjusting the way the sweatshirts were tied around the man’s head and muttering, “At least we can keep the cut on his head up and out of the mud . . . we should rinse it off, but where are we going to get clean water?”

  Jonah noticed that one of the tracer boys had stepped out of the hut—it was a little hard to keep track of someone who was under you and who could move right through you. But the boy was just now coming back in, carrying a tracer version of a hollowed-out gourd in his hand. The boy bent down beside the tracer man and gently lifted the man’s head, so the man could drink out of the gourd.

  “I’ll go see where he got that,” Jonah said.

  He stepped out of the hut into a stiff wind. Oddly, the rain had stopped—it had lasted just long enough to make the final part of their trip back to the village really, really challenging. But the sky was still dark and ominous, and the dim light made it hard to see where Jonah was going. He practically tripped over the hollowed-out water barrel before he saw it.

  The twin of the tracer boy’s gourd was floating about halfway down in the barrel.

  Oh . . . they just used this to catch rainwater, Jonah thought. That’s why there’s not much water in there—there wasn’t much rain.

  He filled up the gourd as best he could and stumbled back toward the hut.

  The tracer boys had started trying to build a fire while Jonah was away. Jonah handed the gourd over to Andrea and then stood watching the tracers. They piled together sticks and twigs and dried-out leaves; one of the boys was twisting a pointed stick against the groove of a stick below it.

  “If those guys can start a fire that way, they’re superheroes,” Jonah said. “We tried that in Boy Scouts, and even the scoutmaster couldn’t get a flame going. It’s impossi . . .”

  The ghost of a flame flared out from the tracer boys’ fire. Moments later, the flames were crackling across the dried-up leaves, spreading to the small twigs.

  Katherine snorted.

  “Shows how much you learned in Boy Scouts,” she said.

  “But . . . but . . . I could start a fire with a magnifying glass,” Jonah protested. “Or, I saw this thing online, where you use a Coke can and a chocolate bar—”

  “Do you see any of those things lying around here?” Katherine asked.

  “Maybe I could try doing it just like the tracers,” Jonah muttered.

  He saw that the sticks and twigs and dry leaves that the tracer boys had used were still in the hut. In original time, the way time was supposed to go, they’d been stacked up neatly. But right now they were scattered about, probably by squirrels or badgers or some other animals looking for food.

  Jonah began picking up the sticks and laying them in the exact pattern the tracer boys had used. It was eerie reaching into the blazing tracer fire. Jonah kept flinching and bracing for pain. But the tracer flames felt like nothing. Like air. Dust. Empty space. He breathed in tracer smoke—so wispy, like the ghost of a ghost. It didn’t even have an odor.

  When all the sticks and chunks of wood were arranged, he tucked in the twigs and leaves as kindling. Then he found the same pointed stick the tracer boy had turned to create enough friction to spark the first flame. Jonah twisted it back and forth in the palms of his hands, the friction warming his hands, at least. He kept the image in his head of the way it had worked for the tracer boy—like magic. One moment the boy had just been rubbing two sticks together, and the next, he had a roaring fire. Jonah tried not to think about how things had worked in his Boy Scout troop: He and his friends had tried and tried and tried, and then the scoutmaster had brought out the matches.

  Jonah didn’t have any matches now. There wasn’t a backup plan.

  He kept trying, long past the point where he and his Scout friends had given up.

  “There!” Katherine shrieked, leaning down close to watch. “You did it!”

  Jonah sat back and looked. If there had been a flame, Katherine had just blown it out.

  “Stay back!” he ordered.

  The two tracer boys were sitting around their fire staring into the flames, cryptic expressions on their faces. They probably didn’t feel cold and wet, even though they were practically naked. They probably weren’t worrying that the man that they’d pulled from the waves might die from infected mud. They definitely weren’t worrying that time had been irreparably harmed or that they’d been set up in some elaborate trap.

  Even though Jonah knew that they were staring into their own fire and had no way of knowing that Jonah was there—because he hadn’t been, in their time—Jonah felt like they were watching him. Their cryptic expressions seemed to be hiding scorn at Jonah’s constant failure, trying to start a fire.

  “I can so do it!” Jonah muttered, rubbing the sticks together faster than ever.

  A leaf crackled and began to smoke—real smoke, not ghostly tracer smoke. A tiny spark leaped from one leaf to another.

  “Whoo-hoo!” Jonah cheered. “Take that, Scoutmaster Briggs! That should be the test for Eagle Scout!”

  “Oh, good,” Andrea said, flashing a rare smile at Jonah. “Now the man can dry off next to the fire.”

  “We can all dry off next to the fire,” Katherine corrected.

  The fire was tiny, and there was no more dry wood around for making it bigger. Jonah had never had to solve any math problems where X was the size of a fire; Y was the rate at which water evaporated; and Z was the likelihood that someone would survive after nearly drowning, bashing his head, and lying in germ-infested mud or that three kids would manage to outsmart someone who had sabotaged their trip through time. Jonah knew
the fire couldn’t make that big a difference. Still, it felt like the fire was a big deal. It felt like they all had a chance now.

  “Here,” Jonah told Andrea. “I’ll help you move the man closer, so he warms up faster.”

  Jonah shoved at the man’s waist. Katherine shoved at his shoulders. Andrea gingerly moved his head. Jonah’s main goal was to keep from pushing the man all the way into the fire, so he wasn’t paying attention to much else. He’d forgotten that the tracer boys had placed the tracer man right next to their tracer fire, which was in the same spot as Jonah’s fire. He’d forgotten what happened when a person joined with his own tracer.

  Jonah gave the man’s body one final shove, and suddenly the glow of his tracer went out. The man had slipped exactly into the outline of his tracer.

  The man’s color instantly improved. His lips moved, even though his eyes remained closed.

  “Greedy privateers,” he muttered. “Thinking of naught but money . . . Coming to Roanoke too late in the season . . . Dangerous winds, dangerous seas . . . Help! The rocks! The rocks! Beware the rocks!” He took in a ragged gasp. “No! No! Our ship! We’re doomed! All will perish. . . . It’s happening! Oh, dear God! All have perished but me!”

  Jonah jerked the man back away from his tracer.

  “What’d you do that for?” Andrea demanded.

  It had been only an instinct, unthinking fear. The man and his tracer were both still moving their lips, but soundlessly, now that they were apart. Jonah could tell what each of them was saying only because it was almost exactly what he’d just heard: All perished but me; all perished but me; all perished but me. . . .

  Jonah shivered.

  “What’s wrong?” Andrea asked harshly. “Can’t you take hearing another sad story?”

  Jonah rubbed his hands hard against his face.

  “No, I just—what if it’s too confusing for the man, being joined with his tracer, thinking with his tracer brain?” Jonah asked, trying to come up with an explanation that sounded reasonable. “The tracer knows he was saved by two boys dressed like Indians, not three kids in T-shirts and jeans or shorts. And then if he sees us but not the tracer boys—because people can’t see tracers in their own time—that will really mess him up.”

  “But this guy never saw us save him,” Katherine argued. “He’ll just think the tracer boys saved him and left, and then we arrived. . . . We saw people rejoin their tracers after seeing different things before, back in the 1400s. I don’t think anything bad happened then, because of that.”

  Jonah was still figuring out other problems.

  “You think, when the man wakes up, it’s going to be okay for him to see us in our twenty-first-century clothes?” Jonah demanded. “Here, now, where we really don’t belong? When it’s all a setup by some mysterious time traveler who lied to Andrea?”

  “No,” Katherine admitted. She winced, probably thinking about how she’d poked at the man back on the beach, trying to wake him up: Sir? Sir? That had been a mistake. They were lucky the man hadn’t awakened.

  Very deliberately, Katherine pulled her hand back from the man’s shoulder.

  “Hold on. Are you saying you just want to . . . sneak away?” Andrea asked incredulously. “Leave the man alone when he’s hurt?”

  The man was still mouthing his silent lament: All perished but me; all perished but me; all perished but me. . . .

  Moving just as deliberately as Katherine, Andrea grabbed the man’s hand and held on tight.

  “Shh, it’s over now,” she whispered to him. “You’re safe.” She looked back up at Jonah and Katherine. “Didn’t you hear him? He’s the only survivor of some awful shipwreck. So nobody would know to look for him. He’s just as stranded as we are. We can’t abandon him!”

  Jonah shook his head.

  “Nobody’s saying we should abandon him,” he said. “We’re just trying to figure out how to take care of him without ruining time.”

  But was that possible? Or was this another trap, one where they’d be forced to endanger time, no matter what?

  “I wish we still had the Elucidator to make us invisible,” Katherine said.

  Andrea sighed.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. She stared into the fire for a moment, her face almost as inscrutable as the tracer boys’. “No. You know what? I’m not sorry. If I hadn’t changed the code on the Elucidator, this man would be dead right now.” She squeezed his hand. “Do you know how much time I’ve spent the past year wishing it was possible to go back and save someone from dying?”

  “Andrea,” Katherine said. “This doesn’t change anything about your parents. You still can’t save them.”

  “I know, I know, but . . . this is one little victory over death, all right?” Andrea said fiercely. “One way to stick it to death and say, ‘Ha, ha, this is one person you can’t have yet. Yeah, you’re going to win in the end, but not right now. Not this time.’”

  The man still could die, Jonah thought. And is it really a victory over death if he was supposed to be rescued in original time anyhow? Or is it more of a victory over . . . time?

  Andrea’s face was flushed, as if she’d said more than she’d meant to. Jonah had to look away, because he couldn’t think straight, watching her.

  “Should we hide, except when we have to be in here taking care of the man?” Katherine asked. “Should we put the man back with his tracer, and leave him like that, because that’d be putting time back the way it’s supposed to be? Or should we keep him away from his tracer until we can find the real versions of the tracer boys? How are we going to find the real boys . . . and Andrea’s tracer . . . and whatever else we need to fix time and get out of here?”

  She sounded completely perplexed.

  This must be what Andrea’s mystery man wanted, when he told her to change the Elucidator code, Jonah thought, staring into the fire. He wanted us confused. So he could make us do . . . what?

  Jonah’s thoughts twisted like the smoke flowing up toward the chimneylike hole in the roof. While he watched, the smoke completely combined with the tracer smoke, so it was indistinguishable. And, he realized, the fire now flamed out and drew in at exactly the same rate as the tracer fire.

  Not scientifically possible, Jonah thought. Two fires, started at different times, by different people, should not be identical.

  But that was how it worked when time was trying to fix itself. Given a chance, the tracers always took over.

  Unless some time traveler intervened.

  “The man who lied to Andrea,” Jonah said slowly. “He’s not standing here telling us what to do. But he’s put us in all these situations where we have to make choices. And I think he’s manipulating things so we always make the choice he wants.”

  “Like the way he got me to change the Elucidator in the first place,” Andrea said, scowling.

  “Exactly,” Jonah said. “So I think we should stop doing what the man expects, what we would normally do. We have to do the opposite instead.”

  Katherine squinted at him.

  “You’re saying we should abandon—” she began.

  “No, no,” Jonah said, before Andrea got upset again. “Nothing that extreme. I really don’t think we should let this man see us, but he’s unconscious and it’s pretty dark in here anyway, so I’m not going to worry about it tonight.”

  “You’re talking about whether or not we put the man back with his tracer,” Katherine said, catching on quickly.

  “Right,” Jonah said. “I was feeling guilty for pulling him away before, for interfering with time like that.”

  “And I was going to say that if we put him back with his tracer, maybe we’d hear more,” Andrea said. “About him, anyway, even if that doesn’t help with my problem with time.”

  “I agree,” Katherine said. “So, normally, we’d be deciding to push the man back together with his tracer.”

  “So we won’t. We’ll keep them apart,” Jonah said. He tugged the man a little farther away. H
e looked up at the dark sky, through the hole in the roof. “How do you like that, Mr. Elucidator Code-Changer? We’re forcing your hand!”

  “But what if we really do ruin time, doing that?” Andrea asked.

  “We won’t,” Jonah said, hoping he sounded confident. “Because that’s what your mystery man is trying to do. We’re showing him he can’t trick us into playing along. It’s like chess or Stratego, games like that, where sometimes you have to use reverse psychology.”

  “Jonah, you’re terrible at chess and Stratego!” Katherine objected.

  “I am not,” Jonah said. “Not anymore. Remember a few years ago, when I used to go over to Billy Rivoli’s house and play board games? I got a lot better.”

  Katherine frowned, but then she shrugged.

  “It’s not like I have any better ideas,” she admitted.

  Across the fire, the tracer boys were lying down, settling in for the night. Dare curled up at Andrea’s feet. Andrea let out a jaw-splitting yawn.

  “I guess it’s worth a try,” she said.

  Jonah lay down, feeling surprised that Katherine and Andrea hadn’t argued more.

  We’re all too tired to think straight, he thought. But my idea will work. I hope.

  The truth was, Jonah really didn’t like Stratego or chess or games like that. There was too much planning, too much strategy, too much trying to figure out your opponent’s plans ten moves ahead.

  What was that really complicated game Billy was always trying to get me to play? Jonah tried to remember. The one where you weren’t just competing against one other person, but there could be five or six people, all trying to win?

  Jonah remembered the name of the game just as he was slipping off to sleep: Risk.

  He woke hours later, to darkness and the sound of screaming.

  “Stop! Stop! Halt the battle!”

  Jonah sprang to his feet, his heart pounding. He gazed frantically from side to side. The fire was barely even embers now, but the dim glow of the tracers cast a little light into the darkness, onto the arched walls of the hut.