Torn-missing 4 Read Online Free Page A

head was directly below the club, the perfect target.
    The tracer wasn’t moving at all, not even with the rolling of the ship.
    For that matter the ship wasn’t rolling anymore, either. It was also frozen in place, at the peak of a swell lifting its right side up and plunging its left side down.
    “So, JB,” Jonah said, calmly taking the Elucidator out of his cloak. “Why’d you decide to freeze time?”
    “I’ve got to stop Katherine from screaming over every little thing,” JB complained from the Elucidator. “Or else—”
    “Little?” Katherine shrieked, darting out from behind the club-wielding sailor. “Jonah, that man was going to kill you!”
    Jonah saw that she’d been tugging on the sailor’s arms, trying to hold them back.
    “Bulletproof! Stabproof!” Katherine sputtered. Shegrabbed the Elucidator out of her brother’s hands and yelled directly at it. “You made it sound like Jonah was going to be safe! How’s a lousy costume supposed to protect him against being clubbed to death?”
    “Katherine,” JB said. “Jonah. Look at the man holding that club.”
    Jonah looked.
    The only thing Jonah had noticed before was the filth and the cruel expression. Now he studied the sailor’s face: the eyes even more sunken than the tracer’s, the cheeks pitted with sores, the cheekbones and chin jutting out sharply, as though they could break right through the papery skin.
    “I’ve seen skeletons in better health,” JB said. “He can barely even lift that club.”
    It was true: Even frozen in place, the man’s arms looked as though they’d been trembling with the exertion of holding the club in the air.
    “He couldn’t have really hurt Jonah,” JB said. “But John Hudson—the tracer—he isn’t in very good shape himself. One little tap, and he would have been out of the action until he’s on the rowboat.”
    “So I’m supposed to go through a whole mutiny pretending to be unconscious?” Jonah asked. Sure, he’d been worried about what he was supposed to do and say. Butwasn’t this a little … insulting? “Couldn’t you just have used a dummy to play this role, and left me out of it?”
    “Wouldn’t have worked,” JB said, the tension back in his voice. “There wasn’t time; we didn’t have enough control….” Jonah felt an icy blast of air, and the ship lurched slightly to the left, before locking into position again, still seriously tilted. “Hurry! I can only hold this for so long! Jonah, get back into place!”
    Jonah shot a glance at his sister. Generally Jonah was a pretty obedient kid. Life was easier that way, he thought. Spend two minutes taking the trash out to the curb, and then you didn’t have to listen to a forty-five minute lecture about how “everyone in the family has responsibilities; everyone has to pull his own weight” and “Jonah, we’re just trying to prepare you for adulthood, when you’ll have to take care of yourself and other people too….” And on and on and on.
    But Jonah had also always been around grown-ups—parents, teachers, coaches—who were big on explaining everything. “The reason you have to clean your room is …” “You have to show all your work on that math problem because …” “If you pass the ball instead of trying to take the shot on goal yourself, then …”
    Jonah wanted to yank Katherine aside—was there a way to doubly pull someone out of time? He wantedto be able to confer with her privately, somewhere JB couldn’t hear them. What if obeying JB was a really, really bad idea? What if they couldn’t trust JB after all? What if he was lying? Should Jonah and Katherine be staging a mutiny of their own?
    Jonah tried to convey all of those questions in one quick glance. He didn’t know if Katherine understood any of them, but she scrunched up her face into an agonized expression.
    Then she shoved the Elucidator back into his cloak and muttered, “Go ahead. I’ll watch out for you.”
    Jonah thought about