Margaret Haddix - Sabotaged

“Okay,” Brendan said, shrugging.

“Jonah, while they’re doing that, could you help me with something over by the canoe?” Katherine asked.

“What?” Jonah said.

“I, uh, think I might have lost a ponytail rubber band,” Katherine said. Jonah glanced at his sister.

“It’s in your hair,” he said.

She shook her head, her ponytail flipping side to side.

“Not that rubber band,” Katherine said. “A different one. It could mess up time forever if we don’t find it.”

Even though he’d slept all day, Jonah was still really tired. Just the thought of standing up seemed beyond him, not to mention having to walk over to the canoe and search for some stupid little rubber band that was probably buried under three inches of sand by now. How much could one rubber band matter anyway? Second had tossed whole jars of paint into the wrong time period.

And five kids and a dog.

“Wouldn’t Andrea do a better job looking?” Jonah said. “She’s a girl. She knows about stuff like ponytail rubber bands.”

Katherine shot a glance toward the other kids. Antonio and Brendan, completely joined with their tracers now, were bent over the fire. Andrea, with Dare beside her, was gazing down at her sleeping grandfather. None of them was looking toward Jonah and Katherine.

Katherine jabbed her elbow into Jonah’s side.

“Ow!” Jonah cried. “What-”

But Katherine already had a finger poised over her lips. She jerked her head to the right, toward the direction of the canoe. Then she quickly pointed to herself and Jonah, and started thumping the fingers of her right hand against the thumb, like someone operating a puppet.

“Oh, you mean-” Jonah began.

Katherine shook her head firmly and pressed her finger against her lips once more. She grabbed Jonah’s arm and began tugging.

“Okay, okay, I’m coming!” Jonah muttered.

They walked several steps, and as soon as they were out of earshot of the others, Katherine burst out, “You are so dense! You would be the world’s worst spy! Any of my friends would have caught on about ten years ago that I wanted to talk to them alone!”

“Well, duh,” Jonah mumbled. “They actually care about ponytail rubber bands.”

Katherine rolled her eyes. Then, near the canoe, she dropped to her knees and began sifting sand through her fingers.

Jonah groaned.

“Please tell me you didn’t really lose a rubber band,” he said.

Katherine paused long enough to glare up at him.

“No, but you need to look like you’re looking for a rubber band,” she reminded him. “In case they’re watching.” She tilted her head, indicating the other three kids.

Reluctantly, Jonah knelt down beside his sister and began scooping up random handfuls of sand. His knees ached. His shoulders ached. His head was still woozy-the day of sleeping in the sun, having nightmares, hadn’t come even close to curing him. Worst of all, he was getting chills again, the little prickles of fear all along his spine that warned of some approaching danger.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked Katherine, his voice coming out rough and accusing. “Don’t you trust Antonio and Brendan after all?”

Katherine brushed aside sand, revealing more sand.

“It’s not that,” she whispered. “It’s-I don’t trust their tracers.”

Jonah dropped a whole handful of sand, sending up a puff of dust.

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “Did you get sunstroke this afternoon? What do you mean, you don’t trust the tracers? They’re tracers! They’re not really there! They don’t know we’re here! They don’t care if we’re looking for a rubber band or not. To them, we don’t even exist!”

The dust floated up to his mouth and nose, making him cough. While he was coughing, he thought of a new argument.

“The way I see it, the tracers might be the only ones we can trust!” he said. “We know they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing because, duh, they’re tracers! They have to be accurate! I like Andrea-”

“You like her too much,” Katherine said.

Jonah ignored this.

“-but she doesn’t care what happens to time,” he continued. “Brendan seems okay, but how can we know for sure that he and Antonio aren’t working for Second?”

“You didn’t see them the first hour or so,” Katherine said. “They were completely clueless and scared out of their wits. They didn’t know anything.”

“Yeah, but as soon as they joined with their tracers, they should have known…” The next word Jonah had intended to say was everything. But he stopped. He remembered Brendan saying he didn’t know if his tracer had done anything great; he didn’t know what the tracer thought about Croatoan Island. He didn’t even know what year it was. And Antonio-maybe he wasn’t just being a jerk when he’d refused to talk about the distance to Croatoan because, “Our tracers aren’t thinking about that right now!”

“You think…,” Jonah began. He had to try again to get the words out. “You think the tracers are keeping secrets?”

Katherine nodded, her eyes huge and frightened. Now that they were away from the other kids, Jonah could see how scared she really was-and how fake her brave face and cheerful chatter had been before.

“Didn’t Chip and Alex know everything their tracers knew, back in the fifteenth century?” Jonah interrupted. “Didn’t they know everything right away, from the first moment they joined with their tracers?”

“I think so,” Katherine said. “That’s how they always acted. Whatever we asked them, they had answers. Unless it was something their tracers didn’t know either.”

“But maybe we only asked them questions about things they’d been thinking about anyway,” Jonah said.

“Yeah,” Katherine agreed. “We never tested them with anything like, ‘What color shirt was your tracer wearing a week ago Monday?’”

“I couldn’t answer that,” Jonah said. “With or without a tracer.”

“Oh, right,” Katherine said. But she didn’t launch into any mocking rant about how he was just a stupid boy, and she could remember every outfit she’d worn since starting sixth grade.

“Do you think the tracers are working for Second?” Jonah asked.

Katherine frowned, considering this.

“I don’t think they could,” she said. “It’s like you said, they’re tracers. They can’t change.” She hesitated. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said I don’t trust them. Maybe that’s not the right way to put it. How could any of this be the tracers’ fault? They’re just what we see, and the problem’s deeper than that. The whole setup is messed up.”

“Because of Second,” Jonah growled. “He’s behind this.”

Katherine nodded.

“He must have done something to keep Brendan and Antonio from melding with their tracers right,” Katherine said.

Jonah struggled to get his aching brain to follow this thought. It seemed every bit as impossible as finding a rubber band buried on a vast beach. Brendan said Second pulled him straight out of time from his room back home-Second didn’t take him to a time cave or time hollow first, Jonah remembered. Could that be the problem? Jonah didn’t know why this would matter. The time hollows had always seemed like conveniences, not essentials. Why couldn’t Brendan and Antonio go straight from the twenty-first century to…

Jonah’s head throbbed, and he saw what he had been missing.

“I bet the problem was the way Brendan and Antonio came back,” Jonah said slowly. “Antonio landing… on top of me.”

This was still hard to talk about. It was like the moment back home when Jonah had first seen a time traveler seem to vanish into thin air, changing dimensions. Jonah’s brain had tried so hard to recast the memory, to turn it into something else-something believable.