Sabotaged by Margaret Peterson Haddix

placed the tracer man right next to their tracer fire, which was in the same spot as Jonah’s fire. He’d forgotten what happened when a person joined with his own tracer.
    Jonah gave the man’s body one final shove, and suddenly the glow of his tracer went out. The man had slipped exactly into the outline of his tracer.
    The man’s color instantly improved. His lips moved, even though his eyes remained closed.
    “Greedy privateers,” he muttered. “Thinking of naught but money . . . Coming to Roanoke too late in theseason . . . Dangerous winds, dangerous seas . . . Help! The rocks! The rocks! Beware the rocks!” He took in a ragged gasp. “No! No! Our ship! We’re doomed! All will perish. . . . It’s happening! Oh, dear God! All have perished but me!”
    Jonah jerked the man back away from his tracer.

 
    “What’d you do that for?” Andrea demanded.
    It had been only an instinct, unthinking fear. The man and his tracer were both still moving their lips, but soundlessly, now that they were apart. Jonah could tell what each of them was saying only because it was almost exactly what he’d just heard: All perished but me; all perished but me; all perished but me. . . .
    Jonah shivered.
    “What’s wrong?” Andrea asked harshly. “Can’t you take hearing another sad story?”
    Jonah rubbed his hands hard against his face.
    “No, I just—what if it’s too confusing for the man, being joined with his tracer, thinking with his tracer brain?” Jonah asked, trying to come up with an explanation that sounded reasonable. “The tracer knows he wassaved by two boys dressed like Indians, not three kids in T-shirts and jeans or shorts. And then if he sees us but not the tracer boys—because people can’t see tracers in their own time—that will really mess him up.”
    “But this guy never saw us save him,” Katherine argued. “He’ll just think the tracer boys saved him and left, and then we arrived. . . . We saw people rejoin their tracers after seeing different things before, back in the 1400s. I don’t think anything bad happened then, because of that.”
    Jonah was still figuring out other problems.
    “You think, when the man wakes up, it’s going to be okay for him to see us in our twenty-first-century clothes?” Jonah demanded. “Here, now, where we really don’t belong? When it’s all a setup by some mysterious time traveler who lied to Andrea?”
    “No,” Katherine admitted. She winced, probably thinking about how she’d poked at the man back on the beach, trying to wake him up: Sir? Sir? That had been a mistake. They were lucky the man hadn’t awakened.
    Very deliberately, Katherine pulled her hand back from the man’s shoulder.
    “Hold on. Are you saying you just want to . . . sneak away?” Andrea asked incredulously. “Leave the man alone when he’s hurt?”
    The man was still mouthing his silent lament: All perished but me; all perished but me; all perished but me. . . .
    Moving just as deliberately as Katherine, Andrea grabbed the man’s hand and held on tight.
    “Shh, it’s over now,” she whispered to him. “You’re safe.” She looked back up at Jonah and Katherine. “Didn’t you hear him? He’s the only survivor of some awful shipwreck. So nobody would know to look for him. He’s just as stranded as we are. We can’t abandon him!”
    Jonah shook his head.
    “Nobody’s saying we should abandon him,” he said. “We’re just trying to figure out how to take care of him without ruining time.”
    But was that possible? Or was this another trap, one where they’d be forced to endanger time, no matter what?
    “I wish we still had the Elucidator to make us invisible,” Katherine said.
    Andrea sighed.
    “Sorry about that,” she said. She stared into the fire for a moment, her face almost as inscrutable as the tracer boys’. “No. You know what? I’m not sorry. If I hadn’t changed the code on the Elucidator, this man would be dead right now.” She squeezed his