Jonah began picking up the sticks and laying them in the exact pattern the tracer boys had used. It was eerie reaching into the blazing tracer fire. Jonah kept flinching and bracing for pain. But the tracer flames felt like nothing. Like air. Dust. Empty space. He breathed in tracer smoke—so wispy, like the ghost of a ghost. It didn’t even have an odor.
When all the sticks and chunks of wood were arranged, he tucked in the twigs and leaves as kindling. Then he found the same pointed stick the tracer boy had turned to create enough friction to spark the first flame. Jonah twisted it back and forth in the palms of his hands, the friction warming his hands, at least. He kept the image in his head of the way it had worked for the tracer boy—like magic. One moment the boy had just been rubbing two sticks together, and the next, he had a roaring fire. Jonah tried not to think about how things had worked in his Boy Scout troop: He and his friends had tried and tried and tried, and then the scoutmaster had brought out the matches.
Jonah didn’t have any matches now. There wasn’t a backup plan.
He kept trying, long past the point where he and his Scout friends had given up.
“There!” Katherine shrieked, leaning down close to watch. “You did it!”
Jonah sat back and looked. If there had been a flame, Katherine had just blown it out.
“Stay back!” he ordered.
The two tracer boys were sitting around their fire staring into the flames, cryptic expressions on their faces. They probably didn’t feel cold and wet, even though they were practically naked. They probably weren’t worrying that the man that they’d pulled from the waves might die from infected mud. They definitely weren’t worrying that time had been irreparably harmed or that they’d been set up in some elaborate trap.
Even though Jonah knew that they were staring into their own fire and had no way of knowing that Jonah was there—because he hadn’t been, in their time—Jonah felt like they were watching him. Their cryptic expressions seemed to be hiding scorn at Jonah’s constant failure, trying to start a fire.
“I can so do it!” Jonah muttered, rubbing the sticks together faster than ever.
A leaf crackled and began to smoke—real smoke, not ghostly tracer smoke. A tiny spark leaped from one leaf to another.
“Whoo-hoo!” Jonah cheered. “Take that, Scoutmaster Briggs! That should be the test for Eagle Scout!”
“Oh, good,” Andrea said, flashing a rare smile at Jonah. “Now the man can dry off next to the fire.”
“We can all dry off next to the fire,” Katherine corrected.
The fire was tiny, and there was no more dry wood around for making it bigger. Jonah had never had to solve any math problems where X was the size of a fire; Y was the rate at which water evaporated; and Z was the likelihood that someone would survive after nearly drowning, bashing his head, and lying in germ-infested mud or that three kids would manage to outsmart someone who had sabotaged their trip through time. Jonah knew the fire couldn’t make that big a difference. Still, it felt like the fire was a big deal. It felt like they all had a chance now.
“Here,” Jonah told Andrea. “I’ll help you move the man closer, so he warms up faster.”
Jonah shoved at the man’s waist. Katherine shoved at his shoulders. Andrea gingerly moved his head. Jonah’s main goal was to keep from pushing the man all the way into the fire, so he wasn’t paying attention to much else. He’d forgotten that the tracer boys had placed the tracer man right next to their tracer fire, which was in the same spot as Jonah’s fire. He’d forgotten what happened when a person joined with his own tracer.
Jonah gave the man’s body one final shove, and suddenly the glow of his tracer went out. The man had slipped exactly into the outline of his tracer.
The man’s color instantly improved. His lips moved, even though his eyes remained closed.
“Greedy privateers,” he muttered. “Thinking of naught but money . . . Coming to Roanoke too late in the season . . . Dangerous winds, dangerous seas . . . Help! The rocks! The rocks! Beware the rocks!” He took in a ragged gasp. “No! No! Our ship! We’re doomed! All will perish. . . . It’s happening! Oh, dear God! All have perished but me!”
Jonah jerked the man back away from his tracer.
“What’d you do that for?” Andrea demanded.
It had been only an instinct, unthinking fear. The man and his tracer were both still moving their lips, but soundlessly, now that they were apart. Jonah could tell what each of them was saying only because it was almost exactly what he’d just heard: All perished but me; all perished but me; all perished but me. . . .
Jonah shivered.
“What’s wrong?” Andrea asked harshly. “Can’t you take hearing another sad story?”
Jonah rubbed his hands hard against his face.
“No, I just—what if it’s too confusing for the man, being joined with his tracer, thinking with his tracer brain?” Jonah asked, trying to come up with an explanation that sounded reasonable. “The tracer knows he was saved by two boys dressed like Indians, not three kids in T-shirts and jeans or shorts. And then if he sees us but not the tracer boys—because people can’t see tracers in their own time—that will really mess him up.”
“But this guy never saw us save him,” Katherine argued. “He’ll just think the tracer boys saved him and left, and then we arrived. . . . We saw people rejoin their tracers after seeing different things before, back in the 1400s. I don’t think anything bad happened then, because of that.”
Jonah was still figuring out other problems.
“You think, when the man wakes up, it’s going to be okay for him to see us in our twenty-first-century clothes?” Jonah demanded. “Here, now, where we really don’t belong? When it’s all a setup by some mysterious time traveler who lied to Andrea?”
“No,” Katherine admitted. She winced, probably thinking about how she’d poked at the man back on the beach, trying to wake him up: Sir? Sir? That had been a mistake. They were lucky the man hadn’t awakened.
Very deliberately, Katherine pulled her hand back from the man’s shoulder.