Sabotaged

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Jonah decided this wasn’t one of those times when precise numbers mattered.

  The tracer version of the canoe was starting to break away again—not in a straight line, but off at an odd angle, swinging wildly back and forth. No, it was the real canoe that was swinging so wildly, as if paddled by maniacs.

  In the front of the real canoe, in the spot where Jonah had sat only moments earlier, was a boy with short dark hair and pierced ears and a T-shirt that said, Sarcasm—just one of my specialties. The boy was staring down at the paddle in his hand with a baffled expression on his face.

  From the back of the canoe, Andrea was yelling at the Sarcasm boy, “Keep paddling! We’ll explain everything later. But for now—keep paddling!”

  Jonah hoped Andrea would be able to explain everything to him later too.

  When she wasn’t yelling at the boy at the front of the boat, Andrea was arguing with a boy—or was it two different boys?—sitting practically on top of her. Jonah blinked and squinted, trying to correct the double vision. The boy he could see now, like the one he thought he’d seen only a moment before, had dark skin. His hair was cut quite close to his head, almost shaved, and he wore a Beatles T-shirt. Jonah blinked again, and suddenly that boy was gone, replaced by the other boy. This boy was naked from the waist up—the only part Jonah could see—and his hair was cut in a strangely familiar style.

  Oh, yeah. He looks like one of those tracers we’ve been following around. . . .

  While Jonah watched, the back end of the canoe lurched to the side, and Beatles T-shirt boy was back, with only the tracer version of naked-chest boy beside him.

  “No, no, you’ve got to paddle exactly the same way as your tracer!” Andrea screamed. “You’ve got to sit in the same place! You’ve got to keep it together so I can go help that guy in the front!”

  She shoved the boy to the right—an amazing feat, since he was taller and bigger than she was. And then she wrapped her hands around the boy’s hands on the paddle and plunged it into the water, trying to pull the canoe back into place, lined up with its tracer. And . . . to pull the boys into their places, lined up with their tracers?

  That’s who those boys are, who appeared out of nowhere, Jonah thought, his brain finally starting to catch up. Sarcasm T-shirt boy and Beatles T-shirt boy—they’re the real versions of our tracer buddies, the fake Indians.

  Jonah did nothing but tread water for a few seconds, basking in the glow of actually having figured something out. He refused to let any more questions into his mind—certainly not any of the disturbing, unanswerable questions that threatened to creep in.

  “Jonah, would you stop goofing off out there?” Katherine screamed. “We need your help!”

  Oh, so she wasn’t interested just in saving his life? She wanted him to solve all the problems with the canoe?

  “Katherine, you go to the front and paddle!” Andrea yelled. “We’re losing the tracers!”

  “Not until we rescue Jonah!” Katherine screamed back.

  Okay, so maybe she did care about saving Jonah’s life.

  Did Andrea care so little that she was willing to leave him behind?

  Jonah slipped slightly lower in the water, his cramped legs shooting with pain, his exhausted arm muscles barely compensating. The water was over his chin and mouth now; he had to tilt his head slightly to keep his nose above the waterline. For the first time in his life, he could understand how someone who knew how to swim might drown anyway.

  “Jonah, swim!” Katherine commanded. “Stop treading water and swim!”

  Treading water was easier—and he was so tired—but Jonah obediently launched his body toward the canoe. His flutter kick did nothing—how about a frog kick? Scissors kick? Butterfly kick?

  It turned out that Jonah was worthless at everything right now except a modified dog paddle. Still, he struggled forward. Katherine leaned dangerously over the side of the canoe, holding out her hand.

  “Don’t tip us over!” Andrea hollered, real panic in her voice.

  “Lean . . . other . . . way . . . ,” Jonah panted.

  Andrea and Katherine both leaned away from Jonah. Even Dare scrambled back as Jonah grabbed the side of the canoe and, with his last burst of energy, lunged up and over the edge.

  For a moment, everything seemed like it could go in any direction. Jonah could pull too hard, tipping the canoe toward him. The girls could lean too far the other way and overturn the canoe in the opposite direction. For all Jonah knew, a hundred more boys could suddenly land in the canoe out of nowhere, completely sinking it with their weight.

  But what happened was that Jonah landed inside the canoe, sprawled slightly on top of John White. The canoe rocked, Dare barked . . . and Jonah closed his eyes, completely spent.

  The canoe’s rocking settled into stillness.

  “Katherine,” Jonah heard Andrea say, softly.

  “I’ll paddle now,” Katherine said.

  Jonah was barely aware of anything for a while after that. The canoe sped forward, but it was like gliding now, smooth and seemingly effortless. Effortless for Jonah, anyway—he had no effort left in him.

  Once he thought he heard Katherine say, “Oh, so that’s what the rake is for,” and then he thought something wet and slimy hit his ankle. But he might have been dreaming. He was dreaming a lot. He dreamed that he was at Boy Scout camp, and there were four new water sports instructors, some guys named John, Paul, Ringo, and George. Jonah thought they looked kind of familiar.

  He dreamed that he was in art class in school, and the teacher, Mr. Takanawa, was announcing that they would draw nothing but Native Americans for the rest of the year.

  He dreamed that he was at a fish fry, and the air was full of the smell of smoke and cooked fish. And even though Jonah was starving, he couldn’t make himself wake up to eat. But Katherine was shaking his shoulders, and she wouldn’t give up. She just kept shaking and shaking and shaking, and her “Jonah, wake up! Jonah, wake up!” kept getting louder and louder and louder. . . .

  Wait. That dream wasn’t a dream. It was real.

  Jonah managed to open his eyelids a crack.

  “Finally!” Katherine exploded. “You were starting to scare us!”

  “Huh?” Jonah mumbled. He’d been asleep—how was that scary?

  He forced his eyes open a little wider. He was still in the canoe, but he had it completely to himself now. And, unless Katherine had magically developed the ability to sit on water, the canoe wasn’t floating anymore, but resting on land.

  Weakly, Jonah propped himself up on his arms, and saw that they were on a sandy beach, the canoe pulled carefully above the high tide mark.

  “Croatoan?” Jonah mumbled. “Is this Croatoan Island?”

  “We’re not there yet,” Katherine said. “We . . .” She stopped and bit her lip. Then she tried again, in an overly cheerful voice. “We’re just making a stop along the way.”

  Jonah nodded, too dazed to analyze the reason she’d bitten her lip, the reason she’d stopped herself from telling him something. He squinted, trying to bring his vision into focus, to look past Katherine. A few yards away, Andrea and Dare sat near a crackling fire with John White and the tracer boys.

  No, Jonah corrected himself. They’re not tracers now. They’re real—the tracers and the real versions of the boys joined once more.

  If Jonah squinted really hard, he could make out the slightest hint of a Sarcasm T-shirt and shorter hair on one boy, a Beatles T-shirt and cropped hair on the other.

  “Brendan and Antonio,” Katherine said. “That’s their names. Well, their twenty-first-century names. They have Indian names too.”

  “I thought they weren’t Indians,” Jonah muttered. He peered over at the two boys again. If they were going to fit into Jonah’s notion of Indians, one’s skin seemed too dark; the other’s, too light. And in both cases, Jonah thought their hair was wrong for Native Americans.

  On the other hand, they both acted as if they felt completely c
omfortable walking around in nothing but loincloths.

  “Neither of them was born an Indian,” Katherine said. “But an Indian tribe adopted them both.” She grinned. “Kind of ironic, huh?”

  Jonah let his eyelids slip shut again. Maybe he wasn’t really ready to wake up. Not if it involved thinking about Indians who weren’t really Indians, and adoptions and . . . how had those boys just appeared out of nowhere, anyhow?

  Katherine jostled his shoulder.

  “Stop that!” she said. “You need to stay awake so you can eat.”

  “Eat?” Jonah mumbled, opening his eyes again. “Eat what?”

  “We were fishing in the canoe—well, mostly it was Brendan and Antonio,” Katherine said. “They were really good at it when they were with their tracers, you know, because their tracers knew what to do. Remember that paddle that looks like a rake?”

  “It’s a fishing rod?” Jonah asked.

  “More like a fish net,” Katherine said. “But close enough.”

  Jonah would have preferred, say, a cheeseburger and fries, but the fish really did smell good. And it wasn’t some suspicious pellet that had come from Second.

  “Come on,” Katherine said, tugging on Jonah’s arm.

  Jonah let her lead him toward the fire. He was surprised at how weak he still felt. Surely that wasn’t just from canoeing and treading water and swimming.

  I was tired before I fell out of the boat, he thought. But I didn’t feel this bad until that guy dropped on me . . . jumped up at me . . . tackled me. . . .

  Jonah’s brain still kept dodging away from thinking about that moment. He stumbled past the two boys, who were taking fish from a sort of improvised wooden rack by the fire. One by one, they placed the cooked fish on huge leaves—stand-ins for plates, Jonah guessed.

  “Uh, hey,” Jonah mumbled, because it seemed kind of rude not to say anything.

  Jonah thought he saw one of the boys separate from his tracer long enough to nod stiffly at him, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “That’s Brendan,” Katherine said. “He’s really nice. But he and Antonio are trying to stay with their tracers as much as they can, until they’re sure the tracers are just going to sit still for a while.”

  Something about the way she put that bothered Jonah, but his brain wasn’t working well enough yet for him to figure out why.

  The second boy—Antonio?—said something to Brendan just then, but Jonah didn’t really catch it. He couldn’t even tell if it was English or another language.

  “They’re speaking an Algonquian dialect,” Katherine said.

  “How’d you know that?” Jonah asked. Was this something else he should have learned in fifth-grade Social Studies?

  “They told me,” Katherine said. “We had a long time together out in that canoe.”

  Jonah noticed for the first time that Katherine’s face was sunburned and—he brought his hand to his face—his was too. He looked back over his shoulder and saw how low the sun was in the sky.

  “So we were in that canoe all day?” he asked. “I was asleep all day?”

  “Pretty much,” Katherine said. “Now do you see why we were worried?’

  Jonah shrugged this off. He didn’t want to seem too wimpy in front of two boys he didn’t even know. But how could he have slept all day?

  Antonio picked that moment to stand up and stretch, revealing perfect six-pack abs. This made Jonah feel even wimpier, since every muscle in his body felt rubbery and sore and pathetic. But Jonah wasn’t going to let the other boy see how intimidated he was. He gave the boy a hard look.

  Then he did a double take.

  “Wait a minute!” Jonah said. “I know you! Weren’t you wearing a sweatshirt with a skull on it? Back in the cave?”

  In the time cave, the day Jonah had learned that he was one of the missing children from history, there’d been a small subgroup of kids wearing skull sweatshirts. They’d gone out of their way to be rude to Jonah and Katherine; if he hadn’t had so much else to worry about, Jonah would have been afraid of them.

  Now the boy standing before Jonah seemed to quiver, his twenty-first-century self separating slightly from his fake-Indian self. Jonah could see just the hint of the Sarcasm T-shirt at the boy’s neckline, just the edge of a tracer at the back of the boy’s head.

  “Yeah—so?” Antonio growled. “What’s it to you?”

  Jonah recoiled. In his experience back home, that was the kind of thing bullies said right before they started looking around for someone to punch. Jonah had almost always taken comments like that as a cue to slip away, out of range of anyone’s fists.

  But that was before he’d survived the Middle Ages, before he’d defied time experts to rescue his friends, before he’d rescued a drowning man, before he’d stood on messed-up Roanoke Island yelling at Second.

  Jonah stepped closer to Antonio.

  “Then you’re a famous missing kid from history, like me and Andrea,” Jonah said. “Who are you, really? Why did JB send you back that way, like . . . right on top of us?” Jonah was proud he could force those words out, describing what had happened. “Didn’t JB know we were there? Does he know now? What are you guys supposed to be doing here?” Jonah’s brain still wasn’t exactly functioning normally, but he found he could come up with plenty of questions. A brilliant one occurred to him, one that made him almost stammer with excitement. “D-do you have an Elucidator with you? Can you let us talk to JB?”

  Katherine put a warning hand on Jonah’s arm.

  “Jonah, it wasn’t JB who sent Brendan and Antonio back in time,” she said.

  “Then—who—?”

  “Some guy named Second,” Antonio muttered. He narrowed his eyes and added tauntingly, “Know him?”

  “You’re working for Second?” Jonah said.

  He took one step closer to Antonio and would have punched him squarely in the jaw if Katherine hadn’t had her hand on Jonah’s arm. Katherine jerked his arm back and then quickly grabbed his other arm, before he could even think about getting a left-handed jab in instead.

  And Jonah was so embarrassingly weak that he couldn’t pull away from her.

  “Katherine, stop it!” he yelled.

  “No—you stop it!” Katherine yelled back. “You’re being an idiot! Antonio isn’t working for Second any more than we are! And neither is Brendan!”

  “How can you be so sure?” Jonah asked, struggling against her grasp.

  “Because I’ve been talking to them all day, while you were asleep,” Katherine said. “And then you wake up and Antonio says two or three words to you, and you think you know enough to start beating people up?”

  “It only took one word,” Jonah muttered. “Second.”

  “You are just like all the white men who come here, to our land,” Antonio said. “You start fighting and stealing and killing before you know anything.”

  Antonio had to separate even farther from his tracer to say this. Right as he was speaking, his tracer stepped completely away from him, carrying fish toward Andrea’s grandfather. Antonio stopped and clutched his head.

  “That was so weird!” he said. “It was like I was thinking with my own brain, but I was thinking the way my tracer would have. . . .”

  Jonah thought about saying, Yeah, buddy. You’re a white guy too. Did you ever think of that? Hasn’t your tracer ever looked in a mirror? And what did I steal or kill? But Katherine was glaring so intensely that Jonah decided he shouldn’t push things.

  “Let’s all just sit down and eat,” Andrea said anxiously. “Then we can figure everything out.”

  “Here,” Katherine said, thrusting a fish on a leaf into Jonah’s hands. “You’re just grumpy because you’re hungry.”

  That was exactly the kind of thing Jonah’s mother would have said. Jonah didn’t want to think about what his mom would have said if she’d seen him trying to punch someone. To distract himself, he looked down at his fish.

  The fish looked right back at him—or seemed t
o. Its little beady eye was still attached. So were all its scales and fins.

  “Don’t go asking for fish sticks instead,” Antonio said sneeringly.

  Jonah swallowed hard.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” he said.

  “I’m sure it’s delicious,” Katherine said faintly. She poked at her own fish and seemed relieved that it didn’t move. She looked as if she’d almost expected it to jump off the leaf, flop over to the water, and swim away.

  “But it’s not what you’re used to, right?” Brendan said. “Sorry. We were trying to stay with our tracers—we didn’t know how to cook the fish any other way but how they would cook it.” He expertly pulled away some bones and put a chunk of fish into his own mouth. “It really is good.”

  Again, there was something about the way Brendan talked about staying with his tracer that bothered Jonah. Jonah looked at Katherine, who shook her head warningly. Now, what did that mean?

  “At least they got a fire started,” Andrea said, taking a fish-on-a-leaf for herself and Dare, before going back to sit near her grandfather. “At least we don’t have to eat it raw.”

  I managed to get a fire started back on Roanoke Island, Jonah wanted to protest. These guys aren’t so great!

  But he wouldn’t have known to use the rakelike paddle to catch fish. He wouldn’t have known how to build the wooden rack that held the fish over the flames. He wouldn’t have known the way to Croatoan Island . . . assuming Brendan and Antonio did.

  Jonah took a bite of fish—it really was okay, as long as he didn’t think about it having a face. And as long as he spit out the bones. He chewed carefully and tried to think about how to ask all the questions churning in his mind without once again ending up on the brink of a fight with Antonio.

  “Are we close to Croatoan Island?” he finally said, trying to sound casual, even unconcerned. He looked around. They seemed to be in some sort of cove, sheltered from the water and wind. A thick woods started several feet behind them. “It feels like we’re a million miles away from anything. Like maybe nobody’s ever been here before.”

  Antonio snorted and separated from his tracer enough to say, “Shows what you know. People camp here all the time. You can tell, just by looking.” He pointed behind him, toward some vague indentations in the sand. “There was a war party over there, back in the spring.” He pointed to the right, to a darker patch of sand. “A smaller group camped there, but they’d had a good day of hunting, so they took up a lot of space.”