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  He hoped his father had sent Thaddeus to meet him. Thaddeus would be ecstatic over the motor bike. Peter might even talk Thaddeus into not mentioning it until they had thought about it, studied it, and kept it a while from their other brother still at home. Yes, he hoped it was Thaddeus who would be waiting for him.

  A point of land stretched far into the river, like it had thought about being an island but found it too much trouble to cut all ties. It flooded regularly, so no one had bothered with the Nwwwlf version of terraforming, although he’d thought he’d seen a young willow on it a few days earlier. It was the sort of thing that gave hope for an Earth-like future in the valley of First Landing. Elsewhere was too much to think about according to the original settlers, who included people like his parents and their cohort.

  He was now far enough on the river’s other side that he could let the current carry him to the small beach on the northern side of the little isthmus. He was also far enough that he was allowing himself the smallest jubilation. He’d succeeded in his task, and he’d acquired an amazing piece of old tech.

  Voices carried over the night air, and his jubilation faded. His father hadn’t sent Thaddeus. Peter knew the voice that waited for him better than he wanted to, and he could figure out the others. His brother Simon had brought friends.

  Silently cursing Simon, and his father for sending him, Peter shipped the oars, unbuttoned his jeans and dropped them on the bench, and slowly, carefully, wearing only his shorts and with no splashing, slid into the dark river water. If Simon and his friends were at the beach, his plan wouldn’t work. But if they weren’t, he didn’t want to be upset with himself later for not trying for the chance. He meant to keep the bike.

  The water’s cold bit through his skin and into muscles that were starting to grow tired. He knew this cove well, and walked thigh-high through the water, dragging the boat behind him toward the isthmus’ northern end, away from the voices. It was Simon’s boat. Peter had to get the bike out of it.

  Simons and the others were laughing. That was because they were idiots. Anger he hadn’t felt at his pursuers boiled up in him. Simon was the ninth of ten offspring in the Dawe clan. Peter was the tenth. Simon had no love for Peter, and Peter knew it. And Simon consistently courted disaster for not only himself but his family. He said it was because he was brave.

  Simon and his friends should have been silent. Being on the other side of the river was no guarantee of safety, but the noise helped Peter now. He walked the boat through the water and pulled it up under the rubbery stalks they called aspertrees. In the daylight they were dark green mottled in indigo. Now they were just inky black, tall, and tubular. The ground was spongy and easier on his feet than the pebbles on the river’s other side.

  Fountains of fronds and grasses sprang from the ground beneath the Nwwwlf trees, and he pulled the boat under them. He could still hear his brother laughing with his friends. He was about to remove the bike when he thought he heard them moving. Maybe they wouldn’t bother looking at the boat. After all, he had what he’d been sent for.

  He took almost more care concealing the boat on this side of the river than he had when he’d beached it on the shores above the city.

  He shoved the little sloop hard between two tall clumps and pulled their sprays far forward over the bike, always listening for a change in the voices. How had they not even posted a watch?

  He scraped most of the water from his legs and quickly pulled his pants on and snagged his shirt before anyone arrived.

  “Little brother,” Simon called.

  Peter controlled the impulse to jerk away from the boat. Simon would just come and look. And take. He kept buttoning his shirt.

  Simon stepped out of the trees. He was not quite two years older than Peter, but taller and leaner. Where Peter had blue eyes and blond, curling hair, Simon was dark haired, with eyes of dark brown like their mother’s, but without the warmth that shone in hers. Simon had not blackened his horns, and they shone in the moonlight with a pearly, iridescent glow.

  “Get back, Simon,” Peter hissed.

  Simon raised a languid hand. It was a graceful movement, but Peter was not deceived by its grace. Simon was powerful. “There’s no one here. I would have heard.”

  Peter spat. “Like you heard me? And came to help with the boat?”

  Again, the languid shrug, this time with two hands and both shoulders. “I know you can cope just fine on your own. That’s why Dad sent just you.”

  Peter moved away from the boat. He was beginning to hope he might succeed.

  “Because of that,” Simon continued, “and because you’re the expendable one.”

  Peter had heard that before. Simon’s theory was that Simon had originally been the expendable ninth child, but their parents had been forced to have Peter because they discovered they liked Simon too much for his role. No additional child had come after Peter, so, clearly, they had not liked their tenth child as well.

  “Let’s go,” Peter said.

  Simon smiled, and his teeth glowed white in the moonlight. “Let’s not. Not yet.”

  Peter stood still. It hadn’t worked.

  Simon gestured at the boat’s hiding place. “Instead, let’s see what you have in the boat that you’ve hidden from me.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Peter said nothing, and he failed to help as Simon pulled on the boat. It stuck briefly, and Simon changed his grip, squatting low.

  “It’s heavier, Peter,” Simon said in the excited tones of someone opening a present. “I wondered why you were trying to be so quiet on this side of the water.”

  Because, Peter thought, I can hear the searchers upstream. And he could. Voices, angry and confused, carried across the water. True, he’d also not wanted Simon to hear him, but that was a lost cause—Simon had heard him trying to sneak in, but he’d had to try. There was no point in saying anything to Simon. It would only make things worse.

  “I’m so disappointed in you, Peter,” Simon gave a final tug on the gunwale, and the boat came free. He straightened and looked into the bottom. After a breathless second he turned on his brother, beaming. “So disappointed, but so pleased at the same time. I am awash in conflicting emotions.”

  Peter stood with his arms folded across his chest. He had nothing to say.

  Simon raised his voice, disdainful of the searchers’ ability to hear him across the water. “Maxwell! Dove! Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  Two people emerged from the trees. Maxwell Hudson, the pan, was lean and dark as Simon. His hook nose and thin lips were made up for by handsome eyes and clean bones. He carried a bottle but walked a straight line. The smaller man, Dove Hudson, carried no bottle, but his steps were wobbly and his shaggy yellow hair looked as if small animals might find it a welcome home. They were cousins, both from the freehold next to the Dawe’s, and they were always together.

  “What’s up?” Dove said, and his words slurred just a little.

  “Peter has brought us a present,” Simon announced. He leaned into the boat, placing his hands on the motor bike Peter had captured.

  Simon crouched and lifted, veins popped out on his forearms, and his face darkened; but he lifted the machine high and conveyed with as much pretense as possible that the move was effortless. Still, he set it down quickly enough.

  Peter was tempted to leave them with it. The theater was about to start.

  “Peter,” Dove breathed. He rushed over and held out a hand, letting it hover over the bike. “You are so brave.”

  Maxwell swatted Peter on the back. “Not bad, kid.” When he let his hand stay, Peter shrugged it off.

  Simon beamed at all of them. “And he wants me to have it.”

  Dove looked at Peter through the screen of hair over his eyes. “I wish I had a brother like you.”

  Peter knew better, but he couldn’t stop himself. “I am not giving it to Simon. I’m taking it to my father.”

  “Are you now?” Simon asked.

  Peter shrugged. “Or you can.”

  “We’ll have to talk about this,” Simon said and began wheeling the machine up through the trees. The isthmus bore a spine of bare rock at its middle. It made a flat enough path. The rest followed Simon, and when they reached the path they walked in silence for several minutes.

  Peter knew what Simon planned.

  It took them maybe fifteen minutes to reach the mainland, where the meadow for the cattle came down to the isthmus and the river. Simon practically quivered with excitement.

  Peter prayed quietly that his brother wouldn’t break the machine. A sullen anger lay banked in the bottom of Peter’s chest, for he knew that the other two wouldn’t stop Simon. It had to be him.

  They were off the isthmus, out of the trees, and far from the edge of the river. Peter no longer had any excuses to avoid the confrontation. Simon kept walking the bike.

  That didn’t mean Simon would keep walking.

  They took a cow path south toward their family’s home away from the Beautiful. Luna picked out the way for them, and Deimos turned it muddy red, lurid with night colors.

  Simon looked over at Peter, who’d managed easily to stay ahead of Simon’s friends and even with Simon. “Shall we test it?” Simon asked.

  “I already have, Simon.” Peter quickened his pace.

  Simon stopped and threw a leg over the bike’s seat. “But I haven’t.” He looked up, laughing, the red light of Deimos making his face red and bright.

  Peter put a heavy hand on the fork in the middle of the handlebars. “No.”

  Simon grew very still. “I wouldn’t do that, litt
le brother.”

  They stared at each other for long moments before finally Peter said, “Get off the bike, Simon.”

  “Will you make me?”

  The other two had reached them and watched in silence.

  Peter moved swiftly as Simon’s defiance settled into triumph. He flung the arm that had been holding the bike toward his brother’s throat, but Simon got one arm in the way as if he’d anticipated Peter’s move and shoved back, maintaining his balance. When Simon didn’t go down as Peter had intended, he changed the direction of his thrust, pushing on Simon diagonally from the left, trying to shove him where he didn’t have a foot on the ground. Again, Simon met force with force, pushing back hard with his shoulder.

  It seemed a standstill, but Simon reached for the throttle and the clutch, gunned the engine, and used his left foot to kick at Peter’s knee.

  Peter felt his leg give and let go, but yelled, “Stop!”

  Simon and the bike pulled away.

  Simon’s kick hadn’t reached Peter’s knee itself, but a space below it, and Peter ran after Simon while Simon experimented with the gears. He’d learned to ride on the family’s old bike, too.

  Peter ignored the pain in his leg.

  Simon got the hang of it and throttled up. The cow path angled up the western slope and across ground pocked with gopher holes and bristling hummocks of grass. The cows hadn’t rotated through this pasture in a while.

  Simon bent low over the handlebars like he was riding a horse, and the noise of the engine changed as he went a gear too high. Peter heard the downshift and then watched in awe as his brother, who was shrinking in the distance, reached almost the top of the hill and made the front wheels lift clear of the ground as if he rode a horse that reared back.

  Simon yelled a loud and joyous cry, and the machine propelled itself uphill on its back wheel.

  Silver moonlight picked out the rider, and Peter, who’d finally come to a stop, felt Maxwell and Dove arrive at his back.

  Dove pushed the hair out of his eyes and drew in a long breath of nothing but delight. “How is he doing that?” he breathed.

  “He’s Simon,” Maxwell said. “He’s good.” He said it as a statement of simple fact, without expression.

  Peter, on the other hand, watched his bike with concern and an urgent hope that it not fall over. He had planned to try that maneuver. He and Simon had watched two parades when they were young, back when the governor still held them, and they had watched the riders pull up their machines in “wheelies,” defying gravity and common sense. They’d wondered if one of the bikes had come from their family. Simon hadn’t liked Peter even then, but they had had a rare happy afternoon comparing notes and theories on how it was done. Their father had explained it later, a certain wistfulness about his eyes if not in his voice.

  Now Simon had stolen his chance, but Peter’s main worry was that Simon put the damned bike down before he reached the top of the slope.

  Simon didn’t. He crested the ridgeline, the machine wiggled like a snake, and the front end plunged forward and vanished, but not before Peter had seen the front wheel slide sideways. It dragged his brother sideways, too, and Peter was running again, Maxwell hard on his heels and Dove bringing up the rear.

  It was a gentle slope, and the cow path meandered up it in a couple loops. They all three cut across the loops.

  The night air was cool and the moons bright. The deep smell of black soil and growing grass was thick in his nostrils.

  Peter was filled with rage at Simon’s fall. He had known this would happen. Now Simon would blame the machine and try to destroy it. He’d throw it over the cliff or rip the cables out, something to exact vengeance.

  He had to get to the bike before Simon did.

  He reached the crest. To the right Simon lay unmoving. Peter still had time. The motor bike lay farther down the hill to the left of the narrow path. Red and white moonlight flashed over spinning metal spokes.

  If a tire was spinning perhaps that was a good sign. He sped down the hill and then stopped, his heart in his throat. Was it twisted? The handlebars and the fork didn’t look straight, jammed up against a young alder’s suckers and trapped by them.

  He squatted and lifted the bike gingerly out of the undergrowth. When he stood it up, he found the disjointed effect had been a trick of the light. All the air left his lungs in a great sigh of relief.

  Perhaps he could get ahead of his brother? He looked back uphill, not bothering with the kickstand.

  Maxwell and Dove knelt by Simon’s prone figure. Dove’s hands covered his face. Even from Peter’s angle, he could tell that Simon still lay where he had fallen. Maxwell stared down the hillside at Peter, and his thin lips were tight and hard. Simon had been going very fast when he fell.

  Peter felt very still. He didn’t speak. He didn’t want to.

  “Is the bike more important than your brother, Peter?” Maxwell’s voice was harsh, but the tremor in it came through. “Is it?” This time his voice broke.

  “He’s dead, Peter,” Maxwell said. He stood.

  Maxwell’s words were only loud enough to carry over the twenty meters that separated them, but to Peter they felt like a scream.

  He dropped the bike.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Peter didn’t move. Simon couldn’t die. He was too big of an ass. In Peter’s experience only the good died. Simon wasn’t good.

  The night air moved over his face and through the sweat in his hair. Something small with a long tail streaked through the meadow across the path, and a squeaking noise got cut short. He shivered, feeling suddenly very cold. Of all the times he’d imagined Simon leaving the homestead and going somewhere far away, Peter had never imagined him dead.

  He thought about what to tell his father. Worse, he thought about what he’d tell his mother. She would never forgive him for bringing the instrument of her son’s death. Thinking of his mother made his throat dry.

  Simon sat up and whooped.

  Dove took his hands from his face, and his big teeth showed through all his hair. Maxwell bent over double he was laughing so hard.

  “My arm hurts, Peter,” Simon called. “Thanks for asking.”

  Peter turned his back on them. He was done with them. The sick horror he’d felt was gone, but it left a residue, and no matter how slowly and carefully he breathed out—or how hard—he couldn’t expel it. He exhaled hard again, but not loud enough for the others to hear. He wouldn’t let them hear.

  He looked for and found the bike, and stood it back up. It seemed undamaged, but he checked it over with his hands. They were trembling with the anger he banked like he’d banked so much before.

  Nothing had come undone and nothing leaked. He swung his leg over the seat, throttled up, and rode away.

  His family’s house was less than two kilometers distant.

  After the starship Valerie Hall reached the planet and its crew named the world Not What We Were Looking For—but with gratitude that it was there at all and that it was mostly if not entirely hospitable to human life—the settlers had learned they didn’t all get along. Fifteen thousand people who didn’t get along was a lot. Half of them had come from Earth’s WesHem, which consisted of all the North American continent and much, although not all, of South America. The settlers from the WesHem did not share the values of the Marss, a strange group that had formed on the fourth planet out from Earth’s sun. Unlike most of the hardy souls who’d gentled Mars, the Marss were a different breed. Some hapless idiot, as Peter’s father described the person, had awakened them first when the crew decided they could risk no more searching, and the Marss had seized control of the direction of First Landing. Mostly the Marss had taken the eastern side of the river. Peter’s family had established an enclave on the other side with a host of others. They had all continued not to get along.

  Despite their mutual dislike, they were all tied to the valley by the ship captain’s decision to terraform the first landing valley with almost everything he’d had. Earth, the home planet of Peter’s kind, seldom found habitable planets. Instead, humanity regularly terraformed rocks with the right magnetospheres and distance from their star, seeding the land and the water with the primordial soup of Earth. The terraforming corporations brought veritable arks to populate the new worlds, ships filled with frozen animal embryos and mature adults in cold sleep. Even with the star drive, the journeys were long ones, and settlers spent the voyage in cold sleep, too.