“Why do you care?” Antonio asked, before Brendan could answer.
All right, then, Jonah thought. That was supposed to be a safe question.
Antonio opened his mouth again. This time he didn’t separate from his tracer, but spoke as his tracer would have.
“It is to my great and unutterable joy that this old man shall live to see many more dawns and dusks,” he said.
Jonah couldn’t help snickering.
“Did you just say something about ‘unutterable joy’?” he asked.
Antonio separated from his tracer enough to blush.
“Hey! I’m speaking Algonquian here,” he said. “You’re not supposed to understand!”
Andrea blinked at Jonah in amazement.
“You even understand Algonquian?” she asked.
“Uh, no—I mean—I didn’t think I did,” Jonah protested. He looked over at Katherine, who had an oddly guilty look on her face. “Wait! Do you think it was because of the translator thingies JB put in our ears before we went to the fifteenth century that last time?”
Antonio whirled on Katherine.
“You girls understand too?” he asked. “You mean, all afternoon when we were talking in Algonquian—”
“I didn’t understand,” Andrea said. “I didn’t get any translator thingies in my ears.”
Katherine sheepishly wrinkled up her nose.
“I didn’t want to say anything, because I thought you might be embarrassed,” she admitted. “But what you were saying, it was so poetic . . . so lovely . . . I didn’t want you to stop.” She all but fluttered her eyelashes at Antonio.
Oh, please, Jonah thought. You think you’re going to get out of this one by acting cute? This guy’s nasty!
“Well, then, uh,” Antonio stammered.
He hovered, almost completely relaxing back into his tracer’s face. But suddenly he jumped up, totally leaving his tracer behind.
“Oh, no!” he hollered. “I am not saying that!”
His tracer stood up, too, almost as if he intended to chase Antonio down.
“Stay away from me!” Antonio yelled, darting around the fire to dodge his tracer. “Just stay away from me!” He turned and raced into the woods.
“Wait!” Andrea called after him. She sprang up.
Brendan separated from his tracer to put his hand on Andrea’s arm.
“Leave him alone,” he said. “He’ll be back. There’s not really anywhere for him to go.”
Antonio’s tracer did nothing but take another fish from the fire and settle back into his seat beside John White.
“I can take over feeding my grandfather,” Andrea said.
But her grandfather’s tracer had fallen asleep, just like the real man. Andrea felt his forehead.
“You think John White is going to be all right, don’t you?” Andrea asked Brendan. “I mean, your tracer thinks so?”
“Yes,” Brendan said. “He does.”
Jonah noticed that Brendan had carefully separated his head from his tracer just as his tracer was starting to speak too. Of course, since it was only the tracer speaking, Jonah couldn’t hear what he said. And the translator thingies in his ears hadn’t given him the ability to read lips.
“Just what was Antonio’s tracer going to say, that Antonio didn’t want to say?” Jonah asked Brendan. “What did your tracer say back to him?”
“Oh, just lots of lovely poetic stuff,” Brendan said, grinning. He slipped back toward rejoining his tracer completely, stopped, groaned, and then stepped entirely away from it. He stood awkwardly beside his tracer for a moment, then flopped down in the sand a few feet away.
“I think I’ll be sitting this one out for a while, too,” he said.
“What are they talking about?” Andrea asked. “More about my grandfather? Something about what they expect to see at Croatoan?”
“No,” Brendan said, grimacing. He looked over at the two tracer boys, who both wore solemn expressions even as they gestured toward the darkening sky, the water, the woods. “Now they’re discussing . . . um . . . becoming men.”
Katherine giggled.
“You mean, they’re talking about puberty?” she asked.
Jonah wouldn’t want to talk about that in front of Katherine and Andrea either.
Brendan shrugged.
“Sort of, but not . . . well, not how we think of it,” he said. “For them, it’s this whole—rite of passage? Is that the right term? They have to prove their bravery and their honor and their loyalty to the tribe. They have to show they’re willing to die if they have to, and kill if they have to, and . . .” He stared into the flames for a moment.
“And?” Katherine prompted.
Brendan shook his head.
“And I can’t really explain. They think about everything differently.”
“But they aren’t thinking about Croatoan Island?” Jonah asked. “Even though we’re going there?”
Brendan’s face looked troubled as he shook his head again.
“No, and . . . I don’t understand why,” he said. He winced. “Not that I understand much of anything right now.”
“You’re a famous missing kid from history,” Katherine said in a soothing voice, as if this was supposed to help. “JB told you in the time cave that you were going to have to go back to the past.”
So Brendan had been in the time cave too. Of course he had. He just hadn’t been obnoxious like Antonio, so Jonah hadn’t remembered him.
“Yeah, but why didn’t JB come and get me himself, like he did Andrea?” Brendan asked. “Who’s this Second guy? Why didn’t he tell me anything? He just shows up in my bedroom one night when I’m listening to my iPod, and the next thing I know, I’m in that canoe, my iPod’s nowhere in sight, and Andrea’s yelling at me to paddle the same way as my tracer. I didn’t even know what a tracer was!”