Margaret Haddix: Sabotaged

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.

“Do you think some time travelers ruined it?” Andrea asked.

“No, because then we’d see a tracer version of the whole village in good shape,” Jonah said. “And lots of happy tracer villagers…”

Katherine touched one of the huts with one finger, and the whole thing swayed perilously. An unmoving tracer version of the hut appeared and then vanished when the real hut stopped swaying and rejoined it. Katherine took a step back.

“Then what did happen here?” she asked. “Where did everyone go?”

“Don’t know,” Jonah said. He was trying not to get too creeped out by the emptiness, the desolation. Maybe there was some perfectly ordinary-even happy-explanation. Maybe the people had just abandoned this village because they’d built a newer, nicer one someplace else. What had Mrs. Rorshas said in fifth-grade Social Studies? Hadn’t it been common for Indians to move around, going from village to village based on the growing seasons or animal habitats or whatever?

Jonah wasn’t sure enough about that to mention it to the girls. Mrs. Rorshas really hadn’t talked that much about the Indians. It’d mostly been the explorers, Jamestown and the Plymouth Colony, the American Revolution… all done and over with by Halloween.

Jonah didn’t remember anything in that history about Indians getting nicer, newer villages. Or happier lives.

“Look,” Andrea said in a hushed voice. “You can tell they had a cornfield over there.” She pointed at a rectangle of cleared land just beyond the last falling-down hut. “We’re going to need food…”

She didn’t add, if we’re stuck here a long time. But Jonah could tell by the others’ faces that everyone was thinking that.

Jonah walked over and kicked at a downed dried-out stalk. Dare snuffled along beside him, nosing aside empty husks. This was more like the ghost of a cornfield-Jonah couldn’t imagine how long ago it had last been planted. Years? Decades? Whatever food had once grown here had undoubtedly been carried away long ago, by birds and mice, if not by people.

Jonah’s stomach twisted, but it was more from fear and worry than hunger. For now, anyway.

“When we catch up with the tracer boys, maybe they’ll have some food we can eat,” Jonah said, with more confidence than he felt. The tracer boys weren’t likely to have anything but tracer food.

He began peeking into some of the huts that were in the best shape, just in case. It was dim enough in the huts that the glowing tracer boys would really show up brightly, if they were there. But the enclosed spaces made Jonah nervous. He didn’t like looking into darkness, in the midst of all this desolation.

The first hut was empty. As was the second. And the third.

In the fourth hut, something leaped out at him.

“AHH!” Jonah jumped back, scrambling to get out of the way. He had a quick impression of hooves and glowing eyes. What is that-a demon? he thought. Where are we?

Barking furiously, Dare streaked off into the woods after the creature.

Jonah couldn’t figure out what it was until his heart stopped pounding so hard and he turned around, catching a glimpse of the tracer that remained in the hut: It was only another deer.

Or, no, it could be the very same one that the tracer boys had killed, because that one is really still alive… how many tracers of the same deer could there be? Jonah was picturing the one deer multiplying into dozens of tracer deer, every time it came into contact with some new disruption in time. Then Jonah realized his leftover panic was making him stupid. There can be only one tracer of any animal. Because there is only one version of original time, only one way time is supposed to go.

It was ridiculous, but Jonah felt much better knowing that this wasn’t the same deer the tracer boys had killed. He gazed almost fondly at the single tracer version of the deer he’d startled. The tracer deer didn’t even lift its head, but just kept peacefully munching on-what was that? Some sort of rotten melon?

Then Jonah noticed the commotion behind him.

“Dare, no! Come back, boy!” Andrea was calling out after the dog.

Katherine was practically falling on the ground, she was laughing so hard.

“Oh, my gosh! You should have seen your face! You’re white as a ghost. You almost look like a tracer!” she screeched.

“Ha, ha,” Jonah muttered. He leaned weakly against the side of the hut, which bowed dangerously inward. Jonah decided he could stand on his own two feet. He straightened up.

“Dare!” Andrea screamed, her voice echoing off the trees. “Dare!”

“Shh,” Jonah said. His ears were ringing, and he didn’t think he could blame leftover time sickness anymore. The screaming, the laughter, the dog and deer crashing through the woods-it was all too much noise, too much more change in this silent, deserted, tracer-haunted place. “Be quiet! Somebody will hear us! We really will ruin time!”

How much change was too much? At what point would there be too many tracers to ever fix?

Katherine’s laughter softened to snorts and little bursts of giggling. Andrea called out, “Dare!” once more, but then she turned back to Jonah.

“Really, Jonah,” she said soberly. “I don’t think there’s anyone except us and the tracers on the whole island. Can’t you feel it?”