Katherine bit her lip.
“I know you were asleep all afternoon, but . . . haven’t you been paying attention since then?” she asked. “Haven’t you noticed how easy it is for Antonio and Brendan to move in and out of their tracers?”
Jonah gaped at his sister, his brain finally catching up.
“That’s why kept you shaking your head at me!” he said. “You didn’t want me to notice. . . .”
“No, I didn’t want you to say anything in front of the others,” Katherine said. “Andrea’s already sick with worry about her grandfather, and Brendan and Antonio are plenty freaked out as it is.”
“So you want to protect them, but it’s okay to worry me?” Jonah said jokingly.
“Yeah. Because . . . ,” Katherine took a deep breath, and for a moment Jonah was afraid that she was going to say something sappy like, Because you’re my big brother, or Because we’re in this together. Or even, Because I trust you most of all. Jonah wasn’t sure he’d be able to take it if she did that. Instead, she just frowned and said, “You know how people are supposed to behave with their tracers. You’ve seen it before. You already know something’s wrong with John White and his tracer, even though that might just be because of his head injury.”
“Antonio and Brendan don’t have head injuries,” Jonah said.
“Right,” Katherine said. “So isn’t it weird that they have to try to stay with their tracers? With Chip and Alex it practically took nuclear warfare to keep them away.”
“Yeah,” Jonah agreed. He almost added, Or true love. But this was not the right time to tease Katherine about that.
Katherine hit the palm of her hand against the sand. They’d both given up on pretending to look for a rubber band.
“I hate this,” she said. “We know Second did something wrong again, and we know everything’s messed up, but it’s like we’re boxed in—we don’t know what we can do about it.”
Another trap, Jonah thought. Or is it just another trick?
He looked back at the other kids: Andrea hovering near her grandfather, Brendan banking the fire, and Antonio . . . well, it looked like Antonio was posing, showing off his six-packs abs in front of Andrea. He was talking to her, too, probably saying, Look at me. Aren’t I hot? Jonah clenched his fists.
“Are you sure it wouldn’t help to punch Antonio?” he asked.
“Would you stop that?” Katherine said. She shoved at Jonah’s fists, knocking them uselessly against the sand. “None of this is Antonio’s fault. Can’t you tell he’s scared out of his mind?”
“Well, yeah, when he heard the wolves.” Jonah snickered. “Did you see how fast he was running?”
“Not just then,” Katherine said. “Ever since he got here, anytime he’s not thinking with his tracer’s brain, he’s terrified. It was like he couldn’t even hear half the things Andrea and I told him in the canoe. That’s why he keeps saying all those mean things, trying to make it so we don’t see how scared he is.”
“Oh, come on, Katherine,” Jonah scoffed. “Have you been listening to too many of those bullying assemblies at school? That’s the kind of thing a guidance counselor would say!”
“That doesn’t mean I’m wrong, does it?” Katherine challenged.
Jonah was about to make a snappy comeback or—to his surprise—maybe to grudgingly agree. But suddenly, across the beach, he heard Andrea scream.
“For real? Are you serious?” she yelled at the top of her lungs.
Jonah was already running toward her when he realized: No matter how loudly she was screaming, she didn’t sound upset.
She sounded delighted.
Jonah skidded to a stop in the sand right by Andrea and Brendan and Antonio. Katherine sprinted up behind him. By then, Andrea was grabbing Antonio in a tight hug.
“Thank you!” she cried. “Thank you!”
She hugged him again before letting go.
Antonio took a step back, just enough to blur away at the edges of his tracer. He barely missed stepping on Dare.
“What did I do?” Antonio asked, stunned.
“You told me the right year,” Andrea said, her face glowing. “The year!” She looked over at Jonah and Katherine, and her grin grew bigger. “We were wrong, what we thought, and what I told Brendan, and he didn’t know any different. But Antonio, my new best friend Antonio did. . . .” She threw her arms around him once more, before jumping back, too excited to stand still. “It’s not 1590, after all!”
“Uh, really?” Jonah said blankly. “And that’s a good thing because . . . ?”
Andrea laughed gleefully.
“You don’t get it, do you?” she said. “Come on, Jonah, you were the one who figured this out before! When you were wrong!”
Jonah could feel his expression getting blanker. Still, Andrea only laughed more giddily.
“Virginia Dare was born in 1587,” she said. “She—I—wasn’t even a month old when my grandfather went back to England for supplies. He came back and found his colony deserted three years later, in 1590. So, you guys thought, John White, deserted island—it must be 1590. Doomed trip for him, no chance for us.”
Jonah was sure he hadn’t made everything sound so simple-minded.
“But,” Andrea said. She held up one finger for dramatic effect. “But! We don’t know about anything John White did after 1593. He wrote a letter describing his ill-fated 1590 voyage, and it was published in a book by a guy whose name I can’t remember. And for all anybody knows, John White might as well have died the day after he mailed that letter. But he didn’t! He didn’t!”
“You know that?” Katherine asked cautiously. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because!” Andrea crowed. “Antonio here remembers when he—er, his tracer—”