“Then—who—?”
“Some guy named Second,” Antonio muttered. He narrowed his eyes and added tauntingly, “Know him?”
“You’re working for Second?” Jonah said.
He took one step closer to Antonio and would have punched him squarely in the jaw if Katherine hadn’t had her hand on Jonah’s arm. Katherine jerked his arm back and then quickly grabbed his other arm, before he could even think about getting a left-handed jab in instead.
And Jonah was so embarrassingly weak that he couldn’t pull away from her.
“Katherine, stop it!” he yelled.
“No—you stop it!” Katherine yelled back. “You’re being an idiot! Antonio isn’t working for Second any more than we are! And neither is Brendan!”
“How can you be so sure?” Jonah asked, struggling against her grasp.
“Because I’ve been talking to them all day, while you were asleep,” Katherine said. “And then you wake up and Antonio says two or three words to you, and you think you know enough to start beating people up?”
“It only took one word,” Jonah muttered. “Second.”
“You are just like all the white men who come here, to our land,” Antonio said. “You start fighting and stealing and killing before you know anything.”
Antonio had to separate even farther from his tracer to say this. Right as he was speaking, his tracer stepped completely away from him, carrying fish toward Andrea’s grandfather. Antonio stopped and clutched his head.
“That was so weird!” he said. “It was like I was thinking with my own brain, but I was thinking the way my tracer would have. . . .”
Jonah thought about saying, Yeah, buddy. You’re a white guy too. Did you ever think of that? Hasn’t your tracer ever looked in a mirror? And what did I steal or kill? But Katherine was glaring so intensely that Jonah decided he shouldn’t push things.
“Let’s all just sit down and eat,” Andrea said anxiously. “Then we can figure everything out.”
“Here,” Katherine said, thrusting a fish on a leaf into Jonah’s hands. “You’re just grumpy because you’re hungry.”
That was exactly the kind of thing Jonah’s mother would have said. Jonah didn’t want to think about what his mom would have said if she’d seen him trying to punch someone. To distract himself, he looked down at his fish.
The fish looked right back at him—or seemed to. Its little beady eye was still attached. So were all its scales and fins.
“Don’t go asking for fish sticks instead,” Antonio said sneeringly.
Jonah swallowed hard.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“I’m sure it’s delicious,” Katherine said faintly. She poked at her own fish and seemed relieved that it didn’t move. She looked as if she’d almost expected it to jump off the leaf, flop over to the water, and swim away.
“But it’s not what you’re used to, right?” Brendan said. “Sorry. We were trying to stay with our tracers—we didn’t know how to cook the fish any other way but how they would cook it.” He expertly pulled away some bones and put a chunk of fish into his own mouth. “It really is good.”
Again, there was something about the way Brendan talked about staying with his tracer that bothered Jonah. Jonah looked at Katherine, who shook her head warningly. Now, what did that mean?
“At least they got a fire started,” Andrea said, taking a fish-on-a-leaf for herself and Dare, before going back to sit near her grandfather. “At least we don’t have to eat it raw.”
I managed to get a fire started back on Roanoke Island, Jonah wanted to protest. These guys aren’t so great!
But he wouldn’t have known to use the rakelike paddle to catch fish. He wouldn’t have known how to build the wooden rack that held the fish over the flames. He wouldn’t have known the way to Croatoan Island . . . assuming Brendan and Antonio did.
Jonah took a bite of fish—it really was okay, as long as he didn’t think about it having a face. And as long as he spit out the bones. He chewed carefully and tried to think about how to ask all the questions churning in his mind without once again ending up on the brink of a fight with Antonio.
“Are we close to Croatoan Island?” he finally said, trying to sound casual, even unconcerned. He looked around. They seemed to be in some sort of cove, sheltered from the water and wind. A thick woods started several feet behind them. “It feels like we’re a million miles away from anything. Like maybe nobody’s ever been here before.”
Antonio snorted and separated from his tracer enough to say, “Shows what you know. People camp here all the time. You can tell, just by looking.” He pointed behind him, toward some vague indentations in the sand. “There was a war party over there, back in the spring.” He pointed to the right, to a darker patch of sand. “A smaller group camped there, but they’d had a good day of hunting, so they took up a lot of space.”
Jonah couldn’t tell if Antonio was making this up or not.
“Okay, but Croatoan—” he persisted.
Katherine caught his eye and shook her head, ever so slightly.
“Would you stop bugging us about Croatoan?” Antonio snapped. “Our tracers aren’t thinking about that right now!”
Katherine was shaking her head furiously now.
“Great fish!” she said, in a too-bright, completely fake voice. “Andrea’s grandfather seems to like it a lot too.”
Perplexed, Jonah followed her gaze. Brendan and Antonio, both completely joined with their tracers again, were taking turns placing small chunks of fish in John White’s mouth. John White once again had the eerie closed real eyes/open tracer eyes, but he was eating with gusto. Between bites, the old man’s tracer would murmur. Jonah guessed he was just saying thank you, but it was infuriating not to be able to hear.
“Do your tracers know what John White is saying?” Jonah asked, changing his approach.