Margaret Haddix - Sabotaged

Jonah had a sudden image in his mind of the girl in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory puffing up and turning blue after chewing defective gum.

“Spit it out!” he yelled at Andrea.

Andrea swallowed instead.

“Okay, you guys can watch me for the next couple hours, and then we’ll know if it’s safe to give this to my grandfather,” she said calmly.

Jonah shook his head.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

Andrea shrugged.

“Time will tell, won’t it?” she said, grinning slightly.

“That’s not funny,” Jonah objected.

Andrea scooped the other four pellets out of the melon half and put them in her pocket. Katherine and Jonah watched her warily.

“Look, I feel fine so far,” Andrea said. “Not so hungry anymore, but maybe that’s just my imagination. It couldn’t work that fast. Let’s just… go on, okay?”

Go on, Jonah thought dazedly. What would that mean? Fixing time? Rescuing Andrea?

Those had been his original goals, but everything was so mixed-up now. How could they fix time when it just kept getting more and more messed up? How could they rescue Andrea when she was determined to do crazy things like talk to her grandfather and eat suspicious food?

Right then, out of the corner of his eye, Jonah saw one of the tracer boys pat John White’s shoulder and stand up. The tracer boy was nodding, nodding… Had John White’s tracer just asked him to do something? The old man’s tracer was still speaking, but he kept blinking, as if he was fighting off sleep. He seemed to be struggling to get the words out before he slipped toward unconsciousness, toward joining the real man completely.

The tracer’s eyes closed, and now Jonah could hear what he was saying because the real man was speaking, too.

“Find it,” John White murmured. Clearly the tracer and the real man were thinking the same thing. “Please find it, I beg of you.”

The tracer boy nodded once more and began walking out of the village.

“Did you hear that?” Jonah asked Katherine and Andrea. “This is a clue! We should follow him, see what he’s looking for!”

Andrea shook her head, firmly.

“I’m staying with my grandfather,” she said.

“But this is something for him!” Jonah said. “Maybe it’s connected to you! Or your tracer!” He turned to his sister. “Katherine?”

Katherine was grimacing.

“You go,” she said. “I’ll stay here with Andrea.”

Her gaze flickered from Jonah to Andrea to John White. She cocked her head and made a face. Jonah could tell what she was thinking: Andrea’s not going to leave her grandfather, and there’s no way we can trust her alone with him. Who knows how many different ways she might try to ruin time?

“So I should go… alone?” Jonah asked. He wasn’t scared-of course he wasn’t scared. But it was a little weird to think that he would be going off on his own without a cell phone, without an Elucidator, without any way to communicate with anyone. “If you two go somewhere before I get back, uh, carve a map on a tree or something, okay?” he said, trying to make a joke of it.

“That didn’t work out so great for the Roanoke colonists,” Andrea muttered.

She walked over to Dare, who was still snoring, and gently shook him awake. She held out his pellet of food in her hand and he eagerly gobbled it down.

“Now you’ll have energy to go with Jonah and keep him company,” Andrea told the dog. She pushed him forward. “Hurry! Before you lose the tracer!”

“Um, okay then,” Jonah said. He took off after the tracer, the dog at his heels. He had to stop himself from turning around and saying to Andrea and Katherine, Are you sure you two don’t want to come too? Or, You’ll come after me if I get lost, won’t you?

When he was pretty sure he and Dare were out of earshot of the girls, Jonah turned to the dog.

“Don’t think this means I trust you,” he told Dare. “I am still watching you, to make sure you’re not animatronic or a decoy or a spy or something.”

The dog licked Jonah’s hand.

“I mean it,” Jonah said sternly. He addressed the sky, “And, Second, you can’t fool me either. I am not eating your food, and we are not blindly going along with any of your plans. Got it?”

Jonah hoped that Second had not planned for Jonah and Dare to go off with the one tracer boy while Katherine and Andrea were left behind for… what? The danger Jonah had been fearing all along?

You’re being paranoid, Jonah told himself. Just like Katherine said.

To distract himself, he concentrated on looking around, watching everything carefully. The tracer boy seemed to be following the same trail he and the other boy had taken the night before, when they’d dragged John White back to the village on the tree branch. Jonah would have expected the whole trail to be lined with tracers-bent-back grasses, footprints, other dents and gouges in the sandy soil. But the trail ahead was almost completely clear of tracer changes.

Because of the violent storm? Jonah wondered. Or… because of the branch that Andrea and Katherine and I were dragging behind the tracer boys?

Jonah watched the tracer boy in front of him trample a clump of grasses. A crumpled tracer version of the grasses instantly appeared. Jonah purposely dodged it.

Dare stepped on the grasses instead, tamping them down in the exact same pattern as their tracers.

Jonah found that unless he concentrated very hard, he automatically walked in the exact same footsteps as the tracer boy in front of him, erasing almost all of his tracer prints. Or the dog did it for him. And even though the tracer boy was barefoot and Jonah was wearing sneakers-and the dog had paws-they all seemed to leave very similar markings on the trail. It happened again and again, the boy creating a tracer, Jonah or the dog erasing it.

Weird, weird, weird, Jonah thought. Is it time making me do that, healing itself? Or is this part of Second’s plot too?

It was so frustrating not to know. He wished he’d paid more attention to the habits of tracer objects the last time, in the fifteenth century. But they really were hard to see. And there hadn’t been so many of them then. They hadn’t seemed so… threatening.

Time is so much more messed-up here, Jonah thought, shivering despite the bright sunlight.

Jonah forced himself to catch up with the tracer boy.

“You know, it’d be nice if it turned out that you were going off to talk to your girlfriend, who’s babysitting a little three-year-old girl named Virginia,” Jonah muttered. But John White had said, Please find it, I beg of you-it, not her. Jonah didn’t have any hope that things could end so easily.

The tracer boy turned and stared directly at Jonah. He couldn’t have heard Jonah, but it was unnerving how the tracer was looking toward Jonah so coldly, so calculatingly. In a split second the boy had an arrow out of his pouch and lodged against his bow. A split second later, the arrow was zinging toward Jonah.

Jonah threw himself at the ground. He lay there for only an instant-his heart pounding, his shoulder throbbing from the impact-before he rolled to the right, just in case the boy was already loading again, aiming again.

Why is he shooting at me? He’s not supposed to be able to see me!

Dare raced toward Jonah, barking furiously. Jonah smashed into thick grasses and dared to look up. Off in the distance, some sort of bird-a duck? a goose?-was rising into the sky, squawking its protest against Dare’s barking. And, slightly behind it, the bird’s tracer rose like a shadow, its wings flapping just as frantically, its beak opening and closing just as angrily. Only, the tracer couldn’t have been bothered by the barking. It was protesting…