Margaret Haddix - Sabotaged

“Come on,” Katherine said, tugging on Jonah’s arm.

Jonah let her lead him toward the fire. He was surprised at how weak he still felt. Surely that wasn’t just from canoeing and treading water and swimming.

I was tired before I fell out of the boat, he thought. But I didn’t feel this bad until that guy dropped on me… jumped up at me… tackled me…

Jonah’s brain still kept dodging away from thinking about that moment. He stumbled past the two boys, who were taking fish from a sort of improvised wooden rack by the fire. One by one, they placed the cooked fish on huge leaves-stand-ins for plates, Jonah guessed.

“Uh, hey,” Jonah mumbled, because it seemed kind of rude not to say anything.

Jonah thought he saw one of the boys separate from his tracer long enough to nod stiffly at him, but he couldn’t be sure.

“That’s Brendan,” Katherine said. “He’s really nice. But he and Antonio are trying to stay with their tracers as much as they can, until they’re sure the tracers are just going to sit still for a while.”

Something about the way she put that bothered Jonah, but his brain wasn’t working well enough yet for him to figure out why.

The second boy-Antonio?-said something to Brendan just then, but Jonah didn’t really catch it. He couldn’t even tell if it was English or another language.

“They’re speaking an Algonquian dialect,” Katherine said.

“How’d you know that?” Jonah asked. Was this something else he should have learned in fifth-grade Social Studies?

“They told me,” Katherine said. “We had a long time together out in that canoe.”

Jonah noticed for the first time that Katherine’s face was sunburned and-he brought his hand to his face-his was too. He looked back over his shoulder and saw how low the sun was in the sky.

“So we were in that canoe all day?” he asked. “I was asleep all day?”

“Pretty much,” Katherine said. “Now do you see why we were worried?’

Jonah shrugged this off. He didn’t want to seem too wimpy in front of two boys he didn’t even know. But how could he have slept all day?

Antonio picked that moment to stand up and stretch, revealing perfect six-pack abs. This made Jonah feel even wimpier, since every muscle in his body felt rubbery and sore and pathetic. But Jonah wasn’t going to let the other boy see how intimidated he was. He gave the boy a hard look.

Then he did a double take.

“Wait a minute!” Jonah said. “I know you! Weren’t you wearing a sweatshirt with a skull on it? Back in the cave?”

In the time cave, the day Jonah had learned that he was one of the missing children from history, there’d been a small subgroup of kids wearing skull sweatshirts. They’d gone out of their way to be rude to Jonah and Katherine; if he hadn’t had so much else to worry about, Jonah would have been afraid of them.

Now the boy standing before Jonah seemed to quiver, his twenty-first-century self separating slightly from his fake-Indian self. Jonah could see just the hint of the Sarcasm T-shirt at the boy’s neckline, just the edge of a tracer at the back of the boy’s head.

“Yeah-so?” Antonio growled. “What’s it to you?”

Jonah recoiled. In his experience back home, that was the kind of thing bullies said right before they started looking around for someone to punch. Jonah had almost always taken comments like that as a cue to slip away, out of range of anyone’s fists.

But that was before he’d survived the Middle Ages, before he’d defied time experts to rescue his friends, before he’d rescued a drowning man, before he’d stood on messed-up Roanoke Island yelling at Second.

Jonah stepped closer to Antonio.

“Then you’re a famous missing kid from history, like me and Andrea,” Jonah said. “Who are you, really? Why did JB send you back that way, like… right on top of us?” Jonah was proud he could force those words out, describing what had happened. “Didn’t JB know we were there? Does he know now? What are you guys supposed to be doing here?” Jonah’s brain still wasn’t exactly functioning normally, but he found he could come up with plenty of questions. A brilliant one occurred to him, one that made him almost stammer with excitement. “D-do you have an Elucidator with you? Can you let us talk to JB?”

Katherine put a warning hand on Jonah’s arm.

“Jonah, it wasn’t JB who sent Brendan and Antonio back in time,” she said.

“Then-who-?”

“Some guy named Second,” Antonio muttered. He narrowed his eyes and added tauntingly, “Know him?”

“You’re working for Second?” Jonah said.

He took one step closer to Antonio and would have punched him squarely in the jaw if Katherine hadn’t had her hand on Jonah’s arm. Katherine jerked his arm back and then quickly grabbed his other arm, before he could even think about getting a left-handed jab in instead.

And Jonah was so embarrassingly weak that he couldn’t pull away from her.

“Katherine, stop it!” he yelled.

“No-you stop it!” Katherine yelled back. “You’re being an idiot! Antonio isn’t working for Second any more than we are! And neither is Brendan!”

“How can you be so sure?” Jonah asked, struggling against her grasp.

“Because I’ve been talking to them all day, while you were asleep,” Katherine said. “And then you wake up and Antonio says two or three words to you, and you think you know enough to start beating people up?”

“It only took one word,” Jonah muttered. “Second.”

“You are just like all the white men who come here, to our land,” Antonio said. “You start fighting and stealing and killing before you know anything.”

Antonio had to separate even farther from his tracer to say this. Right as he was speaking, his tracer stepped completely away from him, carrying fish toward Andrea’s grandfather. Antonio stopped and clutched his head.

“That was so weird!” he said. “It was like I was thinking with my own brain, but I was thinking the way my tracer would have…”

Jonah thought about saying, Yeah, buddy. You’re a white guy too. Did you ever think of that? Hasn’t your tracer ever looked in a mirror? And what did I steal or kill? But Katherine was glaring so intensely that Jonah decided he shouldn’t push things.

“Let’s all just sit down and eat,” Andrea said anxiously. “Then we can figure everything out.”

“Here,” Katherine said, thrusting a fish on a leaf into Jonah’s hands. “You’re just grumpy because you’re hungry.”

That was exactly the kind of thing Jonah’s mother would have said. Jonah didn’t want to think about what his mom would have said if she’d seen him trying to punch someone. To distract himself, he looked down at his fish.

The fish looked right back at him-or seemed to. Its little beady eye was still attached. So were all its scales and fins.

“Don’t go asking for fish sticks instead,” Antonio said sneeringly.

Jonah swallowed hard.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“I’m sure it’s delicious,” Katherine said faintly. She poked at her own fish and seemed relieved that it didn’t move. She looked as if she’d almost expected it to jump off the leaf, flop over to the water, and swim away.

“But it’s not what you’re used to, right?” Brendan said. “Sorry. We were trying to stay with our tracers-we didn’t know how to cook the fish any other way but how they would cook it.” He expertly pulled away some bones and put a chunk of fish into his own mouth. “It really is good.”

Again, there was something about the way Brendan talked about staying with his tracer that bothered Jonah. Jonah looked at Katherine, who shook her head warningly. Now, what did that mean?