Brotherhood and Others Read Online Free Page B

he grabbed the chains, twisted them together, and began to haul himself up into the tree hand over fist.
    Soon he was twenty feet up in the tree. Foliage surrounded him, blocking anyone’s ability to see him, certainly anyone attending the party, which was now less than one hundred and fifty feet over the wall and down from him.
    Amid the music and the happy din echoing over to Robin, a man’s deep, boastful voice boomed something about the wonders of the Perón family. Anger flooded through Robin with such hot intensity that he wanted to fling himself over the wall and find and attack the man. What did he know? How could he know?
    Robin flashed on images of his parents leaving that movie theater and uniformed policemen exiting a dark unmarked sedan, seeing the entire scene as he had from far up the sidewalk. For a moment, there in the oak tree, he relived those terrible memories as if they were unfolding right in front of him. Echoes of shotgun blasts pounded inside his head.
    *   *   *
    â€œRogue? Rogue, do you copy ?” came the pilot’s Texas drawl.
    Monarch roused in the bomb bay, gasping for air, aware that it was cold and that the terrible pressure and heat that had built inside his body was gone.
    â€œCopy,” Monarch managed.
    â€œSorry ’bout that, partner,” the pilot said with a sigh. “Pressurizing system kind of locked up on us there for a minute. You feeling all right?”
    It felt as if every muscle in his body had been worked hard, but nothing was broken. “Just tell me if that’s going to happen again.”
    â€œIt won’t,” the pilot promised. “We are at thirty-five thousand feet. ETA twenty hundred hours and fifteen.”
    Monarch shook his head, coming more awake, feeling colder still. He got to wobbly feet, breathed the oxygen deeply, then eased over, hanging on to the rack until he got to the food sack. He sat with the food and water and forced himself to eat half of the ration they’d given him.
    Two hours later his feet were turning numb and he was fighting chills. He ate the rest of his food and drank half a gallon of water. Ten minutes later, he strapped the smallest oxygen tank to his chest.
    At twenty hundred hours and ten, the pilot said, “You ready, Rogue?”
    â€œAffirmative,” Monarch replied, checking the oxygen mask once more. Trying to minimize the effect the squirrel suit’s wings would have as he exited the bomb bay at better than four hundred miles an hour, he took a narrow stance, parallel to and above the seam of the doors, almost like a diver out on a high board.
    â€œOnce the doors open, you have ten seconds to be away,” the pilot said. “I’ve got targets that will be right out in front of you. Copy?”
    â€œUnderstood,” Monarch said, and went down inside himself, breathing and pushing away all thoughts until there was only the seam of the bomb bay reflected in his mind.
    *   *   *
    Robin lay belly-down on the branch and grabbed leaves, his heart beating wildly at the memory of the shotgun blasts that killed his parents. Gasping for air, furious yet again, he noticed that the deep male voice that upset him so much had died back into the good-natured din of the party. In the next few moments, the anger in the teen chilled and iced until he believed he could hang from it, rely on it, use it to do whatever he wanted.
    And in that process, in that icing, something transformative happened to Robin. All those things his mother and father had taught him, all those things Claudio had been teaching him, they all came together and gelled, and quite suddenly the idea of cat-burgling a multimillionaire’s house during a party became the normal, the expected, the longed-for.
    I am my father’s son, I am my mother’s son, Robin thought fiercely. I will be a member of the Brotherhood. I’m going to take these things right from under