Margaret Haddix - Sabotaged

So Brendan had been in the time cave too. Of course he had. He just hadn’t been obnoxious like Antonio, so Jonah hadn’t remembered him.

“Yeah, but why didn’t JB come and get me himself, like he did Andrea?” Brendan asked. “Who’s this Second guy? Why didn’t he tell me anything? He just shows up in my bedroom one night when I’m listening to my iPod, and the next thing I know, I’m in that canoe, my iPod’s nowhere in sight, and Andrea’s yelling at me to paddle the same way as my tracer. I didn’t even know what a tracer was!”

“Sorry,” Andrea said. “I was just worried about keeping my grandfather with his tracer.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Brendan said, shrugging. “It’s not your fault.” He looked down at the fish bones in his hand and tossed them into the fire. “You know, I was really hoping to be some great African king who just got lost because he ran off with his girlfriend or something. And it turns out, I’m a not-so-native Native American?” He turned to Jonah and asked plaintively, “Have you ever heard of some famous African American/adopted Indian named One Who Survives Much?” His voice cracked, and he stopped.

“One Who Survives Much is Brendan’s Indian name,” Katherine explained to Jonah. “Antonio’s other name is Walks with Pride.”

“Yeah, and we never studied either of those dudes at my school,” Brendan said. Jonah could tell how hard he was trying to sound like he didn’t really care. “Did you at yours?”

Jonah shook his head.

“No, but-” He looked over at Katherine and Andrea. “Remember what I was saying about Andrea being Virginia Dare? That maybe she’s famous for things in the future that we don’t know about in the twenty-first century? Time travel could make lots of new people famous in history. People who did really brave things that nobody wrote about, but time travelers witnessed with their own eyes…” Jonah was liking this idea more and more. “Especially when it’s someone like you, because, um…”

“Because I’m black?” Brendan asked. “Because people in America weren’t writing down much of anything that black people did in… what year did you say this is?”

“It’s 1590,” Andrea said. “We know, because that was the year that John White came back to Roanoke.”

“Okay. So I’m supposed to be doing something brave that makes me famous in 1590?” Brendan asked. “Or I already did it, and I’m already famous, and this is the year I’m supposed to disappear?”

“Or is this just some random year that Second sent you to, because he’s sabotaging you and Antonio the same way he sabotaged Andrea?” Jonah asked bitterly. “You tell us-have you or your tracer already done something that would make you famous hundreds of years in the future?”

Brendan furrowed his brow.

“I-don’t know,” he admitted.

“How can you not know?” Jonah asked. “If your tracer-” Jonah broke off because Katherine kicked him in the leg just then. “Oof!”

Jonah turned to glare at Katherine, but she was cutting her gaze from Jonah to Brendan to Andrea and back to Jonah. Jonah had seen her do that little trick before: This was just like her, “Let’s not talk about this in front of Mom and Dad” code.

Great, Jonah thought. Another mystery. Why doesn’t Katherine want me to talk about this in front of Andrea and Brendan? How is this different from what we were talking about a few minutes ago, when she wasn’t kicking me?

“What song were you listening to on your iPod when Second showed up?” Katherine asked quickly, as if this were urgently important.

“Cold War Kids-‘Something Is Not Right with Me.’ Fits, huh?” Brendan said. “It’d be funny except”-Brendan gestured at the empty water before them, the dark woods behind them,-”look where we are now.”

Just then, some sort of animal howled in the woods. Dare stiffened and let out a low growl, deep in his throat. Then he whimpered and backed away.

“Chicken,” Jonah muttered. But he had chills traveling down his spine as well. The howl was answered by another howl-was it wolves? Coyotes? Bobcats?

The underbrush rustled at the edge of the woods, a ripple of movement through the shadowy giant leaves.

Something was running toward them.

Jonah sprang up and darted to the side, holding his arms out protectively in front of Katherine and Andrea. He didn’t know what was coming toward them, but it seemed like a good idea to stay on the opposite side of the fire.

The last clump of giant leaves parted, revealing…

Antonio.

He was sprinting toward them at top speed, hightailing it across the sand.

“Is something chasing you?” Jonah yelled at him.

Antonio didn’t answer. He bent his head down, focused only on running. His feet barely touched ground. When he was still several feet away from the other kids, he suddenly leaped, launching himself upward in an amazing arc.

That’s going to hurt when he lands, Jonah thought. From Jonah’s perspective, it looked like Antonio was trying to dive into the sand.

No, Jonah realized. Into his tracer.

Antonio collided with his tracer in mid-air. The tracer had just stood up to carry fish bones toward the fire, so for an odd moment Antonio and his tracer looked like a monster with two heads and four arms and four legs sticking out at strange angles-and with skeletal fish attached to two of his hands. Then Antonio’s body straightened out, twisted around, and completely melded with his tracer.

“Is something chasing you?” Jonah screamed again at Antonio.

Almost imperceptibly, Antonio separated from his tracer just enough to shake his head. No. Nothing was chasing him.

Still, Jonah gazed off into the woods for a few moments, watching for rustling in the undergrowth. Nothing but wind moved the giant leaves.

“What was that all about?” Katherine demanded.

Another howl rose up from the woods.

“Brother Wolf speaks most eloquent-” Antonio-joined-with-his-tracer began. But then Antonio jerked his mouth away from his tracer’s mouth. “Crazy tracer!” he muttered.

Brendan dipped his head into his tracer’s head, then pulled back again.

“Our tracers know the wolves won’t come near the fire,” he explained. “The tracers aren’t afraid. But when we’re apart from our tracers, we never know…”

Apart from his tracer, Antonio was terrified of the wolves, Jonah realized. Even now, separated only slightly from his tracer’s head, Antonio had sweat pouring down his face and was panting heavily, gulping in mouthfuls of air. This was a particularly bizarre sight since his chest, still joined with his tracer’s, rose and fell with a calm, even pace.

“My tracer’s not afraid of anything,” Antonio said. He separated from his tracer a little more, to turn toward Brendan. “Is yours?”

Brendan shook his head.

“Not really,” he said slowly. “I mean, he knows terrible things could happen-we could starve, we could be attacked, we could die a million different, horrible ways-but if that happened, he knows it would just be the will of-”

“Don’t say it!” Antonio ordered. “Don’t say ‘Great Spirit,’ or anything like that, because that’s not how it translates-it doesn’t translate, and they’ll just laugh…” He separated his arm from his tracer’s to gesture angrily at Jonah, Katherine, and Andrea.

“Us?” Katherine said, with fake innocence. “Say it in Algonquian, and Jonah and I will understand. We’ll help you translate.”

“Never mind,” Antonio muttered. He turned angrily away. Surreptitiously, he slid his head closer to his tracer’s, so that barely anything except his mouth remained separate. “The tracers are cleaning up and getting ready to camp overnight,” he said gruffly. “Brendan, you’d better get back together with your guy so we can do this the right way.”