Torn-missing 4 (6 page)

But the tracer wasn’t glowing anymore. Jonah squinted, trying to make out the form of a tracer in the dim light sifting through the fog. Hadn’t the tracer been right there a moment ago?

He was,
Jonah thought, horror creeping over him.
But he isn’t anymore.

The tracer had completely vanished.

“Um, uh, JB?” Jonah stammered. “Uh …”

He racked his brain—could he somehow have missed seeing the tracer get up and walk away? He looked over toward the group of men by the shallop, but no tracer stood among them. What if John Hudson’s tracer had awakened and slipped over the side of the railing? He could right now be swinging hand over hand around the outside of the ship, getting ready to spring out to attack the mutineers and rescue his father after all.

But wouldn’t JB have mentioned that Jonah was going to have to do that?

“So, JB, if I’m supposed to be acting like John Hudson, where should I be right now?” Jonah asked, trying to sound casual.

“I don’t know!” JB snapped.

“’Cause, see, I kind of lost the tracer,” Jonah admitted.

“So did I!” JB said. “We lost all the tracers! Every … single … one!”

Jonah tried to get his brain around that. No tracers meant there was nothing to show how history was supposed to go. There were no guidelines now. No help.

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Katherine asked. “The tracers only show up if time travelers change something. So if there aren’t any tracers, that must mean everything’s back on track. So—can we go home now? Or back to 1600 to make sure everything’s okay there, too?”

“Everything is not back on track!” JB fumed. “Everything is completely messed up! It’s so messed up we don’t even know what’s wrong!”

Jonah had never heard JB sound like this before. Even back in 1600, when everything had changed, JB had stayed fairly calm. He’d focused on getting the kids safely away from the disaster.

“So—do you need to just pull us out of this time period?” Jonah asked, trying to sound casual.

“I
can’t
!” JB said. “Time travel doesn’t work anymore! Time itself doesn’t work anymore!”

“Don’t say things like that,” Katherine mumbled. “You’re scaring me.”

“But it’s true!” JB said.

Jonah knew it wasn’t his imagination this time: There were definitely alarm bells and sirens going off in the background, behind JB’s voice.

“You can still talk to us,” Jonah said. “Katherine’s still invisible. I still sound like John Hudson—I bet I look like him too, right, Katherine?”

Katherine nodded. But she was biting her bottom lip.

“So a lot of things are still working,” Jonah said. “Right?”

“Do you know how close we are to … not …,” JB began, and it was clear that he was speaking through gritted teeth. “It’s like the two of you are right on the edge of a cliff, teetering on the brink….”

“Really not helping, JB,” Katherine said.

Jonah thought that if she weren’t already invisible, her face would probably have turned very pale. And then in the next instant she
was
pale. She didn’t look like glass anymore; she looked like the tracing paper they’d used in art class back in elementary school—kind of see-through, but definitely there.

Jonah reached up and yanked on Katherine’s arm, pulling her down below the level of the top of the barrel.

“Ow!” she complained, shoving away from him. “What’d you do that for?”

Then she stopped pushing. When Jonah looked back,
she was holding her hand up in front of her face, examining it as if she’d never seen it before.

“Ohhh,” she moaned.

And then in the next instant she was invisible again.

“Sorry about that,” JB said through the Elucidator, but his voice was tinny and faraway. “Things may be … in and out … for a while. … Try … keep … like John …”

The Elucidator went silent.

“Does this mean we just fell off the cliff?” Katherine muttered.

“You’re invisible again,” Jonah said, trying to think of something comforting. “And I haven’t stopped looking like John Hudson, have I? So we’ve got two out of the three things we need. Two out of three—that’s, like, sixty-six percent. That’s a passing grade in school.”

But was time like school? And, now that he thought about it, did he really want to keep looking like John Hudson? So far all that had done for him was that he’d gotten hit over the head and dragged behind some barrels.

“We’re stranded!” Katherine said. “We’re going to be stuck in 1611 forever!”

“No, we’re not,” Jonah said. “We stay here long enough, eventually it will be 1612.” He grinned, trying to make it into a joke. “Those guys said it was June already. We’ve just got six months to go to a whole new year.”

“We stay here six months, we’re dead,” Katherine said bitterly. “Starvation, remember?” She pointed out toward the sailors. “It’s not like they have any food to share.”

Oh, yeah,
Jonah thought.
Food.

His stomach churned anxiously. He’d been hungry at various points during his previous trips through time, particularly in 1600, when they’d had nothing to eat but fish. But there’d actually been plenty of fish, a virtual all-you-can-catch, all-you-can-eat buffet.

Fishing around ice chunks probably didn’t work very well.

We could starve,
Jonah thought.
We really could. Or freeze to death. Or …

Katherine’s eyes, in her still-invisible face, were large and round and terrified. Her bottom lip trembled.

“Hey,” Jonah said. “Hey! Stop that! We’ll be fine! The only thing we don’t have anymore is JB telling us what to do. We got along without him when we lost the Elucidator in 1600, right? And when we hit the mute button in 1483? We survived those years, we can survive this!”

“Those years are over,” Katherine said. “We know how they turned out. Well, mostly,” she added.

“JB said to stay like John,” Jonah said. “I bet if I just keep acting like John Hudson, that will help time. And it’s not brain surgery! All I have to do is act like I’m knocked out.”

He waited for Katherine to make a crack like,
Yeah, acting brain-dead, even you should be able to handle that.

When she didn’t say anything, he peeked around the side of the barrel.

“See, I bet there’s someone coming for me right n—” He froze on the word “now” as soon as he saw what was going on at the other side of the deck.

Nobody was coming to get John Hudson, to put him in the shallop. Nobody was going to.

Because the mutineers were already lowering the shallop over the side of the ship, down toward the icy water.

“They’re leaving without me?” Jonah said incredulously.

He sat bolt upright, his foot jerking out and striking the bottom of the barrel.

The barrel seemed to move in slow motion, its top section wobbling back toward Jonah and the railing. Jonah reached up and shoved at the rim, trying to maneuver it back into position.

The shove would have worked perfectly—if Jonah had been on flat, unmoving dry land. But his shove came just as the ship hit a swell, dipping down and then up.

The barrel crashed forward, slamming against the deck. It began to roll toward the mutineers.

“I’ll get it! Lie still!” Katherine hissed.

It was the hardest thing in the world to slump over and pretend to be unconscious, when he had so much adrena-line
coursing through his body. Every nerve ending he had seemed to be yelling,
No! Do something! Run!

Jonah let one eye drift halfway open—sometimes people did that when they were unconscious, right?

He immediately wished that he’d kept his eyes closed.

On the other side of the deck the mutineers had whirled around. They looked perplexed at the sight of the barrel rolling toward them. They looked even more perplexed when the barrel came to a complete stop, even as the deck tilted further to the side.

The lead mutineer whipped out his gun.

He pointed it right at the barrel—which meant it was pointed toward Katherine, since she was the one invisibly holding the barrel back.

“What evil is this?” the mutineer muttered. “Does a spirit possess our water cask?”

“Proof that our master was dabbling in devilment!” one of the other mutineers cried out.

“Nay—’tis proof that your mutiny is evil!” yelled back one of the men in the shallop.

And then they all just stood there. It made Jonah feel as if he were watching a defective DVD, the kind that leaped forward or froze at random. Time hadn’t stopped—the ship was still lurching up and down, jerkily; the shallop, on ropes, swayed unevenly back and forth. The men weren’t
completely motionless either. The man with the gun had begun to squint, as though trying to center his aim more precisely … more precisely in Katherine’s direction.

I know you said Jonah’s safe because his costume is bulletproof, but what about me?
Katherine had asked JB, only a few moments ago.

JB hadn’t told Katherine she was safe.

“Oh, hey!” Jonah said, jumping up. The loose ropes fell from his wrists and ankles. “Like my new barrel trick?”

He took a few steps forward, past the ropes. He whispered, “Get out of the way!” in Katherine’s ear, and then hopped up to stand on the side of the barrel. He thought maybe he could walk it forward and back like some circus performer, and then the sailors would be so mesmerized that they’d forget how strangely the barrel had stopped.

But evidently being a circus performer took a lot of training and practice. Jonah didn’t even manage to stand completely upright before he came crashing down, slamming his chin against the side of the barrel. He landed in a heap on the deck, and the barrel rolled on, crookedly, until it cracked against the railing.

Water gurgled out, pooling on the deck.

Jonah sincerely hoped their water wasn’t in as short supply as their food.

“Oops,” he said. “Sorry.”

Everyone was staring at him now. They seemed beyond baffled. The sailor who’d bashed Jonah over the head and dragged him over behind the barrels looked as if he’d forgotten all about Jonah. Maybe the man was just stunned to see “John Hudson” reappear, fully conscious and acting ridiculous.

But Jonah couldn’t quite understand the other men’s expressions.

What if JB was completely wrong about what was supposed to happen to John Hudson? What if he was never supposed to end up in the shallop—what if he was supposed to sail away with the mutineers, leaving his father behind in the ice?

Jonah looked toward Henry Hudson, as if he would provide some kind of clue. Maybe Hudson would be gazing at him proudly and lovingly, and muttering, “My son, you know I’d never leave you behind.” Or maybe he would look disappointed, if he’d been hoping that his son could stay safely on the ship and manage to get back to England, even with a pack of double-crossing mutineers.

Instead Henry Hudson looked more baffled than anyone else.

“They sent you back?” he murmured, disbelievingly. “They sent you back?”

He seemed devastated at the sight of his son. Indeed
for the first time he began acting like a sea captain being kicked off his own ship in disgrace. His shoulders slumped and his face fell. His head pitched forward; he brought his bound hands up to his mouth, as if he needed to hold in his cries of outrage, just for dignity’s sake.

Hudson’s quite visible despair seemed to help the mutineers make up their minds about what they should do next.

“Think ye that the shallop needs its own ship’s boy?” one of the sailors called out.

“Aye,” another replied. “He’ll be shallop’s boy now!”

Jonah had never heard the word
shallop
until a few minutes ago, but he could tell this was supposed to be a huge insult, maybe like Lance Armstrong being forced to ride a tricycle. Some of the sailors laughed so hard they fell down on the deck.

“Devil’s spawn should stay with the devil!” one of the men cried.

He advanced toward Jonah, scooped him up, and then thrust him into the partly lowered shallop.

Oddly, as soon as Jonah landed in the boat, everyone else shifted positions. It wasn’t a matter of making room for him, because there was plenty of room. It was more as if, once he was there, everyone else could fit into their proper spots, where they belonged.