Early Byrd

sunlight I'd ever seen came pouring in through. A bird was singing, and the nearby river burbled and gurgled mere yards away. The cabin would've been a really nice place to relax and hunt or fish from under other circumstances.

  Yukon nudged me forward. "Follow the path."

  I nodded and went first, even though where I really wanted to be was behind him. "Wow!" I said, looking around. "Where are all the animals?"

  "Oh," Yukon replied with a smile. "They're around. It's not like you see on the cartoons, though, where they just walk up to you and act cute. In real life they hide as much as they can from humans and aren't usually nice at all." He hefted the super-short pump-action shotgun he kept eternally slung on his left shoulder. "Bears can especially be a problem up here. That's why you should never visit the latrine without a guard carrying one of these."

  "I can shoot!" I countered. "I have a BB gun!"

  "Heh!" he replied. "Well, that's a start!"

  The outhouse was a two-holer, and Tim was still gagging and choking as Yukon opened the door for him. So I stepped closer and examined Yukon's weapon more carefully. "Is that a rifle?" I asked at last. "Or a machine-gun?"

  "Not exactly," he began. "In fact..."

  I was still listening to the technical details with wide-eyed attention when Tim screamed like a little girl. "Eeeee! Help meI Please, someone!"

  Yukon sprang forward, or he would've if I hadn't grabbed his ankle and tripped him flat. Then, before I could regain my feet to help, Tim had slammed him in the back of the head with a rock. Hard.

  He didn't move after that. I figured he was dead. Tim and I were both pretty strong for our age, and my brother had held nothing back.

  "Jeez," I muttered. "I didn't want to . . . I mean . . ."

  "You'd rather I'd just hit him hard enough to piss him off?" my brother asked. "Then where would Li and Rapput be?" He scowled then tossed the bloody stone into the woods. "Give me the shotgun."

  I felt my face go hard. "It's my turn to take the next shot."

  Tim shook his head. "As I said, the deer ran off. So that one doesn't count. And as for this time—" He waved his hand at Yukon. "—we both pretty much hit him at once. So, it's my turn. For real."

  I frowned—he could easily have bagged the doe if he hadn't dragged things out so long. But now wasn't the time to argue about it, so instead I unslung the gun the rest of the way from Yukon's inert shoulder and handed it to Tim. "Dad says you can like shooting and killing things too much," I reminded him, "and it's a really bad thing when that happens. Pretty awful, even."

  He shrugged. "What do you think the Artemu intend to teach us to do? Sew fancy lace dresses and dance around Maypoles?" He worked the weapon's action and a fat, bright-red shell dropped to the ground.

  I picked it up. "Wow! It's double-ought buckshot. A magnum load." Then I handed it to Tim, who effortlessly returned it to the magazine.

  "It's liable to break my shoulder," Tim complained as he raised the too-large and too-heavy weapon and sighted down the barrel.

  "Or make you feel like it did," I replied. Then I frowned. "You won't be able to make a quick second shot, for sure. Maybe not at all. So we can't count on it."

  "No," he agreed, clearly hating to admit to any limitation regarding his shooting abilities. Then he sighed and slung the weapon from his own shoulder, just as Yukon had. It looked ridiculously oversized there, but it was what we had. "No second shot. So we'll have to make do with one quick one." He smiled. "They'll be checking on us soon. How do we make this work?"

  16

  At first we didn't have any ideas at all. If we hadn't been twin brothers we'd probably have given up and simply run downstream until the forces of the Rocky Mountain Free State caught up with us and did whatever it was they did with such ungrateful rescuees. But because we were twins, we had an entire lifetime of shared mischief and adventures to call on.

  "You're right," Tim agreed. "That won't work either." My brother had just proposed I run back and forth outside the cabin screaming for help. When a guard came to my aid, we'd then have two guns. But even with a weapon apiece we'd never get back inside, which was where we needed to be. I frowned and dug the toe of my sneaker into the ground, trying to figure out a way they'd let us back in while carrying Yukon's shotgun.

  "Remember when we snuck all that extra candy from the theater into our rooms last year?" I finally asked, after three or four other bad ideas had been considered and rejected.

  "How could I forget?" Tim asked, rolling his eyes. "I was sick for a week!"

  "Yeah," I agreed. He'd pigged out something awful. "We didn't have any way to hide it—we were wearing t-shirts and shorts, just like now."

  His eyes narrowed. "Yeah. So we used someone else's stuff." He reached out palm-first with his right hand. I slapped it with my own, and we both grinned.

  "Hello!" I said as I knocked on the freedom fighters’ front door a few moments later. "Can you let us in, please? We're all done now!"

  A peephole slid open, and Red Beard's eyes swept back and forth. "Where's the boss?"

  "He's . . . a bit indisposed," I replied. "Old man troubles, he called it. Said he'd be along in a few minutes."

  Tim bounced up and down on his toes. "I want to come inside!"

  "What's the password?" Red Beard demanded.

  I let my mouth fall open. "I . . . He didn't tell us!"

  "I still don't feel good!" Tim complained. "I need to lie down some more."

  "Me too," I replied. "Can we come in and lay down? Please?"

  Red Beard rolled his eyes and muttered something about how no one ever took security seriously. We heard the door unlatch. Before he could change his mind we were racing through.

  "Wait a minute!" the other guard said from his seat on the couch—he'd never even bothered to get up. "What are you doing with Yukon's jacket?"

  I smiled and stepped out of Tim's line of fire; under the jacket, I knew, the shotgun was cocked and ready. But if my brother had to pull the trigger, we were totally lost. "It's nice and warm out," I explained. This part was actually true. "So he asked us to bring it in for him and leave it in the kitchen." My smile widened as virtual fingers crossed themselves behind my back; during the movie-candy caper, we'd used Mom's oversized purse. In that case, she'd even done the carrying for us.

  "Oh," he replied, disinterested. So I bounced happily and we boys ran giggling down the tunnel to our room. From this point on we had maybe five minutes, tops. Linda and Sam smiled at us from the kitchen, and neither noticed when we dodged down the "wrong" tunnel instead of the one that led to our bedrooms.

  Yukon hadn't exaggerated a bit when he described the rest of the complex as not being nearly as nice our room. The place smelled a lot like the outhouse we'd just visited, the floor was slimy mud, and the cold was even wetter and danker.

  "Halt!" an adult male voice declared, and Tim and I came skidding to a halt. Then a flashlight shone directly in our eyes. "What in the world?"

  "We got lost," Tim declared, stepping forward and shifting his grip on the jacket-draped shotgun.

  "Uh-huh!" I agreed, moving to one side like we did when trying to persuade wild game to move in the direction we wanted it to go. Besides, this way he couldn't blind both of us at once. "What's down here?"

  "None of your business!" the man shouted. "Go back the way you came, this minute!"

  "Robert?" a voice asked; it was Li's, though his voice was little more than a croak. "Timothy? You listen to the man and be good!"

  "Mr. Li?" Tim asked, taking two more steps forward. Forward, forward, always forward or else to the sides, spreading wider apart. That was how to drive game!

  "Damn it!" the man roared, his flashlight darting back and forth. He'd probably never been trained in how to handle unruly children misbehaving in secure areas.

  "Mr Li?" I asked again, a quaver in my voice. Now I was forcing the man back by wiggleworming my way around his waist and even between his legs. If he didn't continually give up space, I'd work
past him entirely. "Are you all right?"

  "Damnit!" the guard shouted again. But this time he did what he probably should've the instant he saw us. There was a whistle hanging from a chain around his neck; he reached for it . . .

  . . . and I wrapped myself around his thigh and let myself fall, putting all my weight on the back of his knee. He folded even more quickly than Yukon had. Instead of using a rock, Tim slammed the buttstock of his shotgun into his face one, two, three times as quickly as he could. Then he lifted it for a fourth blow . . .

  . . . but it was obvious even in the dark that the guard wouldn't be getting back up any time soon.

  If ever.

  By now I was feeling pretty bad about what we'd done to Yukon, and somehow this time was even worse. I think Tim might've felt the same way, because he just stood and stared down at the maybe-corpse for a long moment.

  Li's voice broke the spell. "The keys! They're in the second drawer of the desk."

  This time I snapped out of it before Tim, so that it was me who dashed a few feet further down the tunnel, located the key-ring in question, then after three false tries found the right one. He was being held in the same cage with Rapput; apparently our captors only had the one cell. But to make up for it both wore leg irons and handcuffs, even though Rapput's were clearly twisting his shattered arm in a bad way. Rather to my surprise, the big alien's eyes were open and shining in the dark.

  "Are you all right, sir?" I asked.

  He looked first at me, then Tim. His jaw worked for a moment before