“You didn’t see them the first hour or so,” Katherine said. “They were completely clueless and scared out of their wits. They didn’t know anything.”
“Yeah, but as soon as they joined with their tracers, they should have known . . .” The next word Jonah had intended to say was everything. But he stopped. He remembered Brendan saying he didn’t know if his tracer had done anything great; he didn’t know what the tracer thought about Croatoan Island. He didn’t even know what year it was. And Antonio—maybe he wasn’t just being a jerk when he’d refused to talk about the distance to Croatoan because, “Our tracers aren’t thinking about that right now!”
“You think . . . ,” Jonah began. He had to try again to get the words out. “You think the tracers are keeping secrets?”
Katherine nodded, her eyes huge and frightened. Now that they were away from the other kids, Jonah could see how scared she really was—and how fake her brave face and cheerful chatter had been before.
“Didn’t Chip and Alex know everything their tracers knew, back in the fifteenth century?” Jonah interrupted. “Didn’t they know everything right away, from the first moment they joined with their tracers?”
“I think so,” Katherine said. “That’s how they always acted. Whatever we asked them, they had answers. Unless it was something their tracers didn’t know either.”
“But maybe we only asked them questions about things they’d been thinking about anyway,” Jonah said.
“Yeah,” Katherine agreed. “We never tested them with anything like, ‘What color shirt was your tracer wearing a week ago Monday?’”
“I couldn’t answer that,” Jonah said. “With or without a tracer.”
“Oh, right,” Katherine said. But she didn’t launch into any mocking rant about how he was just a stupid boy, and she could remember every outfit she’d worn since starting sixth grade.
“Do you think the tracers are working for Second?” Jonah asked.
Katherine frowned, considering this.
“I don’t think they could,” she said. “It’s like you said, they’re tracers. They can’t change.” She hesitated. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said I don’t trust them. Maybe that’s not the right way to put it. How could any of this be the tracers’ fault? They’re just what we see, and the problem’s deeper than that. The whole setup is messed up.”
“Because of Second,” Jonah growled. “He’s behind this.”
Katherine nodded.
“He must have done something to keep Brendan and Antonio from melding with their tracers right,” Katherine said.
Jonah struggled to get his aching brain to follow this thought. It seemed every bit as impossible as finding a rubber band buried on a vast beach. Brendan said Second pulled him straight out of time from his room back home—Second didn’t take him to a time cave or time hollow first, Jonah remembered. Could that be the problem? Jonah didn’t know why this would matter. The time hollows had always seemed like conveniences, not essentials. Why couldn’t Brendan and Antonio go straight from the twenty-first century to . . .
Jonah’s head throbbed, and he saw what he had been missing.
“I bet the problem was the way Brendan and Antonio came back,” Jonah said slowly. “Antonio landing . . . on top of me.”
This was still hard to talk about. It was like the moment back home when Jonah had first seen a time traveler seem to vanish into thin air, changing dimensions. Jonah’s brain had tried so hard to recast the memory, to turn it into something else—something believable.
Now it felt like Jonah’s brain was trying very hard to get him to forget completely. The memory already seemed distant and hazy, like something from a dream.
Oh, no, Jonah thought. I am not letting go.
“You know, when Antonio . . . arrived . . . that felt wrong,” Jonah said. “I bet Second did it that way on purpose.”
Katherine nodded, still deadly serious.
“I was looking right at you,” she said. “And, for a moment, it was like there were three people in the exact same spot—you, Antonio, and the tracer.”
Jonah felt chills again.
“That’s how it felt to me, too,” he admitted. He could bear thinking about that moment only in a roundabout way, as if he had to sneak up on the memory to catch it.
Katherine evidently wasn’t so limited.
“And then for a split second after that, you and the tracer both disappeared,” Katherine said, her voice low and troubled. “Maybe I blinked. Maybe I just missed seeing you fall out of the canoe. But where did the tracer go? Before, anytime we saw someone joined with his tracer—back in the fifteenth century, with Chip or Alex—it was always the tracer we could see, more than Chip or Alex. But with Antonio and his tracer, it was like the tracer blended into Antonio, not the other way around. I could see Antonio’s T-shirt better than his tracer’s back.”
Jonah shook his head, trying to make sense of Katherine’s words.
“But that didn’t last,” he said. “The tracers look normal now.” He glanced back toward the others clustered around the fire. Antonio and Brendan, still joined with their tracers, were very clearly wearing nothing but loincloths. “Well, normal for 1590s Native Americans.” He cleared his throat, trying to get rid of the last of the dust. “When did Antonio and his tracer start looking right again? And do you think Brendan and his tracer were messed up at first too?”
“I don’t know,” Katherine said. “I started looking around for you, and when I glanced back at Antonio and his tracer, everything was like . . .” she gestured toward the two boys, moving completely in concert with their tracers.
“You mean Antonio and his tracer were following all the rules of tracerdom, as we know them,” Jonah said, back to joking a little bit, because he couldn’t stand being so deadly serious all the time. “Except for Antonio—and Brendan—not knowing everything their tracers know, and maybe that’s not that different from the last time. Maybe we just didn’t notice it before. Nobody broke any other tracer rules after that, did they?”