Torn

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “Sun don’t go down until practically the middle of the night around here, this time of year,” Staffe muttered.

  “I am well aware of that fact,” Hudson said, a dangerous edge to his voice. “Since you seem to doubt my knowledge as much as this boy doubts my authority, would you care to join him in the stocks?”

  Staffe looked straight into Jonah’s eyes. Then he looked away.

  “No,” he said.

  Jonah heard a rolling sound behind him, some sort of contraption being moved forward. John King shoved down on his shoulders, forcing Jonah onto his knees. And then King yanked Jonah’s head forward.

  Jonah’s throat hit hard wood.

  If “stocks” is just an old-fashioned word for “guillotine,” Katherine would figure out how to stop this before anyone actually kills me. Wouldn’t she? Jonah wondered dizzily.

  Someone pulled Jonah’s hands forward, his wrists slamming against wood now too.

  Jonah struggled to turn his head to look for Katherine—and to see what was going to happen to him next. He caught a quick glimpse of something descending toward his neck and wrists.

  “Noooo!” he screamed.

  Jonah heard wood crashing against wood on either side of his head, but nothing hit him.

  The hands that had been holding him let go. For a long moment Jonah stayed with his shoulders hunched forward, braced for pain.

  None came. Nothing else happened.

  Jonah dared to lift his head, ever so slightly. The back of his head bumped against wood. But it was just a bump—nothing painful.

  Jonah cautiously turned his head side to side. His neck and wrists were trapped in a wooden frame. What he’d seen falling was the top part of the frame being lowered against the bottom part.

  And now he could see John King fastening a lock at the end of that frame, holding everything together, keeping Jonah in place.

  Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. Now I know what stocks are. I’ve even been in them before!

  Several years ago—back in Jonah’s real life, in the twenty-first century—Jonah’s family had taken a vacation to Colonial Williamsburg. Jonah had clowned around in the wooden stocks while the guide droned on and on about old-timey forms of punishment. Jonah just hadn’t bothered remembering what they were called.

  So nothing about stocks actually hurt people, if they let tourists in them, Jonah reasoned. So what’s the point?

  “Behold this boy’s shame,” Hudson intoned solemnly. “Gaze ye up on his shame, and vow to follow a better path.”

  Shame? Jonah thought. That’s the point? That’s all you’ve got?

  And yet … it was humiliating, to have the whole crew staring at him. He caught Staffe’s eye, and the man’s gaze was full of disappointment. Just a few minutes ago Staffe had thought well enough of Jonah to imply that he should be leading the ship. Now Staffe was looking at him as if he were a criminal.

  I can explain, Jonah wanted to tell him. It’s not what you think!

  Only, Jonah couldn’t explain. Not without bringing up time travel and his invisible sister, or admitting that he was only impersonating the real John Hudson. And those explanations would just make Staffe think he was crazy.

  Staffe turned his back on Jonah.

  Then the man who’d had a compass in the shallop—Wydowse?—turned his back as well.

  Then other crew members did the same: one decrepit, ragged, skeletal man after the other refusing to look in Jonah’s direction.

  Jonah began shaking.

  It’s like they’re saying I don’t even exist for them, he thought. Like I’m not worthy for them to see.

  Jonah turned his head, because he didn’t want to watch all those people rejecting him. But he’d forgotten, and turned toward Hudson and Prickett and King.

  Those were the last people he wanted to look at right now.

  He had some pride. He kept his head up and his gaze defiant and didn’t immediately whip his head back in the other direction. He wasn’t going to give the three men any more reason to gloat over Jonah’s shame.

  Then Jonah realized none of the three men looked like they were gloating.

  They looked … upset.

  Hudson started to open his mouth, as if he was going to yell at the entire crew. But Prickett laid a warning hand on Hudson’s arm.

  “Don’t,” he said softly. Probably Hudson and Jonah were the only ones close enough to hear him. “Let it go. Sometimes silence is the greatest sign of power. Keep them guessing about when punishment may come for them.”

  What did that mean?

  Jonah looked back and forth between the crew and the ship’s leaders, and everything he’d thought before flipped upside down.

  The men weren’t turning their backs on Jonah because they were rejecting him.

  They were rejecting his punishment.

  Hudson had commanded them to look at Jonah’s shame. And they were turning away so they didn’t have to.

  This is like—what’s that thing teachers are always talking about at school? Where you rebel, but you don’t do it by fighting? You use peaceful protest? Jonah couldn’t remember the term. But it was what Gandhi had done, what Martin Luther King had done, what Nelson Mandela had done—or would, when the twentieth century showed up. If the twentieth century still existed.

  Whoa, Jonah thought. It’s like I’m the leader of a movement!

  But didn’t leaders of movements know what they were leading people toward?

  “Back to work!” Hudson commanded, and Discovery’s crew scattered, leaving Jonah behind in the stocks.

  As soon as everyone was out of easy earshot, Katherine knelt beside Jonah.

  “Are you all right?” she wailed. “I’ll get you out of there!”

  She reached for the lock.

  “Katherine, no,” Jonah said. “Don’t you know how that would look?”

  He could imagine how the crew would view it: the key to the lock seeming to float out of John King’s pocket, the top part of the stocks seeming to rise on its own, Jonah standing up and going free. It would look like magic.

  Or witchcraft and bedevilment, as the one sailor had guessed way back at the beginning of the mutiny.

  “But doesn’t that hurt?” Katherine asked.

  “Nah, I’m fine,” Jonah said, trying to sound cheerful. “I can last until sunset tomorrow, no problem.”

  The truth was, he already had a crick in his neck from leaning forward, and his knees were starting to ache on the hard wood of the deck. And how cold would it get at night?

  He plastered a smile on his face anyhow, for Katherine’s benefit.

  She frowned back at him.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked.

  “I thought you were in danger,” Jonah mumbled. “I thought maybe you’d turned visible again. What was Prickett yelling about? When he said, ‘Oh, no! What’s that?’?”

  Katherine’s frown deepened, but now she seemed more upset at Hudson and Prickett than Jonah.

  “They were looking at maps,” Katherine said. “I don’t know if this is a sign that time’s really messed up or not, but they have some very strange ideas about what North and South America look like. I wouldn’t have even been able to tell what those maps were, except that the shape of Florida was usually right.”

  “We’re a long way away from Florida,” Jonah muttered.

  “Yeah—I think the other parts of those maps are just guesses,” Katherine said. “What the explorers want to find.” She looked thoughtful. “Every single one of those maps had this beautiful river connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.”

  “You mean, like the Panama Canal?” Jonah asked.

  “Not where Panama is,” Katherine corrected him. “Right here.” She pointed out toward the chilly water beyond the deck. Then she seemed to realize how ridiculous it was to match up a real place with mostly imaginary maps. “Or, at least, sort of in this area. Where Canada’s going to be someday.”

  “That’s the Northwest Passa
ge, then,” Jonah whispered. “What my ‘father’ wants to call the Hudson Passage.” He shrugged, or tried to. It was kind of hard with his neck trapped in the stocks. “Well, they’ll find out it doesn’t exist. Um. Does it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Katherine said, and it was odd for her to sound so uncertain. “Unless the ice caps melt, or something like that.”

  Jonah tried once again to remember what Mrs. Rorshas had said about the Northwest Passage back in fifth grade. Social studies had always been right after lunch, when the classroom seemed way too warm, and Jonah got sleepy. But there’d been a map on the wall that Jonah had stared at sometimes to try to stay awake—had it shown a Northwest or Hudson Passage? Or did it just show the United States, not all of North America? Jonah could remember little stickers on the map for the Pony Express, the transcontinental railroad, the Oregon Trail, the battles of the American Revolution, the battles of the Civil War …

  Wait a minute, Jonah thought. Were the American Revolution and Civil War battles really on the same map?

  Or had Mrs. Rorshas switched out the maps as the year went along, depending on which time period they were studying?

  Jonah hit one of his hands against the framework of the stocks.

  “You said Prickett was upset about one of those maps?” he asked Katherine. “And he was acting surprised, like this was the first time he’d seen it?”

  “Yeah,” Katherine said. “He shouted—you heard him.”

  Jonah raised an eyebrow. At least he could do that much, even though he was in the stocks.

  “The Discovery left England more than a year ago,” he said. “They were stranded out here in the middle of nowhere all winter and spring. So …” Jonah paused for dramatic effect. “Where’d they get a new map?”

  “Good question,” Katherine said. This was perhaps the first time in Jonah’s life that Katherine had acknowledged that he might have a working brain. She squinted over toward the other side of the deck, where Prickett and Hudson were standing near the rail.

  Then her face smoothed out.

  “Oh, duh,” Katherine said. “They must have gotten the map from natives. Canadian Indians. Or whatever they’re called. Inuits?”

  Jonah wasn’t ready to give up on showing off his brain-power. Especially if Katherine was going to unleash fancy words like Inuits.

  “But what language was the map written in?” he asked.

  Katherine went back to looking perplexed.

  “English,” she said. “Or, you know, that funny-looking old-timey English, where everything’s spelled weird, but you can mostly figure out what it means.”

  “How would natives out here have a map written in English?” Jonah asked, even though Katherine was clearly already trying to figure that out. “If anyone English had been here before, I think things would be different.” He was enjoying himself now, and went for the heavy sarcasm. “Wouldn’t the crew of the Discovery have gone to the English embassy for help over the winter, instead of almost starving and getting scurvy and everything?”

  Katherine rolled her eyes, as if trying to make sure Jonah knew how stupid she thought his humor was.

  “Maybe the map was passed from tribe to tribe, across the continent, starting from someone near Roanoke colony or Jamestown—is Jamestown there yet?” Katherine asked.

  Jonah didn’t have the slightest clue when the English founded Jamestown, so he settled for looking skeptical.

  “We’re, like, a billion miles away from Jamestown and Roanoke,” he said sarcastically.

  “Okay, then, some aliens came down from outer space and gave that map to Henry Hudson,” Katherine said, plunging into sarcasm of her own. “Or gave it to some native, who gave it to Hudson. It was right before the aliens built the pyramids and developed the Mayan calendar.”

  Jonah jolted back, banging his head and wrists against the wood frame.

  “It wasn’t aliens,” he said, totally serious now. “It was—”

  “Time travelers,” Katherine said, speaking with him, reaching the same conclusion at the same time. “Or a time traveler,” she added.

  She always had liked getting in the last word. But Jonah wasn’t going to worry about that now.

  “Second would do that,” Jonah said, all joking forgotten. “He changed 1600 for Virginia Dare and her grandfather. He wouldn’t think twice about giving Henry Hudson a map he wasn’t supposed to have. That map is one of the ways he’s changing time.”

  “Yeah, but why?” Katherine asked, her eyes troubled. “What is he trying to make happen?”

  Jonah peered back across the deck, toward Hudson. Jonah could see just the tip of some paper poking out of Hudson’s fur coat—possibly even the map Katherine had been talking about.

  Jonah was about 100 percent certain that it was because of Second that Hudson was there on the ship, back in control, continuing to explore, continuing to sail west—rather than drifting off into oblivion in the shallop, lost to history forever.

  And it was because of Second that the mutineers who’d tried to overthrow Hudson were not standing on this deck, hightailing it back to England. Instead they were stranded on an ice floe somewhere—or already drowned.

  Jonah grimaced. He didn’t want to think about that. He went back to the broader perspective.

  What does it matter which person or group is on the ship, in control, and which one is stranded in the ice? Jonah wondered. What does it matter? Who cares?

  He realized that he’d heard kids asking those same questions in social studies class practically since kindergarten.

  Er, did we have social studies in kindergarten? he asked himself. First or second grade, anyway.

  Every year, sometimes even before the first week of school was over, somebody would complain, “This is boring! Why do we have to learn about old, dead people, anyhow?”

  And that was always the cue for some long, boring lecture from the teacher, who, in the first week of school, still had starry-eyed dreams about Imparting Important Lessons and Opening Minds and Making Kids Care. (By the end of the year the teachers would mostly just grunt, “Because it’s going to be on the test. That’s why.”)

  Jonah had never actually paid attention to any of those boring lectures. Now he wished he had.

  What if the teachers actually told us exactly how the world would be different if Henry Hudson found the Northwest Passage? Jonah wondered.

  Over by the railing the sailors around Hudson and Prickett were pulling a rope out of the water.

  “I told ye it would be deep enough!” Hudson said, with such excitement that his voice carried across the whole deck.

  Jonah realized that they were entering the passageway he’d seen from the crow’s nest. Flat, featureless land lay on two sides of the ship.

  “Didn’t you say that that river you discovered when you were sailing the Half Moon seemed deep enough at the beginning too?” Wydowse asked him.

  “This is different,” Hudson said. He put his hand over his heart, as if preparing to swear an oath.

  Or maybe he was just holding on to the map in his pocket.

  “This time it’s certain,” Prickett agreed. “I believe a toast is in order?”

  He and Hudson and King and a few others went back toward Hudson’s cabin.

  None of them even glanced at Jonah as they walked by.

  “I should follow them,” Katherine said. “I have to hear what they’re saying.”

  “Ye-es,” Jonah agreed unhappily.

  But what if something happened to her while he was trapped in the stocks and couldn’t do a thing to help?

  Jonah watched the door of Hudson’s cabin. He watched the sailors creeping around the deck. He watched the flat land slide by.

  Nothing happened.

  Maybe shame isn’t the worst part of being punished in the stocks, he thought. Maybe you’re just supposed to get so bored that you start saying, “Please! I’ll do anything you want! Just let me out of here!”

  But maybe
the stocks wouldn’t have seemed so boring to the real John Hudson. Maybe he was used to boredom. Adults in the twenty-first century were always complaining about how Jonah’s generation expected to be entertained all the time, constantly watching TV or hanging out online or listening to iPods.

  An iPod would really help right now, Jonah thought irritably. All I’ve got is an Elucidator that hasn’t worked since … since …

  When was the last time the Elucidator had worked? Had that really been JB’s ghostly voice saying Good job in the shallop, or had Jonah just imagined it?

  Somehow it seemed to matter. What if the last moment that the Elucidator worked was also the last moment that they’d had a chance to get time back on track?

  Don’t think like that, Jonah told himself.

  “JB,” he whispered urgently. “Please! Start talking to me again! Tell me what we’re supposed to do!”

  No answer. Thinking about the Elucidator had just made Jonah realize that a corner of it was poking into his chest. He tried to shift positions a little, but it was impossible to get comfortable with his neck and wrists trapped in the stocks.

  “JB, please!” he whispered again. “If you can get us out of here, now would be a great time for it! Please!”

  Too late Jonah realized that Staffe had come to stand nearby. How was Jonah supposed to explain what he’d just said?

  “Oh, uh—,” Jonah began.

  Staffe cast an anxious glance toward the door of Hudson’s cabin.

  “It is good that you be praying,” Staffe said.

  “Er—yes,” Jonah said, relieved that Staffe had misunderstood. Of course he would think of praying before he thought of talking to futuristic time-travel devices.

  “God does forgive those who truly repent,” Staffe said.

  “I haven’t done anything to repent for,” Jonah protested. “I’m being punished unfairly! Falsely accused!”

  Staffe regarded him levelly.

  “You stole that page from your father’s book,” he said.

  “No, I didn’t!” Jonah insisted. “I just … Well, I can’t explain, but—trust me on this one!”