The Walls Have Eyes by Clare B. Dunkle Page B

this!”
    They followed her up a little rise. The sun was setting. Sedately, it gathered its colors in the peaceful western sky. Gold blended into rose, which blended into vermilion, then finally coalesced into the sun’s broad crimson ball. The sun withdrew with tremendous dignity before the coming night.
    Dad was speechless, and Mom cried.
    The clear sky changed almost imperceptibly in the aftermath of the sunset as it faded into twilight. A cool wind flowed over them, the first breath of the chilly night breeze. “You gotta watch for the stars,” Martin advised. “One minute, you won’t see any, and the next minute, you’ll see five or six.”
    â€œI think I see one,” Mom said.
    Dad smacked his own arm. “Hey! Look at that!” The meager light revealed what seemed to be a small black tangle of sewing thread next to a dark smear. “I saw it!” Dad said. “It stuck me with a needle. It took a sample of blood!”
    â€œOh yeah,” Martin said. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just this weird kind of bug.”
    â€œIt’s a tracking bug,” Dad said. “Tracking us. For the agents!”
    Mom plucked the delicate tangle from his arm and tried to examine it in the failing light. The stars came out, but she wasn’t looking at them anymore.
    Martin shook his head. “No, Dad. I’ve gotten stuck by those lots of times. They just whine around. And those A and Z twins don’t even know we’re gone yet.”
    â€œNot twins,” Dad said. “They’re clones. All the agents are clones of the same person. I’ve worked with agents three times, and they look the same, just a little older or younger. ‘You know how we took over the Agency?’ one of them said to me once. ‘We weren’t smarter or stronger than the other agents. It’s just that we never give up.’ They never give up. And now they’re tracking us.”
    Martin started to scoff, but then he didn’t. The ice blue stare of Hertz intruded uncomfortably on his thoughts. Hertz, with his built-in killing device. With the radio link back to his masters.
    I lost someone very important to me
, Hertz had said. But later, he’d told Martin he’d never seen another human being. Had Hertz been placed in the wilderness to track somebody down? Someone he had been programmed to find?
    â€œI can’t believe I let you talk us into coming out here,” Dad said. He stalked to his backpack, jerked his sheet off the ground, and muffled up in it. “The bugs in the suburb listened to us and watched us, but we didn’t have bugs with needles!”

CHAPTER SIX
    When Martin awoke in the morning, the sun was already up and birds were starting to flit among the branches. A trail of tiny black ants was taking a shortcut along a fold of his sheet. He sat up to find a thin wild dog the color of gray dust drinking from the bank across the river. It stopped when he moved and stared at him through amber eyes. Then it trotted away.
    Mom was working on a watercolor of the tall cottonwoods against the morning sky. “It’s amazing how different the colors are out here,” she said. “I’m mixing colors I’ve never used before.”
    Dad had his pants rolled up, and he was splashing around in the river. Martin thought he was having fun, but Dad waded back to shore with a frown.
    â€œThe fish out here are no larger than my little finger,” he said. “I don’t know why you told me to bring my fishing gear, and I have no idea what we’re going to eat.”
    â€œThis is a tiny river,” Martin said. “It’s got tiny fish in it. Trust me, they get bigger than that.”
    They packed up for the hike. Mom was disappointed when Martin made them wrap up in their sheets again.
    â€œLook,” Martin said, tucking his sheet securely around him, “you wouldn’t even believe what I looked