Jonah glanced at her. He must have been wrong about her being on the brink of hysterics. She looked and sounded fine now. Completely relieved. Even . . . happy.
Jonah’s vision and hearing must still be messed up. She couldn’t be happy.
“I’m sure,” Jonah said, partly to convince himself. He forged ahead to another point. “Anyhow, we know how JB does things—he tries to send kids back as close as he can to the moment when they originally disappeared. So we’ve got to be in—well, whatever time it was for Virginia Dare . . . er, you, Andrea . . . right when you were kidnapped.”
“Hmm,” Andrea said, looking around. “I guess this could be right. Close, at least.” She sounded distracted, as if she’d lost interest in what Jonah was saying. Or as if she was thinking about something entirely different from Virginia Dare.
Jonah followed her gaze. All he could see were pine trees towering overhead, the branches overlapping so closely that they almost blocked out the sky. It was too hard, trying to see so far off into the distance. He looked back at their little cluster. He and Katherine were still mostly sprawled on the ground, almost exactly as they had fallen. The dog had inched over only slightly, to lie at Andrea’s feet. But Andrea herself was sitting up perkily, looking completely alert. She’d even had the energy to yank her sweatshirt off and tie it around her waist, revealing a dark green T-shirt that said, Camp Spruce Lake.
Jonah was still at a stage where he was proud just that he could notice, Oh, yeah. It’s really hot here. Doing anything about it was far beyond him.
“See how it is, Andrea?” Jonah said. “You’re in better shape than Katherine or me. This must be the time you belong in. Everything’s fine.”
“Then where’s Andrea’s tracer?” Katherine asked. She was struggling to sit up herself now. Pine needles showered down from her hair, and she fumbled at a cobweb that hung down into her face. “If we’re in the right place and the right time, why don’t we see Andrea’s tracer?”
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.