Sabotaged

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Pale. Ethereal. See-through. Ghostly.

  Glowing.

  It was another tracer.

  Still clutching the dog’s collar, Jonah took a step back. The dog whimpered.

  “I see it, I see it,” Jonah muttered.

  The tracer was an Indian girl in a deerskin dress. She had long braids on either side of her head. And even though she was a tracer, Jonah could make out the light tone of her skin, the sad gray of her eyes.

  Light skin. Gray eyes. This wasn’t an Indian girl’s tracer.

  This was Andrea’s.

  The fresh grave, Jonah thought. Is this tracer here because Second murdered Virginia Dare?

  Jonah realized he was so stunned, he wasn’t even thinking about tracer rules right. Nobody could have murdered Virginia Dare—at least, not yet. Because Andrea was Virginia Dare. And Andrea was still alive, back at the canoe, right now calling out, “Jonah?”

  Jonah didn’t answer.

  This tracer is here because of Gary and Hodge stealing Andrea—Virginia Dare—from history, Jonah was reminding himself. And then because Second made sure that Andrea didn’t come back to the right time or place . . .

  The tracer girl stood on her tiptoes, peering through the branches, straight out toward the canoe.

  She sees them, Jonah thought. She sees Walks with Pride and One Who Survives Much. Can she see her grandfather, too?

  The tracer girl’s mouth made a little O of surprise, and then she looked down—evidently she’d snapped a twig with her bare toes or made some other little noise with her movement.

  Back at the canoe, Antonio cried out in his tracer’s voice, “There it is again! The sound of an unsettled spirit! Let’s go!”

  That’s why the tracer boys heard sounds that Antonio and Brendan didn’t, Jonah thought. Because it was this tracer walking around, moving through the woods.

  “Jonah!” Katherine called from behind him. “I’m serious! The tracers aren’t going to wait for you! Get Dare and come on!”

  But Jonah wanted to wait. He wanted to wait for Andrea’s tracer to step forward, out of the woods. Then Brendan’s tracer would see her, and Antonio’s tracer would see her, and maybe even John White’s tracer would be awake by now to see her too. And whatever was supposed to happen next—whatever had happened in original time—would happen.

  Andrea’s tracer didn’t step forward. She shrank back.

  “It’s okay,” Jonah whispered. “We’re friendly.”

  But of course the tracer couldn’t hear him. She slid farther back into the woods, deeper into the shadows.

  She wasn’t planning to go out and meet the other tracers—Brendan’s and Antonio’s and her grandfather’s. She was afraid of them. She was hiding.

  “Jonah, what are you doing?” Katherine called again. “If you don’t come now, you’re going to have to swim!”

  What was Jonah supposed to do? They’d come to the past to reunite Andrea with her tracer. It had been such a clear goal. But that was before they knew about Second, before Andrea changed the Elucidator code, before John White showed up, before Brendan and Antonio appeared out of nowhere—and before they’d discovered that Croatoan was an island of death. What difference did all those changes make? Could they change the need for Andrea to join with her tracer? What if this was the wrong time and the wrong place for it?

  How could Jonah know?

  “Just give me a minute!” Jonah yelled back to Katherine, even though he knew it wasn’t just her choice whether to go or stay.

  And how much choice do I have? Jonah thought. How much choice should I have when it’s Andrea’s life, not mine?

  Jonah glanced back toward the canoe. Katherine had exaggerated a little—they weren’t casting off quite yet. Brendan was still untying the canoe. There was still time. A minute or two.

  Jonah took a deep breath.

  “Andrea!” he called unsteadily. “Come quick! I found your tracer!”

  “What?” Katherine yelled. “Now? Are you kidding?”

  Brendan stopped in the middle of flipping the rope back into the canoe, though his tracer continued without him. Antonio almost dropped his paddle. And Andrea jumped out of the canoe.

  “I knew we’d find her!” Andrea exulted. “I knew John White would find his granddaughter!”

  Andrea raced toward Jonah and Dare and the tracer. She stopped only when she reached Jonah’s side, directly facing her double. She gasped.

  “You don’t have a whole lot of time to stand there marveling at how weird all this is,” Jonah muttered.

  “How do I . . . ?” Andrea began. “Do I jump? Hold my breath? Close my eyes? Back in?”

  Jonah pushed her. It wasn’t his smoothest move, but he was acutely aware of the time ticking away.

  Andrea jolted forward, her mouth still agog. She spun around, her features lining up with the tracer girl’s features; her limbs lining up with the tracer girl’s limbs: one arm bent around a tree trunk, one foot half off the ground, as if she was poised to run.

  Andrea’s face came back out of her tracer’s face.

  “She doesn’t live on this island!” Andrea gasped. “She came from far, away from the mainland—she came back to bury the skeletons she knew were here, to honor the Croatoans. . . . She didn’t think anyone else would come to the island!”

  “Okay,” Jonah said impatiently. “And . . .”

  Andrea’s face toggled back into her tracer and out again. This time her entire expression had changed, so it was easy to tell her and the tracer apart. The tracer looked slightly apprehensive.

  Andrea looked furious.

  “No!” she screamed. “It’s not fair! It can’t happen like that!”

  “Like what?” Jonah asked.

  “She’s just going to hide until the strangers leave,” Andrea said. “She doesn’t even know her grandfather’s with them! To be this close and not meet—no! I won’t let it happen that way!”

  “Andrea,” Jonah said, and her name came out sounding like an apology. “It’s not your choice. You can’t control your tracer. You only get to choose for yourself.”

  Jonah tried to decide how to spell out all the potential choices. Ideally, they’d all get to vote. Everyone could stay with their respective tracers, no matter what. Or everyone could stay on Croatoan, leaving the tracers of Brendan, Antonio, and John White to go on only as ghosts. Or all the kids could cast off in the canoe together, leaving Andrea’s longed-for tracer behind. Only Jonah and Katherine didn’t have a tracer here to choose or not choose, to weigh in the balance between friends and fate.

  There wasn’t time to say any of that. Andrea was screaming again.

  “No! My tracer’s never going to meet her grandfather! And my grandfather will never see me as myself! No! It can’t be! You’re—coming—with—me!”

  Jonah could tell that Andrea wasn’t talking to him.

  Andrea had grabbed her tracer’s hands, and was trying to tug her tracer away from behind the tree. It was a weird effect, like watching someone wrestle with her own shadow—from inside the shadow.

  Dare whined and backed away, more freaked out than ever. Jonah tightened his grip on the dog’s collar.

  “Jonah! Andrea! Come on!” Brendan called from behind them. “My tracer’s done! I’m getting into the canoe! We’re leaving!”

  “No—you’re—not!” Andrea yelled.

  The tracer-joined-with-Andrea took a step forward.

  Optical illusion, Jonah thought. Trick of the eye.

  Another step.

  Andrea grinned.

  Except, it wasn’t just Andrea grinning. It was the tracer, too, the smile lines around her eyes radiating back toward her braids.

  “Wait!” Andrea/Virginia called, and even though Jonah understood perfectly, he knew she wasn’t speaking English. She was speaking another Algonquian dialect similar to the one Brendan’s and Antonio’s tracers used.

  Andrea didn’t know any Algonquian dialects. Did she?

  “
Do not depart in such haste,” Andrea/Virginia continued, walking toward Brendan, out into the sunlight. “Do you have a ghost-man in your canoe? I am a ghost-girl, and he might be my kin.”

  Brendan turned around.

  No—it was Brendan-joined-with-his-tracer who turned around. The tracer turned too.

  Can’t be, Jonah thought. I know that didn’t happen. Andrea’s tracer wouldn’t have called out. Brendan’s tracer wouldn’t have looked back.

  “Are you a lost spirit of the dead?” Brendan’s tracer asked. His knees knocked together slightly, and Jonah decided the tracer was brave not to run if he was that afraid.

  “No,” Andrea/Virginia said. “I am alive. But my grandfather is lost.”

  Brendan’s tracer hesitated. Then he swept his hand toward the canoe.

  “Come and find him,” he said.

  Andrea/Virginia raced forward, across the shoreline littered with bones. Jonah whipped his head around in disbelief. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something pale in the spot where Andrea’s tracer had been standing only a moment before. Jonah turned his head—a tracer still stood there. But this one was even dimmer, even less substantial, fading away even as Jonah watched. Jonah looked from this tracer back to Andrea: Yes, Andrea was still wearing the deerskin dress and braids. She was still joined with her tracer.

  A tracer in the wrong place, the other tracer disappearing . . . I thought tracers couldn’t change, Jonah marveled. Does that mean . . . Andrea completely changed time? Even original time? Is that possible?

  Out on the water, an equally ghostly tracer canoe slipped silently away from the island, paddled by barely visible tracers of Walks with Pride and One Who Survives Much. Squinting, Jonah could just make out the translucent hand of John White’s tracer clutching the side of the canoe.

  And then the entire tracer canoe vanished too.

  Yet, when Jonah stepped forward a bit and shifted his view back to the shoreline, he could see Antonio/Walks with Pride and Brendan/One Who Survives Much—both in loincloths—standing by the real canoe. The Brendan figure bent down and crouched beside John White.

  “He is hurt and sick and does not wake,” Brendan said.

  “He has seen many troubles,” Andrea said. “It is written on his face.”

  Jonah had stopped thinking of her as Andrea/Virginia. She still looked like the tracer—and was still completely joined. But Andrea was in control.

  She bent down and stroked her grandfather’s forehead, smoothed back his hair.

  “Your troubles are over now,” she said.

  Jonah could see John White’s eyelids flutter—his real eyelids.

  “Grandfather?” Andrea whispered. She had called him that before, but it sounded different now. Jonah could hear a trace of an accent in her voice—not English, but Algonquian. It sounded . . . right.

  John White’s eyelids weren’t just fluttering now. They were blinking.

  And then the eyelids stopped moving and his eyes focused. Even at this distance, Jonah could tell that John White’s eyes were focused on Andrea’s face.

  “Oh, my child,” he whispered, “My child. You look just like my daughter, Eleanor.”

  “Eleanor was my mother,” Andrea said. She touched her grandfather’s cheek. “She always said that you would come back.”

  Jonah saw Katherine stumble out of the canoe. At first Jonah thought she was just making room for Andrea and her grandfather to talk, now that he could actually see her, now that he wasn’t just talking in his sleep. But Katherine kept walking, past the litter of bones, toward Jonah.

  She seemed to run out of energy a few steps away. She clutched a tree as if she needed the help to stand up.

  “What just happened?” she asked. “What was that?”

  Jonah opened his mouth, even though he didn’t have the slightest idea what to tell her.

  “Excellent question, my dear,” a voice said from behind Jonah. “I would call that a second chance. Which also happens—not so coincidentally—to be my name.”

  Katherine gaped; her eyes seemed to double in size.

  “Then, you’re . . . Second?” she whispered.

  Jonah whirled around.

  A strange man stood behind him. If they’d been in the twenty-first century, Jonah would have described the man as a standard-issue computer nerd. He had pasty-white skin, as if he’d spent too much time indoors. His blond hair stood out in all directions, as if, like Einstein, he had other things to think about than using a comb. And he had one side of his shirt tucked into his pants and the other hanging out loose—though for all Jonah knew, maybe that was the fashion in some far-off future.

  “Second Chance, at your service,” the man said, bowing slightly. He cut off the ending of the bow and jerked back up hastily, to peer straight at Jonah. “But I’m forgetting myself . . . given that you were ready to punch Antonio just on the suspicion that he might be working for me, perhaps you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to place myself in such a vulnerable position.” He tilted his head to the side, thinking. “Of course, I believe flabbergasted would be a more predictable emotion than furious for the two of you right now.”

  “I—you—” Jonah could barely speak, let alone throw any punches.

  “See?” the man said. “Just as I predicted.”

  Jonah still didn’t understand what was going on, but he didn’t like proving Second right.

  “So . . . ,” Jonah tried again, struggling to gather his wits enough to ask a complete question. “This is what you were aiming for all along?” He gestured weakly toward Andrea, still bent over her grandfather back at the canoe. “This? Andrea and her grandfather—I mean, Virginia Dare and John White—finding each other?”

  “Exactly,” Second said, beaming.

  Jonah squinted, no less confused. He’d gotten so used to thinking of Second as someone bad, someone to fight against. To resist.

  “You want Andrea to be happy?” Jonah asked.

  “Don’t you?” Second replied.

  “Sure, but . . . that’s not how things went in original time, was it?” Katherine said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  Second sighed. He glanced at something in his pocket.

  “It took you three minutes and forty-one seconds to reach that conclusion,” he said. “That’s about what I predicted—I was just two seconds off. Still, it’s a bit disappointing, when you’ve just witnessed the biggest scientific advance since humanity discovered time travel in the first place, and all you can say is, ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen’?”

  The way he mimicked Katherine’s voice was cruel, making her sound childish and stupid.

  “As your friend Andrea pointed out, original time wasn’t some priceless, perfect jewel,” Second said. “Isn’t it better to make an old man and a little girl happy?”

  Jonah didn’t like Second calling Andrea little.

  “But . . . but . . . if you change time, you might cause a dangerous paradox,” Jonah said. “Make it so that your own parents are never born. Or you might make other things change—so that, I don’t know, hundreds of years from now, the South wins the Civil War. Nobody ever abolishes slavery. Hitler wins World War II. Or . . .”

  Jonah was casting about for other examples of how history could go terribly wrong. But he couldn’t think clearly because Second had begun grinning in such a mocking way—almost chortling, even.

  “What if we make it so that Hitler never starts World War II?” Second asked gleefully. “Or that slavery never catches on in the United States, and there’s no Civil War because there’s no slavery to fight over? So there’s no racism, because there’s no heritage of slavery . . . Martin Luther King is never shot, the Trail of Tears never happens, the Bay of Pigs never happens, the Maine doesn’t sink—”

  “All that’s going to happen just because of Andrea and her grandfather?” Jonah asked incredulously.

  “No,” Second said. “I am 99.9998 percent certain that none of that will chang
e because of Andrea and her grandfather. But don’t you see? We start small, almost invisibly—one girl and her grandfather, on an out-of-the-way island—and then, who knows? Maybe everything else is possible too.”

  He was back to beaming again.

  Jonah remembered something Katherine had said way back when they’d first learned that Jonah and his friend Chip had a connection to time travel: If you’re going to go back in time, you save Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated. Or John F. Kennedy. Or, you keep the Titanic from sinking. Or you stop September 11. Or—I know—you assassinate Hitler before he has a chance to start World War II.

  Maybe Second had heard her say that.

  “So you’re trying to create alternative dimensions,” Jonah said, proud of himself for figuring this out. “Ones with all sorts of different possibilities.”

  “No,” Second said. “Not alternative. You didn’t enter an alternative dimension when Andrea forced her tracer to step forward. Time itself changed. There’s only one time stream, only one history. Time travel just makes it look like more.”

  “But tracers show ‘original time,’ and then there’s the way time really goes, what we see when we come back in time . . . ,” Jonah interrupted. “So there’s two versions, right there.”

  “You’re wrong,” Second said. “Tracers only live through time once, no more than anyone else. It was just that they always drew everyone and everything toward what seemed to be a preordained path. Toward their destinies, you might say. But tracers themselves could never change. Until now.” Jonah wouldn’t have said it was possible, but Second’s grin got even bigger. “You two just witnessed the first time shift in history. The first time destiny itself was derailed. The end of destiny. It’s like . . . you are Watson, and I am Alexander Graham Bell. You are the little boy who watched the first airplane flight, and I am Orville Wright. You are lizards in the New Mexico desert, and I am Robert Oppenheimer.”

  Jonah didn’t have the slightest idea who Robert Oppenheimer was, but he thought it was a little insulting to be called a lizard.

  “Hold on,” Katherine said, stamping her foot. “You want us to think this is like you just created the atomic bomb?”