northeast.

"Which way?"

"Back across the river. And then," said Twist slowly, "I don't know. They've seen the plane. They'll come looking for it, and the first place they'll look is the Capitol, and after that the villages. They'll find it if it's anywhere near, and you can figure what they'll do to the people. They let us have our guns and our hunting knives, so we can kill game and even each other if we feel like it, but artillery, no. Explosives, no. And planes, no, no, no. Especially not planes. I don't suppose there's been one in the air for almost a century."

Twist shivered, his eyes shining, his hands gripping the seat.

"I'm glad I got to do this before I die. It's--" He fumbled for a word and gave up. "I can't say. But it makes you think what we were once, what we could have been today if it hadn't been for _them_." And he jerked his head back to indicate the direction of the Citadel. "The star-spawn. The damned Star Lords."

Burr looked out the cabin window. "It's an awful long way down." Then he asked Price, "Why'd you say you came to find the Chief?"

A suspicious man, Price thought, and so is Twist. Careful, careful. But how can you be careful when you don't know what's going on in the world, and you don't dare ask?

Price said, "I came to give him the plane. I'm the last of my family. I wanted to join up with somebody, and--there aren't many in the desert." This, he thought, was a safe assumption. "Life's too hard. I wanted to come where there are trees and water."

It was a good story. He didn't know whether they believed it.

The Beechcraft left a fleeting shadow on the river and passed on. Twist peered anxiously into the sky behind.

"Can you go any faster?"

"I'm wide open now."

"Not fast enough. They come like lightning. _Whoom!_" Jets, thought Price, and began to look for a hole in the forest. Twist said, "And if they don't find us the first time, they'll send the flying-eyes."

"And they can smell metal," Price said. "So we've got to find a place away from any town and not only out of sight from above but also screened from a magnetic detector. Say in a cave, under a rock ledge, or close to some heavy concentration of metal they're already used to. Can you think of any place?"

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