Andrea shook her head at both of them and kept talking.
“You listen,” she said. “I know what you’re going to say. I know you think your plans and your strategies are important, and it really, really matters to outsmart the man who lied to me, and to protect time, like it’s some perfect, priceless jewel. But it isn’t. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters. Life isn’t like a game. You’ll see. When you lose the people you love most in all the world—when you lose everything . . .” She was getting choked up. Jonah could hear the tears in her voice. She gingerly touched John White’s sleeve. “This man came all the way across the ocean to find his family. He risked his life for that. So if I’m one of the people he’s looking for—and I am—I’m not going to hide from him. I’m going to tell him who I am!”
There had been a moment on Jonah and Katherine’s last trip through time when they had come so close to violating a sacred rule of time travel that JB had yanked them out of the fifteenth century in nothing flat. Jonah found himself hoping that that would happen to Andrea right now. Wasn’t she threatening to upset everything about time? Didn’t she need to be yanked out of the past?
Nothing happened. Andrea sniffed once, defiantly. Her grandfather let out a soft moan. One of the tracer boys turned over in his sleep, his arm disappearing in Dare’s fur. And the fire that Jonah had worked so hard to build flickered out.
There’s proof then, Jonah thought grimly. He realized, in spite of everything, he’d been holding on to just a bit of hope that JB knew exactly where they were and that, somehow, everything was going according to plan. If JB’s projectionist really was the best ever, couldn’t he have predicted that Andrea would change the Elucidator code, that the Elucidator would vanish, and that Jonah and the others would save the drowning man? Wasn’t it possible that the three kids might do something on their own that was better than what they could do with JB bossing them around? It had kind of worked that way in the fifteenth century.
But what Andrea wanted to do—that was just reckless. JB would never allow it. So there was no way that JB knew where they were. Nobody knew where they were.
Except Andrea’s mystery man, Jonah thought.
It wasn’t a comforting thought.
“Andrea—” Jonah began.
“My mind’s made up,” Andrea said. “I’m not going to change it.”
She leaned down to whisper in John White’s ear, but Jonah could hear every word she said.
“Tomorrow. We’ll talk tomorrow. . . .”
Jonah expected to lie awake the rest of the night, worrying and trying to figure out the right argument to make to Andrea, to stop her.
This is like Risk, he thought. There are too many sides, too many complications. There’s what Andrea wants and there’s whatever her mystery man is trying to do and there’s original time and there’s the historical account. . . .
It was hard to stay awake in such complete darkness, in such complete despair and confusion. Jonah drifted off, and the next thing he knew, there was sunlight streaming in through the doorway of the hut.
The sunlight was odd, though: It didn’t seem to filter all the way down to the floor of the hut. Jonah couldn’t make out the lumps that would be Andrea’s sleeping form, and Katherine’s, and John White’s. He couldn’t even see any tracers.
Jonah sat up quickly. The problem wasn’t with the sunlight. Or his eyes. The problem was that he was the only person left in the hut.
Jonah was about to give himself over to panic when he heard a snoring sound coming from right outside the hut: It was a deep, masculine sound and had to belong to John White. Jonah couldn’t fathom why the girls had moved the sleeping man out of the hut—was Katherine trying to get him away from his tracer? Or was Andrea trying to keep him with it? But it was so good to hear the man snoring, to know that he was still soundly asleep, to know that nothing irreversible had happened yet. Jonah let himself relax a little, and he went back to thinking of arguments to use on Andrea.
She doesn’t care about time, but she cares about her grandfather. . . . What if we tell her she can’t talk to him because that might worry him, she might scare him. . . .
Something tickled at Jonah’s brain—an idea, something he might have thought of the night before, right before he fell asleep, or even in the middle of sleeping. Something important about Andrea. But he wasn’t awake enough; the idea slipped away, just a tease.
Along with the snoring, Jonah could hear a girl’s muffled voice outside—it was too muted for him to tell if it was Andrea’s or Katherine’s.
Katherine’s more likely to be talking, but Andrea’s more likely to talk softly, he thought, grinning slightly to himself.
Then he heard the rumble of a man’s voice in response.
Jonah froze, straining his ears. It had to be just the man talking in his sleep, right? Talking deliriously again? It couldn’t be John White answering Andrea, who was so disdainful of time that she might have said something like, Hi, Gramps. Long time no see.
Suddenly Jonah knew the perfect argument to use on Andrea, the idea he’d almost thought of earlier. The idea he should have thought of hours ago, when there was still time to stop Andrea.
Was there still time now?
In one motion, Jonah jerked to his feet and crashed out the door of the hut. He almost tripped over Dare, who was stretched out, sound asleep, just outside the doorway—oh, great, it had been the dog snoring. Jonah whipped his head from side to side, looking for Andrea, looking for her grandfather.