Hudson began giving commands to angle the shallop toward the ship. Jonah took up his oar quickly, before the man could hit him again.
Most of the men in this boat are too sick and out of it to know what’s going on, Jonah thought. But does Staffe think there’s something weird going on? Does John King?
It was hard to tell. Both men were concentrating on lining the shallop up with the ship, attaching the ropes. The lines began to jerk upward.
“Steady,” Hudson called. “Steady does it.”
Moments later everyone who could was stepping back onto the deck of the ship. Jonah helped Staffe lift out the men who were too weak to move.
“My captain,” a man said, bowing low in greeting.
The man had dirty, unkempt hair, and his clothes were every bit as ragged as the other sailors’. His face was just as pockmarked and scarred. But there was something different about him—an air of strength and confidence that no one else had, not even Hudson himself.
“Was that guy here before?” Jonah whispered to Katherine. “What was he doing during the mutiny?”
Katherine shrugged and whispered back, “Never saw him before.”
“Prickett,” John King said, sounding astonished. “I thought you were lamed. I haven’t seen you out of your bunk in days.”
Prickett looked toward Henry Hudson.
“It was a plot the captain and I conjured up,” Prickett said. “When we heard there was talk of mutiny, he knew he’d need a spy on the inside. Someone who seemed harmless. Not even able to walk! When in reality”—he smiled, in a way that seemed like a threat—“I could win a race with any man here, were it necessary.”
“And what did you do with the mutineers?” Hudson asked. “Did you … did you carry out my orders?”
Jonah was certain, suddenly, that Hudson had given Prickett no orders. Hudson was as confused by Prickett as everyone else.
“Of course, sir,” Prickett said, bowing again. “The other men and I—the ones still loyal to you, who were only pretending otherwise—we put the mutineers out on the ice.”
“Juet,” Hudson said, looking around. “Wilson. Greene. Pearce.”
Jonah realized the captain was listing off mutineers, the ones who were missing now.
“On the ice?” Staffe asked. “Do you not feel the air? It’s a warming day today. Ice could melt completely by noon.”
“Then the water’ll be warm enough the mutineers can swim to shore,” Prickett said lightly. “They’ve got better odds than being tried for mutiny back in London, no?”
“Mutineers always hang,” Hudson said. He looked around again, this time seeming to make a point of catching each sailor’s eye. “Even if it’s the captain’s word against the entire crew.”
Jonah had to hold back a shiver when Hudson looked his way.
He’s warning everyone, Jonah thought. Not to even think about disagreeing with him again.
“Juet, Wilson, Greene—they were leaving us to starve,” John King said. “Why shouldn’t we leave them to drown? Why would we share any of our precious food with such … such maggots?”
One of the sickly sailors from the shallop attempted a cheer: “Hear! Hear!” But his voice was hoarse and painful to listen to.
Nobody else joined in.
“The mutineers were hoarding food,” Prickett said. “We found it after we put them off the ship. Symmes?”
He gestured, and one of the men behind him—er, no, just a boy—leaned a barrel forward and pried off the lid. Jonah caught a glimpse of rounds of moldy cheese, domes of moldy bread, and greenish-colored … meats? Was that what meat looked like when it was thoroughly rotten?
Beside him Katherine gagged silently. She put her hands over her mouth, holding back the retching.
Jonah would have done the same if he’d been invisible. As it was, he clenched his teeth together and tried to think about something besides mold and rot.
Never mind eating, he told himself. That fish we had back in 1600? Had to be packed with nutrients—enough to last decades!
Around him the sailors were gasping and cheering and even drooling, as if they’d just seen a gourmet feast unveiled before their eyes.
“Well,” Hudson said, his harsh voice cutting through the cheers. “Perhaps there shall be room for extra rations at the noonday meal. If everyone attends to their morning work. We’ve wasted enough time over this treachery. We’ve business at hand. Wydowse, set a course due west. Everyone—to your stations!”
The men began to scatter.
Oh, no, Jonah thought. John Hudson was ship’s boy—he would have had duties too. Responsibilities. What am I supposed to do?
Symmes, the boy who’d pried open the barrel of food, drove a pointy elbow into Jonah’s ribs.
“You’ve got lookout,” he taunted.
“L-lookout?” Jonah repeated, casting a puzzled glance toward Katherine.
Her jaw dropped. Her eyes got big.
“Oh, yeah,” Symmes said. “No trying to get out of it. I’m not climbing up there today!”
He pointed one bony finger straight up toward the sky.
Jonah tilted his head back and looked up … and up … and up.
A wooden tub stood near the top of the tallest mast, practically up in the clouds.
It was the crow’s nest.
“I … can’t,” Jonah said. “Not today.”
Symmes smashed his foot down on Jonah’s, and then twisted it to make it hurt worse.
“Aye, and wouldn’t that be mutiny?” Symmes asked. “A ship’s boy refusing to go up to the top?” He pressed down harder on Jonah’s foot. Now the pain shot all the way up Jonah’s leg. “Don’t think I wouldn’t tell.”
No, no, Jonah wanted to say. I believe you! You’d tell! You’d climb up and push me out of the crow’s nest if you thought that would help you!
“I’m going! I’m going!” Jonah said.
He reached for a rope.
Somehow Jonah suspected that the real John Hudson would have reached the crow’s nest much faster.
I’m not afraid of heights, Jonah told himself as he inched upward, stopped, then forced himself to keep going. Not. Afraid. Not.
For most of his life that would have been true. But last summer at Boy Scout camp there’d been a moment at the top of the climbing wall. … Jonah had completely lost his footing. He’d been wearing a climbing harness, of course, so he’d had barely a second of free fall before the ropes stopped him from plunging to the ground. He’d never been in any actual danger. But apparently one second of free fall was all it took to rewire his brain, to switch off the confident voice in his head that had always whispered, Heights? No problem! Bring ’em on! And turn on something in its place that sent out whispers of dread: No, no, don’t go up there! You’ll fall! You’ll get hurt. Maybe even killed!
Maybe traveling through time and seeing people die for real and knowing that people’s lives depended on him—maybe that had something to do with his fear too.
I’m not even wearing a climbing harness, Jonah thought, his muscles locking in place for the umpteenth time.
He glanced down, hoping that someone—Henry Hudson, perhaps? John Hudson’s own father?—would call up to him, “Now, now, didn’t you forget something? Safety first, remember?” He wouldn’t expect anything fancy in the way of safety harnesses—carabiner clips probably hadn’t been invented yet in 1611. But wasn’t there a spare rope somewhere he could tie around his waist, just in case?
Down on the deck some of the sailors were walking across the still-icy wood with bare feet. A man who must be the cook was hacking away at the greenish meat with a cleaver that barely missed hitting his fingers. A man working with him had an open flame going under a pot of boiling water that threatened to roll away with every swell of the waves.
Okay, “safety first”—not such a big concept in 1611, Jonah thought.
“It’s better if you don’t look down,” a voice whispered below him.
Jonah s
quinted—it was Katherine. He could barely make out her outline on the ropes beneath him in the wisps of fog.
“What are you doing up here?” Jonah asked. “You don’t have to risk your life pretending to be John Hudson.”
“You think I’m going to stay down there all by myself?” Katherine asked. “Those people are scary.”
Scarier than climbing up to the crow’s nest? Jonah wanted to ask.
But, of course, Katherine wasn’t afraid of heights.
“Besides, maybe if we’re up there, we can reach JB on the Elucidator,” Katherine said. “Maybe, I don’t know, it’s like a cell phone. They work better if you’re higher up.”
“No, they work better if you’re close to a cell phone tower,” Jonah said.
“Well, isn’t the mast tall enough to be one?” Katherine asked.
This was illogical in so many ways that Jonah started working out a list in his head.
The Elucidator isn’t a cell phone. We don’t know anything about how it works.
JB is eleven years away, trapped in 1600. Being at the top of a mast isn’t going to move us any closer to him in the past.
It doesn’t matter how tall the mast is. If it doesn’t have a cell phone tower at the top, it isn’t a cell phone tower.
Or an Elucidator tower.
Or …
With each item he figured out, Jonah moved his hands and legs up higher on the rungs.
“Though, maybe the mast really isn’t that tall,” Katherine said. “Remember how time travel can throw off your sense of distance?”
“Of course it’s tall!” Jonah said. “It’s a mast of a huge ship!”
He looked down again. They were so high up now that the Discovery didn’t look huge anymore. It looked tiny beneath them—like a toy bobbing up and down in the endless, open bay.
Jonah felt dizzy. Dizzy and terrified.
“I told you. Stop. Looking. Down,” Katherine said.
“Stop bossing me around!” Jonah said, fighting the dizziness. Just to prove he didn’t need Katherine bossing him around, he reached up again, even as he glared down at his sister.
He saw the faintest trace of a smile cross her face—a smile she hid immediately.
“Are you trying to make me mad?” he asked suspiciously.
“Yep,” Katherine admitted. “To distract you from being scared.”
Of course that made him madder.
“I’m not scared!” he insisted. And to prove it, he scrambled up the last few rungs of rope, flopped over on his belly, and landed on a circle of canvas-covered wood surrounded by short wooden walls.
He’d reached the crow’s nest.
Moments later Katherine gingerly climbed in after him.
“Jonah,” she said softly, panting a little, and holding on to the mast that shot up through the middle of the crow’s nest. “I’m scared too. It’s crazy climbing up here without a harness or net or anything. Mom and Dad would kill us if they knew what we just did.”
“That would save us from killing ourselves when we try to climb down,” Jonah muttered.
Katherine seemed to turn even paler. Which was amazing, given that she was already translucent.
“Oh, no! I didn’t think about how much worse it’s going to be climbing down!” she moaned. “Maybe … maybe JB will find the real John Hudson and get him in here before his lookout time is over. So he’ll have to climb down, not us.”
She leaned toward Jonah’s cloak and pulled out the Elucidator.
“JB! JB, please! Answer us!” she cried into it.
Silence.
“JB?” Katherine whispered.
Nothing.
“He’s not going to answer,” Jonah said. “Can’t you feel how off everything is? How we keep getting further and further from how time is supposed to go?”
He thought about pointing out how long it had been since they’d seen the last tracer, how long the real John Hudson had been missing. But all that just made him feel even more panicked.
Katherine blinked at him.
“Still,” she said stubbornly. “None of that should stop JB from talking to us.” She held the Elucidator even closer to her mouth and screamed into it: “JB!”
Her voice seemed to echo off the empty sky.
“Shh,” Jonah said. “Or else we’ll have Henry Hudson up here beating me up again, because he thinks I’m trying to send coded messages to his enemies.”
He quickly peeked over the edge of the crow’s nest—looking down made him dizzy all over again. But at least no one was staring up at him.
“Do you think Henry Hudson was that crazy in original time?” Katherine said.
“I don’t know anything about Henry Hudson in original time,” Jonah said sulkily.
“Sure you do,” Katherine said. “Remember the Hudson River? And the Hudson Bay? He must have discovered those.”
“Congratulations,” Jonah said sarcastically. “You just beat me in Geography Bee.”
Katherine went on as if he hadn’t said anything.
“And JB told us Hudson was supposed to end up in the shallop with his son and a bunch of dying sailors,” she said.
Jonah hit his fist against the mast.
“End,” he said. “The shallop was supposed to be the end of the Hudsons’ story. Henry’s and John’s. There’s our proof—the ship wasn’t supposed to come back.”
“Why did it? Why’s everyone acting so weird? Why won’t JB answer us? And what are we supposed to do now?” Katherine asked.
Leave it to Katherine to start adding up everything they didn’t know. Jonah would have been happy to leave all those questions unspoken.
No—wait. He could actually answer one of them.
“I guess I just have to keep acting like John Hudson,” he muttered. He gazed out at the gray fog, the gray sky, the gray sea. It was hard to see where one ended and the other began. “What do you think I’m supposed to do as lookout? What am I looking out for?”
“Icebergs, like in Titanic?” Katherine suggested.
Wonderful. That made him feel so much better.
“Since you’re invisible, why don’t you go back down and eavesdrop on Hudson and Prickett and the others, and figure out what’s really going on?” Jonah suggested, because right now he just wanted to get rid of his sister.
“Jonah—what if I stop being invisible again? And they catch me?” Katherine asked. Suddenly she had tears in her eyes.
She’s that upset? Jonah marveled. That scared?
Katherine was only a year younger than Jonah. She’d been a force of nature in his life for as long as he could remember, constantly flouncing in and out of the house, tagging along after him and his friends, tattling, “Jonah hurt my feelings! Make him let me play with him!” The minute Katherine walked into a room, Jonah always knew right away if she was happy or sad or angry or worried or frightened or ecstatic. And if Jonah or Mom or Dad didn’t pick up on all the cues right away, she spelled it out for them, in diatribes that could last hours.
Was it possible that Katherine had changed too? In the midst of all their time traveling and getting lost and risking their lives and saving their friends’ lives and never knowing if everything was going to work out—was it possible that Katherine had actually learned how to hide her emotions? Some of them, anyway?
A tear rolled down her cheek, and she wiped it away without saying a word.
She shivered, and didn’t say anything about that, either.
“Here, uh, Katherine, I bet you’re really cold,” Jonah said. “You can wear my cloak.”
He started to take it off, but even more tears welled in her eyes. Suddenly it seemed more important to make her laugh than to comfort her.
“Or—you could wrap this canvas blanket around yourself,” Jonah said, lifting an edge of the canvas they’d been sitting on. “I bet it only smells like it’s carried dead fish across the ocean.” He wrapped the canvas around himself, to demonstrate. “See? It’s almost like a Snuggie—
”
He stopped, because there was something under the canvas. Something flat and smooth. … He pulled out a packet wrapped and tied in some sort of dried animal skins. He peeled back the skins to find papers inside.
“Maybe somebody has been leaving coded messages up here!” Katherine said excitedly.
“I don’t think it’s coded,” Jonah whispered, staring down at the papers. “I think it’s flat-out true.”
He’d already read the first sentence:
Something very strange and dangerouse ys happyning on The Discoverie….
“Maybe JB figured out how to leave us written messages, even though he can’t get through to us on the Elucidator,” Katherine said hopefully. She started to reach for the papers, so she could see them too. Then her face fell. “Or—maybe it’s Second again.”
Second had left them written messages before, back in 1600. Second’s messages had always been short—and manipulative.
This message was long and written in an old-fashioned script.
“I don’t think Second would go to this much effort to make his message look like it belongs in 1611,” Jonah said. “He always wanted us to know it was him, when he contacted us before. I think—I think someone actually on the ship right now wrote this.”
He was scanning the rest of the words as quickly as he could:
Conditions have beene difficult and troubling from the time we left Lundon on the 17th of April, in the Year of Our Lord, 1610. The men have fought over coats, over bread, over which way a tossed hammer may land. … The master ys like a straw in the wind, favoring first one man, then another, deciding nothing, angering all. I believe he has secrets he chooses not to reveal. But those secrets may be the death of us all.
I have many reasons to fear for my lyfe, as I lie gravely ill, and there is little hope that I will see the shoares of my beloved homeland again. But I do not fear death. I am reconciled to my fate. What I cannot reconcile is the fear that the storie of this voyage will be told only by those who betray its purpose. Deception walks on the Discoverie; mutiny lurks in the minds and souls of cowards. I believe the evil plans will come to fruition soon….