“It’s okay,” Katherine said gently, patting Andrea’s shoulder. “We understand.”
Andrea scooted away.
“But I dragged the two of you into this too,” she said.
“Well, no, actually JB and his projectionist did,” Jonah said, trying for a joking tone. He didn’t quite succeed. He tried again. “And don’t worry, it wasn’t like we expected to have fun, rescuing you from Virginia Dare’s life. Who knows? This might be a better adventure.”
Both of the girls frowned at him.
“But where are we?” Andrea asked. “When are we? We don’t know anything.”
“Yeah, we do,” Katherine said slowly. “We know you typed in the code exactly the way the man wanted you to. So—where we landed? That was exactly where he wanted us to land.”
All three kids looked back toward the woods they’d come through. The trees were almost eerily still. Jonah looked at the ruins around him: broken down, falling apart, deserted. Desolate.
But quiet, too, he told himself. Peaceful.
The place they’d landed in the 1400s had seemed quiet and peaceful, too, at first. Until the murderers showed up.
Would we have met some murderer looking for Virginia Dare if we’d gone where JB had wanted us to go? Jonah wondered. Or are we more likely to meet a murderer now? Is that what the mystery man wanted?
“I bet Gary and Hodge are behind all this,” Katherine said, pronouncing the names as if they left a bad taste in her mouth. “Somehow they got out of prison, or bribed someone from prison, or—”
“Gary and Hodge would have sent us to the future,” Jonah objected. “We know this is the past.”
“Do we know that?” Andrea asked plaintively. “For sure?”
Jonah felt bad for her: Now she was doubting everything. She looked so sad. And yet . . . even with the tears on her cheeks and the leaves in her hair and the forlorn expression on her face, she still looked better than Jonah felt. Healthier, anyway.
That was it. Another clue.
“Andrea?” he asked. “The time sickness. You didn’t have it very bad when we first got here, did you? The way you could jump up and run right away . . .”
Andrea considered this.
“You’re right,” she said. “I wasn’t paying attention when you were talking about this before, but . . . I don’t think I had any time sickness at all.”
“And how do you feel right now?” Jonah asked. He rushed to explain. “I don’t mean whether you’re happy or sad, or scared or not scared, but how do, like, your lungs feel? Your muscles?”
Andrea took a slow, experimental breath. She flexed her arms, stretched out, and touched her toes. She seemed to be concentrating hard.
“They feel . . . good,” she said, sounding surprised. “Maybe better than they’ve ever felt before. They feel right. When we landed, I thought I just felt so good because I was going to see my parents again. But now . . . it’s like my body still thinks everything is how it’s supposed to be.”
Jonah looked at Katherine.
“Chip and Alex felt ‘right’ in 1483, too,” Jonah said.
Katherine nodded.
“You mean the friends you helped before?” Andrea asked. “This is how they felt?”
“JB said that’s how people always feel in their proper time,” Katherine said. “And it makes sense. I felt kind of off the whole time we were in the 1480s. And I haven’t really felt right since we got here. It’s not my time.”
“But it is mine,” Andrea whispered dazedly. She turned and traced the carved letters on the fallen fence before her. “This is the real Roanoke Colony, sometime before it all fades away into dust, sometime after I was born but before I’m supposed to . . . die.”
Jonah did not like the way that word lingered in the air.
“We are not going to let you die,” he said. It took a lot of effort, but he managed to stand up. He scanned the woods in every direction, as if he was Andrea’s bodyguard, watching out for her every minute. “We weren’t going to let you die if we’d ended up where JB wanted us to go, and we won’t let you die now. We’re going to figure out why that man sent us back here, and we’re going to fix whatever problem we have to fix, and then we’re going home. All of us. Together. Safe.”
Jonah couldn’t have said that Andrea looked completely reassured by that fervent speech—it didn’t help that his voice cracked in the middle of it.
But at least she didn’t say anything else about dying.
“How are we going to do all that?” she asked.
Jonah actually hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“Uh . . . ,” he began.
Katherine pushed herself up, so she was standing with Jonah.
“We’re going to start by following those tracers,” she said, pointing, even though it had been a while since the two ghostly boys had finished tying up their deer and slipped back into the trees.
“O-kay. If you say so. But . . . why?” Andrea asked.
“Because time travelers messed with them, or they wouldn’t exist,” Katherine said. “And some time traveler has definitely messed with us. So don’t you think we’ve got a lot in common?”
They set off into the deep woods on the other side of the clearing. Andrea and the dog didn’t run ahead this time, but stayed right beside Jonah and Katherine. All of them, even the dog, kept glancing around, peering ahead before every step, as if some unknown danger could be lurking behind every tree.
“Anyone traveling through time can create a tracer, right?” Andrea asked in a hushed voice, when they’d gone just a few steps. “You just have to knock someone off his normal path?”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. He was concentrating on trying to figure out which way the tracer boys had gone. Had it been this tree or that tree they’d stepped behind?
“Then couldn’t it have been us who created those tracers?” Andrea asked. “Like, if the real versions of those boys saw us fall from the sky, got scared, and ran away? That could have made tracers, couldn’t it?”
“Ergh. She’s right,” Katherine said, sagging against a tree.
“So following those tracers, maybe we’re like a dog chasing its own tail,” Andrea said.
Jonah wasn’t fully listening. He was watching the tree behind Katherine. It shook slightly, giving off a quick glow of tracer light before returning to normal. Clumps of pine needles showered to the ground, along with a few broken twigs. But the ghostly tracer versions of the pine needles and twigs remained on the tree.
Jonah turned around. The three of them had left an entire trail of tracer destruction behind them: dropped twigs, bent branches, scattered needles. . . . It was hard to notice unless you were looking for it, but now Jonah could see the exact path he and Katherine and Andrea had followed: careening to the right a bit to avoid a downed log, swerving to the left to avoid a cloud of gnats, some of which they’d killed, leaving behind tiny tracer dots.
Wish the tracer boys had left a trail like that, Jonah thought. Then he realized: They would have. Not because the tracers were time travelers, but because there was a ripple effect to disrupted time. Because the tracer boys weren’t really there, everything they weren’t there to do would have resulted in a tracer. It wasn’t just the deer they should have killed—it was also mosquitoes they would have swatted away, leaves they would have trampled underfoot, branches they would have bent back as they walked through the woods. And so the deer, the mosquitoes, the leaves, and the branches were all tracers now too—along with any objects the deer, the mosquitoes, and the branches should have affected.
And all of those things that were alive would glow.
Jonah squinted, peering all around. There—a line of glowing ants on the ground. There—a bird perched high overhead. There—a vine swung back out of the way. And there and there and there—dozens of glowing lights that Jonah had previously taken for glints of sunlight filtered through the trees or blurry glitches in his vision because of time sickness.
The
woods were full of tracers.
“We didn’t create those tracer boys,” Jonah whispered. “Or, if we did, there were other tracers here first.”
“Now, how could you know that?” Katherine asked mockingly.
“Because of that,” Jonah said, pointing to the glowing vine. “And that.” The line of ants. “And that.” The bird in the tree.
Katherine gasped and put her hand over her mouth, as if she’d just discovered the entire woods were radioactive.
“They’re—they’re everywhere,” Andrea whispered.
“Right,” Jonah said. “And how long do you think we’ve been here? Half an hour? An hour? No way could there be so many tracers created just in that time, just because of us.”
Katherine was still looking around, her eyes huge and dismayed.
“Something’s really, really wrong here,” she whispered. “That’s what this means.”
As they stood watching, a real bird landed right on top of the glowing tracer bird, melding completely. The glow instantly vanished. Now it was just an ordinary bird on an ordinary tree branch.
“Well, there,” Jonah said. “That’s one bit of time that’s been fixed.”
He didn’t want to admit how relieved he felt—or how much he wished all the other tracers glowing before him would go back to normal too.
“JB told me that people—and, I guess, animals, too—can’t see tracers unless they’ve traveled through time,” Andrea said. “How did that bird know its own tracer was there? How did it know to land in that exact spot?”
“Chip and Alex said they felt this almost magnetic pull to their tracers,” Katherine said. “The bird must have felt it too.”
“They why aren’t all the other tracers disappearing?” Andrea asked. “One by one, the lights blinking out, everything going back to normal . . .”
Jonah realized he was holding his breath, watching. The lights were not going out. If anything, their numbers were increasing: new pinpricks of light where insects were supposed to be flying, where seeds were supposed to be falling, where squirrels were supposed to be scampering.
“Something’s holding all those tracers in place,” Katherine whispered. “Something won’t let time go back the way it’s supposed to.”
“Is it—is it my fault?” Andrea stammered. “Did I ruin everything because I didn’t come back at the right time, at the exact moment that JB thought I should come back? Is this what happened when I messed up all those variables the projectionist set up so carefully?” She sniffled and waved her hand toward all the glowing remnants of tracer branches and vines and insects and ants. Her hand shook. “Does this mean I destroyed time forever?”
Jonah and Katherine exchanged glances. Jonah decided not to say, Shouldn’t you have thought of that before you changed the code on the Elucidator? But he didn’t know what to say instead.
“Well, no offense, Andrea, but how could you be that important?” Katherine asked, her voice gentler than her words. “You weren’t royalty, like Chip and Alex. You were just the first English kid born in North America, and then you disappeared. That’s all anybody knows about you.”
“Knew,” Jonah corrected automatically. “That’s all anybody knew about Virginia Dare in our time.”
Katherine glared at him.
Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. I guess I’m not helping her argument. But Jonah was working on a new idea, one he’d never thought of before.
And he thought it was important.
“Nobody knew what happened to Virginia Dare because nobody wrote down what happened to her the rest of her life,” he said. “Well, not that we know of. But once there was time travel—time travelers could have known every single thing she did, every moment of her life.”
Andrea was actually blushing now.
“And I bet you did something great,” Jonah said. “I bet that’s why it mattered so much that you had to be returned to time.”
Katherine’s glare had turned into the kind that could vaporize enemies.
“And—and—we’ll make sure you get to do that thing. Whatever it is,” Jonah finished lamely. “And whenever. We’ll get you to the right time. I promise.”
Andrea sniffed. If anything, she looked more discouraged than ever. She crossed her arms and clutched the sleeves of her T-shirt, as if she was desperate for something to hold on to.
“Maybe we should keep walking?” Katherine suggested.
Jonah started to turn back around, facing toward the greatest number of tracer lights. But Andrea, beside him, didn’t turn at the same time, the way he expected her to. He bumped against her.
“Sorry,” Jonah muttered.
Still clutching her sleeves, Andrea stared at him.
I said I was sorry, Jonah thought. What’s she waiting for?
“Oh!” she said, a baffled look traveling across her face. “Do that again. Wait a minute.” She bent down and picked up a small rock, holding it out slightly from her body. “Now.”
Puzzled but obedient, Jonah jostled her shoulder.
Andrea jerked back and forth, but tightened her grip on the rock. A second later, she crouched down and carefully put the rock back exactly as it had been before, eliminating its tracer. Then she straightened up.
“I was wrong,” she said. “It wasn’t Jonah’s fault that I lost the Elucidator.”
“Isn’t that what I said all along?” Jonah said indignantly.
Andrea nodded.
“You were right. I’m sorry. It was just the timing of things. . . . You bumped me right after I hit ENTER on the Elucidator, so I got confused about cause and effect.”
“You’re losing me,” Jonah said.
“There are different ways to lose things,” Andrea explained. “I didn’t think about how it felt different, until you bumped into me just now, when I was holding on to my sleeves. I didn’t let go. And I didn’t let go of the Elucidator when you ran into me the first time. It was me holding on, holding on—and then suddenly the Elucidator just wasn’t there.”
She collapsed her fingers against the palm of her hand, showing what it’d been like to clutch something that had vanished.
“So?” Katherine said, sounding as baffled as Jonah felt. “Why does it matter?”
“Because of the code,” Andrea said. “The code I typed in myself—that’s what made the Elucidator vanish. That man who came to visit me in secret? It wasn’t just that he wanted us to go to the wrong time. He really didn’t want us telling JB about it.”
“Well, duh,” Jonah said, completely frustrated now. “Because he knew JB would put us back in the right time! All that proves is that JB wasn’t your mystery man—and we already knew that!”
Andrea’s face fell.
“I thought that was something important,” she mumbled. “I thought I’d figured something out.”
Katherine put her arm around Andrea’s shoulder, somehow managing to pat Andrea’s back comfortingly while she fixed Jonah with an even more scorching glare.
“You did,” Katherine said. “Anything you think of is helpful.”
The two girls began walking again, easily following the trail of tracer lights leading them deeper and deeper into the woods.
Jonah glanced down at the dog waiting patiently beside him.
“Looks like you’re the only one who’s not mad at me now,” he muttered. He tugged on the dog’s collar. “Come on, boy.”
As they walked forward—exiled a few paces behind the girls—Jonah remembered how much he’d wanted to help Andrea from the beginning, how he’d vowed to take care of her.
How can good intentions get so messed up? he wondered.
Ahead of him, he could hear Katherine murmuring to Andrea, “Well, you know, teenage boys. They don’t always think before they speak. . . .”
Jonah tuned her out.
Hey, JB? He thought, because it would be comforting to have JB there to talk to. Why didn’t your brilliant projectionist predict that the mystery man would go visit Andrea? Why didn�
��t he see that we’d get sent to the wrong time and lose the Elucidator? Why couldn’t he forecast where we are now, so you can come and help us?
But Jonah didn’t know if that was really how the projections worked.
He did know that every minute that went by without JB showing up was a bigger and bigger sign that they were in trouble.
Around them, the tracer lights kept multiplying.
They came upon their second set of ruins in an absolute burst of tracer light.
“Ooh, lots of tracers have been here,” Katherine muttered, seeming to forget that she was too annoyed with Jonah to speak to him anymore. She pointed to tracer vines draped back from a clearing, tracer firewood stacked neatly beside a falling-down hut, still-standing tracer trees that evidently had been chopped down in original time.
“Or—the original two tracer boys have just been here a lot,” Jonah said, because he’d been working out something like a formula for tracers in his head. The absence of one action—say, a boy not slapping a mosquito—could lead to hundreds or thousands of new tracers. Mosquitoes reproduced really fast, didn’t they? So all the tracer lights Jonah had seen—that didn’t have to mean that time was completely messed up or that they were far off from the time they were supposed to be in.
Did it?
To Jonah’s surprise, Katherine didn’t grumble, Why do you always have to disagree? She just nodded and said, “You’re right. I didn’t think of that.”
Jonah figured that was the closest thing he was going to get to an apology for her nasty comments about teenage boys.
“Think this is an Indian village?” Andrea said, stepping out into the clearing.
“I think it was,” Katherine said, stepping up beside her.
Jonah thought about warning them to be careful, to make sure there were no real live human beings lurking nearby before they went any farther. But what was the point? With or without the glow of tracer lights, this village had clearly been abandoned a long time ago. Granted, it was in much better shape than the Roanoke Colony. Here, about a dozen huts made from curved branches circled an open space—possibly the equivalent of a town square. But many of the branches sagged toward the ground, and a few of the huts were more down than up.
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