Sabotaged

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

He tossed the jars back into the melon plant. They broke off several of the leaves, creating a line of tracer leaves.

  Katherine frowned at him.

  “No, wait,” she said. “We should take those along. Not leave behind any more time mess-ups than we have to, you know?”

  “All right, all right,” Jonah mumbled. He fished the jars back out of the melon leaves. He went over to the trunk and dropped them in with John White’s other art supplies.

  “I’m glad we’re getting away from this creepy island and that creepy hut and that creepy guy Second’s gifts,” Jonah said. Somehow, he was sure Croatoan Island would be different.

  “Some help?” Katherine muttered.

  Jonah realized that Katherine and Andrea were attempting to pull John White across the clearing, following the tracer boy carrying the old man’s tracer.

  “Oh, right. Sorry,” Jonah said.

  He rushed over to the girls. They had been trying to tug the old man by his armpits, but with all three of them working together, they were able to lift him up, almost into a standing position. John White’s head sagged forward; his legs dragged uselessly.

  “We’ve—got to—get him back with his tracer!” Andrea grunted.

  Ahead of them, the tracer boy placed John White’s tracer in the crook of the branch they’d carried him on the night before. Much less gracefully, Jonah, Katherine, and Andrea settled the real man into the same spot.

  “Now he looks so much better,” Andrea said.

  It was true. John White’s color instantly improved. The sweat beads disappeared from his face. And even though his eyes remained closed, his whole countenance looked more peaceful now.

  Does it really help John White that much to be with his tracer, like Andrea thinks? Jonah wondered. Or is it just that the tracer’s healthier, and that’s what we see?

  Dare began barking. The second tracer boy was carrying the tracer chest over to put on the branch beside John White.

  “Right. Don’t worry—I’m getting it, boy,” Jonah muttered.

  He was glad that Andrea and Katherine were looking down at John White and didn’t notice that Jonah just dragged the chest. No, now the girls were peering through the trees ahead of the branch. As Jonah heaved the chest onto the branch—almost splintering it—he realized that they were looking at a small sliver of water visible through the woods.

  “Do the tracers think this branch is going to float?” Andrea asked. “If we’re going to a whole different island . . .”

  Jonah hadn’t thought of that. There was too much to keep track of.

  “John White would fall off,” Katherine said. “He wouldn’t even make it across a puddle, if this was all he had holding him up.”

  “Surely . . . ,” Andrea began.

  She broke off because the one tracer boy was pushing the branch forward—all by himself.

  “Show-off,” Jonah muttered.

  The other boy was walking down toward the water.

  “We have to push too!” Andrea said. “We can’t let my grandfather get separated from his tracer!”

  It took all three of them heaving and shoving to get the branch lined up again with the tracer boy’s branch. Fortunately, from that point, there was a slight downhill tilt, so the main problem was controlling the branch’s slide.

  The next time Jonah looked up, they were at the water’s edge, and the second tracer boy was a few yards down the shore. He disappeared behind a tree. Then he reappeared on the water—in a tracer canoe.

  “Oh, there’s a canoe,” Jonah said. “That’s how it’s going to work.”

  He was a little annoyed with Andrea and Katherine for scaring him. Of course the tracer boys wouldn’t try to sail an old man and a treasure chest from one island to another on a splintery, unstable branch.

  Jonah dashed over to the tree where the tracer boy had stood just a few moments before. This was like searching for John White’s treasure chest. Jonah just had to look in the same spot where there’d been a tracer. Granted, the tracer boy had disappeared behind the tree, but he’d reappeared so quickly in the canoe that the real version of it would have to be right there.

  Jonah looked down.

  No canoe.

  He looked to the right.

  Nothing.

  To the left.

  Nothing.

  Jonah peered far down the shoreline, in both directions, then out into the water, as far as he could see. Nothing, nothing, nothing. There wasn’t a real canoe anywhere in sight.

  “Oh, no,” Jonah groaned, dread creeping over him. “Oh, no.”

  It made so much sense that the tracer boys would have a canoe. They’d been alone on an island, after all—they had to have gotten there somehow.

  But they weren’t here for real, Jonah thought dizzily. In our version of time, they weren’t here. So . . . neither was their canoe?

  Jonah didn’t want to trust that conclusion. He leaned weakly against the tree, trying to think through everything again, trying to come up with a different answer.

  The tracer boy was angling the canoe up against the shore. He held the canoe steady while the other boy helped the tracer version of John White climb into the canoe. Then the second boy loaded the chest and the pouch of venison jerky. He shoved the canoe out into deeper water before jumping in and grabbing a paddle.

  Then, without a backward glance, both boys paddled away with John White’s tracer.

  “Hey!” Andrea screamed, waving her arms uselessly. “Wait for us!”

  The tracer boys kept paddling.

  “Jonah! Hurry up with that canoe!” Katherine yelled.

  “There isn’t a canoe!” Jonah yelled back. “Not a real one!”

  “What?” Katherine hollered back.

  Both girls scrambled out toward the water’s edge, to look up and down the shoreline for themselves.

  “Maybe the branch would work better than we think?” Jonah said.

  The branch was already sagging down into the water. A wave hit it, and Andrea reached back just in time to keep her grandfather from toppling over. He would have fallen in if they’d been out on the open water.

  “Or we could swim?” Jonah revised his suggestion. “I carried John White yesterday. . . .”

  Katherine fixed him with a withering glare. She didn’t have to say, Are you crazy? Do you want us all to drown? Can’t you see how far away the nearest land is?

  The nearest land was just a sliver on the horizon. Everything was so flat, Jonah wasn’t even sure it was land. The thin layer of green and brown might have just been a trick of the eye.

  And who knew how far it might be to Croatoan Island?

  “Second!” Andrea screamed at the sky. “If you really want to help us, give us a canoe! A canoe! That’s all we need!”

  Nothing happened. No canoe floated down from the sky.

  Andrea slumped against her grandfather’s side.

  “It figures,” she muttered. “Second’s just been toying with us all along. And now look at my grandfather!”

  John White’s skin looked clammier than ever. A pained expression covered his face, as if he was being poked in the back by various twigs and other sharp, pointy offshoots of the branch.

  “Maybe the stuff I thought was paint is actually medicine?” Jonah suggested.

  “Wouldn’t Second tell us that if he really wanted to help?” Katherine asked. “So we wouldn’t poison Andrea’s grandfather by mistake?”

  “If Second really wanted to help, he’d tell us something besides, ‘With my compliments’ and ‘You’re doing great,’” Andrea muttered. “And—oh, yeah, ‘Here’s how you can save your parents’—and it’s all a lie.”

  Jonah gazed at Andrea. He could see the tears welling in her eyes.

  “Forget Second,” he told her. “We are going to get off this island. We’re going to get away from Second’s plans, and we’re going to catch up with the tracer boys, and we’re going to find your tracer—even if we have to make our own canoe out of th
is . . .”

  Log, he was going to say. There was a downed log floating in the water right at the shoreline. It had been there from the first moment that Jonah had begun looking for a canoe. But a breeze blew some dead leaves away just then, and Jonah saw that the log was actually tied to a tree with some sort of primitive braided rope.

  Why would someone tie up a log? Was the log maybe not just a log?

  Jonah glanced up at the tracer boys in their tracer canoe, paddling off into the distance. He squinted, trying to think what the underside of the canoe might look like, the part submerged in the water. He remembered something from Boy Scout camp, the year the water sports instructor had gone on and on during orientation about “respecting the history.” The instructor had seemed like a crazy old man, but hadn’t he said something about how Native Americans used to make canoes by burning out the insides of logs? Wouldn’t that mean that the outside of a canoe would still look like a log?

  Jonah nudged the side of the log with his foot, rolling it back a bit. Jonah hadn’t pushed hard enough to completely flip the log over, so when it settled back into place, it displaced a huge wave of water. Jonah jumped back too late to avoid getting soaked.

  But he’d seen enough. He’d seen that the other side of the log was hollowed out.

  “I found the canoe!” he screamed. “I found the canoe!”

  “Well, get it over here!” Katherine said. “Before we lose sight of the tracers!”

  “You have to help!” Jonah yelled back. “I can’t do everything!”

  Which was unfair, because Katherine and Andrea had worked just as hard as Jonah had, pushing John White on the tree branch. But Jonah was wet and tired and hungry and sore, and he knew he was going to have to jump into the water to turn the canoe over.

  They were all wet and tired and sore—and irritable—by the time they got the canoe untied, turned over, emptied of water, and loaded with John White and his chest. It took all three of them trying five times before they managed to flip the canoe. They might have succeeded on the fourth try, except that just as they were heaving the canoe up, Katherine said, “Wait a minute! What are we going to use for paddles?”

  Jonah lost his grip on the side of the canoe, and it smashed down on his shoulder, knocking him under the water. He surfaced in the air pocket under the canoe.

  Oh, yeah, he thought, remembering something else from the crazy water sports instructor at Boy Scout camp. This is how you’re supposed to turn over a canoe. From underneath.

  Something was banging against his head, so he grabbed hold of it as he dipped down, kicked to the right, and resurfaced outside the canoe.

  “I figured out how we should do this!” he told the girls, lifting his arms high in the air, triumphantly. He decided not to mention that he should have known all along.

  “And you found a paddle!” Andrea exclaimed.

  Jonah looked at the thing in his hand. It was a carved piece of wood, vaguely paddle-shaped. Huh. Maybe the crazy water sports instructor at Boy Scout camp had said that was the best place to store paddles, under an overturned canoe.

  In the end, once all three of them had dived under the canoe and heaved it into the air, they also found another paddle and a wooden object that looked like a rake. They didn’t have time to figure out what that was for—the tracer boys were paddling farther and farther away—so they just tossed the rake into the canoe. Even after they added John White and his chest, there was plenty of room left for all three kids and Dare.

  Didn’t the guy at Boy Scout camp say that sometimes these canoes could hold as many as twenty men? Jonah thought. Or was that something that Mrs. Rorshas told us about the Indians? He wasn’t sure. He felt too dizzy and disoriented and exhausted to think clearly. And now he and one of the girls were going to have a paddle a canoe that was supposed to be powered by twenty men?

  He decided not to mention that to the girls.

  “I’ll take the front,” Jonah offered, stepping into the canoe. “Can one of you push off?”

  “I’ll do it,” Andrea volunteered. “Hurry!”

  The tracer boys and their canoe were getting smaller and smaller off in the distance.

  Once Jonah and Katherine had settled into position, Andrea was surprisingly quick pushing off from the shore.

  “Go!” she yelled.

  “You paddle—opposite side from me!” Jonah yelled back over his shoulder. He wished there’d been time to review canoeing strategy. “Katherine, tell Andrea—”

  “She knows!” Katherine yelled forward, from where she was crouched beside John White and his chest. “She’s already doing it. Just go faster.”

  Jonah paddled desperately. The shoulder the canoe had slammed down on ached with every stroke, but it helped when he switched sides.

  “Switch!” he yelled back to Andrea.

  “She already did!” Katherine yelled forward.

  Jonah kept paddling.

  At first, it seemed that they were going only fast enough to keep the tracers from lengthening the distance between them. But then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, Jonah realized that they were gaining on the tracers.

  Am I paddling that much faster? Jonah wondered, feeling rather proud that he could outpace the muscular tracers. Then he took a quick glance over his shoulder and realized: He wasn’t the one doing such an awesome job paddling. It was Andrea.

  She was paddling frantically, her paddle re-entering the water only a split second after she’d pulled it out. And she pulled the paddle through the water at exactly the right angle to create the most force, to propel the canoe forward as quickly as possible.

  Oh, yeah, Jonah remembered. Andrea went to camp too. And she ate that food pellet, so she should have more energy than me. Maybe it had steroids in it? Maybe the pellet made Dare peppier, too?

  Jonah didn’t have time to follow that thought.

  “Good job!” he yelled back to Andrea.

  “Just keep paddling!” Katherine screamed at him.

  The paddling was starting to feel grim to Jonah, like punishment. As long as they kept the tracers in sight, did it really matter if John White was joined with his tracer every single second?

  He dared to glance back at John White again. How could it be? How could the man look even paler than before? And—was he shivering? Shivering in all this heat, when Jonah himself had just gotten out of the water and was already sweating again?

  Jonah went back to focusing on nothing but digging his paddle into the water, shoving it back, pulling it out. Digging, shoving, pulling; digging, shoving, pulling . . .

  With great effort, they drew close to the tracer canoe. The tip of the kids’ canoe touched the end of the tracer version.

  “All right!” Katherine cheered. “Almost there!”

  Jonah’s arms felt like they were almost ready to fall off. He’d been holding on to the paddle so tightly, for so long, that he couldn’t even feel his hands—which was a good thing, because they had blisters now. He thought he could put on a final burst of speed and draw even with the tracers. But how was he supposed to keep paddling after that?

  The canoe lurched forward—Andrea was paddling harder than ever. This shamed Jonah into paddling harder too.

  Jonah slipped through the body of the first tracer boy. He drew even with the tracer John White’s feet, with his stomach, with his head. The canoe wavered—losing ground, gaining, losing, gaining—and then with one last yank of his paddle, Jonah ensured that the real canoe and the tracer canoe occupied the exact same space.

  Jonah glanced at the second tracer boy, who paddled alongside Jonah.

  “Hey,” Jonah mumbled. “Isn’t it time for your coffee break? Er—venison break?”

  This seemed hilarious to Jonah in his thirsty, hungry, exhausted state. He couldn’t really see the tracer boy except as an echo of himself: an arm separating every now and then from Jonah’s own, an extra nose leaning forward occasionally from Jonah’s face. It was like talking to his own shadow, like slipping
through fog.

  And then, quite suddenly, the tracer stopped seeming like a shadow or fog. It stopped seeming like a tracer, too—it seemed like an actual boy, with actual arms and legs and a torso and head, trying to take up the same space as Jonah himself. It was like having someone fall on him from out of the sky and leap up at him from underneath and dive into him from every other side, all at once. And like time and space had hiccupped and the other person somehow had a stronger claim to the place where Jonah was sitting than Jonah did.

  Jonah immediately fell out of the canoe.

  Jonah hit hard, the chilly water a huge shock against his sweaty skin. He slipped beneath the surface but gave a fierce kick and came up sputtering. His legs were already cramping; it seemed to take a huge amount of effort just to keep his head above water.

  This is why they always made us wear life jackets at camp, Jonah thought. Be prepared, and all that.

  Jonah would have to settle for a backup plan.

  Let’s see. Find something to grab on to, something that floats, to hold yourself up?

  Jonah had fallen out of the canoe in the middle of acres and acres of water. He was so far from shore that finding a random branch or log floating nearby would require divine intervention. Or Second’s intervention, and Jonah wasn’t going to count on that. But he had been holding on to a paddle when he’d fallen into the water . . .

  Jonah actually lifted his hands up in front of his face, looking at them carefully. Maybe he was still holding on to a paddle?

  Nope. His hands were empty.

  “Jonah!” Katherine screamed, the sound distorting because of all the water in Jonah’s ears. “Swim back to the canoe!”

  Oh. Well, that would do. That would be something to hang on to.

  Jonah had surfaced with his back to the canoe, but it was a little odd that he’d practically forgotten it was there. Maybe his mind didn’t want to deal with the weird thing that had just happened to him in the canoe?

  Jonah took a deep breath and whirled around.

  The canoe was several yards away now, getting farther and farther ahead of him. But it had turned back into two separate canoes again—or maybe one and a half? One and three-fourths?