Sabotaged by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Thinking that he could have stood by and let the man drown? Or thinking that maybe that was what he was supposed to do?
    This setup was a trap, Jonah thought. It was a trick.
    Back when he was in 1483, Jonah had argued with JB about taking so many chances with Chip’s and Alex’s lives. But even JB wouldn’t have set Jonah and Katherine up with a dilemma like this one.
    “Not fair,” Jonah muttered. “Not fair.”
    He didn’t know how it had worked, but he felt certain that the mystery man had planned for Jonah and Andrea to be on the beach right at that moment, right as the boat capsized. He had planned for them to have to make a choice.
    Did he know what we would choose? Jonah wondered. Does he know what will happen because the man didn’t drown? Does he use projections, like JB?
    “Jonah? Are you all right?” Katherine asked.
    Jonah realized he still had his eyes squeezed shut. And he was probably moving his lips, like a little kid just learning how to read silently.
    “Yeah . . . yeah . . .” Jonah didn’t want to talk about tricks and traps and dilemmas with the others. Not yet. He didn’t want to talk about how they might have ruined time by saving the man’s life. Because that wouldn’t change anything they did from here on out—it wasn’t as if they were going to push the man back into the water. Jonah opened his eyes, cleared his throat, tried to remember how to act normal.
    “I’m fine,” he told Katherine. “Thanks to you throwing that branch in.”
    “Yeah,” Andrea agreed. She was brushing sand from a huge scrape on her leg. “That was really smart. How’d you think of it?”
    “Oh, you know me, I’m just so brilliant ,” Katherine said, grinning. She hadn’t used up all her energy fighting the waves, so she had some left for clowning. She held one hand out, placed her other hand on her stomach, and dipped down in a mocking bow. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” Then she shrugged. “Really, though, I just thought of it because I saw what they did.”
    “They, who?” Jonah said, baffled.
    Katherine was already pointing, toward a spot directlybehind Jonah.
    “Them,” she said.
    Jonah turned around. There in the grass were the two tracer boys they’d seen earlier.
    And lying between them was a tracer version of the man Jonah and Andrea had just rescued from drowning.

 
    It took Jonah’s waterlogged brain a moment to figure out what that meant.
    If the two tracer boys rescued the drowning man in the original version of history, then . . .
    “He was supposed to live!” Jonah burst out. “We didn’t ruin history by saving him! We saved history by saving him!”
    Andrea whirled around and glared at Jonah.
    “Is that why you didn’t want me jumping into the water?” she growled at him. “You think history is more important than a man’s life?”
    “No, no—” Jonah tried to explain. “I was worried about you! I—”
    “If I’d gotten back to my parents the day of their crash, would you have stopped me from saving them ?” Andrea asked.
    “Of course not!” Jonah said. “I would have helped you! But . . .”
    “But what?” Andrea asked, her glare intensifying.
    “I don’t think we would ever get that choice,” Jonah said.
    “Because of Damaged Time,” Katherine reminded Andrea.
    Jonah could have left it at that. It would have been easier. But he had too many ideas roiling around in his mind. Some of them were going to spill out whether he wanted them to or not.
    “I think some things just aren’t possible, even with time travel,” Jonah said. He turned to Katherine. “Don’t you remember JB talking about how time protects itself from paradoxes? Certain things aren’t supposed to be possible.” He gestured at the man who had nearly drowned, at the churning waves beyond. “ This wasn’t supposed to be possible. We weren’t supposed to be here!”
    Andrea patted the man’s chest protectively.
    “But we are ,” she said. “And we saved