Torn-missing 4 (11 page)

Jonah’s legs almost buckled under him when he landed on the deck. It was partly exhaustion—climbing down the rigging hurt. But exhaustion alone didn’t account for the way every muscle in his body threatened to give way.

Didn’t ships’ captains used to beat people with whips?
he wondered, his knees trembling.
Beat them until they were almost dead, over nothing?

Or was that just
pirate
captains?

He hoped it was just pirates.

Henry Hudson was glaring down at Jonah with his eyes narrowed, his mouth set into a thin, disapproving line.

He certainly looked like he wanted to beat someone.

“I can explain,” Jonah said, which usually worked with his own parents back home.

At least it worked if Jonah didn’t accidentally say something that got him into worse trouble.

Henry Hudson’s eyes only grew angrier; his mouth flattened completely.

“Speak not,” he said in a cold, hard voice. “I have heard all I wish.”

He turned slightly toward Prickett, who was standing right beside him. Prickett gave a curt nod.

That’s not fair!
Jonah wanted to protest.
Whatever happened to accused criminals having the right to tell their side? Having the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty?

Jonah realized nothing had happened to those rights. They just didn’t exist yet in 1611.

It’s not like I’m an accused criminal, anyhow,
Jonah thought.

Hudson’s glare made him feel like one.

Jonah tried to look at him adoringly, like a loving son. There was a trick to this, which Jonah sometimes used with his own parents. You blinked once or twice with a vacant, slightly goofy look on your face, and your parents forgot about whatever stupid thing you’d just done and started thinking instead about how cute you’d looked as a toddler, about how much they were going to miss you when you went off to college.

Evidently this trick didn’t work with the John Hudson mask.

Or maybe Henry Hudson had never liked his son, not even when he was a cute little toddler. Maybe Henry Hudson wouldn’t miss his son when he went off to … well, wherever you went after growing up as a ship’s boy.

“I—,” Jonah began.

Behind Hudson and Prickett, Jonah caught a glimpse of movement: It was Katherine, frantically shaking her head no.

Even Jonah could figure out what she meant:
Stop talking. Now. Or else.

Hudson slapped his hand against the mast.

“I said, speak not!” he roared. “You have just earned yourself the harshest of punishments!”

He is going to beat me,
Jonah thought, swaying slightly.

“When the others receive their noontime rations,” Hudson said, pronouncing the judgment in a voice colder than the wind, “you shall receive nothing.”

Huh? Jonah thought, trying to make sense of “noontime rations.”
So that’s … no food? I don’t have to pretend to eat green, rotty meat? All right! Sounds like a reward, not a punishment! I’ll just have Katherine sneak something better to me later….

He remembered that he needed to look like this punishment devastated him.

“I’m sorry!” he cried. “Please—”

Hudson struck him across the face.

“You do not mock your father’s authority!” he screamed. “I am the captain!”

“Aye, aye,” Jonah said, resisting the urge to put his hand against his stinging cheek. He cleared his throat. “Aye, aye, sir.”

For a moment he worried that this wasn’t the right thing to say to a ship’s captain in 1611. Maybe “aye, aye, sir” came later. Maybe it would be seen as just more mockery.

But the look in Hudson’s eye softened a bit.

“That’s better,” he said.

Jonah let out the breath he’d been holding without even realizing it.

Dear old “Dad” has just been thrown off his own ship and then let back on just because of some weird mess with time and history,
Jonah reminded himself.
He’s bound to be a little bit touchy about the whole authority thing.

“Swab the deck!” Hudson commanded. “Now!”

“Yes, sir!” Jonah snapped back, trying once again for the very, very obedient military-recruit tone.

Someone placed a bucket and mop in his hands.

Jonah looked up and realized it was Staffe, the man who’d taken his side back in the shallop.

Staffe leaned close to Jonah’s ear. From where Hudson and Prickett were standing, it probably looked as though
Staffe were just making sure that Jonah had a firm grip on the bucket handle.

But Staffe was whispering.

“Don’t stand up for us,” he said in a barely audible tone. “Don’t try to help. It won’t do any good. Not now.”

And then Staffe turned and walked away, back to repairing a row of pegs on the rail.

Jonah almost dropped the bucket.

What was that all about?
he wondered.

“Prickett’s out to get you,” Katherine said.

Jonah shoved the mop forward, then pulled it back.

“I could have figured that out all by myself,” Jonah said. “And I’m not even invisible, and I can’t go around listening to what people say without being seen.”

The coils of dingy braided cloth that made up the mop head got caught on a rough place in the wood, and Jonah had to bend over and pull it free. Jonah could have sworn he could feel someone watching him, but when he straightened up, there was no one else there besides him and Katherine. The leaders of the ship—Hudson, Prickett, and King—had retreated into the captain’s cabin to eat their lunch; the rest of the crew had disappeared into the hold. The weather had warmed up slightly, enough that the water he was swabbing on the deck didn’t instantly turn to ice. But it still wasn’t a
great day for sitting out in the open air eating lunch.

Or for dipping your hands again and again into a cold bucket of water,
Jonah thought sourly.

It wasn’t fair that he was stuck mopping, while Katherine could just stand there watching.

Jonah made a mocking face at his sister, and rolled his eyes just for good measure.

“Okay, genius, if you’re so brilliant, tell me this:
Why
is Prickett out to get you?” Katherine said. “That’s what I can’t figure out. I heard everything Prickett told Hudson about what you did in the crow’s nest—which everybody’s calling the
top
, for some reason. He made it sound like you practically spit in his eye and defied him and swore at him like … well, like a sailor.”

“The liar!” Jonah said. He tightened his grip on the mop handle and hit the mop head against the deck with unnecessary force.

“It took you forever to get down here,” Katherine said. “Prickett had time to tell John King he thought Nicholas Symmes should be promoted to first boy, ahead of you. And to tell that scary-looking cook person that you lost one of the fishing rods. You didn’t even touch a fishing rod, did you?”

“
I
didn’t,” Jonah said. “But maybe the real John Hudson, before he vanished …”

Jonah shoved the mop harder. He was okay as long as he focused on minor actions: mopping, moving the bucket, snarling at Katherine. But if he let his thoughts creep toward anything approaching a broader viewpoint, he started feeling weak-kneed and panicked again.

Whatever the real John Hudson did before I got here, that’s going to affect me,
Jonah thought.
And so does whatever happened that made the ship come back for the shallop instead of letting us float off into nothingness … and whatever Second wanted to accomplish in 1611, when he changed 1600 … and whatever happened to JB that he can’t even talk to us through the Elucidator anymore. … Aaah! I don’t know what any of it means!

The mop got caught on the rough wood again, and Jonah bent over it. The weird sensation of being watched hit him once more—he whirled around quickly, but it was only Katherine standing there, looking frighteningly see-through.

Jonah tried not to actually look at her, since he didn’t like seeing her as glass.

“It’s too weird, having you look and sound like someone else,” Katherine mumbled.

Great. Each of them creeped out the other.

“I’m going to go listen at the captain’s door, to see if I can hear anything Prickett and Hudson and King are saying,” Katherine said. “And then I’m going to look around
the ship and see if there are any other notes hidden anywhere. Maybe the crow’s nest letter writer left a note somewhere about why Prickett hates John Hudson.”

“Maybe,” Jonah muttered. His stomach growled and he added, “See if you can find a nice pepperoni pizza lying around the ship while you’re at it, okay?”

Katherine slugged his arm. At least
that
felt normal.

“I think I’ll be doing well to find a few bread crumbs that aren’t covered with mold,” she muttered as she left. “
And
that they don’t have counted, that they won’t miss.”

How could the
Discovery
have gotten so low on food?
Jonah wondered.

It was a stupid thought, just because back home he was so used to having food available any time he wanted it. He gazed out at the gray horizon—of course food would be scarce here. It was too cold for much of anything to grow on the land. Probably too cold for much of anything to come from the sea. And if they’d left England in April of 1610, that was fourteen months ago. How could they have carried more than fourteen months worth of food?

And what would happen to him and Katherine if everyone was just going to starve?

Jonah applied himself to diligently mopping the deck, because that was a way to fight against all the worries.

“Psst,” someone called behind him.

Jonah turned around. It was Staffe, carrying a tray toward the captain’s cabin. He was looking around fearfully.

“I’ve been watching for the right moment …,” he whispered.

As he walked past, he slipped something into Jonah’s hand.

“Cheese,” Staffe murmured. “So you can eat, after all.”

So Staffe’s been watching me this whole time?
Jonah wondered. He hoped he hadn’t looked too suspicious, talking to Katherine. He eagerly closed his hand around the cheese, his mouth already watering.

But the “cheese” was hard as a rock. If Jonah actually bit into it, he’d probably chip a tooth.

Still, Jonah was pretty sure Staffe was risking a lot by giving it to him.

“No, thank you,” Jonah said, slipping the cheese back to Staffe. “You eat it. I—I’ll take my punishment like a man.”

That sounded like something someone would say in 1611, didn’t it?

Staffe stared at him. The man had startlingly blue eyes that stood out in his scarred, chapped, scruffy face.

“The wrong Hudson is leading this ship,” Staffe whispered. Then he looked around nervously, as if fearing
someone else might have heard. But even Katherine was out of earshot—she was way across the deck now, her ear pressed against the door of Hudson’s cabin.

Wrong Hudson leading
…, Jonah thought.
Was that what was going on between John Hudson and his dad? Did lots of people think
John
should have led a mutiny? Is that how the mutiny went wrong? No—not if John Hudson was supposed to end up in the shallop.

Jonah’s head was starting to hurt from trying to figure everything out. Staffe turned to walk away.

“No—wait,” Jonah said desperately. “I have to ask you—”

But what could he ask that the real John Hudson wouldn’t have already known?
Why does Prickett hate me?
Nope.
Why are you and I such great buddies?
Nope.
What else am I supposed to do as ship’s boy besides going up in the crow’s nest and swabbing the deck?
Nope.

And then he knew what he could ask.

He dug in his pocket and pulled out the drawing of Andrea. He resisted the temptation to stand there gazing at it for a few minutes before showing it to Staffe.

“Look,” he said. “I found this. See—it says this girl joined a tribe. What tribe do you think she joined?”

Jonah thought he’d worked up a pretty clever plan in just a few seconds. Whatever Staffe answered, Jonah could say, “Will you write that down?” And then Jonah
could look at his handwriting and see if it was the same as on the papers in the crow’s nest. At least that was one mystery Jonah might be able to solve.

But Staffe snatched the paper away, hiding it from view.

“You ripped this from one of your father’s books?” Staffe asked, his words weighted with as much horror as if he’d just discovered that Jonah had killed someone.

“No!” Jonah protested automatically. “Well, actually … yeah, I kind of did. But not on purpose! It was an accident!”

This was true. In his very first moments after arriving in 1611 he’d brushed away something he felt against his face, heard paper rip, and realized that he’d torn out this page from a book. It’d been his first clue that Andrea and his other friends had survived 1600—and that their actions had changed time.

The picture never would have existed in original time.

“Your father worships his books!” Staffe muttered. He looked around frantically, as if searching for a place to hide the evidence of what Jonah had done.