“Do the tracers think this branch is going to float?” Andrea asked. “If we’re going to a whole different island . . .”
Jonah hadn’t thought of that. There was too much to keep track of.
“John White would fall off,” Katherine said. “He wouldn’t even make it across a puddle, if this was all he had holding him up.”
“Surely . . . ,” Andrea began.
She broke off because the one tracer boy was pushing the branch forward—all by himself.
“Show-off,” Jonah muttered.
The other boy was walking down toward the water.
“We have to push too!” Andrea said. “We can’t let my grandfather get separated from his tracer!”
It took all three of them heaving and shoving to get the branch lined up again with the tracer boy’s branch. Fortunately, from that point, there was a slight downhill tilt, so the main problem was controlling the branch’s slide.
The next time Jonah looked up, they were at the water’s edge, and the second tracer boy was a few yards down the shore. He disappeared behind a tree. Then he reappeared on the water—in a tracer canoe.
“Oh, there’s a canoe,” Jonah said. “That’s how it’s going to work.”
He was a little annoyed with Andrea and Katherine for scaring him. Of course the tracer boys wouldn’t try to sail an old man and a treasure chest from one island to another on a splintery, unstable branch.
Jonah dashed over to the tree where the tracer boy had stood just a few moments before. This was like searching for John White’s treasure chest. Jonah just had to look in the same spot where there’d been a tracer. Granted, the tracer boy had disappeared behind the tree, but he’d reappeared so quickly in the canoe that the real version of it would have to be right there.
Jonah looked down.
No canoe.
He looked to the right.
Nothing.
To the left.
Nothing.
Jonah peered far down the shoreline, in both directions, then out into the water, as far as he could see. Nothing, nothing, nothing. There wasn’t a real canoe anywhere in sight.
“Oh, no,” Jonah groaned, dread creeping over him. “Oh, no.”
It made so much sense that the tracer boys would have a canoe. They’d been alone on an island, after all—they had to have gotten there somehow.
But they weren’t here for real, Jonah thought dizzily. In our version of time, they weren’t here. So . . . neither was their canoe?
Jonah didn’t want to trust that conclusion. He leaned weakly against the tree, trying to think through everything again, trying to come up with a different answer.
The tracer boy was angling the canoe up against the shore. He held the canoe steady while the other boy helped the tracer version of John White climb into the canoe. Then the second boy loaded the chest and the pouch of venison jerky. He shoved the canoe out into deeper water before jumping in and grabbing a paddle.
Then, without a backward glance, both boys paddled away with John White’s tracer.
“Hey!” Andrea screamed, waving her arms uselessly. “Wait for us!”
The tracer boys kept paddling.
“Jonah! Hurry up with that canoe!” Katherine yelled.
“There isn’t a canoe!” Jonah yelled back. “Not a real one!”
“What?” Katherine hollered back.
Both girls scrambled out toward the water’s edge, to look up and down the shoreline for themselves.
“Maybe the branch would work better than we think?” Jonah said.
The branch was already sagging down into the water. A wave hit it, and Andrea reached back just in time to keep her grandfather from toppling over. He would have fallen in if they’d been out on the open water.
“Or we could swim?” Jonah revised his suggestion. “I carried John White yesterday. . . .”
Katherine fixed him with a withering glare. She didn’t have to say, Are you crazy? Do you want us all to drown? Can’t you see how far away the nearest land is?
The nearest land was just a sliver on the horizon. Everything was so flat, Jonah wasn’t even sure it was land. The thin layer of green and brown might have just been a trick of the eye.
And who knew how far it might be to Croatoan Island?
“Second!” Andrea screamed at the sky. “If you really want to help us, give us a canoe! A canoe! That’s all we need!”
Nothing happened. No canoe floated down from the sky.
Andrea slumped against her grandfather’s side.
“It figures,” she muttered. “Second’s just been toying with us all along. And now look at my grandfather!”
John White’s skin looked clammier than ever. A pained expression covered his face, as if he was being poked in the back by various twigs and other sharp, pointy offshoots of the branch.
“Maybe the stuff I thought was paint is actually medicine?” Jonah suggested.
“Wouldn’t Second tell us that if he really wanted to help?” Katherine asked. “So we wouldn’t poison Andrea’s grandfather by mistake?”
“If Second really wanted to help, he’d tell us something besides, ‘With my compliments’ and ‘You’re doing great,’” Andrea muttered. “And—oh, yeah, ‘Here’s how you can save your parents’—and it’s all a lie.”
Jonah gazed at Andrea. He could see the tears welling in her eyes.
“Forget Second,” he told her. “We are going to get off this island. We’re going to get away from Second’s plans, and we’re going to catch up with the tracer boys, and we’re going to find your tracer—even if we have to make our own canoe out of this . . .”
Log, he was going to say. There was a downed log floating in the water right at the shoreline. It had been there from the first moment that Jonah had begun looking for a canoe. But a breeze blew some dead leaves away just then, and Jonah saw that the log was actually tied to a tree with some sort of primitive braided rope.