Even in the dim light, Jonah could see Andrea stiffen. For a moment she sat completely frozen, a shadowed silhouette. Then she moved her hand. She wrapped her fingers around the man’s hand and held on tight.
“Oh, Father,” she whispered. Her voice broke. Jonah saw her lower her head, gulping for control. After a moment, she raised her head and went on. “You are the only one who can go. You must talk to Sir Raleigh. He’ll listen to you. Only you can save us.”
Sir Raleigh? Jonah thought. What’s Andrea talking about?
The man seemed to know.
“What if Sir Raleigh thinks I abandoned my duty?” the man moaned. “Oh, ‘tis a dreadful choice. To stay, to go… I see evil encroaching, either way. If evil befalls you-”
“It won’t be your fault,” Andrea said firmly.
“But ’twas I who brought you here! My child! And I will not be here to protect you!”
The man seemed to be getting more and more upset. Across the hut, the tracer boys were stirring now. One propped himself up on his elbow, to stare over at the man. He spoke.
Of course Jonah could hear nothing, but he thought he could almost get the gist of the boy’s words from his expression, from the clipped way he opened and shut his mouth. His words would be something like, You. Sleep now. No more noise.
“Oh, no,” Katherine moaned.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jonah muttered.
“The tracer boy’s talking to our guy. Which means…”
“The man we saved joined with his tracer again,” Andrea finished for her, quite calmly.
Jonah looked back at the tracers again. He’d never been good at waking quickly and instantly thinking clearly. He squinted, counting and recounting the tracers. One. Two. Clear enough. But there should have been three tracers in the hut-even without counting any random tracer bugs or other tiny tracer detritus. Maybe he’d miscounted. One. Two. Two tracer boys.
No tracer man.
“Our guy could have just rolled over in his sleep, and, boom, that was it, he was with his tracer again,” Katherine was speculating.
Like the smoke, like the flames, Jonah thought. I knew tracers worked like that.
“We need to pull him away from his tracer again,” Jonah said, sighing. “Then one of us should sleep between him and his tracer.”
Wearily, Jonah moved toward the man and reached for his arm. But Andrea blocked Jonah’s way.
“Leave him alone!” she commanded.
Jonah blinked, even more confused. He’d just had trouble counting to two-and now he was supposed to figure out Andrea?
“Andrea, remember the experiment we’re doing?” Katherine said softly. “Jonah’s plan?”
Jonah himself was having a hard time remembering.
Oh, yeah-we’re not going to be used. Not going to fall for any tricks or traps. Not going to put the man with his tracer… going to do the opposite of what anyone would expect…
Andrea laughed, a little wildly.
“Isn’t this weird?” she asked. “You don’t want to be manipulated, so you’re going to manipulate this man? Use him as a pawn, to keep from being pawns yourself?”
Jonah winced at the bitterness in her words.
“That’s not how I meant it,” he muttered. He guessed he should explain everything all over again, but he was so tired. It was the middle of the night. Jonah just wanted to pull the man away from his tracer and go back to sleep.
He started to reach for the man once more, but this time Andrea actually shoved him away.
“I won’t let you,” she said. “I’ll stop you, no matter what.”
“Andrea, this isn’t a game,” Jonah said, bewildered. “Just-”
“You’re right,” Andrea interrupted. “It isn’t a game. But you’re the one treating it like one. Chess! Stratego!” Her voice arced wildly again. “This is this man’s life. This is his dearest dream, what he’s been working toward for years…”
“What are you talking about?” Katherine asked.
“We have to keep this man with his tracer,” Andrea said. “He has to see me. I have to talk to him.”
“What?” Jonah said. “But that could really ruin time!”
“Oh, time,” Andrea said scornfully. “What has it ever done for me? Besides taking away my parents…”
“Andrea,” Katherine began. “You can’t blame-”
“I can,” Andrea said. “And I do. And I don’t care.” She bent over the unconscious man as if she was going to try to shake him awake.
Now it was Jonah’s turn to reach out and try to pull her back.
“Did your mystery man come back and tell you more lies?” he asked. “Is that why you’re acting like this?”
“No!” Andrea said, struggling against Jonah’s grasp.
“Then what changed?” Jonah asked, holding on. “You agreed with Katherine and me before. Why do you care so much about keeping this man with his tracer?”
Andrea lifted her head, so her chin jutted out. Even in the near-total darkness, Jonah could see how determined she was. Her eyes glistened.
“Because,” she whispered. “Now I know who he is.”
19
Jonah let go of Andrea’s arms. He was too stunned to say or do anything else. For once, he was glad that Katherine was so rarely at a loss for words.
“Andrea, I really don’t think you do understand,” Katherine said, almost snippily. “How could you know? Who could this man possibly be, that would-”
“He’s my grandfather,” Andrea said. “John White.”
Katherine gasped.
Jonah was struggling to catch up. Andrea’s grandfather… had they somehow missed the chance to save her parents’ lives, but zoomed back instead to rescue her grandfather? No, her real grandfather-her twenty-first-century, adoptive grandfather-wouldn’t be from Virginia Dare’s lifetime. This would have to be Virginia Dare’s grandfather, the one Andrea had read so much about. The one who had captured her interest in the Virginia Dare story in the first place.
I think it was because of the grandfather coming back, Andrea had said. How hard he tried to get back to his family, and how many times he failed, and then when he finally made it to Roanoke…
Jonah gasped now too, only a little after Katherine.
“How can you tell it’s him?” he asked.
“He keeps talking about Eleanor, which was his daughter’s name-my… mother’s name. My birth mother’s, I mean.” Andrea sounded defensive.
“I bet a lot of women were named Eleanor back then,” Katherine said.
“The other names he said were people at Roanoke too-Fernandez, Lane, George Howe… And what he was saying about a battle with Manteo’s people? That was this really stupid sneak attack the Roanoke colonists made on an Indian village. They figured out in the middle of it that they’d attacked their own friends,” Andrea said.
“John White wouldn’t have been the only colonist in that battle,” Jonah pointed out, proud that he could come up with something logical.
“But John White was the only colonist who left Roanoke to sail back to England to talk to Sir Walter Raleigh to get supplies,” Andrea said. “He didn’t want to. The other colonists had to beg him. They told him he was their only chance.”
“And he was talking about a baby,” Katherine said thoughtfully. “That would be…”
“Virginia Dare,” Andrea said. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Me.”
She gently patted the man’s shoulder again, and it was almost as if she was claiming him, agreeing to be his granddaughter. Jonah blinked, trying to see better in the nearly nonexistent light. He knew something important had just happened. Did Andrea want to be Virginia Dare now? Was this something else that Andrea’s mystery man had manipulated her toward?
When we got back to 1483, Chip and Alex wanted to be Edward V and Prince Richard, too, Jonah remembered. But that was after we found their tracers.
Andrea might have found her grandfather, but they still didn’t have a clue where her tracer was. Jonah glanced across the hut to the glowing tracer boys, sprawled out flat again, looking soundly asleep. Those tracers were even more proof that time and history were out of whack.