Rivals Read Free

no
clue!” Maggie shouted. Her voice rolled across the landscape, echoing off a
line of cliffs. “Let me be in charge, okay? I promise I’ll keep you safe.
I’ll get you home.”
    Brent’s throat
closed up suddenly and he wondered if it was a delayed reaction to the green
fire, if he was suddenly dying. But no. A tear worked its way out of the side
of his eye. “Home,” he croaked. “We don’t have a home anymore. We’re—”
    “Orphans,” she
said. “Yeah. Which means we have to stick together. And because I’m the
oldest that means I’m in charge and you do what I say. Got it?”
    He nodded
carefully.
    They didn’t go
back. Instead they pressed on, toward the camp. The desert by moonlight was
made of silver in a million different shades. There was enough light to see
where they were putting their feet, but they stayed clear of the long shadows
that were impenetrably dark.
    It was a long
hike. They should have been asleep by now, safely wrapped up in their sleeping
bags. Even when they got to the camp, they would just load everything up in
the car and head back to town, to civilization. To a lot of questions they
couldn’t answer. Brent kind of wished his brain would shut down again, but it
didn’t.
    He heard a
rock collide with another rock in the darkness, a soothing Tchok! and then a
rattle as the rock bounced and rolled and settled down. He looked ahead and
saw Maggie holding a handful of small stones worn perfectly smooth by the water
that had left the desert behind thousands of years ago.
    She threw
another one, underhand. It went farther this time and the sounds were less
clear.
    “What are you
doing?” he asked.
    “Scaring off
coyotes. I don’t know! I’m just—it helps me not think.”
    “Can I try?”
Brent asked.
    “You’ve got
two hands. Get your own rocks.”
    He bent and
picked up a pile of smooth stones for himself. He tossed one at a cactus plant
about fifty yards away. One arm of the cactus creaked and then fell off.
    “I didn’t mean
to do that,” he said, putting a hand over his mouth.
    “It’s just a
cactus,” Maggie said. “There are lots of them.” She threw one of her own
rocks at the plant and another arm came off. Water trickled sluggishly down
its trunk, brilliant in the moonlight.
    “Hold on,”
Brent said. There was something weird about this. He picked up a slightly
larger stone, about the size of a golf ball. He picked another cactus, wound
up, and threw the stone as hard as he could.
    There was a
noise like a gun going off. He had missed the cactus by a few yards. Instead
the stone hit the ground in front of it. Dirt and sand flew up in huge sprays
and the stone dug a deep crater in the ground. Brent ran over to the hole in
the ground and reached inside to find the rock. It was buried a foot down, and
it was hot to the touch when he brought it up into the night air.
    “Maggie,” he
said, “I think we—”
    He looked back
and saw his sister holding a rock as big as a beach ball. It must have weighed
a hundred pounds, he thought, at least. It occurred to him that he hadn’t
wondered at all how she was able to throw him over her shoulder and carry him
out of the cylinder when he was, in fact, a little taller and a lot heavier
than she was.
    “Mags, don’t
hurt yourself,” Brent said.
    Maggie spun
from the waist and hurled the boulder out into the night. Brent watched it fly
as far as he could before he lost it in the darkness. It hadn’t started coming
down again when he lost sight of it. Neither of them heard it land.

Chapter 4.
    They made it back to camp a few
hours later, but it was more than a week before they got to go home. When they
arrived back in town, Brent demanded that they go to a hospital and get checked
out, even though Maggie insisted that she was fine and had never actually felt
better.
    It turned out
that going to the hospital was a mistake. The doctors there had lots of
questions. Once they started answering them, they never stopped