Jonah hoped that Second had not planned for Jonah and Dare to go off with the one tracer boy while Katherine and Andrea were left behind for… what? The danger Jonah had been fearing all along?
You’re being paranoid, Jonah told himself. Just like Katherine said.
To distract himself, he concentrated on looking around, watching everything carefully. The tracer boy seemed to be following the same trail he and the other boy had taken the night before, when they’d dragged John White back to the village on the tree branch. Jonah would have expected the whole trail to be lined with tracers-bent-back grasses, footprints, other dents and gouges in the sandy soil. But the trail ahead was almost completely clear of tracer changes.
Because of the violent storm? Jonah wondered. Or… because of the branch that Andrea and Katherine and I were dragging behind the tracer boys?
Jonah watched the tracer boy in front of him trample a clump of grasses. A crumpled tracer version of the grasses instantly appeared. Jonah purposely dodged it.
Dare stepped on the grasses instead, tamping them down in the exact same pattern as their tracers.
Jonah found that unless he concentrated very hard, he automatically walked in the exact same footsteps as the tracer boy in front of him, erasing almost all of his tracer prints. Or the dog did it for him. And even though the tracer boy was barefoot and Jonah was wearing sneakers-and the dog had paws-they all seemed to leave very similar markings on the trail. It happened again and again, the boy creating a tracer, Jonah or the dog erasing it.
Weird, weird, weird, Jonah thought. Is it time making me do that, healing itself? Or is this part of Second’s plot too?
It was so frustrating not to know. He wished he’d paid more attention to the habits of tracer objects the last time, in the fifteenth century. But they really were hard to see. And there hadn’t been so many of them then. They hadn’t seemed so… threatening.
Time is so much more messed-up here, Jonah thought, shivering despite the bright sunlight.
Jonah forced himself to catch up with the tracer boy.
“You know, it’d be nice if it turned out that you were going off to talk to your girlfriend, who’s babysitting a little three-year-old girl named Virginia,” Jonah muttered. But John White had said, Please find it, I beg of you-it, not her. Jonah didn’t have any hope that things could end so easily.
The tracer boy turned and stared directly at Jonah. He couldn’t have heard Jonah, but it was unnerving how the tracer was looking toward Jonah so coldly, so calculatingly. In a split second the boy had an arrow out of his pouch and lodged against his bow. A split second later, the arrow was zinging toward Jonah.
Jonah threw himself at the ground. He lay there for only an instant-his heart pounding, his shoulder throbbing from the impact-before he rolled to the right, just in case the boy was already loading again, aiming again.
Why is he shooting at me? He’s not supposed to be able to see me!
Dare raced toward Jonah, barking furiously. Jonah smashed into thick grasses and dared to look up. Off in the distance, some sort of bird-a duck? a goose?-was rising into the sky, squawking its protest against Dare’s barking. And, slightly behind it, the bird’s tracer rose like a shadow, its wings flapping just as frantically, its beak opening and closing just as angrily. Only, the tracer couldn’t have been bothered by the barking. It was protesting…
Being shot at, Jonah realized. The boy was shooting at the bird, not at me.
Jonah’s heartbeat slowed slightly; his tensed muscles slipped out of panic mode. He rolled his head to the side so he could see the tracer boy, who might right that minute be putting another arrow against his bow and aiming for some tracer groundhog or beaver waddling near Jonah.
But not at me, Jonah thought, hoping to calm down his reflexes. The tracer can’t shoot me. Even if he did, the tracer arrows can’t hurt me. Got it?
But when Jonah looked up at the tracer boy, he wasn’t slipping another arrow into his bow. He was letting his bow slip to the ground, his shoulders slumped.
The tracers are worried about food too, Jonah thought.
Jonah sat up, studying the tracer more carefully. This was the one with the longer, curly hair. It was hard to tell skin color with a see-through tracer, but Jonah didn’t think this boy’s skin would be much darker than Jonah’s with a tan. The boy’s nose and lips were narrow; his eyes would have been round if he hadn’t squeezed them into such dejected-looking slits.
“I guess you could be English,” Jonah muttered. “Are you one of the lost colonists?”
But then, why was he dressed like an Indian? What had happened to all the other English colonists if he was the only one left? And why was this boy hanging out with the other tracer, the one Andrea was so sure had come from Africa?
Jonah shook his head, trying to shake away the questions. At the same time, the tracer boy shook his head and slung his bow over his shoulder again. Dare whimpered.
“Come on, boy,” Jonah told the dog, almost forgetting that he suspected him of being a decoy or a spy. “We’re going on.”
The dog stayed a few steps behind Jonah and the tracer the rest of the way. Maybe the bow and arrow had spooked him, too; maybe he was afraid that Jonah would suddenly throw himself to the ground once more. But Jonah found himself trying to stay as close as possible to the tracer boy. It was a shame Jonah couldn’t hear the tracer’s thoughts just by stepping into his space. Several times the boy stopped and Jonah walked right into him, his knees raised at the same height as the boy’s knees, his arms swinging at the same angle.
To understand another man, you must walk a mile in his moccasins, Jonah thought, remembering a phrase an old scoutmaster had been fond of-a phrase that Jonah and his friends had laughed at so hard that one of his friends had even peed in his pants during a campout years ago. Even now (well, now in Jonah’s regular time), all someone had to do was whisper, “moccasins” during a flag-raising or some other supposedly solemn ceremony, and the whole troop would instantly be fighting giggles.
But walking where the tracer boy walked, and following his gaze whenever he turned his head, Jonah could telclass="underline" The boy was hunting. Hunting without much hope that he’d find something.
“So there’s not enough food on this island, not even for just two boys,” Jonah whispered. “So why are the two of you here?”
It was just another layer of mystery: Why were the tracer boys on Roanoke Island? Where were their real versions? Why didn’t John White’s return to Roanoke match up with history? What was wrong with him and his tracer? Where was Andrea’s tracer? Why had Second wanted to send Andrea someplace apart from her tracer? Who was Second anyway?
Before Jonah ran out of questions-or came up with a single answer-they reached the shoreline and the tracer boy went to stand on a small spit of land jutting out into the water. Jonah thought maybe it was the same spot where Katherine had stood yesterday to throw the branch out into the water. But he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t exactly had time for sightseeing before.
The tracer boy stood gazing out at the choppy waves. He put his hand against his brow to shield his eyes against the sun and turned slowly, methodically scanning the water before him. Jonah did the same. But Jonah was done in about three seconds-yep, there’s a lot of water out there. And maybe a bit of land out there to the right-too far away to really see without binoculars. Meanwhile, the boy was still staring, as if each square inch of water was more fascinating than the last. Once he finished studying the water, he shifted to peering out along the coastline just as thoroughly.
Suddenly the boy’s mouth opened and closed-if Jonah had had to guess, he would have speculated that the boy had said something like, “There it is!” The boy jumped down from the outcropping of land and began to run along the shore. Dare barked at the unexpected movement.