Big John mutely smiled back.
Reza wove through the wheat in an intricate pattern that he had learned from other kids when playing in the fields. That was in the days before Wiley had convinced him to spend that time in the library, earning himself a ticket off of Hallmark that few of the other kids would ever receive.
While it appeared to Muldoon that Scurvy and Dodger were gaining, Reza was keeping them at about the same distance, but at a cost. He and Nicole, already flushed from fleeing the fire – which still boomed and crackled around them – were getting tired. The weaving that confused their pursuers also meant that Reza and Nicole had to take at two or three steps to Scurvy and Dodger’s one or two, the time being made up by the older boys hunting around for their path after missing one of Reza’s sharp turns. Worse, Reza now had no idea where they were.
“Reza,” Nicole gasped behind him, “we cannot run forever!”
“Don’t stop!” he ordered grimly. His legs and lungs were burning as hot as the flames that consumed the wheat around them. Some of the smoke was now settling toward the ground, causing him to gag. “Keep going!”
Without warning they burst into an open quad. Reza, his legs accustomed to trampling through the wheat stalks, lost his footing and fell to the ground, skinning his palms and knees.
“Damn!” he cursed, grabbing Nicole’s hands as she helped him up.
They were only thirty meters or so across the quad – less than a quarter of the way – when their pursuers appeared behind them.
“Give it up, maggot!” Scurvy cried. His acne scarred face was flushed with the exertion of running. “Game’s over.”
“Save it, Gard,” Dodger chimed in. His lopsided eyes, one placed nearly two centimeters higher than the other, were bright with anticipation, and his brutishly large hands flexed at his sides. “You’re good in the wheat, man, but you’re dead meat in the open.” He smiled, showing perfect vid-star teeth that were completely out of place in his lumpy face.
Reza slowed at the boy’s words, then stopped.
“Reza!” Nicole cried, “What are you doing?”
“He’s right,” Reza told her as he caught his breath. “Those two bastards are quick. They’ll catch us before we get to the wheat on the other side.”
“Then what do we do?” Nicole whispered. Her eyes were fixed on the two approaching boys who now merely sauntered, apparently sure that she and Reza could not get away.
Reza smiled thinly, the fear in his eyes overshadowed by determination. “I’ll have to use my secret weapon,” he replied cryptically.
She watched as he reached into the little cloth bag that he always kept at his belt. Knowing what was in it – a few polished stones that she thought were pretty, some scraps of paper with names of books written on them, and a strip of leather that Reza sometimes did a parody of jumping rope with – did not make her feel any better. But her trust in him, especially now, was implicit.
Unhurriedly, he withdrew the leather strip and one of the stones, a spherical piece of quartz that he had meticulously ground and polished with the tools in Wiley’s little handyman shop in the admin building’s basement.
“Stand behind me,” he said quietly, and Nicole gladly moved herself a few paces back, putting Reza between herself and the two advancing boys, who were now about twenty meters away.
“What’s that supposed to be?” Scurvy demanded mockingly. “A wimp-sized whip?”
“Maybe he’s gonna hang himself,” Dodger said, laughing. “Too bad there’s no tree, or we could give him a hand.”
Reza paid them no attention as he placed the stone carefully in the center of the leather strap, which Nicole now saw formed a perfect pouch for the sparkling rock. He let it dangle to his side, his right wrist beginning to flex, judging the weight and response of the sling and its ammunition.
He looked up to see Scurvy and Dodger still approaching at a leisurely pace, confident in their victory. Reza’s mouth was compressed in a thin line of concentration, his eye calculating the distance and speed with the accuracy of a computerized laser range finder.
“Reza,” Nicole said quietly.
“Shhh,” he responded softly, his mind now focused on Scurvy. In precisely measured movements, he began to rock the sling. As it built up momentum, he brought it up into an orbit above his head, the sling now a brown blur as it whirled around like a propeller blade.
Reza had become an expert in the sling’s use under Wiley’s tutelage, and sometimes used it to focus himself when his mind seemed listless, or just to have fun. He and the old man would have contests, setting up old food cans at various distances and then trying to see who could knock the most down the fastest. Wiley won most of the time, but Reza never pushed too hard just to win. To him, it was the camaraderie that counted, the togetherness, not who bested whom. Wiley was, in fact if not in blood, his father, and had been since the first day Reza came to this world. It was Wiley who met him at the spaceport, Muldoon having fallen ill that day, and the old man had taken the boy under his wing as if Reza was his only begotten son. It was one of the few twists of fate that had gone in Reza’s favor, and he had given thanks for Wiley’s patronage every day since then.
But it was now, here in a vacant quad in the middle of a burning wheat field, that the games of the past were about to show their dividends.
Scurvy and Dodger had taken notice of the whirling leather, but they had no idea what it was or what it could do. Wiley had never shown his little toy to any of the other children, and Reza had carried on the tradition.
Until now.
“Maybe he thinks he’s just gonna take off,” Dodger joked.
Scurvy smiled as his hand reached into the rear left pocket of his jumper, extracting a knife that Reza easily recognized, even at this distance. Illegal on most worlds because of the harder-than-diamond metallurgy that made them the galaxy’s best edged weapons, the Kreelan blade now in Scurvy’s hands was undoubtedly a gift bestowed on him by Muldoon. The boy’s arrogant smile grew larger as he turned the knife in his hand, the blade winking with the reflected light of the sun.
With a last mental calculation, one end of the sling slipped from Reza’s fingers, releasing the stone in a straight line tangent to the whirling circle over Reza’s head. The buzzing of the sling sighed to a stop as it fell, empty, to Reza’s side.
Scurvy had time to blink once before the stone, about the size of a large marble but much heavier, hit him precisely between the eyes. The impact staved in his forehead and drove a splinter of bone into his brain. His sightless eyes fluttered upward as his body collapsed to the ground, twitched once, and then lay still.
There was utter, complete silence in the quad. Even the crackling of the fire seemed muted.
“Son of a bitch,” Dodger whispered, looking at his fallen companion. He looked at the little white rock that now lay on the ground near Scurvy’s head, partly covered with his blood.
The humming of the sling began again as Reza readied his next salvo.
But Dodger was not as dull-witted as Reza had hoped. Fortunately forgetting the knife still clutched in Scurvy’s dead hand, he burst into an all-out charge at Reza, his legs eating up the distance between them as Reza readied for another shot.
“Run, Nicole!” he cried.
“But, Reza–”
“Run, dammit!” he shouted as he loosed his second shot at less than ten meters range.
Nicole watched as Dodger earned his nickname, his torso performing an uncanny twist as Reza released the sling. Had Reza not aimed at the boy’s center of mass rather than his head, the rock would have missed completely. As it was, it hit Dodger in the left shoulder with a hearty thump. It was enough to splinter the bone in his shoulder joint, making him stagger with pain, but it only slowed him down for a moment.