User Unfriendly by Vivian Vande Velde Read Free Book Online Page B

head to the left," he warned me.
    I closed my eyes, because I wouldn't have time to dodge if his foot accidentally came flying at me, and I didn't want to see it happening.
    I felt him swing his foot—could feel that he hadn't gotten very high at all. He swung again—not much better. He was too nervous about getting out of control, was worried about knocking all my teeth out on the rebound. Either that or he was too weak, which didn't bear thinking about.
    "You're doing fine," I told him. "Consider me your cheering section. Consider yourself cheered on."
    "Rah," Robin muttered. He kicked up. Again. And again. He inhaled sharply, and I thought he'd lost the pick, but I didn't hear it fall. I opened my eyes and didn't see it between his toes. I raised my eyes, saw that his fist was clenched. "Got it?" I asked, barely able to get the words out of my gag-dried mouth.
    As though hardly daring to believe it himself, Robin nodded.

9. ENCOUNTER

    The chains weren't long enough for Robin to cross one hand over to the other wrist, even with the slack I provided by supporting him on my shoulders. So with the pick in his right hand he worked to unlock the shackle from the same wrist, and all I kept thinking was that if I twitched at the wrong moment, he was going to drop the stupid thing and we would have to start all over. Or if his hands were half as sweaty as mine, he'd drop it without any help from me at all.
    The tremor that had started in my shoulders was traveling down my legs when I heard the faint
click
of the lock. I almost dropped Robin in my relief.
    "Hey!" The chains rattled as he scrambled to grab hold.
    "Sorry," I mumbled.
    He pulled his right wrist free of the loosened shackle.
    "Could you hurry it up?" I asked as he gingerly worked the stiffness out of his fingers, wrist, elbow, and—finally—shoulder. Sweat was running down my face, trickling into my eyes and making them sting.
    Robin reached over and started picking at the lock on the left shackle. By then my knees were shaking and I was concentrating so hard on not embarrassing myself by passing out or something that I didn't hear the second lock click open. But I heard Robin's triumphant, "Ta-dah!" and I said, "Coming down," and sank to the floor.
    Robin must have jumped off my shoulders—for a few seconds black shadows crowded the edges of my sight and I wasn't aware of anything—but then I was on my knees, and Robin had cut my wrists free with a blade he'd gotten from his left boot. Now he was hugging me while jagged pains shot through my shoulders and upper back, pains that flashed messages to my brain:
You thought that was pain before? THAT was numbness. THIS is pain.
    "We did it!" Robin said. "What a team!"
    What a team, sure. We knelt there for about five minutes, trying to work the kinks and the soreness out of our muscles before we even got the strength to remember to keep our mouths closed while we breathed. I untied the foul gag and threw it to the ground. The game was a lot easier the old way, with the dungeon master rolling dice to compute the amount of damage a character took.
    I checked our peek-hole and saw that our guards were still engrossed in their game. "Safe for the moment," I said. "I think we should take a couple minutes to catch our breath."
    Still flexing his shoulders, Robin nodded.
    "What happened?" I asked. "Back in the woods, I mean."
    He jerked his head up. "What happened to you?" he countered.
    "I went to take a leak behind a tree, and the next thing I knew..."I indicated the cell.
    "And they say girls are always having to go." Robin shook his head. "We were attacked. These guys came tearing out of the woods—"
    "What guys?" I interrupted.
    "I'll get to that."
    "But they were human?" I guessed, judging from the guards I had seen down the hall. "You could see whether they were human."
    "They were human," Robin agreed. "And there were a lot of them. Twenty-five, thirty of them compared to—what? eight, well, you weren't