Margaret Haddix: Sabotaged

“But you told us because… because it’s connected to something that man told you?” Katherine said, her voice full of bafflement. “Something… about the Elucidator?”

Andrea nodded.

“He promised,” she whispered. “He said I could go back. He said I could stop…”

Andrea waited, as if she expected Jonah and Katherine to figure everything out. But Jonah couldn’t think at all while he was watching the pain play over Andrea’s face.

“He said you could stop…,” Katherine prompted. Then she gasped. “Oh, oh-I get it.” Now her words came in a rush. “That man, what he told you-he said you could go back just a year in time, right? So you thought you could stop your parents from being in that crash. You thought you could save their lives!”

Andrea looked down at the ground.

“He said all I had to do was reprogram the Elucidator,” she murmured.

Jonah felt the anger wash over him again.

“Couldn’t you tell the man was lying?” he growled. “Time doesn’t work that way. You can’t go back to a time period you’ve already lived through. You know that! Didn’t you hear anyone talking about the ‘paradox of the doubles’? Or-didn’t you think about what it meant that we’d been living in Damaged Time? Like Katherine was talking about before?” Jonah realized that Andrea had probably been too far ahead to hear anything when he and Katherine were talking about Damaged Time. He just leaned in closer, nearly yelling at her now. “No time travelers could get in for almost thirteen years! Practically our entire lives!”

Andrea recoiled, as if he’d slapped her.

“Nobody told me that,” she whispered.

Belatedly, Jonah realized that could be true. When would she have gotten her crash course in the rules of time travel? The day they’d been trapped in the cave with all the grown-ups fighting over them? Everything was chaos that day. Nothing had been explained very clearly.

“Jonah, it was Angela who mostly told us about all that,” Katherine said. Angela was the only twenty-first century adult who knew about time travel. She had taken a lot of risks to help Jonah and the other kids. “It was when we were divided up into groups-Andrea wasn’t with us then.”

Jonah sighed, his anger washing away. He wished he could stay mad-anger was so much easier.

“See, here’s how it works,” Katherine was explaining to Andrea. “When Gary and Hodge kidnapped you and the other kids from history, and JB was chasing them, you know they crash-landed into our time. Well-” she snuck a glance at her brother “-my time anyway. We still don’t know Jonah’s right time, and he’s too chicken to ask.”

“I am not!” Jonah argued, even as he was thinking, How did Katherine notice?

Katherine ignored him and kept talking.

“You were all babies, right? The ones who weren’t babies to begin with were ‘unaged’ through the magic of time travel-and don’t try to understand that, because I don’t think anyone really can. Anyhow, JB or Gary and Hodge or whoever would have tried to grab you back from our time right away, if they could.”

“But the time crash messed up everything, and no time traveler could get in or out for about the next thirteen years,” Jonah added, because he wasn’t going to let Katherine make it look as if she was the only one who knew what was going on. “That’s how we could all be adopted and have normal lives for thirteen years. And so, when your parents… died… that would have been during Damaged Time, so no time traveler could save them. Not you, not… anybody.”

Jonah’s voice kept slowing down and getting softer as he talked. This wasn’t about showing up Katherine. This wasn’t like getting the right answer in school and thinking, Hey! I knew something the other kids didn’t! Go, me! This was telling a girl she’d never see her parents again.

Andrea was biting her lip. She had her heels wedged in the dirt, her back pressed hard against the toppled fence.

“But-” she began. Then her shoulders slumped. “I know. You’re right. I saw how JB and Gary and Hodge were acting. If they could have come back to get us any sooner, they would have.” She was silent for a moment, then looked up at Jonah. “And, yeah, I should have known not to trust that man. I did know. But I still thought… I hoped…”

And then Jonah couldn’t yell at her anymore about losing the Elucidator, about stranding him and Katherine in… well, now that he thought about it, Jonah didn’t know what time period they were in. He glanced back at the tracer boys with the tracer deer once more. While Jonah and Katherine and Andrea had been screaming and crying and ranting at each other, the tracer boys had managed to truss up the remains of the dead deer. Now they had it hanging from a thick pole, which they were balancing on their shoulders as they walked away. The method they were using, with the deer slung between them, made Jonah think of a picture in a textbook. But he couldn’t remember any picture in a Social Studies book that had had a caption, “If you’re traveling through time and you get lost and you see people using this technique, that undoubtedly means you’re in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and…”

Jonah had always thought that learning Social Studies was mostly pointless. It was weird that he now wished his Social Studies teachers had taught him more.

“So, Andrea, when you reprogrammed the Elucidator,” he began gently, “exactly what did you set it for?”

Andrea grimaced.

“I was trying to get back to June of last year, to this camp I always went to in Michigan. My parents had just dropped me off at camp when…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.

June, Jonah thought. Camp. That’s why she wore shorts.

Jonah liked being able to focus on little details like that, so he didn’t have to focus on anything else.

But Andrea was still talking.

“I thought this time around I could just keep my parents at camp an extra five minutes before they left,” she said. “I thought I could make them help unroll my sleeping bag, or tell them I forgot to pack my toothbrush and they needed to get me a new one, or have them walk down to look at the lake with me… anything I could do to slow them down, to keep them from being on the highway beside that semi truck…”

Jonah really didn’t want to hear any more of this story. And Andrea seemed to be having a harder and harder time telling it.

“Okay, but the Elucidator,” Jonah said. “Exactly what did you type into it? June-what? And… Michigan? The Roanoke Colony wasn’t in Michigan, was it?”

Katherine rolled her eyes.

“Try North Carolina,” she said.

Jonah wanted so badly to say, Everyone hates a know-it-all, Katherine. It would be so nice to take out all his frustration and worry and fear on her. But her face was already as white and strained and worried as Andrea’s. Jonah couldn’t go on the attack right now.

Andrea was shaking her head.

“It wasn’t like you think,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to type in an exact date, or a GPS location, or anything. The man just gave me a code. A string of numbers.”

And you fell for that? Jonah wanted to say. But how could he? Her parents were dead.

“The thing is,” Andrea continued, “I worked so hard to memorize that code. I made sure I knew it forward, backward, and upside down. And I know I typed it in exactly the way the man told me. I checked it three times before I hit ENTER. I wanted so badly to see…”

This was another sentence she couldn’t finish. She just sat there, frozen. She’d stopped crying now, but the tears still glistened on her cheeks. Her hair was tangled in some of the vines.

“It’s okay,” Katherine said gently, patting Andrea’s shoulder. “We understand.”