“Well . . . maybe this is normal, after all, and we just don’t have enough experience with tracers to know,” Jonah said. He thought hard. “Remember that time in 1483, right when the assassins grabbed Chip and Alex? Alex was kicking and fighting, but his tracer was asleep. That’s sort of the same thing. Just reversed, who’s sleeping and who’s awake.”
“That was just for a few seconds,” Katherine said. “John White and his tracer have been like this all morning, ever since Andrea and the tracer boys dragged them out here. This feels . . . permanent. Like he’s stuck.”
Is this something Andrea’s mystery man planned too? Jonah wondered. His plan from the night before for outsmarting the mystery man seemed hopelessly naive. Jonah couldn’t understand anything about their opponent’s strategy.
Jonah’s stomach growled, reminding him he’d had nothing to eat in, well, centuries.
“Maybe if we eat some of their food, we’ll be able to think better and figure this all out,” he said.
“Great idea,” Katherine said. “Except I think that’s the deer they killed yesterday. For us, it’s still alive and running around the woods. Want to go hunting with a bow and arrow?”
“We don’t have a bow and arrow,” Andrea pointed out. “Just the tracers do.” She slumped down beside John White, sounding completely discouraged. “We don’t have anything.”
“Oh, hey—there was some melon in that hut where I saw the other deer,” Jonah said, because he had to offer something. The melon had looked slimy and unappealing the day before, but it was the only possible food Jonah could think of.
Jonah stood and walked into the hut where he’d frightened the deer. The melon vines stretched across the dirt floor, their leaves pale and limp from growing indoors, with the only light coming from broken places in the roof. Jonah bent down to search under the leaves. Every time he lifted a leaf and then let go, it quickly settled back together with its tracer. At least the leaves are obeying all the tracer rules, Jonah thought. He found the remains of the melon the deer had been eating, but it was just a glob of mush that left slime on Jonah’s hand when he brushed it by mistake.
“Find anything?” Katherine said behind him.
Jonah wiped his hand on a leaf and discovered a hard green, baseball-size melon underneath.
“Just this,” he said, holding it up.
“Better than nothing, I guess,” Katherine said. “We can split it on a rock, divide it three ways.”
“Four,” Andrea corrected from outside the hut. “My grandfather needs some real food too.”
Jonah wasn’t sure what the nutrition rules were for someone sort of joined with his tracer, but sort of not. He looked at the melon in his hand. Regardless of whether they each got one-third or one-fourth of it, it wasn’t going to be enough.
“Are you sure that’s the only one?” Katherine asked.
Jonah ruffled the pale, anemic-looking leaves before him, setting off a ripple of even paler tracer leaves.
“See anything I missed?” he asked sarcastically. “Geez, there’s not even a whole tracer melon left anym—” He broke off. He looked back down at the leaves. He lifted the slimy leaf where he’d found the melon.
The leaf itself instantly developed a tracer, but there was no tracer melon underneath.
Jonah shoved aside the nearby leaves. He found the remains of the rotten melon the deer had eaten part of. It had just an edge of tracer light along its top, where Jonah had brushed against it and carried some of it away. But there was no tracer of the small green, hard melon in Jonah’s hand.
“It’s not supposed to be here,” Jonah mumbled, more to himself than Katherine. “Maybe it’s not even from this time. I moved it, and it didn’t leave a tracer.”
He turned the melon over and over again in his hand. Its surface was rough and ridged, except for one section where the pattern of webbing seemed almost carved into the rind.
No, Jonah thought. That’s not webbing. Those are letters. Words.
He flipped the melon over, and this put the letters right side up. Now Jonah could read the words in the crude lettering:
Eat. Enjoy. You’re doing great.
Can’t say more.
—Second
Jonah dropped the melon.
“I am not eating this,” he said.
Katherine was leaning so far over Jonah’s shoulder she was able to catch the melon before it hit the ground.
“Ooh—words,” she breathed. “Is it an Elucidator?” She brought the melon up toward her mouth and began yelling: “JB? Anyone? Hello? Are you there?”
Nothing happened.
“An Elucidator wouldn’t come with instructions to eat it,” Jonah said. “And it’s not from JB.”
Katherine bent lower over the melon and touched the words with her finger.
“Second?” she said. “Is that a name?”
“It has to be,” Jonah said. “Think it’s the same person who told Andrea to change the code on the Elucidator?”
Katherine looked back over her shoulder.
“Andrea?” she called. “Look at this.”
Andrea patted her grandfather’s arm, whispered, “I’ll be right back” in his ear, and came over to look at the melon.
“Is this . . . typical?” she asked, squinting down at it with a baffled expression on her face. “Did you see anything like this in the fifteenth century? Messages on food?”
“Oh, no,” Katherine said.
“I think JB would think it was wrong,” Jonah said. “Interfering too much with time. And dangerous, because someone native to this time period might see it. But this Second guy—who knows what he thinks?”
Katherine rolled the melon side to side, so Andrea could read the whole message.
“Does this sound like it might have been written by that guy who came and visited you and told you to change the code on the Elucidator?” Katherine asked her. “Can you analyze the—what do they call it in Language Arts class? The diction?”
“‘Analyze the diction’?” Jonah said incredulously. “It’s not even ten words! That’s like telling her to analyze a text message!”
“I don’t know about any of that,” Andrea said. “But the way this is carved? It does look like his handwriting.”
Jonah and Katherine stared at her.
“When he gave me the code, he wrote it out, so I could memorize it,” Andrea explained.