Sabotaged

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  She took the melon out of Katherine’s hand and hit it against a rock sticking up in the dust. The melon broke into even halves, revealing five brown pellets where there should have been the fruit and seeds.

  “Five?” Katherine muttered.

  Andrea flipped over one of the pellets, which was a slightly lighter shade of brown. It had the words, “For Dare,” carved into its surface.

  The others weren’t labeled.

  “Okay, then, at least test the food on the dog first,” Jonah suggested.

  “No, I’ll be the test case,” Andrea said.

  She hesitated for a second.

  “Don’t do it,” Jonah said. “Please.”

  Andrea popped a pellet into her mouth.

  Jonah had a sudden image in his mind of the girl in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory puffing up and turning blue after chewing defective gum.

  “Spit it out!” he yelled at Andrea.

  Andrea swallowed instead.

  “Okay, you guys can watch me for the next couple hours, and then we’ll know if it’s safe to give this to my grandfather,” she said calmly.

  Jonah shook his head.

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  Andrea shrugged.

  “Time will tell, won’t it?” she said, grinning slightly.

  “That’s not funny,” Jonah objected.

  Andrea scooped the other four pellets out of the melon half and put them in her pocket. Katherine and Jonah watched her warily.

  “Look, I feel fine so far,” Andrea said. “Not so hungry anymore, but maybe that’s just my imagination. It couldn’t work that fast. Let’s just . . . go on, okay?”

  Go on, Jonah thought dazedly. What would that mean? Fixing time? Rescuing Andrea?

  Those had been his original goals, but everything was so mixed-up now. How could they fix time when it just kept getting more and more messed up? How could they rescue Andrea when she was determined to do crazy things like talk to her grandfather and eat suspicious food?

  Right then, out of the corner of his eye, Jonah saw one of the tracer boys pat John White’s shoulder and stand up. The tracer boy was nodding, nodding. . . . Had John White’s tracer just asked him to do something? The old man’s tracer was still speaking, but he kept blinking, as if he was fighting off sleep. He seemed to be struggling to get the words out before he slipped toward unconsciousness, toward joining the real man completely.

  The tracer’s eyes closed, and now Jonah could hear what he was saying because the real man was speaking, too.

  “Find it,” John White murmured. Clearly the tracer and the real man were thinking the same thing. “Please find it, I beg of you.”

  The tracer boy nodded once more and began walking out of the village.

  “Did you hear that?” Jonah asked Katherine and Andrea. “This is a clue! We should follow him, see what he’s looking for!”

  Andrea shook her head, firmly.

  “I’m staying with my grandfather,” she said.

  “But this is something for him!” Jonah said. “Maybe it’s connected to you! Or your tracer!” He turned to his sister. “Katherine?”

  Katherine was grimacing.

  “You go,” she said. “I’ll stay here with Andrea.”

  Her gaze flickered from Jonah to Andrea to John White. She cocked her head and made a face. Jonah could tell what she was thinking: Andrea’s not going to leave her grandfather, and there’s no way we can trust her alone with him. Who knows how many different ways she might try to ruin time?

  “So I should go . . . alone?” Jonah asked. He wasn’t scared—of course he wasn’t scared. But it was a little weird to think that he would be going off on his own without a cell phone, without an Elucidator, without any way to communicate with anyone. “If you two go somewhere before I get back, uh, carve a map on a tree or something, okay?” he said, trying to make a joke of it.

  “That didn’t work out so great for the Roanoke colonists,” Andrea muttered.

  She walked over to Dare, who was still snoring, and gently shook him awake. She held out his pellet of food in her hand and he eagerly gobbled it down.

  “Now you’ll have energy to go with Jonah and keep him company,” Andrea told the dog. She pushed him forward. “Hurry! Before you lose the tracer!”

  “Um, okay then,” Jonah said. He took off after the tracer, the dog at his heels. He had to stop himself from turning around and saying to Andrea and Katherine, Are you sure you two don’t want to come too? Or, You’ll come after me if I get lost, won’t you?

  When he was pretty sure he and Dare were out of earshot of the girls, Jonah turned to the dog.

  “Don’t think this means I trust you,” he told Dare. “I am still watching you, to make sure you’re not animatronic or a decoy or a spy or something.”

  The dog licked Jonah’s hand.

  “I mean it,” Jonah said sternly. He addressed the sky, “And, Second, you can’t fool me either. I am not eating your food, and we are not blindly going along with any of your plans. Got it?”

  Jonah hoped that Second had not planned for Jonah and Dare to go off with the one tracer boy while Katherine and Andrea were left behind for . . . what? The danger Jonah had been fearing all along?

  You’re being paranoid, Jonah told himself. Just like Katherine said.

  To distract himself, he concentrated on looking around, watching everything carefully. The tracer boy seemed to be following the same trail he and the other boy had taken the night before, when they’d dragged John White back to the village on the tree branch. Jonah would have expected the whole trail to be lined with tracers—bent-back grasses, footprints, other dents and gouges in the sandy soil. But the trail ahead was almost completely clear of tracer changes.

  Because of the violent storm? Jonah wondered. Or . . . because of the branch that Andrea and Katherine and I were dragging behind the tracer boys?

  Jonah watched the tracer boy in front of him trample a clump of grasses. A crumpled tracer version of the grasses instantly appeared. Jonah purposely dodged it.

  Dare stepped on the grasses instead, tamping them down in the exact same pattern as their tracers.

  Jonah found that unless he concentrated very hard, he automatically walked in the exact same footsteps as the tracer boy in front of him, erasing almost all of his tracer prints. Or the dog did it for him. And even though the tracer boy was barefoot and Jonah was wearing sneakers—and the dog had paws—they all seemed to leave very similar markings on the trail. It happened again and again, the boy creating a tracer, Jonah or the dog erasing it.

  Weird, weird, weird, Jonah thought. Is it time making me do that, healing itself? Or is this part of Second’s plot too?

  It was so frustrating not to know. He wished he’d paid more attention to the habits of tracer objects the last time, in the fifteenth century. But they really were hard to see. And there hadn’t been so many of them then. They hadn’t seemed so . . . threatening.

  Time is so much more messed-up here, Jonah thought, shivering despite the bright sunlight.

  Jonah forced himself to catch up with the tracer boy.

  “You know, it’d be nice if it turned out that you were going off to talk to your girlfriend, who’s babysitting a little three-year-old girl named Virginia,” Jonah muttered. But John White had said, Please find it, I beg of you—it, not her. Jonah didn’t have any hope that things could end so easily.

  The tracer boy turned and stared directly at Jonah. He couldn’t have heard Jonah, but it was unnerving how the tracer was looking toward Jonah so coldly, so calculatingly. In a split second the boy had an arrow out of his pouch and lodged against his bow. A split second later, the arrow was zinging toward Jonah.

  Jonah threw himself at the ground. He lay there for only an instant—his heart pounding, his shoulder throbbing from the impact—before he rolled to the right, just in case the boy was already loading again, aiming again.

  Why is he shooting at me? He’s not suppose
d to be able to see me!

  Dare raced toward Jonah, barking furiously. Jonah smashed into thick grasses and dared to look up. Off in the distance, some sort of bird—a duck? a goose?—was rising into the sky, squawking its protest against Dare’s barking. And, slightly behind it, the bird’s tracer rose like a shadow, its wings flapping just as frantically, its beak opening and closing just as angrily. Only, the tracer couldn’t have been bothered by the barking. It was protesting . . .

  Being shot at, Jonah realized. The boy was shooting at the bird, not at me.

  Jonah’s heartbeat slowed slightly; his tensed muscles slipped out of panic mode. He rolled his head to the side so he could see the tracer boy, who might right that minute be putting another arrow against his bow and aiming for some tracer groundhog or beaver waddling near Jonah.

  But not at me, Jonah thought, hoping to calm down his reflexes. The tracer can’t shoot me. Even if he did, the tracer arrows can’t hurt me. Got it?

  But when Jonah looked up at the tracer boy, he wasn’t slipping another arrow into his bow. He was letting his bow slip to the ground, his shoulders slumped.

  The tracers are worried about food too, Jonah thought.

  Jonah sat up, studying the tracer more carefully. This was the one with the longer, curly hair. It was hard to tell skin color with a see-through tracer, but Jonah didn’t think this boy’s skin would be much darker than Jonah’s with a tan. The boy’s nose and lips were narrow; his eyes would have been round if he hadn’t squeezed them into such dejected-looking slits.

  “I guess you could be English,” Jonah muttered. “Are you one of the lost colonists?”

  But then, why was he dressed like an Indian? What had happened to all the other English colonists if he was the only one left? And why was this boy hanging out with the other tracer, the one Andrea was so sure had come from Africa?

  Jonah shook his head, trying to shake away the questions. At the same time, the tracer boy shook his head and slung his bow over his shoulder again. Dare whimpered.

  “Come on, boy,” Jonah told the dog, almost forgetting that he suspected him of being a decoy or a spy. “We’re going on.”

  The dog stayed a few steps behind Jonah and the tracer the rest of the way. Maybe the bow and arrow had spooked him, too; maybe he was afraid that Jonah would suddenly throw himself to the ground once more. But Jonah found himself trying to stay as close as possible to the tracer boy. It was a shame Jonah couldn’t hear the tracer’s thoughts just by stepping into his space. Several times the boy stopped and Jonah walked right into him, his knees raised at the same height as the boy’s knees, his arms swinging at the same angle.

  To understand another man, you must walk a mile in his moccasins, Jonah thought, remembering a phrase an old scoutmaster had been fond of—a phrase that Jonah and his friends had laughed at so hard that one of his friends had even peed in his pants during a campout years ago. Even now (well, now in Jonah’s regular time), all someone had to do was whisper, “moccasins” during a flag-raising or some other supposedly solemn ceremony, and the whole troop would instantly be fighting giggles.

  But walking where the tracer boy walked, and following his gaze whenever he turned his head, Jonah could tell: The boy was hunting. Hunting without much hope that he’d find something.

  “So there’s not enough food on this island, not even for just two boys,” Jonah whispered. “So why are the two of you here?”

  It was just another layer of mystery: Why were the tracer boys on Roanoke Island? Where were their real versions? Why didn’t John White’s return to Roanoke match up with history? What was wrong with him and his tracer? Where was Andrea’s tracer? Why had Second wanted to send Andrea someplace apart from her tracer? Who was Second anyway?

  Before Jonah ran out of questions—or came up with a single answer—they reached the shoreline and the tracer boy went to stand on a small spit of land jutting out into the water. Jonah thought maybe it was the same spot where Katherine had stood yesterday to throw the branch out into the water. But he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t exactly had time for sightseeing before.

  The tracer boy stood gazing out at the choppy waves. He put his hand against his brow to shield his eyes against the sun and turned slowly, methodically scanning the water before him. Jonah did the same. But Jonah was done in about three seconds—yep, there’s a lot of water out there. And maybe a bit of land out there to the right—too far away to really see without binoculars. Meanwhile, the boy was still staring, as if each square inch of water was more fascinating than the last. Once he finished studying the water, he shifted to peering out along the coastline just as thoroughly.

  Suddenly the boy’s mouth opened and closed—if Jonah had had to guess, he would have speculated that the boy had said something like, “There it is!” The boy jumped down from the outcropping of land and began to run along the shore. Dare barked at the unexpected movement.

  “Okay, okay—ssh!” Jonah hissed at the dog. Jonah took off after the tracer boy.

  Debris from the storm had washed up onto the shore, so Jonah had to dodge dead jellyfish, spiky shells, and, here and there, splintered scraps of wood.

  From John White’s boat? Jonah wondered. It was frightening how small the wood fragments were, how thoroughly the wind and water had smashed them to bits.

  The tracer boy was several steps ahead of Jonah; now he stopped and bent down among some rocks. He seemed to be searching frantically along the water’s edge, all but ignoring the waves that slapped against his bare legs.

  If he’s going to this much effort just to find a single crab or a single clam, I give up, Jonah thought.

  Suddenly the tracer boy rose up, hoisting a tracer version of a rectangular box onto his shoulders.

  No, not a box, Jonah corrected himself. A chest. A treasure chest?

  Jonah scrambled over the rocks, hoping he could get to the real chest before the tracer boy moved away. As far as Jonah was concerned, one rock looked pretty much like any other. Without the tracer boy standing there, Jonah might have to search for a long, long time.

  The tracer boy stepped to the next rock, the tracer chest balanced on his shoulder. It was that other rock where he bent down and found the chest, Jonah thought, the rock shaped like a witch’s nose. . . . The tracer boy was walking faster now. He was three rocks away. Jonah crouched low and dived forward, straight through the tracer boy.

  The witch-nose rock was hard, with razor-sharp edges.

  “Note to self,” Jonah mumbled. “Don’t tackle rocks.”

  He’d scraped both the palm of his right hand and his right knee—ripping right through his blue jeans. And, for the first time, Jonah realized that his dive might have been for nothing: What if some time change affected the chest, too, and the real one isn’t here? he wondered.

  But it was right there at the base of the witch-nose rock. Waves still slapped against the lower half of the chest, but it was wedged in so tightly that it wasn’t being battered like the boards from the boat.

  Jonah reached down and tugged on the handles. Once again, Jonah was in awe of the tracer boy’s strength: Jonah had to tug so hard, and the tracer boy had picked up the chest as if it was nothing.

  Maybe it wasn’t wedged in as tightly, in original time, Jonah rationalized.

  Grunting, he managed to free the chest from between the rocks and drag it up to more level, dry ground. The chest was fairly small—not much bigger than Jonah’s backpack for school. Jonah turned it on its side and started trying to figure out its latch.

  Dare began barking.

  “Don’t worry, boy, if it’s a million dollars’ worth of gold coins, I’ll share,” Jonah muttered. “Or if it’s the clue to solving all our mysteries, you’ll get to go home too.”

  Dare kept barking.

  “Okay, okay—what?” Jonah looked up.

  Dare was twisting back and forth between Jonah and the tracer boy. But the tracer boy was barely visible now. He hadn’t stopped to look at what was in
the chest. He was just carrying it away, back toward the Indian village. Only his head and the tracer chest on his shoulder showed above the tall grasses.

  “Never mind,” Jonah told the dog. “We can find our way back on our own.”

  Dare whined and tilted his head to the side, as if he didn’t trust Jonah’s sense of direction. Or, as if he wanted Jonah to picture how worried Katherine and Andrea would be if the tracer boy showed up back in the village and Jonah was nowhere in sight.

  Jonah fiddled for a moment longer with the latch, which was made of some sort of ornate metal. But he couldn’t really focus anymore. His hands shook.

  “All right,” Jonah told Dare. “Since you miss the girls so much . . .”

  Jonah lifted the chest and stepped to the next rock. At first he tried to hold the chest in front of him, by both handles. But that made it hard to walk. His legs kept hitting the chest.

  Jonah glanced ahead at the tracer boy, at how effortlessly he carried his tracer chest.

  When in Rome . . . , Jonah thought, one of his mother’s expressions. Only, here would it be, When on Roanoke Island, do what the fake Indians do?

  With difficulty, Jonah managed to raise the chest to the level of his shoulder and slide it into position. He staggered forward.

  “Really, I am in good shape,” Jonah told the dog. “I play soccer. And basketball.”

  His arms were going numb from holding the chest up so high.

  In the end, Jonah found he had to drag the chest most of the way, just to keep up with the tracer boy. He didn’t even look at the ridges he made in the sandy soil. He kept himself going by imagining exactly what sort of treasure might be inside. Gold coins actually wouldn’t be very useful right now—maybe the chest contained food that John White had brought from England.

  Surely the trunk was watertight enough that the food wouldn’t have been ruined? Surely, if there was food in both the tracer and real versions of the trunk, that would mean it was safe to eat?