“My brother kept smiling for a few seconds as if he couldn’t believe that the boy had said that. He had spent all those years on the road creating this fantasy about school and friends and a normal life. He told me to stay back and then he punched the tallest boy in the mouth. Everybody jumped him, but they didn’t have a chance. Michael was using spinning back-kicks and karate punches on farm boys. He beat them to the ground and would have kept on punching them if I hadn’t pulled him off.”

“So you never made any friends?”

“Not really. The teachers liked Michael because he knew how to talk to adults. We spent all of our free time at the farm. That was okay. We always had some project going, like building a tree house or training Minerva.”

“Who was Minerva? Your dog?”

“She was our owl security system.” Gabriel smiled at the memory. “A few months after we started going to school, I found a baby owl near the stream that ran through Mr. Tedford’s property. I couldn’t see a nest anywhere, so I wrapped her in my T-shirt and took her back to the house.

“When she was little we kept her in a cardboard box and fed her cat food. I decided to name her Minerva because I had read this book that said the goddess kept an owl as a helper. When Minerva got bigger, Father cut a hole in the kitchen wall, then built a platform on both sides with a little trapdoor. We taught Minerva how to push through the door and enter the kitchen.

“Father placed Minerva’s cage in a thicket of spruce trees at the bottom of the driveway. The cage had a trigger weight that would open the cage door, and the weight was attached to some fishing line that was stretched across our driveway. If a car turned off the road, they would hit the fishing line and open the cage. Minerva was supposed to fly up to the house and tell us that we had visitors.”

“That was a clever idea.”

“Maybe it was, but I didn’t think so at the time. When we were living in motels, I had seen spy movies on television and I remembered all the high-tech devices. If bad people were searching for us, then I thought we should have better protection than an owl.

“Anyway, I pulled the fishing line, the cage door opened and Minerva flew up the hill. When Father and I reached the kitchen, the owl had come through the trapdoor and was eating her cat food. We carried Minerva down the driveway, tested the cage a second time, and she flew back to the house.

“That was when I asked my father why people wanted to kill us. He said he’d explain everything when we got a little older. I asked him why we couldn’t go to the North Pole or some other distant location where they could never find us.

“My father just looked tired and sad. ‘I could go to a place like that,’ he told me. ‘But you and Michael and your mother couldn’t come along. I won’t run away and leave you alone.’”

“Did he tell you he was a Traveler?”

“No,” Gabriel said. “Nothing like that. We went through a couple of winters and everything seemed all right. Michael stopped having fights at school, but other kids thought he was a big liar. He’d tell them about the jade sword and Father’s assault rifle, but he also said we had a swimming pool in the basement and a tiger in the barn. He told so many stories nobody realized that some of them were true.

“One afternoon when we were waiting for the school bus to take us home, another boy mentioned a concrete bridge that ran over the interstate highway. A water pipe ran underneath the bridge and a couple years back some kid named Andy used the pipe to cross the road.

“‘That’s easy,’ Michael told them. ‘My little brother could do that in his sleep.’ Twenty minutes later I was on the embankment beneath the bridge. I jumped up and grabbed onto the pipe and started to cross the interstate while Michael and the other boys watched. I still think I could have done it, but when I was halfway across the pipe broke and I fell onto the highway. I hit my head and broke my left leg in two places. I remember raising my head, looking down the interstate, and seeing a tractor-trailer truck coming directly toward me. I passed out and, when I woke up, I was in a hospital emergency room with a cast on my leg. I’m pretty sure I heard Michael telling the nurse that my name was Gabriel Corrigan. I don’t know why he did that. Maybe he thought I’d die if he didn’t give the right name.”

“And that’s how the Tabula found you,” Maya said.

“Maybe, but who knows? A few more years went by and nothing happened to us. When I was twelve and Michael was sixteen, we were sitting in the kitchen doing our homework after dinner. It was January and real cold outside. Then Minerva came through the trapdoor and sat there hooting and blinking at the light.

“This had happened a couple of times before when the Stevensons’ dog hit the trip line. I got on my boots and went outside to find the dog. I came around the corner of the house, looked down the hill, and saw four men come out of the spruce trees. All of them wore dark clothes and carried rifles. They talked to each other, split apart, and began walking up the hill.”

“Tabula mercenaries,” Maya said.

“I didn’t know who they were. For a few seconds I couldn’t move, then I ran into the house and told my family. Father went upstairs to the bedroom and came down with a duffel bag and the jade sword. He gave the sword to me and the duffel bag to my mother. Then he handed the shotgun to Michael and told us to go out the back door and hide in the root cellar.

“‘What about you?’ we asked.

“‘Just go to the cellar and stay there,’ he told us. ‘Don’t come out until you hear my voice.’

“Father grabbed the rifle and we went out the back door. He told us to walk by the fence so we wouldn’t leave footprints in the snow. I wanted to stay and help him, but Mother said we had to go. When we reached the garden, I heard a gunshot and a man shouting. It wasn’t my father’s voice. I’m sure about that.

“The root cellar was just a dumping place for old tools. Michael pulled the door open and we climbed down the staircase to the cellar. The door was so rusty that Michael couldn’t shut it all the way. The three of us sat there in the darkness, on a concrete ledge. For a while we heard gunfire and then it was quiet. When I woke up, sunlight was coming through the crack around the door.

“Michael pushed the door open and we followed him out. The house and barn had burned down. Minerva was flying above us as if she was searching for something. Four dead men lay in different places-twenty or thirty yards away from each other-and their blood had melted the snow around them.

“My mother sat down, wrapped her arms around her legs, and began crying. Michael and I checked what was left of the house, but we didn’t find any trace of our father. I told Michael that the men didn’t kill him. He ran away.

“Michael said, ‘Forget that. We better get out of here. You’ve got to help me with Mom. We’ll go over to the Tedfords and borrow their station wagon.’

“He went back into the root cellar and returned with the jade sword and the duffel bag. We looked inside the duffel and saw that it was filled with packets of one-hundred-dollar bills. Mother was still sitting in the snow, crying and whispering to herself like a crazy woman. Carrying the weapons and the bag, we took her across the fields to the Tedfords’ farm. When Michael pounded on the front door, Don and Irene woke up and came downstairs in their bathrobes.

“I’d heard Michael lie hundreds of times at school, but no one ever believed his stories. This time, he sounded like he believed what he was saying. He told the Tedfords that our father had been a soldier and he had run away from the army. Last night, government agents had burned down our house and killed him. The whole thing sounded crazy to me, but then I remembered that the Tedfords’ son had been killed in the war.”