I said I was sorry, Jonah thought. What’s she waiting for?
“Oh!” she said, a baffled look traveling across her face. “Do that again. Wait a minute.” She bent down and picked up a small rock, holding it out slightly from her body. “Now.”
Puzzled but obedient, Jonah jostled her shoulder.
Andrea jerked back and forth, but tightened her grip on the rock. A second later, she crouched down and carefully put the rock back exactly as it had been before, eliminating its tracer. Then she straightened up.
“I was wrong,” she said. “It wasn’t Jonah’s fault that I lost the Elucidator.”
“Isn’t that what I said all along?” Jonah said indignantly.
Andrea nodded.
“You were right. I’m sorry. It was just the timing of things. . . . You bumped me right after I hit ENTER on the Elucidator, so I got confused about cause and effect.”
“You’re losing me,” Jonah said.
“There are different ways to lose things,” Andrea explained. “I didn’t think about how it felt different, until you bumped into me just now, when I was holding on to my sleeves. I didn’t let go. And I didn’t let go of the Elucidator when you ran into me the first time. It was me holding on, holding on—and then suddenly the Elucidator just wasn’t there.”
She collapsed her fingers against the palm of her hand, showing what it’d been like to clutch something that had vanished.
“So?” Katherine said, sounding as baffled as Jonah felt. “Why does it matter?”
“Because of the code,” Andrea said. “The code I typed in myself—that’s what made the Elucidator vanish. That man who came to visit me in secret? It wasn’t just that he wanted us to go to the wrong time. He really didn’t want us telling JB about it.”
“Well, duh,” Jonah said, completely frustrated now. “Because he knew JB would put us back in the right time! All that proves is that JB wasn’t your mystery man—and we already knew that!”
Andrea’s face fell.
“I thought that was something important,” she mumbled. “I thought I’d figured something out.”
Katherine put her arm around Andrea’s shoulder, somehow managing to pat Andrea’s back comfortingly while she fixed Jonah with an even more scorching glare.
“You did,” Katherine said. “Anything you think of is helpful.”
The two girls began walking again, easily following the trail of tracer lights leading them deeper and deeper into the woods.
Jonah glanced down at the dog waiting patiently beside him.
“Looks like you’re the only one who’s not mad at me now,” he muttered. He tugged on the dog’s collar. “Come on, boy.”
As they walked forward—exiled a few paces behind the girls—Jonah remembered how much he’d wanted to help Andrea from the beginning, how he’d vowed to take care of her.
How can good intentions get so messed up? he wondered.
Ahead of him, he could hear Katherine murmuring to Andrea, “Well, you know, teenage boys. They don’t always think before they speak. . . .”
Jonah tuned her out.
Hey, JB? He thought, because it would be comforting to have JB there to talk to. Why didn’t your brilliant projectionist predict that the mystery man would go visit Andrea? Why didn’t he see that we’d get sent to the wrong time and lose the Elucidator? Why couldn’t he forecast where we are now, so you can come and help us?
But Jonah didn’t know if that was really how the projections worked.
He did know that every minute that went by without JB showing up was a bigger and bigger sign that they were in trouble.
Around them, the tracer lights kept multiplying.
They came upon their second set of ruins in an absolute burst of tracer light.
“Ooh, lots of tracers have been here,” Katherine muttered, seeming to forget that she was too annoyed with Jonah to speak to him anymore. She pointed to tracer vines draped back from a clearing, tracer firewood stacked neatly beside a falling-down hut, still-standing tracer trees that evidently had been chopped down in original time.
“Or—the original two tracer boys have just been here a lot,” Jonah said, because he’d been working out something like a formula for tracers in his head. The absence of one action—say, a boy not slapping a mosquito—could lead to hundreds or thousands of new tracers. Mosquitoes reproduced really fast, didn’t they? So all the tracer lights Jonah had seen—that didn’t have to mean that time was completely messed up or that they were far off from the time they were supposed to be in.
Did it?
To Jonah’s surprise, Katherine didn’t grumble, Why do you always have to disagree? She just nodded and said, “You’re right. I didn’t think of that.”
Jonah figured that was the closest thing he was going to get to an apology for her nasty comments about teenage boys.
“Think this is an Indian village?” Andrea said, stepping out into the clearing.
“I think it was,” Katherine said, stepping up beside her.
Jonah thought about warning them to be careful, to make sure there were no real live human beings lurking nearby before they went any farther. But what was the point? With or without the glow of tracer lights, this village had clearly been abandoned a long time ago. Granted, it was in much better shape than the Roanoke Colony. Here, about a dozen huts made from curved branches circled an open space—possibly the equivalent of a town square. But many of the branches sagged toward the ground, and a few of the huts were more down than up.
“Do you think some time travelers ruined it?” Andrea asked.
“No, because then we’d see a tracer version of the whole village in good shape,” Jonah said. “And lots of happy tracer villagers . . .”
Katherine touched one of the huts with one finger, and the whole thing swayed perilously. An unmoving tracer version of the hut appeared and then vanished when the real hut stopped swaying and rejoined it. Katherine took a step back.