“She’s just going to hide until the strangers leave,” Andrea said. “She doesn’t even know her grandfather’s with them! To be this close and not meet—no! I won’t let it happen that way!”
“Andrea,” Jonah said, and her name came out sounding like an apology. “It’s not your choice. You can’t control your tracer. You only get to choose for yourself.”
Jonah tried to decide how to spell out all the potential choices. Ideally, they’d all get to vote. Everyone could stay with their respective tracers, no matter what. Or everyone could stay on Croatoan, leaving the tracers of Brendan, Antonio, and John White to go on only as ghosts. Or all the kids could cast off in the canoe together, leaving Andrea’s longed-for tracer behind. Only Jonah and Katherine didn’t have a tracer here to choose or not choose, to weigh in the balance between friends and fate.
There wasn’t time to say any of that. Andrea was screaming again.
“No! My tracer’s never going to meet her grandfather! And my grandfather will never see me as myself! No! It can’t be! You’re—coming—with—me!”
Jonah could tell that Andrea wasn’t talking to him.
Andrea had grabbed her tracer’s hands, and was trying to tug her tracer away from behind the tree. It was a weird effect, like watching someone wrestle with her own shadow—from inside the shadow.
Dare whined and backed away, more freaked out than ever. Jonah tightened his grip on the dog’s collar.
“Jonah! Andrea! Come on!” Brendan called from behind them. “My tracer’s done! I’m getting into the canoe! We’re leaving!”
“No—you’re—not!” Andrea yelled.
The tracer-joined-with-Andrea took a step forward.
Optical illusion, Jonah thought. Trick of the eye.
Another step.
Andrea grinned.
Except, it wasn’t just Andrea grinning. It was the tracer, too, the smile lines around her eyes radiating back toward her braids.
“Wait!” Andrea/Virginia called, and even though Jonah understood perfectly, he knew she wasn’t speaking English. She was speaking another Algonquian dialect similar to the one Brendan’s and Antonio’s tracers used.
Andrea didn’t know any Algonquian dialects. Did she?
“Do not depart in such haste,” Andrea/Virginia continued, walking toward Brendan, out into the sunlight. “Do you have a ghost-man in your canoe? I am a ghost-girl, and he might be my kin.”
Brendan turned around.
No—it was Brendan-joined-with-his-tracer who turned around. The tracer turned too.
Can’t be, Jonah thought. I know that didn’t happen. Andrea’s tracer wouldn’t have called out. Brendan’s tracer wouldn’t have looked back.
“Are you a lost spirit of the dead?” Brendan’s tracer asked. His knees knocked together slightly, and Jonah decided the tracer was brave not to run if he was that afraid.
“No,” Andrea/Virginia said. “I am alive. But my grandfather is lost.”
Brendan’s tracer hesitated. Then he swept his hand toward the canoe.
“Come and find him,” he said.
Andrea/Virginia raced forward, across the shoreline littered with bones. Jonah whipped his head around in disbelief. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something pale in the spot where Andrea’s tracer had been standing only a moment before. Jonah turned his head—a tracer still stood there. But this one was even dimmer, even less substantial, fading away even as Jonah watched. Jonah looked from this tracer back to Andrea: Yes, Andrea was still wearing the deerskin dress and braids. She was still joined with her tracer.
A tracer in the wrong place, the other tracer disappearing . . . I thought tracers couldn’t change, Jonah marveled. Does that mean . . . Andrea completely changed time? Even original time? Is that possible?
Out on the water, an equally ghostly tracer canoe slipped silently away from the island, paddled by barely visible tracers of Walks with Pride and One Who Survives Much. Squinting, Jonah could just make out the translucent hand of John White’s tracer clutching the side of the canoe.
And then the entire tracer canoe vanished too.
Yet, when Jonah stepped forward a bit and shifted his view back to the shoreline, he could see Antonio/Walks with Pride and Brendan/One Who Survives Much—both in loincloths—standing by the real canoe. The Brendan figure bent down and crouched beside John White.
“He is hurt and sick and does not wake,” Brendan said.
“He has seen many troubles,” Andrea said. “It is written on his face.”
Jonah had stopped thinking of her as Andrea/Virginia. She still looked like the tracer—and was still completely joined. But Andrea was in control.
She bent down and stroked her grandfather’s forehead, smoothed back his hair.
“Your troubles are over now,” she said.
Jonah could see John White’s eyelids flutter—his real eyelids.
“Grandfather?” Andrea whispered. She had called him that before, but it sounded different now. Jonah could hear a trace of an accent in her voice—not English, but Algonquian. It sounded . . . right.
John White’s eyelids weren’t just fluttering now. They were blinking.
And then the eyelids stopped moving and his eyes focused. Even at this distance, Jonah could tell that John White’s eyes were focused on Andrea’s face.
“Oh, my child,” he whispered, “My child. You look just like my daughter, Eleanor.”
“Eleanor was my mother,” Andrea said. She touched her grandfather’s cheek. “She always said that you would come back.”
Jonah saw Katherine stumble out of the canoe. At first Jonah thought she was just making room for Andrea and her grandfather to talk, now that he could actually see her, now that he wasn’t just talking in his sleep. But Katherine kept walking, past the litter of bones, toward Jonah.
She seemed to run out of energy a few steps away. She clutched a tree as if she needed the help to stand up.
“What just happened?” she asked. “What was that?”