The paddling was starting to feel grim to Jonah, like punishment. As long as they kept the tracers in sight, did it really matter if John White was joined with his tracer every single second?
He dared to glance back at John White again. How could it be? How could the man look even paler than before? And—was he shivering? Shivering in all this heat, when Jonah himself had just gotten out of the water and was already sweating again?
Jonah went back to focusing on nothing but digging his paddle into the water, shoving it back, pulling it out. Digging, shoving, pulling; digging, shoving, pulling . . .
With great effort, they drew close to the tracer canoe. The tip of the kids’ canoe touched the end of the tracer version.
“All right!” Katherine cheered. “Almost there!”
Jonah’s arms felt like they were almost ready to fall off. He’d been holding on to the paddle so tightly, for so long, that he couldn’t even feel his hands—which was a good thing, because they had blisters now. He thought he could put on a final burst of speed and draw even with the tracers. But how was he supposed to keep paddling after that?
The canoe lurched forward—Andrea was paddling harder than ever. This shamed Jonah into paddling harder too.
Jonah slipped through the body of the first tracer boy. He drew even with the tracer John White’s feet, with his stomach, with his head. The canoe wavered—losing ground, gaining, losing, gaining—and then with one last yank of his paddle, Jonah ensured that the real canoe and the tracer canoe occupied the exact same space.
Jonah glanced at the second tracer boy, who paddled alongside Jonah.
“Hey,” Jonah mumbled. “Isn’t it time for your coffee break? Er—venison break?”
This seemed hilarious to Jonah in his thirsty, hungry, exhausted state. He couldn’t really see the tracer boy except as an echo of himself: an arm separating every now and then from Jonah’s own, an extra nose leaning forward occasionally from Jonah’s face. It was like talking to his own shadow, like slipping through fog.
And then, quite suddenly, the tracer stopped seeming like a shadow or fog. It stopped seeming like a tracer, too—it seemed like an actual boy, with actual arms and legs and a torso and head, trying to take up the same space as Jonah himself. It was like having someone fall on him from out of the sky and leap up at him from underneath and dive into him from every other side, all at once. And like time and space had hiccupped and the other person somehow had a stronger claim to the place where Jonah was sitting than Jonah did.
Jonah immediately fell out of the canoe.
Jonah hit hard, the chilly water a huge shock against his sweaty skin. He slipped beneath the surface but gave a fierce kick and came up sputtering. His legs were already cramping; it seemed to take a huge amount of effort just to keep his head above water.
This is why they always made us wear life jackets at camp, Jonah thought. Be prepared, and all that.
Jonah would have to settle for a backup plan.
Let’s see. Find something to grab on to, something that floats, to hold yourself up?
Jonah had fallen out of the canoe in the middle of acres and acres of water. He was so far from shore that finding a random branch or log floating nearby would require divine intervention. Or Second’s intervention, and Jonah wasn’t going to count on that. But he had been holding on to a paddle when he’d fallen into the water . . .
Jonah actually lifted his hands up in front of his face, looking at them carefully. Maybe he was still holding on to a paddle?
Nope. His hands were empty.
“Jonah!” Katherine screamed, the sound distorting because of all the water in Jonah’s ears. “Swim back to the canoe!”
Oh. Well, that would do. That would be something to hang on to.
Jonah had surfaced with his back to the canoe, but it was a little odd that he’d practically forgotten it was there. Maybe his mind didn’t want to deal with the weird thing that had just happened to him in the canoe?
Jonah took a deep breath and whirled around.
The canoe was several yards away now, getting farther and farther ahead of him. But it had turned back into two separate canoes again—or maybe one and a half? One and three-fourths?
Jonah decided this wasn’t one of those times when precise numbers mattered.
The tracer version of the canoe was starting to break away again—not in a straight line, but off at an odd angle, swinging wildly back and forth. No, it was the real canoe that was swinging so wildly, as if paddled by maniacs.
In the front of the real canoe, in the spot where Jonah had sat only moments earlier, was a boy with short dark hair and pierced ears and a T-shirt that said, Sarcasm—just one of my specialties. The boy was staring down at the paddle in his hand with a baffled expression on his face.
From the back of the canoe, Andrea was yelling at the Sarcasm boy, “Keep paddling! We’ll explain everything later. But for now—keep paddling!”
Jonah hoped Andrea would be able to explain everything to him later too.
When she wasn’t yelling at the boy at the front of the boat, Andrea was arguing with a boy—or was it two different boys?—sitting practically on top of her. Jonah blinked and squinted, trying to correct the double vision. The boy he could see now, like the one he thought he’d seen only a moment before, had dark skin. His hair was cut quite close to his head, almost shaved, and he wore a Beatles T-shirt. Jonah blinked again, and suddenly that boy was gone, replaced by the other boy. This boy was naked from the waist up—the only part Jonah could see—and his hair was cut in a strangely familiar style.
Oh, yeah. He looks like one of those tracers we’ve been following around. . . .
While Jonah watched, the back end of the canoe lurched to the side, and Beatles T-shirt boy was back, with only the tracer version of naked-chest boy beside him.