Sabotaged

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Jonah was afraid he might begin drooling, thinking of this possibility.

  Maybe the chest contained weapons meant for hunting food: knives, compact bows and arrows.

  Maybe Jonah was adapting to this time period a little too well: He was actually hoping for weapons instead of gold.

  The tracer boy entered the Indian village with the bearing of a warrior coming home from a great victory. A few steps behind, Jonah decided the least he could do was put the chest back on his shoulder before he walked into the village. He stumbled into the clearing on the tracer boy’s heels.

  “Oh, no, Jonah, what happened to you?” Andrea gasped.

  Jonah looked down. Beneath the torn place in his jeans, his knee was caked with dried blood. He had scrapes from the rocks on his arms, as well as his hands. He put on a grin, hoping he just looked like some battered action hero at the end of a movie. Indiana Jones, maybe. Or Jason Bourne.

  “I found a treasure chest,” Jonah offered. “It was a little rough, getting to it.”

  He hoped Andrea and Katherine didn’t notice that the tracer boy wasn’t so battered.

  “You think John White really was doing some of that privateering himself?” Jonah asked, to distract them. “Stealing Spanish gold?”

  “No, no, not him,” Andrea said, wincing. “It couldn’t be. . . .”

  The tracer boy was placing the tracer chest down on the ground, in front of John White. Jonah was surprised to see that the real man was completely joined with his tracer—both men were sleeping. But the second tracer boy was shaking the tracer man awake.

  “Quick—put the real chest where the tracer chest is,” Andrea said. “So my grandfather won’t be confused if . . .”

  “Quick”? Jonah thought. Do you know how heavy this is?

  But he managed to drop the chest onto the ground in roughly the proper location. The chest didn’t join completely with its tracer; it didn’t shift into position the way a person would have.

  Or, like a person should, Jonah thought.

  Katherine nudged the real chest into place, exactly lined up with the tracer.

  “Just in case,” she muttered. “At least we can do that much to fix time.”

  Andrea crouched down in the same spot as the tracer boy. She began jostling her grandfather’s shoulder the same way, too.

  “Wake up,” she whispered in his ear. “Oh, please, wake up!”

  Jonah looked at Katherine. She shook her head.

  “He’s been asleep the whole time,” she said. “That’s better for us, but . . . it’s breaking Andrea’s heart.”

  Andrea was shaking her grandfather’s shoulder harder and harder.

  “Andrea, you’re going to hurt him!” Jonah said sharply.

  Andrea let go and slumped down to the ground. She put her head in her hands.

  “Why doesn’t anything work?” she moaned. “The food pellet didn’t hurt me, so I gave him the food. I gave him water. I cleaned his wound again—he should be healing! He should be awake!”

  Katherine moved over and gently put her arm around Andrea’s shoulder.

  Hey! I could have done that! Jonah thought. He remembered how he’d vowed, way back at the beginning, to take care of Andrea. He hadn’t realized how complicated that would be. He was glad that Katherine seemed to know what to do.

  “Let’s just watch,” Katherine said softly. “See what happens.”

  The tracer version of John White was awake now. Jonah found that it really bothered him to look at the old man’s face, with the eerie staring eyes superimposed over the closed eyelids.

  “Open it,” John White whispered, the tracer and the real man together. And then the tracer sat up, his upper half separating from the real man. Jonah winced—that didn’t look right either. But then he got distracted, watching the tracer.

  The tracer John White was still talking, though Jonah couldn’t hear him anymore. He gestured, clearly giving directions for exactly how to open the chest. The boy who’d found it was crouched by the chest, his hands on the latch.

  “We might as well see what’s inside too,” Jonah said, trying to sound casual, as if he was used to half tracers giving ghostly instructions.

  He put his hands in the exact same position as the tracer boy’s and mimicked every movement. When the boy finally raised the lid, Jonah had to push a little harder. He hoped neither of the girls noticed how much it strained his muscles.

  “So what’s in there?” Katherine asked. “Andrea’s family fortune?”

  The tracer boy was already lifting the first item out of the chest. Jonah looked at it, did a double take, and then glanced down into the open chest.

  “Paintbrushes?” Jonah said in disbelief. “Who bothers carrying art supplies halfway around the world?”

  “John White did,” Andrea said quietly, pride in her voice. “He was an artist. Is. That was his job on all his trips to Roanoke Island. He was supposed to record views of the local people, the local plants and animals. To get more people to come here. And just to show what everything was like.”

  “Let me guess,” Katherine said. “Nobody had invented cameras yet?”

  Andrea shook her head.

  “John White has been widely praised in modern times for his sympathetic depiction of Native Americans,” she said, as if quoting. “It’s a tragedy that so little of his work survived.”

  Jonah shook his head. Art supplies! Whatever happened to going back to England for everything the colonists needed? Like . . . food? And whoever heard of an artist also being a governor? Were the English trying to make their colony fail?

  The tracer boys were pulling other things out of the chest, so Jonah did the same. Quill pens. Little jars that must have contained inks and paints. Tablets of blank paper. Tablets full of pictures.

  The papers and jars were wrapped in cloth—no, it was clothing: another shirt just like the one John White was already wearing and two dresses that seemed to amaze the tracer boys.

  “I bet he was bringing those for Eleanor,” Andrea murmured.

  The tracer boys held the dresses up against their own chests and laughed, just like the football players at school who had dressed up like cheerleaders for Halloween.

  “Oh, grow up!” Katherine muttered.

  John White’s tracer must have said something similar, because the tracer boys quickly put the dresses back into the chest. At the old man’s direction, they picked up a tablet instead and began looking through the pictures. John White waved his arm, apparently telling the boys, Turn the page, turn the page, that’s not, the picture I want to show you. . . . Jonah pulled the real version of the same tablet out of the chest, so he could turn pages along with the tracer boys.

  On the first page was a drawing of an Indian village with huts made of curved branches. Jonah looked at the picture, then glanced the disheveled huts around him.

  “Do you think . . . It’s a drawing of this village we’re sitting in right now, isn’t it?” he asked, holding up the page so Andrea and Katherine could see.

  “Yes,” Andrea whispered. “Except . . . everything’s in good shape. And there are people.”

  The drawing was actually full of people. Indians—dancing, cooking, laughing, harvesting healthy-looking corn . . . They practically jumped off the page, they looked so alive. Jonah could see on their faces how happy they were, how proud they were of their thriving village.

  Where had they gone? What had happened to them?

  The tracer boys were holding the tracer tablet out to John White, pointing to a particular picture. Jonah could practically hear them asking, “Do you mean this one?”

  John White’s tracer nodded vigorously, tears glistening in his eyes.

  Jonah glanced at the picture the tracer boys held up and quickly flipped through his tablet until he located the same drawing.

  It was a woman holding a tiny baby tightly wrapped in a blanket. The woman’s hair was pulled back from her face rather severely, but her eyes shone with love.<
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  At the bottom of the page were the words Eleanor and Virginia.

  Katherine gently touched the woman’s face in the picture.

  “She looks a lot like you, Andrea,” Katherine murmured. “I didn’t notice when JB was showing us that DVD . . . or whatever that was.” She laughed a little, an embarrassed-sounding snort. “But she’d just given birth then. Maybe women don’t look like themselves when they’ve just given birth.”

  Jonah wasn’t going to comment about that. He peered down at the picture: It was definitely the woman from the scene JB had shown them. And she did look like Andrea or like what Andrea could look like in ten or fifteen years.

  He looked over at Andrea, wanting to compare. But Andrea had turned her face to the side.

  Meanwhile, the tracers were still conferring over the picture. Both tracer boys were shaking their heads, shrugging apologetically. Disappointment clouded the face of John White’s tracer.

  It was so clear what each of the tracers had been saying. John White had been asking if the tracer boys had ever seen his daughter and granddaughter, if they knew where his family was.

  The tracer boys had said no.

  John White’s tracer swallowed hard, struggling to regain his composure. He weakly lifted his arm and swiped it through the air, telling the boys to turn the page again.

  The next picture—which Jonah turned to in the real version of the tablet as well—was of an Indian. He stood proudly, posing with his chin held high. He was wearing nothing but a loincloth, unless you counted the tattoos on his chests and the feathers in his hair. The word at the bottom of this page was Manteo.

  “Manteo was the Indian who got along with the English the best,” Andrea said. “Do you think these boys know him? That might be a clue!”

  But the tracer boys were already shaking their heads. John White’s tracer grimaced and lowered his head into his hands.

  “No, no—don’t give up!” Andrea exploded. “I’m here! Look at me!” She waved her hands in front of the tracer’s face, but of course he looked right through her. She dived through the tracer and grabbed the real man by the shoulders.

  “Why can’t you see me?” she shouted. “Why can’t you hear me? Why don’t you know I’m here?”

  “Andrea,” Katherine said softly. “I don’t think—”

  But Andrea had stopped yelling. A horrified expression was spreading over her face.

  “Look at him,” she mumbles. “Without his tracer he looks . . . he looks . . .”

  Awful was the word that jumped into Jonah’s mind. Without his tracer, John White was ghostly pale, but with beads of sweat trickling down into his hair. His cheeks were sunken, the hollows almost an ashy gray.

  “He looks like he’s going to die,” Andrea whispered. “Quick! Help me put him back with his tracer!”

  But just as she started to tug on his shoulder—before Jonah had a chance to even think whether that was the right thing to do—John White’s tracer lay back down, rejoining the real man completely, even down to the closed eyes. Was the tracer giving up?

  No. He was still struggling to speak, even as he seemed to be slipping toward unconsciousness.

  “Please,” John White said, the tracer and the man talking as one now that they were back together, thinking alike. “Please take me to Croatoan then. Canst thou take me to Croatoan Island?”

  Jonah glanced up just in time to see the tracer boys nodding their heads yes.

  “That’s it!” Andrea exclaimed. A smile spread across her face, instantly hiding the anguish. “That’s how everything is supposed to work! I understand now! We’ll all go to Croatoan, and that’s where we’ll find my tracer! It makes sense, if that’s where the Roanoke colonists went. And when I’m with my tracer, my grandfather will be able to see me. . . . He’ll be whole again; there won’t be anything throwing him off. . . .”

  She bent down and hugged her grandfather’s shoulders. The real version of the man flinched and she sat back.

  “Andrea, remember, your tracer will be a three-year-old,” Jonah cautioned. “When you join with your tracer, you’ll have to go back to being a preschooler again—not that they probably had preschool in this time period.”

  Andrea’s smile trembled slightly, but she replied evenly, “I don’t care. It’d be worth it, being a little kid again, if that’s how things are supposed to work for my grandfather to see me.”

  How things are supposed to work, Jonah thought, a little dizzily. It wasn’t just the lack of food that was making his head spin. Was this what JB would want for them? Was this the way to fix time and rescue Andrea? Or was this another setup?

  “What if this is just part of Second’s plot for us?” he asked. “You said in original time, John White never made it to Croatoan Island. He never saw you or anyone else from his family again!”

  “But they’re taking him!” Andrea said, pointing. Already, one of the tracer boys was bending down, as if preparing to carry John White away. “The historical accounts that I read were wrong about other things—they must be wrong about this, too!”

  “Or Second is tampering with time again,” Jonah said darkly. “Tricking us . . .”

  “How could he?” Katherine said. “Andrea’s right—if the tracers are taking John White to Croatoan, that’s how original time went. Tracers are always right—er—accurate, I mean. They have to show how time really went.”

  Jonah squinted at the girls.

  “How did John White know to ask to go to Croatoan?” Jonah asked. “He hasn’t even been to his old colony yet, to see the word carved in wood.”

  “Maybe he was actually leaving Roanoke Island when his rowboat broke up, and we rescued him?” Katherine suggested. “Maybe he was here two days ago, went back to his ship, and then came to Roanoke again only because the ship was wrecked?”

  “None of that’s what history says,” Jonah said stubbornly.

  “But this is what time says is supposed to happen,” Katherine said, gesturing toward the tracers.

  “You want to make time go right, don’t you?” Andrea asked softly. “Don’t you think we should go to Croatoan with the tracers?” She was looking at Jonah, not Katherine. And, for that matter, Katherine was looking at Jonah. Both of them were waiting to see what he had to say. He thought about making a dumb joke: Hey, America isn’t a democracy yet. You don’t have to wait for my vote! But they were all in this together. Andrea and Katherine did need to hear Jonah’s vote.

  Jonah frowned, trying to think through everything.

  “I guess you’re right,” he finally said. “Nobody was at the Roanoke village, and we saw the word Croatoan with our own eyes, so we know that part of the story’s true. And if all the tracers are going to Croatoan Island and that’s where Andrea’s tracer probably is . . . what good would it do to stay here?”

  “Exactly!” Andrea said, grinning.

  Jonah tried to keep himself from noticing once again how pretty Andrea looked when she was happy. He wanted to be able to think clearly. He wanted to be able to analyze this new development for ulterior motives or secret behind-the-scenes plans by Second. Could things really fall into place this way? Or . . . was there more reason than ever to be suspicious?

  “If we’re going to keep up with the tracers, we’d better get moving,” Katherine said.

  While one tracer boy crouched beside John White, the other was pouring water on the site of their fire from the night before. Then he went toward a hut at the far end of the village, at a distance from all the others.

  “I’ll go see what he’s up to,” Jonah volunteered.

  He reached the hut just as the tracer boy began putting strips of dried meat into a deerskin bag.

  Venison jerky from that deer they killed? Jonah wondered. But where did they dry it?

  The tracer boy poured water on the floor of this hut too. For the first time, Jonah noticed that there had been a tracer fire going here as well.

  Oh, this is a smokehouse. . . . They must have
come straight here and started the fire right after they shot the deer, before they went to the beach and rescued John White, Jonah realized. They could have been getting up every few hours through the night, to turn the meat.

  It bothered him that he hadn’t noticed any of that—he hadn’t even thought to wonder about where they’d cooked their meat.

  What else am I missing? Jonah wondered. What else am I just not paying attention to?

  He realized he hadn’t looked into all the huts in the village the day before—or since, even after he discovered the melon with the message from Second.

  “I really don’t want any more messages from that guy,” he muttered.

  But as he walked back toward Katherine and Andrea and John White, he poked his head into every hut along the way. All of them were empty and dark, their dirt floors bare except for the occasional unhealthy-looking plant. The melon plant in the broken-roofed hut looked like it was thriving, by comparison. Jonah glanced into that hut quickly . . . and then stopped.

  There on the floor, nestled among the melon leaves, were two jars. Jonah bent over and picked them up.

  They left no tracers.

  And they each had the same words engraved on their stoppers:

  With my compliments.

  —Second

  “What’s this? Ketchup and mustard for the little food pellets?” Jonah muttered.

  He pulled the cork out of one of the jars and got a whiff of the thick purplish liquid—it was paint.

  In fact, the jars were identical to the ones in John White’s trunk.

  “You have a really sick sense of humor, Mr. Second,” Jonah murmured. “Given everything we don’t have—all the answers we don’t have—and you just send us more paint?”

  “Jonah! What are you doing? Come on!” Katherine called from outside the hut. “The tracer boys are leaving!”

  Jonah came out of the hut waving the jars of paint.

  “Look what else Second left for us,” he said. “‘With my compliments,’ he says. I say we take a stand: Second, we don’t want your stupid presents!”