Free Sabotaged by Margaret Peterson Haddix

his family, and how many times he failed, and then when he finally made it to Roanoke . . .”
    “No one was there,” Katherine whispered.
    Jonah should have been immune to all of Katherine’s dramatics after living with her for nearly twelve years. But he couldn’t help shivering at the eerie tone in her voice. Off in the distance, Dare’s barking seemed to have a plaintive, desperate quality to it now.
    “That’s not just him barking at the deer anymore, is it?” Jonah asked.
    “No—do you think he’s hurt?” Andrea asked. “Fallen into some hole left by a hunter or—oh my gosh, they wouldn’t have had metal leg traps at Roanoke, would they?”
    She whirled around and started running toward thesound of Dare’s barking. Jonah and Katherine rushed after her.
    They weren’t going back into the woods now, but into an area of tall grasses that whipped against their faces and cut into their arms. Jonah began wishing he’d kept his sweatshirt on, despite the heat, just to protect his skin. But there wasn’t time to stop and put it back on.
    Dare’s barking shifted, becoming higher pitched, more panicked.
    “Something is wrong!” Andrea called back to Jonah and Katherine. “I can tell. We have to . . .”
    She didn’t finish her sentence. She just sped up.
    “Wait, Andrea! You don’t know what’s out there!” Jonah called after her. He didn’t even know what danger he should be worrying about. The mystery man, back to steal Andrea away completely? Whatever enemy had destroyed the Roanoke Colony and the Indian village to begin with? Some other danger the mystery man wanted Andrea to encounter? Pirates, brigands, murderers, thieves . . .
    Listing dangers helped Jonah run faster. But the faster he went, the faster the grasses whipped against his face, against his bare arms, against his ankles. He was glad when the grasses thinned out, but then he was running through sand. It spilled into his shoes, making every steptwice as hard.
    And then he sped around a corner and discovered that Andrea had caught up with Dare.
    The dog wasn’t caught in a metal trap. He wasn’t being carried away by evil time travelers or pirates. Instead, he was crouched on a narrow beach and barking furiously at something out in the water.
    “What is it, boy?” Andrea asked him. “What do you see?”
    Still running, Jonah put his hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes from the bright sun so he could stare out into the surf. The waves were rocking violently back and forth; it was almost impossible to tell from one moment to the next which section of the water he’d already looked at and which he still needed to scan. There was a dark shape bobbing up and down out there—or was it just a shadow?
    Jonah squinted harder and ran closer to the edge of the water. The dark shape began to make sense.
    “It’s an upside-down boat,” he said. “Smashed up, like from a shipwreck.” He instantly regretted saying that word. Shipwreck, car wreck—maybe Andrea won’t think about the similarities? “It probably happened years ago,” he added soothingly. “I think sometimes it takes debris like that a long time to wash up onshore.”
    “Jonah, it was right side up a minute ago,” Andreasaid. She raced to the edge of the water. She jerked off her right shoe, then her left. She rolled up the bottom edges of her shorts.
    “What are you doing?” Jonah asked.
    Andrea shoved away the sweatshirt she’d knotted around her waist. It dropped onto the sand, one sleeve trailing into the water.
    “There was someone in there!” she screamed. “I saw him!”

 
    Jonah barely had a moment to think before Andrea plunged into the water.
    “No!” Jonah called after her. “It’s not safe!”
    Jonah knew there were other objections he should be yelling at her—something about time, about how you weren’t supposed to change time, about how maybe this was a trap or a trick set up by the mystery man? But she was being buffeted by the waves so