Andrea was sitting right in front of him in the clearing, her back mostly turned to Jonah, her mouth open. What if she was about to say the words that would ruin everything, right now?
Jonah dived toward Andrea. He thought he would just get close by and whisper in her ear, but he miscalculated. He ended up tackling her, knocking her to the side. He scrambled to right himself, to get his mouth next to her ear, to tell her what he’d just figured out.
“Andrea, it was only three years!” he hissed. “You said so yourself—Governor White came back to Roanoke after three years! That means . . . he’s looking for a granddaughter who’s only three years old!”
Andrea didn’t react right.
In Jonah’s wildest dreams, she might have thrown her arms around him and given him a big kiss and burst out, “Oh, thank you! Thank you! You saved me from ruining my life! And my grandfather’s!”
Jonah didn’t really expect that.
But he was kind of hoping for an “Oh, you’re right—I should have thought of that!” Or at least a “Thanks—you stopped me just in time!”
Andrea just lay in the dust and mumbled, “Whatever.”
Jonah slid back.
“You didn’t say anything to him yet, did you?” he whispered.
Andrea shrugged.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Jonah repeated incredulously. “Of course it . . .”
Jonah stopped talking, because Katherine came up just then and shoved him back into the dust.
“Jonah, you are a total idiot! What if John White had seen you?”
Jonah looked around and replayed everything in his mind. He’d come running out of the hut—and John White was sitting right on the other side of the clearing, in between the two tracer boys.
Jonah crouched down.
“He’s looking right at us!” Jonah hissed to Katherine. “What should we do?”
He’d been so concerned about Andrea ruining time by talking to John White, and now what had he done himself?
Suddenly he had an idea.
He jumped up and waved at John White.
“Aye, matey,” he said, trying to sound like an old-timey sailor. All he could think of was Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. “Sailing out on the sea for a long time, you can get to wearing some mighty strange clothes. And acting strangely too. But it be time to sail again, so I promise you, you will never see us again.”
He slipped into the woods, gesturing for Andrea and Katherine to follow him.
Katherine burst out laughing.
“At least sometimes he’s a funny idiot,” she said to Andrea.
Andrea gave a halfhearted smile.
“Shh!” Jonah hissed. “Careful!” He kept motioning for Andrea and Katherine to come into the woods with him, out of John White’s view. “He can see you!”
“He can’t see us,” Andrea said. “Or hear us.”
“Of course he can! His eyes are open!” Jonah whispered. “He’s awake.”
“Come and look for yourself,” Katherine said.
Jonah hesitated, then inched back into the clearing.
He could tell John White was joined with his tracer because the tracer boys, on either side of him, were taking turns placing some sort of food in his mouth. They were treating him like an invalid, tearing the food into such tiny morsels he didn’t even have to chew.
And, just as Jonah had said, John White’s eyes were wide open.
Er, no, they’re not, Jonah corrected himself.
Or were they?
Jonah’s brain seemed to be having a war with itself, trying to decipher what he was seeing. It was almost like the first time he’d seen his friend Chip join with his tracer, when it seemed as if Chip had vanished but he really hadn’t.
Ohhh, Jonah thought.
John White had his eyes shut.
His tracer’s eyes were open.
Jonah turned to Katherine.
“How’s that possible?” Jonah asked. “Is he joined with his tracer or not?”
“You tell me,” Katherine said. She swallowed hard. All the laughter was gone from her voice.
“It’s not right,” Jonah said. “This isn’t how tracers work.”
It was unnerving, the old man’s steady gaze and peaceful slumber, simultaneously. It was like double vision, or a double exposure.
Or a huge time error.
“It was weird enough watching Chip and Alex join with their tracers, when we could still kind of see their different clothes and their different hair,” Katherine said. “And the fact that, sometimes, they were different ages from their tracers. But this is the same man, in the same clothes, in the same place. . . . Why can’t he meld with his tracer completely?”
“It must be because the real man hurt his head,” Andrea said glumly.
“Or . . . maybe it protects him from having to figure out why he can’t see the tracers?” Jonah asked.
“There were real people around tracers back in the 1500s, and none of them were half awake and half asleep,” Katherine complained.
John White said something to one of the tracer boys, but even though the real man moved his mouth, he made no sound.
“We can’t hear him either?” Jonah asked. “But I thought—”
“We can—sometimes,” Andrea said. “Katherine and I think it’s only when he says something he would be thinking with both his tracer brain and his real brain. A minute ago, he was talking about how hot it is.”
Jonah shook his head. John White’s eerie gaze bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
“Andrea, when that mystery man came to your room back in the twenty-first century, and told you to change the Elucidator code, are you sure he didn’t say anything about it making tracers act weird?” Jonah asked.
“All he talked about was how I could save my parents,” Andrea said in an icy voice. “I told you.”
Jonah racked his brain for some other explanation.