But, since he also didn’t want to watch the tracer boys with the tracer deer, he wasn’t quite sure where to look. His gaze fell on Dare—the dog was looking back and forth between Andrea and the tracers.
Jonah reached over and grabbed Dare’s collar, to hold him in place. Jonah didn’t have the slightest idea how to help Andrea himself, but maybe having the dog nearby would be comforting to her.
“What’s wrong, Andrea?” Katherine demanded, sounding every bit as baffled as Jonah felt. “Are you some big-time animal lover? Let me tell you, a lot more than deer got killed, back in the past—”
“I’m not crying over a deer,” Andrea spat back at her.
“Then what are you crying about?”
Jonah knew he should tell Katherine and Andrea to stop being so loud. It was dangerous. But the time sickness, the jolt of losing the Elucidator, the horror of seeing the deer slaughtered, the devastation of Andrea’s sobbing—everything seemed to be catching up with him at once. All he could do was clutch Dare’s collar, which was so nice and sturdy. Jonah’s fingers grazed the little pouch where JB had stashed the Elucidator, so long ago, so far in the future. Even that pouch was sturdily constructed, sturdily fastened, and so firmly attached to the collar. . . .
Wait a minute, Jonah thought.
He fiddled with the pouch, trying as hard as he could to pull it off. But it must have been connected with some perfect futuristic superstrong glue. Even using all his strength, Jonah couldn’t get it to budge.
A scene played back in Jonah’s mind.
Hold on—I’m scared the Elucidator is going to fall off, Andrea had said, back when they were tumbling through time, back when they still had the Elucidator. She’d reached over and touched the pouch, in the dark, when Jonah and Katherine couldn’t see her very well. The strap’s loose, she’d said. I’ll just hold the Elucidator myself.
But there wasn’t a strap. There wasn’t any reason that Andrea would have needed to take the Elucidator out of the pouch.
Unless she wanted to lose it.
Jonah straightened up, letting go of Dare’s collar. Jonah glared at Andrea, his eyes narrowed to slits.
“You’re the one who lied,” he said.
Katherine was the one who reacted first.
“What are you talking about?” she asked, switching her baffled gaze from Andrea to Jonah.
“‘Jonah made me lose the Elucidator,’” Jonah mimicked in a mincing, whiny voice that didn’t actually sound anything like Andrea’s. “‘It’s all Jonah’s fault.’” Okay, she hadn’t exactly said that, but Jonah was mad. “She was lying!”
“Jonah, you bumped into her,” Katherine said. “It was a mistake. You were trying to help. Nobody thinks you meant to do that.”
It was weird to have Katherine acting like the peacemaker—the calm, reasonable one. Somehow that made Jonah madder.
“But I didn’t do anything wrong, even by mistake. It’s all her fault,” he accused. He pointed right at Andrea. “She took the Elucidator out and threw it away. On purpose!”
The color drained from Andrea’s face. She began shaking her head from side to side, frantically.
“No,” she wailed. “I didn’t!”
“Who are you working for?” Jonah asked. “Gary? Hodge?”
Those were JB’s enemies, the ones who had kidnapped Andrea and Jonah and all the other missing kids from history in the first place. The ones who were trying to get rich selling famous kids from history to adoptive parents in the future. With Jonah’s help, JB had sent both kidnappers to time prison. But was time prison a place someone could escape from?
“I’m not working for anybody!” Andrea cried. “I just . . .” She kept talking, but Jonah couldn’t understand a single word because she was sobbing too hard now.
“Jonah!” Katherine scolded, hitting him on the shoulder. “You had better have a good excuse for making all those wild accusations. For making her cry!”
For an instant, Katherine sounded just like their mother, making Jonah’s heart ache a little. It was entirely possible that, because of Andrea, he and Katherine would never see their parents again. But Katherine-sounding-like-Mom also made Jonah feel ashamed. He wasn’t usually the kind of kid who made people cry. And the way Andrea looked so fragile and sad had made him want to help her so much—which made him feel even more stupid, now that he knew she’d double-crossed them. . . .
How could he feel so many different things all at once?
Jonah let out a deep sigh.
“Look,” he told Katherine, pointing to the pouch on Dare’s collar. “This is perfectly secure. There was no reason for Andrea to take the Elucidator out. She must have been planning to get rid of it the whole time. And that’s why she’s been acting weird ever since we got here.” He remembered her silent crying, her hesitation to shake JB’s hand, her insistence that they go back in time without getting debriefed. “Really, ever since we met her.”
Katherine reached down to examine the pouch on the dog’s collar for herself. She pulled it this way and that, tugging on it with every bit as much force as Jonah had used. Dare whined a little—this couldn’t be comfortable for him—and Katherine let go.
“Andrea?” she said doubtfully.
Andrea took a huge breath, one that threatened to turn into just another sob. But then she grimaced, clearly struggling to hold back the tears.
“I didn’t mean to lose the Elucidator,” she said in a small voice. “Honest. That was a mistake. But—”
“But what?” Jonah asked. He meant his voice to come out sounding cold and hard and self-righteous, like a prosecuting attorney on a TV show. But some of his other, confused emotions slipped into his voice instead.
He mostly sounded sympathetic.
Andrea sniffled. She leaned back against the fallen fence and drew her knees up to her chest, hugging them close with her arms.
“The man came to my house last night,” she said. “Er—the last night before we left. I don’t know his name. I don’t know who he was working for. I don’t think he would have told me the truth if I’d asked. I knew he was from the future. It looked like he walked right out of the wall. And he knew . . . too much. About me.”
“So, what, he blackmailed you?” Katherine asked. “What had you done—murdered somebody?”
Jonah could tell Katherine was just trying to make a joke, to lighten the mood. But this was evidently the wrong thing to say. Sorrow spread across Andrea’s face, and Jonah thought she was going to fall apart again. Then, just like before, a sort of mask seemed to slide over her entire expression, hiding her emotions. But it didn’t happen so instantaneously this time, or so completely. Jonah felt like he could still see cracks, broken places that didn’t heal.
“Nobody blackmailed me,” Andrea said. “At least, not blackmail like in the movies, where it’s all about money. He didn’t even ask for anything in exchange.”
“In exchange for what?” Jonah asked. “What are you talking about?” He could feel the dread creeping over him. Hairs stood up on the back of his neck; goosebumps rose on his arms. Whatever Andrea was about to say, it was going to be awful.
Andrea didn’t answer his question.
“I know I was probably being stupid, all right?” she said. “I knew I shouldn’t trust the man. But don’t you see? If there was any chance at all, I had to try!”
“Try what?” Jonah and Katherine asked together, the words spilling out almost completely in sync.
Andrea looked up at them and blinked back tears.
“I had to try to save my parents.”
Now Jonah was even more confused.
“You mean, Mistress Dare and—what would it be?—Master Dare?” he asked.
“No, no, my real parents. The ones I knew.” Andrea seemed annoyed that Jonah didn’t understand. “Back in our time. In the twenty-first century.”
Jonah saw the real problem: Andrea didn’t understand time travel.
“Andrea, you don’t have to
worry about your parents,” he said. He almost chuckled, but stopped himself. He didn’t want to embarrass her for not understanding. “They’re fine—they’re just waiting for us back home in the twenty-first century. All we have to do is get you out of history—the right way, this time—and then you can go home and see them again. Honest.”
Jonah spoke with the same soothing tone he’d used with homesick Cub Scouts when he’d worked as a counselor-in-training at camp. Really, if Andrea had been so confused all along, why hadn’t she just asked before?
Andrea shook her head.
“No, Jonah,” she corrected him. “My parents aren’t waiting for me back in the twenty-first century.”
“Of course they are,” Jonah argued. “And the great thing is, because you’ll get back just a split second after you left, they won’t even know you were gone.”
“Don’t you get it?” Andrea said. She didn’t sound annoyed anymore. The sorrow in her voice crowded out everything else. “Back in the twenty-first century, my parents are dead.”
Jonah and Katherine both stared at Andrea, their jaws dropped. That wasn’t a possibility Jonah would have thought of. It was too awful.
“It was a car crash,” Andrea said. “Last year.”
She sounded tougher now, brusque, as if she’d learned how to mask her voice as well as her facial expressions.
“I’m—,” Katherine began.
“Don’t say you’re sorry. Don’t say you can imagine just how that would feel,” Andrea said. “You can’t.”
Jonah was trying to imagine it anyway. What would it be like to lose both your mom and dad? At the same time?
“You mean, your adoptive parents?” he asked cautiously. “The ones who got you after the time crash?”
He was hoping he’d misunderstood somehow.
“Yes, my adoptive parents,” Andrea said impatiently. “I said my real ones, didn’t I?”
Jonah kept trying to get his head around the thought of someone losing two sets of parents by the time she’d turned thirteen. Katherine sniffed, like she might start crying on Andrea’s behalf.
“I don’t like telling people,” Andrea said. “I usually won’t. Because then they start acting like this.” She waved her hand vaguely at Jonah and Katherine. Jonah tried to sit up a little straighter and look normal. It wasn’t easy.
“But you told us because . . . because it’s connected to something that man told you?” Katherine said, her voice full of bafflement. “Something . . . about the Elucidator?”
Andrea nodded.
“He promised,” she whispered. “He said I could go back. He said I could stop . . .”
Andrea waited, as if she expected Jonah and Katherine to figure everything out. But Jonah couldn’t think at all while he was watching the pain play over Andrea’s face.
“He said you could stop . . . ,” Katherine prompted. Then she gasped. “Oh, oh—I get it.” Now her words came in a rush. “That man, what he told you—he said you could go back just a year in time, right? So you thought you could stop your parents from being in that crash. You thought you could save their lives!”
Andrea looked down at the ground.
“He said all I had to do was reprogram the Elucidator,” she murmured.
Jonah felt the anger wash over him again.
“Couldn’t you tell the man was lying?” he growled. “Time doesn’t work that way. You can’t go back to a time period you’ve already lived through. You know that! Didn’t you hear anyone talking about the ‘paradox of the doubles’? Or—didn’t you think about what it meant that we’d been living in Damaged Time? Like Katherine was talking about before?” Jonah realized that Andrea had probably been too far ahead to hear anything when he and Katherine were talking about Damaged Time. He just leaned in closer, nearly yelling at her now. “No time travelers could get in for almost thirteen years! Practically our entire lives!”
Andrea recoiled, as if he’d slapped her.
“Nobody told me that,” she whispered.
Belatedly, Jonah realized that could be true. When would she have gotten her crash course in the rules of time travel? The day they’d been trapped in the cave with all the grown-ups fighting over them? Everything was chaos that day. Nothing had been explained very clearly.
“Jonah, it was Angela who mostly told us about all that,” Katherine said. Angela was the only twenty-first century adult who knew about time travel. She had taken a lot of risks to help Jonah and the other kids. “It was when we were divided up into groups—Andrea wasn’t with us then.”
Jonah sighed, his anger washing away. He wished he could stay mad—anger was so much easier.
“See, here’s how it works,” Katherine was explaining to Andrea. “When Gary and Hodge kidnapped you and the other kids from history, and JB was chasing them, you know they crash-landed into our time. Well—” she snuck a glance at her brother “—my time anyway. We still don’t know Jonah’s right time, and he’s too chicken to ask.”
“I am not!” Jonah argued, even as he was thinking, How did Katherine notice?
Katherine ignored him and kept talking.
“You were all babies, right? The ones who weren’t babies to begin with were ‘unaged’ through the magic of time travel—and don’t try to understand that, because I don’t think anyone really can. Anyhow, JB or Gary and Hodge or whoever would have tried to grab you back from our time right away, if they could.”
“But the time crash messed up everything, and no time traveler could get in or out for about the next thirteen years,” Jonah added, because he wasn’t going to let Katherine make it look as if she was the only one who knew what was going on. “That’s how we could all be adopted and have normal lives for thirteen years. And so, when your parents . . . died . . . that would have been during Damaged Time, so no time traveler could save them. Not you, not . . . anybody.”
Jonah’s voice kept slowing down and getting softer as he talked. This wasn’t about showing up Katherine. This wasn’t like getting the right answer in school and thinking, Hey! I knew something the other kids didn’t! Go, me! This was telling a girl she’d never see her parents again.
Andrea was biting her lip. She had her heels wedged in the dirt, her back pressed hard against the toppled fence.
“But—” she began. Then her shoulders slumped. “I know. You’re right. I saw how JB and Gary and Hodge were acting. If they could have come back to get us any sooner, they would have.” She was silent for a moment, then looked up at Jonah. “And, yeah, I should have known not to trust that man. I did know. But I still thought . . . I hoped . . .”
And then Jonah couldn’t yell at her anymore about losing the Elucidator, about stranding him and Katherine in . . . well, now that he thought about it, Jonah didn’t know what time period they were in. He glanced back at the tracer boys with the tracer deer once more. While Jonah and Katherine and Andrea had been screaming and crying and ranting at each other, the tracer boys had managed to truss up the remains of the dead deer. Now they had it hanging from a thick pole, which they were balancing on their shoulders as they walked away. The method they were using, with the deer slung between them, made Jonah think of a picture in a textbook. But he couldn’t remember any picture in a Social Studies book that had had a caption, “If you’re traveling through time and you get lost and you see people using this technique, that undoubtedly means you’re in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and . . .”
Jonah had always thought that learning Social Studies was mostly pointless. It was weird that he now wished his Social Studies teachers had taught him more.
“So, Andrea, when you reprogrammed the Elucidator,” he began gently, “exactly what did you set it for?”
Andrea grimaced.
“I was trying to get back to June of last year, to this camp I always went to in Michigan. My parents had just dropped me off at camp when . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.
June, Jonah thought. Camp. That
’s why she wore shorts.
Jonah liked being able to focus on little details like that, so he didn’t have to focus on anything else.
But Andrea was still talking.
“I thought this time around I could just keep my parents at camp an extra five minutes before they left,” she said. “I thought I could make them help unroll my sleeping bag, or tell them I forgot to pack my toothbrush and they needed to get me a new one, or have them walk down to look at the lake with me . . . anything I could do to slow them down, to keep them from being on the highway beside that semi truck. . . .”
Jonah really didn’t want to hear any more of this story. And Andrea seemed to be having a harder and harder time telling it.
“Okay, but the Elucidator,” Jonah said. “Exactly what did you type into it? June—what? And . . . Michigan? The Roanoke Colony wasn’t in Michigan, was it?”
Katherine rolled her eyes.
“Try North Carolina,” she said.
Jonah wanted so badly to say, Everyone hates a know-it-all, Katherine. It would be so nice to take out all his frustration and worry and fear on her. But her face was already as white and strained and worried as Andrea’s. Jonah couldn’t go on the attack right now.
Andrea was shaking her head.
“It wasn’t like you think,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to type in an exact date, or a GPS location, or anything. The man just gave me a code. A string of numbers.”
And you fell for that? Jonah wanted to say. But how could he? Her parents were dead.
“The thing is,” Andrea continued, “I worked so hard to memorize that code. I made sure I knew it forward, backward, and upside down. And I know I typed it in exactly the way the man told me. I checked it three times before I hit ENTER. I wanted so badly to see . . .”
This was another sentence she couldn’t finish. She just sat there, frozen. She’d stopped crying now, but the tears still glistened on her cheeks. Her hair was tangled in some of the vines.