Free Rebels of the Lamp, Book 1 by Peter Speakman Page A

Parker?” Parker had the gall to actually hold up his finger in a “please be quiet I’m on the phone” sort of way.
    “They’re coming back,” he said.
    Theo looked up, incredulous. “Who? What’s going on?”
    “I have no idea,” said Parker.
    On the bike trail, Nadir calmly stopped the truck. He and the other men got out. There was no hurry. The children were trapped, unarmed, and they had the lamp with them. There was no one else
for miles. They could take their time to claim their prize.
    The three men took their police-issue guns and walked over to the side of the trail. They peered down through the dust into the ditch.
    Parker and Theo gawked backed at them.
    Nadir smiled and raised his gun.
    “I can’t believe it,” Theo said to Parker. “You weren’t making it up. You really do have a gang after you.”
    Parker just gaped. Think of something, he thought. You’re good at this. Talk your way out of whatever this was.
    “Uh, look, guys,” he said as the three men inched their way carefully down the side of the ditch. They clearly didn’t want to mess up their suits. “I, um, think maybe
you’ve made a mistake, here? I think maybe you’re looking for somebody else and not us?”
    He looked to Theo, who nodded.
    “Just a misunderstanding of some kind, is what I’m saying. It could happen to anybody. But whoever the guys are you’re looking for, I can assure you, it’s not us.
We’re in the
seventh grade
.”
    Parker really thought that last bit would sell them. Nobody would kill a seventh grader with a machine gun. That would be excessive.
    The men, now at the bottom of the ditch, looked at one another. One of them turned to another and said something in a language that neither Parker nor Theo had ever heard. The other guy laughed.
Parker smiled. Maybe he had gotten through to them. Maybe they realized they had cornered the wrong guys. Laughter is the universal language.
    “Great! So...great! Then we can go?” he said with all the hope of a girl being asked to the prom.
    The men stopped laughing. Nadir shook his head as he aimed his gun at Parker and Theo.
    “Parker!” said Theo.
    Parker and Theo scrambled backward, but there was no place to go. They were going to be killed and left there, literally dead at the bottom of a ditch.
    Parker, desperate, grabbed the metal canister. It was the only thing within reach that could possibly pass as a weapon, and even then, it was still just a metal canister.
    “Get behind me! This will block the bullets!”
    “I don’t think it will!” said Theo.
    The kids shut their eyes as Parker held out the canister.
    The lamp, Nadir thought. Finally. It would be his. He aimed at Parker’s head.
    Later, Parker would wonder why he twisted the canister, and, more important, how he managed to turn the caps on the thing in the exact right way, in the exact right sequence, and then he would
come to the conclusion that the thing (or really, what was
inside
the thing) had wanted him to open it and had somehow given him the combination. That almost made sense, when he thought
about it later.
    There in the ditch, though, he wasn’t thinking about anything other than how great it would be if he and his cousin weren’t going to die. He was hoping, really, deeply hoping that
someone, or something, would save them. You might even say he was
wishing
it.

B67051—VESIROTH’S JOURNAL, CIRCA 900 B.C.

    Chaos reigns in the city as the war between my genies rages on.
    Xaru has created an army of his own, ten brother genies that obey him and him alone. Each of his genies is, as he is, a clone of me, but the farther they get from the Nexus,
the more twisted they become. They are copies of copies, with each flaw magnified. One genie, I know, has four arms, and two are horrible twins, conjoined at the head. One is made entirely of
swarming insects. I hear talk of the others, but alas, due to my constrained circumstances, I have not been myself witness to them. There is