Jonah turned around. The three of them had left an entire trail of tracer destruction behind them: dropped twigs, bent branches, scattered needles. . . . It was hard to notice unless you were looking for it, but now Jonah could see the exact path he and Katherine and Andrea had followed: careening to the right a bit to avoid a downed log, swerving to the left to avoid a cloud of gnats, some of which they’d killed, leaving behind tiny tracer dots.
Wish the tracer boys had left a trail like that, Jonah thought. Then he realized: They would have. Not because the tracers were time travelers, but because there was a ripple effect to disrupted time. Because the tracer boys weren’t really there, everything they weren’t there to do would have resulted in a tracer. It wasn’t just the deer they should have killed—it was also mosquitoes they would have swatted away, leaves they would have trampled underfoot, branches they would have bent back as they walked through the woods. And so the deer, the mosquitoes, the leaves, and the branches were all tracers now too—along with any objects the deer, the mosquitoes, and the branches should have affected.
And all of those things that were alive would glow.
Jonah squinted, peering all around. There—a line of glowing ants on the ground. There—a bird perched high overhead. There—a vine swung back out of the way. And there and there and there—dozens of glowing lights that Jonah had previously taken for glints of sunlight filtered through the trees or blurry glitches in his vision because of time sickness.
The woods were full of tracers.
“We didn’t create those tracer boys,” Jonah whispered. “Or, if we did, there were other tracers here first.”
“Now, how could you know that?” Katherine asked mockingly.
“Because of that,” Jonah said, pointing to the glowing vine. “And that.” The line of ants. “And that.” The bird in the tree.
Katherine gasped and put her hand over her mouth, as if she’d just discovered the entire woods were radioactive.
“They’re—they’re everywhere,” Andrea whispered.
“Right,” Jonah said. “And how long do you think we’ve been here? Half an hour? An hour? No way could there be so many tracers created just in that time, just because of us.”
Katherine was still looking around, her eyes huge and dismayed.
“Something’s really, really wrong here,” she whispered. “That’s what this means.”
As they stood watching, a real bird landed right on top of the glowing tracer bird, melding completely. The glow instantly vanished. Now it was just an ordinary bird on an ordinary tree branch.
“Well, there,” Jonah said. “That’s one bit of time that’s been fixed.”
He didn’t want to admit how relieved he felt—or how much he wished all the other tracers glowing before him would go back to normal too.
“JB told me that people—and, I guess, animals, too—can’t see tracers unless they’ve traveled through time,” Andrea said. “How did that bird know its own tracer was there? How did it know to land in that exact spot?”
“Chip and Alex said they felt this almost magnetic pull to their tracers,” Katherine said. “The bird must have felt it too.”
“They why aren’t all the other tracers disappearing?” Andrea asked. “One by one, the lights blinking out, everything going back to normal . . .”
Jonah realized he was holding his breath, watching. The lights were not going out. If anything, their numbers were increasing: new pinpricks of light where insects were supposed to be flying, where seeds were supposed to be falling, where squirrels were supposed to be scampering.
“Something’s holding all those tracers in place,” Katherine whispered. “Something won’t let time go back the way it’s supposed to.”
“Is it—is it my fault?” Andrea stammered. “Did I ruin everything because I didn’t come back at the right time, at the exact moment that JB thought I should come back? Is this what happened when I messed up all those variables the projectionist set up so carefully?” She sniffled and waved her hand toward all the glowing remnants of tracer branches and vines and insects and ants. Her hand shook. “Does this mean I destroyed time forever?”
Jonah and Katherine exchanged glances. Jonah decided not to say, Shouldn’t you have thought of that before you changed the code on the Elucidator? But he didn’t know what to say instead.
“Well, no offense, Andrea, but how could you be that important?” Katherine asked, her voice gentler than her words. “You weren’t royalty, like Chip and Alex. You were just the first English kid born in North America, and then you disappeared. That’s all anybody knows about you.”
“Knew,” Jonah corrected automatically. “That’s all anybody knew about Virginia Dare in our time.”
Katherine glared at him.
Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. I guess I’m not helping her argument. But Jonah was working on a new idea, one he’d never thought of before.
And he thought it was important.
“Nobody knew what happened to Virginia Dare because nobody wrote down what happened to her the rest of her life,” he said. “Well, not that we know of. But once there was time travel—time travelers could have known every single thing she did, every moment of her life.”
Andrea was actually blushing now.
“And I bet you did something great,” Jonah said. “I bet that’s why it mattered so much that you had to be returned to time.”
Katherine’s glare had turned into the kind that could vaporize enemies.
“And—and—we’ll make sure you get to do that thing. Whatever it is,” Jonah finished lamely. “And whenever. We’ll get you to the right time. I promise.”
Andrea sniffed. If anything, she looked more discouraged than ever. She crossed her arms and clutched the sleeves of her T-shirt, as if she was desperate for something to hold on to.
“Maybe we should keep walking?” Katherine suggested.
Jonah started to turn back around, facing toward the greatest number of tracer lights. But Andrea, beside him, didn’t turn at the same time, the way he expected her to. He bumped against her.
“Sorry,” Jonah muttered.
Still clutching her sleeves, Andrea stared at him.