Margaret Haddix: Sabotaged

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.