midst of a crowd of Native Americans. The old man was shaking hands with a dark-skinned boy who was wearing a loincloth.
Below the drawing was the caption: John White and Virginia Dare joining a native tribe, welcomed by One Who Survives Much. Drawn by Walks with Pride.
“This happened,” Jonah whispered.
Katherine stared at the paper.
“Then-the ripple,” she said. “It’s here.”
Jonah thought about that. He thought about how he’d landed and then the paper had come fluttering down onto his face.
“We got here first,” he said confidently. “That’s good, don’t you think?”
The Elucidator crackled to life again.
“Jonah, Katherine, I have to tell you what to do,” JB shouted.
Jonah was still looking at the drawing on the page before him. He saw the way Virginia Dare/Andrea held her grandfather’s arm, the peacefulness that shone from her face.
“Not if it means undoing 1600,” Jonah said. “I won’t do that to Andrea.”
Time travel was so confusing-making it hard to see what was right and what was wrong, who was a friend and who was an enemy, even which events followed which, and which led to something else. But this was one fact Jonah was sure of: He didn’t want to do anything to erase the joy on Andrea’s face in this picture.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” JB said grimly. “Believe me, nobody can undo anything about 1600 now.”
Katherine gasped.
“Then you’re all stuck there?” she asked. “You, Brendan, Antonio, Andrea-none of you can ever get back to the twenty-first century? None of you will ever see your families again, ever-”
“I didn’t say that,” JB said, his voice tense. “The year 1600 is sealed off now, all but carved in stone. But we’re living through it. We’re not in any imminent danger, and there are still some possible escape routes up ahead.”
“Then why can’t we just come back and get you?” Jonah asked. “Meet you at one of those escape routes, maybe. At the bottom of the exit ramp, or whatever you’d call it for time travel.”
“Because those escape routes will work only if you and Katherine fix things in 1611,” JB said. “Everything’s connected.”
“That kind of sounds like what Second told us,” Katherine whispered.
“You have to keep 1611 stable!” JB yelled, speaking quickly now, as if he was running out of time. “You’re our only hope! You’re time’s only hope! Or else-”
The Elucidator went dead again.
Jonah didn’t mind too much. He wasn’t quite ready to think about or else’s. He went back to staring at the drawing of Andrea, soaking in the peace and joy in her expression.
I did help her, he thought. And she helped me. It worked in both directions.
“I can see why some old people just want to think about their pasts,” Jonah muttered. “Where they know how things turned out.”
“We know some things about the future, too,” Katherine reminded him. “We know, no matter what, that we’re going to do everything we can to fix time and rescue our friends. Second was wrong-some things are always predictable.”
Second was wrong, Jonah thought. He was wrong about a lot of things.
It was dizzying to think about how much Second had manipulated them-had manipulated even JB. And though the projectionist had made Andrea happy, Jonah knew that Second had been too reckless, too dangerous, too much of a threat to time.
There would be consequences.
Jonah lowered the picture of Andrea and squinted out toward the world beyond. It was all still just a big gray blur, but he knew that everything would come into focus soon.
Maybe they hadn’t exactly outsmarted Second in 1600. But they’d held their own: Everyone was still safe for now. And 1611 wasn’t just another dangerous year.
It was also another chance.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
If you go to Roanoke Island in North Carolina right now, in the twenty-first century, you can get there by driving across Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge. And, when you arrive, you’ll be in Dare County. Go a little farther east, to the islands that make up the Outer Banks, and you can drive along Virginia Dare Trail. Go north, to Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia, and you can take a cruise on a ship called the Virginia Dare. Or, if you just want to stay home, you could bake a cake using Virginia Dare vanilla or listen to music by a band called Virginia Dare.
Virginia Dare is incredibly famous for someone we know so little about. History records only two events from her actual life: She was born to Ananias and Eleanor Dare on August 18, 1587. And she was baptized six days later, on August 24, 1587. And that’s it. That’s all we know for sure. Both of those details come from accounts written by Virginia’s grandfather, John White, who was the governor of the Roanoke Colony. And he left Roanoke on August 27, when Virginia was only nine days old. After that, Virginia’s life is a complete unknown. Everything else about her is speculation, myth, and mystery.
I first became intrigued by the Roanoke Colony story when I was a kid. I can even remember reading a biography of Virginia Dare-Virginia Dare: Mystery Girl-in the Childhood of Famous Americans series. (You would think that that would have been a really, really short book, but it wasn’t.) When I first began thinking about The Missing series, I knew right away that I wanted to include Virginia Dare as one of the missing kids from history. But when I began doing research about the Roanoke Colony, I discovered a much more complicated story than the one I thought I knew.
As far as anyone can tell, Virginia Dare truly was the first English child born in the Western Hemisphere. But even the Roanoke Colony’s claim to being the first English settlement in the Americas is a little suspect. As early as 1583, a group of Englishmen tried to start a settlement in Newfoundland. But they gave up after just a few weeks because of a lack of supplies.
When I was a kid thinking about the early Europeans coming to the Americas, I pictured it as being comparable to people in the late twentieth century landing on the moon. But that really isn’t the best comparison. First of all, unlike the moon, the Americas already had people living there. Secondly, in a forty-year time span, humans have made exactly nine manned trips to the moon. During the 1500s, Europeans made hundreds of trips back and forth from the Americas. English fishermen, along with those of other nationalities, were routinely sailing to the waters off Newfoundland, fishing during the warmer months, and then taking their catch home to sell. The Spanish, who had gotten a huge head start and already had numerous settlements in the Western Hemisphere, were routinely crossing the Atlantic with ships full of treasure from Central and South America.
When the English looked at that imbalance-we’re getting fish; they’re getting gold-they didn’t like it. They considered the Spanish their enemies, anyhow, for a variety of reasons, including religion. (Spain was a Catholic country; by the late 1500s, England was Protestant.) Spain seemed to have all the power and was expanding its influence across Europe as well as in the Americas. One of England’s main ways of fighting back was to have English ships attack Spanish ships and steal everything they could. This sounds like piracy-or outright acts of war- but the English had another name for it: privateering. All that meant is that the English didn’t feel they were doing anything wrong. The English government and its leaders not only allowed the theft of Spanish treasure-they encouraged it. And Queen Elizabeth got a cut of the profits.
Sir Walter Raleigh, one of the queen’s favorite courtiers, was also one of the men most heavily involved with privateering. (You probably remember Raleigh’s name from some Social Studies class, if you were paying more attention than Jonah.) Raleigh thought that starting a colony in North America would be a way to counter Spain’s power in the Western Hemisphere-especially if it served as a base and hiding place for English privateers.
Raleigh himself didn’t plan to go to the new colony he envisioned; he stayed in England and sent others out on his behalf. It’s hard to know what motivated the actual Roanoke colonists to leave everything they knew and try to
