Jonah couldn’t have said how close they’d gotten to the deserted Indian village—halfway back? Two-thirds of the way?—when the blinding rain began.
This is impossible, he wanted to say. I give up. But how could he say that when Andrea and Katherine were still pushing and pulling and tugging and yanking, even as water streamed into their eyes, twigs stabbed into their arms, and mud slipped against their shoes? So he kept trying too.
The tracers were just a dim glow ahead of him. And then, suddenly, they were out of sight.
“No! I can’t—” Jonah screamed. Rain pounded against his face, drowning out anything he tried to say.
“Let’s go into the same hut,” Katherine said, speaking directly into his ear.
The same hut? Oh . . . The Indians went into one of the huts in the village, Jonah realized. That’s why I can’t see them.
He got a final burst of energy, pulling the branch even harder. Then he dropped the branch and tugged the man into the dim but dry hut. All three kids collapsed in a heap, not even caring that they had fallen right on top of the tracer boys.
For a while, Jonah just lay of the floor of the hut. At least the rain wasn’t pounding down on him anymore. But his shoulders ached from fighting the waves and struggling with the branch. His legs felt as if they’d been rubbed raw, walking all that way in wet jeans. His clammy T-shirt clung to his skin, the saltwater that had soaked into it stinging against the dozens of scrapes and cuts he’d gotten scrambling over the rocks.
“Ohh,” Katherine moaned. “I need a hot shower.”
“Dry clothes,” Jonah mumbled.
“Make it a nice warm robe for me,” Katherine said. “And my fluffy bunny slippers.”
“Hot soup,” Jonah said. “Mom’s chili maybe?”
“Stop it!” Andrea said fiercely. “That just makes it worse, wishing for things you can’t have. You know?”
Jonah could tell she wasn’t just talking about clean, dry clothes and hot food.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
Andrea ignored him. She sprang up and began fussing over the unconscious man.
“We put him down on the dirt floor and he’s got cuts all over him, and they’re going to get infected if we’re not careful. But the water’s coming off his clothes and hair, and that’s turning the dirt into mud . . . how did people do it, hundreds of years ago?” she ranted. “How did they stay clean and healthy?”
A lot of them didn’t, Jonah thought. A lot of them died.
He wasn’t going to say that to Andrea.
She was adjusting the way the sweatshirts were tied around the man’s head and muttering, “At least we can keep the cut on his head up and out of the mud . . . we should rinse it off, but where are we going to get clean water?”
Jonah noticed that one of the tracer boys had stepped out of the hut—it was a little hard to keep track of someone who was under you and who could move right through you. But the boy was just now coming back in, carrying a tracer version of a hollowed-out gourd in his hand. The boy bent down beside the tracer man and gently lifted the man’s head, so the man could drink out of the gourd.
“I’ll go see where he got that,” Jonah said.
He stepped out of the hut into a stiff wind. Oddly, the rain had stopped—it had lasted just long enough to make the final part of their trip back to the village really, really challenging. But the sky was still dark and ominous, and the dim light made it hard to see where Jonah was going. He practically tripped over the hollowed-out water barrel before he saw it.
The twin of the tracer boy’s gourd was floating about halfway down in the barrel.
Oh . . . they just used this to catch rainwater, Jonah thought. That’s why there’s not much water in there—there wasn’t much rain.
He filled up the gourd as best he could and stumbled back toward the hut.
The tracer boys had started trying to build a fire while Jonah was away. Jonah handed the gourd over to Andrea and then stood watching the tracers. They piled together sticks and twigs and dried-out leaves; one of the boys was twisting a pointed stick against the groove of a stick below it.
“If those guys can start a fire that way, they’re superheroes,” Jonah said. “We tried that in Boy Scouts, and even the scoutmaster couldn’t get a flame going. It’s impossi . . .”
The ghost of a flame flared out from the tracer boys’ fire. Moments later, the flames were crackling across the dried-up leaves, spreading to the small twigs.
Katherine snorted.
“Shows how much you learned in Boy Scouts,” she said.
“But . . . but . . . I could start a fire with a magnifying glass,” Jonah protested. “Or, I saw this thing online, where you use a Coke can and a chocolate bar—”
“Do you see any of those things lying around here?” Katherine asked.
“Maybe I could try doing it just like the tracers,” Jonah muttered.
He saw that the sticks and twigs and dry leaves that the tracer boys had used were still in the hut. In original time, the way time was supposed to go, they’d been stacked up neatly. But right now they were scattered about, probably by squirrels or badgers or some other animals looking for food.