Tracers were ghostly representations of what people would have been doing if time travelers hadn’t interfered. Jonah and Katherine had been completely freaked out the first time they’d seen tracers, on their last trip through time. It had also been eerie to see their friends Chip and Alex join with their tracers, blending so completely that they could think their tracers’ thoughts.
The real Chip and Alex-the twenty-first-century versions-had seemed to disappear.
It would undoubtedly be the same for Andrea.
“We’ll find the tracer,” Jonah said, though he was thinking, Do we have to? The original Virginia Dare undoubtedly would have faced some life-threatening danger that Jonah and Katherine needed to save Andrea from. Once she was joined with her tracer, it would be very hard to pull her away from that danger. And now that they didn’t have the Elucidator, how would they know what danger to watch out for?
Jonah stifled his fear and turned to Andrea.
“Andrea, did anybody explain tracers to you?” he asked.
“Oh, um…,” Andrea seemed to have make a great effort to turn her attention from the pine trees back to Jonah. “Sure. JB told me all about them.” She jumped up. “So what are we waiting for? Let’s go find my… uh… tracer.”
She began striding off, going toward an area of the woods where the trees didn’t grow as thickly. The dog, with great effort, stood up and hobbled along behind her.
“Wait for us,” Jonah said feebly, struggling to get his feet. He was as tottery as an old man. Katherine was wobbly just sitting up. Andrea skipped away, past the nearest tree.
“Hurry up, then!” she said, looking back over her shoulder.
Was she giggling?
“No! Listen!” Jonah hissed. “You have to be careful! You can’t let anyone see you! You can’t let anyone hear you! You can’t let anyone know we’re here!”
He thought about mentioning that if they still had the Elucidator, it could have turned them invisible-invisible and safe. That was undoubtedly what JB had been planning, the reason he hadn’t made them wear old-fashioned clothes. But if it really had been Jonah’s fault the Elucidator was missing, he wasn’t going to bring that up.
Andrea peeked out from behind the tree.
“We’re in a wood that doesn’t even have a path,” she said and giggled again. “What are you so afraid of?”
Jonah tried to remember everything he knew about the Virginia Dare story. She was the first English child born in North America, in the… Roanoke Colony. (Wow-wouldn’t his Social Studies teachers be proud of him for remembering that!) And then, hadn’t the whole colony disappeared? Because of what?
Wild animals? Jonah wondered. Hostile Indian tribes? Some enemy the English were fighting with back then-the Spanish? The French? Some other country I don’t remember?
Jonah had reached the end of his knowledge about Virginia Dare. Somehow, not knowing what he was supposed to be afraid of made things even scarier.
“Wait, Andrea!” he called again. “Come on, Katherine!”
Katherine groaned, and he took pity on her enough to reach down and give her a hand. He was still off balance, though, and for a moment it was a toss-up whether he would manage to pull her up or whether her deadweight would pull him down. Then she reached back and shoved off against a tree trunk. The whole tree shook, and a pine cone fell straight down, bonking Jonah on the head.
“Bet that pine cone was supposed to land on the other side,” Katherine moaned. “We probably just changed history, right there.”
“It’ll change even more if Andrea gets eaten by a bear or scalped by Indians or something,” Jonah said through gritted teeth.
The two of them stumbled forward, following Andrea. They wobbled terribly, bumping into each other and the tree branches. Jonah paused to take off his sweatshirt, hoping he’d do better if he wasn’t so hot.
It was still hot. The air was so thick and heavy around them that Jonah almost felt like he should be swimming. His T-shirt was quickly soaked with sweat.
None of that seemed to bother Andrea.
“Don’t you think… it’s weird how… Andrea isn’t scared anymore?” Jonah muttered to Katherine. It was hard to simultaneously walk, talk, and keep an eye on Andrea, who was practically running now.
Katherine nodded, an action that almost knocked her over. She stopped for a moment so she could speak without falling.
“Don’t you think it’s weird how, well… JB knows where we are, right?” she muttered back. “So why hasn’t he dropped in a replacement Elucidator for us?” She peered over at Jonah. Her whole face was twisted with fear. “You don’t think us losing the Elucidator made this Damaged Time, do you?”
“Don’t say that,” Jonah snapped. “Don’t even think it.”
But the idea had wormed its way into Jonah’s head now too. No time travelers could get into or out of Damaged Time. If they’d damaged Virginia Dare’s time period, no matter how well they helped Andrea, they could still be stranded here for days.
Weeks.
Months.
Years.
Forever, Jonah thought. It could be for the rest of our lives.
He forced himself to think only about keeping up with Andrea.
He kept losing sight of her and having to plunge desperately forward just to get the briefest glimpse of her hair or her shirt. Then he’d lose sight of her again. He finally decided it was hopeless-there was no way he and Katherine could keep up.
Just then, very suddenly, Andrea stopped.
“Can’t she at least hide behind a tree until she sees what’s out there?” Katherine mumbled.
Jonah realized that Andrea had stopped right on the edge of a clearing. He thought about calling out to her, ordering her to hide, but it didn’t seem worth the risk. It would have been like yelling at a statue. She had frozen that completely.
Jonah crept forward, Katherine alongside him. They reached a huge tree right behind Andrea and, in silent agreement, they each peeked around opposite sides of the tree.
What’s Andrea’s problem? There’s nothing out there!
That was Jonah’s first thought. And then, because Andrea was still standing stock-still, her face a stunned mask, he looked again.
In the clearing were… ruins.
5
What Jonah had first taken for a few downed trees out in the center of the clearing were actually the remains of a tall wooden fence. The fence we saw in the scene when Virginia Dare was born? Jonah wondered. A shudder ran through his whole body. That scene had seemed so happy, so hopeful, and now it was clear that everything had been destroyed. Rusting, arched metal that might have been the remains of a suit of armor lay off to one side of the clearing, beside an overturned old-fashioned trunk, half-rotting in a trench. There were no houses anymore, no people. Vines were creeping over the last part of the fence that was still even slightly upright, as if they were on a mission to pull it down too. It was no wonder that Jonah had first mistaken the scene for more wilderness: Soon it would all be wilderness again.
“I don’t remember any of this,” Andrea murmured sadly.
Dare whined beside her, as if he was upset too.
“Andrea, you aren’t supposed to remember any of it,” Katherine said briskly, sounding more like herself again. Or maybe Jonah’s ears were just functioning better. “You won’t remember being Virginia Dare until you step into your tracer.”
“No, I mean…,” Andrea let her voice trail off. “Maybe I just went the wrong way.”
She threw an anguished glance over her shoulder, as if she expected to find some other way through the
