And Andrea was swimming back into the debris.
“No! Don’t!” Jonah screamed.
“He’s right here!” Andrea screamed back.
She’d reached the man floating in the debris. He seemed to be trying to swim, but Jonah saw that that was an illusion: His arms and legs were only moving with the current.
“Help-flip-over!” Andrea called.
Belatedly, Jonah remembered that he should actually know how to deal with this situation. He’d taken junior lifesaving lessons at the pool the past summer. But the pool had always been so calm and safe, one kid at a time jumping into the peaceful blue water to “save” an instructor flailing about in imaginary danger. There’d been no hazardous debris, no heaving waves, no actual unconscious victim.
Jonah shook his head, trying to focus.
“Uh-armpit!” he screamed at Andrea. “Grab him by his armpit!”
Either Andrea couldn’t hear him, or she couldn’t understand. Jonah grabbed the man himself, yanking him by the arm to pull him close, then awkwardly turning him over. Finally Jonah wrapped his own arm around the man’s chest, both of them rolling in the waves together. Any of Jonah’s lifesaving instructors would have frowned and pointed out everything Jonah had done wrong. Jonah knew he wasn’t supposed to end up clinging to the drowning victim like this, as if he was just trying to use the victim’s buoyancy to keep his own head above water. And there was something Jonah was supposed to remember about clearing obstructed airways and checking to see if the man needed mouth-to-mouth or CPR. But right now Jonah was doing well just to breathe himself-to breathe air, that is, not saltwater. Jonah was starting to forget which was which.
“Maybe-we can-go in-there,” Andrea sputtered, her words coming out between waves and breaths.
Jonah looked, and the shoreline had changed. The current had flung them downwind from the sandy beach: Now they were facing rocks. And the waves were already smashing the debris from the boat against the rocks, splintering the boards into smaller boards-more dangers that Jonah and Andrea would need to avoid.
Jonah glanced down at the man in his arms. The man’s chest was moving up and down, but Jonah couldn’t tell if that meant he was breathing or if it was just his body bobbing in the surf, bobbing along with Jonah.
Sidestroke, Jonah reminded himself. Just do the modified sidestroke like you’re supposed to, and don’t think about anything else.
He’d only managed to take three strokes forward when something hit him in the head-something from the air, not in the water.
Now, that’s not right, Jonah wanted to complain. It’s not fair for everything to be dangerous!
He turned his head to look and discovered that a huge branch had fallen into the water.
“Grab on and climb out!” Katherine yelled. “Don’t swim! Climb!”
Oh…
Katherine was at the other end of the branch. Katherine must have thrown it in.
Had Katherine been trying to hit him?
No, Jonah realized, she was trying to help him. The branch was a wonderful thing to hold on to while the water seemed to be trying harder and harder to dash him and the unconscious man against the rocks. Holding on to the branch, Jonah could almost stand up. He braced his feet between two rocks and yelled at Andrea, “Help me drag the man in!”
She grabbed on to the branch too. Between the two of them, they managed to jerk the man toward the shore. When they finally reached dry ground, Katherine let go of the branch and helped Jonah and Andrea yank the man out of the water. Jonah fell back on the scrubby grass, completely spent. But Andrea leaned over the man, putting her ear against his chest, her hand beneath his nose.
“He’s alive!” she screamed. “He’s breathing!”
Jonah didn’t move. The ground seemed to be spinning beneath him. Overhead, the clouds were whipping across the sky with amazing speed. The contrasting motions-spinning earth, speeding clouds-were making Jonah feel nauseated. So he closed his eyes. But that just made him feel as if he was back in the water, being tossed back and forth by the waves…
“You saved his life!” Katherine said, in awe, her voice coming from the same direction as Andrea’s. “You and Jonah. That man would have drowned without you.”
… would have drowned…
… would have drowned…
Jonah winced, thinking about how moments ago, standing on the shore, he’d wondered if the capsized boat in the water was a trap or a trick set up by the same man who’d convinced Andrea to sabotage her own trip through time. Jonah had been worried about Andrea drowning. But this was something else. This was him and Andrea willfully changing time. Katherine had felt guilty about knocking down a pine cone in the wrong place. Now the three of them had saved a man’s life. What if the man went on to change history even more? He might have children he wasn’t supposed to have; he might turn around and kill someone who wasn’t supposed to die; he might do anything.
Jonah felt sick, but he couldn’t have said what was making him feel worse: Thinking that he could have stood by and let the man drown? Or thinking that maybe that was what he was supposed to do?
This setup was a trap, Jonah thought. It was a trick.
Back when he was in 1483, Jonah had argued with JB about taking so many chances with Chip’s and Alex’s lives. But even JB wouldn’t have set Jonah and Katherine up with a dilemma like this one.
“Not fair,” Jonah muttered. “Not fair.”
He didn’t know how it had worked, but he felt certain that the mystery man had planned for Jonah and Andrea to be on the beach right at that moment, right as the boat capsized. He had planned for them to have to make a choice.
Did he know what we would choose? Jonah wondered. Does he know what will happen because the man didn’t drown? Does he use projections, like JB?
“Jonah? Are you all right?” Katherine asked.
Jonah realized he still had his eyes squeezed shut. And he was probably moving his lips, like a little kid just learning how to read silently.
“Yeah… yeah…” Jonah didn’t want to talk about tricks and traps and dilemmas with the others. Not yet. He didn’t want to talk about how they might have ruined time by saving the man’s life. Because that wouldn’t change anything they did from here on out-it wasn’t as if they were going to push the man back into the water. Jonah opened his eyes, cleared his throat, tried to remember how to act normal.
“I’m fine,” he told Katherine. “Thanks to you throwing that branch in.”
“Yeah,” Andrea agreed. She was brushing sand from a huge scrape on her leg. “That was really smart. How’d you think of it?”
“Oh, you know me, I’m just so brilliant,” Katherine said, grinning. She hadn’t used up all her energy fighting the waves, so she had some left for clowning. She held one hand out, placed her other hand on her stomach, and dipped down in a mocking bow. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” Then she shrugged. “Really, though, I just thought of it because I saw what they did.”
“They, who?” Jonah said, baffled.
Katherine was already pointing, toward a spot directly behind Jonah.
“Them,” she said.
Jonah turned around. There in the grass were the two tracer boys they’d seen earlier.
And lying between them was a tracer version of the man Jonah and Andrea had just rescued from drowning.
14
It took Jonah’s waterlogged brain a moment to figure out what that meant.
If the two tracer boys rescued the drowning man in the original version of history, then…
“He was supposed to live!” Jonah burst out. “We didn’t ruin history by saving him! We saved history by saving him!”
Andrea whirled around and glared at Jonah.
“Is that why you didn’t want me jumping into the water?” she growled at him. “You think history is more important than a man’s life?”