

# FLIGHT

Neil Hetzner

# _

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Neil Hetzner

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# _

In _Flight_ I have tried to imgine how technology, culture and language as well as the geography of the world will have changed by the end of this century. Yet, while I can only guess at how the physical world will be different, I can be sure the emotional world of humans will remain the same.

# PROLOGUE

What's Past...Isn't.

The road south from Muyinga, weaving through the mountains of Burundi in East Africa like a mud and gravel stream, was more suited for intrepid goats than the battered truclet negotiating its challenges, but Nora Elieson had driven that twisting, never-repaired, vertiginous track so often she could keep most of her mind free to think about guinea fowl.

A half-century before, in another, far different life, the octogenarian had been very well-regarded and very well paid for her thinking, especially the kind of thinking that could solve a problem by leaping over it. Now, once again, from that place of creation that had always been a mystery to her, had come a thought for how to increase the guinea fowl harvest in the villages she had just visited. To keep the thought coming, one deeply tanned hand left the steering wheel and began tugging at the snarl of short gray hair that covered her head. Although she was excited, the fugitive scientist knew she must be careful not to be too clever. Being too clever had cost her that previous privileged life.

It was not cleverness, but a tempered love that had given Nora Elieson her current life. Hanging around a coffee urn at a small New Africa conference, Nora had met Beryl Langue. Langue was a Global Nations' agronomist who had spent twenty years in Fifth World Africa improving sorghum harvests by altering both the genetics of the plant and the agricultural techniques and habits of those who grew it. That GN work had had small infrequent rewards. It was not until after the age of sixty, when Langue met Nora and they married, that both received rewards greater than their ages and attitudes had allowed them to imagine.

At his new wife's insistence, Beryl Langue had left the GN. Nora Elieson had money and an idea for mutating guinea fowl so that a second, third, and fourth wing pair would regenerate after harvesting. That idea took almost ten years to become reality. Progress in science, or anything for that matter, in Africa was a dispiriting slog; however when success finally came, the couple felt the work and wait, and the inroads it had made on Nora's wealth, had been well worth it. To Nora Elieson's way of thinking, the work with the wings of a nearly brainless bird was more important than the paradigm altering discoveries she had made so many years before.

Three years after the breeder stock had been distributed throughout the impoverished villages that clung to life along the steep sides of the Rift, average daily protein consumption had more than doubled. Long-boned, thin muscled children stumbling along the red mud roads had become a less frequent sight.

Being able to harvest two over-sized wings every ten weeks meant that most villagers no longer needed to slaughter their birds for meat. Harvesting the birds' wings, instead of slaughtering them, led to families having bigger flocks. Since guinea fowl need little human assistance to thrive, families were able to increase their protein calories at very little expense in either time or energy. An unintended, but welcome, extremely welcome, side effect was that the larger flocks were driving down the insect population upon which they fed. Since many of those insects were vectors for some of Africa's most virulent diseases, the villagers' mortality rate, especially among infants, was dropping. Nora thought that decreasing infant mortality was more important than increasing life expectancy, something about which she knew a great deal.

As she slung the Toymoto's steering wheel from side to side to avoid washouts and slurries left by the rains, and compensate for its worn-out struts, Nora reluctantly considered just how much longer the work she and Beryl were doing could stay in the shadows.

After one hundred years of money and manpower from the developed countries had been more than matched by a century of corruption, new disease strains, and tribal and national wars, the rest of the world had looked elsewhere than Africa to ease its conscience and do its good. Poor, benighted Africa had become even poorer, more benighted, forgotten Africa.

It was the latter, the forgotten aspect, which first had attracted Nora Elieson. She had needed a place to go to ground. Now, she sometimes worried that the benefits that she had helped bring to the forgotten villagers in the forgotten mountains in forgotten Burundi in forgotten East Africa would cause someone somewhere, the wrong someone, to remember.

The eighty-nine year old woman with the impatient eyes was nursing the dinged and dusty Toymoto through a series of switchbacks forty kilometers north of Gitega when an incongruous sound of civilization intruded. The pulsing of the blades echoing against the steep rocky sides made it sound like a swarm of rotos, rather than just one, was flying up the valley. The sound, a low, slow thump, like clapping underwater, was not totally unheard in Africa. With little infrastructure, but with plenty of weapons and even more hate, rotos were the vehicle of choice for getting those illogical few, who valued their lives but still came to Africa, across her great distances.

Re-feathering. That was the idea Nora was running through her aging but ample circuitry. Burundi had been wet and hot for ages, but when the world began to warm, it had become even hotter and wetter. That change in meteorological conditions had caused certain species of flora and fauna to thrive and others to wither. Guineas could tolerate a great deal of heat, but it took a lot of calories to do so. Re-feathering could lead to both better insulation and heat dissipation. If the feathers....

The thick foliage on the other side of the Toymoto's bug-spattered windshield first began to sway and then to bow up and down in a way that reminded Nora of dancers at a harvest ceremony. The thump of the roto, like the beat of a ceremonial drum, quickened and grew louder, as it dropped down toward the earth.

Rather than just noticing that a roto was overhead, Nora, who had lived much longer than some wished, began to pay close attention to it. She slowed down so that she could divert some of her concentration from the winding, muck-wrecked road to what was going on above the thick canopy that was concealing her.

The machine darted, hovered, darted and hovered in a way that reminded Nora of a humming bird before a flowering trumpet vine.

Having no rational reason to think that she was in danger, but having no reason to dismiss that she felt that way, Nora turned off the truclet's motor and coasted to a stop under the green canopy.

The machine above quieted as if it were listening before it zigged, jigged, zagged and sped off north, back-tracking up the serpentine valley through which Nora had just come.

Even after dismissing all of the adrenaline coursing through her ropy body as mis-applied biochemistry, the old woman waited another ten minutes more before starting on her way. She told herself that when she got closer to Gitega she would try to see if there was enough civilization in Burundi's latest capital to bounce a call to a former capital, Bujumbura, to ensure that Beryl and their daughter, Prissi, were alright.

Less than an hour later, Nora made the call and she found that everything at home was fine except that, after her week's absence, her husband and only child daughter greatly missed her.

They missed Nora even more that afternoon when she didn't arrive when she should have. All through the night as their patience grew thin and their panic grew deep, they missed her even more. The next day they missed her twice more as they drove up and down the road north of Gitega, but on the third time, along with two retired muzungo mercenaries, they found the truclet and those remnants of Nora Elieson that the jungle hadn't harvested.

The truclet had careened off the road in an implausible place. Nora Elieson had come to her end crossing over a ridge that offered a relatively dry smooth surface as well as a tremendous view to the north of spiky mountains burdened in green, like the mossy back of an alligator. To the west one could see the deep shadowy Rift from which hominids first decided to leave their trees. To the south was the badboard stew of slums and worse slums, those canted shanty boxes which had replaced the hominids' trees. Just part of the splendor of Gitega, Burundi's newest capital. Further to the south, no larger than silver threads, one could see, piecemeal, if enough tears could be blinked away, the twisting, snaky waters of the Ruvyironza, source of the Nile.

When the police finally arrived, there was less investigating than philosophizing as the two detectives, all wrinkled khaki and sweat-smeared sunglasses, wondered whether it was the distraction of 'from whence we came' or of 'where we go' that pulled Nora Elieson's eyes from the road at the wrong time.

Beryl Langue, remembering the phone call and noticing the clean swept circle in what should have been a dusty road, thought that the accident might have been something else. Prissi Langue, the couple's twelve year old daughter, despite being warned to stay in the jeep, had been compelled to look when her mother's body was carried back up the gash made by the Toymoto's plunge. She was stunned by what the jungle had done to her mother.

Despite being frightened and confused, Beryl Langue, immediately upon his return to Bujumbura with his devastated daughter, took action. The usually unassuming man called in favors and insisted upon irregularities. After a hurried funeral, more hurried packing, and within seventy-two hours of her death, the remainder of Nora Elieson's family was on a boat on Lake Tanganyika crossing from Burundi to Congo. When Beryl Langue looked back, the battered buildings of Bujumbura glinted in sunlight. When he looked ahead, mist roiled from the lake. Beryl Langue thought that captured things perfectly.

Despite what the police report and death certificate said, Beryl Langue's thinking atop the ridge was correct. Ironically, the aged passenger in the roto who caused Nora Elieson's death, himself a man of great intelligence and greater patience, lost what he, too, valued most.

It was those two losses, high above the turbid life and death of Africa, a continent where a half-bowl of millet could catalyze friend to foe, which gave birth to the troubles would so threaten Prissi Langue three years later.

# CHAPTER ONE

A Teacher Is The Best Experience

Prissi Langue, a fifteen-year old second year Dutton School student, came stomping up the stairs from the Carver Common Room. Prissi was stoking a hissy fit and enjoying every molecule of the volatile chemistry jumping within her body. After a late Thursday night marathon studying for a test in Chinese and finishing a problem set for Fi-Sci II, she had bunked breakfast to sleep late. When she woke, she was ravenous as only a fifteen-year-old girl can be. There was nothing left in her snack-cache but empty bags and boxes containing pitiful corners of salty crumbs or sugary dust. It didn't take a genius to know that her roomie, Nasty Nancy Sloan, had been on a pillage again. To silence the animal growling in her stomach, Prissi had run downstairs to the Common Room to get a tofusicle from the venderator, but when she had stepped on the biometric pad in front of that glowing tabernacle to teener desire, it had beeped twice. A single beep was a warning. Two beeps meant that the machine thought that she was too fat. Two beeps meant the machine, regardless of how much money was inserted as a bribe, wouldn't open the little tabernacle doors behind which a host of secular treasures could be seen.

The Dutton School took care, too much care in the minds of most of its charges, that their young bodies be as carefully nurtured as their immature minds. Since Prissi knew she wasn't close to being overweight, the obvious answer to the double beep was that some starving chunk, probably Nasty Nancy, had jammed the machine...again.

The fuming Prissi, gray-green eyes sparking, bow-lipped mouth spitting noises like an ancient steam radiator, was back upstairs and half-way down the hall when she heard the scuffling steps of someone in Drylons coming her way. She peered down the dark narrow corridor, but the mid-morning sunlight wriggling through the narrow clerestory window at the end of the second floor hall made it impossible to see who was approaching. Since Prissi was far too tired to win and far too competitive to lose an early session of dorm hall repartee, the half-synapsed girl took three quick steps and disappeared into the third floor communal bathroom.

Prissi leaned against the raddled bathroom door and took a deep breath. Her calm detachment lasted for less than a second. The powerful magnet of the three meter long mirror above the sinks tugged at her eyes. Since the greenish bio-phosphor lights would have made a beauty queen look like something that belonged in an aquarium, Prissi resisted looking. Her teener ego had plenty of other battles to fight, but the mirror, evil truth-teller, pulled, promised, wheedled and won. Leaning over the vanity counter-top, which held three porcelain sinks, Prissi tucked her mouse and mange hair behind her ears so she wouldn't miss any of her faults and imperfections.

The ears themselves were faulty—the lobes weren't detached and there were three small moles, looking like an ellipsis on the rim of the left ear. The eyes...yes...the eyes...maybe her best feature...but not today. Those usually laser bright, almond-shaped windows on her soul were dull and the skin below them was brownish gray, like...like...a bat's armpit. The nose—ohmigodohmigod—the nose. The size of a national monument, the shape of a soggy popover...ohmigod...and fertile ground for...for...ohmigod...excrescences. It took Prissi a moment to separate the water spots and other less identifiable specks on the silvered glass from the...things... on her nose. She dipped her face down, then closer, then away. She continued to inspect the day's crop of horrorescent...things... until the raspy sound of the Drylons and the whisper of pinions along the wall faded to silence.

"I hate me. I hate school."

Freeieekin school.

As soon as she had the thought, Prissi felt remorse because she loved Dutton. She really did, but there were days, and this certainly was going to be one, where she could not deal with all of its rules, rules contained in a two hundred page catechism of whats, whens, dos, don'ts, and hows: twenty plus pages on how many gigs were to be awarded for unruly hair, toe peepage, trans-fat consumption, bigotry, littlery, faddism, fatism, sexism, anti-gaiety. A chapter on the ins and outs of honor. A huge section on dorm and dining room demeanor. A chapter on service—service to one's roomie, one's floor, one's dorm, one's teams, to the little village down the hill, to Connecticut, Noramica and the world beyond. A rule for everything, but not a dambdumb peep about walkers and wingers.

The biggest difference in school—bigger than race, wealth, and, in Prissi's opinion, gender— and the administration avoided it.

From what Prissi could gather, in the good old days, a million years or so ago, nearly everyone at any elite prep school would have been a winger. Now, almost fifteen percent of her classmates were walkers. She herself had a half dozen older friends who didn't fly. Two of those hadn't fledged because they came from homes where the money for the mutation was not available. Mary Ung hadn't muted for religious reasons. Frank Beese hadn't been able to get a permit to mute because of his obesity, according to Frank a problem that had killed his grandparents and was likely soon to do the same with his parents. Of Prissi's walker friends, the most striking one was her NQB, not-quite-boyfriend, Joe Fflowers. Joe didn't want to fly because he wanted to keep playing hockey. At least, that's what Joe said, and said, and said, but Prissi was sure that a big part of his refusal was just teener defiance because Joe Fflowers was the grandson of Joshua Fflowers, the man who had invented fledging.

Prissi herself, who only had had her wings for ten months, still was obsessed with what those wings could do. When Prissi fledged, just before her fifteenth birthday, she was 1.6 meters tall and weighed 46 kilograms. As a result of her small size and proportionate weight, she was qualified to choose from a wide choice of wing shapes. With fledging, the general rule was that the larger the subject, the fewer the choices. After discussions with her father, which, if she were truthful, were more arguments than discussions, Prissi wheedled LT wings with a red and silver rippled feather pattern. Least Tern wings, with their delta shape and small surface area, had been designed for quick turns and great speed; however, there were trade-offs. LT's were much less effective for soaring or long flights. Although they took extra energy to fly and were ineffective for long distances, Prissi loved her LTs because they let her do acrobatics and stunt flying most other wingers couldn't come close to duplicating. Another benefit of the stubby delta design was that they took so much energy they pretty much self-regulated body weight. Prissi thought that an LT teener winger would have to be pretty lovelorn, heartbroken or acnefied to get too fat to fly.

Prissi Langue loved flying. For her, it was the ultimate freedom. When she was in the air, two hundred page rulebooks, intractable math problems, the slights and slurs of classmates and the sadness that clung like cobwebs from her mother's death in Africa three years before stayed on the ground. Many of Prissi's friends were ambivalent about flying. They liked their wings because people like them, privileged people, were supposed to like their wings. They liked the freedom flying brought, but they feared the danger. More than eighty thousand Noramican teenerz died each year from crashes. But, for Prissi, being in the air brought nothing other than a great sense of well-being. From growing up in Africa, where two and four-legged dangers existed everywhere, the girl had a well-developed sense of what was safe. Her mother's death only had confirmed what she already knew—the earth was a dangerous place to be alive and an easy place to die. Yet, when Prissi first began to fly, even while she wobbled her wings and bobbled her landings, one of the biggest and most unexpected benefits of being in the air was how safe she felt. The higher she went, the safer she felt. At two hundred meters, looking at the insignificant details far below, Prissi felt as secure as when she and her mother had snuggled in a string hammock on those sloggy, slow, Bujumburan mornings. Mornings where sunlight and mist coming off Lake Tanganyika swirled around one another in a slow dance. Misty mornings. Missed mornings.

Prissi shoved her face closer to the mirror to shove away her thoughts. What a minefield. She loved science, idolized scientists, but how was it be that they could grow wings on kids and regenerate organs, but couldn't do a freeieekin thing about pimples. Science—key to the mysteries of the universe. No, not, quite yet.

Prissi tipped her head to keep her hair, which tended to fall around her face like a tattered flag, out of the way before she put the tip of an index finger on either side of an excrescence centered over her left eyebrow. She pushed down and away. The growth, like a miniature nebula, exploded onto the mirror.

"She shoots, she scores!"

Prissi stared at her contribution to the communal killing field until a panicky flutter told her to look at her mypod.

She swore.

If she didn't flame, she was going to be late for Fi-Sci. Dr. Smarkzy, even though he was her counselor and mentor, did not tolerate students walking in late. Despite her being his star pupil, if she came in late, he would have an aneurysm, and Prissi didn't want her favorite teacher dead. Plus, if she got one more gig during Winter Term, which was almost over, she'd be over the limit and back on Skru Kru scraping plates and ignoring sniggers.

"Freeieekin stupid idiocracy."

Prissi yanked the bathroom door so hard, it snapped back and caught the tip of her left wing. Making a sound that was more expressive than any words could have been, Prissi jerked her wing free. A half-dozen silver feathers fluttered to the grimy floor as the re-energized and re-angered girl accelerated down the hall toward class.

Prissi Langue's favorite subject at The Dutton School was science. She liked Chinese—it slowed her mind down, especially when she had to focus hard on the tonals. She loved her English class—she had spent more time with books than parents or peers growing up in Africa. But, she adored science. Despite being on the verge of finishing her fifth term, Prissi was still amazed at how good the science at Dutton was. While it had been 2094 in the rest of the world, in a science classroom in Bujumbura when she was a student there, it might just as well been 1994. To Prissi, science in Burundi was an overly-Christian white woman droning. In contrast, sitting in Advanced Field Science, Fi-Sci II, was like having a bag of popcorn going off in her head—fifty minutes of thoughts careening and ricocheting around inside her head.

The teacher of Fi-Sci II, an exceedingly old and horribly crippled man, a gnome with a slow smile but a fast gnomic tongue, Dr. Smarkzy, seemed to know all science well and his specialty, a combination of prionology and sub-molecular chemistry, cold. Like some of the particles and strands he described, Smarkzy himself could be volatile, maybe even a little unstable, but to Prissi he was a god—Prometheus. An old arthritic Prometheus, except Prissi guessed that Dr. Smarkzy didn't feel that his time with students was as bad as being chained to a rock—at least, most of the time.

As soon as she had walked into her first Fi-Sci II class the previous September, Prissi had known it was going to be a disaster. It was her last class of the first day of her second year. All of her other classes that day had been had been taught by young, energetic and, mostly, attractive teachers. In contrast, the man standing at the front of the lecture portion of the small auditorium looked to be more than a century old. He was a tiny man, almost as short as Prissi, with a gargantuan head, bald except for a few tufts of pure white hair springing out from above his enormous, translucent ears. The ears were extraordinary. Despite the many hours she had spent studying them since that first day, they continued to have a kind of abhorrent attraction for Prissi. Pink and gray with a blue-tinged rim, they reminded Prissi of the shells of some kind of mollusk—a kind you wouldn't want to eat. When Dr. Smarkzy talked, the ears slowly waved like anemones in a tidal pool. Going along with the old man's ghastly ears, were hands and legs so crippled that he shuffled and scuttled, like a scorpion. That first day, when Dr. Smafrkzy pointed at Prissi to take a perch in the first row behind the walkers' chairs, all of his fingers except for his pinky actually pointed back at himself.

Prissi slowed from a flog to a walk as she spotted the Weiners, a old couple who were the heads in Mickelson House and famous for giving out gigs for the least of infractions, standing out in front of the Mu Datarium. The old furtz were going to make her late. A second later she forgot her frustration when she heard Nasty Nancy squeak, "Priscilla Langue, you are going to be TARDEEEE."

When Prissi whipped around, she almost caught her roommate with the edge of her wings.

"All because of you. You ate my Snoogles and my Yogiyums. I could have starved to death!"

The vehemence of her denial made Nasty Nancy's hair, which resembled a large red-dyed cotton ball, toss about like tumbleweed stuck on a fence post.

"I hate Yogiyums."

"You've been known to inhale what you hate."

"Not Yogiyums. They're like mayonnaise-filled marshmallows."

Despite knowing that speed and Nasty Nancy were antithetical, Prissi pleaded, "C'mon. Hurry up. We'll be late."

"Doesn't matter to me. I'm not even close to Screw Crew and spring break starts in five days. After that, the academic gods wipe the slate clean—which means what? Isn't slate a kind of rock? Why does it need to be wiped?"

"African thing. Tell you later. Gotta go."

"To see Dr. Crab?"

Looking around, but not seeing the Weiners, Prissi resumed flogging toward class. As she half-flew and half jogged toward the worn double doors of the scientatory, she returned to her memory of that first day, of how Dr. Smarkzy had stood quietly in front of the class, waiting for the bell to briz. It was only his eyes, amazingly bright and improbably turquoise, that led Prissi to guess that his mouth was twisted in a grin, not a grimace. Afraid to defy his direction, Prissi had moved to the spot he had indicated. She reluctantly had climbed onto her perch and had been horrified at the thought of spending a year with such a repulsive looking person.

Six months later, Prissi could not deny that Vartan Smarkzy was ill-made. In fact, she had had to concede that point to Nasty Nancy more than once. But, and this is what her roomie did not get, any distraction that Smarkzy's looks might cause stopped the moment when his sparkling eyes, melodic voice and irresistible enthusiasm for teaching science began.

Prissi was half-way through the door to Room 320A of the Katharine Zoeg Scientatory just as the bell brizzed. When Prissi hesitated at the door, Dr. Smarkzy shifted his smartstick from the glowing three-foot hologram of pockmarked tissue caused by the prion responsible for bovine spongiform encephalopathy to Prissi and then down to her seat in the first row of perches. While the chagrined teener made her way toward her perch, ignoring the smirks and sibilant sniggers of her classmates, Smarkzy drew his neck down into his shoulders like a turtle waiting for a fish. The second Prissi perched, Smarkzy, like a mad Wagnerian conductor, was using his smartstick to lead the class to a deeper understanding of the Escher-like folds and structures of prions and their effects in DNA.

DNA. Stairway to a trillion possibilities.

Although her mother and father always had laughed at the absurdity when Prissi would accuse them of not being her real parents, Prissi often wondered whether she was made from her parents' DNA. As early as fourth grade, when she began to learn of all the parenting possibilities—GEEs (genetically-enhanced embryos), surrogation, hy-babes (hybrid babies with either sperm or egg from a donor), and the ancient stand-by, adoption, Prissi had fantasized about how she came to be with the people who called themselves her parents. Those tales, first thought while lying on a cot under mosquito netting on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, usually involved exotic people in even more exotic circumstances.

Prissi stared at the ladder of life pulsing inside its glowing sac at the front of the room and considered the wisdom of bringing some of her parents' DNA back after winter break to prove that she could not possibly be their spawn.

Prissi snorted so loudly that Smarkzy's smartstick swung in her direction. Her face reddening in dismay, Prissi covered her mouth to squelch another outburst.

Spawn. Prissi Langue loved that word. Evil spawn. Like corn smut, but with shoes and underwear. Prissi toyed with the idea of bringing back a gatherum of hair from her father's brush, then bribing an honor's senior to type it to see if she really was flesh of his flesh. But, that would only answer half the equation. Finding out about her mother would not be so easy. The only possession Prissi had of her mother's was a small, ornately carved rosewood box. After her father gave it to her, Prissi had been caught within a labyrinth of emotions as she opened it and found her mother's engagement and wedding rings, as well as a strand of pale green pearls. Even after hundreds of times, looking in the box still released a rat's nest of feelings in the girl. Prissi shook her catfood brown hair to sweep away her thoughts.

Coming out of class, Prissi saw Joe Fflower's broad back half-way down the hallway. She sped up and darted left and right around her classmates to get closer. Like with a lot of teener relationships, Prissi sometimes had a much better time watching Joe than actually being with him. Even from the back, she could tell that, like always, he was walking with his nose in the air. She rode her loving loathing like a favorite horse as she scanned down from his shiny, blond, perfectly curled, but perfectly uncoifed hair to his too broad shoulders and down to his VCB. The first time Prissi had noticed the VERY CUTE BUTT, it was so distinctive that she had nicknamed it Hector. When she found out who its owner was, that he came from a family with more money than Mombai, came from the family that had dominated the meta-mutancy business for three-quarters of a century, she was sure the VCB would never have a place in her life. But, in another example of Dutton's famous tradition of diversity, Prissi Lange and Joe Fflowers had become friends, and, finally, after a months-long fencing match of feints and counters, more than friends.

Following three steps behind, Prissi had a bittersweet feeling in knowing that Hector would soon go behind the feathered veil. There was no chance that Joe's family would let him remain a walker. Prissi had listened too many times while a cavalierly defiant Joe explained why he didn't want wings—at least, right now. He wanted to play hockey. Prissi knew that Joe's reputation was that he was one of the top ten high school hockey players in the country. But, even if that were true, Prissi could not imagine Joe's father, Illiya Fflowers, the Co-President of Cygnetics, a company that fledged over five million teenerz a year, letting Joe have his way. Whether he wanted it that way or not, the Joe Fflower's was going to have to accept that tomorrow would be his last hockey game as a walker. Four days after that, Spring Break would begin. Prissi was positive that when Joe returned from break, he would have been muted. And, while the world would have gained a winger, unfortunately, Prissi's eyes would have to bid a fond adieu to a visible VCB.

Prissi skipped around Kipo Phelps, wrapped an arm around Joe's waist and laid her head on his shoulder.

"Hi."

Joe wriggled himself free.

"No PDAs, miss."

"Well, what if I hit you in the arm, would that be seen a public display of affection?"

"An attack on me is an attack on Dutton."

"Wouldn't want that. I'll see you later. In private."

Joe turned toward Prissi, and gave a slight nod toward the restroom door, but said nothing.

As Prissi watched Joe's VCB go through the doorway, she sighed.

Once again, for the billionth time, commerce would trump art.

Oh, woe. Goodnight, sweet butt of a not always so sweet prince.

Prissi snorted, then immediately chastised herself. Next to her flourishing farm of excrescences, her high strung ever-talking hands, her mutation into a fizgig whenever she had too much caffeine, and the nose, of course, the monumental nose, the thing Prissi hated most about herself was her snort. It was a horrible noise. Like the sound a javelina would make before it gored a dog. The snort was her unedited laugh and it made her want to cry when she heard it.

With gallimaufry thoughts of love and hate, like and dislike, bubbling in her brain, the girl hurried down the hall and burst from the Zoeg. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing. The tulip heads wee bobbing in a way that reminded the girl of Twa tribe dancers. Another snort was triggered by the massive snowflakes dancing in the sky. Snow in March was unknown. Snow from a blue sky in March was magic, and, for Prissi Langue, magic always drew a snort.

# CHAPTER TWO

BFF

The wingless Joe Fflowers flies...in skates, on ice. Unless he makes a mind-boggling decision, tomorrow will be the last time Joe will skate in Evenen Rink. He loves the old arena. Of the scores of rinks where he has practiced and played hockey for eleven years, the century-old Evenen Rink has the hardest ice he has ever skated on. Evenen's ice is so hard that the sound his speeding blades make as he races over its surface could have come from some medieval Japanese musical instrument.

Cross push stretch cross push stretch don't think cross push stretch.

Joe has the entire sheet of ice to himself. His Friday schedule leaves the last class period of the day free. Every week of hockey season he has taken those extra minutes before practice begins just to skate.

No helmet. No pads. No stick. Just dim lights and hard ice.

Joe explodes forward as he uses all of his strength to push through on the inside edge of his left skate. He closes his eyes to concentrate on two sounds—the hissing of metal slicing through ice and the roar of a thirty kilometer-an-hour wind blowing past his ears. He glides blind down the length of the rink. At the last second, as some inner sense feels the boards just ahead, he shifts his weight to his outside edge and, eyes still closed, circles back from whence he came.

If he does not decide, cannot decide, then, tomorrow it is over. In a week, the skater will be gone. A mutant bird in its place.

Joe opens his eyes, cuts an edge, uses three short explosive steps to accelerate, lengthens his stride, digs hard, increases his speed and smashes his shoulder into the rickety old glass. The rink reverberates with sound.

Five more days. His father has let him know the day before that the wing-mute is scheduled for the day after he gets home for spring break.

Five days and the thing he likes doing most in the world will be gone. Unless....

Joe spins toward the opposite end of the rink and speeds off. He drives himself down the ice. As he crosses the second blue line, he notices movement in the shadows behind the heavily scratched glass.

Coach Deirkin. The bald, but bearded coach, famous for his harangues, merely points his finger and gives a slight shake of his head to his best player.

Joe aborts his crash. Slowing his breathing and his speed, the fifteen-year old circles the rink a half-dozen times. The first three times around as he comes down the ice he looks closely through the dim glass for Deirkin. After that, he decides that his coach has gone down to his office, probably to practice yelling.

Joe tentatively extends his arms and flaps. Flaps again. Flaps and swears at his father and what is to be his fate. Unless....

After practice ends, Joe holds back. He waits until he is sure that he is the last one leaving the rink. Instead of following his teammates, who are rushing down the hill to get to the dining hall, Joe slips along the wall of the side of the rink and hurries to the back. The boy makes his way through a small forest of shadows. He stops where he has been told to wait and listens. The only sounds he hears are a couple of shrill taunts from down the hill and the bored drone of the compressors making ice.

"It's Joe."

The tired boy leans against the wall and looks at stars sprinkled, like sequins, among a sky full of cotton-balls. He waits for ten minutes, but no one shows. As Joe waits, his feelings rise and sink, like a teeter totter, between relief and disappointment. He doesn't want wings, but he doesn't want to leave Dutton and he definitely doesn't want to leave Prissi. Joe knows he has a hard time showing it, but Prissi Langue does something inside him that no girl...no person... ever has done. She seems to see past all the defenses and screens he has had to put up from being from an immensely wealthy family. She teases him, likes him, argues with him and, best of all, acts like she doesn't know his last name. He can't even imagine how much he will miss her...if he decides to go.

As Joe pushes himself from the wall and shifts his skate bag higher on his shoulder, a low voice emanates from the deep shadows between the compressors and the rink wall, "Have you decided?"

A startled Joe blurts, "Yes, I...no. Not really."

"Time's short."

"I know."

"It can't happen on a whim. It has to be set up. Organized."

"I know. I know."

As Joe's fears turn to anger at being watched...studied...for ten minutes, it causes his voice to pitch up an octave. He worries that it might break.

"It can't happen with a day's notice. We need two days, at least."

"It's not going to happen now. I'm late. I've got to go."

"Think hard. It's close to too late. Think what you will lose. You could be the best."

Joe whirls away from the speaker, as if eluding a defender on the ice, and sprints toward the lights of the dining hall. As he shoves open the massive door, the teener is breathing hard, and not so much from the run, as from what he is running from. He hurries into the reassuringly familiar light and warmth, the myriad of noises and pastiche of smells swirling through Mullen Dining Hall.

* * *

After being abandoned by Nasty Nancy, Prissi has been sitting alone with her dinner and her thoughts. Tonight's dance. Smarkzy's special lecture on Sunday. The essay due on Tuesday. How boring Spring Break was going to be. And the thing she didn't want to think about: Seeing Joe's cousin Jack Fflowers in less than twenty hours at The Bissell School dedication.

Prissi's thought get even more jumbled when she sees Joe run into the dining room and grab a tray.

As Joe moves from station to station filling his tray, he looks down the length of the cavernous room to where his teammates are sitting. In the far left corner Beak, Frankie Nuts, Willie T and Bawlzout Bechley seem to be scrimmaging as much as eating. Feeling too confused to defend himself against their rough friendship, Joe veers off to the right side of the Tudor-style hall to where Prissi perches at a table by herself. Just before he sits, Joe looks back to be sure that the dessert station will block his teammates' view. After he drops his skate bag, Joe nods to Prissi.

Prissi tips her head at Joe's tray, which is filled with meat and potatoes, and in a mocking voice says, "All green."

Joe, laughing at the line some Ecos use as a greeting, responds with its complement, "Or all gone."

Prissi dramatically twirling her fork through the edamame and udon noodle salad she has been avoiding says, "Or, not."

When a nonplussed Prissi saw Joe bee-lining toward her table, she had twisted around so quickly to see if the hockey corner was empty that she had snapped a couple of quills. Now, while Joe scarfs his food, Prissi leans forward so she can angle her wing and pull out the useless quills.

Freeieekin feathers. She was born too late. Sixty years ago, it was still possible to get membrane wings. But, the ersatz bat wings had gone out of favor not only because the folds of flesh didn't contain melanin, thus wouldn't tan, but also because the wings couldn't be grown without claw-like appendages at the end, which had to be kept trimmed. Plus, of course, they were disgustingly ugly, which Prissi, given her age, actually considered a strong selling point.

Fine, she thinks. Wings that looked like they were made from the wattles of dowager geris had drawbacks, but they didn't have freeieekin feathers.

After Prissi finishes her wingkeeping and looks over, Joe Fflowers seems a million kliks away. Not sure of what he might be thinking or feeling, Prissi feels an irresistible urge to touch the bumps on her face before putting her head down and stirring her food. She wishes Nasty Nancy hadn't run off to finish her homework before the dance. Although Prissi is still hungry, she is not hungry enough to chance the social dangers of eating udon with Joe at the table. She can visualize noodles flying across the table and onto Joe after being launched by some random spazz neuronal blast. Or, if by some unexpected good fortune, the food happened to make it to her mouth, she is sure that half of it would hang from her lips like the slobber and green that slops from the mouth of a hippo deep into its dinner. But, swirling and twirling, but not eating, looks stupid, too. And, she can't leave...because... Because. Because, she can't. Because her honor demands that she say something about going to The Bissell School tomorrow to see Jack.

After a painful moment, instead of the truth, the guilt-driven side of Prissi opts to go with a non sequitor.

"Smarkzy. What do you think?" Prissi blurts as a second part of her brain wonders how Joe's nose still seems to be pointing up when his head is tipped down over his plate

"What about Smarkzy?"

"Genius, huh?"

"Not to me. He's just a garden variety scientist."

Prissi's face goes from the pink of internal conflict to anger's bright red. She asks combatively, "And that would be?"

"Dissatisfied, superior, tunnel-visioned snoops."

Prissi fakes a smile she hopes will convey her surprise that such a handsome privileged alete can be so cynical.

"But, interesting, right?"

Joe puts his fork down and tilts his head so he can face Prissi more directly.

"Not to me. They're all the same. It's all about dissatisfaction. It doesn't matter how much they know, it's not enough. Science is all about knowing. Every time a scientist learns something, he wants to leap forward to learn something else. It's like they're Boy Scouts collecting badges and can't get enough."

"So, like every other alete who got in here on brawn and nor brain, you prefer ignorance."

Joe Fflowers shakes his head in disgust and turns back to the solace of his plate. Prissi stirs her food and savors the double dip of guilt—over what she has said and what she hasn't. After waiting long enough to suggest that she is withdrawing rather than retreating, Prissi gathers everything onto her plate and pushes back her chair. As she tentatively walks behind Joe, the unhappy teener retches a small, bitter, "Sorry."

Joe nods his head, then, without turning around, quietly says, more to himself than to Prissi, "I prefer feeling to knowing."

Since it is easier to feel righteous than guilty, Prissi says, "Well, since you do, let me say that I FEEL more like studying tonight than dancing."

A part of Prissi hopes that Joe will parry something back, but he just shakes his head again. Prissi hurls her plate and silverware onto the conveyor at the bussing station, then, bolts from the silence that trails behind her.

# CHAPTER THREE

Minor Miracles

One hundred sixty kilometers south of Dutton on the wounded island of Manhattan, Joe Fflowers' grandfather, one hundred-seven year old Joshua Fflowers, is tapping the treads of his wheelchair and thinking of flight. Before him, through the glass wall, a flurry of rare and precious snowflakes dance in the currents of the updrafts rising from the street one hundred thirty-eight stories below. Ever since he moved into the Airie almost seventy years before, Fflowers has been intrigued by the phenomenon of a rising snowfall. To the west, across the three kilometer-wide Hudson River, ragged vermillion clouds scud toward him as the source of their evanescent beauty, a dying sun, drifts toward the horizon. It is just minutes before the ancient's favorite time of day. His gnarled bones, more claws than hands, tattoo the treads in anticipation of what's to come as well as anger at the slow passage of the minutes.

Years blur by, and, still, minutes drag.

Fflowers nudges the wheelchair closer to the electricity-generating Secur-solar windows so that he better can see Fifth Avenue a half-kilometer below. After a long look into what once had been the world's economic Grand Canyon, the trillionaire looks out at the thousand upon thousands of aquaphorous lights that give a blue-green glow down the spine of the island south all the way to the Houston Levee. As he waits for the minutes to pass, the old man recalls the first time he stepped onto what once was such a vibrant island.

May 21, 2010. His eighth month at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. An MIT PhD. micro-biologist and post-doc researcher at twenty-two. Dragged, along with Elena Howe, by the primary researchers, their mentors and bosses, Reiklein and Grammai, to meet Larktston, the magic money man, who was becoming interested in meta-mutancy. Spring fog and drizzle. Grid-locked streets. Muted headlights. Bleating horns. Shiny surfaces everywhere. A gauntlet of umbrella spokes as they hurried toward The Plaza after abandoning their marooned cab. Larkston meeting them in The Oak Room—beyond garrulous, maybe drunk. Pork chop hands squeezing shoulders and elbows, herding. Into the elevator. Up twenty floors. Larkston big in an airless room. Little things—red, black, green—on silver trays. Big slugs of alcohol in little glasses. Napkins, napkins and more napkins pressed upon him by a tiny waiter with a comical Hispanic accent. Larkston's laugh, like his billions, growing exponentially. Ricocheting off the walls despite the floral rug and damask-covered couches. Grammai rolling his eyes, stuttering in alarm that a magic moment, so long schemed for, might pass without being seized. In her first of a thousand times, Elena into the breach. Fingers. Calming fingers stroking Larkston's arm like a favorite horse's mane. Soothing words. Her low whisper of a laugh taming Larkston's bray. Grammai with the laptop. Reiklein, the breathy, hyper-kinetic zealot, interrupting Grammai, the Oppenheimer clone. Elena, touching, smiling, breathing, not begging, but rather imbuing the rich man with belief.

Then...the moment. The mutation. From interested observer to contractually-shackled benefactor. Handshakes. Back pats. More over-generous drinks. The just-shy-of-impolite retreat. Gamboling down Fifth. If over-weight, middle-aged genius can gambol. To the train. To the labs. To the ramparts.

The old man looks at his watch, a stem-wound gold-cased graduation gift from his ineffectual father, who himself had received it from his almost wealthy great-grandfather.

Only two minutes have gone by.

A snowflake as large and light as a dandelion seed bounds up, hits the window, rotates ninety degrees and melts away. The ancient Midas watches its rill slide toward earth. His fingers tap. He looks out toward the southern half of Manhattan. The island is so different from when he first came to live on it. Back then, it had felt as if the city were more alive at night than during the day. He loved to wander about looking at the lights and the magic they made of the night. While the streets of SoHo, Tribeca and West Heights were busy and even crowded during the day, they weren't bustling, they weren't kinetic with the edgy kind of energy that they had at night. He had come to the city and the city had changed. In part because of his efforts, but, he told himself, the vision before him would have been even more different without his efforts.

It was not just Manhattan. The world itself had changed. The world had gotten warmer and wetter and Manhattan, once capital to the world, now was dying. And, he had changed. He had gotten colder, drier, and...and...he was dying.

It was almost quitting time in the thousands of offices below him. A century before, a human wave of energy would have spilled out onto the streets. Like a broken dam. And that torrent would have plunged through the canyons and poured into the restaurants and bars, the bodegas and markets. What had been full during the day would empty and what had been empty would fill and overflow.

The city had been so alive...but, then, immutable, unstoppable metamorphosis. Like all cities, in all times. Like all of life.

Ice melted a half a world away and that newly released water found its way to Long Island Sound and the rivers that bordered both sides of the city. Tides had risen and then barriers to protect the city had risen and the waters had risen higher and the city had fought back but the waters rose again and, after awhile, the city had tired of the fight. The streets of southern Manhattan became canals. The ground floors of buildings were abandoned. Entrances were raised. Catwalk and elevated sidewalks hugged the facades of Wall Street for a time and, then, had been abandoned like a rotting ship. Like an old pensioner facing straitened circumstances, the city had retreated from what had been and cobbled together what could be. Over time, more and more people decided that it was easier to leave than absorb the changes. Two new, clean, well-lighted, sterile cities, nicknamed Newton and Screwton, had been birthed in the western hills of New Jersey. Newton—birthmother of the new in fashion, music and the vid-arts, the only visual art remaining. And Screwton, the ever cold, ever hungry succubus to Mammon. On this particular weather-mad March eve, the old man, now, finally, a realist, slips his noose and indulges both in nostalgia for a city, and a life once ten times as bright. His mind jumps with bright-hued, but scattered, memories, like a scrap-book unbound.

....Bursting through set after set of double doors with the desperate desire of a salmon on a fish ladder, through the final portal, then, sucking blue-black night air deep into his lungs while his eyes feasted on the star-pocked sky. A night heron's pale moon shadow racing across concrete the color of old ivory. The tic-flicking exhaustion and brain-inflaming exhilaration of knowing they are close, so close to the biological switch they are trying to divine. A galvanic fear that they will miss the small turn that can take them through the maze. Moments later, knowing it is the perfect moment, Elena Howe, now wife, though not named Fflowers, licorice black shiny hair keeping time to the broken rhythm of the breeze, rushing up to offer perfect lips to Fflowers. Elena, a silver sylph brightening a lunar world. Hermes in disguise.

Fflowers emaciated fingers drift to his face. He touches the drought dry corners of his eyes before rubbing the ridges of his forehead.

The sky goes scarlet. Finally, six o'clock comes. Below him, a first thousand doors open. Workers in therma-jerkins of every color, kanga-paks cinched tightly across their chests, crowd the doorways. Two or three quick steps along the docks jutting from each floor of every building, a moment's plummet, and then the flap of wings.

Thousands upon thousands, one hundred thousand, then two, then three hundred thousand winged humans begin their flights home. All those flights and freedoms, each and every one, a boon from his small band's efforts almost eighty years before.

Human flight, now an old trick, but one still worth the wait for an old earth-bound man. A dying man.

For a few short moments, like the bats in Carlsbad Cavern, clouds of humans, their wings of every shape and color, fill the sky. Ten minutes later, the flock is gone, the city empty except for slow exodus of the wingless.

The old man rolls himself back from the glass wall, executes a slow turn and makes his way down a long hallway toward his nightly chore.

Joshua Fflowers wheels himself to the dining room, where a table that could, and a half-century before regularly did, seat thirty, is set for one. Although he is not hungry, when he is served, Joshua Fflowers eats. Despite the palette of colors on his plate—the sea-grass green of asparagus, an arterial red tomato sprinkled with chalk-white chevre, two seared lamb chops with golden edges—when those colors get inside his mouth, they turn to gray. The old man has ageusia, has had it nearly a half-century, since the year after Elena was lost. All food, whether crisp, crunchy, chewy or of a pudding softness, whether marinated in wine, bathed in infusions of basil or rosemary, or drowned in a puree of Scotch Bonnets, vinegar, molasses and milk, tastes like...gray...like nothing. Food as slurry. Food as duty. And, since his health has failed, he can not even eat what is on that brightly hued plate. That plate is just art, artifice and irony. His health is such that dinner comes from a bottle fitted with a tube. The centenarian's twisted hands drag the bottle toward him. He lowers his lips and suckles whatever is in it that supposedly harms him least.

Oh, Romulus, such a meta-mutancy, the craving wolf into a craven lamb.

There are not many areas where Fflowers is, or ever was, dutiful, but this is one. He eats to sustain a life that passes both too fast and too slow. A life that, at midday, is much too short, and, alert and alone at three in the morning, much, much, much too long.

"Oh, Elena, what we could have wrought."

The old head jerks up when he realizes that he has blurted out in anguish what he only had meant to think.

He swallows methodically, but thinks less so. He is dying and hopes for that relief. He is dying and begrudges that darkness. He has all of an old man's wants—revenge, love, forgiveness, eternity.

He hopes he has just one more day with all this weighty age that has worn him down. He will dedicate the building tomorrow. Then, go off to his rejuvenation. If all goes well, in two weeks he might be eating from a plate. He might be walking. He might be happy. If all goes wrong, well, then, a bane is lifted and he is free.

# CHAPTER FOUR

Betrayals

Bissell School sophomore halfa-hunk and modestly talented soccer...hero, Jack Fflowers flung the FRZ-B past Prissi's right shoulder toward Lake Wanapocamuc. From twenty meters below her, Nancy Sloan challenged, "No waya you can playa."

Prissi yelled back, "Oh, yaya?"

Prissi dropped her right wing, threw her left leg over her right, and shoved her left wing forward and down. Her body pivoted around. She drew up her legs and pulled her wings tight to her body. She cannonballed until she was less than ten meters feet above the lake. When she executed a two-part wing flare, her silver and red feathers shimmered like the aurora borealis. Prissi dove down and caught the FRZ-B in her mouth when it was less than a meter above the glittering surface of the lake. She barked in delight as she skimmed just above the lake's dimpled water. As the winger passed from water to land, she banked up, then, abruptly dropped her last rows of remiges down to brake. When she landed, the exuberant teener skidded on a small patch that remained of the previous night's snow. As she snapped her body to keep her balance, something popped in her right shoulder. Despite the needle-sharp pain, Prissi forced herself to finish off the one hop landing. The hurting winger stopped just in front of the granite perches by the Bissell School boathouse where she, Jack and Nasty Nancy had been sitting nd talking until competitive juices and spring hormones had motivated them to play an under-manned version of 3D-FRZ-B.

Prissi's shoulder was on fire, but she didn't say anything when Jack, with a flurry of bright white and Bissell blue feathers, muffed his own one-hopper and banged against the boat house. Nancy slowed so much on her landing attempt that she fell from the sky with the grace of a pregnant booby. Nancy was panting, and, as Prissi easily read from her cork-screwed eyebrows and radish-red face, not too happy that she hadn't scored a single point. Since she still had the FRZ-B in her mouth, Prissi cocked her head like a cocker spaniel and, to break the tension, puppy moaned until her roomie laughed.

"Bad puppy. Give me my FRZ-B."

Prissi backed up a step and growled.

"Puppy!"

Prissi extended her neck; Nasty Nancy took the disk, gave Prissi a pat, then, all three teenerz plopped onto their rough hewn perches. Hiding her eyes with her spineless hair, Prissi studied Jack and compared him to his cousin. Where Joe's hair was blond and curly, Jack's was caramel-colored, slightly wavy with a sheen that looked more greasy than healthy. Where Joe's chest came before the rest of him like an ice breaker plowing the northern seas, it was Jack's sleek otter head that arrived before his narrow chest and indifferently slumped shoulders. Where Joe's eyes were bright blue, round and innocent, Jack's were dark and lazy. Joe was mostly forthright; Jack seemed to prefer corners and alleys. All in all Prissi thought Joe was more attractive, but Jack was more DISTRACTIVE. Prissi shivered in delight...and guilt.

After taking a long and purposefully loud slurp of his caffe-mucho and tapping out the opening of Beethoven's Fifth on the table top, Jack Fflowers complimented Prissi on her catch.

Prissi demurred, "It's all in the wings. How much time do we have?"

Nancy looked at her mypod, "About an hour."

Exchanging the girl-to-girl look, Prissi stated in the way generations of teener girls have, so that her statement sounded like a question, "We better go get cleaned up?"

As the trio flew toward Jack's dorm, they looked down at the temporary stage that had been set up for the dedication of the new science center. The light covering of snow, which blanketed the rest of the hilly Bissell campus, had been removed from in front of the stage with blowers. Sitting on brilliant spring green grass was a battalion of folding chairs and perches in close formation. From high above, Prissi could imagine an ancient army awaiting the clarions. Rising imposingly from behind the stage, just to the right of Grayswold Hall was that ancient science building's replacement—the six-story, six-sided pink and gray granite Joshua F. Fflowers Scientatory. A half-dozen members of the Bissell grounds crew were fussing over barrels of brave school blue tulips looking forlorn against the snowy backdrop.

As she passed over the stage, Prissi was more than a little surprised when she realized that the little man painfully mounting the temporary stairs and shuffling his way to the podium was Vartan Smarkzy. Prissi flew in a tight circle so that she could watch her mentor look out over the non-existent audience before taking a sheaf of papers from his pocket and sticking them on a shelf under the podium's top.

Prissi pounded her LTs and caught up with Nasty Nancy and Jack just as they dropped down and landed in front of the tower which jutted from the front of Hoch Hall.

"Did you see who that was? Dr. Smarkzy. What's Bissell doing letting my favorite Dutton teacher talk?"

Jack grinned, "Our arch-rivalry is dead for a day. Except for FRZ-B. Smarkzy is giving the dedication. He and my grandfather went to school together. My grandfather told me Smarkzy did some real CE work back then."

Nancy gacked her patented cynical laugh, "What was cutting edge back then? Battery-operated flashlights? He creeps me. He's like a crab, but with no shell."

Prissi fought the urge to argue with her roomie. Ever since coming back from Winter Break and finding Adam Lin no longer had an interest in her, Nancy had been putting on weight. With each kilogram of flesh gained, Nasty Nancy had become nastier—more sarcastic, more critical, more cynical. Given the way her friend was panting after a sortie that hadn't changed Prissi's breathing at all, the teener guessed that Nancy was only a few kilos away from having her wings clipped. For Prissi, that was a very scary thought. Even though Nasty Nancy Sloan did not love flying in the way that she herself did, Prissi knew that if her roomie were grounded, the results would be so ugly that their friendship, begun the first week of their lower mid year, would not survive.

Prissi took a tai breath to calm herself down, but, it didn't help much. She took another breath and held it even longer. Prissi told herself that she needed to stop being so judgmental, even though being judgmental was one of the Constitutionally-guaranteed rights and privileges of teener girls. She looked over at Nancy who was scowling and waiting for a comeback. Prissi clamped her jaws and smiled.

To get away from feeling meek and indecisive, Prissi turned her attention from Nancy back to Jack. Even though Jack Fflowers had no VCB, he was not without a certain darkside-ish charm, and it was that which is what had gotten Prissi in her current mess.

In the classroom , but, especially, on the playing field, Dutton and Bissell had been fierce, but friendly, rivals for more than two hundred years. On the ice, up and down the steep hills of cross country courses, on the links, in sculls, on football, baseball and soccer fields, thousands upon thousands of contests had been played out in hard fought and, often, close competition. Each fall, the schools alternated hosting an afternoon's athletic contests, then a dinner, and, afterwards, a dance.

The previous year, it had been Bissell' turn to host the events. Prissi, the only lower mid on the varsity soccer team, first met Jack Fflowers when he complimented her play as she came off the field after an agonizing 3-2 Dutton loss. Later in the afternoon on that perfect October day, Prissi watched Jack play on the junior varsity soccer team in a game in which Jack had gotten two penalties as his team lost to Dutton 5-4. Prissi and Jack bumped into each other at the dinner and, again, at the dance. Giving into the teener version of the fates, the two new acquaintances talked a little and danced a lot before it was time for the Dutton students to return to their campus.

The next time Prissi saw Jack Fflowers was in three months when he showed up at Dutton for January's Winter Dance. Again, there was more dancing than talk. At the end of the night, there was something in the shadows outside Mullen Hall that made Prissi's lips tingle for what seemed like a week. Afterward, they traded a half-dozen txts. By the time Bissell came to Dutton the following fall, Prissi's friendship with Jack's cousin, Joe Fflowers, had begun. Joe had been both surprised and unhappy when Prissi told him that she knew Jack. Joe made it very obvious that the two cousins did not get along. Against her better judgment, but enjoying the frizz it gave her, Prissi got together with Jack after their respective 3D FRZ-B contests. Both had given up soccer after having fledged over the summer. They met by the pond and talked a little before Prissi, to relieve the awkwardness she was feeling, challenged Jack to a flying contest. When Prissi easily won that contest, Jack stalked away angry. She saw him staring at her at the dance while she was dancing with Joe. The boys' faces made plain their feelings, even though the band was too loud to hear what they said to one another.

When Prissi was back in home in Manhattan over winter break, Jack had txtd her and apologized. A day later he called and she had agreed to meet him at the Diddy Center to ice skate. Since Prissi had grown up in Burundi, where the only ice skates to be found might be in a colonial-era museum, Jack easily outskated her before taking her to dinner at Nam's, one of the most expensive restaurants in Manhattan. Back at school, they had txtd one another a couple of times a week, a practice Prissi had not quite gotten around to sharing with Joe.

Despite their intersections and interactions, Prissi had been surprised when with only two days notice Jack had invited her to the ceremonies for the dedication of his grandfather's gift to Bissell. She had hesitated to accept until she learned that Joe was not going to the ceremonies so that he could play his last hockey game for Dutton. After she had failed to tell Joe what she was going to do, Prissi had squirmed an invitation for Nasty Nancy to come along to ease her guilt.

Prissi nodded her head back toward the new building as she asked Jack, "Does your grandfather like his legacy?"

When Jack shook his head, waves of Peking duck-colored hair bounced attractively.

"He hasn't seen it much lately. He used to come up here a lot to check things out, and take me to dinner. But, not lately. He doesn't get out much. He was supposed to be rejuved six months ago, but then there was an organ match problem. And then this thing," Jack swept his arms toward the new building, "got delayed. He really wanted to be here, so he just decided to put things off until after the dedication. But as he waited, things got worse. After he finishes up here today, he goes right to the Juvenal Institute."

Nasty Nancy offered her caustic opinion, "I can't see hurting my health so a bunch of bored kids can clap for me."

A furious Jack enunciated each word, "I don't think he is here for the acclaim. He loves Bissell. He thinks that if it weren't for the education he got here as a student, a scholarship student, none of the other things would have happened."

"Like becoming the richest man in the world."

Nasty Nancy's tone caused both Prissi and Jack to step back from where they had been leaning against the black granite perches in front of Hoch Hall.

"Need a breather, Nance," said a mortified Prissi. Jack said nothing. He just flew away.

# CHAPTER FIVE

GEE Whiz

Joshua Fflowers felt as old as time as he smiled and scrabbled with another hand. Some unconscious, but meticulous, portion of his brain recorded it as the one hundred forty-first hand-shake. Despite the pain in his finger joints, Fflowers squeezed firmly and dryly. He held back a sigh, smiled and reached out to the next well-wisher while pushing back his own wish just to be done with the circus in which he was starring.

Fflowers had been excited when he first had the idea of giving Bissell a new science center, but, now, almost four years later, he was far beyond the point of regret. He didn't begrudge the money he had spent on building and equipping a facility that put Andover and Exeter, Eton and Harrow, even Toin, to shame. The money was nothing, not even one tenth of one percent of his worth. If his commitment had been no more than the transfer of funds, things would have been fine. But, of course, it could not be that simple. Nothing ever was, except in physics. He had to be toadied to, fawned over, and feted by the school's administration and trustees. He had to be consulted with on the architecture and artwork—not that anyone particularly listened. He had to be commended and thanked...by everyone from Headmaster Binny Dowdahl to the Board of Trustees to the alumni association to the parents' committee and student council to the little fellow who folded towels in the field house. He had to be lauded and applauded at the just finished dedication ceremonies where he had given a speech that was more coughs and growls than subjects and verbs.

And, now... now, he was in a receiving line that snaked to infinity, acquiring a zoo of germs from squeezing the greedy hands of envious wishers and obsequious well-wishers leaning over his wheel chair, coveting his wealth, pitying his health, all while whispering, bellowing platitudes, gratitude and good cheer.

The benign benefactor in Fflowers fought the rebel's urge to power up the wheelchair and plow through the crowd to safety. Away from the parade of stifling people with their mid-body noises and smells as they hulked and hovered over him. Away from the stream of sycophancy slowly wending its way past him. Away to the roto. To relief. In three hours he could be through the Institute's doors and beginning the rejuve he should have had so long ago.

Joshua Fflowers ruefully thought of how he might have delayed too long, irrevocably ruined his health, for the sheer joy of what he was doing at the moment. The old man toyed with the wheelchair toggle. He turned his head to stare at the sleek stomach, an abdomen looking almost as stiff as its starched shirt covering, of Binny Dowdahl. Well-met hale fellow headmaster. Spinner of dreams. Pocket picker of the rich. Fflowers considered whether he should request, or demand of Dowdahl, that his duties be over, but Binny was regaling an Oriental couple looking de la mode Chinois in their long flame-hued phoenix wings.

As Fflowers waited for the ineffably charming Dowdahl to finish his story, he recalled how even Ives Cheredon, his beloved headmaster from ninety years before, despite being as brilliant a raconteur as he was essayist and poet, occasionally had self-loved his words and thoughts to where a tale well told, with more fillips and flourishes than a Souza march, had made an assembly seem to last an eternity.

Feeling his hand move, the old man turned away from the past to look up, past a short fat body, into a large eager face, hacked in half by a bad-toothed smile. Except for the monstrous teeth, the man looked and smelled like a boiled egg. While he pawed Fflowers hand, the little man sputtered, "Thank you. Thank you. Yes, as always, I believe our future, our nation's future, is now walking, now, this very day, in the hallowed halls of Bissell. Those hands deserve the best, and you have certainly given them that. I thank you. Bissell thanks you. Noramica thanks you. Yes. Yes."

"Yes."

As Fflowers sent the man on his way, he wondered when the little enthusiast last had sent a eurollar to the school. His gaze drifted back to Dowdahl's starched stomach. The excursus continued.

Another hand took Fflowers. He shook and smiled and shifted his thoughts to something much more pleasant...Smarkzy. Being back with his oldest friend had been the high point of the day. He and Vartan had come to Bissell the same year, 2001. Smarkzy, the sophisticated only son of a New York investment banker—a banker famous for taking outrageous risks on untried technologies and earning even more outrageous rewards— had befriended the poor scholarship student escaping from the skeletal remains of a Massachusetts mill-town. They met in a Latin class and, despite their differences in background, found they had much in common. Both hated sports, abhorred the sweating, swearing camaraderie. Both loved science—tearing back the veil to reveal Nature's close-kept secrets. Both thought the Greeks and Romans, their art, literature, and history to be far more engaging than the current product. Vartan was smart, well-bred, well-read, quick with a quip, slow with a judgment. Smarkzy was...suddenly, the ruminations stopped. At the edge of Fflowers' peripheral vision, but no more than a dozen handshakes away, was his grandson, Jack.

A small hand, a small distraction.

"Thank you for your kind act."

"Thank you for your kind words."

As the next well-wisher approached, Fflowers looked at Jack, but thought about Jack's father and his uncle. Joshua Fflowers despised both his sons, the younger one, Illiya, for being an indecisive moralist, the older one, Adaman, one for being immoral. He cared little for his grandson, Illiya's son, Joe, but Fflowers truly enjoyed his time with his grandson Jack. Jack reminded the centenarian of how he was when he was young. Brash, devious, charming, bright, but not afraid of those who were brighter.

The next few guests, whatever they might have given or pledged to the school, got their money's worth from Joshua Fflowers—a firm though twisted grip, funny words, a twinkle in the eye. Fflowers charmed like he had eighty years before when, penniless, he had sought to loosen any number of purse-strings to pursue his mad idea.

* * *

As they shuffled forward along the slow-moving line, Prissi studied the famous old man while Jack told her how close he was to one of the world's three trillionaires. Jack spent a lot of time at the Airie, Fflowers' Manhattan penthouse at the southern end of Central Park on The Plaza Plaza. Jack had traveled to Europe and Russasia with his grandfather during school and summer breaks while it still had been relatively easy for the old man to travel. Jack amused the wealthy old man. Although she had no reason to doubt Jack, from the physical changes she was watching unfold on the old man's face, Prissi was sure that Jack's relationship with Joshua Fflowers must be much more complicated than he was letting on.

As they had advanced in the line, Prissi had been watching the icon of fledging, the most famous scienpreneur of the century. He had been bored, then, after he had seen Jack coming his way, he had become more animated. Suddenly, the trillionaire had become extremely agitated. His head was bobbing and twitching, and Prissi was sure she could see a tremor in his hands. The curve of his mouth changed so that the smile became a rictus.

Turning her mouth toward Jack's ear, Prissi whispered, "Is this going to be okay?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Look. He seems epic upset."

Jack looked, then, laughed, "Probably just frantic that it's taking so long to see me."

When Prissi stepped hard on his foot, Jack continued, "Or besotted by your beauty."

"Jack, be serious. Look. He looks horrible. He could CPUke in a second."

* * *

In a different, less current language, Fflowers was thinking many of the same thoughts as Prissi. He thought what black-humored poetic justice it would be if he were to die, his central processor apoplectic, at the dedication of a building he had endowed with the sole thought of nurturing students whose brains were capable of re-discovering something miraculous he had caused to be lost so many years before. What Greek theater it would be, if, at the moment of his death, he should be brought back together with the person... no, it couldn't be **the** person, but a startling mirror image of the person, one of three, who had wrought the century's greatest miracle, and wrestled it into the light before slamming it back into the ignorant dark.

Despite the press of bodies and wheedling voices around him, Joshua Fflowers could not take his eyes off the girl talking with Jack.

Moving along with the shuffling sycophants, laughing with his grandson, was a girl who looked how Elena Howe, his wife, muse, science partner, and enemy looked when she was fifteen. The girl's impossible resemblance to Elena squeezed the insides of Joshua Fflowers like a heart attack. This Doppelganger could not be by chance. Somehow, this impossible girl had to share most of Elena's double helix, but how? Could she be Elena's daughter? Impossible. Rapacious Fate struck twice had taken away that option. Could she be a niece? Impossible. Elena had had a sister...Morgana. But, she must be dead thirty years by now. Could she be a grand-niece and look that much like her? Impossible. A daughter that couldn't be. A niece that couldn't be. The girl looked too much like Elena to be anything else but a clone. But, how? And, why? Why now? Why here with Jack?

As the guests in the line shambled along, like refugees from a war zone, Joshua Fflowers pondered. He and Elena had never had children. That was a decision, strictly a temporary decision by Fflowers, to which Elena reluctantly had agreed. He had argued that they were too caught up in changing the world with wings. Children could come later. Of course, they had hedged their bets with frozen eggs and seed. That had been a prescient move given that Elena was to fight ovarian cancer before she was thirty-five. But, the eggs had been stored at the lab where the research for the Centsurety Project had been entering the final stages. The eggs, the knowledge and processes of Centsurety's world-altering discovery, and worst of all, Elena herself had been lost to him in the explosion which destroyed the lab.

As he had a thousand times over the last fifty years, Fflowers clamped his jaws tight to keep from wailing.

By the time Jack and Prissi had their turn, Joshua Fflowers had recovered enough of his equanimity that he could do his Midas and Merlin imitations without a misstep.

From two steps away, the girl, whom Jack introduced as Prissi Langue, even more closely resembled Elena—the slight epicanthal folds that gave the eyes their almond shape, the almond theme continued with the Shoshone skull, the slight creases, eczema markers, under the Venus-bright eyes, the long neck, an elegant stem for what Fflowers suspected would be a head overflowing with intelligence and derring-do. The girl was so much like Elena that he had a barely resistible urge to ask her to take off her shoes to see if she had elongated toes with the little ones turned nearly sideways.

Joshua Fflowers held his grandson's hand as Jack introduced Prissi.

"Mz. Langue, my pleasure. Have you a chaperone to protect yourself from my Jack of all traits, bad traits?"

When the old man winked at her, Prissi felt an instant freedom. She shook her head, "No, sir. No chaperone. Just my rapier tongue and Dutton's shield of honor."

The old man growled in pleasure like a dog getting its ears scratched. He felt like he had been yanked back eighty years to those halcyon days when Elena Howe and he first met as post-doc students at Cold Spring Harbor.

Joshua Fflowers had rarely slept when he was a young man. He had felt that he had no time to waste in sleep. But, he had spent thousands upon thousands of hours in bed thinking and, in a whisper, recording those thoughts into his mypod with the serenely sleeping Elena alongside. In those hours, as he had studied her face in the silver of moon-glow or the amber of street light, he had done what he considered to be his best thinking—how to give freedom to humankind and how to cripple those who stood in his way. As he had thought the thoughts that changed the world, he had studied Elena's face pore by porcelain pore. Now, from a meter away, Fflowers had no doubt that by some mystery, which he swore he would unravel, the face before him, this wonderful, wily, intrigued, intriguing, bright, never to be expected face, was, somehow, protein of Elena's protein.

"Langue? Are you French? Langue is French for tongue and the root of the word language."

"No, sir. I'm from Africa. No French there in quite awhile."

The old man tipped his head as he considered that piece of information.

"And how did you end up at Dutton? Are you a legacy student?"

"No, sir. My mother died and my father moved us to New York. After we were here awhile, he decided that I could get a better education if I went to boarding school."

Jack interjected, "Well that's true...if you're smart enough to go to the right boarding school."

Joshua Fflowers held up a hand to stop Jack, "And, are you getting a better education?'

Prissi nodded her head vigorously, "Dr. Smarkzy is one of my teachers."

"Then, you are. Then, you certainly are."

As he continued to talk to Jack and the girl, Joshua Fflowers could feel the force of the receiving line grow, like water building behind a dam. On a powerful whim, he decided he could get to the institute even later than he already was going to be. Organ preservation had come a long way. He asked Jack and Prissi to have dinner with him. When the girl declined, saying that she had to get back to Dutton, the centenarian felt the rejection as sharply as a high school boy.

A minute later the teenerz said their goodbyes—Jack with a hug and the girl with a wide, but enigmatic smile—and hurried off. Once they were gone, a distracted Joshua Fflowers hurriedly fed the egos of the rest of the hungering parade.

As Binny Dowdahl accompanied him to the roto, Joshua Fflowers rattled off a dozen questions about Jack, Prissi, and Jack and Prissi. Dowdahl had the right answers about Jack, knew nothing of Prissi as she wasn't a Bissell student, and raised his eyebrows until they resembled the St. Louis arch as answer about the two of them. When Fflowers asked him to find out what he could, Bissell's headmaster and chief Myrmidon nodded eagerly.

As soon as the wheelchair was locked in place and the roto's blades were spinning, the trillionaire began ogling Prissi Langue and her family. By the time he landed at the Juvenal Institute, his biggest finding was how little he was able to discover, despite access to innumerable interlocked databases and a host of search engines, about Prissi Langue and her parents. However, Fflowers was still far too much the scientist to be stymied by initial failure. He knew that as soon as his rejuve surgeries were over, he would be back on the trail. He had no choice. He had to know about the girl.

As Joshua Fflowers considered who and what Prissi might be, he necessarily thought about his two sons. Even as he was prepped by a host of nurses to receive his new parts, he reviewed for the millionth time how those two sons were the unfathomable punishment he had paid for a well-intentioned act.

Two years after the Centsurety lab explosion, in an effort to relieve his pain and divert his anger, Fflowers had had his seed mated with Elena's eggs. Adaman had been the result. From the moment of his birth, Fflowers had felt that the son was nothing like the mother, nor the father. He neither looked like them—an outcome which belied the supposed advances in genetic engineering—nor did he act like them. By the time Adaman was two, Joshua Fflowers learned why. He had thrown the die and lost—because the die had been loaded. The egg that had been fertilized with his sperm had not been harvested from Elena's ovaries. A DNA scan had revealed that. Months of investigations as to who was the source of the egg resulted in nothing but dead ends. Knowing that Elena had switched eggs on him finally brought full force to Fflowers how much she despised him.

As Adanan grew into a snarky, oily, needy boy, Fflowers' revulsion grew alongside. Finally, since he could not change his feelings, he tried to change the paradigm by having a second son. Fflowers was fifty-seven when he grew a second son from an egg that had been carefully considered and even more carefully tested. The result, Illiya, was somewhat more to his liking...at first.

Even before the arrival of Illiya, Fflowers could not think of Adaman as his real son. The boy was a burden, a disappointment, even his heir, but not his son. Night after night, Fflowers would wander through the dozens of rooms of the Airie, which felt twice as big and frighteningly empty since Elena had gone, and consider the child whom he and Elena could have, and he had convinced himself, would have made. A child more like Elena and less like himself.

In the late night chiaroscuro made by the swirling beams of winger beacons, hawk's roto searchlights and the spatter of late night revelers' erratically weaving flight lights, Fflowers would walk his own personal stations of the cross. The high-ceilinged library, crammed with science and myth, where over and over he had insisted to the doubting Elena that they were too young and their lives too full to have children...yet. The baronial dining room where Elena first had mentioned in passing the anomalous results of her pap exam. The statuary gallery, at that time his sanctorum, the place where he first had had the idea for the Centsurety Project. The parterre, with its central allee lined with marble and alabaster imaginings of all the forms the gods had left undone. The parterre, where the best and worst of his memories had been born....

Fflowers looked past the flurry of hands preparing him for his rejuve....

....It had been on starry night in late winter, just before the Ides of March, in the parterre which was filled with art and flowers, that a sleepless Joshua Fflowers had had the idea for the very best present he could give to Elena for her forty-fifth birthday.

It was a time of congruence. Things long worked for were falling into place. Finally, after fifteen years, the China market was exploding. Cygnetics just had reported record quarterly earnings for the twentieth time in a row. The delayed fledging process had been making remarkable progress. After a dozen tries, the special embryos of the Centsurety Project, still no bigger than beans, seemed to be thriving. It was time for him to give Elena her wings. It was not that he had had no doubts about his gift. After all, the wings would be grafted, not grown. And Elena, who had helped millions to fly, had never expressed her own desire to fly. Soon after Elena's battle with ovarian cancer and resultant hysterectomy eight years before, Fflowers had argued with her to get wings as a balm to her wounds, but she had wanted nothing to do with it. Rather than flying in an empty sky, she preferred to lose herself in work.

At the time, Fflowers had heard his wife's wishes, but he hadn't believed them. There had been too many other times when Elena's initial resistance later had turned to acceptance. Fflowers had convinced himself that, once the gift was made, Elena would be immensely grateful that he had taken the initiative.

But, Elena had not been grateful. She had been horrified. And as her revenge, she had left and taken all of her, and so much of him, from him. He had been left with an incurable emptiness, and progeny he could not own within his heart. Now, with the appearance of the girl, who, in some miraculous way, must be egg of Elena's egg, the girl who had conjured herself at this auspicious moment, Fflowers knew that he was about to be rejuvenated in both body and soul.

As he was wheeled into the surgery, Joshua Fflowers was more hopeful and more excited than he had been in more than fifty years. Fate had come round. He was forgiven.

Seventy-two hours later, a half-dozen slight sighs away from death because of a rejected liver split and a pancreatic transplant gone spectacularly wrong, hope and promise as well as any interest in Prissi Langue, her history and kin, were far removed from Joshua Fflowers' guttering thoughts.

# CHAPTER SIX

Lost Paths

As he lay dying, Joshua Fflowers could not pursue his interest in Prissi, but the same could not be said of Prissi's interest in Joshua Fflowers.

The day after the Bissell dedication, Prissi, along with a scattering of students and a smattering of Dutton faculty had listened while Vartan Smarkzy had given a Sunday Series lecture called False Paths. Smarkzy's talk focused on some of the heralded scientific theories or paradigms which had led to little or nothing—humouristic medicine, a geo-centric solar system, alchemy, the id/ego/superego trinity, and dark matter.

After the lecture, on a beautiful balmy afternoon with a soughing wind and dumpling clouds, Prissi was taking a necessarily slow walk across campus with Dr. Smarkzy—slow both because of her teacher's infirmities and because Prissi herself was still sore from hurting her shoulder the day before. Smarkzy was adding to the false paths he had mentioned in his lecture—phrenology, natural design. Prissi was listening but she also was feeling a sense of loss because Spring Break was to start in just two more days.

Even though she would be relieved to get through the rush of work Dutton teachers assigned to be due just before break, if she couldn't be out of the country vacationing on an island as seemingly most of her friends were scheduled to do, then Prissi would rather be at Dutton than home. Although it was almost three years since her mother had died, Prissi thought that her father now was even more wounded by grief rather than in the days and weeks immediately following the accident. From Prissi's view, the time healing all anodyne wasn't working for Beryl Langue.

Noticing that Prissi was favoring her shoulder, Smarkzy gently tapped it

"This, this whole process of fledging—the meta-mutancy, the timing, and the intricate biochemical processes— also might prove to be a false path."

Intrigued with the man she had met yesterday who had discovered the process that allowed fledging, and interested that there might be a better way to accomplish the transformation she had undergone the year before, Prissi asked, "Why? We fledge. We fly. What's wrong?"

Smarkzy's gnarled hands did a tortured pas de deux in the air. "Well, perhaps it's not so much a wrong path as a less than optimum path. A young person or that person's parents must decide whether to have wings at a period in life when much, if not most, is still in shadows. The wings one chooses may not fit what one becomes. In other words, the wings choose the life rather than the life choosing the wings. How many thousands, if not millions, of people lose ten, twenty or more years of flying because they have a mis-match between wing style and somatotype?

"Eons ago, in my fabled youth, I was asked to help out with did some interesting work being done by a former student of mine. She was working with a group that was being funded by a well-known scienpreneur, one whose acquaintance you recently made."

"Joshua Fflowers."

With his head so big, his body so frail, and his balance suspect, Prissi tentatively held out a hand when her teacher began vigorously bobbing that head.

"Although, at the time, as a field of study, meta-mutancy was more than twenty-five years old, most of the theorizing still ran down just one, albeit admittedly somewhat wide, path. Joshua Fflowers was already famous, honored and immensely rich. But, if you knew Josh as I did, you would know that wouldn't be enough. He was driven to do more than he already had done—which was no less than the gift of flight to mankind—if gift it truly be."

After a pause, Smarkzy chuckled, "To wealthy mankind, anyway. From what my former student told me, my old classmate was frustrated, pent-up. He was driven to go someplace new and exciting—perhaps akin to the irresistible force that drove the 15th century explorers. I could understand this because he and I had been fair friends when we were at Bissell together. I'm not sure I've ever met a more driven man...and, my dear young lady, I've known a few Nobelists as well as many Duttonians in my many years."

He nodded in thanks at Prissi's snort.

"That distinguished Bissell alumnus put together a group of people—a group of scientists—very bright, very well-educated, but, unfortunately, not well-socialized to the norms and rules of mainstream science—a group the likes of which probably had not been seen since Josiah Wedgwood, Newton and their group, or, perhaps, the Oppenheimer team."

Smarkzy stopped dead in his tracks and rubbed the slight stubble that rimed his chin.

"Hmmm. That's a new thought. Fflowers might even have seen himself as Oppenheimer—you know of Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Manhattan Project— a brilliant physicist and an even more brilliant strategist, administrator and motivator?"

When Prissi shrugged, Smarkzy mimicked her.

"No? Well, that's a pity. I'd say he's well worth a look...a long look. My former schoolmate brought together a collection of people who were almost guaranteed to do brilliant science. But, it was almost as sure a bet that the light they brought to their work would be outshone by the light and heat of their personal frictions. I remember Roan, that was the name of my student, described it once as a place where big, bright labs were filled with bigger, brighter egos. They came together at a place Fflowers had built just outside the research center at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island—a hallowed place where some very serious science, including, perhaps, some of my own, had been getting done for many, many years. Fflowers drew them in with a dream, fabulous tools, gave them long leashes and lots of money—all of which comes very close to a scientist's definition of paradise."

"And?"

"And?"

Rather than show her pique, Prissi smiled, "What happened?"

"Actually, no one seems to be quite sure what happened. My friend broke a very serious oath of secrecy to tell me that the group, or a portion of the group of which she was an integral part, had made a very important discovery. But what that discovery was I surmised but never really knew for sure. Soon after, there was a disaster, an explosion. The work was lost; the scientists dispersed."

Prissi's eyes glowed like a dwarf star with interest.

"A lost, rather than false, path?"

Smarkzy's eyes twinkled, "Yes, an apt description."

"Like a lost treasure?"

Smarkzy's head snapped around to look at Prissi.

"Why would you say that?"

Prissi's hand fluttered as she talked.

"Because there was a major discovery. And, somehow, it was lost. I wonder what it was."

"You seem intrigued."

"I am."

The old man stood lost in thought for several moments before he held out his crippled hands, studied them and, then, reached out and touched Prissi's shoulders. When he spoke his voice seemed to Prissi to be coming from a space farther than a step away. "Well, youth is a time for great enthusiasms, but, unfortunately, here, at Dutton, we purposefully leave you very little time to pursue those enthusiasms. Hmmm...why don't we do this. See if your interest in this lost path waxes or wanes over the next few months. If you have a spare moment over Spring Break, do a little preliminary poking around. If, when you return, you want to pursue this, I'll try to help you out. But...."

The old man stopped.

"But what?"

"But...please keep your interest quiet...no...forget I said that."

Prissi was unclear what she was supposed to forget...and why.

Dr. Smarkzy took his hands from Prissi's shoulders and began to walk.

In a voice not much more than a whisper, the old man said, "My experience is that young people are easily attracted to Science with a capital S; however once they do science, with a lower case s, many are quickly dissuaded. The essence of science is frustration, and if you decide to go forward, you may and should expect to find your own endeavors frequently frustrated. There very likely was no major discovery. And that is why it has remained dusty on a shelf for so long. But, who knows? You live in New York, if I remember?"

Prissi nodded.

"The New York Public Datarium has an immense collection of Fflowers early papers, papers which he graciously donated at the time he gave the billions to have the building renovated. They are not open to the public, but...hmmm...Pequod...an old colleague, now a research librarian...he might...I suppose I might be able to help you get some access to those..., or, if I get the urge to come to the late great metropolis, I might poke around a bit myself. Seeing my old school mate yesterday has stirred my juices a bit. There were a number of stories started back then that never were finished to this reader's satisfaction. Hmmm."

"Could you ask your friend?"

"Yes, I'll see if we can get you a peek."

"No, the other one. The one whom you said I remind you of."

The old man's head tilted far back and, again, Prissi threw out a hand in support. He stared at the flock of docile clouds overhead for the longest time.

"Roan Winslow. Another lost path. With the accident, my friend..." Smarkzy waved his hand as if dispersing a cigarette's smoke. "...disappeared."

* * *

Unlike what would be true for most fifteen-year old girls, any and all thought of pursuing the Mystery of the Lost Path did not disappear from Prissi's mind an hour after leaving Dr. Smarkzy. In fact, her new-found interest made her eager to finish up and go home—well, not exactly home, but to the New York Public Datarium.

Since her arrival in Manhattan, the NYPD had been one of the teener's favorite haunts. Having an excuse to go there and having a mystery to solve took away much of the dread of spending three long, slow silent weeks with her father. As Prissi walked back to her dorm the energy that had been generated by her talk with Dr. Smarkzy had quickly drained away as she thought of how her father had always been thoughtful, caring, polite, but he never had been talkative, clever or entertaining, like Dr. Smarkzy and Joshua Fflowers. The daughter had accepted her father as he was until the previous summer. After nine months of living on a campus filled with bright adults and, in her opinion, brighter teenerz saying clever things in machine gun fashion, after a thousand quick contests of quick wits, like cat fights with words, Prissi had found spending much time with a very nice, but distant, dogged parent to be beyond dull.

Prissi's emotions made her feel both disloyal and guilty. Her father seemed bored doing whatever he was doing. He never talked about work, and that was how his daughter knew that it didn't engage him like his re-gen work in Africa. What made it worse for Prissi was that she assumed most of the money he made doing what he didn't like doing was being handed over to Dutton. Even without his saying a word, that guilted her.

By the end of the previous summer, her father's emotional state reminded Prissi of an accident victim wandering around in a stupor. In fact, she often imagined that both he and her mother had been in the truclet. Her mother had died. Her father had survived, but barely. He was in shock. He needed help. And, she hated herself for feeling that the role of savior should be played by someone other than herself.

Now, instead of spending the three weeks of break flying over the skies of Manhattan until she could fly no more and had to come home, Prissi Langue had a goal, a mystery, to keep her going. Her father might be dull, but the intrigued teener was sure Joshua Fflowers and the Secret of the Lost Path was not.

# CHAPTER SEVEN

So Long

On the Monday afternoon after her conversation with Dr. Smarkzy, Prissi was in the Double D trying to write a history paper. Even though it was early in the afternoon, the young winger was tired and antsy. Break would begin at noon on the following day. Now that she had something to do over break, Prissi was ready to go. Unfortunately, before that could happen, she had a lot of work to finish up.

Prissi began the afternoon sitting on one of a bank of Skrenes the Dutton Datarium provided trying to draw parallels between present-day Ecoists and the centuries' old Jainist religious sect. Her intention was to suggest that Ecoism was more a religious sect than a political party. She sat at the machine for almost an hour watching her whispered words get transcribed onto the Skrene as jumbled words, illogical sentences and incomprehensible paragraphs. Finally, unable to take another minute, she bounded off her perch. As she hurried to the bathroom, she resurrected a litany that occasionally accompanied her paper writing: She was stupid, a sham. A dorquette. A brain dead techinept...and...as she slammed her way past the door and looked into the mirror....and a fertile field for unnatural growths...and...and she should shave her head rather than let her toxic hair spread...and....

Her fury at her incoherence and her imperfect looks elided into sensual pleasure when she finally had the brainstorm not to return to her perch, but instead to dig in her kanga-pak for her special pen. She collected her stuff and found a spot in the reading area that had a view of the pond. She dropped her wings over the arms and slid her butt deep into the butter smooth russet-colored leather of an ancient high-legged club perch. Within seconds after changing perches and idea recorders, Prissi's thoughts were flowing so fast that the tool she held in her hand for recording those thoughts could barely keep up. The ancient golden fountain pen had been given to her by a retired diplomat in Bujumbura on her tenth birthday. Even as it hurried across the paper, the pen was losing ground to her spate of thoughts. That feeling, of thoughts spilling out faster than the ink could record them, was glorious to someone whose writing usually was laborious. Finally, there came a break in Prissi's stream of ideas. The self-satisfied teener took advantage of that synaptical short-circuit to glance out the windows at the rippling waters of the pond and look up at a bowl of puffy popcorn-like clouds, iridescent above and dark gray beneath, being blown across the sky.

Forty minutes later, when Prissi paused a second time, the clouds looked like inquisitive sheep.

After an hour and a half of dedicated work, and with nine pages of words and ideas that made sense to her, Prissi redacted her earlier view of herself. Even if she was a techinept, she had lots of friends who were techadepts. She got along with them fine even if she wasn't one—maybe that was from growing up in Africa, where a whole night of uninterrupted electricity was cause for celebration. As Prissi flipped through what she had written, she reassured herself that most of the world's great literature and, for that matter, the foundation of most of the sciences, had been created with pen and paper, quill and vellum.

As she often did with words that drew her, Prissi said the word, "vellum," aloud. She imagined what a piece of that old invention must feel like between one's fingers. Just the name suggested how smooth and sensuous it must be. What fun it would be to draw a pen nib across a piece of vellum. Voluptuous vellum.

Prissi mused about being in an alchemist's laboratory, literally burning the midnight oil, mixing philters with phlogiston and recording the results on velvety, voluptuous vellum. When Prissi next looked up from her reverie, an angry wind had pushed the sheep into a tightly huddled frightened herd. She shifted from her history paper to a set of bio-stat problems, but despite the urgency of getting the homework done, Prissi kept finding herself looking out the large windows to see if the predicted snow had begun to fall. The Ice Age Cometh. Prissi forced her head down. A few minutes later, when, despite her best efforts, it popped up again, Prissi noticed a pair of state hawks circling over campus. Besides wondering what might cause the police to be on campus, Prissi also felt jealous. Flying through the snow was a rare treat. Something mysterious, something attractive. Ugh. She forced her eyes back down to her work. The eyes remained where they were supposed to be, but the mind continued to wander—although there were scores of teenerz from some of the world's wealthiest families, security at Dutton was mostly handled by the campus officers. Only a handful of students were considered so attractive a target that their parents hired private security firms. When the hawks from the Connecticut State Police became involved it usually wasn't because of a danger to a student, but, instead, because of some incredibly stupid prank by a student—usually a lower-mid trying to make his reputation, or a senior losing his.

Prissi was sprawled in her reclining perch feeling good, except for the occasional late afternoon stomach growl when Nasty Nancy, whom she had been trying to avoid since their ride back from the Bissell dedication, came rushing up.

"Did you hear? Your NQB is gone?"

Prissi's stomach rolled over, but not from hunger. "Joe's gone?"

"Like smoke. Like youth. Like love. Like a Friday night peetsa."

Although Prissi prided herself on her cynicism, she immediately felt angry at Nasty Nancy's cavalier words. Her roomie's large head, made larger by its penumbra of combed out, frizzy, red hair, bobbed back and forth with excitement. Her little black soutane button eyes sparked.

Controlling herself, Prissi asked, "What do they think happened?"

"The 'they' who are supposed to do the thinking in, and for, this hallowed institution probably aren't thinking. What they're probably doing is emitting excuses as fast, big and stinking as pigs' farts and dishonoring our sacred honor code by conjuring up a thousand ex post facto gigs for your missing swain to show he has been a bad seed, a bad apple and a Bader Meinhof ne'er do well."

Since Prissi was used to missing half of Nancy's allusions, she sniggered because she knew she should, then, felt badly that she had given in to Nancy's cruelty.

"No one knows anything?"

The serious tone of Prissi's question caused Nasty Nancy to tack away from her intended course. She looked at her friend's concerned face for a long pause, considering what it might mean, before responding.

"Supposedly, he ate breakfast and that was the last time he was seen. Since it happened on a day without classes, when he wouldn't be missed for awhile, it looks like it was planned. The mystery is whose plan. His...dash for freedom, or...." Nancy paused and tried to wriggle her eyebrows, an action which conveyed more the look of someone with Tourette's Syndrome than the portentousness she was aiming for. "...something more malign. Why someone from a family that rich and with so many enemies didn't have private guards is hard to fathom."

"He told me he had to fight his parents about that. He didn't want guards. He just wanted to be normal."

"Then he should have done something about that sun-seeking nose of his and, of course, the trillions."

Rather than chance an argument, Prissi brushed Nancy off by insisting that she needed to finish her problem set. Nancy spun around. With her halo of red hair, blunt shape and butt swaying walk, Nancy reminded Prissi of a sea anemone in a tidal pool as she churned her way out of the room.

Once Nancy was gone, Prissi allowed herself to be overwhelmed with guilt.

Since that evening three days before when she had shared her dining hall table with him, Prissi had had three conversations with Joe. Two of those, one late and the other later on Saturday night after she had returned from the Bissell dedication, had been short, angry and awkward. Joe had been iced that Prissi had gone to Bissell. He saw it as both a betrayal of their friendship and an act of sycophancy. Their third conversation, held the following day, had lasted for more than two hours and had been very different.

That chance conversation happened because Prissi Langue had secrets other than eating candy in bathroom stalls and filching shampoo. She also adored what she herself called CRNs—cheesey romance novels.

Prissi had been wandering around the antiseptic little village of Waterville on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks after she first had arrived at Dutton. It had been a typical New England early autumn day—80 degrees, windy, the grapy smell of kudzu perfuming the air. Even though she loved the school, loved her teachers and loved the challenge of what went on in the classrooms and labs, Prissi frequently was intimidated by much of went on outside the classroom. On that particular afternoon, instead of sitting in her room working through why she felt inferior to her classmates, or couldn't easily make friends, it had been easier to run down the hill to the village.

She had lazed along Waterville's narrow canted sidewalks window shopping its small shops, coveting clothes that she knew never would look good on her, and admiring jewelry she couldn't afford. She drank an iced pom and wolfed a ridiculously small piece of chocolate mousse cake. She was on her way back to campus, dawdling to draw out her return, when she noticed the small, square-shouldered Waterville Library.

Although the rise of the net had made most small libraries obsolete, a few, mostly those with hefty endowments, remained open. Of those survivors, many were more museums that repositories for accessible or pertinent knowledge. On a whim, Prissi climbed the stairs. After spending an embarrassing minute explaining to the tiny, bright blue eyed, balding woman sitting on a high scarred wooden stool that she, Prissi Langue, was, indeed, a Dutton student, she had accepted the librarian/docent/guard's declaratory judgment that, indeed, a Dutton student in the Waterville library was a rarity. After circling round the chipped green marble half-moon desk, which both protected the past and, Prissi guessed, defended the old woman against the present, the teener began to explore. Twisting her head so that she could read the vertical titles and tentatively touching a dulled rainbow of book spines, Prissi meandered through the stacks.

In a dark corner on the second floor, next to a door marked STAIRS, fitted into a corner in an L-shaped bookcase, Prissi found the mother-lode. A fancy, but faded sign, declared Romance. Prissi's first reaction was a snort that reverberated throughout the empty library, but, ten minutes later, she was sighing and crying. The bookcase contained hundreds of books that told the story of improbable women falling impossibly in love with implausible men. And, while it was not always love at first sight between the covers of the books, it had been love at first sight for Prissi. She loved the women from the pre-winger era who had enough flesh that it could quiver. She swooned over the men too dumb to know that they shouldn't be driving fast cars with deleterious eco effects. She adored the fact that many of the stories took place in a place long gone—a dry, bustling wealthy, hyper-kinetic Manhattan, a romantic island filled with sex and sin. Almost everything she read, she loved, but the books that she most loved were those written in the 1950s when all the characters had names like her own and her friends. She found story after story where Jacks and Joes, Nancys and Marys, Pauls and Marks, Cathys and, yes, twice, even Priscillas fell in deep, tortured, twisted, weepy, wounded love.

That dusty corner of the Waterville Library became Prissi's haven. When she had free time or, even when she didn't, but needed a respite—from friends, teachers, or, most often, her feelings—Prissi she would run down the hill to the library for her CRN fix.

As Prissi slumped in her perch and watched the celestial sheep crowd one another like a fox was about, she thought of what had happened twenty-four hours before. After the last False Paths lecture and her conversation with Dr. Smarkzy, Prissi had run back to her room, changed clothes, and spent twenty minutes flying lazy figure eights over Dutton's golf course and soccer fields before winging her way to the village. After checking to see if anyone was watching before attempting a maneuver that could result in losing her flight license, Prissi executed a doubly foolish, given Saturdays' shoulder injury, perfect one-knee betrothal landing on the library's cracked asphalt parking lot. Prissi was smoothing her feathers when Joe Fflowers exploded out of the library's dismal, dinged metal and scratched glass entrance. He started when he saw Prissi, stuttered, and stopped.

After several minutes of mis-meshed verbal gears grinding through Saturday's traitorous events, including a stuttery apology by Prissi, the two teenerz finally found their usual edgy comfortability. They talked and talked, as if they hadn't seen each other for ages...or, as if they expected that they wouldn't see each other again. Goals, god, games, and music. Love, lust, loss, and movies. Family, fear, faith, failure, food...and the future.

When it was time to go back to campus, Prissi started to walk alongside Joe, but he held her shoulder and, then, turned her so her back was against the shelves of romance novels. He put one hand on her waist and the other just under Prissi's chin. Like always, like dozens of times before in empty classrooms, by the pond, under a stairwell, hidden behind the rhododendrons outside the Mu, the first kiss felt wonderful. Tingly. The second, much longer, started as an area of wet warmth around her mouth but then zipped around her body flipping on banks of switches like a pilot readying a jet for takeoff. The third kiss involved low growls and Prissi wasn't sure who was making them. But, then the tongue that had been around her mouth and in her mouth was in her mouth and out and in again, so rapidly, so hungrily, and so fiercely that Prissi had a vision of a rat in a popcorn bag. That vision led to a snort, a push against Joe's chest, and, suddenly, wordlessly, he was gone.

After Joe left Prissi pulled books from the shelves, studied their covers, read their steamy blurbs and wondered what was wrong with her. When her eyes began to blink in a desperate attempt to stop whatever was trying to occur, she hurried outside and launched herself into the air. Her muscles ached as she flapped hard to achieve altitude. By the time her mypod showed one hundred meters, Prissi was high enough that she could see Joe racing up the hill toward the school. Although from her height and his distance, Joe looked small, his presence tugged at her like the draw of a black hole. The frustrated girl shouted to the wind at how stupid she had been to succumb to Jack Fflower's slippery charm and how stupid she was to push Joe's amateur affections away.

Now, on Monday afternoon, with six matrix algebra problems still to be solved, Prissi stared out of the window and wondered what might have happened to Joe. Her concentration was such that it took her several minutes to realize that a scattering of snow-flakes had turned into a storm. Being careful not to harm her wings, she pushed herself up from the leather perch. She stood at the window and marveled at the large flakes, like a billion albino spiders, scurrying down from the sky.

Snow in southern New England, even in the dead of winter, was a rarity. To have snow three times in March was unseen and unheard of in the last fifty years. Prissi's thoughts turned from Joe to the recently reported possibility that a decline in green house gasses was leading to a new ice age. She stared with her nose pressed to the glass thinking of an icy world—flying in rain, which turned to ice, which caused her to plummet as her wings froze and faltered. As she watched, the storm strengthened and the snow began to swirl, eddy, cling and cover.

Staring at the dervish flakes, Prissi wondered if Joe was out in the storm. She worried at the danger he could be in until she suddenly realized that if Joe had disappeared for the reason she guessed, the snow would be a help in his escape.

In their talk the previous day, Joe had given her all of the details of how he had scored a hat trick in the game against Choate on Saturday afternoon. He had continued with how much he loved the speed, the lack of friction, the intensity of the play. He liked the feeling of holding nothing back. He anticipated the split second when a moment of incredible physical grace was summarily stopped by an act of explosive violence. He told Prissi how he had absolutely crushed Choate's leading scorer twice on the boards the day before. When Prissi suggested for the tenth time that Joe could keep playing hockey even after he fledged, he told her he had no interest in winger hockey. They played on ice with sticks and a puck, but it was too slow and too dull. With wings, there could be no checking. When she insisted that he was going to have to make the change, he looked at her for a moment before dropping his eyes to stare at the hands clasped in his lap. After a long pause and without looking back up, Joe said that he was thinking of delaying his fledging. He had heard that there was a way. A way to delay. Play now. Fly later.

Looking out the window as the tumble of flakes, Prissi became embarrassed a second time as she remembered how, when Joe had brought up delayed fledging, her snort had shot something wet against the stair's door. Her voice had risen as she told Joe that he already was pushing the edge as much as he safely could. There was no way for him to delay further. If he didn't fledge soon, the window closed forever. Prissi reminded Joe that no one in his family was going to allow him to get away with that. A walker in the family that invented fledging. That couldn't be. When Prissi started to press him even harder, Joe closed his face.

As her bright, celadon-flecked eyes gawked at the cascade of flakes, the agitated teener tried to recall Joe's exact words. After thinking about it, she was sure he had used the word delay. Looking out at the sculpting of the groomed lawn as it became covered in snow, Prissi wished Joe well, but bet against him hiding safely long enough to get past the fledging window. She guessed that, if he had run away, he would be caught that day. Any kid whose parents had the money was i-tagged. Three hawkers would fly a grid with their transmitters and receivers. They'd home in on Joe's signal, triangulate the results, swoop down, make the catch, and pass him off to his parents and let them turn the key.

Unless...unless he had a lot of help in getting someplace where it was hard for the hawkers to fly, somewhere the i-tag's signals would be blocked. Prissi shook her head. Joe's chances for escape were less than her chances of fitting into a size two glass slippers...or, dambit, dress.

Suddenly, Prissi whirled away from the window. She grabbed her things and hurried outside to catch snowflakes on her wings. Doing that would be easier than working through the question that had just come to her. Did any of Joe's motivation to run away come from anger or disappointment at her? For betraying him with Jack? Rejecting his kisses? Prissi dropped her bag in the snow and, uncaring of how many gigs it would cost her for flying over campus on a school day, flapped hard and flew fast toward the west, into the heart of the storm.

# CHAPTER EIGHT

Sticks and Stones

Two hundred kilometers to the north, in an unending, unbroken Adirondack Mountain forest, fifteen-year old Joe Fflowers swears as he slips and falls in the new snow. Rubbing his arm where it has struck an up-thrust of rock hidden alongside the overgrown path, he takes advantage of the moment to take a deep breath. He is still on his knees when, from ten meters feet ahead, his guide, Seka, imperiously barks, "C'mon. Hurry up. I don't want to use the lumenaids."

In the growing gloam, Joe pats his aching hands together to remove the snow and catch his breath. Adrona, his other guide, coming up the trail behind him, taps his hip with a walking stick.

"Hurry, hurry. We want to be undercover before hawks fly."

"How much farther?"

"Wishing for wings?"

Despite the twelve hours a week that Joe spends training with the hockey team, his chest aches from the pace they have been keeping. His knee has grown much worse.

As planned, Joe walks away from The Dutton School just before lunch. His rendezvous with his railroader in a little used parking lot behind the Waterville Fire Department building goes smoothly. The railroader puts him inside a kafir board tool box that takes up most of the bed of what Jack guesses is a 2050 vintage truclet. The vehicle whines and groans as its tiny electric motor climbs through the hills of northwest Connecticut, then screams in outraged protest as it fights its way through the higher elevations of the New York mountains. Since the truclet has almost no springs left and his railroader hasn't thought to put anything soft in the box, Joe bounces around throughout the trip. The farther north they go, the worse the roads become. Joe is twisting around trying to make himself more comfortable when the driver hits a huge rut. Joe flies through the air and smashes his head against a corner of the box. When he comes back down, his left leg twists under him. His knee pops.

After four hours, a cold, bruised Joe, with a throbbing knee, is helped from his hiding place. Two people dressed in well-worn green Microx are waiting in the shadows of an enormous fir tree. Joe guesses the older of the two, whom the truclet driver calls Seka, to be over two meters tall and weigh upward of eighty kilograms. A small head with red leather cheeks, jewel-like blue eyes and an osprey's nest of white hair, nods at the introduction. The second guide, Adrona, is less man than boy. Joe thinks that he might be no more than two or three years older than Joe himself—certainly no more than twenty. His hair is as unkempt as Seka's, but it is reddish gold. The piercing blue eyes are the same.

Joe's driver points, "Seka will take you from here, " He extends his knuckles as he says solemnly, "Stars aligned."

An embarrassed Joe taps the outstretched knuckles with his own and mutters, "Stars benign."

The railroader leaps toward the truclet as the runaway hurriedly settles his pak on his shoulders before running under the protection of the thick boughs of the forest.

Seka hands Joe a satin-smooth, knobbed walking stick before jogging up a steep hill through a dense forest of tall, scarred white pine and hemlock. The thick layer of pine needles beneath their feet muffles the sounds of their passing. At first, the cushion of needles seems to lessen the pain pulsing in Joe's knee; however as they continue to climb through the clean-smelling woods, the flagging boy realizes that the give of the needles is wearing him out just like a walk in deep snow.

Near the crest of the hill, the trees begin to thin. Seka stays ten meters below the ridgeline and begins to move laterally. Within minutes, the added pressure from running along the canted land causes Joe to slow and, finally, to stop. As the escapee leans over to rub his kneecap, which feels like it's been put on upside down, Adrona taps his spine.

"Jump."

An angry Joe pushes the stick away.

"What?"

"Jump the pain. People think pain is a wall. It's not. It's a fence. Jump it."

From a few paces ahead, the sound of Seka's walking stick being quickly rapped on a tree reminds Joe of the way Coach Deirken pounds his hockey stick to get the team to skate faster in the ice rink. Despite the incentive, Joe doesn't move.

Adrona makes a sound of disgust and moves off.

Joe kneels on his good knee as he watches them hurrying away through the woods. For a moment, his anger and defiance convince him to let them go, but, as soon as his guides' backs disappear from view, the satisfaction fades and the fear of being lost in the woods forces Joe to his feet. As he begins limping after his keepers, the boy thinks of how, if he had wings, he could fly out of the forest to safety. That thought confuses him.

Twenty minutes later, the wind picks up. It tries to free itself of the snow it is carrying by darting left and right, up and down, swirling around. It teases the fearful boy. It reminds Joe of the twists, turns, spins, jukes and dekes he does on the ice to confuse his opponents. Despite his efforts, when he looks ahead, he can't see Seka or Adrona but only the line of their tracks quickly disappearing as the wind fills them with new snow. With his knee pounding, his chest heaving and his mouth whispering, "Jump," the boy pursues his rescuers.

When Joe finally catches up, the snow has stopped, the wind has died and the light is all but gone. His guides are standing at the edge of a precipice. Joe carefully approaches and looks down into a pit whose bottom is lost in shadow. Seka nods, "Stay on the path."

With their knees bent and sticks planted, Joe's guides begin their descent. As Joe tries to follow the spot where he wedges his walking stick gives way. As he begins to slide down the cliff, Joe rolls onto his stomach and throws out a hand as his toes try to dig into the scree. When he finally stops, he twists his head to stare down the cliffside to where Seka and Adrona, black ghosts against a near-black background, hover.

"The path. Of course."

With his heart still pounding, Joe carefully gets up, and, poking his walking stick before him like a blind man's cane, begins a barely controlled slide toward the black maw below.

Shaking from fear and fatigue, Joe's relief at making it to the bottom of the immense pit disappears as soon as he looks around and neither sees nor hears his guides. He turns a full circle trying to pull a shape or two from the darkness. Looking up, outlined against the rough black edge of the cliff far overhead, he sees a flattened oval scattering of faint new stars shining against the blue-black mussel shell sky. He shifts his attention from the distant sky to the immediacy of his wounds. His feet are bruised and his hands are raw. The pain in his knee is worse. The weight of his pak seems to have doubled.

Joe tilts his head again to stare at the stars above. He takes a tentative first step, groans, takes a second, wails at the pain, and, then, stops. In a knot of emotion that he can't untie, he beats his arms at his side like the wings he hasn't wanted. Beats them in anger, beats them to forestall any more pain, beats them in hope and despair, beats them in frustration. After a minute, he stops to catch his breath. As he drags cold air into his hot lungs, Joe reconsiders the elements of the decision that has brought him to this point: Knife-edged blades slicing ice in a cold, frictionless world. Crowds roaring in muffled applause behind the rink's thick plastic walls. Prissi, chastised, teary, sorry for how she has treated him.

# CHAPTER NINE

Won't Break My Bones

Joe Fflowers wipes away icy tears as he stumbles across the slag and scree-covered floor of the abandoned Adirondack iron mine. He is freezing cold, feels faint from hunger and the pain in his knee just keeps growing. Despite that pain, Joe tries to hurry across the pit floor; however his guides are nowhere to be seen. He walks a half-moon arc twenty meters out from the bottom of the path thinking that he will pick up their tracks, but he can find no prints in the flurrying snow. After he trips and falls on a low mound of snow-slick tailings, Joe sits down on a rock, which looks like a cupcake with its frosting of snow, to gather his thoughts.

The longer he sits, the more overwhelmed he becomes with regrets. He does not hate his parents, but he is estranged. For more than a year he has felt an enormous chasm between their wishes and his own wants. But, regardless of those differences, when he thinks about the enormity of what he is doing, it makes his stomach churn, and, despite the cold, his hands sweat.

His uncle, Adaman, had been the one who first suggested that there might be a way to put off fledging until later. Jack's dad had insinuated to Joe that the labs at Cygnetics were close to solving the half-century old problem of delayed fledging. Even though Joe distrusted his uncle, he had listened. The idea had gotten into his head that he could play hockey for another dozen years, represent Noramica in the Olympics, play professionally, and, then, get his wings. Despite ogling every site he could think of to find support for what his uncle had told him, Joe didn't find much beyond weak hints and wishful thinking. However, he reassured himself that any knowledge of a late fledging would be a tightly guarded Cygnetics secret. Still unsure, Joe had held off making a decision until Prissi told him that she had gone to Bissell to see Jack and meet his grandfather. Although Joe knew that it should have had nothing to do with his decision, it did. It was her betrayal which had tipped the scales.

Even now, sitting in the snowy dark, a part of Joe is titillated with thoughts of how badly Prissi will feel if he dies in an abandoned mine pit. When that anguished joy quickly dies out, the aching boy thinks that if, somehow, he could turn back and return to school right this moment, he would be able to shift some of his father's rage away from himself and toward Uncle Adaman. The problem, of course, is how to reverse course. He is in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere, and, in more ways than one, in the dark.

Joe tries to fight back against the feelings of despair that are nipping and biting him like rats on a dying dog. He reaches down between his shoes, brushes away the snow, picks up a handful of stones and, swearing with each toss, begins chucking them into the black void. The snow is so thick that he can barely hear them land. He hates this place. Plunk. He hates Jack. Plink. He hates Prissi. Plonk. He hates his uncle. Plunk.

The stones are almost gone, but his anger is still with him when a stone hits him on his sore knee. Although it startles him and hurts, he suppresses his outrage.

Let them come to him. He isn't going to grovel.

He pitches another stone in the general direction from where he thinks the attack has come. He waits, but doesn't hear a sound except for the wind flinging itself over the mine pit's rim high above. Another rock hits Joe's knee in exactly the same place as the first one. This time his anger over-rules his judgment. He swears loudly as he leans forward to pick up more ammunition. He flings a stone, hears nothing, waits, hurls another, silence, pitches a third, and, then, is rewarded with a third strike to his knee. As soon as he is hit, he leaps up and throws the handful of stones he has left with as much force as he can muster.

Neither sound, nor stone, emerge from the darkness.

Joe is lying on his side, knees drawn up tight to his chin, shivering such that all of his bones hurt, when he is tapped upon his head. Not a light tap. Not heavy enough to harm, but definitely heavy enough to say, with insistence, pay attention.

"Rich, but weak. If you can obey in all things, then, get up. If not, lie there like an old dog and die."

Behind Joe's closed lids, he can see an immense pendulum, an ancient pendulum with a shaft of shining, honey-colored wood and a gleaming brass compass rose, slowly swing back and forth...from pride to hate and back again. Pride says take nothing. Stay and die. Hate says crawl, snivel, rise, do whatever to survive so that there can be revenge. The pendulum swings back and forth in smooth silence as Joe weighs his options.

Pride...hate...pride...hate.

"Decide. Now."

But Joe can't decide. He is mesmerized by the pendulum's swing. He has never seen fate so clearly. Two choices, one path. He holds his breath and wavers until three more taps to his head, each harder than the one before, doubles, trebles, then quadruples his hate.

He rolls onto his knees, muffles the involuntary groans pulled from his throat, and pushes himself erect.

Seka strikes Joe's forearm.

"Here. Hold this."

Joe fumbles in the darkness until he feels the smooth knots of his guide's staff. As soon as he grasps the wood, he is jerked forward as Seka sets off into the black with the same assurance as if it had been high noon.

After a few minutes of being dragged along in the black, Joe senses that they have passed through some kind of opening and now are underground. The black is black as it has been, but the sound from his feet is different. The air is as cold, but absolutely still. In another minute, Joe's steps ring out like rimshots on a snare drum, then echo back from the walls. The syncopation brings Joe some small comfort because he can pretend someone, someone like himself, is walking alongside. Since it feels as though their path is pitched downward, Joe decides they are in a tunnel. The pace Seka sets is fast. The tunnel floor is rough and the darkness hides both dips and chunks of stone so that Joe often stumbles. Each time he does, he can feel his guide's disdain for his clumsy feet travel down the length of the staff.

After what might have been a half-hour, the air begins to carry a tinge of smoke, like burning leaves. A few minutes after that, Joe notices that he can make out the silhouette of Seka's shoulder swaying two meters in front of him. Another couple of minutes and the tunnel opens onto a large cavern. The room is dimly lighted with two torches wedged into fissures in the rock walls. The perimeter of the space has benches cut into the stone. A shadowy figure, Joe guesses it is Adrona, sits on the nearest bench. In the center of the room, which is more than twenty meters across and easily ten meters high, is a rough circle of rocks whose darkened edge indicates it use as a fire pit. On the far side of the room are three low doorways, which pulse in the flickering torch-lights as if they are alive.

Despite the illumination from the torches, Joe holds onto Seka's stick as they traverse the room and enter the archway on the right. When the teener passes through, he notices a framework of stout timbers lining the corridor. Joe glances up and sees that the wooden posts support a mat woven of thick saplings. He can see sharp corners of large blocks of rock jutting through gaps in the mat. As he hurries after Seka, Joe decides that he has just seen a device which can be triggered to block off the tunnel.

After a few more minutes, Seka pushes through a heavy wooden door into another torch-lit room. This space, smaller than the first, has a dozen low narrow doors framed into its shadowy perimeter. Against the far side of the room, almost directly under a guttering torch, four people are sitting at a large trestle table playing cards.

As Joe and Seka approach, a small wizened woman with a hawk's nose, vertiginous cheekbones and a hawser thick braid of gray hair that reaches past her waist, cackles, "Gin, " and carefully puts down her cards. She taps her well-worn cards before pointing two knobby fingers at Joe and, in a voice that rises and falls like a religious chant, says, "See, I told you that he would bring us good luck. We share our protection with him and he will share his good fortune with us."

The abbess, which is how Joe guesses the old woman sees herself, beckons him. He hesitates until he feels a prod from behind. When he turns, he is surprised to find the flat-eyed Adrona. If the younger guide has been following him, Joe has heard nothing.

The tetchy hag snaps her hand impatiently. In the instant before he steps forward, Joe guesses that abbess may not be the right word. The crone shows her half dozen teeth in a smile.

"You liked your walk?"

Joe makes himself smile and nod.

"My name is Rholealy."

She slowly swings her head to indicate the room.

"Welcome to Greenland. You are safe within this place. It has been many suns and moons since the heathens and their hawks have bothered us."

Again, a slight twist of her head indicates their surroundings.

"Here, you will walk in peace."

Joe feels like he has stepped out of the Dutton School and into Middle Earth. He half-expects a nine-fingered hobbit and his loyal friends to burst from one of the doors singing a lusty song about the power of One Ring. Although his knee is on fire, his body is exhausted and his stomach is empty, Joe has to bite back a smile as he says, "Your hospitality, Madam Rholealy, is most welcome."

After deciding that Joe's use of "Madam" isn't meant to mock, the old woman nods her head in condescending grace.

Joe hears Adrona snicker behind him. Rholealy's hands drop back to the table to gather the cards. Assuming that he has been dismissed, Joe turns back toward Adrona. The guide points the walking stick at an opening.

In less than an hour, Joe has been fed a meal of walnut meats, dried apples, and a hot drink that has pieces of bark floating in it. When he finishes, his stomach is full, but he feels famished. Adrona shows Joe to a bench in an alcove carved into the wall, hands him two thick oft-darned blankets and leaves behind a small sputtering pine brand.

As soon as the guide leaves him, Joe allows himself a second bout of being overwhelmed. He lies rolled up in the surprisingly warm, smoky smelling blankets, looking at the tortured shadows the guttering torch casts, and imagines the Mullen dining hall with its chandeliers shining down on one hundred polished tables, six hundred chairs, the pungent smells of coffee, roast meat and chocolate. He flexes his ankles as he imagines flinging himself around Evenen Rink on scimitar sharp blades. He substitutes the sounds of his favorite pap music by the Kotanbawls coming to his ears rather than the arrhythmic plink of a drop of water that he keeps hearing reverberate along the tunnel. He imagines flying high above the playing fields tossing a FRZ-B back and forth to...Prissi.

It seems impossible that he can be where he is. That he has left behind so many important things. Yet, somehow, he is and he has.

Several times in the first weeks of hockey practice, Joe had noticed a man staring at him from the Evenen bleachers with the intensity of a coach or competitor. At first, Joe thought that it must be the father of one of his teammates. Later, he guessed that the burly man might be a scout. Maybe from the Islanders or Bruins. Joe began to look for the man when he had done something he thought was outstanding. Occasionally, he was rewarded with a quick nod of approval. He saw the man at a game at Loomis. Joe's eyes sought him out after he scored a break-away goal late in the third period. The man gave him a quick grin. Finally, after running across one another at the Akwautown Deli, the man, who told Joe his name was Nathn, had taken a quarter hour to tell the Duttonian how good he was and how much better he could become. Nathn asked Joe if he were going to fledge. When Joe said he didn't want to, but would, Nathn had said what a shame it was that someone so gifted at hockey should give that gift away.

Joe twisted around on the rock ledge trying to make himself more comfortable.

It might have been three conversations later that Nathn told Joe that if he ever wanted to go to a place of safety until his window for fledging closed that Nathn could help with that. He had done so with other gifted aletes whose participation in those sports would end with fledging. Joe had laughed and said the idea was ridiculous, and it was...until he was speeding along a sheet of perfect ice, or on the verge of sleep in his dorm-room. Finally, when Joe had asked Nathn if he was a scout, the man just smiled enigmatically.

Even though he is utterly exhausted, Joe cannot fall asleep. He keeps going over the steps he has taken, the thinking behind those steps and the consequences of his actions. He lies still, his eyes closed while the colors on his lids shift from yellow to gray to red and back to yellow as the pine brand sputters. Even after the torch burns itself out, the flickering on Joe's lids continues until he opens his eyes to stare at the blackest black he ever has experienced.

As the minutes ooze by, the black around Joe and especially the black over his head—perhaps a hundred meters of dark earth pressing down upon him, changing him in the same way that the earth's weight makes diamonds from coal and coal from sun-dappled leaves and grass—grows heavier and heavier. The minutes ooze, but there is a faster flow inside him. Joe's bladder fills, then, over-fills, but the novice guest doesn't know what to do. If he gets up, he can't see where he is going, nor does he even know where he is supposed to go. And if he just gets up and moves away and empties himself somewhere, he is afraid something will happen so he won't be able to find his way back.

The minutes ooze. His bladder pulses. His hate bubbles up like volcanic mud. Druids. Deluded Druids hiding under the earth, hiding from their supposed enemies, but, it seems to Joe, mostly hiding from the present world. How can his hosts be so self-absorbed that they couldn't be bothered to tell a guest where the bathroom was? Or, he suddenly wonders, is this some kind of test? Or, worse, a joke?

Joe's fear of getting lost wanes and the anger at his maltreatment waxes. Finally, his body can take no more. He gets up from the bench, turns to face the place where he has been, and, fingers trailing the wall, takes a careful step to the left. Joe repeats that eight times. When he is through, he carefully paces back the way he has come. Within a few minutes of finding his bed, he falls into a deep sleep.

When he wakes, his torch has been replaced. Leaning against the edge of the alcove is a long stick with rags tied to its end. The mop is sitting in a scarred wooden bucket half-filled with water. Looking at the mop, Joe suffers the heat of his shame as it flows up out of his chest and onto his cheeks, where it pulses and glows like last night's torch. He pushes the bucket down the floor with a foot and begins the clean-up. When he finishes, he picks up the bucket, grabs the torch and starts down the corridor. He hasn't gone far before he spies a faint glow on the tunnel floor. A low, narrow door is carved into a slight recess in the stone. He hears murmurs and rolling laughter. The angry boy wedges his torch into a slight crack in the hewn wall. His fist draws back to pound the door, but stops when he decides that knocking is too timid. He yanks down on the carved wooden handle and slams open the plank door. He strides into a long, low-ceilinged room dominated by an immense stone pedestal table framed with long plank benches. Two dozen Greenlanders in varying shades of green and brown rough-sewn clothes are crowded together eating breakfast.

The old woman Joe has met the night before—he realizes he doesn't remember her name—smiles her horrible smile as she drifts a bent finger toward Joe and his bucket.

"Civilization may not run deep within the male aristocrat, but other things do."

When most of those at the table laugh, the fire in Joe's cheeks flares even brighter.

"Can I eat?"

The old woman stares at Joe until his gaze drops, then mocking him with a slight deferential nod of her head, she said, "Can? Obviously. May? Certainly. Those who work deserve to eat. Put down your tools and join us."

Joe balances the mop handle against the door frame then shuffles along the length of the table looking for a place where he can sit. Unlike at Dutton, where his friends, or even students he didn't know, would have squeezed sideways to let him in, here, no one shifts. When he comes to the end of the bench, Joe scans down the other side, which is just as full. Deciding that he is no more likely to be accepted on the far side than he has been on the near, a seething Joe, suddenly feeling as though he is in a hockey game where he must take charge, strides back to the door, grabs the bucket, hurls its contents into the hall outside, storms back to the end of the table, up-ends the bucket into an improvised stool, sits, and stretches out a hand to grab a basket half-filled with small, oddly shaped pears and apples.

The old woman's cackling is joined in by almost everyone at the table. Joe says nothing, nor does he look at anyone. He holds his head high and stares at the far walls as he devours the fruit. As soon as he is full, he bounds up without really having any idea of what he is going to do next.

"Wait."

A person, a woman Joe supposes, middle-aged with long limp black hair framing a narrow head delicately balanced on an incredibly long thin neck, leans toward the hag she is sitting beside to whisper. After a moment, the woman turns back toward Joe.

"Do you prefer up," and here she tips her head so far back on her thin neck that she reminds Joe of a jonquil in a spring wind. When her head abruptly snaps back, Joe expects to hear something break. "Or, down?"

"Above? Do you mean above-ground?"

"With the sun, yes."

"Yes. I want to go up. I was told that after coming here that I would get to go north. To Montreal, where a walker wouldn't be so noticed among all of the immigrants."

The doe-headed woman starts to say something, but stops when the old woman snatches her arm. The crone's eyes glare as she speaks to Joe.

"And you will. In time. With our help. You will journey to your destination when the time is right. When we decide the time is right. And, right now, we decide the time is wrong. You are like a rare jewel that is coveted by many. We have been entrusted with keeping the jewel safe. And so we will. Because you are so valuable to some, the time you must wait to be safe may be longer than you wish, but, you can be assured that you will arrive where you wish to be. In the meantime, you will stay with us, enjoy our hospitality and learn our wise ways."

The old woman leans forward over her plate and says in a whisper that all can hear, "Although my friends and charges revere me as a prophetess, I am not predicting the future when I say that once you spend some time with us, you are very, very likely to want to spend even more time with us."

The dull thump Joe experiences in his chest as he listens to the old woman's words is like the sad slow toll of a death knell.

"For now, after you clean up your tantrum, you may go into the sun with Blesonus. You may enjoy the forest and the work you will do there. When the work is done, you may come back to the lair for food and rest."

As Joe passes by the place on the bench where the old woman sits, Blesonus, who is alongside her, whirls around, grabs Joe's wrist, and pulls him tight.

"Stop. I must listen."

The strange woman puts an ear against Joe's right hand, moves it up his forearm and beyond to his shoulder. She shifts on the bench so that she can go through the same exercise to his left side. After that, she stands, firmly turns Joe away from her and presses her cheek onto his right shoulder blade. Her cheek remains there for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds while Joe becomes increasingly embarrassed and, to his total amazement, peculiarly excited.

Finally, Blesonus murmurs something that to Joe sounds like, "Yes."

The pressure of her cheek changes to the light rapid taps of fingertips. After a moment that, too, stops. When the touching stops, Joe starts to walk away, but Blesonus barks angrily, "Stay."

Blesonus' tone, although an octave higher, reminds Joe of his father's occasional imperious commands. His inclination is to march off, but the idea that he might soon be out of the darkness and back above-ground where he can get away from his captors keeps his feet planted. He hears a rustling behind him before Blesonus' hand firmly grasps his neck. Two seconds later, Joe screams from the most excruciating pain he has ever felt. In a split second, he understands that Blesonus has stabbed him and he is dying. With a technique he has perfected in hockey when checked against the boards, Joe relaxes for a split second, then spins out of his assailant's grip and lunges toward the door.

"Now, it's safe. We can go up."

It is the dulcet tone rather than the words themselves which cause Joe to swing back toward his tormentor. Blesonus is holding aloft a wooden-handled knife with a needle-like blade whose last five centimeters are covered in blood.

"I had to slightly wound you in order to mortally wound your i-tag. Otherwise, we wouldn't be in the sun for ten minutes before the hawks would know your location. Now, you are safe."

Responding to Joe's inquisitive look, Blesonus continues, "We didn't do it yesterday because you were far enough below ground before they began a real search. Once you're twenty meters underground, your signal can't be read. But, today, if we had gone up without destroying it, you would have been tracked. Now, you can go where you want and they can't find you."

Watching Joe wince as he reaches around to where he has been stabbed, the hag—through his pain Joe suddenly remembers that her name is Rholealy—giggles.

"All freedom comes at some price. In just a few days, your pain will be small, but your horizons will stretch forever."

Shaking his head in disbelief, Joe mutters to the room at large, "Is there some problem—ethical, ecological, philosophical—with anesthetics?"

A young person with a snub nose, fleshy lips and nearly shaved head, a person of such asexuality that Joe isn't sure whether it is a male or female, pushes up from the table. With both arms extended in a theatrical gesture of inclusiveness, the person says, "The world is where it is because too many for far too long have acted without consequences. No life must be without pain. You desire a certain freedom. For that freedom, there are costs. We, our Mother's maids, live with, and readily accept, the many consequences that go along with our decision to live apart as on an island broken free of the mainland."

While the Greenlanders nod in agreement with the words being spoken, Joe continues to shake his head.

"How do I really know that my i-tag isn't working?"

Cupping a hand behind an ear as she leans toward him, Blesonus smiles as she says, "Since I know, you know."

She steps over the stone bench, takes hold of Joe's hand with one of hers and, using the other to grab the bucket, leads him toward the doorway.

After Joe has cleaned up the floor of the tunnel, Blesonus reaches into one of the many pockets on the vest she wears and withdraws two small circles of pale green glass rimmed with leather and offers one to Joe.

"Here."

Joe takes one of the lenses and watches as his guide screws the other into her eye socket, like a monocle, before frowning slightly to keep it in place.

"What's it do?"

"You'll see."

Joe attempts to follow Blesonus' example. It takes him several tries before he can figure out how to keep the lens in his eye socket while at the same time keeping his lid open enough to see. When he finally manages to secure the lens, he is puzzled. What he sees with the lens seems no different than without it.

"Come."

Blesonus extends her hand again and begins walking quickly down the tunnel. Within a minute they are getting to the outer glow of the last torch. Joe starts to slow his steps as the tunnel grows darker before he realizes that with the lens he can see a slightly glowing line running at waist height along the walls of the tunnel. After just a minute of practice, Joe figures out that when he closes his left eye and stares through the lens in his right that he can see many meters ahead. The lens takes away the mystery of how Seka and Adrona had been able to travel so quickly and with such assurance in the inky black inside the mountain.

"What makes the glow?"

"Fish."

"Fish?"

Blesonus giggles, a sound far more girlish than anything Joe could imagine her making.

"Not quite fish, but like a fish, that we farm in pools. Something Rholealy made."

"But why does it glow?"

Blesonus laughs again at Joe's ignorance.

"Not above. In pools down here. Bio-luminescence. We dry the fish skin, make a paste and paint the walls. The lens concentrates the light."

As his guide moves ahead, Joe sees that she has a small glowing spot on the back of each of her moccasins. Even though they move rapidly along the tunnel, Joe notices that where passages intersect, there are bioluminescent markings, which he assumes work like street signs.

Waiting until they are long past the last sign, Joe asks, "How do you know where you are going? How do you keep from getting lost?"

"We always know."

"Like you always know where to stab an i-tag?"

"Yes, the same."

The voice of the woman hurrying ahead of him is so smug that Joe knows that if he had any idea of which way to go to get himself above ground, he would knock her aside and race toward his freedom.

The boy is limping and his knee is throbbing long before they come to a set of stairs carved into the stone. The steps are very steep, almost like a ladder. By the time Joe has counted to one hundred, the glow from Blesonus' heels is barely discernible above him. When he gets to one hundred thirty, Joe has to lean sideways against the rough rock wall to massage his knee and catch his breath. The stairs finally end at one hundred ninety-three. Since the boy doesn't find his guide waiting, he follows the glowing streak as it zigzags every few steps in the narrowing tunnel. He is crab walking along feeling very claustrophobic when there is a zig, a yellowish glow, a zag, then, a golden light suffusing the rabbit hole, a last zig and Joe is blinded by intensely bright sunlight bouncing through a thin web of leafless vines growing in thin soil in front of the tunnel's opening.

With his eyes squeezed tight against the assault from the sunlight, Joe removes the lens, and rubs his eye socket. He pivots away from the light, opens his eyes a slit, and impatiently waits for them to adjust.

It takes a couple of minutes before Joe can see without pain. He moves into the fractured sunlight bouncing off a billion-faceted mound of mine tailings. Yesterday's snow is completely gone. As soon as Joe circumvents the rubble pile, he spots Blesonus, a hundred meters ahead and twenty meters above him hustling up a steep trail toward the top of the immense pit. Hobbling across the pit floor as fast as he can, Joe keeps looking up, but as far as he can determine, Blesonus never looks back to see if he is following.

Joe, with his burning knee and jellied thighs, feels completely exhausted when he finally crests the rim. He struggles over to a large rock, drops down on it and looks around. Below him, the pit is huge, at least a kilometer across and more than a hundred meters deep. In front of him, he can see kilometer after un-ending kilometer of tree-covered mountain slopes. The perimeter of the mine itself is ringed with tall scraggly pine trees except for three rough arches where Joe guesses once were roads. In those breaks, scrub and underbrush grow thick. He barely can make out the skeletal remains of an immense crane and a junkyard's worth of rusting machinery cloaked in brush.

"Even with no i-tag, you need to be careful."

Joe jerks his head toward the voice, but he can't distinguish Blesonus from the trees until she shifts sideways.

"Sit over here."

Joe exaggerates his limp as he crosses toward his guide. As he followed Blesonus through the tunnels, he has made grandiose plans to run off at his first chance. However, with his physical struggles with the unending stairs, and after looking out over the limitless forest, Joe's plans shrink to waiting and watching. As he approaches Blesonus, he forces a smile.

"It's so beautiful here. So peaceful. It must be wonderful to walk these woods in complete silence. I get to do that a little bit when I'm at summer camp. It's my favorite part of going there."

Blesonus returns his smile, but waggles her head at his ignorance.

"This land is never quiet. You must learn to listen with different ears. The wind whispers, soughs, screams, mutters, moans, and cries. The trees snap, groan, shiver and creak. The water gurgles, gargles and laughs. The birds, bears, bees all talk, argue, sing, sigh. If you were to sit here for an hour with a still mind and open ears, you would hear a whole orchestra of sounds."

"And do you do that often?"

A small thin cloud of regret scuttles over the woman's face, which, in the sunlight, Joe sees is older and more worn that he had thought.

"The last years have not been easy ones. Living takes up more time, so listening gets less."

To encourage her to keep talking, Joe extends a hand toward his guide and guard.

"Why has your life been harder?"

Blesonus slowly nods her head a half-dozen times before she speaks.

"We Greenlanders were few, now fewer. We are older. We are weaker. When the last men left, Rholealy laughed at their backs, but they have been missed."

Joe is confused by Blesonus' words.

"What about Seka and Adrona?"

The sound from the guide's mouth is sharp and harsh like the snap of a dry stick.

Joe is astounded. "Seka and Adrona are women?"

"In all ways, but birthing."

Blesonus tips her head and studies Joe's face until he grows embarrassed.

"...but birthing."

"How long have you been here?"

"I was born here."

Joe reaches down to massage his knee before he asks, "Can we walk? Or is there work to be done?"

"Both. Eat this."

She hands Joe a small sprig of wilted green canoe-shaped leaves and tells him to chew them before she sets off down a faint path. It is almost an hour before she stops by a large, black boulder, perched in a manner that seems to defy gravity, high above a narrow winding dirt road carved into the dense forest. The leaves he has eaten have helped with the pain so much that Joe has had little trouble keeping up.

"Wait here," Blesonus whispers before she crouches down and begins to shuffle down through the brush toward the road. As soon as Blesonus is out of sight, Joe turns back toward the way they have come. He looks up to see if he can pick out their path, but he can't see much. He starts back up the mountain to get a better sight-line, but within two dozen steps, he isn't even sure whether he is on or off the path. He slinks back down to where Blesonus first left him.

Five minutes later, Joe hears the slightest rustle. When he glances up from where he has been resting with his back propped against a tree and his eyes closed, he sees his guide standing no more than a meter away from him.

"It's safe, but hurry."

Joe scrambles down the steep slope after her. Blesonus stops next to a thick tangle of briers. Motioning for Joe to do the same, she drops onto her belly and wriggles her way into a small, nearly invisible opening in the tangle of thorns. Joe follows the worn heels of her moccasins until he finds himself inside a shallow cleft in the hillside. In the darker shadows at the back of the cleft is a large dinged and dented case. Half-crouched, Blesonus finger-combs dried leaves and thorns from her long hair before handing Joe a tightly knit string bag.

"Hold this."

Using a small key she has pulled from one of the pockets of her vest, Blesonus removes a lock and opens the rusted lid. She passes back to Joe a half-dozen lumenaids, two five kilo bags of salt, two large bottles of some kind of pills, a five liter sof-pak of tea extract and a mypod still in its bubble.

"Now, this."

Joe takes a second bag and watches the woman fill it with pack after pack of licorice. When that bag is full, his guardian motions for Joe to work his way out from the shallow cave. As soon as Blesonus herself emerges from the thorny gauntlet and rises to her feet, Joe, who has been wiping blood from a half dozen scratches, asks, "What is all this stuff?"

"Staples. When the Greenland movement first started, members were completely self-sufficient, but, as time passed and more people joined, some of the Kins were in places where it was very difficult to follow the original precepts. Special dispensations were given. It was a long battle. Those with less than perfect adherence were considered traitors, apostates, infidels, and heretics, but after a nineteen-year battle, the Greenland Council held a conclave in New Jersey and it was decided that it was better to have healthy, but less than perfect followers, rather than perfect adherents battling scurvy, rickets and goiter problems. Since the Council of Trenton ended in 2063, each Kin has had the freedom to self-determine its needs, as well as which of those needs may be met from resources outside the lair."

Blesonus waves her hand at the bulging bags.

"With the latest revision of our charter, everything we have here is...acceptable."

Joe hefts the bag he is holding.

"Licorice?"

"Rholealy's ancestors were from Australia."

Blesonus' tentative, almost embarrassed reply, which Joe doesn't understand, does make him feel better than anything else has since running away from Dutton.

"And?"

"And it's very important."

Joe has a vision of the Kin's members kneeling while Rholealy passes out licorice with the solemnity of a priest dispensing the Eucharist. The image makes Joe laugh, and his laugh instantly puts Blesonus into a rage.

Whispering savagely, hurling words like stones, Blesonus says, "You rich, stupid whelp. You come to us to escape your life. You depend on us to save you. You dare to laugh? You have no right to question anything that we do. I should leave you here and let you wander in this unmapped maze until you die."

As Joe slings the laden bag of seemingly sacred candy onto his shoulder, he conjures his meekest tone, "No. You are right. Absolutely right. I should not have laughed. I owe you an apology and both obedience and respect."

When his guide turns to read his face, Joe keeps his eyes empty and averted. Glowering, but saying nothing, Blesonus starts up the trail. As they climb, Joe pays all of his attention to the trail itself. He tries to determine if, when the path seems to disappear, which it frequently does, there are markings. He looks for some subtle blaze, or another trick, like the fish paint, that allows Blesonus to know where she is going.

If there is a trick, Joe is not able to figure it out. After forty minutes of strenuous hiking back up the mountain, a meek and chastised Joe asks Blesonus about the Kin. When had the men left? Why did they leave? Did they often get new members? Had they harbored teenerz, like himself, before? Who provided the things in the metal locker? Was if for free? Why would they do that?

Joe learns that the last four men had left the den eleven years before because of differences with Rholealy's leadership. They have had only one new member in recent memory. Joynea, who had come to them just over five years before after running away from a clonephanage, is the one who had talked about responsibility at breakfast. About twice a year, a refugee would show up for a few days before moving on—usually to Montreal, to get lost in the Noramca's co-capital. The necessities they were bringing back to camp came from a small group of supporters called the Censure Commitatus, who believed that adolescents should be allowed to make their own decisions about their bodies and their guiding beliefs without the interference of family, teachers and clergy. The Kin was willing to accept and protect teenerz undergoing those trying times. In exchange, the Censures helped the Kin. The provisions came at no monetary cost to the members of their lair, but there were other costs, substantial costs, associated with their tradition of offering sanctuary.

"Like what?"

"Hounding."

"By whom? Rholealy said everything had been safe here for a long time."

"Rholealy attends our souls, but some powerful wingers and their hawk minions have not forgotten us. I feel we are watched. When we go on our walk-abouts, things happen."

"Like what?"

"Two summers ago, eight of us left in early May. Only six of us made it back to the lair in late September."

"You left your home for five months?"

"Oh yes, every year. One third of us make the journey."

"Why? Where do you go?"

"We go to see the wonders of Our Mother. We go where we feel we are pulled. Two years ago, we walked from here to the southern end of Lake George, over to Rutland and then up through the Green Mountains. We crossed the St. Lawrence River on the east side of Lake Champlain, and went west and north until we came to Lac Papineau where there is another Kin. We camped there for almost a month, making friends, fishing, weaving reed baskets, collecting herbs. Then we went south and east and came back down along the Salmon River to Saranac Lake.

"It was wonderful...The Mother, when She is left alone to mother, makes so much perfection. Within a week of leaving the lair, I knew that being a Greenlander was all that I ever wanted to be."

There is a catch in Blesonus's voice that causes Joe to ask, "You had had doubts?"

Blesonus makes no response beyond shifting her pak higher on her back. Joe does the same, but is rewarded with little relief. The pak is heavy. He is tired. The effects of the leaves Blesonus had given him have worn off. Now, both of his knees ache.

Blesonus stops.

After waiting a minute to see if his guide will continue her tale, Joe, with some trepidation, asks, "What happened to those people on your walk-about?"

His guide starts moving up the path. It is minutes later before she says, "They were taken."

"Taken?"

"Stolen."

"You mean they were kidnapped. How? Why?"

"We were almost home. Less than week to walk. When we woke up, they were gone. Stolen in the night."

Joe throws out his hands in disbelief.

"Well, maybe they weren't stolen. Maybe they just decided to leave. You yourself said you had doubts. Maybe they did, too, except their doubts were big enough that they acted on them."

Blesonus' look leaves no doubt in Joe's mind that she has had that same thought and has forced it back into the shadows.

When the path flattens out on a shoulder of the mountain, Blesonus says, "We'll stop for a moment."

The stick-like woman shucks off her pak, lifts her narrow shoulders, arches her back and twists her head back and forth to loosen her neck muscles. Joe, who guesses he has the lighter pack, drops his down with a groan before he tries to imitate her. When he curves his back to loosen the tightness at the base of his spine, he sees how much more mountain there is to climb. He makes a small sound of dismay.

"No. You are looking the wrong way. Turn around."

Blesonus put her hands on Joe's shoulders. She holds him for what to Joe seems like a long time before turning him around. They are standing at the top of an escarpment jutting out from the mountain. Joe assumes that it is rain water rushing down the mountainside which has scoured the outcrop free of soil. From where he stands he can see five folds of mountains covered in a carpet of green except for the occasional patch of gray stone and the thin silvery strings of waterfalls.

"It is beautiful."

"A million acres, a hundred souls."

"Is that really true?"

"It's close enough to true. This land was already mostly protected by the Adirondack State Park. When the last of the mines closed and logging was forbidden in the Clear Cut Act of 2038, the exodus of young people, which was already a steady stream, turned into a torrent. After that, the older people slowly died off, killed themselves, or were starved out. Now, it is just us and a handful of Last Boyz hunting and fishing. And smugglers."

"What kind of smugglers? People smugglers?"

"Those and some other kinds."

"Such as?"

Blesonus bends to catch a strap of her pak. As she slings it onto her shoulders, she says, "Time to move on."

Joe wonders if the leaves he has eaten, which he guesses might be coca, could be something that is smuggled. He considers whether the food he carries on his back is payment from a coca smuggler.

Twenty minutes later Blesonus begins to talk in a low monotonic voice that makes Joe think that she has forgotten that he is on the mountain with her.

"I am forty-three. I have been surrounded by My Mother's beauty since my birth. She has given me thousands upon thousands of dusks and dawns of red and orange, gray, black and white, and another thousand colors which have no names. Mother loves a treasure and loves to share it. She has offered me the gold of her sun just cresting the mountain and in the head of the dandelion and lily. She has plied me with silver. The silver of the moon on the coldest winter night. The silver of the thin squirrel in spring. The silver of cascading water and immobile granite. The silver of melting ice and flashing fish. The Mother provides me with a home with those who think and feel as I do. But...I am the last of my family, and if I stay here I will be the last of me and mine. If I live here, childless, when I die, all of those who gave of themselves to make me, back a thousand years, will die a different death than the one they have died before. I am content to live and die like that if it makes My Mother happy, but sometimes I can hear her plead with me to pack my things and go. To leave. To live a less pure life."

Seeing an opportunity where he has thought none existed, Joe asks, "If you chose to go, would you be free to go?"

Without stopping, Blesonus twists her head around and looks at Joe as if he has been eavesdropping on her. She opens her mouth, but says nothing, then, picks up the pace.

"I've had to make the same decisions," Joe says in a tone he hopes will gain Blesonus' sympathy. "My family and my friends want me to have wings. To fly with them. To be part of their flock. But I am most alive when I am close to earth. The sky is something to look up to, not a place from which to look down on others and consider them to be less fortunate than I. For all of the pain I have in my knees, I would rather be here, trudging back up this mountain with you, seeing and feeling and smelling your Mother's charms up close rather than looking down on a splotch of green and a sliver of silver far below. I only hope that, after a time, my family will see the sacrifices I am willing to make to be part of this earth rather than being above it all. I hope they see, accept, and finally approve of how I want to live my life."

Joe knows from his literature classes that oftentimes the strongest arguments are those half-made. He wonders if he already had laid it on too thick. He guesses that if Prissi were here her snorts would be coming like mortar fire. He decides to shelve the rest of what he wants to say to go off in a new direction.

"Would men ever returnr? So there could be fathers?"

"The lair has decided men no longer are welcome. Men, and all they bring, distract us from The Mother."

Joe considers the irony of a mother who doesn't want her children to bear children. For a moment, his anger at Blesonus' cultish stupidity outweighs the necessity of currying her favor so that he can escape.

"I would think that Mother might like her worshippers to have an organization that was a little more sustainable."

Blesonus nods her head, but her words belie that action.

"Rholealy says our devotion will be rewarded."

"Devotion to whom?"

"Mother."

"As Rholealy understands her."

"Yes."

They are just a couple of hundred feet shy of the crest of the mountain when Blesonus misplaces a foot on a section of the path thick with scree. Her legs splay out as if doing the splits. She yelps, falls sideways and begins rolling back down the path they have just climbed. When Joe catches up with her, she is grabbing the back of her left thigh with one hand and waving her other hand over a lava flow of tea extract oozing across a pure white field of salt.

"Are you okay?"

"No, no, no, no."

"Let me help you up. See if you can walk on it."

"No. No. You don't know. The lair will be so angry. They'll iso me."

"What's iso?"

"Isolate. I'll have to eat alone, work alone, sleep by myself. No one will talk to me."

"Because you spilled some salt?"

Blesonus' waving hand is redirected from the spill to the space just in front of Joe's face. Her voice pitches up into the hysterical range.

"You don't know. You can't know. Our life is so horrible, it's made the little things—salt on stringy greens, a cup of hot tea in a cold, dark, damp room—incredibly important. The loss of the tea and half the salt is horrible so the punishment must be horrible."

Blesonus collapses her head onto her knee. Her body heaves with her sobs.

Joe realizes that this is the first time he has ever heard a woman cry. He is caught between wanting to reach down to touch her shoulder to give comfort and slapping her until she shuts up. He thinks of the ancient adage about not crying over spilt latte and how Blesonus' loss is only tea. He turns his back on his guide and stares out over the endless miles of forest. He looks outward to distance himself from the thick, moist noises coming from close by. He has to get away. And he can not wait until Rholealy decides it is the proper time. He turns back, drops to his knees and gently grasps the sobbing woman's shoulders.

"Ssshhh. Ssshhh. Blesonus, listen. Just listen for a minute."

Using a gesture he has seen many times in a vid, a supposedly comforting gesture, Joe takes the woman by her chin and lifts her head so that he can look into her face.

"Good. Good. Listen. You didn't spill the salt and ruin the tea. I did. My knee. My knee let go and I fell just like you did. You...let's see...yeah...I yelled and...you pulled a muscle when you twisted around to stop my fall. They can be angry at me."

Joe watches intently as Blesonus first vigorously shakes off his suggestion with her head, then, becomes more tentative, until finally her head is still but cocked at an angle. The sleek head and the angle at which it is held remind Joe of a Labrador retriever which can't quite figure out what it sees stirring in the brush.

"Why would you do that?"

Joe gives the woman, now growing calmer, his sweetest smile.

"Because it would help you and it wouldn't hurt me—at least, not much. What are they going to do to me? Here, let me help you up. See if you can walk okay."

Joe helps Blesonus to her feet, picks up both paks and starts up the trail feeling as cocky as if he has just solved a tricky quadratic equation.

# CHAPTER TEN

Of My Discontent

From time immemorial, dissidents and false friends have waited until a leader has left his country to mount a coup. Without the physical presence of their commander, troops and troupes of bureaucrats and functionaries find it harder to risk their lives to maintain the status quo.

When Joshua Fflowers went into the Juvenal Institute, there were stirrings, but, really, those were of no more concern than the slight movements in the straw after the barn cat pads outside to soak up some sun. It was not until the pancreatic portion of his rejuve took a mortally threatening turn for the worse that the stirrings became skitterings and the first murmurings were heard. The murmurings were of many things: Adaman—Joshua Fflowers older child, art supporter, political dabbler, and not so competent co-president of Cygnetics. Would he be deposed? What of his brother, Illiya, the younger, if not smarter, then, certainly more respected one, the other half of the leadership of Cygnetics? What of the old man's money—more than a trillion eurollars? Would it be sliced into big or little pieces of pie? Cygnetics—with its multiple vulnerabilities, would it take a fall? Would the b-crats at the nation's Health and Hearth Department become emboldened and release the supposedly dambing report that supposedly had been kept glued to the director's desk by Fflowers' supposedly gargantuan campaign contributions? Then, there was the power—the sweet perfume of power floating above any stench thrown off by a failing body. Who would inherit the old man's power in science, philanthropy, politics, and Cygnetics itself? Was the Fflower's family reign over?

When word got out that Joshua Fflowers was failing, men and women, friends, false friends and enemies, all began to sharpen their weapons and gird their loins for the battles ahead. But, how could word get out? The Juvenal Institute was almost as renowned for its discretion as for its medical skills. The answer is that while being honeyed and hounded by the press is something which an eminent surgeon, held to account by Hippocratic Oath and insulated, to a degree, by wealth, might resist, it is infinitely harder for an aide or orderly to parry the press' advances and enticements with the same degree of skill.

For those with the desire to stay abreast and who have the requisite money, there was information—very good, although not perfect, information—about Fflowers rejection of his liver split within hours of that dramatic change. The details of the failure of his new pancreas found their way to those with an interest in even shorter order. With each revelation, whether it was a spiking fever, a leaking vein, or a massive auto-immune response, the rustlings in the barn grew louder.

Some of that rustling sound and skittering movement about Joshua Fflowers' fate was being made by a person who himself was the object of much speculation, someone who had just come through the entrance of the Juvenal Institute with everything but heralds blowing horns.

Adaman Fflowers often had considered how his fate seemed so much like that of the luckless Prince Charles of England. It was the Unbonny Prince Charles, whose grandmother, the revered Queen Mother, had lived to be one hundred one. It was the Unbonny Prince Charles whose mother, Queen Elizabeth, lived to be ninety-nine, and who, whether dotty, potty, or not, was still on the Windsor throne when her son, Charles, ever, always and only a prince, passed on. But, now the fifty-seven year old Fflowers boy who would be king was hopeful that his fate might be different.

Adaman Fflowers had had no reason, and even less desire, to visit his father when the old man first entered the Juvenal Institute. It wasn't until the geri was comatose and fighting for his next breath that Adaman ordered a roto. There was something powerful within the son that wanted to see his father in a helpless state. Lear in a johnny.

When he arrived with his entourage of bootlicks, security guards, media handlers, infectious medical second-guessers and rabid legal advisors, Adaman Fflowers was met by Rogger Blaine, head of the Juvenal Institute, along with Dr. Blaine's own entourage of bootlicks, excuse makers, medical explainers and legal defenders.

After twenty minutes of diplomacy and posturing, those who were paid to argue and threaten were left to do so. Dr. Blaine personally accompanied the theatrically distraught Adaman to the suite where his father had been recuperating until his spectacular reversals. Once there, the son threw off the rest of his retinue, like a Shakespeare thespian his cloak, except for Schecty, his head of security. The two of them followed Dr. Blaine to the observ station above the ICU. Looking down through the tinted glass, Adaman could see that the Invasive Care Unit was a large room divided into six glass-walled cubicles, three along each wall, with an open area in the middle. All of the cubicles were full of equipment, but empty of patients, except for one. Adaman Fflowers counted eleven people doing things to help a twelfth.

Dr. Blaine was far too skilled and far too arrogant to explain, apologize or offer any condolences to Adaman Fflowers. Instead, benignly, he observed for a moment before making his goodbyes. Just as the director was making his recessional through the door, Adaman asked Dr. Blaine what his brother, Illiya, thought should be done.

Dr. Blaine responded with a head shake. As far as the director was aware, Illiya Fflowers had not been to see his father.

After the doctor left, Adaman spent ten minutes watching the body of Joshua Fflowers being swarmed over like a race car in a pit stop. As he walked back to his father's suite, he nodded to himself in amusement at how remiss his brother had been in not attending to the patriarch. And what a fine show he was missing.

Back in the suite surrounded by the blanket of his retinue, Adaman found that The Juvenal Institute and its staff planned plans. They didn't plan results. That is what his people said they had been told by the institute people. It had been explained to Adaman's advisors by Dr. Blaine's advisors that Joshua Fflowers, inexplicably, had rejected his replacement parts. Their only guess as to why the old man's body had done that was some evidence that Fflowers had undergone some unusual localized and, assuredly, illegal, genetic transformation at an earlier point in his life. It was the extra DNA, formally named supernumerary accentric fragments, which were triggering the rejections. It was that same DNA, and its supposedly illegal aspects, that were supposed to trigger an acceptance by Adaman Fflowers that the Juvenal institute had done nothing wrong.

Adaman was wandering around his father's luxurious suite, half-listening to the briefing, which seemed too long to be worthy of its name, as his legal and medical aides worked to one-up one another, when he picked up an a large envelope emblazoned with the familiar Bissell School logo. It amused Adaman, illustrious alum, to see an actual letter—the paper and frank. It was so gracious and so old-fashioned and just exactly the thing that Binny Dowdahl, whose name appeared handwritten in the upper left-hand corner, would think to do to appeal to Joshua Fflowers.

Within seconds of opening Dowdahl's letter, Adaman felt like he had been thrown overboard in a wintry sea. Gripping the letter in one fist as if it were an assassin's wrist, he slid the accompanying pix from the envelope. His breath stopped while he stared at the dedication day image of his retrograde father being smiled at by Jack and a young girl whose face stabbed deep into some self-surviving, cunning reptilian portion of Adaman's brain. Who and what was this person who so interested his father? Something tugged, but just what it was wouldn't come to him, but he knew it must come because it was important. Critically important.

Adaman Fflowers accepted that his father despised him. That acceptance had not come easily. When Adaman was a child, he had tried in many ways—pleading, fawning, adoring, and even, obeying, to get his father to like him, but by the time Adaman was twelve, he knew that his goal was hopeless. In the years that followed, rather than expending useless energy to get his father to like him more, Adaman had done his best to inveigle his younger brother, Illiya, to behave in ways that would cause Joshua Fflowers to like his second son less. However, Adanan's efforts, Joshua Fflowers had continued to prefer and favor Illiya over his first-born.

It was not until Jack was born that Adaman realized the game did not have to be played out between Iliya and himself. Seeing a possible opening, Adaman had coached, mentored and directed Jack to become what his grandfather wanted. To Adaman's great relief and satisfaction, Jack Fflowers proved to be both an eager and apt grandson.

When, just two days before, Schecty had told Adaman that he had heard from Nathn that his nephew, Joe, had taken the bait and was on his way to a new life, Adaman Fflowers had been ecstatic. He felt the end game of a long hard played match was coming and he held the more powerful pieces. Although Joshua Fflowers continued to despise Adaman, he did love Jack. Now, he would feel betrayed by Joe. That feeling, that Joe was a traitor, was sure to redound badly for Illiya.

Upon hearing Schecty's news that the plan was working, Adaman had allowed himself some time to gloat and dream. Finally, his years of scheming were paying off. The chess match would be over as soon as Joshua Fflowers heard the news. The match still might not end in checkmate, but a stalemate was better than an outright loss.

Adaman's triumph had lost its glow when, on the following day, he was informed of Joshua Fflowers precipitous decline. Adaman's thoughts harkened back to Prince Charles and his lame fate. If his father was too sick to learn what Joe had done, or died before he changed the distribution of his wealth and power, all of Adaman's efforts would have been for naught.

The unrequited son paced and thought and paced and thought. After a time he had an idea. He went to the room's closet, and searching through his father's clothes found what he thought he might find. As long as he had known him, his father had been a doodler. Whether he was on a fone, conferencing, thinking, or in a meeting, his hands kept busy. Adaman pulled out a small wad of cocktail napkins, some from the dedication and some from the roto flight. He sat cross legged on the bed and spread them in front of him. Squiggles, arrows, a sketch of his new building...and Es, lots of Es, and a few fancy Ps. And arrows linking E's to P's. After deciding that Priscilla Langue might be the P, Adaman's confusion unraveled. E led to P. E led to Priscilla. Adaman's throat made a noise like a clogged drain. He lifted up the pix of the girl and tried to remember the portrait in the Airie he had studied a thousand times. That portrait had been done when Elena Howe was forty, but Adaman could see that the resemblance was there.

The torrent of words that burst from his mouth left strings of spittle on Adanan's chin. In the space of a day he had gone from checkmating his brother to being in check to being checkmated. If his father died, the will would remain unchanged. But, now, if the old man rallied, the will very well might be changed, but not in the way that Adanan had planned. Adanan could see how an eleventh hour appearance by someone named Priscilla Langue could cause him to lose everything he had worked for so many years. Adaman knew without a doubt that if the old man had any opportunity to develop a relationship with the simulacrum of Elena Howe, his own and, most likely, Jack's future, too, would be ash. He also was sure that Prince Charles last conscious feeling had to have been a bitter one. Adaman swore to himself that the Unbonny Prince's fate would not be his own.

If his father died, there was nothing he could do. But...if his father lived, the girl could not.

Adaman Fflowers was mapping out a strategy with Schecty about how to handle the girl when his brother, Illiya, accompanied by a single security guardian came in.

"Ah, the prodigal son. I, we, and, of course, dear he, expected you earlier."

"Joe's gone."

As he quickly gathered the napkins off the bedspread, Adaman shook his head at the pettiness of his brother's concerns.

"Really? How daring. Probably a lark. Something sophomoric. Spring Break jail break."

In the raspy voice that he has had since he was a toddler, when he ate some scouring powder that somehow got where it wasn't supposed to be, a tragic accident older brother Adaman had known absolutely about, Illiya said, "Maybe, but I don't think so. I think it's more. I think he might be grounding. When he was home over Winter Break, the issue of fledging came to a head."

Although he already knew the answer to the question, the older brother asked, "Why? What's the problem?"

Illiya's exasperation seeped through his calm words like perfume through a jet's air handler.

"He doesn't want to fly. He can't seem to think of anything beyond playing hockey. His mute was scheduled for tomorrow. He has been making noises, but we just thought it was Jongitis. Even the bravest kid can feel some fear of flying."

"Not my Jack."

"No, of course, not. Not Jack."

Illiya walked around the room in agitation.

"Joe wanted to fly since before he could walk. For years, he would flop around the room pretending. But, ever since he got so good at hockey, he's had a million reasons why he shouldn't fly. When he came home for Thanksgiving, he was adamant. He was going to stay a walker and play hockey. His coach said this. His coach said that. He'd rather play hockey for ten years than fly for fifty. We told him he that there was no question that he was going to fledge. He finally consented, but pleaded to delay the mute until after hockey season was over."

Adaman's speech is clipped as he interrupts his brother, "And you told him the window for growing the best wings was small."

"Of course."

Adaman crossed the room, picked up an envelope, the one with a Bissell logo, folded it and stuffed it in a pants' pocket before he said, "And Joey started talking about PAM techniques. Break-throughs. Second chances. Am I correct?"

There is silence as Illiya absorbed the anger he felt at Adaman calling his son, Joey. Finally, he asks, "Did he get that from you?"

"I believe we traded a couple of EMs. He wanted to know when—youth's hope— or if—his mistrust of Cygnetics science—it would happen. Since I handle the science side and you handle the money, he thought I would know more about those kinds of things than you. What could I say? I told him it was something the company has been working on almost from the beginning. You can change jobs, or faiths, a dozen times, change spouses, give birth anytime from ten to seventy. So, why should you have to make the most momentous decision of your life within a short period of your adolescence? If we could perfect Post-Adolescent Mutation, a person could run, swim, play baseball, climb mountains, sail, be a plumber or scuba diver, or any of the things a winger can't do, or do well, for ten, twenty, thirty years and then begin to fly.

"Flying has always been the pre-eminent symbol of freedom—and a big part of freedom is the ability to change, to make choices—but our technical constraints take away so much choice. We are free when we fly. We are free to fly. But, we are not free to decide when we fly."

Unable to suppress his anger any longer, Illiya's voice rose, "Did you encourage him to stay a walker because he just might be able to mute his wings later on?"

Adaman threw up his hands at the absurdity of what his brother has said.

"No, Illiya. I told him the truth. That science swings from the unthinkable to the incremental and back again. Until our illustrious father, dare we call him dad, and our intended mother worked out the G-splices and mutancy maps for the first implant, self-flight was unthinkable. Wings on humans. Not wings on things attached to humans. Unthinkable. Until Brianna Brim landed at mid-field at Super Bowl LI. That moment fundamentally changed the world—like the invention of language, love, god, the A-bomb.

"But, then...our oh so busy near mom and dad...bat wings to bird wings...incremental. And all of the things since—colors, shapes for speed or distance, lowering the failures with anti-rejection drugs, projecting body mass to wing size, all of those things are just accommodations to the initial lightning bolt. And, as those things were solved, the scientists always thought that PAM would be just another incremental improvement. Not just a tweak—I don't think anybody was that arrogant. Not something you can see ahead and just need to pack some water before you get on the path. But something that, at least, gives a glimmer over the horizon. But, so far, even after sixty years on the path, there's been no glimmer. As you know, despite our efforts, our very expensive efforts, PAM has proved intractable—like squamous-celled cancers. As a result, if we're being honest...as brothers should...but please don't tell the stockholders...we've taken away as much freedom as we've given."

Illiya's voice, an octave higher and beyond incrementally louder, blurted, "You told him that? Flying diminishes freedom?"

"I'm sure I listened more than I talked, brother . Of course, there was probably a little of the fond uncle's wisdom. But, I did tell him that PAM did not seem to be around the corner, and, that like anything else, flying could add or subtract from one's life."

Illiya threw his hands up in disgust.

"Well, after all of the balanced parsing, Adaman, after all the philosophizing, what remains is that Joe is gone. The son of the Co-president of Cygnetics Corporation is hiding so that he won't have to fly. If this gets known, and if the Gen4 data starts to leak out now that dad's not there to stop it, this news could drop fast to the bottom line."

"Dramatic, but I think implausible. We've kept that data off the screen for months. I'd give Joey a day or two before setting off alarms. You have unleashed our own dogs, I presume?'

"I had a team of six guardians begin a search as soon as the school called me."

Adaman held his chin in imitation of a wise man thinking.

"Hmmm, I think if it were my son, which, of course, I am so jealous that it is not, I would call the school and tell them that Joey has shown up at home none the worse for wear."

"And, if he doesn't show up?"

"Our guardians are very, very good. I can't see that happening."

"They are so good that they have found nothing in forty-eight hours."

Adaman shrugged in theatrical defeat.

"Then, perhaps, my proposed course is the wrong one. It is your son and you must decide. I must concern myself with our poor father." Adaman touched a fingertip to his cheekbone. "And another small matter."

After Illiya left, Adaman finished his conversation with Schecty. No consternated Unbonny Prince Charles biting on a knuckle. The girl must go.

"Please, Schecty, when you get in touch with me, please refer to our new situation as 'another small matter.' That I think will keep my spirits up as I grieve what is, or isn't, happening to papa."

# CHAPTER ELEVEN

Head over Heels

Prissi had two surprises when she arrived home for Spring Break.

The first surprise was discovering two immense shipping crates sequestered behind their cyclone fenced storage area in the basement of the Gramercy Arms. Her father obviously had let go of his notion about leaving their African past behind.

When Nora Langue had died, Beryl Langue's immediate response had been to cut and run. He locked up his lab, asked friends to pack up their furnishings and, within a day of Nora Langue's ashes being scattered onto Lake Tanganyika, he and Prissi were crossing that same lake in the first leg of their sojourn. A week later, they entered Costa Rica through a back door encumbered with a total of three suitcases and two paks.

Now, almost three years after her mother's death, Prissi had the opportunity to be re-connected with her past through the collection of boxes spread across the storage area floor. Prissi couldn't wait to see what might have been saved of their lives in Burundi, but she realized that her second surprise might cut into her time to explore the first.

Dr. Smarkzy had sent her the contact numbers for his friend, Pequod Jones, at the New York Public Datarium. He EMed that if Prissi wanted to travel down The Lost Path, she could have no better cicerone than the curmudgeonly Pequod Jones. In addition, Smarkzy himself was going to take advantage of his break, to which he could attest faculty anticipated more than students, to see if he could find some things from the GOD that could help the cause. Prissi assumed that the good old days referred to Smarkzy's time at Cold Spring Harbor.

Despite the romantic allure of The Lost Path, Prissi probably would have spent much more time in her apartment building's basement going through her past rather than at the NYPD if it had not been for a piece of very bad luck.

In homage to her favorite teacher, Prissi flew up Fifth Avenue late in the afternoon of her first day home. She met Pequod Jones, who proved to be anything but a curmudgeon. Jones, a ruddy-faced old man with a beach ball belly and flailing arms, let her know that he was breaking the rules by allowing her to look through the Fflowers collection...and that he was taking great pleasure in doing so. He told her that he was compelled to break the rules because he was a scientist first and a datarian second.

Prissi spent two hours going through a miniscule portion of the archives Joshua Fflowers had donated to posterity. She skipped through paper, disk, stick, bubble and liquid memory of Fflowers early years as a scientist, entrepreneur, executive, and philanthropist looking for material relevant to delayed fledging. She found little enough of that; however she did discover that the company that Smarkzy recalled his friend working for was named Centsurety. Of the small amount of material that did seem relevant, almost all of it was either so stupefyingly dull or so obtuse that Prissi's lids drooped within seconds of beginning her work.

When Jones bounced by to ask Prissi about her progress, Prissi, being a Dutton student, was compelled to tell him the truth. It was drudgery. Eyes bright and head bobbling, the datarian smiled as he said, "Science, small s is," and walked away.

Prissi, who had worked long enough not to feel guilty but had found so little to pique her interest that she couldn't convince herself to stay another minute, was paking up when her bad luck arrived in the guise of an old pix presented to her by Pequod Jones.

"Maybe it will make it more interesting if you can see with whom you are dealing."

The large pix Jones held out to the teener was a group-shot of a dozen, mostly young, men and women loosely clustered around a couple of picnic tables.

Dr. Jones pointed out Joshua Fflowers and then named three other people he knew. He ended with a pudgy finger touching a widely smiling dashing young man raising a bottle in toast to the unseen photographer.

"The rightly revered Dr. Vartan Smarkzy."

Prissi's head was nodding but she failed to hear any more of Jones' words. Her brain was processing the face of someone he hadn't named. What had Prissi poring over the ancient pix was the face of a young woman holding hands with a tall, crane-legged man in khaki shorts. The woman in the lo-def pix had an eerie resemblance to some of the pixs in a flashbook her mother had sometimes showed her that that held images of LBP, Life Before Prissi. Her mother had worked for Joshua Fflowers? On The Lost Path? Nora Elieson, oatmeal cookie and butterscotch brownie maker, queen of guina fowl life cycles,had had an exciting life that she hadn't told her daughter about? Suddenly, Prissi couldn't wait to get home to go through the boxes in the basement. A mystery within a mystery. That notion was irresistible to the teener, far better than reading another CRN.

Prissi began packing her kanga. Pequod Jones was right and wrong. The pix did energize Prissi, but not because of some scientific mystery. It was what the possibilities might be for her own history that inspired her.

Prissi had never felt especially close to her father. He was over seventy when she was born. He was a very good, but not a very warm person. It wasn't that he was cold; rather, he seemed to be perennially distracted. Prissi knew that her father's work with regenerative chickens and guinea fowl had helped thousands upon thousands of Africans lead a better life; however it was the science and not the savings in misery that seemed to hold his attention. When villagers tried to thank him with a smile, words or a small gift for designing a bird whose wings could be removed for meat and, then, grown back to be harvested again, he always looked like he was about to bolt.

Despite Beryl Langue's undemonstrative nature, Prissi knew that her father adored her. In return, she held her father in high esteem for his rationally-bounded caring, good works, and forthrightness. From all of the CRNs she had consumed, Prissi knew that Beryl Langue would have made a horrible lover, but a perfect 1950s father.

In Prissi's estimation, her mother was her father's complement. Nora Elieson was fun. Despite being in her late eighties, she had been as much a pal and fellow adventurer as a parent. When the family spent the too short weeks of summer school vacation east of the Rift in Karuzi province, Prissi and her mother would quietly sneak around the mud and wattle camp in pre-dawn dark paking picnics and gathering gear to take to their blind by the waterhole, where they would spend hours watching the animals come to drink. They had rolled and cut cookie dough into lions, tigers and wildebeest with wooden cutters carved by an old blind man in the village. They had produced plays with tribal masks and paper cutouts with the village children on a powdery red clay stage. They had whispered secrets to each other as a harsh dry wind punched at their hammock. Even when it was time to leave the highlands so that Prissi could return to school, the adventures didn't end. The mother and daughter had explored most of Bujumbura, sometimes even without their guard.

Those memories were her parents. More than once Prissi had heard her mother's tale of the chance meeting between two middle-aged scientists outside a Global Nations conference room, of how that led to love and how their love for one another gave birth to Prissi. So who were these two in the picture with their shoulders touching, eyes slightly squinting, glorious teeth backlighting theatrically wide smiles? There didn't seem to be too many GN aid recipients in the picnic picture. Who was the man holding her mother's hand, who, assuredly, was not her father? Who were all these people who weren't in any of the stories her parents told? What romance and mystery was Prissi holding in her hand?

Prissi didn't think asking Pequod Jones about the couple would do her any good. As garrulous as he was, if he had known more, she was sure he would have told her. She considered sending an EM to Dr. Smarkzy, but held back for a reason she couldn't quite explain. Looking again at the pix, Prissi was sure she was looking at her mother. Prissi prided herself that after almost two years of boarding school she could smell a secret a kilometer away. What was before her was less than a half-meter away and it smelled to high heaven. She was absolutely sure she was looking at something she wasn't supposed to know, but, as a budding scientist, but she wasn't going to confront her father until she had amassed more information.

When she got back to the apartment that night, Prissi smiled brightly at her father's muted welcome and curbed her impatience when he told her he wanted to eat at Fraunces Tavern, the oldest restaurant in New York. Instead of having the hissy fit that welled within her from being put off the track, she smiled again at her father as she whispered to herself, "Science, with a small s."

Fraunces Tavern, which had been built in 1719, had been moved from its location on Pearl Street when the waters began to rise around Manhattan. As she and her father entered the columned door fronting on Madison Square Park, Prissi could tell from the lack of noise that the restaurant was mostly empty. Although Beryl Langue tried to appear engrossed by Prissi's answers to his questions about her life at Dutton, it was obvious that her father was sad. Prissi guessed it was his response to the arrival of the crates. To Prissi, it seemed that the longer her mother was dead, the harder it became for her father. It had gotten so much worse in the last year that there were times when Prissi thought that there must be something more than the death of his mate pulling her father down into such despondency.

During their dinner, just the two of them sitting at a table for four in the dim yellow light of the colonial-era structure, they vacillated between staring at one another and speaking in non sequitors. Her father drank two glasses of Danish chardonnay before their dinner arrived. He drank another glass with dinner and after dinner alternated sips of cognac and coffee. Prissi watched him as he blinked his eyes to keep back what she guessed might be tears.

As they walked back downtown toward Gramercy Park, Beryl Langue told his daughter that he had been thinking about his life, what he had accomplished and what he had not. He paused, as though choosing his words carefully, before telling her that his life had been both too long and too short. When Prissi, being dutiful, asked him what he meant, her father said that he had lived long enough to make many mistakes, but that he didn't think he would live long enough to rectify them. Prissi stayed quiet until they got through the door of their Gramercy Arms apartment, then, having decided that the time was not appropriate for her questions, she hugged her rigid armed father until he made a noise she wished she had not heard.

Once in her room, Prissi resumed work on her mystery. She sat on her bed with her puter balanced on her crossed legs to continue her ogle, but she soon found that the evening with her father had paralyzed her for much beyond rumination.

Prissi was grateful that she didn't have to live with this morose man, and she was grateful that he paid her way to Dutton, but those feelings were tempered with a bruising guilt.

After they left Africa, Prissi and her father had spent six weeks in Costa Rica looking at bird farms, and another two months in Cuba. When they left the fifty-second state, they took a boat to Miami, then, took their time driving north to New York City in a rented van.

It seemed to Prissi during that time of transition that every time they moved, they left more things, excluding memories, behind. The farther from Africa they got, the more pensive her father became. But, when she asked him what he was thinking about, he never would say.

They had arrived in New York City in October of 2094 and settled into a non-descript flat in the run-down area surrounding Gramercy Park. Until he found a job with a small company that massaged data for the GN, her father stayed in the darkened apartment during the day hunkered over his puter and took long walks in the evening.

Having arrived in New York after the fall semester had begun, Prissi's only option was public school. She started eighth grade at a dilapidated concrete box in the shadow of the FDR levee without protest. The teachers were dull, but not as mind-numbing as those she'd had in Africa. The material was mostly useless, boring or both. But the kids—speaking a Babel of languages, with erupting skins of every hue, playing music she'd never heard before—were great. The thirteen-year old pushed Africa away and welcomed all the variety to be found in fading fin de siècle New York.

Other than being a bit surprised, Prissi didn't think much about it when, in early November, her father told her that he wanted her to take the PSB, the Private School Boards. Before her mother had died, the question of sending Prissi out of Africa to go to school had come up at the dinner table many, many times. Back then, Prissi had complained bitterly that she wasn't challenged in school, and, the older she got, the worse it became. People said how hard it was to be stupid in a smart world, but the frustrated girl told her parents that it was much worse to be smart in a stupid world. She had given her parents two choices. They could send her off to school—England, Gerance, China, Noramica or Japan—she didn't care which. Or, they could give her a lobotomy.

Ever Prissi's defender, even though she admitted it would break her heart, Nora had argued that she and Beryl would be the prime beneficiaries from sending Prissi away since everyone knew that one of the world's most dangerous creatures was a bored teenage girl. But, her father repeatedly had rejected those plaints and pleas. They were a family. Families stayed together. England, with its war with Scotland, was too dangerous and Japan or China were too far away.

Suddenly, after less than a month in New York, her father had been insisting that she take the exam. He told Prissi that he just wanted to see how she compared with other kids.

That answer came back loud and clear with her PSB results. Even though the schools she had gone to in Africa had been very bad, the tutoring she had received from the parents, especially in math and science, and the constant reading she had done must have been very good as Prissi placed in the ninety-eighth percentile of those tested.

It was not until Prissi's scores came back that Beryl Langue began to talk about schools. When he did, Prissi tuned out. She liked where she was and whom she was with. New York City might be a century past its prime, and certainly offered no academic competition to Hong Kong, Addis Ababa, Montreal or Beijing, but it was far better than the dust, dirt and sudden death of Bujumbura. While Beryl Langue insisted that Prissi needed more of a challenge than she was getting in a New York public school, Prissi thought that the truth was that her father wanted less of a challenge than he was getting at home.

Prissi had ignored her father and the whole idea of going off to school until he rented a car, took her out of school for three days and drove them to Connecticut to visit Choate, then up the road to Dutton and Bissell. In Western Massachusetts, they looked at Deerfield, after which they drove north to St. Paul's and Exeter in New Hampshire. On their way back south, they stopped In Massachusetts again to visit Andover and Middlesex.

Prissi could not believe how beautiful the schools were, but she was slow to accept giving up the scary thrill of New York. Her father pushed. He assured her that even though the setting was very different, she would keep the same mix of kids as were in her present school. The only difference would be the high probability that the boarding school kids would be smarter, more talented and more competitive.

Finally, Prissi wrote the essays and filled in the forms for her top five choices. And hunkered down for the interminable wait. Would a 98th %-ile PSB score, good soccer goalie, tri-lingual, African-born girl get through the narrow gate?

The answer was yes and no. In March, she found out that she wasn't good enough for Andover, St. Paul's and Deerfield, but Exeter and Dutton had accepted her.

Given that her father had become even more depressed and distracted over the intervening months, Prissi was happy to have an opportunity to escape. She decided that she would go to Exeter. It had the advantages of being not only a bigger but a far richer school than Dutton. It also was much farther away from Beryl Langue. Beryl Langue, however, insisted that Prissi matriculate at Dutton.

Prissi arrived in Waterville, Connecticut reluctantly. However, by the end of her first week, Prissi Langue was in love with Dutton and her roommate Nancy Sloan, and the pond, her soccer-mates, and the emerald green perfectly limed soccer fields, and the meatburgers and fries at The Jig and even Mrs. Mallory, who hovered around the juice and espresso dispensers in Mullen Hall dispensing motherisms.

After massaging her stomach to move more than memories of Fraunces Tavern into the past, Prissi fell asleep feeling exhausted and very sad that, after a half-day at home with her father, she was wishing she were back at school.

# CHAPTER TWELVE

Escapade

Joe Fflowers is right. Even though the Greenlander lair is devastated by the loss of its tea and salt, they have not taken their disappointment out on him. Instead, in the two days since his supposed fall, he has been treated kindly by almost everyone in the den. They offer him salve for his knee, wash his clothes, and give him larger portions of food than they themselves take.

What Joe especially appreciates most is that they talk to him. By having conversations with varying members, each of whom is willing to share something that maybe they shouldn't, Jack learns that there are seven ways out of the lair. The path that he and Blesonus had taken is one of the most difficult. It is the one used when the den has guests. Three other exits leave the den midway down three different sides of the mountain—north, west and south. The last three passages are supposedly long torturous bolt holes. One ends in the valley on the mountain's west side. Another exits on the south side behind a waterfall several hundred feet above an abandoned logging road. The third also opens behind a waterfall, which, after pitching through four cascades, becomes a stream that flows to the Hudson River.

Joe figures that if he can make his way to the Hudson, then his boating skills, developed during summer vacations on the narrow scythe of Cape Cod Island, will provide him with a means of escape. He is sure that he can find some kind of boat that will get him downstream to Albany. From Albany, he can make his way back north to Montreal, which has always been his goal...or...or, some other place that can be decided later.

The morning after their failed mission, Blesonus leads Joe further down into the mountain along a steep-pitched tunnel until they came to a series of four caverns, each of which has a pool of the "fish,' which are the source of the Greenlanders bio-luminescent paint. The animals look like giant tadpoles. When Joe pleads, a skeptical Blesonus hands him a small pot of the paint.

That night, instead of sleeping, Joe goes wandering into the bowels of the mountain. He takes the pot of paint with him, and every time there is an intersection in the tunnels, he marks his way with a thumbprint. Each time there is a choice, he opts for the way that seems to lead deeper into the mountain. Even after several hours of searching, while yawning from lack of sleep and fighting the growls in his stomach and the throbbing in his knee, the frustrated boy still has not discovered the exit he is seeking.

Joe is a hundred meters down a corridor when he stops dead. He can't remember marking the last intersection. The panicky adolescent whirls around in the tunnel and rushes to retrace his steps. Standing before the intersection, which indeed has no marking, he tries to remember whether he had turned in from the right or left. His heart is beating so fast that he has trouble concentrating. He turns left, takes a step in that direction, then, wavers. His body begins to quake. He tells himself to slow down, that the quaking is less from fear than from low blood sugar from the Greenlanders' meager diet. The panicky boy slumps against the cold of the wall and consciously slows his breathing. After several moments, it dawns on him that it doesn't make any difference which way he turns. If he goes to the left to the next intersection and there is no mark, then he will know that he must turn around, walk past where he presently is and go to the next opening, which will be marked.

Joe pushes himself up from the floor, plays his hunch and turns left. When he comes to the intersection and sees no glowing thumbprint, he retraces his steps. He is so confident as he walks back that when he comes to the other opening and finds no thumbprint, it takes him a moment to realize the full implications. It stuns him to realize that he has forgotten to mark at least two junctions.

The magnitude of his stupidity literally floors Joe. He sits in the dark, with his thighs and calves spasming as he stares each way at the unbroken line of phosphorescence and ponders his next move.

From what Blesonus and the others have told him, there is a spiderweb of tunnels, some natural, some left from the mining operations, but most constructed during the heyday of the Greenlanders, winding throughout the mountain and even into adjoining mountains. Back when novices joined the Kin in droves and visitors came to see the life extolled in news programs and two documentary films, the trails had been well-marked. But, after the lair was repeatedly attacked by anti-greens and Last Boyz, the cave dwellers removed most of the markers to make things more difficult for any intruders. Despite the fact that that over the decades most of the world has forgotten that the Greenlanders, like the Shakers before them, even exist, the majority of passages remain unmarked and, even worse for Joe, unused.

Joe rolls his head against the hard cold stone as he tries to figure out the mathematics of his situation—one mistake gives two possible paths, two mistakes makes four possibilities, and if he has forgotten to paint three entrances, he will have eight possible trails to backtrack. The longer Joe sits, the more he feels how exhausted he is. The air around him thickens. It feels heavy enough to wrap himself in it. He doesn't want to move. Suddenly, his panic triples as the idea comes that what he is feeling is like the stories of lost hikers going to sleep in a snow storm. Completely agitated, he jumps to his feet and starts to run down the tunnel. It is only as he comes to an intersection and the decision that implies that he gets enough hold on himself to consider that, as unnerved as he is, if he continues, he may only compound his troubles.

The cold, frightened boy holds back a sob as he slides his back down the damp rock wall. He removes the monocle from his eye and rubs the skin and muscles around the socket contemplatively. After a few minutes of getting himself calm, Joe rolls onto his side, draws up his knees and, just before he falls deeply asleep, assures himself that he is too agitated to do more than take a quick cat-nap.

# CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Puzzled

When she woke the morning after the Fraunces Tavern dinner, Prissi knew her day's task was to find out more about the faces in the Pequod Jones pix. However, rather than immediately going back to the NYPD, she thought it made more sense to see if she could find anything in the apartment or in the newly arrived cases from Africa that would help her.

Minutes after her father left for work, Prissi began her search in the small bedroom he used as an office. Twenty minutes of rummaging file drawers and pawing through the piles of papers stack on the badboard bookcase revealed nothing.

Although she had some guilt as she snuck around the office, those feelings were nothing compared to what Prissi experienced when she moved her search to her father's bedroom. She found nothing more exciting than a water bottle, zines and a pen on top of the bed-stand. The edstand's dusty drawer held paper clips, rubber bands, tissues, a pill vial, more pens and two unopened paks of gum. The sock and underwear drawers held socks, underwear and a musty smell that gave Prissi the creeps. Moving to the closet, the mortified teener had a frisson of anticipation when her hand touched something thin at the far end of the shelf above the clothes rod. Standing on her tiptoes, she caught a corner and withdrew a yellow padded Saf-Rap envelope.

With her quivering hands making the task more difficult, Prissi finally managed to split the seal. She half-pulled the sheet from the envelope. When she realized she was holding her mother's death certificate, she wondered why her father would keep it in his closet. She flared her wings and sat down on the rumpled sheets of her father's bed. Pulling the heavy sheet of paper free of its envelope, Prissi read the succinct recounting of a life—name, date and place of birth, and place and date of.... Her mother's date of death was wrong. Nora Elieson had died on May 20th, 2094. That was a date Prissi could never forget. The paper Prissi had in her hands said her mother had died on May 23rd. She shrugged. That was Africa. A place so nonchalant about, so inured to death, it didn't even know when its people died.

When she started reading again, Prissi's quivering hands began to shaker. A snotty sob, the first one in almost two years, strangled her. In a split second, a flick of the eyes, Prissi's life changed. The daughter's life changed because the mother's death changed. Instead of dying from the injuries she had sustained in a one vehicle accident along the Muyinga Gitega road, the death certificate said that Nora Elieson's accident was no accident, that her death was self-inflicted.

As quickly as it had started, Prissi's sobbing stopped. Yesterday's pix. Now, this paper. Was her family's life, and, thus, her life, all a lie? Something worse than tears started to explode from Prissi, but she slammed it back with a ferocity she didn't even know she had. That, whatever that was, was not getting out.

Prissi shoved the death certificate back into its dark home. She tapped the edge of the envelope against her head before she put it back on the shelf at the back of a closet, a place where it did and didn't belong.

The disturbed teener stumbled down to the basement of the Gramercy Arms. Desperate to find something to make sense of what she had just discovered upstairs, Prissi rotated the five gears of the padlock securing the door of the mesh wire storage compartment. She snapped the lock shackle and threw back the door, pushed enough things aside so that she could spread her wings, dropped to her knees and began picking up pieces of their African life with the desperation of a hurricane survivor returning home.

Suicide?

Suicide? It wasn't possible. Her mother was happy. She was healthy. Her mother loved her. She would never kill herself. Prissi held and discarded familiar objects...and thoughts. Although she rubbed the sides of vases and lamps, no genie emerged to change her fate. She rubbed her forehead with hands that smelled of a lost life, but no thoughts came that could make sense of the crime of which the paper in her father's closet accused her mother, a crime of which Prissi and her father, though indirectly, also were accused.

It was after five o'clock before a drained Prissi stood up amidst the mess she had made. She had found nothing that told her why her mother would commit suicide. But, she did have answers to other questions. Now, she understood why they had left Africa immediately after the funeral and why her father wasn't able to recover from his wife's death. Prissi wanted to be at the door when her father came home and tell him what she knew.

With the disengagement of a sleep walker, the distraught girl tried to bring order to her thinking by bringing order back out of the chaos she had created in the storage cage; however before she had made much progress, exhaustion, more emotional than physical, made her quit. Even though her father would be home from work before long, Prissi didn't go back to the apartment. Instead, the feeling that had welled up in her father's bedroom, the feeling whose release she feared, propelled her through the acid rain-etched glass doors of the Gramercy Arms.

It was just after 6:00 p.m. and the green glow of the aqua-phosphor street lights along 21st Street painted ghastly faces on those walkers hurrying along the sidewalk. Overhead, the pulse of the beating wings of the walkers' bosses, and the tapestry of crisscrossing beams of flighlights, filled the air. Prissi had burst out of the door without an idea in her head except to move fast enough so that the turmoil within wouldn't overwhelm her. But, once outside in the cool dark air, some rational fragment of her brain reminded her that it had been over six hours since she had eaten anything. While six hours was not a personal best, it was the longest she could remember going without food since starting boarding school. Even though her mind was indecisive, her belly knew immediately that it wanted to head toward the Malawi deli two blocks west of Fifth Avenue. Prissi thought that if she hurried, she just might get there before all of the mbatata biscuits were gone.

In Burundi, mbatata biscuits had been Prissi's favorite food. Now, despite her painful confusion, the teener smiled at the thought of how she and mother would buy them from a stall at the market near their apartment building. Biscuits in hand, she would cajole her mother into buying an Irn Bru. They would walk down to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, with their unhappy bodyguard in tow, eating and drinking and talking, talking, talking.

Prissi had just switched on her flightlight when she heard someone trill her name. The voice was familiar, but for a second, because it was so out of context, she couldn't quite place it. She looked up to the balustrade that stuck out a meter from the front of the apartment building across the street and saw a shapeless figure crouching there.

"Prissi, it's me."

Recognition came.

"Freeieekin Caesar."

The shadowy figure leapt off the parapet, flapped twice and landed in front of Prissi. The amorhous form pushed back a hood, pulled off a watch cap and metamorphosed into Jack Fflowers. A dirty, disheveled, intriguing Jack Fflowers.

"What's going on?"

With a theatrical self-satisfied grin at his arrival's effect on Prissi, Jack drawled, "I'll tell you, but I'm really hungry. Do you have anything to eat?"

"I'm just running out to get some dinner. C'mon with me. It's not far."

Jack shook his head, "Not a good idea." He nodded to the blue-black sky overhead as he pulled his hood back up.

"Why are you hiding? Isn't it Joe that's the fugitive?"

Jack interrupted Prissi, "Can we go some place safer?"

Although Prissi prided herself on not being thrown off course, there was something about Jack that made her willing to wait to ask her questions.

"Come on up. My dad will be home soon, but I can say I ran into you, say we're good friends from school, you know."

With a smirk, Jack gestured to his clothes, "Do I look like someone who would go to prep school?"

"No, you're right. But, my dad, even though he doesn't spend much time in this world, still might smell something snooty on you. But, it's either up there or down in the basement."

"What's down there?"

"Storage and a utility room."

"No super?"

"No the building's too small. They use Central-Super."

Jack leered, "Down."

Although Prissi knew that she should be in shock, she found herself happy that Jack was teasing her. She turned to see if the lobby was empty before beckoning with a jerk of her head for Jack to follow her. When she stopped to put her thumb on the lock sensor, Prissi felt Jack's breath on her neck.

As soon as Prissi showed Jack the cage where she had spent the afternoon, he immediately said, "This is epic. I can incubate here. But what do I do if someone lands in our love nest?""

Jack's words made Prissi's face flush. To create a diversion she asked, "What is going on? Why are you hiding?"

Jack ignored her.

"I'll stack these boxes and push them close to the back wall where it's darker. I can hide there."

Jack was still moving boxes when he said, "Hmmmm. Still not much cover. I'd be a rat in a cage."

"But, no one comes down here."

"It only takes one."

Jack walked out of the cage to the end of the long room where he yanked on a door handle.

"What's in here?"

"The heat and stuff...electricity."

As he turned back, Jack shook his head.

"Not good."

Prissi's shoulders slumped.

"I'd better go."

A wave of feeling, part panic and part pain, washed over Prissi. With a huge effort, she conquered both.

"No. Don't go. Not yet, anyway. No one will come. I'll go get food and be right back. What do you like?"

Jack, seemingly startled by the kindness, shrugged his narrow slouchy shoulders, "Anything. It's been awhile."

As Prissi raced up the basement stairs, she hit herself in the forehead with her fist. She ran through the lobby, caught a wing as she rushed through the door, flung herself from the top of the three step stoop and beat her wings madly. As soon as she was airborne, she dropped her left wing, pounded her right and made a sweeping turn down 21st Street toward the lights of Fifth Avenue three blocks away. By the time she got to the intersection with Lexington Avenue, she was over thirty meters in the air and moving fast; however the cold air rushing past her face did nothing to cool the heat in her cheeks.

Prissi kept climbing as she sped her way toward Park Avenue. When she reached sixty meters, she roared in confusion. The teener drew up her heels, dropped her head on to chest, folded her wings tight and did a triple somersault. She came out of the third flip so fast that when she flared her wings to stop her freefall, she felt the same pop in her right shoulder that she had experienced at Bissell. She dropped her legs to increase her drag before carefully beating her wings a half-dozen times to make sure everything still worked.

As she walked in to the EZ-Lam Global Market, Prissi was panting so hard she could only manage a choked As-salaam alaykum to Jiffy Apithy, the owner's third son, second-shift cashier, honors student in molecular engineering at NYU-Man and, most importantly, fellow soccer player. Prissi had spent hours of her first months in New York playing after school and weekend pick-up soccer games with a motley crew that included Jiffy. She greatly respected Jiffy's competitiveness, which, she was willing to admit, came close to equaling her own. Prissi grabbed a tote, and smiled at her friend before pointing toward the open deli display at the back of the store. The smile Jiffy tossed back was so big it was barely contained by the wide dimpled cheeks of his perfectly round face.

In a minor miracle, there were four mbatata biscuits left. Prissi snatched them like they were the crown jewels. She added a zip-bag of kibbe, lentils and onions, then, put it back as being too far-fetched, found nori-wrapped mahi-mahi and a container of fresh water shrimp spring rolls. She grabbed two bottles of Irn Bru, kefir and a 2 liter bottle of Arctic water. She hefted the tote, frowned, shrugged and packed it in her imagination before making her way back to Jiffy.

Prissi stood on the floor scale, wriggling impatiently as Jiffy scanned her flightcard. He put her purchases on the sale scale. The scale buzzed.

"You're a kilo over."

Prissi stared at the food for a second before flaring up at Jiffy.

"C'mon, Jiffy, let it go. You know I only live a couple of blocks away. Nothing's going to happen from here to there."

When Jiffy shook his head, the combed out hair on the top of his head swayed back and forth like sagebrush in a breeze, "I like Noramica. I want to stay."

Prissi tried her disgusted look.

"Zeusus, Jiffy, Malawi culture must be big on drama."

Jiffy's dark eyes, always warm and friendly, turned ice cold.

"It is not the culture in Malawi that is a drama, it is the living...which is mostly dying."

"I'm sorry. That was stupid...and mean."

Prissi took out the water bottle and walked down the aisle to put it back on its shelf. She paid and then opened her kanga-pak to arrange her purchases in the suggested order and orientation shown on the receipt. She bounced up and down a couple of times to settle the pak. Half-way out the door, Prissi turned back toward Jiffy, "Sometimes I can be very stupid."

Jiffy stared at her with his new eyes and waited five seconds before finally giving her a small nod of his head.

The energized confusion Prissi had felt flying to the market was replaced by a heavy-winged feeling of loss on the flight back. What was it about Jack that caused her to do stupid things, to hurt people she really liked?

An angry Prissi shoved open the basement door and muttered, "Hey, it's me," but, her anger sputtered when she opened the cage and didn't find Jack.

"Jack? Jack?"

At first, as she listened, she heard only the hair dryer drone of the heat pump, but then she heard a muffled sound, like a sweeping broom. Prissi tentatively moved toward the noise, which seemed to be coming from a cage at the far end of the basement.

"Jack?"

Jack's head rose from behind a wall of boxes. Prissi snapped the padlock that secured the door. It held.

"How'd you do that?"

Jack wriggled his boomerang-shaped eyebrows and offered Prissi a wry grin before he disappeared from view. Prissi heard the broom noise again, then a scraping sound like a small snow shovel cleaning a sidewalk. A second later Jack came out from behind the low wall of boxes in the Langue cage with a small screwdriver in his hand and a big smile across his dirty face. Somehow, Jack's smile made Prissi's elbows tingle.

"The sides are pretty flimsy."

The riled teener unzipped her kanga and offered the mbatata muffins.

"Africa's best."

Jack stood still. "Africa's best could still be Noramica's worst. What are they?"

Those words focused Prissi's thoughts. The tingle went away.

"I'm sure I can return them if they're not to your standards."

Jack's lips formed a word, but they made had no sound. The boy slid down on his haunches and began to shove food into his mouth.

"Sorry, though rich, I'm naïve. I just didn't know Africa had anything that was best."

Instead of expelling her words, Prissi stomped down the corridor and banged her fist against a cage.

"Are they good?"

Jack, with his cheeks bulging like a squirrel in autumn, nodded his head.

To get rid of the excess energy that was making her feel like gnats were biting her, Prissi stalked back and forth in front of the cages. On one pass, she looked down and studied how filthy Jack's hair was. On another pass, she thought she could smell his hair. It was kind of smoky like old bacon fat and maybe something fishy.

Jack finished the mbatata and started on the mahi-mahi. Despite the heat pump drone, Prissi could hear his mewling sounds as he ate. His sounds reminded her of a litter of kittens and, somehow, made it hard for her to breathe. She coughed twice. When the fish was gone, Jack began shoving the spring rolls into his mouth in a way that suddenly began to disgust her. If he had been hurt, maybe bleeding, or covered in vomit, or had his intestines spilling from a wound, she was sure that she would have been willing to help him; but eating the way he was eating, with rice noodles stuck to his chin and his jaws crushing through the bulge of food in his mouth, was harder to accept. The eating, the smell of his hair, the self-absorption began to revulse her.

Prissi hurried to the far wall to get away from Jack. As she held onto the wire of the last cage taking deep breaths, her eyes were drawn to a gray bin amid a jumble of boxes and broken chairs. Although the light was dim, the writing identifying the contents of the bin as schoolwork was in her mother's handwriting. During the half minute she stared at the container, Prissi could not come up with a plausible reason for why it would be there.

Feeling foolish even as she did it since she knew what the result would be, Prissi tugged on the padlock. It did not miraculously open. She cradled the lock in her palm as she studied it. Like the one of her cage door, it had five numbered wheels, which meant a possibility of 99,999 combinations. Fighting her intuition, Prissi made herself begin at 00000, tugged, advanced the far right rotor until it read one and tugged again. She was at 0027 when she heard Jack crush the container that had held the spring rolls. Reluctantly, Prissi let go of the lock and walked back down to her cage.

"This was great. The best and most I've eaten since I got here."

"Which was when?"

Even to herself, Prissi's thought her voice sounded like the eunuched charm that came from the venderators at school.

"Monday night."

"What's going on?"

Jack's eyes seemed to dull as he looked at something beyond the basement door. He pinched the skin of a cheekbone before rubbing the back of his grimy neck.

"You can ask, but I'm not sure I can give you an answer."

After a long silence, Prissi asked, "You're not running away, too, are you?"

Like a child's charade of a steam turbine, Jack's shoulders rose, a hiss of air escaped his lips, and, then, his shoulders slumped.

"Kinda. I mean my folks don't know where I am. But, really, I'm not running away. I hope I'm running toward."

"Joe?"

"Yeah. Since I kind of feel responsible that he took off, I want to help find him."

"How could you be responsible? I thought you and Joe didn't talk."

Jack flashed his biggest smile, "We don't. But, it was Christmas, at my grandfather's. There wasn't much choice. Better to talk about fledging and flying than some other topics."

When Jack waggled his eyebrows, Prissi raised one of hers and started to call him on what she guessed was a lie. Instead, her embarrassment over what he was insinuating, caused her to ask, "I thought you loved to fly."

"I do, but I like a lot of other things, too. Part of it is just growing up. Or, maybe accepting that for the first time in my life I didn't get to have what I wanted."

"Which was?"

"Play now. Fly later."

Instead of resenting Jack's life of privilege and his nonchalant self-centeredness, Prissi took a deep breath, pushed her wings far forward, and carefully slid down the cage door to sit on the floor opposite him.

Jack continued, "Joe didn't really have anything against flying. In fact, I know he'd love it. Obviously, he'd be good at it." Jack stopped as if waiting for Prissi to say something. He cocked his head sideways in a manner that reminded Prissi of a crow looking at something shiny in the grass before giving her another huge, consciously vulpine smile.

To get past the effects of his smile, Prissi said, "But, Joe loves hockey and he wasn't ready to give that up."

"Did he tell you that?"

"Indirectly."

Although he was still smiling, Jack's eyes locked onto Prissi's and didn't waver.

"Do you know where he went? That's mostly why I'm here. I thought he might have given you a clue about he was going to do. I know he trusted you."

Prissi shook her head resignedly. "No clue."

A couple of greasy plaits broke free from Jack's head when he mimicked Prissi's action. He grabbed the ends and began to twist them. Again, Prissi felt as though he was expecting her to say something. There was an uncomfortable silence until Jack leaned toward Prissi to say, "My dad told me that it might not be long before you'll be able to mute when you're in your twenties. He told me that Joe might be able to play hockey for fifteen more years. Be in the Olympics...then fledge and do whatever he," Jack laughed bitterly, "or, more importantly, the family wants."

"Like get your butt home, now?"

"Like that."

Prissi couldn't contain herself, "Jack, you know they've been promising that for fifty years and it hasn't happened. It's like a cure for herpes or acne. Always just around the corner, but it hasn't happened. How would you be feeling right now if you knew you had missed the window and never could fly? You shouldn't have told...."

Prissi never had a chance to finish her sentence. Her mypod chirped. It was her father. He was worried. When he found out that there was nothing wrong except that Prissi had run into a friend, he wondered when she was going to be home. Should he go out to get them something to eat? Rather than tell her father that she was down in the basement, Prissi reassured him that she would be home with dinner in twenty minutes.

"Look, I've got to go. Stay here. I'll be back as soon as I can."

Jack stood up. "I need to go out for awhile. I've got a hunch. If I go, can I get back in?"

"No."

"Okay, maybe, I'll stay. But don't take too long. I've got to keep moving...for Joe's and my own sake. Plus," the smile flashed like a shooting star, "a pining heart is a..."

When Prissi reached out to Jack, he stepped forward and held her tight. They swayed together like tidal seaweed for too many seconds before a weak-kneed Prissi shoved him back. Jack's eyes were big in surprise at the force Prissi used to disengage. She laughed.

"You misread my intentions."

She reached forward and plucked a convenient piece of rice noodle from the sparse stubble on his chin.

Jack grabbed her again and held her tight. Prissi felt his hands smoothing her feathers and fought the urge to let those caresses go on.

Finally, when she stiffened in his arms, Jack released her as he said, "I hope you don't misread mine."

Like a dog to its bowl, the wolfish grin bounded back onto Jack's face just before its owner slouched back down onto the floor.

An hour later, when Prissi pushed through the basement door after having eaten a quick Malay take-out with her father, she was surprised to find the basement dark. As she punched the light-switch, she whispered Jack's name. She half-expected him to play Jack-in-the-box a second time. She walked past all of the cages until she was in front of the utility room door. She tried the handle to see if he might have figured out how to get past that lock. When the handle didn't turn, she spun back around to catch him sneaking up on her, but the room was empty. She hurried back to the Langue storage area and looked behind the re-arranged totes. No Jack there, and no Jack hiding in any of the storage areas.

No Jack. No Joe.

When Prissi plopped herself down on a black crate, it protested with an angry sigh. She tried to figure out what she had done to cause Jack to leave. Her hand drifted to her face where her fingers played with her pimples like the buttons on an accordion. She sat, thought, regretted, grew angry, at him, at herself, at it, and finally, when there were no more targets, she slumped and stared at the tips of her wings. She savored her unhappiness. She probed and prodded the tenderest spots like a defeated fighter poking at the greenest of a set of bruises.

Finally, having grown bored with her self-indulgence, Prissi pushed herself to her feet. It wasn't until she snapped the lock shackle to secure the Langue cage that she remembered the tote in the other cage. This time when she stood in front of the wire door, she listened to her intuition. She rotated the dials of the lock until they duplicated the combination for the lock on the Langue cage. When she gave a tug, the lock opened.

Prissi took a few seconds to listen to the building's sighs and groans before opening the door. Once inside, the teener brushed aside her lifeless mouse fur hair and used her feet to push aside the boxes surrounding the one with her mother's writing. She spread her wings enough to kneel down. Her hands hovered over the gray container before her trembling hands began peeling back its shipping seals.

The top layer held boxes filled with Prissi's art and homework assignments from elementary school. As the motherless refugee opened the boxes, along with all of the memories, came the faintest smell of Africa. The next layer contained a flash album, which was all black because of dead solar batteries. It would take hours of exposure to light to see what pix it held. There was another ancient album with images on paper protected behind plastic sleeves. Prissi couldn't remember seeing that before. Taking her time, she found two pix of the young woman who had been holding hands in Pequod Jones' pix. In one, the woman, wearing a lab coat and a serious face, was leaning over something which looked like an aquarium. In the second image, the woman, who Prissi was sure was her mother with a half century of living removed from her face, was standing on top of a mountain in jeens and heavy boots. Prissi took the pix from the album thinking that she would add them to her arsenal for when she battled her father for her family's past.

The third layer held banded stacks of letters. When Prissi flipped through the relics, she saw that most of them were from her father to her mother. Two were not. They were from someone named Al Burgey who lived in New Jersey.

On the bottom of the box Prissi found a red plastic filo. When she opened it she discovered a small bag covered with a pattern of tiny red and black beads. Opening the bag, Prissi found a spiral crystal, banded in gold, and suspended on a heavy link gold chain. This was a piece of her mother's jewelry she had never seen before. When Prissi held the crystal up to the light, its interior was hazy with tiny fractures. She dropped the pendant over her head and tucked it inside her shirt. It felt good to have something of her mother's against her skin. It was good until that feeling started to make her eyes itch.

Prissi went back to her exploring. At the very bottom of the box, she found a large, tattered composition book. It only took her a minute to realize that its pages contained her mother's notes, ideas and observations about different scientific experiments.

As the entranced girl read, she fingered the pendant. Most of her mother's work seemed to be focused on mutancy. There was no mention of Centsurety, but Prissi was now even more sure that her mother had worked there for Joshua Fflowers. Her hands vibrated as she held and read the evidence of a secret life her mother had lived.

After spending twenty minutes thumbing through the notebooks, Prissi had no better idea of what her mother had been working on other than that it involved a mutancy project which brought more frustration than satisfaction. When Prissi turned the last page of the notebook, she saw from the remaining scraps that many pages had been torn out.

Prissi compared the first entry in the notebook with the last and wondered why she had never heard a single word about the three years her mother had spent doing this work. She wondered why the notebook and pendant and pix were in a tote in the wrong storage area. And, lastly, she wondered if there could be a connection between the things before her and her mother's suicide.

In frustration, Prissi used her outstretched feet to shove the boxes away from her. She flared her wings, flexed her shoulders, and rolled her neck. She took a deep breath, held it, slowly released it, and began her story: She was not the evil spawn. Instead, her mother was an evil...no, her mother was a good scientist who worked with evil ones...a good scientist who had been going to blow the whistle on the evil scientists. Who had found out what she was going to do...and tried to stop her? Someway—she would have to work that out later—the good scientist had evaded her fate by going underground. Years later, she had resurfaced in Burundi as a housewife who helped her scientist husband help mankind and adored her daughter, and....unbidden by Prissi, her story's unwanted ending came...who committed suicide.

Prissi shook her head. That couldn't be the right ending. It couldn't be. She packed everything back in the box as she had found it, except for the pix and the pendant. She locked the wire door and was on her way out when she noticed a small piece of paper wedged into the chicken wire of the Langue cage.

Opening the note, she read: 213? SFE-B/TZT/K.

Since Prissi knew it hadn't been there earlier, she assumed that it was some kind of coded message from Jack. One of the things she was beginning to hate about Jack was that when he tried to be mysterious, he came off as being either snarky or stupid.

Feeling that she didn't have the time, Prissi shoved the paper in her pocket. She didn't need for everything to be so cryptic. She headed upstairs to interrogate Beryl Langue...her purported father.

* * *

It was after midnight before Prissi got in her bed. Although she was exhausted, she tossed and turned as she thought about what her father had and hadn't told her.

They had sat in the living-room—she sprawled on the couch, he, after carefully draping his frayed gray wings, sitting stiff and upright in a century's old captain's chair. Prissi's strategy had been to work on her father's past before confronting him with her mother's history and, finally, her suicide, but, on a whim, she had begun her interrogation by asking him if her mother ever had been a scientist. After a long pause, her father nodded his head yes. Thinking of the pix Pequod Jones had shown her, Prissi persisted. Was it a long time ago? Well, it would have to have been. Was it possible that she was a meta-mutanist? He had never been sure what that phrase meant. After all, how much change was a big change? Growing impatient, Prissi asked if Nora Elieson had worked for Joshua Fflowers. Beryl Langue said that he didn't know the answer to that, but that he himself had occasionally seen Joshua Fflowers because, back then, Fflowers still went to conferences and spent time with scientists. Prissi decided to return to her original plan. What had Beryl Langue worked on back then? Her father shrugged. Like all scientists, he worked on little pieces of puzzles. Exasperated, Prissi had asked, what kinds of puzzles. Her father took his time before answering that just before mid-century a lot of time and research money had been spent on expanding the parameters of meta-mutancy. Prissi asked if he meant flying. His nod was barely discernible in the low light of the living room. Certainly, flying, in the broadest sense. Even his re-gen work was an off-shoot of flying. Flying and nanotics had been the money magnets. Everything had to be linked in some way to those two topics if it was going to get funding. Just like the money had once been tied to TB, AIDs and nuclear bombs. Wing design, especially deltas, had gotten its share. He had done some work on remige edges. Prissi let her father ramble on about feathers and wing designs even though she didn't believe it was anything other than a delaying tactic.

When her father finally sputtered to a stop and started to push himself out of his chair, Prissi knocked him back by immediately asking: What else was being researched? Beryl Langue had to think about that. It had been a long time ago. Finally, he said nothing was coming back to him.

Prissi asked if her mother had ever worked on delayed fledging. He shrugged and said he didn't know the specifics of all of her research. He shook his head, almost as if he were denying what he was saying. Since everything tended to be connected, it certainly was possible that some of what she worked on might have been related. He paused before saying that any efforts in that area obviously hadn't been useful because delayed fledging still was proving to be an intractable problem.

Prissi started to ask another question when her father stopped her. "Why the sudden interest in the past? I thought science had proved that the last thing a fifteen-year old girl is interested in is her parents."

Figuring that she had as much right to dissemble as her father, Prissi avoided saying Smarkzy's name but told Beryl Langue about the lecture on False Paths. He was nodding in approval until she mentioned her idea of the Lost Path. That something wonderful had been discovered and then lost at a company named Centsurety that Joshua Fflowers had owned. The mention of Centsurety froze her father. He stared at her. A finger rose to make a point. He opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his head. Finally, he said, "I suggest you find something more useful to do."

Prissi always had thought of her father as either too nice or too naïve to lie. But, tonight, after listening to his words, especially after the mention of Centsurety, and noting the hesitations, watching his eyes with their slight shifts and darting glances, Prissi had known that her father was lying to her. In a way, though it was frustrating and made her angry, it also made her feel a new respect for him.

Propped up in her bed, unconsciously smoothing her feathers and massaging her sore shoulder, Prissi gloated that all her father had done was to make her even more eager to find out how her mother was connected to Joshua Fflowers. If she could immerse herself in figuring out that connection, then maybe, just maybe, that would keep the other, bigger question at bay.

But not until tomorrow. As soon as her mind allowed the smallest wedge, the bigger question filled the molasses thick, black, suddenly claustrophobic air of her bedroom.

Why had her mother committed suicide?

The teener's breathing became shallow and fast as she thought of all the things she had done, or hadn't done, that would make her mom want to let go of her life. Prissi couldn't stand it. She swept her arms through the night's murk to dispel them. When that didn't work, Prissi changed tactics....

....Jack had held her and his lips had been....

# CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A Row and then a Row

Joe starts awake in the thick pitch black dark with the rough skin of callused fingers rubbing his lips.

"It's okay. It's me."

In the silence of the underground space, Blesonus' whisper sounds like distant thunder. Joe, after being pushed and nudged, rolls his cold crampy body, as unwieldy as a memfoam mattress, into a sitting position.

"You're lucky I found you. What are you doing down here?"

Joe is far too groggy to make up much of a story.

"I couldn't sleep. I wandered off. I was going left, right, left right, but I forgot. I ended up here and just stopped—both because I was tired and because I was afraid that the farther I went the worse off I'd be."

Blesonus sniggers in disbelief, "For a smart boy from a fancy school, your penmanship isn't too good."

"What do you mean?"

"You've left some t's uncrossed and some i's undotted. Like the thumbprints. The pot of paint. Anyone lost in a cave is going to follow passages that go up, not deeper. You told me your school has prided itself on the honor of its students for two hundred years. Why not just tell the truth and say that you were trying to escape."

"Do you have a light?"

Joe hears a rustling, then, Blesonus' face and a small section of the tunnel appear in the algae green glow of a lumenaid.

"I wasn't trying to escape. I was just trying to explore enough so that if, or when, I do want to escape, I will know how to get away."

Blesonus tousles Joe's hair in a way that makes him feel very uncomfortable.

"From what I can see, you still have more to learn. You should thank Mother I found you. While we Greenlanders know the whole mountain, there are many tunnels where no one goes for weeks. You could have died. The cold down here is patient. It doesn't kill you in hours like it might above if you were out in bad weather, but in a day or two, without proper clothing, it will slowly, but absolutely surely, drain your life away."

By now, Joe is alert enough to know that his best response is to be both meek and beholden.

"You're right. I am lucky. You're a good friend. I'm lucky to have you watching over me. How did you happen to come looking for me?"

"I was up. I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about how delicate our lives are here. When I fell, it wasn't just tea and salt that was lost. I also lost my sense of belonging. You go along day by day thinking things are the same, but everyday things change, but, usually, a day's change is too small to be seen. It took that fall for me to understand that what we had here for years and years was a true community. The threads that bound us were of the tightest knit, the strongest mesh. Now, that's gone. We have no community, only a fiefdom, a little duchy run with fear and shame by our mad duchess."

Blesonus' voice has dropped below a whisper.

Joe Fflowers has lots of experience with the power that a wedge can have when carefully placed and firmly tapped. He often has practiced that art at the family dinner table. And, certainly the rock walls around him give eloquent testimony to the power of something small, but sharp, being able to destroy something much larger than itself.

The boy touches the woman's wrist. After a moment, she covers her light. They sit shoulder to shoulder inside their black blanket and whisper. More than an hour passes before they rise and Blesonus leads her charge back to the Kin.

At dinner that night, a meal of chewy grain and faded greens, Joe looks at the faces and torsos of the twenty-eight women seated around the table. Despite Blesonus' revelation that everyone in the room, with the exception of himself, is female, he is having a very hard time accepting that. There are seven at the table who, if he were asked to categorize, he would have said were men. With their short hair, broad shoulders and cheeks that look like they are darkened by more than just the shadows cast by the flickering torches, what else could they be?

From the care with which the portion of salt that he saved is dispensed and the obvious enjoyment that it brings, Joe guesses that it has been awhile since salt has been on the table. As he methodically chews the half-cooked porridge until it forms a paste soft enough to swallow, Joe wonders how long this folly can endure.

It takes Joe several days to complete his plan. When the time comes, he stuffs his pockets with a map Blesonus has made for him and two lumenaids. He fills the small canvas bag she has given him with with licorice and dried cherries. He takes his pak and coat, and, just before dinner, stashes them in a shallow alcove past the entrance of the fourth turn of his escape route.

Near the end of the dinner, after he has eaten his fill and more, Joe loudly interrupts Rholealy as she tells a story to make a joke. The first time he does it, she turns her head and stares. The second time, the old woman raises two gnarled fingers, then, cuts a swath through the air. After the third interruption, those sitting along the benches began to squirm in anticipation of the reward for incurring Rholealy's wrath. The crone motions to Joe.

"You, boy, come here."

Joe shakes his head in dismissal as he reaches for another apple, not that much smaller nor more wizened than the face of the woman who summons him.

"Now, boy."

Joe slowly rises, then saunters around the corner of the table. As he approaches, Rholealy takes the wisteria vine staff she uses to walk and raises it as a weapon. In a movement as fluid as lifting an opponent's stick on the ice, Joe grabs the staff, rips it from the old woman's hand, and flings it across the room. The sharp sucking noise of shock fills the room. When Rholealy raises her thin arm to strike him, Joe pushes it aside and forces the crone's face down into her porridge.

The immediate outcry at this unthinkable outrage is followed by sudden and complete silence.

A dozen of the Greenlanders trade glances with one another before six women rise up to come to the aid of their leader.

Joe dismisses their efforts with a wave of his hand.

"Why protect this old witch? She's weak."

When Rholealy attempts to lift her head, Joe holds it down and pushes it back and forth on the plate as if it were a piece of bread mopping up gravy.

"Weak. And insane. Your poor mad queen. She's ruined your Kin, your lair, your beliefs, your best hopes. Look."

Joe takes Rholealy's glass of cider and pours it on her head.

"This is whom you fear? Depose this fraud. Get yourself a real leader."

As she and Joe have rehearsed, Blesonus jumps up from her place, hurries across the room, grabs Rholealy's staff and runs at Joe with the stick raised high in the air, "How dare you! Leave! Now!"

Joe backs away from the threat, pushes through the door and hears the hoped-for cheers as he races down the gloomy tunnel toward his gear.

It takes Joe more than two hours to make his way to the opening which leaves him closest to the Hudson River. During those long minutes, he battles his doubts that Blesonus actually has helped him to escape rather than wander lost until he weakens and dies far beneath his world.

When he finally crawls out of the needle-eyed opening and slides around the rocks and through the brush that hide the mouth of the tunnel, Joe is overwhelmingly relieved to be free and glad to see that the night sky is as clear as it had been during the day when he and Blesonus had decided that the time was right. With clear skies and clean air, the half-moon throws enough light that Joe can keep moving. The bolt-hole he has exited is at the top of a steep grade of rough-edged rock with a scattering of spindly scrub eking out a life from the soil trapped in the clefts of the rocks. As Blesonus had explained, to conceal its presence, there is no path leading from the tunnel's opening. Joe catches his breath as he studies the terrain before him and tries to pick a way which will lead him safely down the mountain.

To the south, the proud youth can see a sinuous break in the forest, which he assumes is the logging road Blesonus has advised he use as his escape route. Even though the abandoned road is overgrown, supposedly, it will lead him to a county road, which, after eight kliks, will bring him close enough to the river that he will be able to hear it.

It is after midnight, and all the licorice and cherries have been eaten, before Joe comes to the edge of the Hudson. The kayak which he steals from under the porch of a ramshackle cabin is ancient. Cocooned in cobwebs, its cockpit filled with rotted pine needles, the green polypropylene of its surface cracked and checked like a Renaissance painting, it does not reassure Joe with its seaworthiness. But, within an hour after launching it into the Hudson, Joe is confident enough that he tightens the skirt and steers the quirky boat away from the shoreline he has been cautiously hugging. He veers toward mid-stream to catch more of the silvery current hurrying on its way south.

Long hours later, as the sun awakes with a long pale yellow yawn, Joe shouts with joy at the warmth that yellow promises. His body is violently shivering from the mist and spray which has been coming off the river and burrowing its way inside his coat. Throughout the night's slow hours, the colder the stripling got, the more spastic his paddling became and, consequently, the more river water bounced off the skirt and onto his coat. However, even as Joe's body grew colder, his thoughts became more feverish.

The old Joe Fflowers is gone...and he can't be found now because his i-tag is gone, too. The old Joe is gone and this new, unnamed, boy is free. Truly free. He can go anywhere. He will need more money than what he brought from school, but there are ways to get that. Easy ways. He is alone, but not lonely. He never wants to see his family again. He is tired of being hidden and protected from the world, like a miser's hoard, because of his family's wealth. He is tired of being told what and how he must be. He is free...except for his looks. With all the Fflowers money, there will lots of people looking for him. He will need to do things to his face and hair so that he won't be recognized. But, like the money, that can be easily done. He recalls the Greenlander women who he thought were men. First, he will change his looks and, after that, he will change himself. He will become someone else. Someone who makes his way in the world because of what he does and not because of who he is.

When the sky is just shy of full light, Joe falls off the current and heads toward the shoreline. Although there is almost no possibility that anyone can know where he is, he doesn't want to take a chance that Blesonus has betrayed him or that another of the Greenlanders has signaled someone to look for him. He hugs the edge of the ever widening Hudson until he spies a rough-shingled cottage nestled in a small opening carved out of the woods. After landing, dragging the kayak out of the water, and stashing it behind a rat's nest of debris left behind by a past flood, Joe holds to the shadows of the woods as he makes a horseshoe reconnoiter of the cabin. Not until he is certain that the cabin is uninhabited does Joe draw close and peek into the windows. A minute later, he uses a rock to break a small pane and unlock the window. Ten minutes after that Joe is asleep in a glorious cold, damp, sagging, musty smelling bed.

As Joe's legs spark and quiver, as his arm muscles tighten from the paddles' pull, Joe's mind dives ever deeper into a dark, safe place.

When the escapee finally awakes, slowly and reluctantly letting go of a color-saturated image of an immense piece of cake, cake with an aroma of vanilla so intense that he can still smell it after waking, the sun is far along on its journey to the west. Joe wakes relieved, but ravenous and with arms that weigh too much to move. Finally hunger exceeds enervation. Taking his time as he rolls his shoulders and flexes his aching hands, Joe pokes through the sagging cupboards. Next to the sink, he finds chain saw oil, mosquito repellent, mouse traps, and candle stubs in a cookie tin. In a shallow cupboard meant to hold guns, back when guns were legal, he discovers jars of sesame butter and grape jelly and three vacpacs of quinoa and curry soup. Not sure of how to safely open the gas line to the stove, Joe eats the soups cold. Even cold, he thinks they taste better than anything he has eaten with the Greenlanders.

The sun still has a way to fall but the western shore already is in shadow when Joe puts the kayak back in. In the same way as he had paddled the night before, he begins with caution, but as the sky turns to slate and shale and the forest's shadows lengthen, Joe follows their progress away from shore.

The runaway gives a hoot of satisfaction when the moon rises and he can see that it is bigger than the night before. It excites him that already he is enough of a riverman that he can recognize the day's difference—he doubts than anyone else at Dutton could do it. He also is comforted with the knowledge that as he makes his way south and the river grows in size and strength that the moon, too, will grow with it. He begins to sing as he skims his way along—the same songs that would get mangled coming home from a hockey win. For the next few minutes Joe's thoughts switch from wanting an audience to watch his adventure, to wanting teammates to share it, to being happy that he is the kind of man who can make his own solo way.

The runaway has been paddling for several hours when he notices that he is having trouble keeping the kayak on course. The Hudson's ever broadening rolling surface is fractured into a million watery moonlit hills, rills and valleys. A current of warm southerly air is buffeting the prow of the kayak as the wind fights its way across the current. Twenty minutes later, clouds, looking like sideways clusters of the darkest grapes, hurtle across the sky. Joe is so busy keeping the kayak pointing south that the clouds almost reach the moon before he realizes that he is about to lose his light. That tardy insight comes when he is hundreds of meters from shore. He pulls hard to angle his way back to the western bank and safety, but that angle puts the freshening winds right on his prow.

After a minute of slow progress, Joe decides that the safer course is to paddle across the wind rather than directly into it. He digs in on his port side until the kayak points toward a bump of land far down river on the eastern shore. When Joe tries to cross through the middle of the river, he can feel the current grow stronger through the thin skin of his boat. A powerful stream of water within the river itself takes hold of the kayak and shoots it downstream. When Joe redoubles his efforts to push through the current, the kayak slips sideways. In a split second, a well of water builds up behind the kayak's port side. Joe leans against the rising gunwale. He digs in his paddle but it is too late. The kayak rises up, hovers, and flips over. Although Joe is already cold from his hours in the river, that cold is nothing compared to what he feels when his head and torso plunge into the Hudson's black swirling waters.

The shock tries to paralyze him, but even as he loses control, Joe starts his own rescue. Dozens of times over the years at his summer camp, he has practiced kayak rollovers and recoveries. When his head goes under, his lungs are full. He shifts his fulcrum from left to right. He knows that the secret of a recovery is not to panic and to continue the momentum of the rollover. In camp, during the day, with warm, still lake water and counselors all about, a capsize had been fun. A quick way to cool down. You are right side up, a moment later upside down and a moment after that, right side up again. All in friendly water.

Now, suddenly, the water is angry. Angry and black to blind him. Angry and cold to slow him. Angry and fast to exhaust him. And...Joe realizes as he struggles to right himself while hurtling down the massive surge of water...the water has an ally. His winter coat, which has kept him mostly warm and mostly dry, has turned into a millstone. Its bulk and sodden weight works to keep him upside down. As he twists to bring the kayak broadside to the current so that the force which flipped him over will help to right him, the coat, now like a spongy anchor, thwarts his efforts.

Joe is so caught up in his fight against coat and current that his lungs are already white hot and desperately hungry for oxygen even before he decides to open the skirt so that he can escape. His fingers fumble and fumble again until all of Joe's attention is drawn to some unfamiliar part of his brain which is screaming at him to open his mouth.

First, yellow spots and then oozing patches of red crowd in from the edges of his tightly closed lids. Joe's hands let go of the paddle so that they can tear at the coat. The thought occurs to him that even though the Hudson is tormenting the kayak, it really is benign. It is the coat that wants him dead. He rips at its snaps and tears at the nelkro that is strangling him.

In his ears, a sound louder than a descending jet shrieks at Joe to breathe deep. When he fights off that command, his tormentor changes to the softest whisper. Take a breath. Just a sip. Just a sip. Just the smallest sip. In his mind, filled with a thousand jumbled images, like debris from a flood, Joe sees his coat sleeves writhing in the water like lamprey eels, like leeches, come to take his arms. In horror, he flails his arms first to evade their attack, then, pounds them in counter-attack.

Just as the eels let go, red spreads full across his eyelids like a stunning sunset. The shriek is back again. It pierces his ears and this time Joe does as he is told. He opens his mouth to take a sip...just the slightest sip.

# CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Flight and Fight

Despite her persistent attempts to uncover her parents' past, both by direct questioning and more than two hours of ogling before she fell asleep, Prissi woke up the next morning feeling frustrated. She decided to get out of the apartment to see if she could clear her mind. Although she felt too distracted to fly, the winger cheated as she walked down 21st Street toward the East River by slightly spreading her wings to let the following wind give her a push. She crossed First Avenue and climbed the stairs to the FDR levee. Once on top, she took a deep breath of salty air and stared across the mile wide soup of gray water to the misty ghosts of what had been Brooklyn.

When the world's waters began to rise, a decision was made that Manhattan was too important to the psyche of the country to abandon all of it. When the same argument was made to save the other New York boroughs, southern senators, who had been forced to abandon New Orleans early in the century, voted against providing funds for any other part of the city that was below sea level. Walkers continued to live in Brooklyn in the heights, as well as in Manhattan south of Houston Street, but that lifestyle was a complicated one of illegal squats, small boats, unpotable water, hydrocycles and dodging the house hawks.

Standing on top of the levee, Prissi watched a pod of dolphins cavorting in the choppy waters near the base of the Williamsburg Bridge. Ferries and a handful of pleasure boats, as well as a couple of gypsy water taxis, were tatting frothy gray lace with their wakes. The teener tried to think of a good reason why her father would be so close-mouthed about her mother's early years as a scientist. After failing to breach that wall, she had badgered him about his own early life. She had circled around and back to those years for over an hour before giving up. It was obvious that he was hiding something, but what that something was remained a mystery. Prissi couldn't decide whether it was fear or shame or something more benign that was making her honest, forthright father deflect her questions. What she did know was that if she couldn't get the truth from her father about his past, she certainly had no chance of getting him to divulge anything about her mother, especially about how and why she had died.

Prissi celled Nasty Nancy to tell her that she had spent her first day home at the NYPD digging around in the Joshua Fflowers papers trying to find out about a company Dr. Smarkzy had talked about. Prissi ignored her friend's sniff when Nancy heard Smarkzy's name. Knowing that Nancy would have no intrinsic interest in helping her do research, Prissi dangled bait. The records she was going through were supposedly off-limits to the public. Some kind of mystery about Joe and Jack's grandfather. Prissi inveigled her roomie by playing up Nasty Nancy's great detective skills. Could, would Nancy fly over to NYPD and dig around with her? Lunch would be Prissi's treat?

Nancy didn't say anything for awhile.

"What's the name of the company?"

"Centsurety."

"What business were they supposed to be in?"

"Something with meta-mutation."

"Sounds more like a life insurance company. I'll bet there were a million of those kinds of companies back then. How long ago?"

"Maybe sixty."

Prissi fought off the twinges of guilt that were making her cheeks tighten.

"If they don't show up much, they must have been really unimportant. What's that noise?"

"Outdoors. I'm over on the FDR."

"Well, Cilly, that's certainly banal. Are you feeling your spirits lifting as you commune with nature?"

Although she hated Nancy's nickname for her, Prissi managed a laugh, "More my scraggly hair and dirty wing tips, but, you know something, Nano, the longer I'm at Dutton, with all of that space, the harder it is to stay in the apartment for days on end."

Hearing a nickname Prissi didn't use much anymore softened Nancy's edge.

"Migod, Prissi, don't go native. Actually I've got cabin fever, too. Two days with my parents is about thirty-six hours too long. Come to NJ and we'll shop."

"No. Shopping makes me crazy. I only want what I can't afford."

The silence was so long Prissi looked to see if she had dropped the call. Finally, Nancy whispered, "Look, I'll meet you in...two hours and help you track down your mysterious company."

"Do you really think you can help?"

"No, Prissi, it's my snarky self coming out. I can't go another minute without seeing you. My heart pines. My lips...."

"Yuck, Nancy. Don't do that. It gives me the creeps."

And it did give Prissi the creeps even though she was 99...well, maybe 91%, sure that Nasty Nancy did it just to get the response that Prissi had just given her.

"By the lions."

"By the lions, unless it starts raining."

Although Prissi was eager to have Nancy's help, she didn't mind having two hours to kill, or probably more, since her roomie was always late. Since it was such a beautiful day, the pent-up adolescent decided to go for a fly-about. Standing at the edge of the levee, she took a moment to pre-flight herself. She eye-hooked her vest and clipped her hair back from her face. She checked to see that her wrist and ankle cuffs were tight. She pushed and tugged her kanga-pak to be sure that everything in it also was snugged tight. She pointed a hand into the air, oriented it north and pushed the anemometer button on her mypod—west southwest at 12 knots. Prissi figured that was enough wind to give her a good workout without exhausting herself. She flapped, kicked and was in the air. She was feeling so upbeat she considered immediately flying out over the water, but all wingers were trained to fly for at least three minutes before going anyplace where it might be difficult to land. Usually, Prissi was intrepid, but, with her shoulder having popped twice lately, she decided to be cautious.

Winging was no different than swimming. A muscle pull, a charley horse, low blood sugar or volatile weather, and what should have been fun, could turn life-threatening in an instant. Prissi dropped her right shoulder, half tucked that wing and veered south. She climbed to just over twenty meters and followed the levee.

When the waters around New York first had begun to rise, Francis Phange, a senator from Massachusetts and leader of the Ecoists' caucus, had managed to stall federal permitting by the Environmental Projection Agency to the Army Corps of Engineering to construct a levee around the entire island of Manhattan. His argument, and that of his party, had been that since it was Big Business that had caused, or accelerated global warming and it was Big Business that had used its political clout to delay taking action against GW until it was too late, then it was Big Business that should suffer the consequences. Big Business needed to be taught a lesson. Since the lesson was to be taught to the arrogant people of New York, the representatives of many of the Big Ag and Big Service states joined forces with Phange. Even after the permits finally were issued, Phange and his allies managed to stall federal funding.

The young governor of New York, DeWitt Clinton, the mayor, and a coterie of major New York City business leaders tried to put together a regional coalition to fund the rescue project, but both New Jersey and Connecticut saw the situation as an opportunity, after two hundred fifty years, to get out from under Gotham's shadow. After a ten-year battle, the federal government did provide funding, but the enabling legislation specified that the levee was not to extend south of Houston Street. Wall Street was to be sacrificed to expiate the capitalist pride and greed that had cost the country years of economic well-being during the Great Foreclosure Exposure of 2008-2016.

Since it was just after the morning rush hour, Prissi was one of the few wingers in the air along the FDR. Of those who were flying, almost all were going uptown. As she flew further south toward Houston Street, the buildings along the levee began to be more rundown. Piles of trash dotted the curbs. The people below her who were walking on the levee or riding their bikes seemed to be mostly from the southern hemisphere.

Once she flew past where the levee turned west along Houston Street, Prissi entered a twilight area of the city. All of the buildings south of the levee had been declared uninhabitable more than forty years before; however from the number of small boats in the streets and the number of vegetable gardens and grills on the roofs, it was obvious the area in what once had been called Little Italy and the Bowery, still had lots of people living above the water line, although below the poverty line.

A few blocks further south, the number of boats shrank and the shorter buildings canted in all directions as a result of the water-soaked land beneath them. The taller ones, since they had been more valuable at the time, had been interlaced together with steel girders and guy wires as a temporary measure while the political battles had been fought. Now, decades later, the steel beams holding them together were a rusted web. Every couple of months an adventurous, usually newly fledged, winger, would be killed trying to nightfly through the maze of corroded steel. Prissi herself had felt a tug to try her skills in that deadly puzzle, but if something happened—she was hurt or stopped by a housing hawk overflying the ruins—she would get her wings clipped until she was twenty-one. Even though she had only been flying for a year, the young winger could not imagine going back to being earth-bound.

Prissi raised her chin, dropped her feet and flew toward a sun clawing its way up a ladder of clouds in the eastern sky. At seventy-five meters the air was appreciably colder—her mypod displayed an effective air temperature of 42. When EATs got below forty, wingers had to be extra careful of becoming exhausted. The girl climbed until she was higher than most of the decrepit ruins along the edge of the island. She spread her wings as far as she could, then tilted them slightly forward to get more lift. As she went into a sustained glide, she opened her mouth wide and shouted, "Freeieekin fenomenal!" A second later she began singing a horribly off-key rendition of the Dylantones anthem from the 70s, "Blown in the Wind."

"How many years must a girl look up, before she can fly in the sky?"

Prissi began alternating wing beats so that she slalomed back and forth, from over the river to almost brushing against the sides of the buildings. As she sang and slalomed her way south, the buildings got worse. Some structures remained intact but a corner had sunk into the sludge beneath so that they seemed to lean forward in anticipation. Others had huge cracks which ran from ground level up to their crenellated tops. The sight of so much destruction wrought by the world's rising seas began to depress Prissi and caused her to change her plan. Instead of circling around the tip of the island, she banked toward the river and felt the westerly wind shift behind her. Taking advantage of those winds, she beat hard as she followed the skeletal remains of the Williamsburg Bridge east into Brooklyn.

As she flew farther east, she began to climb, first past one hundred fifty and then two hundred meters. The EAT dropped to 14 degrees. Her cheeks felt like they were on fire from the cold. Two hundred fifty meters was the highest she had ever flown and almost twice as high as her teener permit allowed. The view was spectacular. Looking east, she could see Long Island with its scores of islands, formed from where the waters had risen along the low lying areas, looking like an immense bolt of polka dotted material. Far to the east she thought she could see an intense, unbroken green which she guessed was the Pale, the area of wilderness that grew up after the Great Fire ended the Ticklish Situation. Prissi flew east until she could see the details of broken windows and rusty stains on the abandoned JFK airport towers and terminals jutting out from the waters on the northeast corner of Jamaica Bay.

After checking the time, Prissi made a sweeping turn away from the sun and to the south and west until she was flying above the coast line. Looking down, she witnessed a giant school of fish, changing shape like an amoeba, as it followed the contours of the shore. When she got to Sheepshead, she dropped down to one hundred meters and turned north. She flew over Prospect Park, then, crossed back into Manhattan by flying over the triple towers of the Brooklyn Bridge.

From Prissi's height, the southern tip of Manhattan looked as if it had been destroyed by bombs. Twenty-story high piles of interlocked debris were the cairns created when Wall Street skyscrapers had fallen. They reminded Prissi of the drip castles she had made with the sands on Lake Tanganyika's shore. Dropping down to twenty meters, Prissi skirted the southern edge of the island, dismissed the urge to swing out to Liberty, and began flying north along the west edge of the island just above the wide brown swath of the Hudson River.

By the time she flew over the Holland Tunnel Memorial—one of the early victims of the rising water—Prissi wasn't sure that she could make it to the datarium. Fifteen seconds later, the exhausted girl wasn't sure she could even make it back to the relative safety north of the levee. Prissi berated herself for being so stupid and for pushing the limits with her high flying antics. She veered right so that if she faltered, she would be over land, but a forced landing in the area beneath her was almost as dangerous, although of a very different type, than being forced down over the Hudson. Prissi's growing fear began to crowd out her goal. The teener fought the urge to pant. She fought the urge to give in to the cold that had found its way deep into her bones. She pushed back the notion that her wings were too heavy to lift. She yelled at herself that she wasn't tired. She whispered to herself to set a goal. Ten more beats. She made that. She paused for one beat to rest, lost altitude, then set another goal. Eight beats. She made that, too, but her wings were quivering and her altitude had dropped to less than five meters. Six more. Prissi could see the wavering shadow of the levee just two blocks ahead. Four. Five. Three more beats....

When Prissi landed on the broken surface of the Houston levee, she landed hard. She caught a toe, started to plunge forward, but managed to avoid disaster by grabbing a corner of a levee bench. She spread her wings and leaned forward so that her elbows rested on her knees. Over the next three minutes her breaths went from white hot, to fiery red, to warm. As the pain and nauseating fear slowly subsided, it was replaced with a pride that made her muscles glow like after a deep tissue massage. She had made it. She unclipped her hair and worked shaky fingers though the damp tangled strands.

To be sure she was okay and to give the last of her fear a chance to evaporate, Prissi decided to walk for a couple of blocks before making the last leg of her flight.

She was taking slow steps on Eighth Avenue, just north of Walker Park, when three keds with dirty hands and over-sized clothes came lurching out of an alley and across her path. Prissi guessed that they weren't more than twelve or thirteen years old. With their glazed eyes, soggy plastic bags and over-sized sneaker shuffle, she guessed they had to be high on ethanol. Prissi considered veering toward the other side of the street, but she figured that, even if they wanted to roust her, their reflexes were so moked that they wouldn't be able to do much more than the shuffling they were doing. The boys stopped as soon as they realized Prissi was alone. As they stared at one another, the shortest boy, who had greasy black strands of hair framing a wraith-thin face and piggy eyes, which now were fighting off the vacancy he had spent the morning acquiring, scuttled sideways. The other two, featureless in the shadows of their hoods, reluctantly dropped their bags of dreams and took two steps closer to Prissi in an attempt to herd her toward the building. Despite her total exhaustion just minutes before, Prissi could feel a runnel of adrenaline begin flowing through her body.

The waifwraiths took another half-step. Their quarry bared her teeth, barked, and surprised them by leaping toward the building rather than away. Prissi planted her left foot high on the wall, pushed and flapped. She dug her right foot into the rough brownstone and flapped again. By the third flap, she was three meters in the air. The boys jumped forward to catch her heels, but their coordination was gone. They crashed into one another and then into the wall. Prissi took another step up the wall, then pushed off with both feet, dropped her right wing to turn and began flying up the avenue.

She barked and barked until her throat grew sore. One girl. Three boys. Bad odds for odd badboys. The chemical rush was more than enough to sustain her all the way to her destination. Coming up Fifth Avenue, she climbed, flipped a double somersault, dove, and came in at such a steep angle for her landing that her momentum bounced her up a half-dozen of NYPD's venerable steps. She yiked twice after completing that foolish stunt.

Because she was intent on picking at a new excrescence on her nose, Prissi didn't notice Nasty Nancy getting off a uni-bus until her roomie yodeled. When Nancy got closer and saw Prissi's bright eyes and ruddy cheeks, she asked, "What happened?"

"Had to beat up some boys."

"Life's little joys. Where?"

Prissi pointed south

Nancy interpreted that to mean that Prissi didn't want to talk about it any more, and Prissi interpreted her normally self-absorbed roomie's questions to mean that Nancy didn't want to talk about why she had come on a bus instead of flying. Prissi kept her eyes averted from Nancy's wings because she knew if she looked, she'd see that Nasty Nancy Sloan's growing weight had finally resulted in her pinions being clipped.

"Let's go find Centsurety."

They climbed past the lions—Patience and Fortitude—now so worn by the patience and fortitude of New York's air and water pollution that they were more like the smooth shape of sheep rather than their predators. Just inside the datarium's massive doors, they paused to look in the display cases. Prissi had been to NYPD many times, but every time she passed the display cases, she stared in amazement at the diversity of the books that used to be published—books as small as her thumb and as large as a desktop.

Leading Nancy back through the library's maze of corridors, Prissi told her friend about the pix Pequod Jones had shown her. When they arrived at the datarian's desk, Prissi returned Jones' smile with her brightest eyes and a smile twice the size of the old cherub's as she explained why she needed Nancy's help. Prissi thought her cheek stretching product might be losing its power because it took Jones a long minute before he nodded his approval.

Although Prissi herself had made her first acquaintance of a microfiche reader two days before, it only took her a couple of minutes to teach Nancy what she had learned about operating the ancient, temperamental machines. Prissi was a little surprised when Nancy proved to like the archaic technology as much as she herself did. Part of the attraction was the novelty of the clunky moving parts of the reader itself, but a bigger part of the charm for Prissi was looking at the grainy images before her. She could almost feel the poor quality paper that once was used to deliver the newz. Taking a break for her research, she scanned back and forth to see how many pages of print were contained in one day's edition, then, multiplied that by the circulation figure she noticed on the masthead. The number astounded her. It was hard for her to fathom the resources of lumber, water, electricity, petroleum and who knew what else to produce 61 million pages of newzprint a day, three hundred sixty five days a year—and that just for one city. It was while calculating those resources that Prissi noticed that the logo she was familiar with, "All the Newz Fit to Cast," had once been something different.

Their search was slow, mostly boring, but not totally unproductive. A series of small articles in The Times surfaced. Nancy found a research note in a mutancy journal. There were two Cygnetic foundation filings.

Three hours after they started, the girls took a break to put together what they had found. Not without a couple of roomie arguments, the girls came to the conclusion that Centsurety had been a small research-oriented company, or more accurately, institute, which had been funded with a series of grants awarded by Cygnetic and the Fflowers Family Foundation. As Dr. Smarkzy had said, Centsurety had been based in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, but was not directly affiliated with the famous research center located there. The research notes indicated that Centsurety scientists were pushing against some of the more intractable limits of mutancy, including delayed fledging. Centsurety's director, a man named Richard Baudgew used the phrase "meta-mutancy" to describe a process of combining the major organ systems of different organisms. Centsurety was waiting a license to pursue research in that area.

A later article in The Times reported a whistleblower had provided documentation to suggest that some of the science being done by Centsurety was going beyond the ethical limits established by the Bio-ethics Standards Taskforce. In response, BEST had arranged for two Yale bio-ethicists to investigate the work that the Centsurety scientists were doing; however an explosion and fire had gutted the facility two days before what was supposed to be an unannounced visit. Two scientists, Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby had died in the fire. An investigation concluded that the catastrophe had started with a pinhole leak in a tank of hydrogen.

It was Nancy who found a pix published in Newsday showing a group of mostly young scientists hovering close to a grinning Joshua Fflowers. She poked Prissi who was leaning close to the screen of the reader next to her to take a look.

"Do you recognize any of these?"

Prissi studied the fuzzy image of a number of people standing around in a laboratory. In addition to the woman she thought might be her mother, some of the other faces were familiar because of the picture she had been given by Pequod Jones. Joshua Fflowers was the only person named. The others were noted as his colleagues. The accompanying article described rumors, denied by Fflowers, that Centsurety scientists had made a breakthrough in delayed fledging.

"A couple."

"Look at Fflowers. He certainly looks smug, doesn't he? Handsome, too. Like someone else in the family. What did your dad say about Fflowers?"

"He said he had seen him a couple of times at conferences, but didn't know him, but when I mentioned Centsurety, he blew a mother chip. Told me to get interested in something else."

First, Nancy chortled, "There's nothing like a parental no to motivate."

"He's hiding something."

Nasty Nancy patted Prissi on the arm, "Just like his daughter."

Nancy's tone suggested that she was getting ready to drop one of her patented brain bombs.

"Meaning?"

"You and...ta-da...Jack Fflowers. You've been so coy about your budding...friendship... with the grandson of the planet's nearly richest man. What happened after we had our tiff?"

Prissi knew that what Nasty Nancy was really asking was for Prissi's to tell hery that what had happened at Bissell wasn't a big deal, but the way Prissi saw it, the fact that she had invited Nancy to help her said that all was forgiven. She wasn't inclined to do or say any more than that. Instead, she gave Nancy a roomie rap on her shoulder

"I don't want you overwhelmed with joy for me. It ain't like that."

"Ah, protecting me from love, the one emotion I can't handle—unlike jealousy, envy, hate, anger and depression."

Prissi forced herself to laugh, then, stared hard at Nancy.

"What?"

"I'm trying to make a decision."

Prissi looked at her friend, looked down at the information Nancy had helped her gather, and allowed herself to be overcome by the events of the last twenty-four hours. She mentally shuffled through the images of her mother's death certificate, Jack's appearance, his disappearance, her father's strange behavior, the attack by the keds before she asked, "If you had been Judas, what would have been your price?"

"You mean to reveal to the entire Dutton student body that you broke your personal code of cynical honor and became enamored of a rich, arrogant Bissellian?"

"Something like that."

"I wouldn't. I couldn't...even if I wanted to. I'm a member of AA."

Prissi nodded, "Amours Anonymous."

Nancy's body contorted in an exaggerated slump.

"I, too, am lost."

Prissi was used to Nancy having weekly swainswoons.

"Who, now? Electron-boy?"

"Migod, no. He's such a prion. Twisting and turning and folding everything around."

"Then who?"

"Guess."

"I thought I just did."

"Guess again."

Prissi went for the dark horse.

"Dog Dalmain."

Nancy batted her crew-cut eyelashes as she flashed her village idiot smile.

"I think he wants to have my baby."

"It'd be a beautiful gob of protoplasm." Prissi weighed the possibilities before asking, "Secret share?"

Nancy nodded and said, "Deal. Tell all."

When Prissi remained silent, Nancy gave in and gave the correct response, "Words ensnare."

"I saw Jack last night."

"Ultra epic uber-shock!"

Before Prissi agreed to tell Nasty Nancy the story she was begging to hear, she insisted they scan all of the material they had discovered and input it into both of their mypods. As soon as they finished, Prissi delayed further by suggesting they leave to get something to eat.

They walked around the corner of the library so they could sit in the sun in Bryant Park. The small park was about half full. At the north end, near the Indian and Cote d'Ivoire vegan stands, a flock of wingers were slumped on their castplast perches drinking frothy emoos and picking at eggplant kebabs, lafels and small balls of deep-fried bosmotic rice. On the other side of the park, the tables were filled with walker workers drinking Irn Bru and scarfing Jersey9s with kraut and catzup. Prissi and Nancy made their way to the Middleground where tall stools for walkers were placed alongside perches. In a silent reminder that Prissi had offered to pay for lunch, Nancy climbed up on a stool and tossed her pak on the counter space next to her to save a place for her roomie.

"What do you want?" Prissi asked.

"Something unhealthy, please."

"Unhealthy caloric or unhealthy chemical?"

Nancy flared her clipped wings in defiance.

"Both, if they have it."

Prissi came back with batter fries and a tube of Bakon-Cheez Sqrt for Nancy and pom seeds and a bottle of AO Storm for herself.

Nancy looked at Prissi's tray with a frown and whined, "Traitor. I read those anti-oxidant drinks can kill you."

"I almost fell out of the sky today. I have to be good."

Prissi froze at the implication of what she had said. She sighed in relief when Nancy smiled ruefully and said, "Yeah, well if you have to be good, I have to be beyond perfection. I'm starting to look like a bumble bee. I have to lose eight kees before I can flap a wing. Which deprezzes me, which makes me want to eat. So, I'm eating. And if you were a trueblu friend, you'd eat with me. C'mon eat. Be like me. Be deprezzed. Skru up. I know you, too, have a deep-seated wish to be a walker again."

"No, I have a not as sub-conscious as it once was wish to be a big-butted LT winger, which doesn't work very well."

The food was mostly gone, as was the sun, before Prissi finished her story. She opened her hands into a finger bloom, "So, what do you think?"

"I think Jack is coy."

"That's it? Coincidences, inexplicables, freeieekin codes and all we have is Coy Jack?"

"We, especially you, don't have Coy Jack. I don't think anyone has Coy Jack. God, he is so oompa... but I don't trust him. Why is he doing what he is doing?"

Prissi offered up Jack's implausible excuse, "To help find Joe?"

"And why would he do that? You're the one that told me they didn't mesh."

"Maybe because Jack wants to be a hero. If he found Joe, he'd be that, plus it would be a way to rub Joe's face in it. Obviously, he came to see me because he knows Joe was my NQB. He thought if I knew, then, with his charm, he could get it out of me."

Nancy laughed, "And plenty more probably."

"Yeah, when the poles freeze over."

"Hey, could be happening. Check the weather. You said you didn't get to finish your talk with Jack. If your theory is true, then why would he leave before he had any information about Joe? And where did he go?"

The way Nancy asked the question, Prissi knew that her friend had a better answer than what she had been able to come up with.

"I don't know. Maybe homing with friends."

Nancy bellowed so loudly that several people looked toward where the girls were sitting.

"You've used that word twice. Friends? Cilly, think of what you're saying. People as rich as Jack and Joe Fflowers don't have friends. They don't have friends because they can't have friends. They either have enemies or sycophants or Bambi-eyed dreamers, or predators. Even if they could have a friend, it would have to be a putinly rich friend, otherwise Jack or Joe would always question whether it really was a friend or just another person trying to get something. And if the friend is a rich kid, then think about that for a second. What rich family is going to hide a kid from another, even richer, family?"

"So, Joe and I aren't friends?"

"You're his, but he isn't yours. Friends trust each other. Like us. Did Joe trust you enough to tell you what he was going to do? No? So, if he didn't do that, it meant he didn't trust you, and if he didn't trust you, then, by definition, he ain't your friend. QED."

Even though Prissi had ambivalent feelings about Joe, it still wasn't easy for her to hear Nancy's logic. More in her defense than because she believed it to be true, she said, "Maybe he was protecting me."

"From what? "

"Maybe from lying. If I knew where he had gone and a hawk or teacher asked, then I'd have to lie."

"Which is what a friend should be happy to do."

Prissi was sure she didn't want to go down a path she and Nancy had traversed before in late night lights-out sessions. Instead, she asked, "So what do you think?"

"My guess is that Jack may be trying to connect with some rad-eco walker group that might have been part of, or know about, Joe's going underground. Maybe that's why he looked so graggy. Playing the part. "

"Maybe he's sincere."

When Nancy chortled a half-eaten fry exploded from her mouth, flew past Prissi's shoulder and crashed into the back of her perch.

"Ick."

Nancy rolled her eyes in a way that reminded Prissi of a Qatar doll.

"My poor lost fry is disgusting, but a dirty, stinking boy warms your soul."

"I can't help it. I'm fifteen."

"Well, I'm fifteen and I can easily help it."

"You're an anomaly."

Nancy smiled in appreciation at Prissi's compliment.

"Tell the lovely anomaly again about the numbers on the paper."

"213? SFE-B/TZT/K."

Nancy wrote what Prissi said on the counter with a finger dipped in catzup.

"K is probably Jack. So if K is a J, then we go back a letter in the alphabet and TZT becomes SYS, see you soon, which really just confirms that you're on the right track. And he wants to see you at 213 something street in a lower apartment or basement, or, if the numbers are off by one like the letters, 212 or, maybe, 102."

"But what about the SFE-B?"

SF could be about safety. Or San Francisco—what's left of it. Or, the arrow refers to those letters and not the numbers. So one down from SFE-B would be TGF-C. Does that do anything for you?"

"No."

Well, he's not a genius and I am, so let's see if the skip a letter backward rule also applies to the SFE-B, which would be... RED-A. Oh, yeah. Red A. Red A."

Nancy scooted off her perch and did a quick war dance.

"And what, my boarding school friend, what would be the very first thing a boarding school student would think of if I said Red A."

Prissi shook her head, "I have no idea. Ready? Does Red-A mean ready?"

"C'mon, Cilly, think. If a not too smart boarding school guy, you know, a Bissell kinda guy, was making a bad pun, what would a Red A mean?"

Prissi jumped off her perch and did the same dance that Nancy had done.

"Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne."

"Right. Hawthorne. Probably the name of the street. Let's see if I'm right."

Both girls pulled out their mypods and raced to see who could be first to input "Hawthorne."

Prissi slunk back on her perch in defeat. "Aw, stinkin' freesia. Eleven Hawthornes. That's a lot of possibilities. How are we supposed to figure that out?"

Nancy shook her head as her fingers kept flying over the mypod pad. When she finally looked up, she was grinning in triumph.

"Let me ask you, my occasionally sagacious friend, if you were looking for a lost soul, where would you be more apt to look? Uptown or Mudtown?"

"Mudtown."

"Correct. And since he is boy and, worse, a Bissell boy, you can figure the code is not too, too cypherotically cryptic. So, to hell with all the Hawthorne permutations, my deb card is bet on a little street in Mudtown. If, my beauty, if you want to limb-lock your mysterious scion, fly your not quite fat butt down to 213 or 102 Hester Street and look in the basement window."

"Scarlet Letter. Hester Prinne. And there's just one Hester Street?"

"Just one, and it's in Mudtown, so that has to be it."

"What about the arrow? What's that mean?'

When Nancy's shoulders went up in a shrug, the corners of her mouth drew down in a frown.

"Don't know. Maybe Cupid. Cupid with his arrow."

Again, Nancy leered and, after a second, Prissi leered back.

"I can't go there. I already got attacked today in the village and Mudtown's even worse."

Prissi wrapped her arms around her wings. "Ooooh, ooooh, it's far too dangerous for me. Maybe, just maybe, you could go for me? You know...as my best, bester, bestest friend."

Prissi accompanied this improbable suggestion with a simpering smile. As soon as she saw the anguished look on Nancy's face, Prissi knew she had made a horrible mistake.

Nancy seemed on the verge of tears when she said, "Stop it. You know I'm can't go with you. The only place I'm going is home."

Prissi apologized, "I'm sorry, Nano, I forgot you're clipped. It's hard to imagine us not flying to Waterville to get good bad food."

"I've got to get home."

Nancy made a theatrical tata with her hand.

"Okay. Maybe, I'll let him languish for a day or so. I can use the time to figure out what devious things Jack's grandfather was doing sixty years ago. Or, maybe I can track down some of the people mentioned in the stuff we found...you know, maybe get more names for the people in that pix.... Sound okay?"

Nasty Nancy nodded approval of the plan as she threw their trash down the co-gen pipe. On their way out, Prissi read the plaque at the park's entrance.

"I wonder why it used to be called Needle Park."

Nancy did a community theater imitation of furrowed brows.

"Maybe because scholars sat out here after a long day researching or writing about something of interest only to themselves and four other people in the world. They staggered out of NYPD, came here, got hyper-caffeinated on triple eso's and needled one another."

Prissi shook off Nancy's explanation like a catcher with an over-eager pitcher.

"You don't think it was a place filled with immigrant or grandmotherly knitters?"

"Nope, that would be Needles Park."

"Maybe an Egyptian obelisk used to be sited here."

"Probably just some guy who donated something, or maybe it had a lot of pine trees here once. Ooops. Look. You want that one?"

A yellow rubberized bi-bus, with its lower deck of perches nearly empty while most of the upper level seats were full of walkers, pulled up to the curb. Nancy nudged her head into Prissi's wing.

"Tytle."

"Tytle back and thanks a lot."

Nasty Nancy scuttled toward the bus looking, to Prissi, like a baby beaver returning to the comfort of its mother. When the bi-bus made a huge sigh as it pushed itself back up on its air cushion, Prissi felt like the words had been taken out of her mouth.

After the bus disappeared into the twilight, Prissi opened her kanga to make sure everything was secure. When she was satisfied, she started to read the winds for pre-flight. As she flew south toward Gramercy Park, Prissi fought the urge to make a quick detour over the Hester Street area of Mudtown. Her eyes and mind were tired from hours at the fiche reader and puter screens, but the fatigue from the tedium of what she had been doing only reinforced her desire for physical exertion. The thing holding her back was the fear left over from the morning. It wasn't so much the attack by the keds as the fear she had felt when she was over the Hudson and her body was refusing to do her bidding. She flew a half-dozen tight figure eights as she considered what to do. The sun, defeated by the day, was glowing orange behind New Jersey's hills. To the north, strips of L&L lights, green for launch and red for landing, illuminated office buildings. The sky was swirling with wingers leaving work. To the south, the decrepit buildings of Mudtown had already fallen into a shadowy murk. Prissi considered how, if she waited a few more minutes, she would be able to douse her light and fly as a shadow against shadows.

Prissi slowly flapped her wings as she keyed in the Hester Street address into her mypod before dropping a wing and heading down Broadway. As she crossed 14th Street and Union Square, she fought a flutter in her chest which she told herself was nerves and nothing else. She counted down to First Street. Broadway ended in the next block where it ran into the Houston Street levee. Prissi doused her lights and looked down the crepuscular tunnel made by the dark and decrepit buildings slung along both sides of the canal made by a submerged Bowery Street. The small girl canted her wings to rise above the height of the abutting buildings. She wanted to avoid guy wires and bracing girders as well as to keep an eye on those citizens who hovered around the coproquette roof fires cooking their dinners. When she came within a half klik of her destination, her mypod screen displayed five small amber arrows. She continued flying over the Bowery before making a wide right turn onto Hester Street—a narrow duct of oily backwater. The last arrow disappeared and a star flashed on her screen.

Prissi dropped down until she was less than three meters above the sludgy canal. As she flew close to a five-story brownstone with rotting wrought iron balconies, which reminded Prissi of kids' braces on the crooked French doors they protected, the mypod squeaked like a mouse in a cat's mouth. Prissi passed the house, climbed, looped and dropped back down until she was flying just above the lintels of the first floor windows. In the dying light it looked like every window pane in 213 was missing except for two on the fourth floor. The building listed toward the sidewalk like an old bum staring at a coin in the gutter. A peeling red door sat at the top of a set of shopworn granite steps. Using the burned-out street lights, which tipped in every direction like the candles on a week-old birthday cake, as a yardstick, Prissi estimated that the first three steps of the stairs were underwater.

The cautious girl was looping back to make a third pass when something passed through the pinions on her right wing. Panicked, she side-slipped and slammed into the headless remains of a streetlight hidden in the murk. Her right shoulder popped. She slid down the pole into the cold waist-high water desperately fighting to keep the undersides of her wings dry. It took almost no oil to keep a set of wings from flying. She started to swear, but thought better of drawing even more attention to herself. Her injured wing begged to be lowered, but Prissi knew that if she gave in to that, it could take an hour of grooming before she could fly again.

After swiveling her head to see if she could see who had shot an arrow at her, Prissi began slogging her way down the street to the nearest stoop. She tried to angle across an open space but was stopped by a submerged wrought iron fence. She changed direction and began hopping to keep her wings dry. By the time she reached the nearest stoop, she was breathing heavily. She half-flapped to knock the water from her wingtips, and used her hands to squeegee water from her pant legs.

Prissi's refuge was a five story brownstone with missing windows and a smashed front door. As Prissi climbed the front steps, she peered into the darkness behind the broken door and wondered whether it was more likely that a ten kilo rat or a sexually-starved criminally insane alcoholic would be coming out to make her acquaintance. She took two steps closer to the opening, listened, stared, and finally decided that it was probably safe. She leaned against the building and took a dozen deep breaths. Her whole body began to quiver as she considered how stupid she had been. She took a Cran-slam from her kanga and drank the whole thing in five gulps. Within a minute the glucose, oxygen-enriched drink had stopped her shakes. She pushed her shoulder against the building, but nothing happened. That setback did make her swear, but she did so quietly. As she stepped back to get a running start on a second attempt to relocate her wing, she heard a high-pitched squeal. She leaned out over the edge of the stoop to see an obviously cannibalized, graggy looking hydrocycle, with its right pontoon nearly buried in the murky water, hurtling around the corner from the Bowery end of the block. Prissi took two quick steps and slammed herself against the building. The fire in her shoulder burned twice as bright. The shoulder half-popped back in and then stuck. The burning pain blistered sweat onto her forehead and somersaulted her stomach.

She whispered, "Don't puke."

The cycle was less than a hundred meters away and coming fast. A rooster tail of water being thrown high above the rear paddle wheel intermittently caught a shard of light. Prissi ignored the nearly paralyzing fear of what would happen if she launched herself from the stoop and her wing failed her. The two blue-jay winged men on the cycle shook their fists at her as they veered her way. The one in the back, who was wearing some kind of huge furry hat that made him look like a mythical beast with the head of a buffalo and the body of a man, reached down. Prissi hurled herself against the building again, and pushed off as hard as she could. Her first flap was lopsided and she pitched toward the water. With her second, her shoulder snapped back into place and she gained a meter of height. As the cycle slid beneath her, Prissi looked down to see buffalo man reaching up with a homemade grappling hook. The hook caught her ankle. Prissi dropped a wing and spun herself. Her ankle twisted out of the hook's grasp. She kicked backwards, flapped and was free.

The hydrocycle whined as it made a sharp turn, but it was too late. It slammed into the submerged fence. Both men were thrown and the riderless machine began an erratic course down the street. Prissi, absolutely sky high on adrenaline, was swerveingback toward the men with the idea of taunting them, when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow, something blue and white, point something at her. She beat her right wing up and down to turn sharply, then, pounded both as she climbed toward the top of the buildings. Something whizzed past her. Without thought she mashed her wings toward the bruised sky as the arrow arced higher before falling back into the water. In eight beats Prissi was high enough that she could pass over the tops of the buildings on the north side of the street. Flapping as fast as she could, praying that she wouldn't hit a wire or clothes line, Prissi skimmed north over the wrecked tops of Mudtown's furzy homes toward the lights and safety of her home.

As Prissi flew she wondered at the blue and white splotch she had seen. Jack's wings were blue and white...and there was an arrow in the code he had left. A shiver, like a cold snake, slithered from Prissi's head all the way to her feet.

That night, Prissi had to wait until after eight before her father came home. She had a thousand questions for him, and even started to show him the things she had found in the library, but he cut her off. He had work to do and he had already told her to find a different hobby. If she didn't want to listen to him, if she wasn't willing to be responsible for the freedom he had given her, if she didn't appreciate all of the sacrifices he was making to send her to Dutton, then he would take her back to Africa, where, at least, he would be happier.

# CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Enmity and Amity

Just after eight the next morning, Prissi was in the air and flying north along the East River levee. Although it was Friday and only just past rush hour, the city seemed sadly empty. Very few wingers were along the river or flying across from Queens. The ten meter flame jutting from the building's rubble made the old United Nations memorial look, as it always did to Prissi, like a gas well being flared off. North of Fiftieth Street, Prissi veered out over the river and split the distance between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. She swept under the remnants of the Queensboro Bridge. The sun over her right shoulder warmed her right wing, which was feeling good. A balmy wind blowing out of the southwest lifted her wings. She climbed just past fifty meters, pulled her knees up to her chest and soared. As she approached 90th Street, orange helibuoys at thirty and sixty meters pushed her farther out from the island and away from the site of where the members of the Ghost Brigade of Darfur had exploded three bombs in an attempt to breach the levee and flood the Upper East Side. A half-dozen E-cops, three wingers and three walkers, followed her flight with their weapons held at half rest.

Spiceville, the area between 138th and 149th Streets, from river to river was home or hovel to a great number of immigrants and foreign students who went to Columbia International University. Many of the dilapidated buildings that crowded against one another were owned by foreign governments. From a law passed back in 2068 that was intended to pay homage to, but also diffuse, the growing nationalism of many Middle East, Far East and African countries, certain buildings, owned by foreign governments, were afforded a sovereignty equal to that of an embassy. One unintended consequence of the Harmony Act was that those sovereign buildings were not subject to city or state building regulations or codes. When aspiring nations were dragged back into the Fifth World by war, disease, or, most often, corruption, their sovereign buildings were left to rot. As Prissi flew a tightening spiral over the motley neighborhood, she studied the rooftop tent cities and networks of eight and ten story buildings lashed together with ratlines, rope and wood bridges, and metal ladders. On 141st Street, she saw where a lattice of narrow steel beams connected the roof of one brownstone to another across the street. Most of the platform was covered in sheets of badboard while the shacks and sheds, hunched close together like huddled beggars, were constructed of re-used re-side. Even as high as she was, Prissi could smell heavily spiced grilled meat and the fetid sweetness of rotting garbage.

Prissi keyed her mypod for a PS report. The public service screen scrolled up, identified the area, and reported that the neighborhood was red level for crimes against property but just a blue for crimes against persons—although females were seventy percent of the victims. Of those, only twelve percent were wingers. Prissi knew that it wasn't that the area was kind to wingers, but rather, that most wingers were smart enough not to come to the neighborhood. It was because of that dearth of wingers that, Prissi had to fly two blocks west of where she wanted to be before she found a spot where she thought she could safely land without catching a wing on a clothes line or sliding on a smear of garbage. Despite her caution the teener's left leg slid out from her as it landed on something as dark as the pavement but much slicker. She threw out her right wing to catch herself and managed to keep from falling backward onto her head, but at the expense of hearing a loud pop in her wing joint.

"Hieronymus freeieekin Bosch. Not again. Heaving Zeusus."

The pain was so sharp that Prissi bent forward to vomit onto the street to try to rid herself of it.

After brushing her lips clean, she hobbled over to the sidewalk and limped along until she came to a narrow unfenced space between two buildings. She looked all around before she scuttled three steps deep into the dark space, took a deep breath and slammed herself against the moldy wall of the building on her right.

She hit the wall so hard, her head snapped sideways, but nothing else happened. She screamed something that if heard at Dutton would have put her on Skru Kru for 6 hours. She shook her head violently, sucked down as much air as she could hold and slammed into the wall a second time.

The same pop, the same exquisite pain, the same puke, although not as much, and her wing was relocated.

In the ten months since she had first flown, Prissi had dislocated her wings seven times—every time on the right. She had considered telling her father so that he could put in an insurance claim, but she thought that as she got a little older, the ball at the end of the humerus would expand enough to better fit the socket. Anyway, she always told herself, a dislocated wing was better than lockwing.

Prissi favored her wing as she walked back toward the river and Richard Baudgew's apartment.

In the picnic pix, the man she was going to see was looking at the camera with a pair of XXUV sunglasses in one hand, as if he had just taken them off for the photographer, and a dark drink in the other. He was a tiny man, by far the shortest man in the group, shorter even than two of the women. Below the swirl of brown hair that fell across his forehead, his eyes were so deep-set that it was hard to tell what color they were. The eyebrows were dark and curved in a way that reminded Prissi of a wooly caterpillar. His nose was as small and dainty as his bow-shaped mouth. His chin was as small and smooth as a chicken egg. From her experience with a couple of her teachers at Dutton, Prissi guessed from the pix that Baudgew had been in his early thirties and smart, cynical, sexless and very funny in a cruel way.

The building, whose armor doors and elevator were broken, was a prime example of the Afro-mask architectural Renascence which had permeated the area in the 2040s. Prissi climbed to the fifth, and top floor, and rang the briz. A minute later, safe behind its slide screen, a shadowed face with bright bird eyes stared at Prissi. The apartment dweller's breath caught so sharply that his, "Yes?" became two long syllables.

Brightening her smile as much as she could, Prissi said, "Hello, my name is Priscilla...Prissi."

Baudgew's nose twitched as if he had gotten a whiff of tainted fish.

"I assume the doors are broken again?"

When Prissi nodded, he asked, "Are you selling something...sweet?"

"No, no sweets. No selling. I'm hoping you can help me with a school project. I have a question about a pix I found."

When the old gnome stayed quiet, Prissi continued, "From a long time ago."

She pulled the pix from her kanga and held it up to the slide screen.

Baudgew's response was a pendulum swing from a moment's pleasure to a cold distancing.

"Where did you get that?"

Remembering that what Pequod Jones had allowed her to see what forbidden to the public, Prissi stammered, "I...a...a friend found it...somewhere. I'm writing a paper about blind alleys in science."

Prissi steeled herself, "Could I come in?"

The old man's head tipped ten degrees to the left and then to the right, like a parakeet on its perch, as he studied Prissi through the hardened glass. He stared at her with no more embarrassment than if she were a mannequin in a dress store. Finally, she heard four quick clicks and the door slowly opened.

Prissi thought that, in person, the old man, dressed in a flowing paisley robe, resembled a eunuch in an Ottoman court portrait. His small pursed pale pink mouth looked like the end of a piece of chem lab hose.

Given the neighborhood, Prissi was surprised at the faded opulence of Baudgew's apartment before she remembered that a half-century ago, New Harlem as it was called then, was one of the most desirable locations in the city. All of the Oriental rugs, filigreed brassware, and heavily carved dark furniture again made her think of a Turkish court. As Baudgew darted and glided quickly from living room to kitchen and back to living room carrying a brass tray with tiny cerulean blue cups, a pot of coffee and a dish of cardamom seeds, his silk robe swirled and swished about his cropped pajama pants. Prissi was sure that, if she were to walk to the far end of the long narrow, red wall-papered living room, none of the pix she could see hanging there would be of her host with wife and children. When he finished his hurly-burly of hosting duties, the little man sat primly on a gold and ivory love seat and tightly tucked his robe close around his short, thick and, apparently hairless, legs.

The syrupy black coffee was poured and, at Baudgew's insistence, Prissi agreed to float a cardamom seed on its surface before the old man's tiny, pink, strangely smooth hands reached out for the pix. He held the image close to his face before snapping several of the faces with a lacquered fingernail.

His first words, "Of surpassing beauty and in the bloom of youth," were drenched in sarcasm. He flipped the pix back onto the table. When Prissi leaned forward to recover it, she spilled a drop of coffee on the tray. Dr. Baudgew sharply inhaled.

"Sorry. I can be a little spasmotic."

The little man's mouth looked as though he has eaten something tart.

"Spasmotic?"

Knowing that her welcome was wearing out faster than her knowledge was growing, Prissi pointed to the pix, "This is you, isn't it?"

The effete elf slightly nodded. Prissi touched the other faces that Pequod Jones had named. When she herself repeated the names, Baudgew agreed. With tingling fingertips, Prissi lightly touched the two faces of the couple holding hands, "Who are these two?"

"Oh, my. Those are the twin wizards, Smart Glen Laureby and his smarter sidekick, Roan Winslow."

"I think she might be my...great aunt."

Baudgew had a half-smirk on his china doll lips as he leaned back and studied Prissi's face.

"Really? I don't see the resemblance. Is your great aunt's name Roan?'

Prissi shook her head.

"Was her maiden name Winslow?"

Prissi was still considering that Nora was an anagram of Roan and didn't really hear Baudgew's question.

"What?"

The petulant homunculus repeated, "Winslow. Was her name Winslow?"

"No. I don' think so."

"Is your great aunt a too smart person?"

Prissi, not understanding the little man's animosity, ignored his comment. She tapped the pix and asked, "What did they do?"

Baudgew paused for a second as he decided whether he wanted to be sidetracked.

"Do? Why, science, of course. What else do really smart people do? We were all scientists. Except those two were just a little smarter and a little quicker scientists than the rest of us. We plodded. They bounded...until they got so far ahead of the pack, they got lost."

"Why? What happened?"

"If you believe one of them to be a relative, I would be doing an egregious unkindness to say."

"No. I want to know. I do."

The shriveled pixie tugged his robe even tighter around him.

"Thus spake Pandora."

"I do. Please."

"They were working one weekend and there was an unfortunate explosion and fire and two too smart people disappeared."

"Disappeared? Wasn't that kind of hard to do...even back then?"

"A euphemism. To protect youth's innocence. They were in the explosion. A rather dramatic explosion. Given how large the explosion was and how fierce the fire that ensued, perhaps disappeared is not so much the euphemism."

Baudgew's hands exploded from his silk cuffs.

"Poof. Left just a belt buckle and a tooth or two. And memories...such fond memories."

Prissi looked closely at the picture again to see if she recognized her mother.

"And where does Pandora live?'

Prissi caught herself in time to edit her answer. The little man was setting off lots of her Africa-honed alarms.

"In Connecticut. May I ask what you did at Centsurety?"

"Why, of course. Asking questions has always been youth's privilege. Do you in youth mean you, as in me, or as in all of us?"

Baudgew wriggled in his robe at his cleverness. Prissi leaned down to the low table to pick up her cup. When she sat back up, using a trick she had learned to cope with certain Dutton boys, her body was several inches further away the from the dwarfish man.

"All of you."

Baudgew twisted on the couch so that he could look at Prissi more directly as he coyly smiled, "We made things."

"What kind of things?"

"Oh, you know...interesting things." He reached over to slide his hand down Prissi's wing. "Did you know that wings used to be interesting? A long time ago. We were interested in wings...and things."

When Baudgew stroked her wing a second time, Prissi decided that it was time to go. She stood, thanked her host and put the pix back in her kanga. She paused for a second in thought before she suddenly reached down and, before her host could protest, scooped her cup and saucer and took them to the kitchen. A second later, Prissi was back in the living room and headed for the door, which Baudgew was just opening. Even though he groped her a third time as she was half-way out the door, she asked, "May I ask why you live in this neighborhood?"

The old man raised a finger tip and theatrically wiped away a non-existent tear. "Though Cain, though able, I can't leave Elba, thus able in Elba I remain." His harsh little laugh and final touch of her feathers sent Prissi bolting through the door.

The creeped-out Prissi stood on the cratered sidewalk outside Baudgew's home for ten minutes hoping that she would meet someone from his building. He was such a bizarre little man that she was sure his neighbors would have lots of stories. She was prepared to wait even longer, but a group of four boys, dressed in reds and treads crossed the street to be on her side. After being attacked twice the day before, Prissi didn't wait. Two hops, four flaps and she was out of reach. The shortest boy shook his fist and yelled something. It was Arabic, but the phrase wasn't familiar to her. She dipped a wing as she yelled, "Not today, zurga."

Her small tormentor darted sideways to the gutter looking for something to throw at his taunter, but Prissi was beyond range before he found anything suitable. The urchin threw the half-bottle anyway. He laughed when it exploded in the street, and his friends laughed too, but Prissi was sure that their laughter was directed at him.

Prissi leveled off when she got to one hundred meters. She was confused. She was sure the woman in the picture was her mother. The fact that Roan was an anagram of Nora seemed important. But, Baudgew said that she was dead. As she flew cross-town she thought of going back to the NYPD to see what she might find out about Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby...and Richard Baudgew, but as she swerved south onto Lenox Avenue, she decided that before she did that, she needed to clear her head. It was a beautiful day for flying. At 96th Street, at the top of Central Park, she turned west toward the Hudson. When she got to the river, she turned back south, but only for a few blocks. On a sudden whim she banked west again and began flying across the river.

As soon as she was over the water, Prissi had to fight the urge to breathe fast and fly faster. From the licensing course all wingers took, Prissi knew all about aerohydrarophobia; however she had never felt its symptoms before. But, the after-effects of nearly crashing from exhaustion the day before, and the fact that she had dislocated her wing less than two hours before, made her nervous. The fear came from thinking that she had no place to land. As soon as she started having that thought, landing was exactly what her body felt compelled to do. Despite her trepidations, Prissi was not so hinky that she was willing to fly another eighty blocks north so she could cross above the George Washington Bridge. The winger calmed herself by reciting the statistics which showed that it was much more dangerous to fly in bad weather or at night than to fly over water.

Prissi tipped her head up so that she could stare at the palisades far in front of her rather than at the brown and white waters of the Hudson churning beneath. To distract herself, the teener imagined what she might find at her destination. After her second standoff with her father, the frustrated girl had gone to her room and ogled every scrap of information she had. One of those scraps was Al Burgey, the name on the two letters she had found among her mother's things. An A. Burgey lived in Verona, New Jersey. Beyond a couple of lines in his letters, there was no evidence that he was a scientist, but Prissi didn't care. An Al Burgey knew her mother. An A. Burgey lived in Verona, so that was where Prissi was going.

As soon as Prissi was clear of the river, she landed, caught her breath, and keyed Burgey's address into the mypod's flight planner. According to the itinerary, it would take her just over an hour to get to Burgey's house. Prissi closed her eyes and tried to gauge whether she could fly to Verona and still have enough energy to get back home. Her best answer was maybe. She dug into her kanga and found a semi-smashed Zzolt-a-bar. She gobbled it, brushed the sticky crumbs from her face, used her tongue like a spatula to work the greasy not-quite-strawberry flavored scum from the back of her teeth, and flapped back into the air.

An hour later, as she looked down from one hundred meters, Prissi thought Verona looked quite a bit like of Waterville. The newly green tops of mature maples and oaks lined both sides of the narrow streets. The houses, mostly large and mostly old, sat back from the streets. The only indication that the wealth and serenity of the small town might be less than what it appeared was the four burned-out houses Prissi saw as she flew over.

House-burnings, HBs, had been a common method of grass-roots social change during the Ticklish Situation of 2038. Usually the HBs were set by poor walkers against rich wingers or by radical fundas against their ecoist counterparts. In both instances, the fact that the destruction was by fire was considered to have importance. In the previous five years, as evidence of world cooling grew and more people doubted their science, and the ecoists started to lose power, houses began to burn again.

When she got close, the winger's Prissi's mypod squeaked and its arrows began their sequential flashing.

Prissi slowed her speed as she flew ten meters above the smooth pavement of Oakstaff Street. Burgey's house was an ancient mongrel with two eyelash gables jutting out over a low-walled porch. The house was painted a sallow yellow with black shutters. From her perspective, Prissi thought the overall effect was of a toothless geri having a snit. When she walked up the undulating brick walk, the teener was surprised to see, given the HBs close-by, a wooden door with a large oval of etched glass. No steel door, no bars, no slide screen, not even a safety screen. The lack of caution on the owner's part caused Prissi to stop dead on the first step of the porch. She had already dealt with one weird person; she wasn't sure that she wanted to make it two on the same day. She considered, half-turned, re-considered, then, turned back and hurried up the steps to ring the doorbell before she changed her mind.

A tall cadaverous man with a tomahawk nose, rheumy eyes and tendrils of silver hair floating like seaweed over the large reefs of his ears, bent forward, stopped for a moment, as if nonplussed, then, offered a lipless smile before asking, "Yes?"

Prissi was sure that the man standing before her was older than her father, yet, he had the voice of a young man.

"Mr. Burgey?"

When he gave his head a slight shake, an empty bag of skin beneath his chin wriggled.

"Burgey. The accent is on the first syllable, and the g is hard."

"I'm sorry."

"Please, don't be. How could you know?" He paused for a second before continuing sotto voce, "How, indeed?"

When Prissi told him her name, his smile widened and the wrinkles in his cheeks expanded like an accordion drawing air.

"You knew my mother?"

"Yes, yes I did."

"And, you know she's dead?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so."

"How did you know?"

Burgey waved his hands.

After waiting for more and receiving nothing but a cluck, Prissi launched into telling the sickly-looking geri about her school project studying blind alleys in science. She ended by asking, "Did you ever hear of a company called Centsurety?"

It was very apparent that that was not the question that he was expecting. His short narrow eyebrows shifted from _accent grave_ to _accent aigu._

"Would you like to...?"

Before he finished his question, Prissi had answered it with her most confident smile and a tactical retreat. Instead of starting to go inside, she took a step back, flared her wings, dropped them over the railing and leaned her butt against the railing's peeling paint.

After Burgey had watched the teener's retreat with amused eyes he asked, "Why are you interested in something from so long ago?"

Prissi's first thought was to invent for Burgey, who was looking incredibly birdlike, with his small bright eyes and sharp nose, details about...a lost uncle. Instead, for reasons she couldn't explain, she decided to trust this slightly frightening man with the truth.

She explained how she first had become interested in Centsurety and how her interest had grown and shifted when she found the pix that showed a woman that looked like her mother. Did he know if her mother worked there? Had her mother been married before? Was her name ever Winslow? Someone named Roan Winslow, who looked a lot like her mother, supposedly had died in an explosion. What did he know about that? Did he remember much about a man named Glen Laureby and what he was doing, the kind of science he was doing? Did he have any pix from that time? Or, any articles, or records?

When she began to ask another question, Burgey held up a hand, a hand with fingers thin as pencils and as gnarled as twigs, a hand that reminded Prissi of the hands of Dr. Smarkzy and Joshua Fflowers. The old man kept the hand up, as if to ward off any more questions, even as he disappeared into the house.

While she waited, Prissi became so agitated that her butt started bouncing on the railing. Her excitement waned however, when, rather than returning with a box or worn leather flash screen, as she had imagined, Burgey re-emerged with a tattered red cloak covering his wings. He drew one of the faded, gray plastic perches close to Prissi, flared his wings and perched.

"May I see the picture...do you mind if I date myself by calling it a picture?"

Prissi pulled the pix from her kanga. She pointed, "This is the woman who looks like my mother, but Dr. Baudgew tells me that she can't possibly be my mother because she died in an explosion."

"Baudgew?"

"Yes, I just came from seeing him. He said this woman is dead."

Al Burgey took the paper from Prissi's finger and studied it for a long moment before handing it back.

"Sleeping dogs stir. Of which some may have a vicious bite. I wish that you might have come to see me before seeing Dr. Baudgew. He's not a nice man. Do you know I believe that I may have a picture taken on the same day?"

"Could I see it?"

As soon as she blurted out her wish, Prissi's eyes were drawn to the darkness behind the front door. With everything that had happened over the last day, she figured that her luck gauge must be close to empty. Al Burgey's lipless mouth twitched in the smallest of smiles.

"Wary, are we?" he tutted as he moved his head back and forth in a way that reminded Prissi of a metronome.

"Not trustworthy, am I?"

"I don't know. I'm just nervous. Ever since I started looking into this I've been having trouble. Like I've stirred something up that I shouldn't have."

"I believe you may have. Did you find anything else interesting among your mother's things besides my letters to her?"

"No, just some pix, your letters to her and the notebook."

"Nothing else?"

"No, nothing."

"That may be for the best."

"Except for a piece of jewelry."

"Hmmm. Can you describe it?"

Prissi brightened, "I'm wearing it."

"May I see it?"

Prissi hesitated for a second before reaching under her vest and lifting the spiral crystal over her head. The ancient hand darted forward and opened just enough that she could drop it in. Burgey brought the bright object close to his brighter eyes and studied it. When Prissi tentatively stuck her hand out for the crystal, Burgey's hand closed tight. Holding the bauble in his crippled fist, he brought his hand to his lips and tapped them before he asked, "Did you show this to Dr. Baudgew?"

"No. I didn't even mention my mother. He was too graggy. I didn't trust him."

"Are you sure that he couldn't have seen it around your neck?"

"I don't think so. I don't see how."

Burgey closed his eyes and cocked his head in a way that reminded Prissi of people at a Brahms' concert. When his head finally straightened, Burgey pointed a finger at Prissi.

"Have you seen the newz? Joshua Fflowers is dying."

The geri's words shot Prissi off the railing.

"How can that be? I just saw him a couple of days ago. It's how all of this got started."

"His body is not accepting what his mind conjured. Something many of us have endured."

The ancient man looked at his crippled hands before raising the one closed over the crystal to his ear as if he were trying to hear something. The effulgent eyes clouded over. Finally, Burgey's head nodded as if in affirmation of a decision he had made. When he eased himself off his perch, it took a second for him to get his balance. Noting Prissi's concern, he said bitterly, "A tetch of ALS. Wait."

"But, my...."

"Wait!"

Prissi was surprised by how commanding the old man's voice was. He slowly turned and disappeared into the gloom behind the door. In the ten minutes that he was gone, Prissi input a couple of options into her mypod for getting home. She could fly straight across the Hudson, or she could fly north, shadow the George Washington Bridge, and fly back south along the west edge of the city. The first option was much shorter; the second much safer.

Just about the time Prissi thought that the geri wasn't coming back, Al Burgey pushed his way out the door. Prissi was confounded to see that one of Burgey's gnarled hands held a small beaded bag, red and black and seemingly identical to the one Prissi had found in her mother's tote. Burgey tipped his palm to offer it to Prissi. She opened the bag and freed its contents. A crystal fell into her hand. Prissi frowned. When she looked up, the geri opened his other hand and said, "Here is yours."

At first glance, the crystals were twins.

"Take it. Just be careful. Very careful, as, now, unfortunately, must I. You may be putting a key into a treasure chest, but, more likely, you are sticking your hand in a bee's best. I shouldn't be doing this, but with Joshua Fflowers dying, this might be the right time."

"But what is it? What's going on? What kind of bee's nest? What..."

The old man slowly shook his head.

"Trinity."

He started to say something more, then, stopped. Finally, he just said, "Stars align."

"Stars benign."

Burgey shook his head again, "Or, all too often, malign."

Even though Prissi had no idea what was going on and had a dozen questions she wanted to ask, she slowly dropped her crystal over her neck. She looked at the one Burgey had just given her, Rather than chancing having the two of them around her neck bang against one another, she started to put it back into the beaded bag, but the old man reached out, snatched the bag from her, and slipped it into his pocket.

"Something to hold secrets."

Prissi dropped the second crystal into her kanga and tapped her chest, "You have even more?"

"I'm an old man. All old men have secrets. Secrets and memories...treasures and curses...but mostly great regrets."

Prissi tried again, "What secrets? What treasures? What's going on?"

"Be very careful. Be very smart...but not too smart. Go! Go, now!"

Feeling more emotion than she wanted to feel, Prissi nodded sharply and said, "Thank you so much."

"We'll see."

When Prissi leaned forward with the thought to shake his hand, Burgey jerked back so quickly, he fell against the door.

"Go. Go. Before I change my mind."

And, even though she had no idea of what had just happened, Prissi went.

# CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Strikes Twice

After the girl had left him, Dicky Baudgew had thoughtfully scratched his cheeks with the long yellow nails growing from his short pale pink fingers.

Baudgew once had been quite rich. Unlike many twenty-first century scientists, who had accumulated great wealth because they had invented something useful and, somehow, despite the odds and all the lawyers, had been able to maintain their intellectual property, Dicky had made his money by being a manager and manipulator of scientists for Joshua Fflowers. Early on in his success, Joshua Fflowers had decided that it made more sense to make one corporate pit bull rich than to allow dozens of scientists to rob him blind.

Fflowers had made Baudgew rich once, but he saw no need to repeat his largesse. Unfortunately for Dicky, a long life and a largish number of vices had greatly reduced his means. He still had nice things, but, he knew, that unless something changed, he wouldn't be getting any more.

The things he did have—furniture, art, rugs—meant too much to Dicky for him even to consider selling them. Instead, as his cash flow slowed to a trickle, he had moved from a ten-room Central Park West apartment with park and river views to six rooms in Spicetown with a fifth floor view of petty poverty and crime. Since Dicky was a realist, he had accommodated himself to his changed circumstances but, since he could not prevent the occasional dream, he had not accepted them.

Before Dicky met them, Joshua Flowers and Elena Howe had been employed as post-doctoral researchers by Reiklein and Grammai, a team of Cold Spring Harbor primaries. At the time, much scientific research resembled investment banking. The people with lots of good ideas rarely had the money to carry them out. The people with lots of money rarely had good ideas. The principal researchers had gone to Grant Larkston, who had agreed to put up fifty million dollars to fund research into the possibilities of curing certain late-presenting hereditary diseases by insinuating a genetic splice into the patient during the bio-chemical turmoil that was present during puberty. The Reiklein and Grammai's thesis was that hereditary diseases were a mutation, but of a very minor scale compared to the mutation that took place in pubescent teenagers as they were transformed from children to adults. Their strategy was to piggyback their defect-altering genetic changes onto the natural changes occurring during puberty.

Within a year the team had made enough progress to be sure they were on the right path. Larkston was pleased at their rapid progress. It was in the second year that an outcome of one of Elena Howe's experiments and an insight by Fflowers as to the commercial importance of that finding led those two to leave Cold Spring Harbor.

In the following year, Reiklein and Grammai announced their breakthrough —thousands of lives could be improved by the techniques they had developed. The two researchers, Cold Spring Harbor, and Larkston shared ownership of the patented processes. The researchers would make millions, Cold Spring Harbor would make tens of millions and Larkston would make hundreds of millions. Everyone was very happy....

...Until less than four years later, when Fflowers stunned the world by having fourteen-year old Brianna Brim fly above Cheney Stadium and land on the fifty yard-line during halftime of the Superbowl LI. The millennial dream, humans flying freely, was realized...could be realized...for a price not much more than the cost of a year's college tuition...well, the cost at a very good college.

Then, everyone was unhappy. Larkston and CSH sued. They argued that the meta-mutant techniques and procedures leading to flight should be theirs because Joshua Flowers and Elena Howe had derived the fledging process from the original research. It took three years, but Fflowers prevailed. Reiklein and Grammai got a footnote in some textbooks about meta-mutancy, a number of legal citations and a bitterness that lasted the rest of their lives. Larkston got a laboratory at CSH named after him. Fflowers got fame, fortune and Dicky Baudgew to make sure that no scientist ever did to Joshua Fflowers what he and Elena had done to Reiklein and Grammai.

By the time Fflowers was thirty-nine, he was the richest man in the world. And one of the most benevolent. Despite being born poor, Fflowers did not hoard his wealth. He gave huge amounts to Bissell, much more than the already richly endowed school had ever received before from an alumni. He gave money to Yale and MIT, his alma maters, and even to Cold Spring Harbor. His fortune funded billions of eurollars of CE research. For the recipients of those grants, the only requirement was to take big chances. Those individuals and the organizations they worked for, usually universities were given all rights to whatever came from their efforts; however the story was very different at Cygnetics and its many subsidiaries. Dicky Baudgew's job was to make sure that whatever the scientists at Fflower's companies developed, that the financial benefits of those efforts stayed with Fflowers.

Dicky had found that his snaky charm and well-honed manipulative skills were usually enough to keep productive scientists working for Cygnetics. When those skills weren't enough, Dicky had added a certain subtle menace, which, because it was so subtle, got and kept people's attention.

At the time, Baudgew took great satisfaction in the power he wielded as Director of Research. He was good at finding the scientists, usually young, with the most promise and matching them up so that a synergy was created.

Dicky Baudgew loved a puzzle and keeping successes coming out of Fflowers lab had, for a long time, been the best puzzle of his life. Dicky loved everything about his job except for standing in Joshua Fflowers' shadow. Fflowers wealth rankled, but what rankled more was the fact, and Dicky knew without a doubt that it was a fact, that he, Dicky Baudgew, was far smarter than Joshua Fflowers. Dicky coped by swallowing his anger when he was around Fflowers and spewing it about when he was not. As a result, Dicky's power and wealth grew, although not as fast as his dissatisfaction. Then, when things turned bad in the aftermath of the Etruscan Project and the destruction of Centsurety, Fflowers swept Dicky Baudgew aside with all the care of a hash house waitress cleaning a table.

Over the ensuing decades, Dicky spent his money, but hoarded his anger. His once broad ranging mind shrunk into the narrow focus of the obsessed until he was left with little more than wishes. Impossible wishes.

Finally, despair had freed Dicky of those wishes. He had feasted on ash. Bitter ash. Until, whatever force ran the universe, a force that seemed to revel in irony, sent, with no warning, a girl to knock on his door. Suddenly, poor Dicky Baudgew thought that he might have a second chance to make a wish come true. The problem for Dicky was to understand just what opportunity Fate had thrown his way and how best to use it.

There could be no doubt that the girl who had just graced his humble abode was flesh of Elena Howe's flesh. She was too much a twin of Elena to be a granddaughter and too young to be a daughter. The girl was definitely a puzzle.

Oh, how Dicky Baudgew loved a puzzle. He'd made his mark solving them. When he was very young, he had spent lots of summer days twisting Rubik Cubes and their cousins, setting up chess problems and playing puter games. As a teenager, anagrams and quadratic and chemical equations kept him busy. In college and medical school, he had been entranced with the limitless cryptic messages DNA liked to write using its limited AGTC alphabet.

After medical school Dicky interned as an endocrinologist; however he soon found the puzzle of getting people and their conflicting egos to work successfully within an organization to be much more intriguing than why their organs failed.

Dicky had started work at Cygnetics as a project manager for one aspect of feather patterning; however within a year, the high productivity and low turnover in his group had drawn the attention of Joshua Fflowers. Dicky had bounced his way up the organization fast enough to make lots of enemies—some angry, but most, and wisely so, fearful. When Fflowers' manic hubris led him to start Centsurety, he picked Dicky Baudgew to be his main puzzle-solver.

Dicky was an inspired choice because Dicky so loved a puzzle and Centsurety certainly was that. He had to find enough sincere and dedicated and, most importantly, closed-mouthed scientists to do the front of the house work on delayed fledging, while putting together two teams of brilliant renegades to do the back of the house work that Joshua Fflowers really wanted done.

The loyal Dicky had done everything from lab design—cutting edge facilities with a physical layout that encouraged cross-talk and synergy(at least at the front of the house)—to talent scouting to walking the well-lighted halls of B-crats getting the necessary permits to allow Fflowers to play God using Dicky's hires as his angels.

Everything had gone swimmingly. The spotlighted front of the lab made minor progress on the exquisitely complicated process of delayed fledging. In the shadowy back of the lab, the Fallen Angel, Elena Howe and the Ugly Elf, Vartan Smarkzy, and their pup-filled wolf pack made astounding progress in solving the Greek problem. In the shadows beyond the shadows, the Twin Wizards, Glen Laureby and Roan Winslow, struggled and slipped and struggled and gained to solve the age-old old age question. Flitting between all three groups was Joshua Fflowers, the Mad Hatted Midas, with his chef's toque, sticking his fingers in every pasty, pudding and pie. Thus poked Zarathustra.

Then, in a way that ridiculously mimicked the dramatic traverse of a Greek tragedy, everything came together for one shining moment before plunging into disaster.

Fflowers, fallen from Olympus, escaped some of Fate's revenge. But, to pay for that undeserved mercy, a sacrifice to the governmental gods must to be made. Just like in a myth much younger than the Greeks, the lupine Dicky Baudgew donned the sheepskin and went to his doom.

Dicky's doom included taking a large chunk of Flower's fortune and going to Macao for a year, then spending two more in Beijing, four in Kuala Lumpur, before completing his penance, if not his rehabilitation, in Montreal. He returned to a quiet and ineffectual life in Manhattan. By the time Dicky was back home, quite a bit of his fortune had been transmuted into things—silk and ivory, jade, rice paper, nacre, alabaster, gold and porcelain things—and other pleasures and arts of a more transitory nature.

All of the things which Dicky Baudgew had brought back him from his exile still surrounded him as he sat scratching his face. Dusty now, and rarely noticed, the things gave their owner much less comfort than they once had. A deteriorating body and unrequited revenge had shouldered them aside like a hungry piglet its littermates on the way to milk and mother.

Dicky looked around his apartment and then out a black-streaked window. New Harlem, once the choicest address in Manhattan, had become Spicetown, a hell-hole of poverty and a stewpot of people. Dicky sat, scratched and pondered how he was rich with objects, but so very poor with satisfaction...except, now, for his little puzzle.

Dicky Baudgew surely loved a puzzle.

The tiny geri let his head drop back against the oily spot it had made over the decades on his favorite deerskin suede chair. His hands dropped down to his neck. He picked at the sparsely bristled thin folds of skin and hummed a long forgotten song.

Fflowers, like Lear, the faltering king. Elena—the abdicated queen. The girl—a pawn. A few more pawns, a less than shining knight or two and...and, an interesting puzzle was born.

The ancient scratched and thought of what to do and whom to use as the morning sun wheedled its way through the once very good, but now very faded, Braunswig & Fils curtains.

The sun was in the west and Baudgew had a tremor in his hands, which he couldn't decide came from hunger or excitement, before he decided that the very first step was to determine just what the girl was. Why did she look like Elena Fflowers, but think that Roan Winslow might be her great aunt? That thought knocked Dicky out of his chair. He had so enjoyed being clever with the girl that he had not thought to get her mother's name. How could he not have asked? That was minor, but stupid. Dicky took a pinch of skin on his arm. Stupid people didn't solve puzzles and people who didn't solve puzzles needed to be punished. Dicky squeezed until tears ran from his eyes.

After he got his breath back, Dicky pushed himself up from the stained chair to ogle a name and make a call.

As he waited for the man and his science to arrive, Dicky thought hard about the girl who had passed his portal. Was she a clever, or, a lucky girl? Was she a clone of Elena Fflowers, a suppressed X embryo, or an exceedingly rare accident of genetic fate? What would the best answer be? Surely, at first glance, a clone, essence of Elena, would be the most valuable. The rumors were that Joshua Fflowers was fading fast. How Dicky would like to dangle that bauble before his enemy's failing eyes. What could be more painful to a man facing his mortality than to be briefly teased with the physical form he once had loved, or more accurately, idolized since Dicky wasn't sure Joshua Fflowers had ever loved anything in all the world during his long life.

Dicky thought and scratched.

But the taste of revenge, despite how sweet, could not linger.

He already had taken the first step. The next in the puzzle was to compare the DNA of Elena and the girl. The girl's DNA was easy. The man, when he arrived, would sample the lip and handle of the cup shel had used. Finding Elena's DNA would be more difficult. It might still be on record at Cygnetics, although that was not very likely. However, if it were there, getting something out of that bee-hive shouldn't be too difficult. Alternatively, the Juvenal Institute, which had done her transplant, would definitely have it; however there would not be many fissures in the firewalls of that august edifice.

Unfortunately, Dicky Baudgew's thinking had to take a turn.

Less than five hours after the guileless girl had announced herself at his door, Dicky heard from the tech doing the work on the tea cup that there was no DNA to be found. The cup had been wiped clean. Dicky didn't know if she was lucky, but the girl appeared to be clever. Dicky abhorred clever girls...of any age.

Dicky had always told himself that when one door closed, another must open. He would get what he needed. The tracker he had planted in her feathers as she left his apartment would insure that. It would just take a little longer. Dicky made another call. Afterwards, the little man paid his dues.

For being stupid a second time, Dicky's sense of justice demanded he pinch the skin on the back of his knee with the tweezers he usually used on his eyebrows. After cleaning up the blood from that bit of retributive drudgery, Dicky made himself a cup of adreno tea, sat, pondered, and scratched and scratched and pondered and scratched and pondered until his cheeks leaked lymph like a tapped maple tree.

# CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Fly By Night Fate

Standing out on Oakstaff Street, Prissi decided that she should be cautious and fly the northern route home. But before she had flown a dozen kliks, her shoulder was hurting so badly that she knew she couldn't make it straight home. After circling twice, she landed on the ubiquitous green roof of a Vegantopia. Dozens of seggies were parked by the front door. After getting her bearings and a PS report, which came up bland, Prissi flared her wings and dropped to the ground.

Inside, the winger found the usual lay-out. A long row of herbaria and aquaria separated the counter from the dining room. The counter had chairs near the door and perches at the far end. Most of the counter seats were occupied by bored-looking pre-fleds sucking down banana soys and sporking up glute-not desserts. As she walked past them, Prissi gave those staring at her the "you're invisible" look she usually reserved for Waterville townies.

A red-haired walker, whose eyes were considerably smaller than several of the excrescences galaxied across his forehead, listed the day's soups in a low drone that reminded Prissi more of a horsefly caught between window pane and screen than human speech. Prissi guessed at a couple of syllables and ordered a pomelo and squash potage with a hi-fi muffin and a quadralatte. Prissi rubbed the outline of the crystal around her neck and pondered what had happened at Burgey's house. It was obvious that the crystals were more than just pieces of jewelry. But what could they be? While she waited for her food, Prissi put both pieces on the counter and studied them. They seemed to be no more than spiraled pieces of fractured glass. They reminded Prissi of the crazed glaze of some raku pottery. Were the crystals, despite their large size, some how precious? Diamonds? Africa still was the home of diamonds. Had her mother found something like the Hope Diamond? Prissi snorted. Was she holding some kind of new world altering material?

Hearing a clink, Prissi looked down the counter. Before the boy got within three meters of her, Prissi knew that he was going to slop soup onto the counter. Dropping both crystals in her kanga, she leaned back on her perch in anticipation, then, smiled smugly when a chunk of squash and some viscous orange fluid made its escape.

The boy muttered something and Prissi guessed, "That's okay," was an appropriate response. The soup was decent, but the muffin was so thick and dry with spelt and bits of healthy chaff, and so oddly tasting from the extra baking soda needed to lift it enough to call it a muffin, that it took Prissi some real work and a lot of latte to get it down her throat.

By the time she was half-way through her litert of coffee, Prissi knew that she could fly to Montana on one wing. Riding her feeling of invincibility, she pulled her special pen from her kanga, grabbed a clean lapkin and wrote, "Bigger tip: Wash your face with Zit-o-zilch and **E-NUN-CI-ATE.** " She weighted the message down with a twenty eurollar coin left from her change, flared her wings for the pre-fleds and sashayed toward the door.

Back in the air, the rejuvenated teener felt so much better, she considered flying directly home. But, a smarter part of her knew that her bravura was more caffeine than strength and that to be safe, she needed to take the long way home. She started north toward the GW Bridge, but soon could feel herself getting so hypo-glyked from all the caffeine running through her that, after a couple of kliks, she landed on the roof of a school and called Nasty Nancy.

"Hi, it's me."

"Sounds just like you."

"I'm in NJ totally discharged. Any chance I could flop and flap with you?"

"Sure."

"Do you need to ask your folks?'

"You forget I am an only child."

"Just for a couple of hours."

Nancy Sloan's parents lived in a ten-room penthouse apartment on the western edge of Fort Lee. The glass-walled cavernous living room ran the width of north side of the building. At the east end of the room, one could see the GW Bridge dimly glowing in the waning daylight. To the north the writhing brown snake of the Hudson chewed away at its banks while far to the west the double urban auras of Newton and Screwton pulsed.

Prissi looked out at the nearly empty skies and remembered a previous visit to the Sloans when she had watched flock after flock of wingers sweeping past to their homes in the outer suburbs. As she took in the view, Iaocomo and Emerald Sloan, who owned a generic pharmaceutical company that specialized in STD remedies for Fourth and Fifth World countries, came out to say hello, then went back to their office, which Prissi remembered as being almost big as her father's apartment.

After the adults left, Prissi started to tell her Nancy where she had been and what she had learned since leaving home that morning, but Nancy said that she really wasn't that interested. Deciphering what had happened to a little company a half-century before wasn't what she wanted to do right then. Instead, she suggested that she teach Prissi how to crochet. Prissi, who wasn't sure what crocheting was but was very sure that it wasn't pronounced the way Nancy was saying it, figured that she owed her roomie enough for her NYPD help that she shouldn't argue.

A frustrated Prissi stayed for almost three hours sitting in the Sloan's immense media room on a high armless couch that allowed her to drop her wings behind its back. After they ate slivers of pepperoni peetsa, Nancy showed Prissi how to twist and turn the yarn so that a piece of string became a piece of cloth. Despite her initial dismissive attitude, Prissi found herself more interested in the yarn being knotted than the yarn being spun in an old 3-D vid starring Shiloh Voight playing in the background.

It was almost ten before Prissi got up to leave. Outside on the launch pad, the sky was so clear that she could see a billion stars. Once she was in the air, with lights both above and below her, she felt like she was flying inside a magic tunnel. As she approached the GW, she dropped low until she was flying just above the aquaphosphor lights of the ancient bridge. Being drawn to the lights' beauty made Prissi think of the ancient Greek sailors drawn dangerously close by the singing of the Sirens. Prissi's snort carried for blocks. Not this one. Admittedly, she was part bird and part woman, but her singing would have sent any sailors tacking off in the opposite direction. As fast as they could haul sail.

Prissi swept off the bridge and turned south. The air above the West Side levee was much darker than over the GW. She slowed her pace to give her eyes time to adjust. Looking ahead Prissi saw that the air was almost completely empty of wingers. The buildings hugging the levee began to seem ominous. The further south she went, the emptier the city seemed. She sensed things at the edge of her peripheral vision, but when she snapped her head around, nothing was there. To feel safer, Prissi climbed a couple of dozen meters higher, but despite the additional height, her nerves stayed jittery. A klik later she dropped down until she was flying at less than ten meters feet off the ground. Again, she felt like something was shadowing her. She twisted her head around again, saw nothing, turned back and screamed when she saw how close she was to a blank brick wall that hovered alongside the levee.

"Josie Geezsaphat. Just fly."

Prissi looked far down the levee and saw two flight lights coming her way. Seeing those beams reassured her that she wasn't the only person flying over Manhattan that night. The lights drew closer and, being northbound, began to climb to give Prissi room to safely pass beneath. As the two passed overhead, Prissi saw a flash of orange. She yelled, "High," and the others yelled back, "Sky."

Prissi was still smiling at that brief contact when a darkness grabbed her from above and drove her down toward the levee. She managed to get her feet under her just as she hit. She stumbled forward, had her balance for a second, was hit a second time, and felt the levee's concrete surface tear at the skin on the heels of her hands as she skidded forward. When she was knocked down a third time, her head smashed into the unforgiving surface. Her body ground to a stop...except for her consciousness, which flew away.

Two shadowy forms, like giant birds of prey, dragged her deep into the shadows at the levee's edge, then flapped their orange wings in fierce excitement at they picked and tore at her.

# CHAPTER NINETEEN

A Friend In Deed

While his body moved at the glacial pace demanded by his disease, Al Burgey's mind whirled. He had a hard time fathoming what he had just done. Or, why. Especially, why.

After holding in his hand a piece of the puzzle he had spent years trying to obtain, he had handed it back along with his future. Was he trying to reclaim his soul at the price of his body?

Knowing the long reach Dicky Baudgew had from his over-decorated web, Burgey doubted that he or the girl had much time before they would be dealing with that deadly little spider's attention. The girl had thrummed a thread and there would be hell to pay.

The crippled geri shuffled around the house collecting clothes, papers and pills. His heart beat rose. His fingers became so frantic as they tried to cull what he might need that they dropped as much as they gathered. As parts of his body extended their betrayal, he asked himself unanswerable questions.

Why would he not fight back with every weapon against such a horrible death? But, could he live two hundred more years of a life mired in guilt? Even if it was the right thing to do to give the girl back her crystal, why had he given up his own? He had sold his soul for more life, but, suddenly, when longer life was put into his hand, he had refused. Was he insane? Senile? Or a late-blooming saint?

As Burgey haphazardly filled the large suitcase on top of his bed, his mind reviewed his sins.

It had started with a fall. A misreading of gravity's rules. A thirteen stitch gash to his forearm. A somewhat larger wound to his head. A much much larger wound to his sense of self. His first thought was that he was becoming fragile. Frail. But the tests said otherwise. He was in the beginning stages of ALS. With the latest treatments, it would take time, but over the course of five or ten years, every muscle in his body would die. He wouldn't die. Just his body. His mind would continue to work as well as if ever had.

As Burgey contemplated the horror of his future, he began to think about the crystal that had lain hidden in its little preserve for so long. His prodigious mind considered how his disease might be cured or curtailed if his piece of the longevity puzzle could be reunited with the other two. He came to the conclusion, a result based as much in fear-driven hope as science, that if all three parts of Trinity could be brought back together, both his mind and his body might be able to continue on its interesting way for a very long time.

As had been true sixty years before when Trinity—Nora Winslow, Elena Howe and he, Glen Laureby—first discovered how they could triple the lifespan of an individual, deciding the best way to gather up that ancient, dangerous and purposefully scattered knowledge took time.

He knew that if he went to Elena Howe and asked for her piece of the puzzle, having only his own in hand, she wouldn't give it to him. But, if he were to come to her in possession of two crystals, then she might be willing to add the third, especially if she herself were feeling as unacceptably mortal as he was. Consequently, he decided that he needed to get Roan's piece first. He did not delude himself that achieving that goal would be easy. First, he didn't know where she was. Since Roan had never quite trusted him when he was Glen Laureby, he doubted that she would be immediately won over by his reincarnation as Al Burgey.

As the sick geri struggled to pile papers into the suitcase, he thought how correct Roan was to have doubted him. Before they were lovers, he had tried to steal some of her research. While they were lovers, he had had an affair with Elena Howe. And sixty years after they had last seen one another, he had been responsible for her death.

Whether as Glen Laureby, or his reincarnation as Al Burgey, the man who was throwing handfuls of socks and underwear into his suitcase had always been smart. Indeed, Laureby/Burgey was so smart that he occasionally didn't know what limitations there were on his intelligence. That is what had happened in Africa three years ago as well as in Cold Spring Harbor more than a half century before.

After the fiasco Fflowers had caused by using Trinity's longevity research before it had been perfected, Glen Laureby had known that he had to get free of the megalomaniac. His plan was to leave and take Roan Winslow with him, but before Laureby could decide where to go, Roan had happened onto a new approach to solve the problems with the old longevity formulation. With that discovery, a complicated weaving of prions with a person's DNA, Laureby's plans changed. Rather than just leaving, he had the idea of taking the discovery with them. Tripling a life span would lead to even greater riches than giving the world wings; however Roan convinced Laureby that taking what Fflowers would consider his own would greatly shorten their own life spans.

Laureby felt stalemated until Fflowers gave Elena wings. Laureby saw that prideful act as an opening. He nurtured Elena's anger and comforted her beyond just words. When Roan discovered that her gallant was not so gallant, things came to a head.

The disaffected members of Trinity, while not trusting each other, found that their hatred and fear of Joshua Fflowers bound them together. It was Laureby who came up with the idea of faking the deaths of Roan and himself. It was Elena who had the idea that if she took the Etruscan embryos Fflowers might be so afraid of the political consequences that he would let her go. It was Roan who decided that the best way to protect herself from Fflowers' wrath, if he happened to see through their ruse, as well as keep Trinity bound to itself, was to split up the longevity solution among the three of them. To reassemble the prion-extended DNA of the longevity solution it would be necessary to reconnect the information etched within the three crystals.

The plan had worked. Winslow and Laureby had died in an explosion and gone off to start new lives. Elena had taken the embryos and left a letter explaining what would happen if Fflowers came after her. For sixty years, a balance had been maintained.

Until Al Burgey fell and cut his arm.

It had taken Burgey more than a year and much more money than he could have imagined to find Roan. Over the years he had received the occasional communication from her. Usually, she would write as a fellow scientist. What did he think about this or that line of inquiry? It was not until his hirelings had managed to backtrack from a post office box in Bratislava through Teheran, Haifa, Monaco, and a half-dozen other dead ends and cut-outs, that Laureby realized how great Roan's distrust of him was. The trail had gone dead until he chanced upon a small news item that led him to believe that East Africa might be a good place to focus the search. It took more money and time to follow up the rumors about some unusual guinea hens. It had taken even more time and more money to find that Roan Winslow had become Nora Elieson.

Burgey developed a plan based on pity. He would go to Africa and convince Roan to give up her part of the puzzle. After all, he had been her colleague, friend, lover and fellow conspirator. She might not trust him, but she certainly wouldn't allow him to die in the way that was ordained. She would listen. She would understand.

When Al Burgey arrived in Bujumbura, he found that Nora Elieson wasn't there.

He had hired a roto, tracked her to the village where she had been staying only to find that she had left that morning. When he finally caught up with his old colleague, Laureby found she was not as understanding as he had assumed. She wanted no part of his plan. When she wouldn't agree to give him what he had come for, Burgey threatened to harm her or her family.

That had been a mistake he would long regret.

Elieson had tried to get away. In her attempt, by accident or choice, she had careened off the road to her death.

Guilt and remorse over his former lover's death effectively ended Burgey's quest. He returned to Noramica and the slow, maddening drama of his disease.

After awhile Allen Burgey came to believe that he had accepted his fate. In a strange way, he saw the progress of the ALS as penance for his former lover's death. However, at that moment when he took from the girl Roan Winslow's portion of the DNA sequence, Burgey's fist had closed tight and did not want to reopen.

Even now, as he threw shirts into the suitcase, he was monumentally ambivalent. One moment he would feel an unconquerable urge to track down Prissi Langue and snatch back what should be his. A second later would come a surge of serenity welling from the idea that he might obtain forgiveness from helping her.

In the end, as the complicated Glen Laureby/Allan Burgey waited for the Wingcab to take him to his hidey-hole, he did both. He left Prissi Langue clues that would take her someplace where she might be safe, but that also would provide him an opportunity to take back what he craved.

# CHAPTER TWENTY

Adding Insight to Injury

Throb, throb, spike. The pain in her wing joint cadged and cajoled. Throb, spike, throb. The pain played a child's tune inside her skin. Throb, throb, spike. Even though the simple song was insistent, it still took Prissi several moments before she was willing to come back from the warm, quiet place where she had hidden. Throb, throb, spike. Finally, some part of Prissi's beleaguered brain realized that the spiky note came when she took a breath.

Prissi pushed open her eyes to see...nothing. She closed her lids, then, opened them again. Nothing. Fighting panic, Prissi turned her aching head and was relieved to see the pale glow of moonlight on the cracked concrete of the levee's aged surface. When she turned, the pain's tune changed. No, that was wrong. The tune remained the same. It was the tempo that changed.

Prissi ignored the toddler's music as she carefully drew her knees beneath her so she could back up enough to bring her wing down from where it had been wedged against the wall of the levee. The pain of that effort shot what was left of her Vegantopian lunch and her peetsa dinner with Nancy out her mouth and through her nose. To Prissi, her whimper sounded like a kitten's cry. She stayed on her knees as she carefully backed away from the splatter she had just made. She drew out her breath until the needling pain subsided

Sliding her eyes sideways, Prissi was surprised to see her mypod still on her wrist. Her understanding was that mugger's always took them, not only because they were valuable, but, more importantly, because it kept their victims from immediately calling for help. She stopped to consider...if it wasn't a mugging, then.... Prissi reached inside her pak and was amazed to find the two crystals still there.

What was going on?

With as much care as if she were on a swaying tightrope, Prissi keyed her mypod. "Dad, can you come? I'm hurt. On the West side levee, maybe around 80th. I can't see where I am. I got mugged. Just come."

In less than two minutes, two hawks, with their aug-pacs hissing and green-gold halo lights searching through the shadows, swooped up the levee. Two minutes after the hawks landed, a roto-rescue landed thirty meters away. Moments after that, feeling overwhelmed by their attention, Prissi began to wonder if the police team's barrage of questions were meant to distract her from what the medical team was doing to her.

Just as Prissi was being gurneyed to the small roto, Beryl Langue, blood-red face almost black in the phosphor light, so short of breath his sentences had the gaps of a bad phone connection, interrupted his only child's rescue to try to find out what had happened. Even after he had identified himself to the hawks, they insisted that he curtail his questions and concerns until after they got his daughter to the hospital.

Reluctantly, Beryl Langue allowed himself to be cordoned off from Prissi.

Ss Prissi was strapped inside the roto's bubble, she felt a primal magic flowing from the IV into her arm as the pain in her body flowed out.

The roto coughed, hummed, then rose in the air and bee-lined its way to Columbia-Unitarian Hospital. Once the dust and gravel of the departed roto's wash had settled, the two hawks followed. It took another five minutes for the octogenarian Langue to feel recovered enough from his desperate flight uptown to be confident that he could safely make it to the hospital.

Prissi missed her admission and first hour at the hospital. It wasn't until a flash of self-awareness caused her to pause in the middle of a sentence, that she even realized that she had resumed consciousness, and, obviously, the power of speech. Two hawks, one on either side of her head, each just a half-step in from the edge of her peripheral vision, hovered expectantly while Prissi tried to figure out what she was saying and, more importantly, what she already had said. Had she kept it to just the mugging; or, had she been blurting things out about Centsurety, Richard Baudgew and Jack?

As Prissi started to talk again—to relieve the room of the growing pressure from her silence—a shadow moved forward and morphed into her father.

"Prissi, was it a robbery? Or did they...assault you?"

Thinking as fast as the medicine clogging her synapses would allow, and making use of the things that had happened over the last several days, Prissi said, "I think it was just teenerz. When they flew over me, they were kind of wobbly, maybe just fledges, you know, just being flerks."

From the left side hawk, "How many?"

"Three."

From the right side, "If they flew past you and weren't very good flyers, how did they catch you? Your father tells me that you're a very good winger, much better than your license would suggest."

"Another one, in front, came right at me. I slowed down to see which way he was going. Left side, right side."

"Is this a third or fourth one?"

With the hawks alternating their questions, it gave Prissi a couple of extra seconds, as she turned her wide-eyed innocent face from one to the other, to formulate her answers.

"Just three. The two who flew over and the one in front."

"Not four?"

""No...I don't think so."

"And you didn't recognize any of them?"

"No."

"Three people, young boys, strangers, attack you, but don't molest you, nor, if my eighteen years experience means anything, do a great job of robbing you. If you had money, it's gone, but your mypod is still on your wrist. It strikes me as...."

Before he could finish his conclusions, Prissi interrupted, "But if they were fledges, maybe after they knocked me out, they got scared...at what they had done... and just took off."

Happy with the way that sounded, even though a part of her thought it might be dialogue she had heard in a vid, Prissi said encouragingly, "That has to be it, right?"

The hawk on the left shook his head as he concurred, "Right. Has to be. Miss Langue, we don't have much to go on. We'll check the air-cams to see if we can get more of a handle on this. And, of course, it needn't be said that if you happen to remember more, or remember differently, that you'll be in touch. I would caution you to be extra careful. My experience is that it's the improbable that is most likely to repeat itself."

With the irritated voice of a logician once again being forced to counter the illogical, Beryl Langue asked, "Why would you say that? It doesn't make sense."

"Because what happens only seems improbable because we don't have all of the information, sir."

"Are you insinuating that my daughter isn't being truthful?"

The left-side detective stuck out his hand to Beryl Langue, "Good night, sir. Even fledglings can get away if they have enough of a head start."

Reluctantly, Beryl Langue shook the hawk's hand.

Although Prissi was pleased with how well things had gone with the hawks, she was less sure about whether to continue along the same path with her father when he asked in an angry voice, "What were you doing? Why were you in New Jersey? Why didn't you let me know where you were?"

"Daddy, I thought you might be busy, like last night, so I didn't want to bother you. My friend, Nancy, remember Nancy, we got together to work on something for school, but... and I was going to stay over...and I was just about to call you when Nancy was...rude to her...mother and her dad had been drinking, her dad had been drinking, and he got angry so I couldn't stay over. So I figured I could be home in an hour so I just left...in such a hurry...I was kind of upset...because of the drinking, so I forgot to call."

Prissi forced herself to take a deep breath as she surged across the finish line. Her father wavered between angry and relieved, then, opted for relief.

"How do you feel?"

The face Prissi made for Beryl Langue was a mosaic of her words.

"Stupid, sore, very happy you're here, angry at those boys, and...safe."

She reached for her father's hand, and hoping to end her performance, said, "Really, really safe. And, really, really sleepy."

Prissi's father snapped his fingers to turn off the bedside light. As he held her hand, Prissi matched her breathing to that of her father. Beryl Langue quickly drifted back into the sleep he had been startled from two hours before. His daughter, fighting the chemicals wandering around her body, stayed awake replaying every minute of her day. Who had attacked her? How did they know where she was? When had they begun tracking her? And, most confusing, what was it that they wanted? Why hadn't they wanted the crystals? As she prepared to surrender to the sleep her body was demanding, Prissi decided that Al Burgey was right. It had been a huge mistake to pay Richard Baudgew a visit. Worse, she had the strongest feeling that many of the effects of that misjudgment were still ahead of her. Prissi's last thoughts before falling back into her iv-deepened sleep were of the undeniable wisdom of wiping her nose clean, putting her head down, returning to Dutton as a bright, energetic, not so inquisitive, fifteen-year old girl.

# CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Day of Reckonings

When Prissi woke six hours later, she knew where she was and what had happened to her. She turned her head expecting to see her father slumped in the chair beside her bed, but the chair was empty except for his thermajerkin. When she looked at her mypod, which she found on the bedside table rather than her wrist, it was just past seven a.m. She guessed her dad might be getting breakfast. As soon as she had that thought, she herself became ravenously hungry. She wondered if the ward she was on was one of those at Columbia famous for its concierge services. She let her mind drift—corn muffins baked long enough that the tops were crusty and nearly brown, sweet butter, one of the multispensers that held six kinds of honey, a bowl of black raspberries with a swirl of whipped cream, and a choco-latte with more whipped cream...and something good to read. She was toying with a Pagrath Ghaib, Dickens, Michael Flynn, Bryce Pynchon, when a rough rogue wave rising a dozens of meters higher than the surrounding dreamy seas slammed into her.

Centsurety.

It was the only thing she wanted to read about or know about. She wanted to understand every jot and sliver about Centsurety. The people who had worked there. The work they had done. And why poking around in events from long ago was important enough to someone to ride her into the ground. Then, like turning suddenly and feeling a deep bruise, Prissi remembered her last thought before falling asleep. She tried to visualize opening her hand and letting Centsurety go, but that vision wouldn't come. In fact, when Prissi thought to look down, both of her hands were clenched tight into fists.

What was the secret?

Prissi slid sideways on the bed and stretched her tubes and wires far enough that she could reach her mypod. She typed in a directory search, got Allen Burgey's number and pulsed the call button.

The line chirped and chirped before pitching higher as the call was forwarded. More chirps, but no answer. No answering machine. At a house whose owner could barely walk. Although Prissi could not believe what was happening to her, she was instantly sure that she wasn't the only one who had been attacked the night before. But, how could that be? What was it that she had started?

Dr. Baudgew has called her Pandora. Could it be true?

To take her mind off questions she couldn't answer, Prissi picked up the housefone. By the time Beryl Langue returned to the room, Prissi was picking at a half-eaten lox and cream cheese omelet. A half-hour later, her IV's had been disconnected and she was dressed in her freshly laundered clothes. When she tried to talk to her father, he ignored her except to tell her to hurry it up.

To conform to hospital policy on discharges, Prissi was forced to segue along the hospital's corridors in an ancient two-wheeler, whose severely nicked and scratched frame suggested she might be safer walking from her room to the hospital exit. They got into the first of the Wingcabs lined up outside the hospital and belted themselves onto their perches. As soon as the driver, a Darfurian ex-pat Prissi concluded from the looks of his clothes, put the cab up on its air cushion, she knew she would have a headache before they were halfway downtown. The engine for the front jet was sputtering. The hack threw the van into gear and they lurched forward. He drove with the front end canted up so that every time the fore jet sputtered, it had more room to drop down before its emer-wheels smacked onto the road. Bounding up and down in a way that reminded the teener of a camel ride she had taken on an Egyptian vacation when she was eight, Prissi gave a small smile of satisfaction when the headache she had predicted arrived before they crossed 59th Street.

The caroming cab ride and the close presence of its captain kept Prissi and her father from saying more than the occasional banality—made just frequently enough to stave off embarrassment—on their way home. However, as soon as they crossed the threshold into the apartment, Beryl Langue was instantly transformed. A finger pointing to the couch, face dark with anger's rich blood, voice rising, he asked, "What is going on? What have you done?"

Prissi, unbalanced by a version of her father she had never witnessed before, and could scarcely imagine, moved to the couch with the boneless slink of a remorseful dog.

"I don't know. I really don't."

"Pandora's flung open the lid, and she doesn't even know what she's done? Sit," he commanded when she hesitated before the couch. "Sit! And I'll tell you what you've done. You've opened a door that's been sealed for sixty years. You've angered, no, incited, a powerful and vindictive man. You've endangered yourself, and, probably, others. Without a thought, with appallingly feckless ignorance, and the most naive foolhardiness. You have amused yourself with a game that could prove deadly."

With her throat so dry that the rough edges of her words caught, Prissi coughed, "Deadly?"

"What do you think would have happened, if your attackers hadn't found whatever it was they were looking for?"

Relying on bravura as a strategy, Prissi countered, "What things?"

Her father's howl made Prissi jump. She had never seen him like this before.

"What things? I don't know. But, you had something and your attackers got it because if they hadn't, you would either be dead or being held somewhere being tortured."

Even though her father's words only confirmed what she already had guessed, as tears burst from her eyes for the second time that morning, Prissi realized that some part of her, a large part, had been holding out hope.

"Why would anyone want me dead?"

Her father's stare stung Prissi as much as if he had slapped her in the face.

"Tell me what you have been doing."

"I already told you. It started out as a school project. I was interested in blind alley science. But then I found some things...about Mom...that got me off on a tangent."

"And I told you to leave it alone."

"And I was going to, but...." Prissi wavered over what she should say next. The silence grew before she decided that her fate and, maybe, the fate of her father, demanded that she tell the truth.

When Prissi finished telling the story of the lost path, Jack Fflowers, her mother's notebook, Richard Baudgew, Al Burgey, the crystals, the attack and the unanswered phone at Burgey's house, her father opened his mouth, then, closed it. He opened his hands, then, closed them back into the fists that he had been clenching during most of her tale. He had hovered and hulked over Prissi the whole time she had been talking. Now, he stepped back from her, extended an index finger at his daughter and touched his lips. He left the room, but was back in less than a minute. When he hurried back through the door, he had a pad of paper in hand. He motioned to Prissi to move over before sitting down beside her. Again, he touched he lips before showing his daughter the pad upon which he had written, "We have to go. Get what you need."

When Prissi had called Burgey's home, she had understood when there was no answer that something bad must have happened. She had pushed back the possibility that the old man might be dead, but she couldn't deny that something bad had happened, and that that something probably had happened because of her. Now, for the second time that morning, Prissi had the feeling that her father was right, she had started something that was endangering herself and others. But, mortal danger is a very hard thing for a fifteen-year old, even a fifteen-year old who had grown up in Burundi, to comprehend. Prissi knew that her father was right, but, at the same time, she knew he must be wrong. Somehow, the danger wasn't real. Could not be real. It was just a shadow. Something that would change with a slight shift in the sun. She had made a mistake and, like all teenerz, Prissi thought that all mistakes could be corrected.

Lost in her thoughts, Prissi jumped when her father touched her shoulder, then, tapped the paper.

Prissi nodded and whispered, "Where?"

Her father whispered, "Go. Now."

Prissi tipped her head and mouthed, "Where?"

Beryl Langue slapped Prissi's cheek—something she never could have imagined.

"Now!"

Feeling like she was moving within the syrup of a dream, Prissi nodded.

In her room, the frightened girl looked at the little that was there. Unlike her friends, for example, Nasty Nancy, whose room was filled with clothes, jewelry, childhood drawings, music, old invitations, pix, a thousand shoes, Prissi owned little. Most of what she did still have was sitting in her room at Dutton. Now, she was being told to choose among the few things left. For an instant, she had the image of a hot air balloon, unladened, then, untethered, floating away, away and even farther away. She quickly touched things that once had meant so much to her, in part because they were so few: a shell necklace, a panther mask, her rag stick and string dolls so beloved among the rag-clothed, stick thin children in Burundi's villages.

Nothing in the room called to her. Rather than make choices, it was easier just to leave it all. Finally, energized by her despair, the shell-shocked teener grabbed socks and underwear and the small box with her mother's pearls and rings. She looked for her mother's notebook, but couldn't find it.

As she pondered how she could have mislaid that, Prissi hurried to the bathroom for toothbrush, floss and eye shadow. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, stopped dead to look at her complicated face, and stayed in place until she thought her face looked more determined than afraid.

Once outside the Gramercy Arms, too burdened down by their belongings to fly, Beryl Langue grabbed his daughter's arm and steered her east on 21st Street at a fast pace. Three blocks away, just after Prissi asked him if he had moved her mother's notebook, he shoved her under the awning and through the doors of a KaffeKiosK. Prissi ordered a Sumo-Sumatran and followed her father to a perch near the back of the room. Before she got to him, Beryl Langue edged off his perch, strode to the door at the back of the room, opened it, and carefully looked around before sitting back down. He twisted on his perch so that he could keep an eye on the entrance.

"Dad, what's going on? What was Centsurety? And why is it so important so many years later? Is everything that has been happening because of me, because of something I did? Or, is it because of Mom and something she did in the past?"

Prissi reached out to touch the pale tips of her father fingers. Despite the physical connection, her father's stare, looking at something far beyond the confines of the KaffeKiosK, didn't change.

"Dad. Dad! You have to tell me. Why would someone want to hurt me?"

Prissi's hand moved from Beryl Langue's fingers to his wrist. She squeezed hard.

"Dad?"

Her father shook his head.

"I'm not sure what is going on. Do you remember when Pandora opened the box, more than just Despair escaped? I think that may be happening here. Joshua Fflowers, or that man you saw in New Harlem, Baudgew, or some rival of Cygnetics, any or all or even others could be involved."

"Involved in what? I'm positive Mom worked for Centsurety, but I don't know what she did or was trying to do or how that can be important sixty years later."

Beryl Langue withdrew his wrist from Prissi's grasp. His hand encircled his coffee cup. He lifted it to his lips, but put it back down without taking a drink.

"You have to understand the times, Prissi. Back then, science was moving much faster than other aspects of society, especially government. Many scientists felt thwarted. We used to talk about how the times we were living through weren't much different from the 16th century when Middle Age scientists like Copernicus and Galileo were constrained by the Church. As our frustration grew over not being able to do science as we wished, some of us became disdainful, arrogant. People who seemed to stand in our way were our enemies, unenlightened Luddites. When Fflowers set up Centsurety, I imagine that the people who went to work for him figured that his power and money would be able to keep the pagans at bay."

Prissi had been tapping her thumbs against the table's edge waiting for her father to get to the point.

"You're saying Mom worked for Fflowers, right? But, why? What was she working on?"

"My understanding is that the stated goal, the white hat research, was delayed fledging. And, you have to understand that that was a very real goal. There was a growing political backlash concerned with children and their parents being forced to make such an important, expensive and irrevocable decision at such a confusing period in a child's life. DF would have solved a lot of problems."

"If there was a front door, Dad, there must have been a back door."

Beryl Langue slowly, and, seemingly, reluctantly nodded.

"Youth is arrogant. Your mother was an extraordinary scientist, and an extraordinary human being, but...."

"Dad."

"Flowers had wanted to be a classicist, but he grew up poor. In boarding school he had studied Greek and Latin, but he knew if he chose the life of a classicist, he would starve. He became a scientist, a very good scientist, but he never quite let go of his first love."

Langue pursed his lips tightly together as if he had finished saying what needed to be said. His eyes drifted past Prissi and out to the world beyond.

Prissi took a sip of her coffee. The drink was bitter, like burned Kona, then, somehow oily, with just a soupcon of ashes. She laughed silently at the irony of that.

"You've been looking at some paths of science that seemed promising, but didn't go anywhere. Sixty years ago, your..." Beryl Langue stopped as if he were having trouble remembering..."your mother was working on something...a problem that seemed intractable, impossible but that had fascinated people for eons. Fflowers insisted that the time was right for the problem to be solved. Your mother was intrigued by the problem and also by the chance to work with Glen Laureby, who was on the fast track for the Googleheim Prize. I remember your mother telling me that conducting their research was like ascending the face of an unexplored mountain. She and Laureby began at the base, went up a little way, and began to climb what seemed to be a promising path. They were doing science, with a small s, like science usually is. Plodding forward, sliding back, taking a breath, adjusting gear, and then plodding forward two steps beyond where they had been.

"Your mother told me that one day they hit some particularly bad footing and slid all the way back down to where she and Laureby had begun. They were burned out. She went to their boss, not Joshua Fflowers, but a horrible little man, the man you met yesterday, Baudgew, who went to Joshua Fflowers to ask him to let them do something else until they got their energy back for the real task. The request was denied...if it was ever even brought to Fflowers. This Baudgew was a very vindictive man. If your mother and Laureby didn't succeed, Baudgew's career would suffer.

"Your mother considered quitting. She thought that she would leave Centsurety and go to work at a university. Any university in the world would have wanted her. She was that good. But Fflowers wife, Elena, a brilliant scientist in her own right, found out what was going on and took them under her wing. She gave them some time to think and putter. And she worked with them. The result was absolutely unexpected and entirely serendipitous. Your mother, Glen Laureby and Elena Fflowers found a way to do what they had been hired to do. But rather than that being the end, it was just the beginning. But what they discovered was so illogical, so counterintuitive, so unlikely a place to find an answer, that they were certain they must have made some monumental error. It was like finding the disease was the cure."

A frustrated Prissi interrupted, "Like inoculation. That illogical?"

Beryl Langue nodded, "Your mother said that it was like she had slid all the way back down the mountain, given up and was walking away when, all of a sudden, she found a set of steps carved into the stone which climbed all the way to the peak."

As her father talked, Prissi fidgeted—both from the jolt of caffeine but more so from the opacity of her father's words. When she couldn't stand it anymore, she grabbed his sleeve to interrupt, "But, Dad, what was it? What did Mom find? And, why is it important now?"

Beryl Langue stared at Prissi, but seemed to see something else as he weighed his words, "She found a key...not just her...it can't all be blamed on her...she forgot that, I think...they... they found a key and used it to open a box...Pandora's box."

"Daaad," Prissi whined, "Be specific. People are trying to kill me, and you're trying to shield me with euphemisms. How can I be careful in I don't even know what I'm supposed to be careful about?"

Prissi tugged on her father's arm as she implored him to tell her the truth.

"They were working on a kind of meta-mutancy. A change, but a kind of change that would take you back to where you were. Almost like a Mobius strip."

"What kind of mutancy? Wings?"

"No, not wings, not unless angels really have wings. Do you know...." Beryl Langue suddenly stopped talking before ripping his arm from Prissi's grasp. When she turned to see what the matter was, he was staring through the KaffeeKiosK's window.

"Run, Priscilla! Run! Now! Out the back. Now!"

Two blue jay-winged men were staring through the window.

"Now!"

Prissi pushed off from her perch and bolted toward the rear door. She heard the front door ripped open. Someone yelled, "Stop!" Then, a crash.

As Prissi pushed into the back room, she twisted her head enough to see her father following behind her but taking the time to knock over each perch as he passed it. She rushed toward a door on the far side of the small room which was crowded with a half-dozen machines set up to roast, grind, and make coffee. Prissi smashed the back door open, but stopped in her tracks when she heard a scream that she knew must be her father's—a high-pitched noise filled with pain and fear. She jumped back inside the doorway and darted behind a short dented steel counter holding tall equally dented coffee brewalators. Just as she ducked down, the door flew open and a broad-chested winger, with a shock of silver hair leaping up in the middle of his head, rushed through and bolted out the half-opened back door. Prissi exploded from behind the counter, jumped to the back door, yanked it closed and locked it. She whirled around, rushed back and stared through a crack on the hinged side of the dining room door. Her father lay crumpled on the floor with another blue jay winger, this one taller and too bald for a crest, holding him down with a foot on his neck. Prissi froze. She stared indecisively for a few seconds until someone began pounding at the back door.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The man standing over her father looked up.

Boom! Boom!

Her father's assailant, himself indecisive, hovered for a moment before sprinting toward the back room. Prissi let the attacker get almost through the entrance before she slammed the door against his wing as hard as she could. He shrieked. Prissi ripped the door back. The man's motion carried him forward. Prissi leapt on him from behind. He stumbled from the momentum of her weight before falling to the floor. Dazed at her success, Prissi stood for a half-second in triumph.

BoomBoomBoom!!!

The man on the floor started to rise. Balancing her weight on the end of a counter, Prissi jumped up as high as she could and landed on the man's outspread wing just below his shoulder. Something bent. She leapt a second time and felt the bone beneath her feet break like a green limb in the woods. Prissi bounded off the screaming man. As she came back into the dining room, she noticed two people near the front door, as paralyzed as Lot's wife, holding cups half-raised to their lips. Prissi bent over her father.

"Dad. Dad!"

In a mumbled, weirdly dreamy voice, Beryl Langue implored, "Nora!"

"C'mon, Dad. C'mon. Get up!"

Prissi got one hand under her father's shoulder.

"Centuries."

Boom! Boom! Boom! Crack!

Her father groaned. Prissi eased her other hand under Beryl Langue's head and began to lift. His head came up far too easily. A feeling, as if she had just touched the slimiest thing on earth, swept over Prissi.

Her father's neck was broken.

His eyes rolled toward her and fluttered in recognition. He whispered, "Wallet." His lids dropped down.

When Prissi rolled her father so she could reach into his back pocket to get his wallet, his head slipped from her other hand and smacked against the floor.

Screaming first and, then, vomiting just as she passed the frozen coffee drinkers, Prissi rushed out the front door of the KaffeKiosK, took two strides, bent her knees and....

"Here, here, Prissi. Prissi, here!"

Prissi was a few meters in the air. Two buildings away, with his body in shadow and his head just far enough forward to be painted with sunlight, was Jack Fflowers waving a hand to draw her closer.

"Quick. Over here."

Prissi flung her wing up so quickly in order to change directions that she felt the joint half-pop. As she careened toward Jack on a wing and a half, she felt like her mind, as well as her body, was being pulled in too many directions at once. Her touchdown by Jack was more controlled crash than landing. She sprawled forward. He caught her in his arms, held her tightly for a long moment, flashed a snowy white smile, and pulled her into an alley. Halfway down the shadowy corridor Prissi could see a bulkhead with its doors thrown open. Holding her shoulder to diminish the pain, Prissi raced down the alley-way a step behind Jack.

"In here. Quick."

Jack stood aside so that Prissi could go down the dark steps into a darker gloom. As she hurried past him, Prissi turned too quickly and caught the lower portion of her dislocated wing against a sharp corner of the steel door. An excruciating pain shot from her shoulder to her stomach and the rest of her coffee shot from her mouth and nose.

"Puking Pluto."

"Go. Go. Go."

The panting winger staggered down the ancient worn metal steps, which clanged in protest at her weight. Jack followed her for three steps then turned to close the metal flaps above him.

The small space at the bottom of the stairs smelled of rust and rot. In the dim light sieving through the rusted bulkhead doors, Prissi studied the building's door for a split second before yanking its handle. Nothing happened. She violently twisted the handle and shoved the door. Nothing happened. She tried again, then snapped her head around to Jack

"What's going on. It won't open."

"Probably locked."

Prissi's voice pierced the small space with the sharp crack of an ice break in the Arctic.

"What? You brought me here? To a dead end? What a freeieekin feeb."

She shouldered Jack aside and started back up the stairs. Jack grabbed her wing, the dislocated one, and Prissi gave a high-pitched moan. Jack dropped the wing as if he had been shocked.

"Shut up. They'll hear you."

Prissi was so incensed at Jack's stupidity in bringing her to a place with no escape, and his arrogance in touching her, that she was vibrating. Finally, to keep from exploding, she aimed a punch at his head before veering off and smacking the side of the stairwell.

"Prissi, stop it," Jack whispered as he took her arm and led her back down the stairs. Prissi pulled away, darted back up three steps, whirled around and flung herself into the air. She smashed into the rotting door, felt it give and simultaneously felt her shoulder snap back into place. Cautiously, she half-flared her wing in the enclosed space. She was satisfied that, if necessary, she would be able to fly—although for how long was another matter. The feeling that one thing was going better stopped when she heard the sounds of footsteps crunching over the alley's carpet of broken glass and gravel. Jack held a finger to his lips in a way that reminded Prissi of her father just minutes before. The tears that instantly welled in her eyes as she thought of her father further blurred the door handle as she half-knelt to inspect it.

More steps.

Prissi tugged on Jack's sleeve and whispered, "Push." She pointed to where a crack in the door, seemingly new, probably from her slam, showed above and below the lockset.

A muffled, "Down here," came through the door.

Prissi placed her hands above and below the doorknob and wedged her feet back against the edge of the second step. When she twisted her neck to see what Jack was doing, he was just standing there. For a brief second, Prissi thought that he didn't seem to care if he were caught. She hissed and jerked her head at the door. Jack slowly followed her example. Despite the fear and adrenaline boiling within her, Prissi was distinctly aware of Jack's shoulder alongside hers and the long patch where their two thighs touched.

The crunching outside stopped and the light inside the bulkhead dimmed, then, brightened as someone moved about in the alley.

"Hurry up."

The command shot through the rusty holes and caromed inside the stairwell like a marble in a box.

Prissi twisted her head toward Jack's face just three inches away. Making her gaze move up from his lips, she looked into his eyes and nodded. Both sucked in deep breaths and began to push. The door creaked.

"She's in here."

Crunch, crunch, crunch as someone ran down the alley.

Prissi groaned, a sound which reminded her of the sound her father had made on the coffee shop floor, as she pushed with all of her strength. Jack's efforts and sounds joined hers and together they sounded like spatting cats under a full moon. The door cracked. A narrow beam of light split the door they were pushing against as the bulkhead door above was partially opened.

Prissi grunted in a voice she herself didn't recognize.

"C'mon down, hero. I'll break your freeieekin' wing, too."

A muffled whisper, "Get on that side."

Another crack. Prissi felt like she was doing most of the work. She thought the veins in her forehead were going to burst through her skin like broken springs. Crack. The door gave way, but Prissi's triumphant yell lasted only a quarter second. The door had opened just ten centimeters before it was held in place by a security chain. The beam of light from above widened.

"NOW!"

Prissi, her whole body turned to energy like some graphic novel heroine, propelled herself off the step and smashed her good shoulder into the door just at the chain. The rusted screws holding the jamb plate in place ripped loose. The door hurtled open and Prissi hurtled after it. She barely managed to keep herself from sprawling across the floor by grabbing at the door frame as she sped by. Regaining her balance, she could see in the light coming from the bulkhead row after row of cheaply made shelves and scores of pallets stacked with open and sealed cases of wine and liquor. Immediately, Prissi knew where she was. Isabel's House of Spirits, was the largest liquor store in Manhattan. The frantic girl ran to the first open case she saw, a case labeled Veuve Cliquot, and grabbed two bottles from it. When she whirled back toward the entryway she almost took Jack's head off as she windmilled both bottles toward the pair of legs coming down the bulkhead steps. Both bottles fell short of their target, but they did explode, sending flying shards of glass and spumes of glistening pungent bubbles everywhere. Someone shouted. Maybe in anger. Maybe in pain. As Prissi retreated to get more ammunition, Jack scrambled past her with a bottle.

"Dumbnation, Jack, is your other arm broken?"

As Prissi grabbed more ammo, she caught the label—Corton Charlemagne—out of the corner of her eye.

Two nearly simultaneous explosions. Then, three closely spaced individual ones. Jack finally followied Prissi's lead and returnedcame back with two bottles in each hand and one tucked under an arm. A half-case of Pommery exploded. Then, more explosions. More shouts. A detonation of Haut Brion brought on a scream. The wine went from a splash to a puddle to a pool spreading across the floor. Suddenly, there was a loud noise from behind, and the whole basement jumped into relief as six banks of ceiling lumos came on.

"What the...."

Feet came pummeling down a set of protesting stairs behind where Prissi and Jack, now holding two sets of legs at bay, were waging war. Prissi jerked her head at Jack. They unloaded the bottles in their hands and skittered sideways down an aisle to hide. A behemoth of a woman, refrigerator big, with a head of blowzy black hair so froed it made her head seem disproportionately large compared to her immense body, waddled, ran, something, fast and implacable toward the battleground Isabel came swinging an immense aluminum bat like it was a kitchen spoon. The owner saw the damage, the assault on her most precious vintages, the finest wines northern Europe had to offer, and shot forward with a speed that should have been impossible considering her obesity. She took a roundhouse swing at the one set of legs. The resulting noise reminded Prissi of walking on wet peanut shells. She and Jack didn't wait to see the fate of the second set of legs. Moving quickly and quietly, they headed toward the stairs, which still vibrated from Isabel's descent.

Prissi whispered, "Tiptoe."

With the exaggerated movements of amateur clowns in a small town farce, they silently mounted the stairs and entered a small office with a large window opening onto Isabel's immense display of the world's harvest of fruits and grains.

A slam and a scream from down below.

"My Pommery. My God, my Pommery. You slug."

Jack started to grab the door handle, but Prissi stopped him.

"Plan?"

Jack shrugged.

"Go slow. Look normal. If that doesn't work, then...."

"Run like hell. I'll meet you at...at...NYPD in an hour. Okay?"

Jack nodded. He started to step aside, but Prissi shook her head.

"No, you go first. If my wings catch something or screw up some new way, it won't affect you. Go. Go. Go."

There were four clerks on the floor, as well as dozens of customers, when Jack eased through the door. Prissi watched his jittery non-nonchalant walk through a store forbidden to anyone under the age of twenty-three.

A clerk looked up, wondered where Jack had come from, appraised him and immediately started on a diagonal to cut the under-age interloper off before he could escape. Through the glass Prissi saw the clerk mouth something. Jack froze and a second clerk approached on his flank.

Prissi opened, then, slammed the office door as hard as she could. Customers and clerks both looked to see what had caused such a noise.

Prissi pulled at her hair as she churned forward.

"Omagod, omagod. She's fallen. Aunt Izzy. Tia Izzy, she fell down the stairs."

Several customers, obviously regulars, looked above the check-out lanes to where a huge hologram of Isabel, deeply cleaved in an operatic red dress with hair much blacker and more controlled that what Prissi had just seen, smiled down benevolently on her customers like a mahatma on his initiates. The clerk closest to Jack wavered, then, as he saw two other clerks hurry toward the back of the room, he turned his attention back to the teener. Jack broke his beeline so he could put a large display of Iowa chardonnays between himself and the clerk.

Prissi intentionally staggered against a row of nano brews. Green and brown beer bottles went tumbling.

"Her leg. Omagod. Omagod. Her poor leg. Blood."

Twenty more bottles crashed to the floor.

Catching Prissi's diversion out of the corner of his eye, Jack took up the same tactics. A large, slowly spinning globe held paks of the world's snacks—banger and egg crisps from Scotland. Algae green styro-flavored peapod shapes from Japan. Setting sun orange cumin and cinnamon flavored extrusions from India. Other extrudings, improbably pink, of a meat-like texture, from east of the Urals. Crunchy fried and fiercely spiced not-yet-endangered insects from the Fifth World. Jack toppled the globe and tromped through the destruction. Bags burst and sharp smelling shrapnel flew in all directions.

Jack was less than four strides from the door. Prissi was thrice that distance away. People were moving in all directions. Short people, unable to see over the counter to determine the cause of the explosion assumed terrorists and either dropped to fetal positions or stampeded toward the doors. The clerks, knowing the eponymous owner's wrath at the destruction they had not been able to prevent, began dropping to their knees, like grief-stricken mothers after a natural disaster, to salvage unbroken bottles of wine and beer.

Prissi picked up the pace even as her eyes dartedback and forth, up and down, trying to pick a path through the maze of obstacles to freedom.

"The baby! The baby! Tia fell on the baby."

A whole rack of discount Kurdistan cabernets, bottles ejecting from the racks like torpedoes in a submarine, shot across the path in front of Prissi. She yelped and half beat her wings to get over the hurdle.

From ahead, Jack screamed, "Goal!" as he burst from Isabel's out onto 21st Street. Prissi beat her wings again, but she had too much adrenaline flooding her body. In a split second, she was two meters in the air. Her head banged into a light fixture.

"Freeieekin Hesus Mimi."

Her wings paused. She lost her balance and fell into a safety cushion of snack bags. Dozens of bags simultaneously exploded from her weight. The air filled with things, mainly orange and yellow-colored, spewing the smells of dehydrated onion and garlic, smoke and chipotle. Prissi tried to get up, but slipped on the debris. Tried again. Took an outstretched hand. Rose. Tried to disengage her hand from what she now saw was a red-faced clerk. She screamed in terror, "My baby! My baby!! Tia crushed my baby!" and snapped her hand free from the clerk, now paralyzed in shock, as he imagined a collision of Isabel and baby. Prissi juked left to freeze the last clerk, then, side-slipped through the doorway. She flapped her wings, and went airborne trailing orange, yellow and red particles like the tail of a comet.

No Jack.

Prissi flew low to the ground and as close to the buildings as she dared until she came to the end of the block. As soon as she turned up First Avenue, despite the throbbing ache in her shoulder, she elevated as quickly as she could. Prissi flew north to 22th Street before swinging back south and flying so low over the tops of the buildings that her shoes barely cleared the roof. Prissi landed back from the edge of the building facing onto 21st Street directly across from Isabel's and scuttled forward until she could scrunch down in a corner behind the worn limestone parapet. She shifted her gaze from the skies above to the sidewalks and doorways below.

No Jack.

Prissi slunk down even tighter against the crumbling brick when three hawks swooped down and landed. Two of the officers book-ended Isabel's entrance while the third dropped down into the shadow of the alley. The hawks pushed into Isabel's, then came out a few seconds later with the red-faced clerk who had grabbed Prissi's hand. He gesticulated in such a dramatic way that Prissi thought that he might be an out-of-work mime. Finally, he pointed west. The breathless teener guessed he was indicating which way Jack had gone. Seconds later, two people holding coffee mugs like weapons burst from the KaffeeKiosK and ran toward the hawks. Within five minutes, six more hawks arrived. Prissi watched them search the alleyway and cordon off the KaffeeKiosK. A roto arrived and two medics jumped out and started to go into Isabel's, but a hawk pointed them toward the KKK.

Prissi decided that she couldn't watch was going to be brought out of the coffee shop. Plus, her African neurons were telling her it wasn't safe to stay; however just as she was preparing to leave the safety of the shadows, she noticed an aero-lim cruising slowly down 21st Street west of First Avenue. It came to a stop, but stayed hovering outside a storefront whose signs announced it as the Phosphor Essence. Since Prissi rarely saw a limo this far south and, when they did, lighting and lamp shops weren't likely to be their destinations, the girl drew back and continued to watch.

The Phosphor Essence door opened and a blur, but a blur whose size, shape and blue and white wings reminded Prissi of Jack, bolted across the sidewalk and dove into the car. Prissi got a sickening feeling deep in her guts.

The aero-lim floated off. Prissi waited a couple of minutes more for the nauseous feeling to pass before flying uptown. By the time she was north of Thirtieth Street, she had formulated a plan. She swept down into Thirdtown and bought a Tibetan hat, which smelled like sour milk, to cover her hair and a bamboo vest that only a dwert would wear. She landed on a secu-booth on Thirty-sixth Street and debited everything left in her savings account after going through her father's wallet and not finding the pin code for his debit card.

Prissi flew up Fifth Avenue into traffic heavy enough that she had to pay more attention to her flying than the events of the last hour. Arriving at 42nd Street ten minutes before her proposed rendezvous with Jack, Prissi reconnoitered a block north, then looped the loop so that she was headed back south. She flew two blocks back the way she had come, looped north again, did a short glide, landed on the battlements of a twenty story building and fought the push from the thermals streaming up the building's face before scrambling behind a winged gargoyle keeping watch from its Gothic aerie. Removing her hat, Prissi stared down at the well-worn lions protecting the entrance to the NYPD.

Twenty minutes later, from her coign of vantage, Prissi's attention was drawn from the cramp in her thigh to a cleaned-up, confident Jack getting out of a beat up hack and moving quickly up 5th Avenue toward the datarium. Squinting her eyes, the teener thought she could make out another passenger in the hack. She also thought that Jack was looking good, very good, for a run-away. When he got to the first lion, he sprinted up the steps, taking them two at a time.

Prissi wasn't exactly sure what she should do. The after-effects of the attack and escape pulsed in her temples and tingled her fingertips.

Jack. Jack? Friend? Foe? Rescuer? Turncoat? The evidence was mixed. He showed up outside her apartment and in the next two days she was attacked three times. Today, what was the probability that he just happened to be outside the place where her father was killed?

There. She had thought it. The thought she had been keeping at bay. Pushing off and swatting away—like mosquitoes, like bees, even while she was hurling bottles and running and smashing chips and flying in fear.

Dead.

She couldn't fathom that.

Coffee and plans, admittedly scary plans, one minute and a snapped neck the next.

Paying for something she had done...or was doing, whose importance remained in shadows.

Her father.

Her boring, irritating, aloof, pedantic, all-wise and ever-ignorant father.

Gone.

Prissi felt something slide up and out of her stomach, but this time it didn't churn up her throat and burst from her mouth. This time it got caught at the top of her rib cage where it shook the bars of that prison until it broke free. She sobbed until her throat was raw, her eyes burned like open wounds from her salts and her chest ached as if she herself had stopped Isabel's bat.

Finally, she forced herself to think of Jack because the answer was important.

Friend? Foe? Or, neither? Maybe a pawn? Or....?

"Century."

Is that what he had said? What did that mean?

A broken neck.

Prissi couldn't keep the thoughts of her father's neck from intruding. Rather than deal with them, she hurled herself from the parapet and shot across the street to a botched one hop landing at the top of the NYPD's worn steps. Prissi wiped the blood from her palms, ignored the tears in the knees of her aeros and went inside.

Prissi found a perplexed Jack looking at a display of covers from a defunct inkzine called The New Yorker. Before he could say a word, Prissi banged his shoulder.

"C'mon."

She hurried off to the Spears Reading Room. She walked past the scanners and sniffers and made her way under the arched windows and ornate gilt ceiling to the back of the immense room. With the heavy reassurance of a d-TERROR-ence door close by and the entrance to the room so far away, Prissi felt relatively safe being with Jack. When she looked at him, he stared back. She knew that he was studying her red eye rims, blotchy skin and a still leaking nose. Before he got past, "Are you....?" Prissi shook her head so emphatically that fluid flew from her nostrils.

"No. Not at all. Dad's dead. They killed my dad."

Jack's horrified look seemed real.

"Who?"

To keep from crying again, Prissi relied on an old stand-by, "Ecoists, Afro-nationalists, crypto-Christians, radico-greens, nihilists, the spawn of Mordor, Satan, Fifth World Marxists. Who knows...?"

Prissi paused her protective stream of sarcasm, then narrowed her eyes, which made them burn even more, to a dark beam of inquisition, "Maybe, and most likely, your grandfather."

As far as Prissi was concerned, Jack's laugh was too loud and too sharp to be natural.

"My grandfather? How? He's an old man about two breaths from death himself."

"Is there some natural separation between age and power? Lear seemed to have some trouble with that. Listen, Jack, ever since I started looking into Centsurety, your dear grandfather's pet project, things got bad, then worse, and, now, horrible. My dad's dead as well as a man in New Jersey. I've been attacked twice, I think by the same guyz, and the only thing that I can see that connects all of the data points is a company that went up in smoke a long time ago."

"Prissi, you're wrong. My grandfather is a good man. I know...."

"No, Jack, you're wrong. The only thing you really know is that Joshua Fflowers is a good grandfather. You don't know any more than that. Look at me, in the last few days I've learned that I don't know anything for sure about my parents. I've got pix of someone who looks a lot like my mother might have looked like a long time ago and guess what Jack—this woman who looks so much like my mother doesn't have my mother's name. She has the eyes and nose and chin and smile of my mom, but not her name. Which is just a teeny bit interesting to me, Jack. Intriguing. Mysterious. But with both of them dead, what happens to the mystery, Jack? And if I don't figure out the mystery, then what happens to me, Jack?

"Of course, your grandfather is involved."

Prissi slammed a fist into Jack's upper arm.

"And if I had any brains, I'd get as far away from you as possible because you're just too much of a coincidence. You're like one of those guys running on and off stage in a Moliere play. Except it's too scary to be a farce. I should either get away, fast, or," Prissi grabbed Jack's arm, "kidnap you and trade you for my own safety."

Jack crossed his arms onto the library table, then, dropped his head onto his arms.

"You're completely wrong, Prissi. My grandfather, if he can even think, is worried about what organ is going to fail next. Have you seen the newz? He's busy dying at the Juvenal Institute. You said two attacks. What was the other attack?"

When Prissi told him of the details of her flight down the West Side levee, Jack said, "Why do you think those two events are even connected? Isn't it more likely that, rather than my grandfather reaching out from a coma to ruin your life, that you happened to get mugged flying around at night when you should have been home? And the thing today? Couldn't that have been a robbery?"

"Yeah, sure. They wanted my coffee. Look, Jack, I like caffeine more than most, but I still don't see myself killing anybody for their Kona. My dad's dead, Jack. And if I wasn't such a dambed plucky young heroine, I might be, too. And you'd be worried over who was going to dance with you at Winter Ball next year."

At Prissi's levity, Jack lifted his head, but Prissi's face, streaming with tears, belied her tone.

"Gotta go, Jack."

"Where? Where are you going, Prissi?"

Prissi looked at Jack and tried to read his face. But whatever was written there was indecipherable to her. She gave him a half-pat, a half-smile, a half-sigh, and a full shrug before she pushed him away from her perch and started across the room. When she was halfway across, without looking around, she gave him a half-wave. She hurried out of the NYPD, even though hurrying through a public place often brought unwanted attention from guards and cameras. As soon as she was outside, Prissi launched and flew back to her previous perch. It was fifteen minutes before Jack came out. He stood above the two NYPD lions for a moment, almost as if he were posing, before launching off the top of the steps, flogging south to the end of the block, and making a lazy turn onto 41st Street. Less than a minute later a black aero-lim pulled out of the same street and eased into traffic. Prissi looked to see if she could see a patch of blue and white, but the windows were tinted too darkly for that.

Prissi sat in her aerie and thought about her next move.

She could go back to the apartment. Dangerous. Or, try to find where her father's body had been taken. Dangerous. She could see if she could stay with Nancy. Deprezzing. Or, go back to Al Burgey's house to try to find...what...something that made some sense. Dangerous and deprezzing. Or, she could dart back across the street to the library to see if she could find more pieces to the puzzle. Boring, but.... Or, she could call Dr. Smarkzy to see what he would suggest. Maybe.

Prissi wasn't sure whether she was being tracked or followed, but she also certainly wasn't willing to concede to Jack's notion that the events of the last two days were mere coincidence. Coincidence was too easy. Prissi remembered how in honors lit, Mz. Carbarari, after praising the humanity, psychological insight and extraordinary language skills of Shakespeare, had derided him for his dependence upon coincidence to move so many of his plots forward.

# CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Not a Safe-House

It took Prissi another twenty minutes before she found the energy to launch herself into the air. Being careful to favor her right wing, she flew north to Spicetown. Although it made her nervous to be just a few blocks from where the creepy Richard Baudgew lived, she figured that Spicetown was the best neighborhood she knew to do what she needed to do. As soon as she landed, she began walking as fast as she could along the crowded streets. Lots of people looked at her wings, but she ignored them. After three blocks, she darted into a narrow store selling ethno-clothes. Inside, the lights, oozing like an oil spill, made it almost impossible for Prissi to tell what color of clothing she might be buying. Between glances to see if anyone was staring through the windows, Prissi pawed through racks of brightly dyed poorly made clothes until she finally found two tops and two pairs of yurskins dyed a polluted river brown. She handed the clerk, who looked to be Ethiopian, cash, then vibrated while he processed her purchases in African time. Six blocks away she found a pair of used brown lightweight flight shoes. Two blocks closer to the river, Prissi bought socks and underwear. Still walking toward the river, she stopped at a CiVViS and bought a pak of bubble tags. A block from the river Prissi ducked into a run-down KaffeeKiosK and ordered a Turbo-kona. She walked out through the back of the store and into an alleyway. Turning right, she trotted toward the river. She made her way through the maze of quayside debris until she found a relatively isolated spot. She drank her coffee and downloaded her mypod to two of the bubble tags as she listened to two Jamaicans crooning Carib gospel while they filleted fish from two big blue bins. When the download was complete, Prissi walked back to 139th Street and made a bee-line toward a store she had noticed earlier as she had done her other shopping.

A half-dozen young boys, with weak tea to double espresso-colored skins, were fardin and goophin in front of the run-down electronics store. For the third time in a row it was the shortest boy—Prissi was beginning to think that she might have discovered one of the immutable laws of males teenerz tnature—was the one started the confrontation by leaping in front of her just before she reached the door. When she stopped, two other boys began sliding their hands down her feathers. Prissi shivered dramatically in revulsion, which encouraged the boys to do more. The one on the left began flicking a long chopstick thin finger at the tips of her pinions. Prissi bent forward and emitted a sob. The assailant in front of her started to laugh, but stopped short when Prissi leaned her right shoulder into him, then swept his legs out from underneath him with her left leg. He sprawled on the sidewalk with a smear of blood on his cheek where it had smacked into the concrete. Prissi thanked her African elementary school for its mandatory courses in self-defense as she snapped an elbow into the chest of the boy to the left while he was staring at his vanquished friend. She flared her wings as she stepped toward the shop door.

An extremely tall black stick man, who Prissi guessed must be Masai, laughed a distant rolling thunder as Prissi pushed her way through the door.

"Warrior woomahn."

Prissi salaamed as she greeted him.

When Prissi told the shop owner what she wanted, his hands began to move in a way that reminded her of a crane walking along the shore. The offer and counter-offers went back and forth as regular as a metronome. Prissi listened to the words, but paid most her attention to the man's hands. When she was sure she had done as well as she could, given that she wasn't in a Burundian bazaar where competitors could see one another and there was no such thing as a two-party negotiation, Prissi conceded. Frowning, as if disappointed that an agreement had been reached so quickly, the stick man disappeared through a faded polka-dotted curtain, which, Prissi guessed, probably had begun its life hanging from a cheap shower rod. While she waited, Prissi walked toward the front of the store to see if her tormenters were still hanging about. Even though she couldn't see them, Prissi was not reassured that they weren't close-by.

Stick man returned with a mypod so old and battered that his customer laughed in wonderment at the price he was demanding. Flighty hands flicked away her concerns as easily as winter flies. Prissi took out the bubble tags she had used to download her mypod. Despite the incredible amount of data, the relic loaded in seconds. Prissi scrolled and found her files and folders in place. The download bit counter total matched the upload. The GPS was accurate when she switched that on. There was no way to check to see if the altimeter would read accurately. She keyed in the address for the NYPD and the correct flight plans popped up.

As Prissi fiddled with the device, the stick man's fingers stopped their dance. When she looked up, the smile he gave her with the few teeth he still owned showed brilliant white against watermelon red gums. His teeth looked so healthy that Prissi knew that it wasn't disease that had caused the loss of the others. Sadness dropped over her like a shroud. A second later, she flung it off by deciding to be happy that whatever malign African force had coveted the man's teeth wasn't malignant enough to take his smile.

Before that smile faded, Prissi asked the stick man for a favor. He immediately agreed and led her past the polka-dotted curtain. The back room was dark, piled high with boxes and smelled of garlic and harissa. The thin man's worn orange flips slapped against the treads with a sound like soft clapping as he climbed a flight of rickety stairs. Since the stairs were being used more as shelving for another jumble of boxes than as a means of elevation, Prissi was extra careful with her wing tips. Two flights up, they came to a matte black metal door with a chicken wire reinforced window letting in smog-colored light. After unlocking the door and opening it wide to let her through, Prissi's benefactor murmured a goodbye. Prissi touched his wrist, no bigger than a small white child's, as she thanked him. Again, the bright gums and handful of teeth emitted their warmth. A second later his face was gone and a half-second after that, Prissi heard the snick of the lock.

Keeping away from the edge of the roof, Prissi carefully reconnoitered the sight lines from the surrounding buildings. After she had decided on the rookery's most private spot, she shucked off her kanga, and stripped off her old clothes while keeping her wings close to hide her nakedness. She hopped and twisted her way into her new clothes as she tried to blot out the smell of patchouli coming off them in clouds. When the teener was dressed, she wadded her old stuff into a bag and launched herself from the backside of the building. She flew south and west until she saw a re-cyclist. Dropping down, she trailed behind him as he pedaled his cart south down Fifth Avenue alongside the park. When he stopped to collect a pile of shoes in a string bag set out along the curb, Prissi swooped down, dropped her old clothes into the open yellow bin behind the back wheel, before swooping back into the air.

Free from the weight of her past, angry at her future, and ignoring her body's weaknesses, Prissi beat her wings hard. She climbed and climbed and climbed until, by the time she was at the bottom of the park, she was higher than the top of the Airie—more than five hundred meters higher than her license allowed. She looked down at Joshua Fflowers' roof-top garden—a maze of shrubbery wrapped around more than two dozen white marble statues of mythical beasts. As she moved closer to take a better look, the security lights began flashing to warn her off. She dipped a wing, swung away from her tormentor's home and flew west toward the Hudson. From being up so high, the girl was able to glide almost the whole way across the Hudson River to New Jersey. And, even though her shoulder seemed to be popping out every ten minutes, with so much else going on, Prissi never even thought of crashing into the turbid brown water far below. The hydroaerophobia that had bothered her just the day before was crowded out by too many other kinds of more realistic fears.

Despite having no warning of her visit, except for the alarms going off, Nasty Nancy's parents were gracious when Prissi landed on their roof. Prissi lied that she hadn't called ahead because her mypod was acting up rather than saying that she was staying off the grid because people were trying to kill her. Despite Dutton's emphasis on honor, Prissi thought that proper etiquette called for the lie. Nancy, who had been out buying clothes, seemed aloof when she returned; however, as Prissi filled her BFF in on what had been happening, Nancy grew warmer. That concern, however, stopped as soon as Prissi, blubbering through a squall of tears, told her about her father's death. Through the fog of her tears, Prissi watched Nancy's eyes grow large as she described to her friend what had happened. It took Prissi a minute to understand that it was concern for what danger might be following close on Prissi's heels, rather than concern for Prissi herself, that had Nancy's attention. The teener had hoped that her roomie would invite her to spend the night. She assumed, since the Sloan's were wealthy, that their security systems would keep her safe. When she realized that no invitation was going to be made, Prissi made her goodbyes. As she was walking Prissi toward the door, Nancy's conscience seemed to override her sense of self-preservation.

"What about your dad? What are you going to do about his services?"

Appalled at Nancy's naiveté, Prissi barked, "Nothing. What can I do? If I were to show up for anything, like claiming the body, the same thing will happen to me that happened to him."

"But what about school?"

"Freeieekin A, Nancy, don't be such a dwoof. I can't go anywhere I'm expected to go. Whatever I've opened up is enormous—and I don't even have a clue what it could be. My dad said that they had found something, a key of some kind, biological, chemical, something that opened up what turned into a Pandora's Box."

"What was it?'

Prissi flapped her hands to keep from hitting Nancy, which seemed to be the only obvious thing which would make her feel better.

"Jay-Zee, would I be here fumbling around if I knew? Something with my mom's science, something happened that made him so ashamed or afraid that when he was talking about it he couldn't get past metaphors and similes. So, the surviving family member and scientific detective is pretty much clueless. "

Nancy nodded enthusiastically. "Hubris. Something with hubris. When the pride of man leads him to act like the gods. It's got to be something like that."

Prissi shook her head disconsolately, "I don't know. And I don't have time to speculate. At least, not here. I've got to get somewhere safe."

"You have to go back to school, Prissi. You can't stay here, you know you can't. It wouldn't be fair. But at school, you'll be safe. Even if whoever is after you knows you're there. Think of the kids they protect. I mean if Joe Fflowers can be kept safe, so can you."

"Pretty delusional for a cynic, Nancy. School doesn't even start for another two weeks. What am I supposed to do in the meantime? Hide in the laundry room and eat Tofrutos? Even if I made it back to school safely, I'd be fogged in a day or two. I wish I could go back, though. I wish I could talk to Smarkzy to see if he knows what's going on, but now that I've found out that he played a part in it, I'm not even sure whether I can trust him. He was the one who got me started. Did he use me to flush something out? Something that was too dangerous for him to do? I don't know. I don't want to think that, but I don't know."

"So, don't go. Just call him. Talk to him."

"Omagod, you don't understand anything. Everybody I talk to, my dad, Burgey, the guy in Verona has been killed. If I call Smarkzy and he's innocent, he gets hurt. If he's part of what is going on, then I've just helped them pick up my trail again."

Nancy, whose face had indicated while Prissi was yelling at her that she was prepared to respond in kind, suddenly went rigid.

"What does that mean? Everyone you talk to ends up dead, and you come here? You come here and...and...infect me and my parents?"

Nasty Nancy's short fat arms shot out like battering rams and she slammed Prissi in the shoulder, the same shoulder that had been dislocated earlier in the day.

"Get out! What are you doing to me? Get out! Now!"

By the time Nancy finished her tirade, her voice was high and loud and an umbra of spit mist hung in the air. Prissi started to put a finger in Nancy's face, but, suddenly, she felt so exhausted, so deprezzed and so defeated, that the idea of just lifting her hand was overwhelming. She made herself walk out the rooftop door, but once she was outside, even though she knew her Nancy would be watching through a gap in the curtains, Prissi stood immobile. She felt too tired to fly at all, let alone to fly safely. And, even if she had more energy, she had no idea where she should go. The fear and anger, which had energized her ever since leaving the hospital so many hours before, that had flared up with her father's murder and the fight and escape from his killers, that had burned bright with Jack Fflowers apparent betrayal, was gone, burned out, turned to ash. Now, she was neither afraid nor angry. She was only empty, numb, hopeless. Prissi thought that if she were to fall from the rooftop where she stood in the dusk's bleeding light that she wouldn't even bother to flap her wings.

Her sobs and their chemistry wracked her chest and burned her eyes and flayed the back of her throat.

She was fifteen. Her mother was a suicide. Her dad murdered. Betrayed by one friend. Abandoned by another. Privy to some secret or crime of which she herself hadn't a clue. Her home unsafe. School no refuge. She had no idea where to go and not much money to get anywhere even if she did.

Prissi's whole body trembled.

She wanted someone to tell her what to do and where to go and what to say...and...and...what to eat and wear and when to take her bath and brush her teeth. She wanted to go back. Back before everything was uncertain and dangerous. Back before she knew her parents had been living a lie. Back before she knew anything about Centsurety. Back before she knew Jack and Nancy. Back before Noramica.

Africa.

She wanted to be back in the thick air, sticky dust, rotten smells and open sores of Africa.

And in a split second, Prissi knew what she had to do. To be safe, she would have to get herself back to Africa. Where the water wasn't safe to drink and the evening shadows were filled with insects that could leave you shaking with chills and glowing with heat. But, a place where the satellites didn't spy and the phones didn't work and the current of electricity ebbed and flowed at some unknown force's whim. She might not be able to put the misery back into Pandora's Box, but she could run away. Leave the box and the troubles that had escaped and, now, buzzed around her life.

But, before she could run away, she had to run toward something.

A small flick at the edge of her peripheral vision let Prissi know that Nancy still was watching. And, although less than five minutes before she had been too forlorn to care that her former friend was watching her sob, now that she had a goal, Prissi did care. She brushed the water from her face, took three deep breaths, flapped her wings and flew off into the gloam of the New Jersey sky.

# CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A Pleasant Surmise

Dicky Baudgew felt like he was ten years old again. His father, his dull, dumb father who, despite his nearly absolute lack of mental gifts, hated to lose, once again had swept the checkerboard from the kitchen table rather than admit defeat.

Dicky stared at the notebook that nestled in his hands. He had spent hours reading through Roan Winslow's notes and formulas. He had made sense of much of it, but rather than feeling triumphant, the information he had decoded had only made him hungrier. The notebook, a small consolation prize after the morning's rather dramatic activities, contained some of the science Trinity had developed to extend life, but certainly not all, nor even most. The puzzle remained.

Eternal life had been a multi-millennial dream. What Trinity had created did not achieve that dream, but it did triple a person's lifespan. When Fflowers had first told him about the Centsurety project, Dicky Baudgew had wondered what better dreams could be dreamed with two hundred more years to dream them. However, when the original life extension science that Trinity had developed, while still critically imperfect, had been hi-jacked by Joshua Fflowers, who had made a gift of it to favored few, Dicky had seen how dreams could turn to nightmares. Fortunately, Dicky Baudgew was not among the cursed select. For that snub, he was grateful because Joshua Fflowers' generosity had proven to be a bit of a Trojan gift. The lucky ones, the Chosen Few, had been given decades more years of life but at the price of even more decades of a crab-like crippling. The Ugly Dwarf and his friends grew uglier.

By the time of the explosion, Trinity had already gone far beyond the imperfect version which Fflowers had misused. Exceptional scientists that they were, the members of Trinity had analyzed their errors and corrected them. The notes indicated that. Trinity was sure that it had found the answers. The secret of long life, centuries' long life and all the puzzles that might bring. By studying Roan Winslow's notes, which his people had found in the girl's apartment while the father was off watching over her at the hospital, Dicky could decode enough to surmise that the solution involved the FOXO3A gene. He remembered that the FOX gene had been identified early in the century with clusters of long-lived Japanese Americans in Hawaii. Some of the sketches Dicky found led him to believe that Trinity had found a way to wrap a complicated prion-derived architecture around the FOX gene. What that structure was, and, more importantly, how is had been built, Dicky didn't know because what Dicky held in his hand was an expurgated, a seriously expurgated, version of Trinity's work. Dicky thought how, like Leonardo and so many other scientists before her, Roan Winslow must have been a non-trusting soul. Her notes were in code. Code was fine with Dicky Baudgew. After all, there had been many reasons at Centsurety for mistrust. And, Dicky, of course, liked a puzzle. But, a puzzle, to be fair, had to have all of the pieces necessary to solve it. The pages torn from Roan Winslow's note book suggested that this puzzle wasn't fair. Dicky got angry when things weren't fair.

Dicky's fingers ran along the chad that remained from where pages had been ripped from the back of the book before he flicked the notebook onto his escritoire.

To dampen his anger, the little geri took a shallow breath.

If offered the chance to add two hundred more years of life, would he take it? He let his breath out. For once, he didn't know. It suddenly hit him that longer life to a jade like himself might not be a gift. At the odd, self-pitying moment, he had sometimes wondered whether the twenty extra years the gods curiously had already allowed him were meant as Olympian gift or gag. What he did know for certain was that billions of people would exercise the option of to extend their lives if given the choice. There also was no doubt in Dicky Baudgew's mind that every government on earth would do what it had to keep its citizens from getting that chance. Long life might be a tremendous good for an individual, but it would bring nothing but trouble for a society.

Dicky stood in front of his full-length rococo gilt mirror. He extended his tiny pink fleshy hands to his twin.

"Would you like to live to be three hundred years old?"

Dicky sucked his ancient bee-stung lips, another work of art he had acquired during his oriental exile, inside his mouth and opened his eyes ingénue-wide. In a high simpering voice he exclaimed, "I would! I would!"

Relaxing his face back to that of an old man, he asked, "Would you be willing to go to work for another two hundred years so that your longevity does not become a burden to your family, community or nation?"

The ingénue returned to the mirror, but she seemed somewhat hesitant, indecisive and, from Dicky's viewpoint, angry at the injustice that the responsibility for her longer life should devolve onto her.

When there was no response, Dicky asked a follow-up question, "Would you be willing to be neutered, or if you already have had children, would you be willing to have those children neutered, so that Dear Mother Earth is not destroyed by over-population?"

The ingénue's mouth twitched.

"Are your children, if you have children, going to be happy if, either you outlive them, or if they must wait two hundred years longer for their inheritance?"

The ingénue disappeared and old, clever Dicky Baudgew was staring at his laughing lovely self.

The road to hell was paved with good inventions.

Dicky's raucous laugh skittered around his dusty, shopworn seraglio like a cockroach in a can.

# CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Catastrophic Consequences

The black sky was lightened with small gray clouds, like fingerprint smudges, when Prissi landed in the overgrown back yard of a burned-out house three blocks away from Allen Burgey's home. Despite her exhaustion, the winger scurried across the yard to hide in the deeper shadows of the skeletal remains of the back porch. As she waited for her breathing to slow, she listened.

She had flown from Nancy's with her flite-lites off, which if she had been caught, would have cost her her license for a year. Since it was long past rush hour, there had not been a lot of wingers in the air. In fact, there had been so few, that it had been relatively easy for her to slalom back and forth to keep away from the paths of the other flyers without going too far astray from her flight plan. As she flew, to keep bad thoughts from coming, Prissi had focused on the beauty of the night.

The lights of other flyers seemed to flicker on and off as their wings beat up and down in a way that reminded Prissi of those nights in Dutton's soccer fields when they were constellated with fireflies. On the ground far beneath her, thousands of lights of all colors and forms glowed—the algae green parallel lines of the aquaphorous street lights, round red ladybug taillights chasing after the blue white beams of headlights. The random pattern of yellow, white and blue vid screens made houses look like space stations.

Like many other fledglings, when Prissi first began to fly at night, especially when she was away from the lumen intensity of the city, she would sometimes become disoriented and think that the lights below were the heavens above. Her flight instructor had called that kind of disorientation sirening. This night in her flight there had been many moments of confusion, but none were about what was earth and what was sky. When those wrenching moments had tried to overwhelm her, Prissi had fought back by using the lights, the numbing chill of the air, the clean smell high above the earth and the infinite shades of black and blues above and below her as weapons.

Arriving over Verona, the newly cautious Prissi had circled over Burgey's dark and apparently empty and unharmed house twice before deciding to land in the overgrown yard behind the stark remains of a nearby burned-out house.

Ten minutes after landing, Prissi was calmer and re-invigorated. And more confident. Her flight and reconnaissance hadn't attracted anyone's attention. With her wings slightly flared to keep them from rustling, Prissi began hop scotching from shadow to shadow back toward Burgey's house. Having reasoned that if anyone were expecting her, it would be from the air, she had decided to make her way on foot; however since most of the homes were likely to have MDs or secu-cams, she was very careful as she made her way along the winding street. Bars of light, like spectral marimba, hung in the dark outside steel-shuttered windows. From the colors of the bands of light, Prissi could tell which rooms held vid screens—wall-sized screens filled with the life of the world outside brought inside to edify and entertain the vidiots hidden behind their secured windows.

Burgey's house was dark and, as she had noticed during her first visit, ridiculously under-secured. She couldn't see a single motion detector. When Prissi found a small window at the back of the house unlocked, her first thought was that Burgey was either senile or dangerously defiant. Her second thought was that maybe the window was unlocked because it had been forced open by whoever had killed the old man. That thought led to whether the killer might still be in the house. Which led to Prissi's wondering why there was no evidence that the hawks had been at the house. Which led to being slammed full force when it suddenly hit her that it was still the same day she had begun in a hospital bed. Which led to the thought that she was leaving a parade of physical evidence on a house that contained an undiscovered dead man.

Prissi took her fingers off the window sill and let them float there as she tried to guess which of the possibilities she had just enumerated were most likely to be true.

Finally, the lure of finding something—debit card, credit card, uni-stamps, jewelry, even cash, and, least likely, but most valued, an explanation—pulled her through the window.

She landed with her head up, back arched, wings tightly compressed and her hands deep in a sink of dirty dishes. Despite feeling incredibly vulnerable, she snorted when it struck her that she probably looked like a lizard waiting for its lunch to come buzzing over a swamp. Prissi worked her hands out of the sink onto the counter's edge, then, slithered forward until all of her was on the kitchen floor. Being careful to protect her wings, Prissi got to her knees and pulled herself up using the chipped edge of the ancient granite counter top. Once up, she took a deep breath.

The house smelled like one of those mixed scents that has no name—dust, lonely cooking, skin flakes, ancient soap, loss, bitterness—Prissi flailed her arms in a sweeping crisscross to stop her list of adjectives. She told herself that before she got too deeply involved in the quality of the old man's emotional life, she should determine whether his body was still in the house. Although she could feel fear sniffing around her, she reminded herself of all the bodies she had seen in Africa dead from unease, disease and worse.

The LEDs of a half-dozen appliances emitted enough light that Prissi could see an archway leading out of the kitchen. Standing just behind the arch, she could make out a large ovoid shadow. Gliding into the darker space of what she assumed was the dining-room, she stared at the bee-hive hut until it revealed itself to be an oval dining room table stacked high with papers. A second archway at the far side of the dining room led to a hallway. Prissi tiptoed forward. To the right was the front door. To the left, a couple of meters back, a steep staircase led to the second floor. Prissi slunk across the hallway and paused under the arch to the room beyond. She opened her eyes wide, then, squinted as she tried to see into the blackness of what she assumed was a living room. So little light came through the heavy curtains from the street aquaphors that Prissi could not make out more than an indistinction of black and even blacker shapes. She had just started to ease into the room when she heard a noise.

The high strung girl froze. The noise was so slight that in the ensuing silence she wasn't even sure she had heard anything. But, the prickling of her skin told her better than her ears that she was not alone in the house. Her heart started pounding so furiously that she was sure it was going to cause her feathers to rustle.

There.

Definitely something.

A step.

And again. And this time Prissi was almost sure the noise was coming from behind her. From the dining room. The thought that she had walked past someone hiding behind a door or curtain caused her stomach to surge up and down like a dinghy in a following sea. She slid into the living room knowing as she did so that she was going farther away from any means of escape.

She tentatively touched the first shadow before her.

Leather.

She carefully skirted left even though she was terrified that she was going to catch a foot against one of the chair's legs or something the old man had left on the floor—a mahjong set, a huge bag of marbles, a set of cymbals, or a ten pound bag of potato chips.

The snigger at the idea of stumbling onto a hassock-sized bag of potato chips, something she had already done earlier in the day, with a murderer in pursuit was past Prissi's lips before she could squeeze them tight. She knew, now for sure, that she was hysterical.

A small clicking sound. Coming closer. Pause. Closer.

Prissi took two more steps. Suddenly, something touched her leg. She lurched away. Her knee caught the edge of a table. As she hurtled forward, the black was torn by a horrible shriek. Prissi threw out her arms to break her fall. The table and whatever was on it fell with a loud crash. She landed on the floor. Something landed on her for a split second. Then, was gone.

All was quiet. After a five second eternity of nothing, Prissi clicked on her flight lights. Caught in its beam, the world's scraggliest cat—back arched like Robin Hood's bow, fur electrified, broomstick tail twitching—stared back at her with eyes as big as the crown jewels.

"Freeieekin feline. Are you nuts? Omagoodgollygod, my neurons will never be the same. I ought to take three or four of your lives. Hesus Jay Seuss."

The world's scraggliest cat cocked its head in a way that made Prissi guess it might have grown alongside a litter of black Labrador puppies. When she walked her fingers toward it, the cat held its ground for a couple of seconds to show that it wasn't afraid before bounding from the floor to a chair arm, to the chair back, then, onto Prissi's back and, finally, out the way it had entered.

As soon as the cat was out of sight, Prissi, in between huge choking pants and maniacal laughs, pushed herself to her knees, flicked on a table light and looked around.

The living room was definitely lived in. The leather chair she had touched as she had entered the room was as brown and creased as a desert dweller's face. The arms of two upholstered chairs, maybe once in the distant past, forest green and tufted, were gray and smooth. The floors were scarred; the table tops dusty. At the far end of the room was a glass-paned door covered with a yellowing sheer curtain. The crystal doorknob turned, but when Prissi pushed it, the door refused to open. There was a deadbolt keyhole, but with no key in it. Prissi pulled the curtain aside and saw that what had begun life as a screened-in porch had been converted to a bedroom/office. Prissi guessed that as Allen Burgey's disease had progressed, he had adapted his house to fit his limitations. Despite the murky light, she could see that the bed had a handrail and the funnel and tube of a facsi-lav so he didn't have to get up during the night. Past the un-made bed was a huge desk covered with a mountain range of papers. Even through the locked door, those papers tugged at Prissi like filings to a magnet. With the memory of her successes earlier in the day guiding her, the manic girl wrenched the doorknob back and forth before slamming her hip into it.

Nothing happened.

The more she thought about it, the weirder it seemed to Prissi for the door to be locked. Regardless of what scenarios she conjured, it just didn't make sense for the bedroom door to be locked—especially since Burgey seemed to be so nonchalant with the security for the rest of the house—unless the geri had left. If, indeed, he had gone, then, maybe, he was alive. That thought felt like the first good thing to happen to her all day...except for the lox and cream cheese omelet. She stood still for a moment the better to savor an image of the old man, stubbly chin resting on crippled hands, looking across a table at an old friend who had offered him shelter.

That moment soon passed. Prissi looked around the living room to see what she was going to use to smash a pane in the door before it hit her that some deadbolts needed a key on either side. Breaking a window wasn't going to help. She about-faced and hurried from the living room. In the kitchen, the world's scraggliest cat was slunk down over the sink sniffing plates. When Prissi took a step closer, the cat ejected through the open window. Prissi flipped on the overhead light and began opening drawers. Dull water-stained knives, bent spoons, a spatula with a partially melted handle, greasy glasses, a baking dish with a black crust of something in the corners. The remnants of a set of flatware...but no key.

Prissi scanned the room, which looked so forlorn in the miserly yellow light. The basement door. Before she even took a step, Prissi knew that the key would be hanging on a hook just inside the door. Somehow, Prissi was not surprised when she found a key that had a tag and on the tag were the initials PL.

Although her nerves were firing off like popcorn because of her excitement and fear, Prissi tried to be methodical as she sifted and sorted through the stacks of papers on the desk. A set of worn old-fashioned spiral notebooks seemed to be details of the symptoms, progress and treatment of the old scientist's disease. There was a Pisan tower of print-outs dealing with Allen Burgey's financial affairs. She was surprised to see how Burgey's first name was spelled. She thought the usual spellings were Alan or Allan. The balances on these financial statements seemed large to Prissi, but she guessed they might not be unusual for a person who hadn't spent his life in a decrepit city in equatorial Africa. Prissi entered Burgey's account numbers in her mypod, even though without PIN numbers, the information was useless. Suddenly feeling more exposed than she had since the cat's attack, the jittery teen gathered up the papers, jumped up from the desk, switched off the old-fashioned puter and made her way in the dark back to the hallway. Using her mypod's glow to guide her, Prissi climbed the stairs.

The second floor had an old-fashioned granite and glass bathroom, which looked like it hadn't been used in ages. There were equal-sized bedrooms on either side of the landing. As soon as Prissi entered the bedroom on the left, she saw the same beaded bag Burgey had handed to her the day before sitting on the top shelf of a scarred wooden bookcase. Her hand was trembling as she picked it up. Since it would have taken the crippled man considerable effort to climb the stairs, Prissi was sure that Burgey had left the bag for her as a clue, just like putting her initials on the tag on the key. Burgey had anticipated that something would draw her back here. Prissi's eyes watered with the idea that someone, even if it was an old crippled man, was trying to help her; however that intuition seemed to be misplaced when she opened the bag and didn't anything inside. It wasn't until she turned the bag inside out that she saw there was a tiny opening on the seam at the bottom of the lining. She worked her finger into the gap and felt something stuck to the bag itself. A second later she peeled away a tiny piece of sticky tape. When Prissi held it close to her eyes, she saw written in spidery letters: COLDEST GREEN.

Although she was positive that the message was meant for her, the phrase sparked nothing in Prissi's brain. She rubbed the words with her thumb as if it were a magic lantern which would reveal its secrets given the proper care. When that failed, she used her fingers to rub her face as if she had made a mistake and it was her wan worn visage that was the genie's lamp. When nothing came, the exhausted teener sat down on a corner of the bed so that she could hang a wing on either side.

COLDEST GREEN

Prissi thought that if Nancy were around her first thought would be that it was an anagram. After ten minutes generating STEER GLEN COD and other variations, with none bringing an ah-hah moment, Prissi decided to take a different tack.

She pretended that her memories were a slide show. She scanned backward until she was seeing the house for the first time. The canted sidewalk, the sagging porch, her surprise at how unsecured the house was. Clik. Clik. The murky face through the screen. Clik. The old man leaning precariously as he mounted the porch perch. His conversation. Clik. Back inside. The wait. Then his return with the bag. She had removed the crystal...but distractedly...because of what he was saying about danger...but there was something that had tweaked her attention at the time...and that was...was....

Prissi squeezed her eyes tight better to recapture the moment she had received the bag. He didn't have it in his fingers...because they were so twisted. Instead, the bag had been nestled in his palm and he had tipped his hand over, like a water dipper, to let it fall into her palm and it had been...it had been...cold. When she removed the crystal it had been cold, too.

Cold.

Much colder than room temperature.

Prissi bounded off the bed and half-fell, half-glided down the staircase.

With its bright light and ancient squeezers of condiments, the refrigerator reminded Prissi of a reliquary. There were no green vegetables, nor vegetables of any color in the bins. There were a few small unlabeled, suspicious looking containers. Since there was so little food, the teener wondered what the condiments were for. The freezer, however, was much more promising. Spinach, kale, broccoli, peas, green beans—a whole assortment of health in dozens of geri pak portions. Prissi pulled everything green from the freezer. Not knowing what, if anything, the old man might have left for her, she was unsure how she should proceed. Would mike or halo heat or running water or infra be more apt to be harmful? The peas, broccoli and green beans would be easy—open and sort. The spinach and kale would be frozen in blocks. Anything hidden in them would be like nuts in their shell.

Taking a second to think about it, Prissi decided that using the easiest and quickest method might have been on Burgey's mind. She decided to infra everything. Ten minutes later the kitchen sink was filled with defrosted vegetables and the air was filled with the smells of the world's healthiest vegetable soup. Prissi herself was filled with hope as she was in possession of the PIN to a money market fund, a second set of numbers which Prissi took to be co-ordinates and a postscript from Burgey letting Prissi know that though he was sick, he was well and on his way to a safer place...as he hoped she was, too.

Despite knowing that Burgey would be assessed an outrageous bill, Prissi began shoving the soggy mass of vegetables down the Insingerator. After everything was turned to ash, Prissi locked the kitchen window. In the office, she shaped cushions and blankets to look like someone sleeping before closing and locking the door. Upstairs, she unlocked the window in the left bedroom, lifted the screen, then closed and relocked the window. After washing up in the bathroom, she came back into the bedroom. She closed the door and pushed and heaved and pulled the bed until it was tight against the door. She went back to studying Burgey's financial statements. She looked at the balances on his accounts and wondered why he had decided to help a stranger. It wasn't until she leaned over to write the PIN number on a piece of paper in case her mypod failed that Prissi had her epiphany.

She was writing out the number on the same sheet that she had used to write out the combinations of COLDEST GREEN.

STEER GLEN COD.

Allen Burgey. G L E N L A U R E B Y. Glen Laureby.

Allen Burgey was Glen Laureby, her mother's partner, the man who had been holding her mother's hand in the pix.

Prissi exploded out of bed, deconstructed her stronghold and began wandering through the house. Thirty minutes later, not having found the pix she was sure must be there, the desolate girl was back in the bedroom. With the last of her strength, she wrestled the bed back against the door. Hiding in the dark and under the covers, Prissi emitted a long deep sigh that morphed into searing anguish which triggered the sobbing that she had been holding off for hours.

Her father had never been warm and cuddly. Kind and cool had been his style. He had become even more reserved after Prissi's mother had died. But, despite that emotional distance, Prissi never had doubted that he always had her best interests at heart. She knew with certainty that he did those things for her even though raising a teener girl by himself was not something that would have been at the top of his wish list. But, he had done it and done it with dedication, consistency and without complaint. And... Prissi started to think of their relationship from the other side, her side. She had depended upon him while she flouted her independence. She had felt secure in his attention while giving him almost none. His age, ills, wounds, losses, hopes and wishes had been of very little concern to her.

As Prissi fought between going forward with her thinking or turning back toward a less distressful path, something knotted behind her breast bone and began to ache.

...The way his head had felt. His neck so useless. His look so helpless. The whisper for her to go. Thinking of her escape, her well-being, rather than concentrating on the last moments of his life.

Prissi bawled.

Like a baby. With sobs so deep, she feared for her next breath. Loud wounded noises. Bubbles of snot blowing out of her nose and dripping down her lips.

She had been so horrible to him. She was so horrible. And she was so alone.

Finally, her body ran out of the energy to express her grief and remorse. She rubbed her chest where the bone felt as if it had been broken. Next, a half-dozen whimpers. A tightly held handful of blanket. And, finally... finally, so many, many hours after waking up in the hospital and eating a lox and cream cheese omelet, sleep. Exhausted blessed sleep.

# CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Adventures of Bob Tom and Joe

Joe Fflowers is moving in fits and starts, like a jig. What flummoxes him is how he is fighting his way across the river's current without moving his arms. Although he is only half-conscious, he is sure that the things, things that seem to weigh fifty kilos, hanging from his shoulders are his arms. It takes the boy longer to realize that the coat which had meant to kill him has saved him. Something has snagged the coat and he is being drawn toward shore. Joe lifts his head to see how he is being rescued, but he can see no one on the shadowy shore. He drops his head back down on his shoulder and lets himself be pulled along.

Five minutes later, Joe's feet drag against the Hudson's grainy bottom. Seconds after that, a hand grabs his shoulder and pulls him out of the river.

"Whoa. It's a big un. Not much fight, but purty good weight. Lemme see if it's a keeper."

Joe senses a moon-lit shadow hovering over him. He feels a tug on his collar and realizes that his rescuer is trying to extract something from his coat.

"Wheejammy. That's tough skin. Oughta cut it out, mebbe. Less see."

While the man tugs and twists, Joe surrenders to the exquisite joy of being unexpectedly, inexplicably alive. His throat is burned raw. Just thinking of how much it hurts causes Joe to heave. As he turns his head, river water gushes from his mouth and nose.

"Willikers, he's spoutin. Ahoy, Moby...no...lessee...too little...ah...Noby, yessir, Noby Dick, the little runty whale, he blows. My first, but runty little whale. Ahoy, Noby One, thar he blows."

As his rescuer himself spouts, Joe lets his awareness lazily drift down from his throat to his arms and chest. The cold he discovers there is so profoundly different from anything he has ever experienced that it takes a moment to comprehend what it is. Once he does, a spark of consciousness triggers what should have been done autonomically. Joe's body suddenly begins bucking like a wasp-stung pony.

"Whoa, Nellie. Where'd my whale go? Whoa! We gotta get this here bronco broke."

A massive weight centers itself on Joe's hips. Rough and powerful hands begin pulling his clothes off.

"Dang, he's got prom queen skin. Get him nekkid, then what?"

While his naked body convulses, but stays on shore, Joe's mind slides back into the river.

When he comes to, Joe finds himself wrapped in a smoky smelling thermet and curled around a small fire. His throat still is raw, but the inner cold has disappeared. In fact, his face is too hot. When he shifts his head away, his action draws his savior's attention.

"Hey, Noby One, you there? Feelin better? You wuz shakin so fierce I thought the devil had your soul."

Joe straightens his body.

"Lay still, little one. Ain't you smart enough to get well slow? You stay still and I won't. Well, Noby, let's get ourselves acquainted. My name's Bob Tom Damall. And danged if I don't sometimes, but not this here time. I've been watching you since a little after you stole my boat. You owe me, Noby. You owe me big for that. My most favorite boat. Just two days away from makin it all nice, I was. Gone now. Unless it gits snagged up somewhere down river. But, don't be countin on it, Noby, cuz the last I seen it, it was hurrying toward New Jersey like a damall tame horse toward stable oats."

Even after Joe's eyes adjust to the early-morning sunlight, he can't make out any facial features on the man beyond a pair of small bright crow's eyes and a prophet's beard. Looking down, Joe can see that his rescuers hands are huge. With them planted on his knees, the fingers reach half-way down his calves.

When Joe pushes himself up on one elbow, Bob Tom diddles his head in despair at Joe's stupidity. The boy stares at the anchorite for ten seconds trying to figure out if he is dangerous before asking, "Who are you?"

"Tole you—Bob Tom Damall."

"But...."

"Oh, I unnerstand, Noby. You don't really wanna know who I am. You wanna know what I do cuz you think what I do makes me who I am. Who knows. You cud be right. Well, first thing," Bob Tom flares a pair of drab gray wings so that he can lean sideways. He picks up a monstrous fishing pole with a twenty centimeter red speckled lure and points it at Joe's face, "First thing, and mebbe the most important thing for you, I'm the best Damall flyin fly fisherman on the Hudson. That's no lie. No one catches bigger, and no one catches better, and Damall certain, no one catches more. And I'm bound to be the first fly fisherman in these here parts to catch me a Noby Whale in midstream on the Hudson. Although I've pulled out a few rotters in my years. Whew, still remember the stink of one—old, old woman couldn't a weighed more en forty k. Looked bigger, of course, cuz of the bloat. But, she sure rotted up bigger'n she was and smelled even bigger'n she looked."

Feeling his stomach roil, Joe tries to change the subject, "You make your living fishing?"

Bob Tom Damall's stertorous laugh rolls up and down the river like cannon fire.

"Noby, I don't hardly make a livin' fishin, furrin and some other things best done at night. But, I survive and have been since I come up here in '62."

"Up from where?"

The tip of the fishing pole transits a one hundred twenty degree arc.

"Ain't it obvious? From down there. I come up and watched a slew of people goin the other way and I said, 'You know what, Bob Tom? You're right and they're plumb wrong.' And I'll still say that whether that's right or not cause I'm a feller slow to make up his mind and Damall slower to change it. Now, what about you, Noby? You just tell me what you do, so's I'll know eggzactly who you are and jist eggzactly how to judge you."

Joe slowly works himself upright to gain some time. He studies the fire to gain even more. Finally, he looks into Bob Tom's amused eyes and feels obliged to give him some of the truth.

"I'm Joe. I ran away from school and then I ran away from the people who helped me run away from school."

"Yessir, and, then, you done run away with my boat."

Embarrassed despite the humor in Bob Tom's voice, Joe murmurs, "Yes, I did."

"And, then, that Damall boat ran away from you."

When Joe laughs, his throat hurts, "Yes, it did."

"While you were fumblin your way downriver, no offense, but one of the things you ain't is a riverman, was it all of you runnin away or was some of you runnin toward somethin?"

Joe shrugs his shoulders and gives a small grin, "Damall, if I know."

Bob Tom shakes his pole at Joe, "See, Noby, hangin around me just a bit and already you're smarter."

The hermit starts to point somewhere with the pole, then carefully puts it down on the ground, "My experience is away's always easier than toward."

Bob Tom raises a wing so that he can stretch an arm behind the rock he is sitting on. Joe is startled to see that the old man has skinwings. Gray wrinkled folds of leather. Those fusty appendages command Joe's attention even as the ancient hauls up a raggedy pak of a design as ancient as his wings.

"Iffen you're all puked out, mightn you be gettin hungry?"

As Joe slowly chews strips of dried, black-colored meat, which Bob Tom insists is from the biggest, blackest bear ever caught in the Adirondacks, the river man...mountain...man, Joe is uncertain which way to think of him, tells stories about things he has killed of which there is a great diversity in species, but a singularity in characteristics. Each is the biggest, fattest, tastiest, tallest, fiercest, furriest, fastest animal of its kind ever seen in or above the Adirondacks or on or in the Hudson River and its tributaries.

While Bob Tom talks non-stop, his body goes from absolute stillness—wings relaxed, legs extended, hands on knees, unblinking eyes focused on the fire—as still as a zenpro or a hunting dog on point, to a flurry of little acts, like a squirrel in its nest—poking the fire, adding branches, re-arranging the rocks at his feet, using a twig to settle the folds of his wings.

The Sisyphean sun has rolled itself over the zenith when Bob Tom asks, "What's your plan, Noby One?"

"The plan was that after the search for me died down I was going to go Montreal."

"Noby, my new friend, you just might be a tetch dyslexic. Montreality, as I see fit to call it have'n been there a time or two, is north and this here river flows south. You've got to go more en forty thousand kliks, some of em none too easy, goin the way you're goin, to get to old Montreality."

Joe, who has already felt a dozen different emotions about Bob Tom, experiences a surge of anger swell within him.

"I know where Montreal is. I planned to go downriver to Albany and then back up to Montreal."

"So, where's that plan got you now?"

Joe bangs his fists on his knees in exasperation.

"I don't know."

"But, not to the mountain of reality?"

Joe says nothing, but shakes his head in despair.

"Because?"

Joe yells, "Because I didn't know it was going to be such a fight in the river."

"Yore a mite feisty, Noby, but even so, I've got two thoughts. The first is that just because you kin put a boat on a river don't make you a riverman. I'm a riverman. You may be lots of things. I wouldn't know about that, but you ain't a riverman. My second thought is that it ain't much of a plan or, mebbe, not much of a man behind the plan, if all it takes is a little bit of roily water to change what a person wants to do."

"What do you know? I'm fifteen. I escaped school and the hawks and my parents. I escaped the Greenlanders. I got myself here."

"Son, those Greenlanders if they's the ones I think they are, ain't nothing more en a den of bristle-lipped wimmin. And you're here cuz I was kind enough to pull you here, instead of doin what I oughta done, which is rescue my very favorite boat. And, furthermore, if I was to ask you where here is, I bet you'd be hard put to say much more en this here is between the North Pole and equator. So, don't yell at me, and, especially don't yell at the kind soul who let you steal his favorite boat instead of making you into jerky and who rescued you and not his dear and favorite boat when a little bitty water couldn't be handled by a whiny little man boy. Seems to me you ain't much more'n just a little bitty whale with a big spout."

Joe fights the tears that are forming in the corners of his eyes, but loses.

When Bob Tom sees the welling in the boy's eyes, he directs his fishing pole toward the Hudson.

"There's plenty of water out there, Noby One. I don't guess we need any more. Let's see if we can't figger out doin somethin a little more useful."

Joe and Bob Tom spend most of the day resting and making plans. Joe tells more of his story, but he doesn't tell his rescuer any of the details of his family because he isn't sure whether Bob Tom Damall, if he knew, might not think it was a good idea to kidnap and ransom Joe Fflowers.

The plan the two finally come up with is that Bob Tom will help Joe get to Albany, where he will catch a hover train to Montreal.

After telling Joe to stay put, Bob Tom takes to the air and flies north up the river. About an hour later Joe spies him flying back south towing a canoe behind.

"Let's get goin. I'm feelin awful bad bout stealin this. Seems sad to have a sin on my soul for such a poor excuse for a boat. I wouldn't a needed to do it if you hadn't a stole and then lost that favorite boat of mine."

Feeling cockier from the food and rest, and also thinking that the boat Bob Tom has dragged ashore looks much better than what he lost, Joe asks, "Why didn't you just fly south and look for your boat?"

"Yore gonna question the judgment of the best waterman on the river? Get in this here sorry boat before I toss you back where I found you."

While Bob Tom breaks down his fishing pole until it fits into a case no longer than a commuter's umbrella, Joe climbs into the canoe and sits on the forward thwart.

The river man looks at Joe and shrugs in resignation.

"Tarnation, Noby, you're no smarter en a barnyard chicken. In the back, son, in the back, unless yore hankerin for another little swim."

Though he doesn't understand Bob Tom's reasoning for unbalancing the boat, Joe crawls into the back of the canoe. His stupidity colors his cheeks and neck when Bob Tom lashes his fishing pole into the canoe, hooks a light line from the bow of the canoe to his belt, shoves the boat into the water, and launches himself into the air. From fifteen meters overhead, the grizzled man tows the canoe into the center of the river to catch as much current as he can. Once in mid-river, Bob Tom lazily flaps his fusty wings kilometer after kilometer.

As a hockey player, Joe is used to expending all of his energy in two minute spurts. The longer Bob Tom flies, the higher he rises in Joe's esteem.

After the sun finishes its labors and goes home, the night sky is clear. The stars are jewel bright and the world is silent except for the skirring of the canoe through the current. After what must have been an hour, Bob Tom's voice booms down to ask if Joe's parents are the worrying kind.

"They probably didn't start out worrying. They probably started out being angry that I didn't do what they wanted. By now, though, I'm sure they're worried, especially my mother."

Bob Tom thunders, "How much does that bother you?"

"I've been too busy to think about it."

"That's Damall busy, Noby. Mebbe I should save my wind for breathin and let you take this time, since you ain't got much to do but sit back and let me work, to think about how you feel about what you're putting your folks through."

Joe tips his head to yell up, "I'm not gone forever. I just need to stay away long enough so that I can't fledge."

"Okay, Noby One, hearin you say that, I just decided that I ain't gonna save all my breath. I grew up in some pretty high hills. When I was just a kit, I did everything a young'n could do in them hills. I hiked, climbed, fished, parasailed, spelunked caves, trapped critters, rode mountain bikes and lots more. You just try to name it and I can just about Damall garantee I done it. And I loved evry minute of it. I could get all squidged up inside just thinking bout how good and easy, real easy, those times were. But, Noby, you know what? They weren't nothin compared to flyin higher and higher as the sun sets, or flappin alongside a big old turkey vulture or flyin blind through sunrise fog where all you can see is a ghostly rosy glow way far away.

"Flyin, Noby, why there ain't nothing like flyin. It's purty easy for some folks to be god-denying with both feet on the ground, but you come up where I am right now and its purty Damall hard to imagine that some big hand ain't stirred the pot.

"Okay, I'm done. I'm sure you listened real hard to jist about evry word. You think about your folks first and, then, you think about what a time we'd be havin if you were up here with me."

Surprising himself, Joe does just as he is told. He thinks about where his mother would be sitting and waiting and how she might touch a cup of lattea two or three times with her long manicured fingers, touching, but not drinking, blinking, but not crying, and wondering if it is her good son or an evil stranger who's breaking her heart.

After a long time Joe leans far back on his seat so that he can see the silhouette of Bob Tom above him. He studies the slow, steady, graceful pace and wonders just what the riverman is experiencing. How silver is the starlight on the tops of the pines? How much sweeter is the mix of river smells and fresh air up there? What does the Hudson's snaky tributaries look like from high above on a moon-lit night? Joe thinks about how a person can't ever go slow enough in a plane to see the same kind of detail as a winger would flapping over the treetops at fifteen kilometers an hour. A person would see more things in a roto, but with a lot more noise and smell. And how did a lifetime of seeing those things from above compare to living a small fraction of a life in the cold friction-free world of the ice rink?

It is after eleven and Bob Tom has been flying for almost four hours before he drags the canoe out of the current and heads it toward shore.

They eat more bear strips and Bob Tom gives Joe something he calls bark brew. They sleep for five hours before his guide rousts Joe awake to tell him that if they get moving they can be in Albany just after sunrise—late enough to get around without attracting too much attention from the hawks, but early enough that there won't be too many people on the streets.

Bob Tom's estimate proves accurate, but by the time Joe comes ashore just under a bridge that carries a rail line across the Hudson his plans have changed. The hours he has had to think have led him to the conclusion that, indeed, he loves hockey, but it has come to him just how much of his motivation not to fly has been birthed by defiance. It is exactly because flying is what he is supposed to do, what is expected of him as a Fflowers, that he doesn't want to do it. He knows this is normal. He is acting just like a teener is supposed to act. But, he tells himself that even the dumbest teener must know that there is a difference between a whim and something that lasts forever. Joe decides that a smart teener wouldn't do something that would permanently thwart his future. In the hours of being drawn along the moon-dappled river by the gray on black shadow above him, Joe has come to understand that if it could be a choice between flying now, or flying later, he would choose later. If, however, the choice were between flying now, or flying never, then, he wants to fly.

When Joe tells Bob Tom that he is going to call to let his parents know that he is coming home, he isn't surprised to see the riverman nod his head and smile in agreement. What does surprise him is when his guide throws a lock line on the boat, carefully slings his pole case under his wing and cheerfully says that he is accompanying Joe to the depot.

"You don't have to do that. I'm okay. I'm grateful for all you've done for me. I'll ask my parents to thank you in more than words—maybe with something that could turn into another favorite boat. Just tell me how to get in touch."

Bob Tom fiddles with the buckle of his pole case strap so that it rides higher on his shoulder.

"C'mon. We better get movin. My guess is the depot ain't gonna be close. I wanna see you safe and sound."

"But, I'll be fine."

"Make a promise. Keep a promise."

"You didn't promise me anything."

"Not you, Noby One. My dotter. I promised my dotter I'd see you safe."

Even before he blurts the question, Joe knows the answer and that knowledge surges through his body like a high fever.

"Blesonus is your daughter?"

Bob Tom nods as proudly as when he was telling Joe stories about his trophy catches.

"Yep, my one and only."

"You were a Greenlander? Part of the kin?"

"Yep, again. Noby, you're sharpenin up. I stayed as long as I could for her, but I finally got wimmined out. Them bristle-lips got to be where none of em was tolerble for more'n the time is takes a tick to puke. An it was just my luck that the worst one was my soulmate and mother of my one and only."

Joe can feel himself on the verge of hyper-ventilating.

"Who's Blesonus' mother?"

"Why you know who. That ole possum ugly bristle-lip you done fed her soup to."

Joe makes a complicated sound that inadequately expresses the encyclopedia of thoughts and feeling he is having.

Flaring his wings to keep the tips off the levee where they are standing, Bob Tom bends over so that he can slap his huge hands against his knees as he laughs so loud that a small flock of buffleheads dabbling near shore take to the air in disgust.

"Damall, Noby Flowers, flesh of intelligent flesh, you are a slow one. Iffen a man was interested in improvin his fortunes, he could do worse than throwin you in a sack and sendin off a ransom note. Just so that don't happen and snarl up my hi n bye with my one and only, I'll stay alongside til I'm satisfied evrythin is just the way it should be."

It takes most of an hour to make their way to the Albany Noramtrax depot. When they push their way into the crowded, low-ceilinged cavernous room, dozens of heads look up and stare at the unusual duo. Since he has made the decision to go home, Joe hasn't thought that there are still good reasons to conceal or alter his looks. Now, however, seeing how much attention Bob Tom and he are drawing, he thinks that definitely is a mistake. Across the graffiti-covered deformed plastic benches he watches several sets of people lean their heads together to whisper. Two raggedy looking bob n hobs, wearing their de rigueur many studded boots and hand-chopped pageboy haircuts and carrying their immense skateboreds, get up from their bench and start toward Bob Tom and Joe.

"Let's go find the commix so's you kin talk to your folks while I trade stares with a couple of these here rough and tough hombreros."

At the commix, all three of the cam-fones are out of service. The blog on the cam-fones says they'll be back up in an hour. Joe turns back to see how things are going with the riverman. The first two bob n hobs have been joined by two more and a tag team of keds. Joe notices that Bob Tom's pole case is off his shoulder and that he is tapping it against his thigh like a truncheon.

Joe spins back to the array of iconics before him. If he can't reach his parents directly, he will have to do it indirectly. Either way, it doesn't seem like there's much of a future in hanging around the depot. Sensing the air behind him go electric, Joe quickly swipes and buys a pre-paid mypods. He turns to see the six thugs have formed a circle around the river man. While his antagonists have the scowls and puffed breasts of the threatening male of most species, Bob Tom is smiling broadly as he leans on the now extended pole case. As Joe comes closer, Bob Tom is saying, "You young'ns ever heard of Paul Bunyan or Pecos Pete? If you ain't, it's yore loss cause I'm cut from the same cloth. You'll be well-advised to turn tail now afore anythin happens to you that'd put a serious damper on yore future happiness."

"We get done with you, geri, you'll be fardin out your ear."

The relaxed old man looks over the heads of the hostile tribe to say to Joe, "Ah, Noby One, I believe our business may be finished here...cept for one small item. Do you think you could member what you done with my most favorite thing and mebbe do the same with one of these here young'ns?"

Joe nods and edges closer to the nearest bob n hob. The fat pock-faced boy, whose ears stand out two inches from his greasy skunk-striped hair, is nonchalantly leaning against his immense skatebored. Another boy, the one who has told Bob Tom's fate, whips his licorice stick frame around to stare at Joe

"Forget the geri; it's the rich dwert we want."

As the leader steps toward Joe, Joe yanks the skatebored free from the fat boy. Bob Tom yanks the lower third of his fishing pole out of its case.

As all six teenerz leap toward Joe, he back pedals as he sweeps the skatebored in front of him like a ship's boom swinging over a deck. One boy is knocked into a second, and both stumble to the ground, but the other four keep coming. Knowing that it will take too much energy to change the direction of the eight kilo skatebored, Joe keeps spinning like a windmill. As he comes around he catches one of the keds on the shin. The boy yelps as he bends down to grab his leg.

"I love me a fracas."

Bob Tom, poking and pointing his chopped off fishing pole like a musketeer his foil, comes at the remainder of the crew from behind. He stabs one bob n hob hard in the back of the knee. The leg buckles and the boy goes down. When the leader turns around to see what has happened, he takes a shot in the stomach so hard that the air which explodes out of him is so foul it could be from his bowels.

"Git. I'll meet ya outside."

Joe looks at the depot entrance and sees that if he goes that way he is apt to get caught up in the crowd gathering there. He turns the other way and begins running toward the doors that lead to the air trains. One of the two remaining hobs takes off after him. Once he is through the double doors and out under the canopy that shelters the passengers from Albany's bitter rains, Joe throws the huge bored down in front of him and jumps on. Even though it has been years since he has ridden a bored—skateboreding is definitely not something done, or even spoken of at Dutton, except by a Retro-neo-emo named Quacks—as soon as he is moving Joe can feel some of the old body memory coming back. A big grin crosses his face until he takes a quick look behind and sees that the hob on is bored is is gaining on him. The boy's arms are flashing up and down like pistons, which is a part of skateboreding Joe didn't remember. A second later he realizes that each of the hob's fist holds a long thin bladed screwdriver. Joe guesses the tools aren't for making repairs.

Seeing the spikes of the screwdrivers draw closer, Joe slams his foot to the pavement three quick times trying to pick up speed. Looking to his right, Joe sees that the jaded passengers on the departing air train are barely looking out the windows at the unfolding drama he is starring in. Another quick head twist tells Joe that he is losing the race. He looks ahead to see where he can ditch the skatebored and try to outrun screwdriver boy. Twenty meters ahead, the canopy ends and a high mesh fence begins. The ramp itself curves off to the left. Joe figures that as he enters the curve he will shoot the bored back into his assailant and run to safety.

Just shy of the curve, Joe hears the hob muttering something. It takes Joe a half-second to figure out that his hunter is chanting, "Stab him. Kill him," in cadence to a click being made by a chipped wheel on his bored.

Joe's heart rises into his throat as he hurtles into the curve with his knees deeply bent and his center of gravity far off the bored. The ramp continues back toward the street, but instead of the walkway being edged with grass, it is bounded on both sides by a meter high wall to keep people off the grass. Joe tries to figure the odds of being able to fire the bored at the boy, leap to the wall, then to the ground and outrun his assailant with his bum knee. Instead of seeing himself sprint to safety, the image that arises in Joe's mind is of two screwdrivers sticking out of his back as he tries to scramble over the wall.

"Stab him. Kill him," seems to come from just behind Joe's left ear. The wheezing teener slaps his foot to accelerate and, as he does so, the exact same noise echoes from behind him. The street is still thirty meters away when Joe feels a thud at the back of his neck. He flinches as he anticipates the screwdriver being shoved deeper into his flesh. Instead of pain, however, what he feels is his speed suddenly picking up. As he hurtles down the walkway, he has to work to stay on the skatebored.

"Keep your Damall balance, Noby," Bob Tom yells from ten meters above as he locks the line on his fishing reel and begins towing Joe rapidly away from the trouble at the depot.

"Stab him. Kill him," falls to a whimper as Joe hurtles off the walkway and makes a wide sweeping turn into the street, just missing a truclet speeding down the road. The tiny truc swerves sideways and half its contents, jugs of maple syrup, go spilling from the back and bounce and split along the cratered highway. The smell of breakfast fills the air.

Joe and Bob Tom's return from depot to boat takes less than half the time of their journey from boat to depot. Joe's heart is still pounding, but Bob Tom looks like he'd just holed a forty foot putt.

"I love me a fracas. Don't get much chance anymore. Mountains are mostly empty. The bears are scared and I cain't quite bring myself to scrap up with all them bristle lips. Damall, that was a good time. Even though I almost hurt my favorite fishin rod poking at them boys. I'm awful glad I met you, Noby One Fflowers. You've let a little lightning out of the bottle. What next? How bout a walk-about? You and me and Noramica's most thrillin sights and sounds?"

Joe finds himself smiling and shaking his head as he compares the man standing before him with his father.

"I'm going to get in touch with a friend with this," Joe holds up the new mypod, "and have her get in touch with my parents to keep the hawks out of it."

Bob Tom looks longingly as his fishing pole as he slides it back into its case, "Sounds dull. When's the latest you can fledge safely?"

"I can't wait much longer. If I'm going to do it, I need to go home now and get it done because I have to be back to school in two weeks."

"I could turn you into a passable riverman in two weeks."

Joe thinks hard before he answers, "Maybe after school's over. Let me talk to my mother and father...."

Bob Tom interrupts with a roar, and for a second time, the dabbling buffleheads have to scatter.

"Mother. Father. Parents. Damall, Noby, ain't you got any folks? No mom or dad or a ma or pa? Jeezuz Crikey."

"We're not exactly on a first name basis in my family. But, let me talk to my...folks...maybe I could hang out with you for another week, then fledge and get back to school a few days late."

The surprise on Bob Tom's face, and whatever feelings are triggering it, causes him to turn away and cough a couple of times.

"Damall, I'm so used to breathin pure, this here city air's got me goin."

Joe is surprised when his screen tells him that Prissi's mypod is off-grid, but he is stunned when he calls Nancy Sloan to track down Prissi and hears about what has happened. He drops to his knees as he listens to Nancy say that Prissi thinks his grandfather and Jack are responsible for the death of her father and the attacks on Prissi herself. When Nancy finally stops talking, it takes Joe almost a minute before he can gather himself enough to ask Nancy where she thinks Prissi might be. Nancy says that she doesn't know, doesn't want to know, but that she does want Joe to talk to his family and make sure that they know that the Sloans are innocent and have had nothing to do with anything.

When Joe fills Bob Tom in on the details of what he has already surmised from listening to one side of the conversation, the riverman says, "I guess we're gonna go on that walk-about anyway."

"What can we do?"

"Do? Well, Damall, Noby, we're gonna find this here Prissi. She ain't, is she? I sorely dislike prissy. If a woman ain't got what it takes to worm a hook or gut a buck, what good is she?"

Joe tries to allay Bob Tom's fears with some of Prissi's exploits.

"Well sounds like she's got gumption. But gumption ain't always enough, though it'll take ya pretty far. We better get goin."

"And do what?"

"Noby, what do you expect the best hunter, trapper and tracker you're ever gonna meet gonna do? We're gonna find that girl and save her. Someone's gonna regret this here cavalry just got called in. Saddle up, young'n. Time's awastin."

* * *

South of Albany, the Hudson River Valley opens up. Farms replace forests. Small villages sit high on rolling hills. The most noticeable difference to Joe is the river's traffic.

Hoverrafts carry passengers up and down the Hudson from Albany to New York. Dozens of ag-barges, laden with the harvest of the area's famous mesclun and chard farms, make their way south to feed the millions of mouths in the New York-Newton-Screwton nexus.

As he tows Joe south, Bob Tom yells out the sights like a tour director. Aqua farms holding acres upon acres of bags filled with fresh water oysters. He tells Joe not to miss the stationary barges that provided the platforms to grow cold water hydroponic lettuces.

Joe takes some time to look at the changing scene along the riverbank, but most of his attention is directed to keeping the canoe out of trouble. Being in a hurry to rescue a girl he doesn't even know, Bob Tom is flying much faster than he had before. The increased speed causes a surge as its bow which continually threatens to swamp the canoe. As brown and green swells of water roll up the sides of the canoe, Joe wonders how much longer the riverman can keep up the pace. Less than an hour later, Joe gets his answer. After ten minutes of jerks and sloughs as the old man tires, Bob Tom pulls out of the center of the river. He slows his speed as he angles toward a tied-up barge piled five meters high with pallets filled with badboard crates. Joe lands the canoe just down river from the barge. The boy notices the riverman staggers when he lands. When he looks at Bob Tom's face, Joe is surprised at how florid it is. Purple veins bulge from the old man's forehead like a low mountain range. Instantly, Joe feels guilty about how hard the Damall man is working for him and fearful of the toll that effort might be taking.

While the runaway ties up, Bob Tom tromps off toward the gangplank and crane where a handful of workers are darting back and forth. Less than ten minutes later, Bob Tom flopes his way through back toward Joe. "Hop lively, Noby, we got us a ride."

When Joe looks back at the canoe, Bob Tom shakes his head, "Forget that old thing. She's hardly sea-worthy. And I never liked her anyway cuz she was stolen. There's plenty of boats worth stealin, but any boat worth takin ain't all that easy to steal and this here boat come awful easy. C'mon, shake a leg. We're on easy street."

The adventurers haven't been on the barge for more than twenty minutes before a tug, towing three barges behind it, sweeps in and grabs them. Within ten minutes, they are floating down the middle of the river. Within an hour after they begin their ride, the riverman is antsy. He paces around the deck of the barge testing lines and strapping to see if they meet his standards. When that job is done, he assembles his pole and starts casting into the river even though, as he tells Joe, the wake of the convoy is bound to scare off anything smarter than a flat worm. After a quarter hour of fishing, a disgusted Bob Tom puts his pole in its case and flies off to the tug to talk to the captain.

Joe takes advantage of the respite to think about what Nancy has told him. He can imagine his grandfather or even his uncle taking some gray-area actions, but certainly not murder, to get something they wanted. The same is true for Jack. Joe has thought his cousin was a Sleek Wheedly ever since he can remember. But, that is a far cry from doing anything to harm Prissi. Joe knows his family can't be involved. He knows it. But.... Joe isn't sure what the but is, but something keeps his fingers off the mypod screen. Instead of k-necting with his parents or uncle or cousin, Joe sits atop a mesa of mesclun crates and thinks about how, or if, he might be able to find and help Prissi.

# CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Down and Dirty

Despite the disasters of the day before, the sun had been up an hour before Prissi Langue's gray-green eyes, as secure behind their lids as her arms tucked beneath the worn, mothballed blankets, took notice. Even after her raggedy lashed lids flickered, it was a long moment before the mind behind them was willing to stir.

As she became conscious, Prissi's first complete thought was of Gregor Samsa. His metamorphosis had been a fiction, a conceit by Kafka, but hers was real. Even with her eyes closed, she could tell that her weight had tripled overnight and half her brain cells had died.

Too big to fly. Too dumb to care.

Carpe diem?

No.

Please, no.

In a way that took her back to a memories of floating in a muddy African watering hole, Prissi relaxed deep into the musty smelling mattress. The drone of insects, the haze of humidity and dust, the inertial force of an equatorial sun.

Paralyzed in paradise.

The reverie was broken when a growl, like a madmetal guitar riff, heralded Prissi's hunger. A groan of mental protest surpassed her belly's growl before she surrendered her torpidity to the next chapter of her fate. She scootched her belly at an angle until her legs dropped over the edge of the bed. However, once there, she lost courage and, rather than standing, the fifteen-year old flared her wings enough so that she could kneel on the floor, where she stayed until the tears welling against her lids receded.

When she finally was upright, Prissi was as wobbly as if she was standing was for the very first time. Seconds later, like a precocious baby, the slight, oval-faced, almond-eyed, mousy-haired girl took her first steps. As she went downstairs to scrounge the kitchen, Prissi admonished herself not to give up.

Today had to be better.

After looking through the refrigerator, the famished teener had regrets about how cavalierly she had cremated the contents of the freezer the night before searching for a clue to why her father had been murdered and her life was in danger. It wasn't that the refrigerator held no food; it just was difficult to determine the phyla and genera of what was in the various little containers. Snapping open a couple of lids to see and smell, Prissi, while willing to concede that the contents might be edible, was hard-pressed to say what they might be. The idea of flying with a case of diarrhea overcame her normal sense of culinary adventure.

Four Wheat-a-bix and water and a small bite of something she was almost positive was cheese, or, at least, a cousin to cheese, ended the stomach rumbling. In an act, which she couldn't decide was charitable or cruel, Prissi opened several of the refrigerator containers and left them on the back stoop for the world's scraggliest cat.

Minutes later, after brushing her teeth with her fingers and salt and after a long tense moment of not crying, Prissi was in the air and flying east across New Jersey toward the Hudson River.

As soon as she was high enough to allow it, Prissi made herself do a double barrel roll. The physical exuberance wasn't matched by anything emotional, but she felt better about being able to make a long flight after having tested her suspect wing joint.

What to do first?

Get money from Burgey's bank accounts and use it to make an escape? Tell the Manhattan hawks what was happeneing and let them find her enemies? Confront Baudgew, the elfin man who made her skin crawl?

Prissi was pretty sure that the numbers besides the PIN number she had found hidden in Burgey's spinach were coordinates. Although she had only been in Noramica for three years and had only been flying for less than a year, Prissi was pretty sure the coordinates pinpointed some place out on Long Island. Given her recent bad luck, Prissi guessed that wherever Burgey wanted her to go was probably deep in the trackless forest beyond the Pale. She knew that if she keyed the coordinates into her mypod, it would only take a split second for a map to display her destination. However, the worried teener was afraid to do that. Despite the cautions she had taken after escaping the blue jays who had killed her father, Prissi wasn't positive that she was off the grid. The man in Spicetown had assured her that the mypod she bought from him could not be tracked, but, after the events of the last few days, trusting anyone seemed impossible.

Prissi wondered what could be out on Long Island. As far as the recent immigrant knew, most of western Long Island was sparsely populated and the entire eastern end was totally uninhabited and had been since the fires in 20...something...2047?...2048, when the island had been burned as the unanticipated climax of the Ticklish Situation.

Although Prissi was somewhat reassured by the fact that the ridiculously vulnerable fortress she had constructed in Burgey's upstairs bedroom had not been attacked during the night, she wasn't confident that changing her clothes and substituting mypods were enough to keep her in the shadows and safe. It was those doubts about her safety which kept the fifteen year old from wanting to go back on the grid to do any research. As an alternative, Prissi considered how dangerous it might be to make a quick stop at NYPD. She thought that if she went to the NYPD, she could look at a map of Long Island, use the coordinates to figure out the location, make a plan and, simultaneously, stay off the grid. Although there was a chance someone might be watching to see if a certain small, red and silver winged girl climbed the steps between the two worn lions, the NYPD certainly had to be safer than going back to the Gramercy Park apartment to look through her father's old atlas.

Prissi closed her eyes and let the brisk March wind tug the tears from their edges. Old atlas or not, the idea of walking into their apartment, a place she never had liked, was too painful even to consider. And there wasn't any compelling reason to go back. Her mother's cryptic notebook already was missing. The things her father had taken from the apartment, except for his wallet, had been lost at the KaffeeKiosK during the attack.

Prissi's wings skipped a beat as she realized that she had been assuming that those things were lost. As she resumed her flapping, she considered what the chances might be that her assailants, caught up in the injuries they had sustained attacking her could have forgotten to collect the gear she and her father had taken with them. After a moment's consideration, Prissi concluded that, even if those precious possessions were sitting in a heap in the back room of the KaffeeKiosK, it was just too risky for her to go herself—someone could be thinking the same way she was. But, she might be able to call to see if...no, calling might only forewarn her enemies. But, Prissi thought, maybe her friend Jiffy Apithy could go. He might be willing to go check for her...but, if he went, he also might end up like her father, with a broken neck and eyes staring into a distance too far for Prissi to understand.

Prissi shook her head as if that physical movement might magically straighten out the conflicting thoughts going on inside it.

She didn't know what to do. And, she was afraid to do another wrong thing.

In-bound air traffic grew heavier the closer she got to the Hudson. Prissi was making up her mind about going to the NYPD when something suddenly darkened her vision. Someone shrieked a curse. Prissi threw the same phrase back so quickly it might have been an echo, except it was an octave higher. Even as her anger spiked, she realized it was she who was in the wrong. She had been so absorbed in her thinking that she had drifted over into the outbound corridor. The teener dropped a wing, swooped right and rejoined the stream of in-bound travelers. She scolded herself to focus on the flying. If she didn't, there would be no need to think about the future. Before she was half-way across the Hudson, a second winger screamed and horned her because she was floating up into his flight line. Prissi's heartbeat tripled and her blood pressure doubled. She realized that if she couldn't get control over herself, she was more apt to be killed by her inattention and ineptitude than by any enemy. Again, she swore at herself to pay attention and concentrate on her flying. But paying close attention to thousands of wings was equally nerve-wracking.

In the year since she fledged, nothing gave Prissi a greater sense of freedom than flying in an empty sky in fair weather. But, few things felt more claustrophobic than flying in the middle of a dense flock. Even though she herself was the one who had made two mistakes in two minutes, as soon as she really started to focus on her flying, she became hyper-conscious of all the possible ways the wingers around her could do something thoughtless, aggressive, or stupid—all acts which could cause her to plummet into the riverr below. Not for the first time she pondered how meta-mutationists had figured out how to give humans wings, but they hadn't figured out how to give them the group brains necessary to safely fly within a flock.

The chemicals that had blasted through Prissi's body from being horned didn't readily dissipate. Instead, as she approached the tangle of Manhattan buildings before her, a skyline that reminded her of an old hyena's worn and broken teeth, Prissi's heart continued to pound so hard she thought it might tear itself into two. Her fingertips tingled and a cluster of black spots, like the black funeral balloons gay men released when a partner died, bobbled in front of her.

Before her thoughts threw her into a full panic, Prissi remembered to say the old mantra from her wing instructor: Fast wings. Slow breaths. Fast wings. Slow breaths. Fast wings. Slow breaths.... Help me, Dad. Help me, Mom. Jay Seuss Christy. Help me, Dad.

It may have been the brain cells freed up by slowing down that let the confused fugitive notice two wingers in the outbound lane. She had not seen the faces of the wingers who had attacked her two nights before and started the nightmare she was trying to escape, but something about the orange-feathered pair coming her way triggered a strong neural response. She veered south and increased her wing beats. She watched to see what response her evasions might have. The pair kept their altitude and continued toward New Jersey. Prissi increased her speed. She turned her head back twice, but the orange wings kept beating their way west across the Hudson. Deciding that she was paranoid, but nodding her head that she had every right to be so, Prissi kept up her pace.

As thousands of wingers approached the Manhattan shore, the discipline of the flock broke down. A dozen flyers, and then twice that, mostly younger and all male, flying on the south side of the torrent suddenly cut sideways against the grain to head uptown. The blare of horns and a Babel of curses followed them. Both because she wasn't used to flying in rush hour and because she had left Burgey's house with only the vaguest of plans, Prissi slowed her speed.

She was less than a half klik from shore when she heard the squawk of horns coming from behind her. Craning her neck, she saw a flash of orange far back in the flock in the in-bound lane.

A third blast of adrenaline exploded through Prissi. She instantly converted it to kinetic energy.

Fight or flight?

After the events of the last couple of days, the answer definitely was flight. Prissi pounded her wings so hard she began to rise. In the fog of fear, it took her a second before she realized that rising up would make it easier for her pursuers to follow her. She pitched back down into the thick of the flock where it would be the harder for her enemies to spot her. Despite feeling her blood sugar starting to drop, Prissi sped over the freighters docked at their piers along the edge of the river, flew two blocks further onto the island, and made a tight pinion-rattling turn south onto Eleventh Avenue. She flew for just a block before heading back west. She canted her wings and nailed a one hop landing just shy of the edge of the building at the end of the block. Moving forward, she peeked around the corner just in time to see the duo of orange wingers cross onto Manhattan. Prissi leaned against the building to catch her breath. She was wondering how they could have known she would be crossing over from New Jersey. She had gotten rid of her old clothes and her mypod. She was thinking about other ways to track her, like her i-tag, when a peripheral splotch of color informed her that the pair of orange wings was sweeping around the corner. Prissi leapt, launched and flew north, but a half-second later she realized that if she were to escape her assailants it would be from her wits and darting ability and not from the speed of her wings.

She dropped a wing and cut sharply left toward the hulking superstructure of a Liberian freighter. When she snapped her head around, her attackers were less than twenty meters behind her. Prissi flew directly over the narrow gap between the freighter's scabby hull and the edge of the pier, drew up her knees, folded her wings and cannon-balled toward the black opening. She passed through the narrow gap with just a scrape to a leg. Just before she plunged into the Hudson's oily gray water, Prissi snapped her wings half-open and tattooed a humming bird beat. Even though she was forced to trim her wing span so that she could fit in the narrow span between hull and pier, her rapid stroke was powerful enough to keep her aloft for the seconds it took for her to reconnoiter where she was and what she had to do.

Flying along the flaking hull of the ship back toward the river, Prissi studied the width of the openings between the pilings supporting the pier. She thought that she might be able to dart between them. The problem wouldn't be getting between the spans, but rather making the necessary sharp u-turn before she crashed into the hull of the next ship.

Prissi heard muffled, metallic shouting. She had guessed right. Her attackers' wingspans were too wide to allow them to follow her between hull and quay. She sped the length of the freighter, swept under the curve of the stern and pounded her way back toward the wharf. At the bow end of the second ship, she lowered her remiges to slow her speed before dropping her left wing and smacking sideways into the end of the pier.

Like an exhausted bat, Prissi hung onto the slimy wall. After a dozen deep breaths, she dropped almost to the water before she flared and flew under the bow of the next ship. Continuing her zigzag, the flagging teener headed back toward the river. As she swept around the hull of the third ship, she caught a glimpse of a pair of orange wings patrolling above the Hudson. She assumed that the other winger was flying a quay-side reconnaissance pattern. She considered keying her replacement mypod with the emergency code to bring the hawks, but, she wasn't ready to compromise its signal. With yesterday's blue jay attackers, who had killed her father, and today's orange wingers, it was obvious that her enemy, who she thought had to be Joshua Fflowers, had plenty of people to keep chasing her despite anything the police might do. Plus, since she didn't know what secret she had other than it must be linked to the two fractured crystals hanging around her neck, Prissi had no idea what she would tell any hawk that would be any different from what she told the ones who had interviewed her at the hospital after the first attack. She thought a better plan was, first, to get herself out of the jam she was in, and, then, find out how she was being tracked. That was what she thought, but her body was having a different idea from her mind. The nearly spent winger was drawing her breaths in great gulps. She had been using her energy up too fast by flying with less than her full wingspan. Given how she felt, Prissi guessed that she might only be able to keep up what she was doing only for a couple of minutes more, and, even that depended on her shoulder not betraying her again. With semi-spread wings, she was putting enormous strain on the same joint that has dislocated itself three times in the last week.

To get some distance from her growing fatigue, Prissi told herself that what she was doing was just a game. Like 3D-FRZ-B. Just another air-borne game. To win, she just needed to come up with the right strategy.

As she rounded a fourth ship, Prissi thought there might be a solution. For it to work, however, she had to get herself to the 39th Street ferry terminal.

To distract herself from her dwindling energy, Prissi counted wing flaps to the accompaniment of an old African counting song. As she got closer to the terminal, she tried to guess what her pursuers might do. She thought that the one now flying over the river might move closer to shore to seal off any chance of her escaping back into the city. Prissi curved around the gleaming hull of an enormous Chinese ship and pounded her way toward the swirling gray of the Hudson. As soon as she passed the stern, she banked her wings and flew south just a couple of meters above the water. She thought that she must have guessed right because she saw no orange.

Prissi was hoping that there would be a ferry close to departing for the Jersey shore or one just coming in to berth. Her plan was to fly on board and let the crowd keep her safe, but looking to the south, she could see that her plan was flawed. The two ferry boats in port were empty having already disembarked their cargo of walkers and injured, obese, or old wingers. Looking west, Prissi could see two more ferries coming from the Jersey shore, but neither was past mid-river. Prissi dropped her primaries and rose in the air up so that she could see what other options she might have, but before she had climbed ten meters, two patches of orange were streaking toward her. Prissi smashed the air with her wings as she dashed south.

Three blocks away, a small freighter, colored mostly in patches of rust and a few flakes of green, flying the orange, white and green stripes of Cote d'Ivoire, was making a slow turn into a berth.

When she looked behind her, Prissi could see the orange wings were flying from two angles so that they could pinch her. Responding exactly as if she were in a game of 3D-FRZ-B, Prissi let them close, then, at the very last moment, she darted right, then left, then right again before she threw her wings back and floated up out of their reach. Her pursuers snapped half rolls and came at her from the front. This time she folded her wings, cannonballed, pulled out just above the river and began climbing as fast as she could.

Despite their bigger wings, in general, men, with their more heavily muscled bodies, could not climb as fast as women. Prissi rose until she was sixty meters in the air. Looking forward, she could see that the freighter was just over a block away. As she bee-lined toward the ship, she shrieked and pummeled the button on her flight horn.

Thinking that Prissi was welcoming them to Noramica, some of the sailors clustered on the deck of the battered ship began waving back at her.

A quick backward glance let Prissi know that, despite her maneuvers, the orange wingers were right behind her. From playing fly games with the boys at Dutton, Prissi knew that while a male's bulk might slowehis climbs, it helped his dives. It was obvious to Prissi that unless she changed her tactics she was going to be caught before she made it to the tanker's deck.

Calling on the last of her reserves, the teener snapped her head down and her butt up as she collapsed her wings. Two thirds of the way through a barrel roll, she flared her wings, ignored the fire that erupted in her right shoulder and came up behind her attackers. She beat her wings, corrected her path and picked the assailant to the right. She accelerated until she was just behind him. Just as she passed over, she pulled her wings tight, bent her knees, and snapped her legs into his left side wing joint. He made a sound like a cheap seat cushion when a fat man sits before falling toward the water. His partner took a split second deciding which target to pursue before following his partner down.

Prissi looked toward onto the freighter deck and its mystified crew. Seeing that they were bewildered at what they had seen, she shrieked again and let her right wing drag. Gravity took hold even as her body slipped sideways through the air. She gave her audience more horn and more screams. The sailors, realizing she was injured, began yelling back to her and running along the deck to where they estimated she might crash. Prissi fluttered her left wing just enough to correct her course and closed the vents on her primaries to give herself as much drag as possible. Thinking it would help her cause, Prissi continued shrieking, dropped her wing even further, slipped sideways again to slow her speed, skimmed just over railing and did a stumbling three hop landing. Whimpering, Prissi staggered forward with a limp wing in a bravura performance that would have shamed a killdeer.

Feeling the crew pressing forward, Prissi raised her eyes and looked into the darkest crowd of faces she had seen since leaving Burundi.

She winced. She groaned. She stumbled. She limped. The crew first moved back, then, moved forward two steps, and, finally, halted. Just as Prissi was widening her grateful smile and deciding on her next move, she noticed the focal point of the eyes of the crowd shift from her to something behind her.

As she turned her head, her two assailants landed. Without hesitation, they began shouting, "Stop! Stop her! She stole our money."

Hands from the crowd began reaching out toward Prissi. Caught between the crew and her orange enemies, Prissi fought off the urge to fly away. She started to say something in English before catching herself as she remembered the ship's flag.

"M'aide, s'il vous plait!"

The words exploded out of her like buckshot, propelled by the force of her losses—her mother, her father, and, suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, Africa. Despite the danger she was in, Prissi leaned forward to recapture the warmth and smells of Africa coming from the clutch of crew before her:coconut, groundnut, mwambe beef, harissa, sweat. A two meter tall woman with a pocked face and grease-stained hands stepped toward Prissi.

From behind, a winger's hand reached out.

"Hey, she's a thief. You saw what she did. He's hurt."

Prissi felt a hard hand grab the arc bone of her wing.

The woman sailor stepped around Prissi and put her hand on top of the winger's hand. She began speaking rapidly, but the thug just shook his head in incomprehension. Still holding tight to Prissi, he took a step back. Prissi leaned forward to break his grip. The imposing woman barked something in a language Prissi thought might be Daho-doo. A half-dozen of the woman's shipmates stepped forward to confront the wingers. Not liking the odds, the man holding onto Prissi released her with a hard slap to her shoulder.

"Later, friend, later."

Seconds later, the wingers were in the air flying north and Prissi was fighting the kind of exhaustion that made her want to slide down on the sun-warmed rusty steel deck to take a nap. Instead, she forced herself to make friends of her rescuers. Just before Customs came on board to check for contraband and lock IX-monitors on their ankles so that the crew could go ashore, a hyper-alert Prissi fluttered off the tanker and onto the quay. As she waited out of sight while Customs did its duty, she developed her plan.

As soon as the agents had flown off, Prissi went back on board. Being Africans, no one in the crew had wings, and no one had a mypod; however after asking around, she was directed to a junior officer who had a sat-phone. She used the ancient relic to call the EX-LAM market and was overwhelmed with relief and gratitude when she heard Jiffy Apithy's voice answer.

When Jiffy was hesitant to do as she asked—either from fear or because he was still angry with her from what he thought was a racist remark she had made—Prissi offered him the key-code to her apartment. Since she didn't see how she would ever be able to go back, she told him that he could take what he wanted. Prissi read his hesitation before agreeing as embarrassment that his cooperation had to be bought.

An hour after nightfall, the tall woman who had befriended Prissi, whose name she had learned was Safiatou, and three other sailors waited until a dilapidated hack, painted a blackish-green color that reminded Prissi of an overly ripe avocado, slalomed up and hovered ten centimeters above the battered asphalt. Prissi ran down the gangplank sandwiched between two pairs of her new friends. When they got to the cab, the Africans yanked open the back doors and piled in but Prissi took an extra moment to keep from damaging her wings as she got in the front. The hack accelerated away from the quay like a newly commissioned ambulance drive and sped down 9th Avenue. At 21st Street, the cabbie, whipping around the corner, split a handholding couple like an unstable atom, running to the opposite sides of the street. When the cab crossed 7th Avenue, Prissi yelled. The driver slammed on the brakes. Prissi shoved money at the sailors, salaamed them, and ejected herself from the cab into the writhing smoke rising from the front of the moldering cab.

Prissi hopped twice then began beating her wings. As she flew past the EZ-LAM Market, Jiffy Apithy came running out. Just east of 5th Avenue, Prissi landed. A second later, breathing heavily, Jiffy caught up. He grabbed her hand and they ran another half-block before darting down a narrow opening. A dozen steps down the alley, a tall shadow loomed out of even deeper darkness. Prissi heard the sound of grating metal. The sound was so similar to yesterday's noises when she and Jack, hiding beneath a liquor store bulk-head, had been attacked by the blue jay wingers, that Prissi involuntarily pulled back. Jiffy yanked her forward, then dropped her hand as he slapped skin with the shadow—an all-black apparition except for a double row of perfect white teeth. The trio hurried down a set of steps into a basement dimly lighted by a lumenaid. They hurried across a dank empty space. Through a door, through a room, through a door, darker, into a third room. A roughly framed hatch in the floor was pulled and held open by their faceless helper. Jiffy went first. Prissi, suddenly claustrophobic, forced herself to follow. Down a rickety ladder into molasses black spider web-riven air. Into a space so constrained Prissi caught and snapped the tips of some of her feathers.

After the third time a wing caught, Prissi swore and, finally, Jiffy spoke.

"We don't get many wingers."

Down another ladder. Swaying over nothingness. To a landing no bigger than a hotel towel. And then, a short walk along a tunnel shored up with salvaged bits of metal and wood. The air was hot, still, stale, and, so devoid of oxygen that Prissi's chest began to heave. The weight of the earth above her and the buildings above that bent her shoulders. However, despite her worry that she might suffocate, or be crushed, some part of Prissi, a big part she suddenly realized, felt much safer. There was no way that the men could follow her down the torturous route of her escape.

Another ladder, this one both rickety and missing rungs, and, finally, Prissi's feet touched down on the smooth concrete of an abandoned subway line.

As the globally warmed waters around Manhattan had risen, as the island of Manhattan city began to fade and lose businesses and population, as the proportion of wingers increased, as the expense of keeping the subway tunnels and tracks in some kind of repair soared, as the avenues and streets of the island became less congested after the banning of private cars, station after station of New York City's underground transportation had been mothballed and abandoned. Most of the system in lower Manhattan had been closed down and boarded up and abandoned—except for the kinds of travelers and residents who couldn't, because of poverty, insanity, lack of proper credentials or a conflict with those responsible for public safety, live above ground.

As they walked above the old subway tracks, now submerged under a meter of pus colored water, Jiffy told Prissi that he was hoping to find his friend, Benny. Benny, the youngest son of a family from Jiffy's father's Malawi village, had snuck into the Noramican paradise by jumping off as ship as it was moving up the Hudson for a night berthing. After swimming to the unpatrolled New Jersey shore, Benny had made his way back to Manhattan on a ferry. After resisting and escaping a hawk who had questioned him about his V-ZA status, Benny had gone underground. He had been living in the subway for five months. Jiffy said that his friend was caught in the same snare that held so many other aliens. He needed money to pay for forged papers and id chips, but it was difficult to make much money when one was living mostly underground. Benny hadn't been into the EZ-LAM for almost two weeks, but the last time he had surfaced, the refugee had told Jiffy that he was camping with a group of ten other African illegals, south of the Union Square station. He was desperate to get above ground. It wasn't safe. He and the people he was living with had been forced to travel in groups because of a wilding of thirty or more zies, all, apparently, either under- or over-medicated. Two of the Africans Benny had been living with had been assaulted and one had died from his injuries.

Although Jiffy's information chilled Prissi, she understood why her guide hadn't said anything about the dangers until they were right before them.

As they walked out of the feeble glow of the widely spaced phosphors into thick, still black space, the skin on Prissi's neck would prickle and her feathers would puff. When they passed back into the sickly green glow, her physical symptoms would abate. When she whispered to Jiffy what was happening to her, he giggled nervously and told her that if they were going to have a problem, it would be very, very obvious. Zies were not known for the subtlety of their behavior.

Prissi came to understand what Jiffy meant when, after walking along a narrow section of concrete where her feathers scraped the oozing side of the tunnel, they heard shouts and screams, arguing and laughter. Coming around a curve, the tunnel opened up into the large, better lighted space of what once had been the Astor Place station.

On the wrong side of the tracks, that is, on their side, was a subterranean village. Hovels constructed of both badboard and goodboard hugged the tunnel wall. Two dozen chairs—everything from a webbed beach chairs and mangy loungers to a worn red velvet banquette—were surrounding a large fire pit holding a small fire.

Less than half of the chairs were occupied; however most of the others, though empty, had clusters of people hovering close to them. From the cacophony of words and noises coming from the villagers, Prissi assumed that this was the wilding of zies Jiffy's friend had warned him about.

As Prissi and Jiffy edged further into the light, the sounds of the villagers grew louder and more agitated until the air was torn by a sound like the howl of a rabid dingo. Immediately the villagers grew still.

The source of the howl, an impossible being, a being which looked to be made from two sets of parts, beat his, her, its fists in the air with glee. Above was a tiny head that was all angles—razor sharp cheekbones and a long chin that came to sharp point. Long, licorice twist arms with pencil length fingers extended out, Messiah-like, from a cadaverous chest. Below the pinched waist was a butt as big as a loveseat and thighs, which if they had been haunches of beef, would have fed a community barbeque.

"Guests, everyone, guests. Even a grill baby. Best behavior, all."

The being rolled forward in a way that reminded Prissi of an old-fashioned upright vacuum sweeper. From the high pitch of the voice, Prissi thought the speaker might be a woman.

Jiffy started forward. Prissi grabbed his shirt.

"Wait."

Prissi stepped in front of Jiffy as the villagers, moving forward in a single group like a glob of bacteria, began to sing in a dozen different keys, "We welcome you today. We welcome you to play. We see. We say...."

Suddenly and with the eerie simultaneity off a bacteria quorum language command being followed, the group surged forward.

"...We hope you like to pray."

Immediately, Prissi spun and shoved Jiffy toward the edge of the platform.

"Jump."

"I can't."

Prissi knocked Jiffy off the platform into the curry of water.

A half-second later, hands grabbed at her. She felt feathers being torn from her wings as she pushed herself off the platform and began flapping. Her right wing wouldn't move because one of the zies, with a pie crust pale and featureless face surrounding a pair of over-electrified eyes, was holding on. She beat her left wing, but instead of going up, she started tipping head-first into the poisonous canal.

Prissi screamed, "Header."

Jiffy looked up, then, as he spread his feet, Prissi used her right leg to kick herself free from the pie-faced crazie. She stretched her left leg forward, stepped on Jiffy's head and launched herself into the air. As Prissi flew across the subway stream to the platform on the other side, the zies ran back to the center of their village. They grabbed bottles and rocks and metal poles and headed back to attack Jiffy.

"Run."

The boy's twiggy legs began thrashing through the water.

Prissi made a sweeping turn back toward the end of the station platform from where they had emerged seconds before. As she neared the tunnel entrance, she made a sharp turn and began flying back as fast as she could. Looking ahead she saw the zies at the edge of the platform easily keeping pace with Jiffy's churning efforts to escape. As Prissi watched, her friend was hit in the back with a bottle, prodded with a pole and hit in the head with a rock. He fell forward and his head disappeared under the water. Prissy shouted his name. He struggled up. She screamed, "Grab me."

At the last moment, coming up behind him, Prissi swept past Jiffy with one of her legs passing over each of his shoulders. He grabbed her ankles. She pounded her wings harder than she ever had in her life. Jiffy was pulled forward in the water like a giant lure. A bottle bounced off the teener's right wing. Despite the pain it left, she kept up her efforts. At the far end of the station platform, Prissi flew into the murky tunnel. Behind her she heard the zies cry, "Over! Over!"

Thirty meters inside the tunnel, Prissi veered toward the steel rails which separated the narrow walkway from the sludgy canal. She dropped her right wing and slammed against the rail. Holding onto the rail with one hand, she reached down for Jiffy with the other.

Coughing and crying, her bleeding friend painfully pulled himself from the water and slipped a leg over the railing. As soon as his second leg was over, Prissi stretched her head away from her body and added the contents of her stomach into the muck flowing along. When she was finished, in between huge breaths, she asked, "Can you run?"

"Like the sirocco."

Hearing feet pounding on the concrete, Prissi looked back to see a silhouetted swarm of zies coming down both sides of the subway tunnel.

"Go. Find your friends. I'll try to amuse them."

Jiffy looked forward to safety and back to the threat running down the tunnel.

"How?"

Prissi shoved Jiffy, "Charm. You know, my forte. Go!"

Running, but in an ungainly way that favored his injuries, Jiffy disappeared into the murk. As soon as she couldn't see him, Prissi spun herself off the railing and began flapping back toward the zies. Seeing her approach, the demented gang's cries grew louder and shriller. They prepared their weapons as Prissi herself prepared to fly past them. Some of the adhd-ites, too excited to contain themselves, threw their rocks and bottles too early. Those missiles Prissi easily dodged except for a hefty rock, which she caught like a soccer ball. The leader and several others had climbed over the railing so that they would have a better chance of stabbing Prissi with their poles. A couple of meters shy of entering the gauntlet, Prissi flung the rock at the narrow sweaty wedge of the leader's head. The creature's ice-pick point pupils doubled in size and intensity just before the rock landed, then, when the missile connected, winked out. The being dropped to its knees like a pole-axed steer, staggered, let mgo of the railing and tumbled off the platform into the water. As Prissi swept past, she grabbed the pole from the thing's fist, canted her wings and skimmed along the roof of the tunnel. Twice her legs were cudgeled by a zie's pole, but not with enough force to bring her down more than a half meter. The enraged teener flew through the screaming gauntlet and passed out of the tunnel into the old station. She aimed toward the zies' camp. As she swept over the campfire, she swung the leader's pole. Fiery brands flew into the badboard hovels. By the time Prissi made a wide sweeping turn at the far end of the station, the village was ablaze and the villagers streaming back out of the tunnel mouth were spewing sounds beyond anguish.

While most of the residents raced to their burning hovels, a handful, either from cunning or indecision, hovered restively by the tunnel entrance. To avoid passing through their weapons a second time, Prissi swept wide to the right, then flew alongside the wall at the south end of the station. Coming upon the remaining zies from the side, Prissi used her pole to knock two more in the water. As the drowning zies yawped for help, the hysterical winger executed an Immelman turn and smashed another frothing zie across the shoulders before swerving into and fleeing back into the tunnel.

Almost blinded by the bolts of adrenaline and epinephrine jolting across her vision, Prissi sped down the inky tube. As the dusky narrow space grew ever darker, the flashes dimmed and Prissi felt safer. Slowing her pace, she sucked huge gouts of the damp fetid air into her lungs. She touched the tips of her thumbs to the ends of her middle fingers in an attempt to slow her body chemistry. Prissi's efforts might have worked given more time, but when the bleeding, enraged, hawk-faced zie leader launched herself off the railing where she had been waiting for revenge, Prissi's body went berserk. With screams, growls, and tears exploding from her, Prissi began tearing at the hands locked around her calves. She beat her wings as her nails shredded the skin on the zie's hands. Even as the two combatants sank into the diseased water, her efforts had no effect on the insane woman's grasp around Prissi's legs. Prissi thrashed forward even as she despaired that her wings were getting soaked. Losing her balance, the woman's head slid under the water. Prissy shifted her weight backward to keep it there, but neither the woman's hold nor her teeth, which she had embedded in Prissi's thigh, loosened until the zie had drowned.

A horrified Prissi pushed herself away from the lifeless form, whose fat lower half already looked as if it were bloated from the drowning. As the body slowly drifted away, the repulsed, quaking Prissi clawed her way up the railing and onto the walkway. Her wings felt like they weighed a thousand kilos. Dripping goo-thickened greasy water, sobbing, making sounds that were not words, Prissi pulled herself along the tunnel's gloom.

The teener was still sobbing when the subway opened up again for the Bleecker Street station. She stood stunned in the shadows just inside the arched mouth, like a befuddled tourist in a national park cave. As she worked to control the noises being wrenched from her throat, she scanned the space ahead.

Prissi could see no village or enclave like with the zies, which was good. But, there also was no sign of Jiffy, or his friends either, which was not good. Instead, there were several lumps pressed close to the tile that might have been rubbish or humans or some combination of the two. There were a dozen blind spots behind abandoned stairs and broken-tiled columns where danger could be hidden. Prissi knew that she needed to be extremely cautious because it was a certainty that she had no fight left in her. The events of the last days, one after another, the attacks, her father's death, Jack Fflower's betrayal, the dead zie, had emptied her out. Her courage was long gone. Courage weak cousins, bravura and bravado, had followed behind. Her adrenals were empty. Too numb to fear, too tired to care, Prissi knew that she couldn't surmount any more danger. She could only avoid it. She was too tired to run and her wings were too oily to fly, even if, by some miracle, her energy were to return. She knew she had to find a haven with clean water, rags and alcohol to clean her feathers.

The overwhelmed Prissi bleakly spread her wings and let herself slump against the slick damp wall as she considered the odds of finding what she needed.

# CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

As They Sew, So Shall She Weep

"Poppet."

Prissi awoke. Given how crazed she had felt after her battle with the zies and the death of their leader, she was surprised that she had fallen asleep.

A fleshy, black and pink hand thrust a battered Panera Bakery pak in front of her face.

"Poppet. Did you order take-out?"

At first, Prissi couldn't get her mind around the question. When she did understand, her insides sagged. The zies had found her. Prissi tilted her head back to see an immense henna haired woman with a pendulous wattle, like a chocolate colored torque. Standing in her shadow was a silent bony-faced wraith with hands that twitched at each other in a way that reminded Prissi of a surreal Punch and Judy show.

"Take out? You order. We deliver."

Prissi shook her feverish head in despair.

"Are you sure? You look like a bonnet, which has lost its bee, or, being. As you can see, the more you lose your B, the more you need a D...as in de-livery."

The skinny woman reached out to touch Prissi's wings. When the fat woman laughed, she made a sound like a flag flapping in the breeze and the flesh under her chin rose and subsided like a glassy sea.

"Yes, indeed, your livery is in need of delivery."

Prissi recoiled when the bird-like woman's hand darted forth to poke at her stomach.

"Take away a y, and why, because your liver itself needs its chicken removed as well as its r, so you can live again and forget those zies."

At the mention of the zies, Prissi thought of how their leader had died. She groaned and reached toward the bite wound in her thigh.

When the fat woman's hand snatched out with astonishing speed to catch hold of Prissi's wrist, she didn't resist.

"Don't touch it. You'll only make it worse. Come, poppet, we'll take you out of here and take you there."

The two women offered supporting arms to Prissi as they started across the broad expanse of the underground station. As they progressed, several of the lumps Prissi had noticed earlier stirred. Eyes without faces stared from the bundles of rags as they passed by. When one lump started to rise from its concrete bed, a slight wag of the fat woman's index finger, as big as a boudin, suggested it reconsider. It did.

After crossing the station and re-entering the gloom, Prissi's two companions walked for hundreds of meters before stopping. The farther they went, the less Prissi had walked by herself and the more she had been supported by the two women. Prissi's fever began to overwhelm her mind and she let herself drift until she heard a jingle, a jangle, a click and a door, nearly invisible in the gloom and blackened wall, opened inward. The bird lady went first and the fat lady behind with Prissi sandwiched between the uneven slices.

Prissi was so exhausted and feverish that she was barely conscious of what was happening to her. She finally did realize that she was being tended to, but in a way that was very different from the care she had received at Columbia Unitarian Hospital.

Some brightly burning part of her mind tried to understand the aches and pains that seemed to come from bruises and sprains that were being nursed. Those hurts all seemed to be part of a body that was not quite her own. Somehow those hurts reminded her of being tickled by Nasty Nancy through a mound of winter blankets. There were scrapes, scratches and cuts. There seemed to be dozens of those. She was alert enough that she could locate one—it was on the right side of her jaw. It announced itself as a warmth—like holding a potato not long from the oven. Then, there was the third thing.

It was a hole, a very deep black emptiness. It had no feeling, but Prissi could tell that it held the promise of exploding with pain. It took Prissi several moments to understand that the black hole was where the zie had bitten her.

Prissi heard murmuring like the sound of mountain wind through grasses. She felt a tugging at the black hole. She thought she knew what that was and the thought horrified her. A black and red swirl, like lava swelling from a volcano started forming at the edge of her closed eyes' vision. Prissi squeezed her eyes even tighter to push the image away, but the lava oozed past where she was squeezing and began to fill the space behind her lids.

Prissi bit hard on her lower lip to keep from screaming. She was terrified at how excruciating the pain would be if she couldn't stop the flow of lava. When it became obvious that pushing back would not stop the molten threat, she thought of other things, powerful things, that would keep the lava away. Her fingertips stretched to touch her father's face, to pat his hair, to gently hold his feeble neck, his worthless neck.

There was more tugging as the caregivers beyond her lids tried to stitch the leg wound closed. Tugging and tugging to close the lava hole.

A sound that began lower than a growl and ended an octave higher than a shriek erupted from Prissi.

"Yell, poppet, yell. It won't seal the wound, but it may heal the wounded. Who did you dance with? That thief, the hyena? Well, we have just the thing for hyenas, don't we, Lavie La?"

As the fat woman talked, Prissi unclenched her fists and let herself fly away from all that was happening, and all that had happened, to her.

# CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Been Down, So Long

Bob Tom had fallen asleep as soon as the sun disappeared. Joe couldn't blame him. After all, they had been up early in the morning so Bob Tom could tow Joe the rest of the way to Albany. They had walked for miles to the train terminal, battled the bob n hobs, and made their way back to the river. After that, Bob Tom had flown for kilometers after they headed downstream before hitchhiking a ride on the salad barges.

Using the light of the moon, Joe studied the old man. The rough furrowed skin on the Bob Tom's face reminded the boy of the naked faces of the Adirondacks Mountains themselves. The eyebrows, a frowze of white and gray hairs of all lengths, if enlarged a hundred times, could have been mistaken for one of the animals Bob Tom hunted. Joe smiled as he thought of those two trophies hanging on the bare wood walls of a cabin alongside a bear's head and a pair of moose antlers. Looking at the riverman's nose, a promontory of vein-blasted flesh, Joe didn't doubt that that mighty organ could smell scents more mortal noses would miss as its owner claimed. As if it knew it was being considered, the nose quivered before making a sudden disturbance that resounded across the Hudson.

Joe scanned down Bob Tom's tatterdemalion clothed, hull-like chest to where his hands lightly held the bottle the captain had sent back with him after their visit. As the night's air was broken by a second racketing snore, the hands, whose slender fingers and large joints made them look like they were assembled from Tinker Toys©, tightened on the bottle's neck. Joe reached over, slightly twisted the bottle until Bob Tom's finger's loosened, and removed it from his hands.

Joe held the bottle up to the silver moonlight and wasn't surprised to see that more than half its contents were gone. Before finding a safe place to stash the liquor, Joe studied the bottle to see if he wanted to reconsider his decision to say no when Bob Tom had asked him if he wanted a celebratory drink. The boy twisted the cap off, but after smelling the bottle's contents, he decided that he would keep the pledge he had made at the beginning of hockey season.

With the bottle wedged between two crates of spicy smelling mesclun, Joe came back to Bob Tom and lifted his legs so that his whole body was stretched out on the shelf they had made earlier by moving a half dozen crates around. As Joe velked the old man's themkin tighter to keep out the night air, the old man's mouth fell open in an unconscious yawn. The sight of that gawp acted on Joe like a nail in a tire. All the pressure within him began leaking out. He yawned, yawned again, struggled as he made himself a nest from a mound of coiled rope and within minutes of getting as himself comfortable as he guessed he could, despite all of the adventures of the day, was fast asleep.

* * *

Even as he fought the hands that were holding him down, Joe had the clarity to twist his head to see what Bob Tom was doing. From what he could glimpse between his assailants' arms, those three crew members were having a much easier time overpowering the riverman than the two who were trying to tie Joe up as the teener kicked and thrashed, and used all of his hockey experience to get out of their clutches. Joe, since he was neither drunk nor drugged, might have succeeded, although what advantage that might have produced given that he was on a barge in the middle of the Hudson River wasn't clear, if the other three crew members, after securing Bob Tom, hadn't joined their mates.

After the crew members bound their hands and feet with the same heavy plastic zip-ties used to secure the crates to the barge and locked Joe and Bob Tom in a well-worn storage locker area in the bow end of the tug's hold, the old man immediately fell back into a deep sleep. By flopping around on the floor of the hold and not worrying about the bruises his efforts were making, Joe managed to work his way onto his knees. From his kneeling position, despite the tight restraints around his crossed wrists, Joe could reach Bob Tom's hands. Leaning back on his heels, he tried to roust his friend by pulling on an arm, but when that appendage stretched like a water balloon in Joe's hand, he gave up on that tactic. Instead, he leaned forward, wedged his head under the riverman's fusty armpit and using all of his strength, managed to push Bob Tom upright, but as soon as Joe removed his head, Damall fell over like some hideously re-imagined Raggedy Andy doll. Listening to Bob Tom's stertorous snores, Joe wondered if there was something else in the bottle besides the bourbon the old man had treated as if it were sacrament. After one more effort to bring back Bob Tom to the living, an exhausted Joe gave up on getting any help from his rescuer.

As the old man slept, the exhausted but sleepless Joe laboriously crawled and wriggled around the hold looking for possible means of escape. The steel lever handle on the locker's door moved a couple of centimeters, but no more. A second unmovable door, one that seemed to lead to the tug's engine room, didn't have a handle on it. After more than an hour of probing the locker and considering the collection of frayed lines, lubricants, a dilapidated generator, and foul weather gear without coming up with anything that felt like a practical plan, Joe decided to followed Bob Tom's example and go to sleep. As he waited for his exhaustion to win out over his outrage at the cowardice of his captors attacking while he and Bob Tom slept, Joe desultorily twisted his restraints until his wrists began to bleed. What did the tug's crew plan to do with him? Would they themselves try to ransom him or would they turn those dealings over to someone with a little more experience? Would they try to keep Joe and Bob Tom in the hold of the ship or would they decide that it would be safer to stash them someplace on land? If it was to be land, would they opt for someplace rural or would they carry their quarry all the way to Manhattan or beyond? And the most interesting question of all, given that the victims had seen their faces, did the kidnappers have any intention at all of returning their captives even after a ransom had been paid?

After asking his questions and getting no answers, Joe finally fell into a short uneasy sleep.

* * *

Joe had been watching shards and pinpricks of lights lasering around the storage hold for almost two hours before Bob Tom began to stir. After he had awakened, Joe had started by reconsidering his questions from the night before, however those thoughts were so formless that the boy soon abandoned them. Instead, his thoughts veered from escaping the hold, to fledging and flying, to Prissi, to Prissi's lips when he kissed her, to fighting the Hudson for his life, to the extraordinary way he had been rescued and what a debt he owed to Bob Tom, and back to Prissi and the danger she must be in, to some vague time in the future when he and Bob Tom, and... maybe, Prissi would be flying above the Adirondacks spying in the nests of eagles before landing and eating a meal with Blesonus. Joe was so engrossed in his diversionary thoughts that it wasn't until Bob Tom groaned a third time that the boy recognized that his friend was awake.

Shaking his bound hands at those above-deck, Bob Tom exclaimed, "Et tu, Brute or whatever yore damn name might be." The old man brought his bound hands to his head and struck himself in the forehead.

"Noby One, my little friend, you done yourself a huge favor by passin on what I thought to be Kentucky's finest."

Bob Tom hit himself a second time.

"I'm afeered that they done me some permanent damage, Noby. My brain feels like it fell in a swift current and got battered around in the rocks."

Although he was sympathetic, Joe wasn't feeling patient. He figured that Bob Tom must have had between four and five more hours of sleep than he'd had and since the riverman had been drunk, he hadn't fought as hard and consequently hadn't been as bruised and banged up as Joe himself. When Bob Tom groaned and started to hit himself in the head a third time, Joe asked, "Any chance of you taking a time-out from your exercises to help me think how we're going to get out of here?"

Damall's bushy eyebrows bolted upward like a couple of mangy rabbits flushed from their warren.

"After all I done for you and you talk to me this way. I'm hurt, Noby, bad hurt from what them pirates done to me, but I'm worse hurt from yore unkind, ungrateful and surely uncalled for words."

Joe held out his hands, "What are we going to do? If we don't do something soon, they might kill us."

Bob Tom grunted as he raised his shoulders from the deck of the hold and looked around before asking "Where'd you get that idea? Kilo for kilo, yore surely the most valuable piece of real estate in all of New York."

"We've seen their faces."

"As ugly a collection as I've had occasion to witness since...", Bob Tom paused as if he couldn't think of what next to say.

Despite their situation, Joe smiled as he asked, "Since you was underground with a bunch of bristle-lipped wimmin?"

"My very thought, Noby, despite it bein a while comin. My very thought."

"So what are we going to do?"

"Well, I'd say the furst thing we're goin do is ask our hosts for some java, an I'll drink yore's so to help my pore head, an a half dozen eggs over easy an, mebbe, some bacon. You like bacon, Noby?"

Bob Tom did some yelling and he and Joe did some exploring, but the day passed and no one answered their calls. Neither bacon nor eggs, not even coffee arrived. Not did any solution to their problems appear. They used a broken pipe wrench they found to try to wedge under their plaston fetters and snap them, but the loops were drawn too tightly around their wrists to succeed. Bob Tom talked about using the wrench and a couple of pieces of pipe they scavenvged to attack the kidnappers when they came below, but Joe didn't see that plan as being very successful until their hands and feet were free.

The hours slowly passed, the light faded, and their hunger pains and thirst grew. The engine, on the other side of the handle-less bulkhead door, chugged along, but the only other sound the captives heard than the engine was the sloshing of the Hudson against the steel hull. Joe was curled into as small a ball as possible trying both to keep warm and to keep his hunger from spreading beyond his belly, when he was startled from his sleep by Bob Tom's anguished swearing.

"May you burn in the stench of brimstone and feel yore spirit weighed down with a millstone."

"What? What's wrong?"

"What's wrong? I'll tell you what's wrong. We've been assaulted on. Captured. Mis-used fearsomely. But, l I'm not one to make a fuss about bein mis-used. Since Eden, it's all men's fate. But, Noby, there must be limits. What happened to me lessen four days ago, Noby? What sorry fate came to pass?"

Bob Tom, with his hands held up in the air in anticipation, waited, and waited some more for Joe's answer.

When Joe didn't respond, Bob Tom finally let his hands drop to his chest.

"Tarndamnation, Noby. What ignominy have I suffered? What near mortal loss?"

Joe finally had an inspiration, "Your kayak? Your favorite boat?"

"Yes, my most favorite boat is gone. Taken from me by fate...with a punkin-sized helping of help from you, as I recall. And when that was taken, did I complain? No. No, sir, I took ole Fate's medicine, a right bitter medicine, and swallered it down."

Joe's hands started to protest Bob Tom's re-telling of the story, but the riverman shook his head.

"I won't put up with it. I, Damall, damwell won't."

Bob Tom paused and Joe gave in and played his part, "What?"

"My pole. My fly-fishing pole. Not only my favorite fishin pole, but the best fishin pole on the whole Hudson. Where is it? Who's got it? I lost my favorite boat, but I will not, won't lose my favorite fishin pole. No, sir. I won't."

Looking around at the shadows that lurked in the corners of the tug's hold as if some answers were to be found there, Joe says, "Then, let's get it back."

Bob Tom concurs, "Good plan," before yawning. Seconds later, he is snoring, but it is hours before Joe gets back to sleep.

The following day their captors opened the hatch and sent down an unimaginably bright column of sunlight as well as a five liter can of water and a tub of something that was more than soup but fells short of stew. Bob Tom and Joe waited until the tub cooled before alternating their hands into the pot.

When the pot is about half-empty, Bob Tom wondered, "You ain't holdin back, are ya, Noby. Lettin me have a little more just cause I'm bigger'n you and apt to be more haingry?"

Joe laughs, "I thought about it, but figured I shouldn't because I'm a growing boy."

Feeling restored by the food, and with Bob Tom more than a day away from his hangover, the two captives spend their time crawling around the hold seeing if what they find can be turned into a means of escape. Joe follows the hunter's advice to look at things sideways, not to try too hard to figure anything out, just let it come. Joe, who has been looking for things either sharp or hard enough to cut through their restraints, tries to take Bob Tom's advice.

Joe tells himself that he must have done a good job when he looks at a small battered-sided lantern, flicks a switch, and gets an idea. He wriggles around until he is facing Bob Tom, who is rummaging around in the dark, narrow, wedge of the bow.

"Look! I've got an idea."

He wiggles the lantern.

Bob Tom turns around, "An I can see it's a bright idea, Noby, but a bright idea is a far ways from a solution."

Afraid that he won't have enough time, Joe turns off the lantern and begins wriggling along to where he remembers seeing cans of motor lubricants and fluid. Once there, he picks up a can, reads the label, puts it back, picks up a second, reads that label, puts it back, reads a third and holding it tightly drags himself over to the pile of orange foul weather gear. Pulling a slicker free, he studies how to tear a pocket flap free. With his hands bound one over the other, he can't use them to tear it off. After a minute, he puts a corner of the flap in his mouth and bites down as he uses a hand to try to tear it free. His effort fails. He starts to ask Bob Tom for help, but decides to take a second to try to figure out another way to free the flap. When nothing comes to him, he follows Bob Tom's instructions to the letter and literally turns his head half-way from the slicker. After a minute he laughs and gives his full attention to the slicker. Using his forearms, Joe spreads the slicker out on the locker's floor. Once that is done, he twists and turns until he can kneel on the shabby jacket. He scoots around until he has one knee of on either side of a pocket before bending over, wedging a fist into the pocket and straightening up. It takes more strength that he would have guessed, but the pocket's side seams finally let go. Joe backs up, leans down and now using his forearms to secure the slicker, he bites the flap and pulls and twists, like a dog trying to win tear a rawhide bone from its owner's grip.

By the time Joe has the pocket torn free, Bob Tom has crawled over to see what he is doing.

"Iffen I'd knowed you were that haingry, Noby, I wouldn't et so much myself."

Joe laughs, "I'm haingry for freedom, Bob Tom. Here, hold this."

Joe brings his mouth close to the old man's hand and they transfer the pocket.

Bob Tom looks at the patch of waterproof fabric and asks, "What now?"

When Joe explains what he aims to do, Bob Tom just shakes his head, but within an hour, both captives have their hands and feet free. As soon as the plastic on the binds on his feet burns through, Joe extinguishes the torch which he has made by rolling up the patch of slicker, soaking it in engine oil and lighting it with a spark from the filament of the lantern bulb after its glass case has been broken.

When Joe looks to Bob Tom for approval, the riverman gives it to him, but Joe's glow doesn't last long because Bob Tom says as he shakes his hands to get the blood circulating, "Having our hands free ain't the same as bein free."

The old man looks around the room's murk again before looking down at the pipe wrench which Joe has used to hold the torch in place.

"Let's just think bout this a minute or two."

"Well, we better not think too long because if they find us with our hands free, we're going to be in trouble."

Bob Tom shook his head dismissively, "I ain't afeered of a little trouble."

Joe's headshake at the riverman's words mirror Bob Tom's own gesture.

After a minute Bob Tom makes his way to the locker's door, studies it, grabs the metal handle, tugs on it and grunts. He walks over to the handle-less door that goes to the engine room, studies it for a long moment and then puts his shoulder against it. He shrugs, turns back, picks up the pipe wrench and walks over to the old generator pushed against the locker wall. It only takes him a few minutes to pry the casing off. It takes much longer to get the generator's magnet free. Once he does, he slowly moves the magnet toward the pipe wrench. The magnet's pull is so strong than when it is still five centimeters away, the wrench begins to move. When Bob Tom moves the magnet in a small arc, the wrench obediently follows a similar arc.

"Well, I guess we got us a ticket out of here, but a ticket don't mean much if we don't have a plan."

For the next hour, the captives think about what their course of action will be once they are freed from the locker.

Once they figure out what they will do if things go as they hope and what they'll do if all hell breaks loose, Bob Tom and Joe wait until the middle of the night. When the time comes when they think it is most likely that all the crew will be asleep except for someone at the helm, they carry the magnet to the steel door that opens to the engine room. Being careful to make as little noise as possible , Joe takes a sleeve he has torn from a slicker and holds it against the door where the handle would be if it had one. The sleeve muffles the noise when the magnet pulls Bob Tom forward and attaches itself to the steel door. Before he begins to move the magnet, Bob Tom studies the door almost as if he can see the L-shaped handle on the other side and the metal hook it fits into to secure it. Simultaneously pulling the magnet toward him to create as much slack in the handle on the other side of the door as possible, Bob Tom slowly moves the magnet in an arch. Joe has his ear to the door to listen for any sounds that the handle is turning. He hears nothing and despite the sweep of the arc, the door remains locked. Bob Tom shifts the magnet and tries again. He moves the magnet four times but each try ends with the same results.

As the old man prepares for another attempt, Joe whispers, "Wait."

When Bob Tom is not inclined to wait, Joe grabs his arm.

"Wait."

He eases the old man to the side and then, using all of his strength, he begins to work the slicker sleeve from behind the magnet. When it is finally free, Joe steps aside and says, "Try it now."

"That ain't gonna make no Damall difference."

"Try it."

Bob Tom does and Joe's ear picks up the hollow sound of metal turning against metal. Twenty seconds later the door is free and Bob Tom, holding the pipe wrench at his side as a weapon, eases himself through the door.

As they had hoped, the engine room is empty. As they move through the small hot, machine-filled room, Joe picks up a ball peen hammer to arm himself. Above deck the two escapees stay in the shadows as they reconnoiter the deck of the tug. Joe finds a cache of flotation devices and carries them to the back of the tug where Bob is working on releasing the hitch. As Joe ties the PFDs together with a long coil of line, he watches until he understands how the coupler works. As soon as he understands what Bob Tom is doing, Joe grabs the PFDs, jumps aboard the first barge and runs to the far end and begins to release that coupler. He can feel the train of barges begin to change direction within seconds of Bob Tom setting them free. Joe waits until he sees Bob Tom fly over his head and land on the third barge. Joe frees the connection between the first and second barge and leaps onto the second. The excited boy has barely scrambled five meters along the wall of lettuce crates when he hears Bob Tom's anguished cry.

"T'ain't here. T'ain't here."

A second later, whoever is captaining the tug sounds the alarms. Joe hurries to the stern of the second barge and begins to free it from the third as lights blink on the tug and shadows begin to move across her deck.

As soon as Joe and the PFD's make the jump onto the last barge, the teener becomes cautious. Having heard his cry, the boy thinks that Bob Tom might have fallen into a trap by the kidnappers. Seconds later, Joe is pleased to find the old man is alone.

Alone, but agitated.

"I cain't find it."

Their plan has been that in the confusion of having the cargo break free, Bob Tom and Joe would hide on the back of the third barge as long as possible with the hope it might escape the current and make a run toward shore. If that didn't look like it was going to happen, their back-up plan was for Bob Tom to pull Joe to shore while he rode atop the PFDs.

As a spotlight beam locks onto them and shouts are heard from the tug, Joe says, "Your fishing pole? Forget it. It's probably on the tug."

"I'm not leavin without my most favorite pole."

"C'mon, we have to go. "

"I ain't goin til I get that pole. Them buzzards are goin be too busy with them barges to be fussin with us."

Joe starts to push Bob Tom toward the stern of the barge and out of the spotlight.

"C'mon! We have to go. What do you think they think is more important? A bunch of lettuce or me?"

"Noby, I cain't. I gotta have that pole. My only daughter gave me that pole."

When Joe pushes the old man a second time, the old man pushes back. Feeling helpless to fix what he is beginning to understand is something that has become unhinged in the old man's mind and absolutely determined that he is not going to allow himself to be recaptured, Joe pushes past the riverman. The boy races to the stern of the barge, clambers up on the rail, and holding the coiled line in one hand and the half dozen PFDs to his chest with the other, Joe jumps into the Hudson and back into the scariest moments of his life.

# CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Avenging Angels

Prissi thought it might have been a minute, but, in actuality, it was two days later before she woke. She returned as she had departed. In the dream she was flying through clouds so dark and thick that they seemed to grab at her wings. She was straining. She could feel her muscles tiring. She had to get below the clouds before she was so exhausted that her wings would falter and she would fall out of the sky. After she tipped her wings and began to descend, she started looking for the bottom of the cloud cover. Lower and lower she flew, but, even though she could feel herself dropping, her altimeter read the same. She angled her wings more. She flapped harder. The air was tearing at her hair as she hurtled downward. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She knew she had to be close to crashing into the earth, but the clouds were just as thick and dark.

No, she realized, they were thicker. Her skin began to burn and she became aware that there were things in the clouds, sharp things, like the claws of small birds, that were tearing at her. She was surrounded by a swarm of small orange birds. They were raking her with their talons, but she couldn't tell if they were attacking her, or trying to slow her plunge.

Prissi awoke to a damp cloth wiping her cheeks and forehead. Jiffy Apithy's eyes moved across her face at the same speed as the cloth he was using to cool her brow.

"Jiffy," Prissi sighed in relief. "You're okay. I was so sure something had happened to you. Something that would be my fault."

Although his face was devoid of humor, Prissi thought that she caught the slightest undertone of teasing as he said, "I'm not okay. Look at this."

Jiffy twisted his neck so that Prissi could see the twelve centimeter square bandage on the back of his head.

"Is that from the rock?"

Jiffy nodded, "Six stitches, although a real doctor might have used twice that. I'd be angry, but I figure a big scar on my head might help my soccer game or, maybe, my reputation."

When Prissi laughed, the noise sounded to her like a chicken trying to escape from a bag, "Any better and you'd be the best. That header you gave me saved my life."

"Maybe the first time. Yoli and Lavie La saved you the second time. I thought you were dead when they dragged you in and I hadn't even seen that thing on your leg, that bite. When I did see it, I chucked. Can you imagine what was growing in that wound between the germs in that zie's mouth and all the stuff that must be in the water? If they hadn't found you and brought you here, you'd definitely be dead."

"Who are they?"

"A mix, but mostly from Darfur."

"Where are they?"

"They waited as long as they could to see how you were doing, but they had to go to work. You've been out for two days."

Prissi was stunned.

"Two days? How can that be?"

"Quite a vacation."

Prissi had a hard time comprehending how she could have gone somewhere for two days and not know it. What had happened in that time? As soon as she asked herself that question, she knew it was the wrong one to ask. The right question was, "What hadn't happened?"

The first, and very reassuring answer to that, was that she hadn't been found.

"Are we really safe? Am I safe? Who is Yoli and the other woman, the one who is so thin?"

Jiffy grinned and when he did, his bright pink gums and blazingly white teeth lifted Prissi's spirits like some exotic tonic.

"They're friends of my friends. Someone from Darfur found this place a couple of years ago. It's hard to know what it was. Maybe, a place to fix things. Like a machine shop. Or, a room where there was a lot of equipment. It's dark and the air isn't exactly enriched with oxygen, but none of us are walking around with headaches unable to remember our names. The big lady, Yoli, is a healer when she isn't hidden in the back of a Togoan restaurant on West 46th chopping vegetables. The skinny one is Lavie. She's sewing shirts down in Mudtown for a street vender. There are fourteen more of them living here. Some working. Some not. It's like a village. Some work. Some cook. All share. They pool money. As soon as they have enough saved, they buy a set of ids for whoever's been here the longest. Then, when that person goes above, she has to send back twenty percent of her earnings until there is enough for the next set. When that happens the first person's obligation is done. Two of the women down here, Samosking and Winnie, have their papers, but they haven't left because they still have family below and they figure they can save money faster by staying down here.

"You're safe, I think. The zies took off after you burned their village and none of the stragglers have been seen down this way. I've been back to the store twice to work my shifts. My father says everything is quiet and I haven't seen anything. You probably can stay down here as long as you want...as long as you're willing to help."

With more edge to her voice than she intended, Prissi said, "I'm willing to help, but I don't know how long I'm willing to hide."

Jiffy took the cloth away from Prissi's face and held it tightly in a fist.

"What else can you do? If you go back up, how long will it be before your enemies find out? Hours? A day?"

"That's what I have to figure out. Someway they have been tracking me. I got rid of everything I was wearing and threw my mypod away. I thought that would do it, but they still found me. I'm guessing that they must have found my i-tag code."

"How could they get the code? I thought it was so secret."

"Maybe it was in my dad's stuff."

"But, if it was in your dad's stuff, how did they find you the night before?"

"I don't know. But what else can it be?"

When Jiffy shook his head, it looked to Prissi like a dandelion flower gone to seed blowing in the wind.

"Who knows? But, the important question is what can you do about it."

"I have to shut it down."

"How?"

"I don't know, yet. I don't even know where it's implanted, so getting it out could be a little messy."

Jiffy's laugh was much deeper than his small body would have suggested.

Hating the feeling of missing something that was supposed to be funny, something that happened too frequently at the Dutton dining hall for a girl raised in a vidless life in Africa, Prissi had to work to keep an angry edge from her question, "What's funny?"

"Anyone looking at you—all of the bandages, stitches, cuts and bruises—would think that someone already had gone to great efforts to find your tag."

Begrudgingly, Prissi's laugh joined Jiffy's.

"Zeusus Mimi. I sure do hurt. I don't even want to think of anyone poking and prodding at me anymore. I wonder if there is some way to shut it off while it's still inside me. What do you think?"

Jiffy shrugged. "I don't know. My kind of people are looking to get to where we're the kind of people who could afford an i-tag."

Prissi, again, got the feeling that Jiffy was making her pay another installment on the debt she had accrued the night she had gone to the EZ-Lam Market for food for Jack. Thinking of that night took Prissi back to the fluttery feeling she had when first she was alone with Jack in the basement...and how that feeling had turned to revulsion as she watched him eat. She recalled the long hug he had given her. An embrace she had wished for before it happened, but soon wished it would end as it had dragged on.

"Wait. You're right. My troubles started before my dad was killed. They started right after I saw Jack. Jiffy, I think Jack might have stuck a bug on me. In my feathers. Do you think anyone down here would have a pinion or down comb?"

"Gee, Miss Scarlett, I sho's hope so. Prissi, yours are the only feathers down here. If you don't have a feather comb, no one else will. But,...if you could possibly make do with a fro-pull, I think my people may be able to help."

Jiffy left and came back a minute later with a carved wooden, wide toothed comb. When he offered it to Prissi, she had another spasm of guilt.

"Do you think you could do it? If I try, I'm going to miss a lot."

Jiffy said, "Will our families approve?" as he stood behind Prissi and began to carefully comb through her pinions.

Although Prissi knew that Jiffy was joking, she decided to counter the guilt Jiffy was making her feel by throwing out some of her own.

"Since I no longer have a family, it won't be a problem on my side."

The movement of the comb paused for a moment but Jiffy said nothing.

Instead of feeling good that she had gotten back at her friend, Prissi felt even guiltier that she had baited him. But, she didn't apologize.

It was nothing more than a small snag in the down on the backside of her right wing. As soon as Jiffy found the bug, Prissi could almost feel Jack's arms around her, how he had hugged her tight while he insinuated the device that led to her father's death. While it was good that Jiffy found the bug, it would have been better for Prissi if the combing had continued until a second TRK-R, the one planted by Dicky Baudgew, had been discovered.

Prissi's first inclination when Jiffy put the pea-sized device in her hand was to release her rage at Jack's betrayal upon it; however a second later she thought she might be able to put it to a better use.

In the two days that it took to arrange the details of her plan, Prissi courageously, but ultimately, unsuccessfully fought off Yoli's efforts to tend to her wounds. On the morning of the third day, after telling Jiffy goodbye and thanking him for his help, Prissi followed three members of the village south along the subway tracks. Her accomplices, Yoli, Lavie, and a tall woman with rickety looking arms carried sticks, knives and a Fifth World artifact made from First World materials. South of Prince Street, the group left the subway. For the next quarter hour, they followed a circuitous path to the surface that reminded Prissi of the descent she had made five days before. The only differences were that this time, as they ascended, the air felt too rich with oxygen and the unease came from the threat of leaving her underground haven for the danger of the surface, rather than vice versa.

Prissi pulled herself up the last steps of a scarred ladder, which was attached inside an immense brick chimney, until she emerged into the gangrenous light of a second floor brownstone apartment. She skirted close to the moldy window and looked down at the sluice of water idling along the street. Not knowing how much time they might have, Prissi encouraged her friends to set the trap.

Prissi made a nest for herself with an old hand-woven tribal blanket in the corner of what once had been someone's small street-side living room. After the teener was in place as bait, the Africans set the trap and disappeared. Yoli wedged herself into a coat closet. The rickety woman backed herself into the fireplace and descended the ladder until the only clue to her presence was a thick stick which emerged from the hole. Lavie folded herself into a small cupboard built under a set of bookcases, pulled her stick against the baseboard and pulled close the cupboard doors.

Jiffy had doubted that Prissi's plan would work because he thought there was a good chance that when the TRK-R was submerged in the water in the subway that it might have been damaged. Prissi was sure that Joshua Fflowers would not have given Jack anything less than the best, most reliable technology.

As she lay on the mossy floor, Prissi tried to gauge how much healing her body had done. She was sore. Muscles ached and there were a dozen places on her legs and arms where she could press a finger and feel the dull pulse of a deep bruise. The bite was worse. It throbbed as regularly as her heart beat except that it had spiked higher as she climbed the ladder.

As Prissi had made her plans for revenge, she also had taken time to consider her escape. She had to get to Africa. That was clear. Everyone who had helped her—the ship's crew, Jiffy, Yoli and her friends—were Africans. The people who had attacked her and killed her father were not. Once she looked at it that way, it became simple. She needed to hurt those who had hurt her, then, escape to the place from which her true friends came.

As she had tended the wound the zie had made in Prissi's calf, Yoli had told her patient about the extraordinary efforts her people from Darfur, refugees from a hundred years of war, had made to come to Noramica. Yoli couldn't understand how anyone would want to go back to that benighted continent. Noramica, even looked at from two hundred meters below ground was a paradise compared to the fields of Darfur— field which were fertile with nothing but corpses. Prissi had heard what Yoli had said, but it didn't change her mind that her chances of survival were much higher in Africa than where she was.

Even though Prissi was in a state of high alert, she was caught off-guard when Yoli tapped the closet door with a fingernail in warning. It wasn't until a minute later that she heard the slightest of rustlings. A minute after that, a stair tread squeaked. The door opened just a crack. A moment later, however, it was thrown violently open and two blue jay wingers burst inside. As her attackers, knives in hand, leapt into the room, Prissi jumped up from the bundle of rags where she had been feigning sleep. The men were less than a meter from their intended victim when they suddenly lost their balance. The three hidden tribeswomen had begun to jerk and twist their sticks. The fishnet, which they had woven from the finest fishing line, so fine that it was nearly invisible on the floor beneath the wingers' feet, was attached to the sticks. Yoli, being the biggest, had kicked open the closet door and used her prodigious weight to yank the net toward her. It was that first sudden movement of the net beneath their feet that caused the wings to totter. A second jerk from the chimney and a third from Lavie caused the two attackers first to tilt toward one another and touch shoulders, like tango partners, before crashing to the floor. As soon as their quarry was down, the women rushed forward and tossed their sticks across one another to secure the net. Prissi slipped a noose around the neck of the trap. When the noose was tight, the women freed their sticks. When one of the wings began slashing at the net with his knife, Yoli smashed him across the back of the neck with her stick. He slumped. To insure compliance, Yoli hit him a second time and delivered a similar blow to his partner. After Lavie La had collected their knives, Prissi came within a step of her captured enemies and began to shout questions.

"Who are you? Why did you kill my father? Why are you chasing me? Who do you work for?"

When the wings were slow to answer, Yoli prodded them with her staff. When they still maintained their silence, all three of the women pummeled them with their weapons. After another period of silence, unbroken except for harsh rasping breathing, Yoli sat down on the net. The men groaned beneath her weight. Yoli took the long slender wooden hook she had used to work on the net from a pocket of her skirt and put the first three centimeters of it into the nearer man's nose. Lavie put her hook in his ear.

Prissi again asked why they were trying to kill her. After five seconds of silence, the hooks went in another centimeter. A bubble of bright red blood blew out of the man's nose when he struggled. Yoli settled her weight more comfortably.

When there still was no answer to Prissi's questions about who was after her and why, the hooks explored a little deeper

Prissi hesitated when she saw the stream of blood running from the man's ear. Her anger and primal urge for revenge began to drain from her as quickly as his blood flowed. Those feelings were replaced by feelings of horror at the cruelty of the Africans' acts. The teen wavered between asking another question and calling off the interrogation when Yoli said something under her breath. The rickets woman sat down on the second winger as carelessly as if he were a tussock and put her hook in his left eye.

Immediately, the answers began to come.

The information Prissi got was not what she expected. Joshua Fflowers was not involved. Jack and his father were, but Joshua Fflowers was not. In addition, the two bleeding blue jay wingers had no knowledge of a pair of orange-feathered wingers. The triumphant but astonished girl and Yoli had a brief conversation. Prissi handed her rescuer a scrap of paper. After that exchange, the small girl hugged the huge woman and thanked her for everything she had done. She hugged the rickets woman and Lavie La. After Prissi left, Yoli rendered both wingers unconscious by holding a rag, wetted with the contents of a small bottle she drew from her dress, to their noses. She opened the net and the three women began plucking feathers from Prissi's enemies. Within an hour their wings were bare. Their job finished, the three Africans collected their gear and descended back into their subfusc world.

# CHAPTER THIRTY

Waxwings and Waning Wings

It was hard for Prissi to leave Yoli and Lavie, but, it was even harder for her to leave the top step of the dilapidated building. She had left the murk of the ancient brownstone and stepped into the brilliant sunlight of a spring day. But, as Prissi stood in that warming light, she looked at the deep shadows of the buildings across the street and shivered. Nothing above ground felt safe. Years before, Prissi Langue had spent a couple of afternoons in a soggy hemp hammock in Africa listening to her mother read a story, a story her mother said had been a favorite of hers as a child, about a girl far, far from home. The girl was lost, overwhelmed, and beset by worries and dangers. Squeezing her eyelids tight to keep back the tears, Prissi did as the girl in the story had done. She clicked her heels together and made a wish. Even with that potent magic, it was more than a minute before the fifteen year old found the courage to beat her wings and launch herself into the air.

Within minutes the aching winger was leaving Manhattan and flying across the East River. Prissi figured that even with no tail wind and with three rest breaks, she should be able to get to the place indicated by the coordinates the mysterious Allen Burgey had left for her before dark. She hoped to find him safely there when she arrived and with answers to all her questions.

For the first hour, not sure whether she could trust her right wing, which had been dislocating even before her fight with the crazie, Prissi flew no more than thirty meters above ground. She followed the route of the long-abandoned Long Island Expressway as it crossed Queens and dug deep into the moldering towns that lay beyond.

Despite the serious doubts Prissi had about her safety and her body's capabilities, after a week of hiding and healing in an abandoned subway, it felt wonderful to be above ground. The air was balmy and filled with spring perfumes—lilac, mock orange and kudzu. The wind was blowing out of the south west. Prissi dropped the front edges of her wings, drew up her legs and felt the soft breeze sneak past the cuff of her pants. The sun beating on the back of her neck felt as sensuous as the heat massage a Dutton School trainer would give her after she pulled a muscle. However, despite her good feelings, Prissi was not even out of Queens before she began to feel tired. The wounds she had suffered fighting off the zies were not yet healed. She considered resting, but, she told herself that what she was feeling was the kind of fatigue that could be overcome if she just kept her wing beats and breathing regular.

In Prissi's first year at Dutton, after the soccer season was over, she had opted to run winter cross country. Although she was used to running from her years playing soccer, she had never run competitively before. It took daily practice and lots of advice from Coach Cardana for Prissi to understand that her body had both limitations and limits and that she was not to confuse the two.

Coach Car repeatedly had lectured the team that limitations were a set of physical checkpoints and mental hurdles. Limitations were where a body, or, more often, a mind, wanted to quit. Limits were far beyond those points. Limits were where the body stopped, despite what the mind wanted. The essence of cross country was running past limitations to find the limits.

Prissi's shoulders ached and her breathing was ragged, but she was sure that if she could accept those conditions, and keep flapping her wings and feeding her lungs, that her body had a lot left to give.

Prissi was right. Ten minutes later, her compact body had metamorphosed into a machine. With her mind clear and her spirits exhilarated, Prissi increased her altitude.

Afraid of giving the men who had killed her father any clue as to where she was going, Prissi had kept her mypod turned off. As a result of staying off the grid, it was just a guess that she was over four hundred meters in the air. She was, however, high enough that when she looked down, she could see how automobile traffic once had surged in and drained out of Manhattan. The wider, relatively straight thoroughfares were in the middle of Long Island, where land was cheaper and more people could afford to live. At the northern edge of the land the roads were narrow and sinuous, almost as if they were meant to shake off the poor as the rich made their way toward their waterfront homes on Long Island Sound.

Even though she knew that it would be costly both in terms of time and her reserves of energy, Prissi could not resist the urge to keep climbing until she could see the water on both sides—the lacy green of Long Island Sound and the limitless gray of the Atlantic Ocean—that made the land below an island. Looking at the water to her north, Prissi considered whether she should alter her course and go to Cold Spring Harbor where, a half-century before, her mother had worked at Centsurety. But, as she looked at the green paisley of coves and bays, she guessed that it could take hours, hours which she didn't have, to find the former meta-mutational lab. Deciding that it made more sense to rendezvous with Allen Burgey, Prissi turned her head back toward the east. She would find Burgey and insist that he tell her everything he knew about her mother and those long ago discoveries. If, after all that, she still didn't understand what was going on, or couldn't come up with a plan to stop it, then she would give up on her quest and start figuring out how to get back to the safety of Africa.

Within seconds of thinking about Africa and the comfort of its familiar dangers, Prissi was fighting a stitch in her side. She spread her wings so that she could glide while she massaged the burning coal of knotted muscle. When the fire remained hot, she closed her eyes and slowed her breathing to the slightest sigh, then rhythmically kneaded, caressed, and kneaded again. When the pain finally drifted away, like the long linger of summer thunder, and she opened her eyes Prissi found that she had drifted uncomfortably close to the ground. Climbing back to a safe altitude, the teener's body soldiered along well enough and her mind was so occupied with splinters and shards of thoughts and ideas, that stopping didn't even enter her consciousness.

It wasn't until a charley horse in the arch of her right foot suddenly set her thrashing and screaming that the folly of ignoring her plan for regular rest became clear. She slip-slid through the air as the tips of her toes strained to touch the heel of her foot. She pushed the ball of her right foot against the ankle bone of her left leg trying to break the muscle contraction, but the only result was that she plummeted fifty meters.

"Suffer! But, fly!"

Her screams helped to re-orient her. She told herself that despite the excruciating pain, no one died from a charley horse, but they did die from falling out of the sky. Prissi moaned in pain and screamed in frustration that another body part, not just her wing, was conspiring against her. She canted her wings and plummeted as fast as she could without totally losing control. As she plunged back to earth, she searched for the best place to land. It wasn't until she looked that she realized that she had been so lost in her thoughts that she had passed not only into an area of sparsely populated outer villages, but also that she had gotten away from the worn cracked snake of the expressway. The houses swooping up to meet her were dilapidated. The street they bordered was a narrow lane of crazed asphalt sprouting tussocks of weeds. Despite all the poverty and neglect, Prissi consoled herself that she didn't see any of the burned out homes that characterized so many poorer neighborhoods where pro- and anti-green factions had fought their battles.

The crippled teener took a hurried look to see if there were a flat roof close by, but all the houses were gabled. Although she wasn't eager to land in the road, she wasn't about to attempt a landing on a peaked roof while one foot was twisted in a knot. Looking ahead, she decided that she would touch down in the middle of the next intersection. At least, at a crossroads, if trouble came, she would have four ways to escape.

Prissi landed hard on her left foot, twisted something, yelped, hopped, yelped, hopped again, and came to a graceless stop. Even as she was turning around to see if her appearance had drawn any undesirable attention, Prissi hobbled over to the worn, chipped curb. She stepped up on the pocked asphalt using just the toes of her feet. After getting her balance, the winger slowly lowered her heels toward the road's surface. The pain was excruciating, but by the time Prissi had stretched her arches a fifth time, she could tell the cramp was starting to loosen up.

Even before the pain had subsided by half, Prissi started to laugh—partly, in relief and, partly, in reliving.

It had been the end of the first week of cross country practice. In the middle of the night she had been ripped from sleep by the very same cramp in her arch as she was now experiencing. Shrieking in pain, she had flung herself from the lower bunk and crashed into Nasty Nancy's desk. As Prissi had thrashed about in the dark, shoes, styli, mugs and music had flown around the cramped room like shrapnel.

Prissi shrieks were joined by Nasty Nancy's terrified screams at whatever horror had gotten into their pitch-black room. The wild teener ripped open the door, staggered into the dusky lighted hallway, and banged against a wall. She grabbed the cramping foot, staggered, hopped, hoped, then fell against the opposite wall and slumped to the floor.

Moaned.

Wailed.

Writhed.

Then, heard the clicks and slams of hallway doors and frightened whispers of floor mates.

The slap of bare feet and the calm honeyed tones of Ms. Hepenny.

"You're fine, dear. Just fine."

Felt soft fingers on her cheeks, stroking, stroking, then, suddenly squeezing hard and prizing open Prissi's tightly clenched jaw. Something soft and fuzzy—a sock, no, a towel stuffed into her mouth. Again, the dulcet tones belying the violence used to open her mouth, "You're fine, dear. Just fine."

Not fine.

Agony.

"Where are your medications?"

Then, a hall floor fish-eye lens view of Miss Tronce's famous teal chenille slippers. Scuffing rapidly. Stopping.

"What? What?" in Tronce's best, and most incontrovertible, bark, "What is going on?"

"Langue's had a seizure. Petit mal, I'd guess. I've first-aided her."

Thrashing about. Shaking her head. Grabbing her foot.

"Oh my, here comes another one."

Ms. Hepenny stooping to provide more help.

A bellowed, "Move."

Miss Tronce on her dock piling knees catching Prissi's flailing foot as neatly as a polar bear his salmon. Holding the ankle tightly in the dense warmth between her massive upper arm and her more massive breast shelf.

Pushing...omagod...bending...ohohmagod...pushing...ohohohmagod...pushing until Prissi's pain turned into shooting stars, an Independence Day finale...omaaa...and, then, as suddenly as it had come, like summer hail, the cramp was gone.

Tronce's growl of satisfaction.

"Climax and curtain, girls. Back. To. Bed."

Tronce, in a way that defied both age and gravity, brought both herself and Prissi to a standing position.

"To bed, girls. Now."

Holding her by the arm, Tronce walking her back toward her own apartment. When Prissi hesitated, Tronce ordering, "Walk, Langue, walk."

Tronce's living room. A smallish room with a dangerous maze of book stacks. Petra after the quake. Victorian deep red walls fighting the good orderly fight against dozens of parrot-colored Fifth World paintings. Tronce making Prissi step on a russet brick used as a door stop.

"Step, lower, stretch. Again. Good. Keep going."

Prissi worked.

Tronce disappeared.

Came back with a large mug of warm milk.

"Milk for calcium. Warmth for comfort."

Pointed a breadstick-sized finger at Prissi.

"If you're going to run, you'll need lots of calcium to keep from cramping. When it happens again, as it will, if it's your arch, get all of your weight on your toes. If it's a calf, point your toes away and then pull them back as far as you can. If it's the back of your thigh, well, just scream until you pass out. It'll make you feel better to do something violent."

Milk finished, Prissi hovered. Something deep stirred by Tronce's no nonsense care.

Tronce, again, pointed her finger, like God to Adam, "Be gone. Remember, never fear pain. Fight it. Or, accept it."

A small tic appeared in one corner of Miss Tronce's thin-lipped mouth and Prissi realized that she was seeing a smile.

Half-way back to her dorm room, Prissi had felt a twinge in her foot. She had slowed her pace and lightened her step, but only for a step or two. The rest of the way she had stomped. And had felt safer than she had at any time since her mother's death.

Prissi brushed the thoughts of Miss Tronce away from her eyes and kept stretching her arch until the pain was gone. Instead of immediately returning to the air, however, she decided to walk until she was sure the cramp really was gone.

Although there were cars and truclets in a few of the driveways she passed, there didn't seem to be anyone home in any of the houses. As her fingers unwove the snarls in her hair, the teener wondered what people did in such a desolate place so far from the city. Since Prissi had been in Noramica for less than three years and that mostly in the environs of Manhattan and Dutton, she only had a cursory knowledge of how the rest of the country lived. If she were in Burundi, she would intuitively know whether a village was empty because of war, disease, pestilence or because the villagers were in their fields planting or harvesting.

Here, the silence and emptiness around her carried no information. It could be that all of the children were in a daycarium or school and every parent was working. Or, as easily, a plague could have wiped out the inhabitants. Prissi remembered walking with her father into a village just west of Mount Heha at the end of the dry season and finding all the inhabitants dead. It had only taken seconds to know that they had died from dysentery from drinking mud water after the government troops had stolen all of their LifeStraw© water purifiers.

After walking less than two blocks, Prissi flared her wings, did a dozen deep knee squats, stretched her calves and arches and flew.

Once the village was behind her, Prissi felt better; however those good feelings weren't buoyant enough to get her much more than ten meters off the ground. As a result, she wasn't high enough to get a fix on the Long Island Expressway. Again, she considered activating her mypod, but quickly put that thought aside as she remembered the orange-winged men who had attacked her twice already. She now knew for sure who had sent the blue jays and knew that they had intended to kill her, but the orange wingers and their less than deadly behavior was still a puzzle. Prissi told herself that it had to be Dr. Baudgew behind those attacks, but she couldn't understand what his ends might be. However, whatever they were, it was better to stay off the grid and deal with the problems lack of information would bring than to risk another attack. She wished that she had thought to take a compass when she and her father had fled their apartment. In Africa, she had carried a compass more often than she had worn a watch. Now, she didn't know what to do beyond looking ahead, picking a point, flying to it and picking another point.

Twenty minutes later, Prissi was back on the ground digging the tips of her thumbs into a knot in her right calf. Fifteen minutes after she had gotten herself back in the air, she again was forced to descend. This time the only place to land was on a hillside covered in small trees, low scrub and Gordian knots of raspberry briers. In the few seconds the floundering girl had to make her decision of where to land, after the muscles controlling her right wing started spasming like an eel out of water, Prissi opted to suffer the briers rather than smash into a tree. By the time she got herself stopped, extricated from the tenacious thorns, back on her feet and standing upon a small outcrop of blue-gray rock, where she could massage her wing muscles, she was having second thoughts about missing the trees. She looked back at the thick trail of feathers caught in the briers and wondered how those losses would affect her flying.

After the cramp was gone, even though the sun was drifting lower, Prissi stood on the rock and took her time smearing away the blood on her legs and arms. Even after her wounds were tended, the teener remained motionless and just stared at the sky. For the very first time since she had fledged, Prissi Langue was afraid to get back into the air. She didn't trust her wings, nor her muscles, nor her lungs. Even though daylight was fast fading and she knew that she had no option but to fly, that knowledge failed to free her frozen feet.

Prissi was still staring at the sky, a darkening vastness where those she most loved had gone, when a flock of cedar waxwings landed in the brier patch. Prissi's gaze drifted down to watch the small brown and yellow birds. Their black masks, cockily crested heads, and intriguing habit of passing the last of the winter dried berries back and forth among one another made Prissi think of a band of merry thieves. Her old friend Jiffy and her new friends, Yoli and Lavie La, too, had shared what they had with her.

As Prissi continued to watch the waxwings, her breathing calmed and some of her courage began to return. When the flock of birds suddenly flew off, Prissi knew that it was time for her, too, to go.

For a third time, the rested traveler stared at her mypod. She knew she could turn it on and in less than a minute know exactly where she was and how far she had to go. The whole reason she had dumped her old mypod and bought the one strapped to her wrist was so that she could use it. But, she wasn't positive that the gap-toothed man in Spicetown hadn't done something to the mypod so that she could be traced. More worrisome, she didn't know how the orange-feathered wingers had found her...twice. Plus, as far as she knew, anyone asking for a location fix from out in the middle of nowhere might trigger some kind of rescue effort. She didn't need to be sitting in a police station somewhere answering questions from suspicious hawks while malignant forces gathered round.

Prissi took a last breath, exhaled and should have launched herself.

But, her wings refused to move.

Freeieekin coward. C'mon, you freeieekin traitors, flap. Now. Flap.

Prissi had a vision of teal chenille slippers flapping down a hall.

C'mon.

Finally, Prissi's wings responded.

A couple of minutes later she was high enough to see that the land ahead was an unending carpet of what she had just left. Looking at kilometers after kilometer of brier and brush caused the girl's newly regained courage to falter.

Flap. Dambit. Flap....

...And Prissi flapped and flew, and when her thigh cramped, she let it cramp until it was drawn up almost to her chest and she was screaming and she still flew. And when the sun hurtled to the ground and the treetops were painted in a rose that quickly darkened to red and then wine, she still flew. And when the treetops faded away under night shadow, Prissi canted her wings and flew higher and higher until, when she looked back over her shoulder, she could see nothing but a long string of blackish red, like a stream of cooling lava, on the western horizon far behind her. She flew high, and, then, higher, until the cold chattered her teeth, shivered her body, and distracted her from the cramps in her thighs. She flew over a long straight strand of seed pearls glowing north and south all the way to the water. She assumed that necklace of lights marked the outer edge of the Pale, the end of civilization. And still she flew.

Once past that point of no return, Prissi flew even higher. But, as high as Prissi flew, she could see nothing in all in the darkness before her. Not a single light. No silvery string of stream. No darker patch of black.

Prissi flew and flew until she got to a place where she knew that this would be the very last time she would ever fly. And she flew and thought about her mother and father and what it would be like, if it would be like anything, when she flew far enough to be where they had gone. And she flew through the cold and in darkness and flew until she passed through a gate that opened her memories of the ineffable joy of flight, of the indescribable welcome of being in an empty space high above the earth, without a single soul in sight. High and free of...orange wingers, free of Africa's burnt shanties and bloat-bellied babies and mangy jackals and the swirling earth-bound clouds of red dust and black smoke, free of Noramica's greed and power and two-faced friends, free of mystery and adventure, free of the drudgery of...everything. And, despite the pain and the fire in her lung and the spasms in her limbs, Prissi Langue flew in perfect contentment.

And when her right wing popped free and flapped to its own silent song, Prissi felt only joy. She laughed at how at peace she was. Then, on a whim, she twisted her good wing down and flew an off-kilter loop. Laughed more and did a second, then a third and fourth loop—more than she had ever done before and done so fast and so well that she had no idea, nor even cared, whether she was flying up, down or sideways, still headed east or headed back from where she just had come, or headed straight down.

Laughing. Laughing in a way that reminded her of the excited cackle of hyenas.

Prissi pulled her working wing tight to her body and let gravity tell her which way was down. Then, as she plummeted to the earth, she noticed a small break in the clouds letting the moon hidden behind those clouds light a narrow patch of earth.

In desperation, Prissi flung out her wing. The wind nearly tore it off. She flapped, but with just one wing, her flight could only be unstable and disordered. She reached over with both hands and pushed up on her dislocated right wing. Dislocated, but not completely useless. Like a luffing sail, it caught the wind, filled, and she began a slip-sliding glide toward the large patch of not quite black.

A sudden desire to come to that differently dark place, a desire stronger than anything she could remember ever wanting except her mother, swept over her. Prissi knew that only in a poetical sense would she ever get to her destination. Her altitude, her speed, her floundering wing and her dwindling energy could not get her there.

A noise as hysterical as the laughter she had made before, but sad, sputtered through her lips.

Prissi squeezed her eyes tightly shut, dark against dark, gave a desperate click of her heels, and flapped with her one wing toward her fate.

# CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Death Rattles and Riddles

Even though it had been had been two years since Olewan had talked to Mortos, when she heard the pounding on the door she knew its cause. When Santos first grew sick, she and the leader of the centaurs had seen each other almost every day. But since the time that Santos, knowing that any help that Olewan might give to him would be only a palliative, went back into the Green to die, Mortos had come back to the Bury just a handful of times. Each time after that, his expressed purpose had been to report on Santos' further decline, but his real purpose had been first to inveigle, then to petition, later to demand and, finally, to plead that Olewan use her science and skills to do what was necessary to prevent the extinction of his species.

On those days when Mortos' anger grew to where his hooves stomped the pitted concrete floors of the Bury and his long ebony tail flailed the walls of the anteroom of her laboratory, Olewan always offered the aging centsur an open face and sympathetic words. That apparently caring face, however, hid a cold closed heart.

While Mortos talked of extinction of a species, Olewan anticipated the proper end of an aberration, the dark folly, a horrific hubristic experiment .

When Olewan was Elena Howe and first learned what her husband, Joshua Fflowers, wanted to accomplish with his collection of young cutting edge scientists in his cutting edge facility, she had been more amused than horrified. The night Joshua told her that he had decided to call his new venture Centsurety because he was confident his people surely would be able both to develop centaurs and to add a century to a person's life, she had laughed at his arrogance. Now, even more than a half-century later, she could remember how she had ridiculed him—why not dream bigger dreams: hippocampi and amphisbaena, and Minotaurs, Sirens and harpies? She had laced her sarcasm with near-hysterical laughter as she had asked why he was so eager to step outside the bounds of science, where he was treated as a god, into the role of God, where he assuredly would be treated as a fool, freak, felon, or all three.

Her husband's answer was the one that explorers had used from time immemorial, an answer that brooked neither doubt nor interference: If it could be done, it should and would be done. When Elena had shaken her head at the absolute folly, the unmitigated arrogance of what he was proposing, Joshua Fflowers had taken her hand, and, as he had done successfully so many times during the twenty years of their romance and marriage, begged that she help him just one more time. And, when, for the very first time, she had resisted his will, he had promised her that it would be his last request. He had promised that if she would use all of her great gifts to achieve his final dream, then anything he could give, he would give to her.

Elena Howe had gripped the warm strong fingers of the remarkable and complicated man who was her husband, had looked into his mischievous brown eyes, which returned her stare without wavering, and had said, "I want your time and our baby." One child, two, twelve, could be got from the eggs harvested from her womb before that organ had been removed because of a different kind of growth.

She had asked, and her husband, lover, colleague, friend had answered. As the warmest smile split his face, Joshua Fflowers had said, "That, and more, my Elena."

To invent the centaurs, Elena, joined by Vartan Smarkzy, had worked, and wrestled and, finally, had discovered the master key. They took that key and linked it to seven minor keys other Centsurety teams had seduced from nature. Putting all their work together, the scientists had ended with a dozen embryos which Darwin would have been hard put to explain.

Joshua Fflowers, who over those years had become a mix of Prussian ringmaster and dark cheerleader, was beyond joy. After a day, or many days, of doing the things he had to do for Cygnetics to continue to grow and to keep its status as the world's most profitable business, he would roto out from Manhattan to Cold Spring Harbor, burst into the lab and stare at the twelve little worlds wherein his dreams grew. Stare and rejoice until the things in the jar died. There had been cycle after cycle of joy and grief as one generation of embryonic centaurs died and a next generation was grown.

While one myth was being made real by Smarkzy and Elena, a far older, far more powerful myth was being pursued by Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby. After three years of false leads and blind alleys, they, too, had a breakthrough. A major, though seriously flawed, breakthrough. That breakthrough was so important that it was shared with no one but Joshua Fflowers.

With remarkable progress being made on his two dreams, Joshua Fflowers was so filled with largesse that he decided to give Elena an even better gift than the two she had wished for. On Elena's forty-fifth birthday, Joshua Fflowers threw a party at the Centsurety lab. It was a perfect party for Elena—beer and hotdogs and hamburgers on a grill with music from the ancients—Meatloaf, Mayall, and Mayer. Fflowers made an effusive toast to Elena, the rose compass of his soul, while the partygoers toasted with small glasses before drinking the aquavit they contained. Late that night, Fflowers, although angered that Roan Winslow had already left and would miss the toast, gathered Smarkzy, Elena, and Laureby, together. He offered them small glasses of what he said was the rarest aquavit, the water of life, in the world, and toasted their genius.

When the party was over, he whisked Elena away.

Three days later Elena awoke to her gift—she was the first person in the world to be given wing transplants.

As a result of Fflower's gift, Elena's two wishes, for a child and Fflower's time, were never fulfilled. Repulsed at his arrogance—how could someone who said he loved her have her body cut and carved to fasten on a dead person's wings—Elena plotted a fitting revenge.

She would take what he valued most—she would take his dreams by destroying the centaur embryos, the Centsurety research and the laboratory that created them. She would take his future by substituting the clutch of her eggs stored in the Centsurety lab. Finally, she would take what he often said he valued most—herself, especially her brains, and disappear.

Elena had no doubt that what she planned to do to Joshua Fflowers was more than justified, but, as she readied her plans, she realized that the consequences of her actions might not be permanent. She could kill the embryos, but as long as Smarkzy had knowledge of the processes, more centaurs could be created.

When Elena talked to Vartan Smarkzy, she found him to be as horrified at what Joshua Fflowers had done to her as she was herself. Horrified, yes, but not quite ready to sacrifice his career and, given how megalomaniacal Fflowers was, perhaps, his life.

To win Smarkzy over, Elena told him of the discovery made by Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby. While that definitely shifted Smarkzy's thinking, it wasn't until Fflowers announced that liquid they had toasted with on the night of her birthday was truly aquavit—the water of life, that Smarkzy became Elena's ally. Standing before that small group of phenomenal scientists, Fflowers, the arrogant arbiter of their lives, told them how humbled he was by their intelligence, their creativity, and their persistence. Seeing them, their work, their results, had inspired him. Fflowers told them how he had taken the output of Winslow and Laureby's research, linked it with human growth hormone, and, here he brought his fingers to his lips like a video chef, made a recipe for long life. It was his secret triumph. He had to admit to all of them. He was jealous of what they did. As Cygnetics had grown, he had had to spend more time in hyper-kinetic corporate offices and quiet banker lairs. He missed the excitement of the lab. He had wanted to prove to himself that he could still do science. Real science. Eye-popping, paradigm shifting, capital S, Science.

He had tested this miraculous mixture, which had spilled from his unconscious, on mice, rabbits and dogs. The mice had lived almost twenty percent beyond their expected life expectancy...and he was sure the rabbits and dogs would do as well. They might think he had rushed things, but it was important to have the gift be ready for the birthday party. He apologized that he had not discovered the secret of everlasting life. No, nothing so grand. Just the much more modest gift of probably twenty more years of this glorious thing life. He knew that he had taken three years of their lives in round-the-clock research. He was eternally grateful for what they had done. To repay them, he gave them back those years many fold.

Olewan's head shook back and forth as she recalled how happy, and apparently guileless, Joshua Fflowers had been while the recipients of his largess fought off panic.

Olewan's head continued to shake. The ironic thing was that their fears had been both on target and misplaced. Now, Olewan was almost twenty years beyond her expected lifespan. As was Fflowers. She knew from her last message from Glen Laureby that Smarkzy still lived. All of those who had unknowingly drunk Fflower's elixir had lived longer than their peers, but she wondered how much gratitude they had for that extra score since it had been spent with twisted hands and feet and atrophied muscles. Longevity, like flight, had come at a price.

Even while she was working on the first wing mutations, Elena Howe had worried at the price. Flying was freedom, but wings were slaves—to age and weight and disease. Flying was for the strong. Old people were not strong. The odds of a winger flying more than a hundred meters after their seventieth birthday were small. Given that the average life span of white Noramicans was approaching ninety, the reality was that most wingers could expect fifty or sixty years of flight and then twenty or more years of carrying around a set of useless and cumbersome appendages. Ornaments...momenti mori...momenti voli.

Old thoughts were moving through a mind that was as old and twisted as the legs that slowly crab-walked up the long ramp that lead to the entrance of the Bury. Olewan knew, as she knew many things without knowing how she knew them, that it would be Mortos at the door. An impatient hoof banged loudly off the steel frame and then again, even louder.

Olewan opened the door to an old man dressed in a raggedy jacket with a small injured bird roughly held in his arms. He held the girl out like an offering.

In a guttural voice that was more at ease with consonants than vowels, the centaur said, "From your species. Get good care."

Olewan, whose heart had not been touched in years, reached out a knot of fingers to smooth a small patch of bent and broken feathers. Suddenly, the old woman was as rigid as Lot's wife.

"Where did you find her?"

"In tree by bay. Sky dark. Heard noise, loud. Took time. No noise. Then, breathing. Rasp."

The hoary centaur stared hard at Olewan.

"Know that sound. Santos. Merkos."

The old woman had been so overcome by the girl's face that she hadn't focused on her injuries. Once aware of all the harm, and despite her hobbled legs, Olewan darted back from the doorway with the jerky speed of a frightened crab.

"Here, quick, bring her in."

Mortos brought his hooves to the very edge of the threshold, then, to Olewan's dismay, he bent forward and gently laid the broken girl on the concrete floor.

"No, stop. What are you doing?"

"Freak, monster...non-species...not worthy of your...normal...home."

The centaur whirled about and his hooves sounded like spring thunder as he galloped away.

Olewan bent over the girl whose chest was jerking about as if she were sobbing. The crone touched the girl's face in awe, before she scuttled down the long ill-lit hallway croaking, "Boy. Boy! Quick. I want you."

It was hours later. Olewan, her shape resembling a bag of dirty laundry, was slumped down in a chair laboriously making her way through an exhausted, twitching snore-filled sleep. Prissi's sleep was deeper, drug deep. Her body was still except for the erratic rise and fall of her chest, which emitted a discordant mix of rasps, wheezes, and sharp clicks. The third person in the operatory, a seventeen year old not quite feral boy, was hyper-alert. He stood immobile over the ancient hospital bed and took in the sights, sounds and smells of the wounded girl. After many minutes, the hands which had been hanging at his sides came to life. With the stealth of a hunting cat, they slowly, smoothly and sinuously moved toward Prissi. Two fingers on his left hand, fingers with broken nails and scabbed skin, touched the blue-sheened skin just above where an IV line punctured the girl's wrist. His fingertips moved to touch the girl's own cracked and chipped nails. They gathered and smoothed a small hank of gritty hair. A minute later, the boy moved to the foot of the bed so that he could stare at the girl's face straight on. His breathing and his body calmed until he was as still as when he watched in the woods. He never had imagined that what he now was seeing would look like it did. After a time, a noise, neither growl nor purr and not quite a keen threndled from his chest. Minutes after the noise began, the teener started as if he had been shocked. He fled the dim room, raced down the darkened hallway and burst into the darker night.

From the air, certainly, and even from ground level an observant visitor would think the Green's snarl of brush, vine, shrub and struggling trees was impenetrable. In fact, that was only mostly true. The all-devouring fire of The Ticklish Situation had left thousands of square miles of fertilized earth as inviting of creation as a blank canvas. The warming of the world's waters and air had added its welcome. Less than a dozen years after the fire, the land around the Bury had formed dense green mats broken only by the encroaching waters, buckled roads and parking lots, and the steel, stone and concrete skeletons of the burned out buildings of what once had been Brookhaven National Laboratory. Within a quarter century, when seen from the air, there looked to be nothing on Long Island east of Huntington but the green of jungle and the silver, greens and browns of the insidious waters. All that had been made by man, including the scientific sprawl of Brookhaven had been destroyed and, as if in shame, blanketed by nature.

However, for those intrepid enough to crawl under its green covers to seek out the jungle's secrets, they would have found a warren of paths—actually, more tunnels than paths. These dark lush corridors came in many sizes. Some were small enough to deny entry to weasels; others were big enough that the largest animals in the woods—deer, black bear, man, horse and man-horse—could make their way.

The boy, who called himself Fair, ran out of the Bury's entrance and into a small courtyard concealed under a canopy of growth that hid it as well as the scores of shells of what once had been the central campus of the laboratory. Despite the almost complete lack of light under the thick mat of trees, the boy lengthened his stride. At the edge of the clearing, his legs skipped, darted, stuttered, and then lunged, like a rabbit, as he entered the jungle. Once inside the tunnel, his arms forced aside the hungry little hands of the kudzu as his hands held back the switches of forsythia eager to punish. His head bounced and ducked like a dervish in ecstasy as he avoided the low limbs of oak, ash, horse chestnut, willow, maple, river birch and pecan trees.

The boy, much more comfortable now that he was in the thick dark and thicker brush, gracefully fled down the tunnel until, ten minutes after leaving the injured girl, he suddenly jumped sideways through a nearly invisible break, scrabbled down an embankment and came to rest with wet eyes and ragged breath along the edge of a small stream. The gently flowing water, no more than a few meters across, was gleaming argent from the hovering moon shining down through a small break in the canopy.

Fair dried his eyes with a quick wipe of his hands. Slowing his breathing took longer. Finally though, the ache in his chest and the burning at the back of his throat faded. He twisted a pinch of flesh below his chin as if it were a stopcock which would let the tumbling thoughts which filled his mind drain. After ten minutes, the boy was able to sit perfectly still within the small grotto of vines. He sat, watched and waited.

In minutes, or hours—with an empty mind he had no way of knowing—the boy heard a slow rhythmic sound, like a lazy man sweeping, drift across the water. More sweeping. A rest. More sweeping. A longer rest. A small, not-to-be-denied smile appeared on Fair's face. More sweeping and, then, a small black bear, blacker than the woods from which it emerged, crouched at the top of the opposite bank.

The bear half-stood, and, as if being polite to an old woman or honored guest, bobbed its head before hunching back down.

Knowing this particular yearling, Fair was biting his lips to hold back laughter. The bear, too, seemed to know what was coming. It took two tentative steps forward and moaned in anguish as it began an uncontrolled slide into the water.

As its body was engulfed by the stream, the bear screamed at the injustice of being born a smooth-soled clawless mutant. Next, it snorted at the folly of its rage. Finally, it chortled with the pleasure of cavorting in the water. The bear smacked the stream with its pacific palms. Fair shared a moment of the bear's pleasure until the thought that always came—how long could anything without weapons survive in the world—filled his mind. The boy held onto that thought as he watched the bear struggle to pull itself out of the stream and make its way back up the bank.

After all sounds of the bear had drifted away like autumn fog, Fair stood in a pool of moonlight and looked at both sides of his hands before he kneeling down and leaning over the stream to study the pale doppelganger staring up at him. He looked for a long time.

The golden snakes of a rising sun were writhing their way through the heavy brush before Fair pushed his way back into the Bury. He quietly padded along the hall to where the girl was.

Olewan was still sleeping, seemingly little changed except for a thumbprint of drool shining upon her chin. The girl, though, had changed. Her face, her breaths, the color of her skin all looked worse than before. As the boy stared at her, a tingling ran down his arms and out to the tips of his fingers. His breaths—short and broken—began to mimic those of the girl.

The tatter-clothed boy spun around, took two steps and yanked on the old woman's threadbare sweater. When Olewan's eyes snapped open, they were bright blue and as happy as a child's.

"Quick, quick, something's wrong."

The boy tugged Olewan's arm twice more. Using Fair's impatiently offered hand as support, the stiff-jointed geri managed to get on her feet. However, when the old woman required another second to find her balance, the impatient boy tugged a third time and Olewan lost her balance. Luckily, when she fell, it was back into the safety of the warm nest she had just left. When Fair offered his hand again, the old woman knocked it aside with a vicious swipe. The boy retreated a step before he turned back to the dying girl. The ancient scientist squirmed her body to the edge of the chair and pushed herself to her feet.

"See, look, something's wrong."

"Mmmmm. Yes, it is. Dislocated wing, broken leg, intestinal bleeding, probably her pancreas—and a concussion—if not more. Very wrong."

A frightened Fair barked, "Do something."

"I have. The bones are set."

"The bleeding?"

"Patience."

The boy yelled, "No! Not patience. Fix bleeding!"

The hag shook her head.

"Fix her," the frantic boy directed.

"I'm not a doctor."

Fair's arms flew up in the air like a marionette's.

"You fix snake, raccoon, squirrel, bear, woodman."

The teener flung his arms wide at the large room, a combination laboratory, operatory, dispensary and morgue. "You save a life. Take bird wing. Fix. Take squirrel heart out. Fix. Save things that should die. Kill things that could live. Basement god. Now, here," Fair stabbed his finger at the twitching form on the bed, "Fix."

Viper fast, Olewan's twisted hand darted out and slapped the crying boy's face.

"Go. Go! You know nothing. Nothing of life and even less of death."

Shocked by his mother's slap, Fair ran from the room. After he was gone, a mumblng, finger-fidgeting Olewan stood over the girl.

How had such a mirror of her genes come to be dying before her eyes?

Even with her age and ills, her porous mind and trickster memory, Olewan had no doubt that she was looking at her daughter. The moment she had seen the girl in Mortos' arms, she had known what she was seeing.

What she didn't know was what to do.

Should she try to save this strange atavism from a distant past? Whom or what would she be saving? Who grew this? Joshua Fflowers? Someone else from the Centsurety group? Baudgew? Smarkzy? A stranger? Who had stolen her eggs? Winslow? Laureby? Was the girl here by chance or was she an astounding pawn in a chess game suspended for a half-century? Was this broken form here to test her skills and science, assassinate her heart, bring her old age comfort, test her deepest, most hopeless beliefs, or was she here with no intentions, a random act of immeasurable consequence?

When Elena Howe first secretly colonized the ruins of Brookhaven it was with a half-dozen zealous young scientists fleeing from both the criminal consequences of their work at Centsurety as well as the unknowable wrath of Joshua Fflowers. They had brought some of their science with them. With what they could scavenge from the scores of undamaged underground labs, and with the help of friends left behind, they were able to feed and shelter themselves and forestall boredom. For a time. At the end of the first year, deciding that there must be better forms of exile, two scientists left. A year later, when the weight of isolation exceeded that of fear, another disappeared.

Each time someone left, the difficulty of living among those remaining grew. Within a dozen years Elena was alone. In the first of the alone years, Elena had enjoyed the solitude. It was more than a small pleasure to hear no complaints about the monotony of the food. There were no arguments about the meager lab supplies. There was none of the energy-sapping Donner Party politics of a small group of people living under duress.

After the last of the party had slipped away, too shamed or chagrined, or, most likely, angry to say goodbye, Elena had taken a deep sigh of relief that had lasted most of a year. She had emptied her mind of decades of decisions and compromises, stress and sympathy. She emptied her mind and filled her pockets with rocks, leaves, buds and flowers as she wandered the woods around her. She spent time with Mortos, Portos and the other centaurs whom she had rarely seen since they had been released into the woods four years after their release from their gestation jars.

The herd in those days was still healthy and, mostly, happy. Mortos and Elena would rest in a shadowy haven. While the centaur flicked insects away from his birth-giver with his long, black curried tail, they would talk about the world about them. When they first began their talks, each had difficulty making the other understand. As is true with any insular group, be it prep school or mountain tribe, the centaurs' language had diverged from what they had first taken into the woods. It wasn't just the sounds—diphthongs, occlusions and plosives—that had changed. Those years engulfed in wood and water, surrounded by a thousand greens, had evolved a language different from the one used by someone who had spent those years filled with the microscopy of her research and social relations.

The language barriers were difficult, but could be, and were, hurdled. Mortos helped Elena to see the physical world at a level she had never seen before. She was used to looking at the world one cell or DNA strand at a time. Mortos helped Elena to pull her perceptions back from the eyepiece to really look around. Some of the best moments of Elena's life, moments equal to if not exceeding the excitement of the day-nights and night-days when she and Fflowers had unraveled the secrets of fledging, had come while riding atop Mortos broad shining back as he trotted down unending green tunnels. The undulation of the centaur's back, the humidity, and, especially, the aqueous green light as the sun fought its way through the tangle, would give Elena the sensation she was back snorkeling off Grand Turk Island where she had vacationed as a child.

The conversations had grown longer and the friendship between Elena and Mortos had grown deeper over the years. She was as comfortable in the Green as he came to be in the Bury. Carefully comfortable—because there was as much that could go wrong in the Green for someone with Elena's concrete and subway origins as there was danger in the smooth-tiled narrow corridors of the Bury for the hard-hoofed centaur. The fact that Elena had created Mortos and his brothers became less important as the years passed. All was good until Santos became sick. Santos' sickness awakened the herd to the fact that sickness was the precursor of death and death was the precursor of extinction...if something wasn't done.

Olewan remembered the conversations Smarkzy, Fflowers and she had had sitting atop the counters of the lab at the end of another all-night session. What aspects of their origins would the centaurs mimic? Would they be as wise as horses or as dumb as men? To which diseases would they be vulnerable? Cancer or colic? Would their lifespan be more equine or human? How would their senses manifest?

At the time of the centaurs' genesis, Elena had been both fascinated and horrified by what she and Smarkzy were doing. But, it wasn't until after the Fflowers' birthday gift of unwanted wings, a time when it seemed like a viable generation of centaur embryos finally was growing, that Elena had to make a decision.

As Winslow, Laureby and Elena Howe made plans to destroy the laboratory and the knowledge that had been acquired, they had argued about what to do with the forms living in their glass worlds. In her desire for revenge, Elena had called them monsters and wanted them destroyed, but Roan Winslow and Laureby both had insisted that the human part was transcendent and must be saved. To win their cooperation, Elena compromised. Her thought had been to save the centaurs until the others were gone before doing what needed to be done. However, once the brood had been transferred to the Bury, once Laureby and Winslow had disappeared, and once a two-faced Smarkzy had weaseled his way back into Fflowers' good graces, Elena had been mystified by her inability to open the incubators to end the twisted life within. The bitter, childless scientist had been blind-sided at how quickly and deeply a maternal instinct had grown.

During the remaining months of gestation, Elena closely monitored the fetuses' development. Despite the harsh conditions the small demoralized group was working under as it tried to figure out a new way to live, Elena would take as much as an hour a day to do no more than stare at the creatures forming in the low-light of their improvised environment.

When the centaurs were developed enough to survive on their own, it had been Elena who had lived with them for two years in a dormitory setting filled with nippled bottles and nests of dried grass.

With their round, bald, big-eyed heads and long gangly legs, the infant centaurs had been endearing. However, at six months they weighed almost two hundred pounds and were anything but cute. Even with the accelerated growth of the torso and head, they were bizarre looking. The heads were adult-size, but they had the moon-faced look of a three-year old child. That lost-in-space face topped a ten year old's torso which emerged from a colt's broadening back and increasingly powerful legs.

It was at this point that that the care Elena gave to the centaurs transmuted from a mother's to a warder's. She held down her growing horror and disgust with a sense of duty—duty rigorously defined and rigorously executed. That duty was kept until the centaurs could survive by themselves in the Green. After that, Elena banished the centaurs from her thoughts...until all of the other things that held her thoughts disappeared and she was alone. It was not until then that she thought to go to the Green and see how her husband's experiment continued.

First, she had been surprised and, then, engaged. Until Santos had become sick. After that, Elena isolated herself until she could not bear another monologue. To relieve the tedium of self, in imitation of a bored God creating Adam and Eve, Elena made Fair from one of her eggs and a seed left by one of those who had run away so many years before. That experiment, too soon and too like God's, had been a disappointment.

# CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Hide and Seek

From the moment he was dragged from the Hudson, Joe has never questioned how accomplished Bob Tom Damall is on a river; however given the events of the last three days, Joe certainly questions how sane the old man might be. Even as Joe bounced down the Hudson on his collection of PDF's, he could hear Bob Tom lamenting the loss of his fishing pole. After a few minutes, however, Joe realized that all of his attention needed to be on the river, his kidnappers, and their actions, and not on Bob Tom's antics.

It was four or five hours later and two hours after a curve in the Hudson had allowed Joe's mound of PFDs to break free of the current when Joe's walk along the shadowy edge of the eastern shore of the river in interrupted by the old man's call. After a few minutes of helloing back and forth Bob Tom drops out of the night and lands by Joe.

The old man's face is covered in dried blood as is one of his hands, but Joe can see that Bob Tom's favorite fishing pole is tucked in his pants.

"You got it."

"Course, I did."

"What happened?"

"There was some discussion as to ownership, but once that got resolved, they handed it over."

Joe stared at Bob Tom's wound before saying, "Just like that."

"Power of persuasion, Noby, rhetoric can be a powerful thing."

During the ensuing days as they made their way south toward Manhattan, Joe kept expecting Bob Tom to say more, to gloat, to sing his own praises as he always seemed to do, but the old man never did offer any more explanation that those first sentences. It wasn't until they were ten kliks north of the city and Bob Tom insisted that they scuttle the small power boat they had stolen the night before, that Joe wondered whether the riverman had done something so bad to the crew that he was worried about hawks looking for him.

* * *

Joe crawls out of the foam-edged river onto shore at 215th Street, just south of where the Harlem River marks the northern edge of Manhattan. Although Joe is very happy to be back on land, he can't help but worry about what aquatic parasites might be attacking his body through the scratches and scrapes he has gotten during the last days. After Bob Tom lands and busies himself coiling the rope he has used to pull Joe ashore, Joe tells the old man he needs to find someplace where he can thoroughly wash himself. The old man snorts, "No real riverman's gonna get sickly from a bitty little bug you can't even see. Besides, it's good insurance. You walk around this here town smelling like you do and folks might sniff twice, but they ain't gonna take after you like they done in Albany."

While Joe takes some extra comfort in thinking that Bob Tom might be right, he is mainly basing his hopes that he goes unregognized on the transformation he has made by shaving his head and eyebrows with an ancient octo-blade they had requisitioned from a summer camp lodge. Joe hopes that his bald head and eyebrow welts, plus the patchy stubble on his chin be enough to keep people from recognizing the missing son of the Co-president of Cygnetics.

"And even though you still got lots to learn about river life, Noby One, any bug that looks at you the way you look now is gonna figger you're already desperate sick with something a whole world worse than whatever it could inflict on you.

"Now, where we goin and how we getting there?"

Joe has wanted to call Nancy to see if she has heard from Prissi, but he doesn't trust Nancy to keep a secret. He guesses that if she hasn't heard any newz that he has reunited with his family she will assume that he is trying to find Prissi—which can only mean that Manhattan is his destination. Even though Joe's has spent many of the hours they were captives thinking of the best answer to Bob Tom's question, he still wavers, "I don't know. Maybe at the NYPD."

"I think we should start where she and her pa lived."

"That's the last place she would be."

"I know that, but mebbe we'll find something that'll get us started. Kinda like given a dog a scent."

Joe disagrees, "Don't you think whoever is after her will already have done that? If something is there, they'll already have found whatever it was."

"Good God in heaven, Noby, what do they teach you at that school of yours? You think if you want a huntin dog, you just go git the first thing with a waggly tail and floppy ears? There's a wide world of difference between this here dog's nose and some others. And let me remind you that yore lucky to be spending yore days with the best-nosed Damall dog in this here quarter of the country."

Joe gives Bob Tom a deep bow, "I know. And I also know I'll never be allowed to forget."

Bob Tom slaps his thighs and shuffles his feet, "There you go, son. Now, let's git."

Two hours later, Joe stands a half-block down and across the street from the entranceway of the Gramercy Arms partially camouflaged by the lush ficus tree he is holding in a cerulean ceramic pot. Bob Tom Damall is directly across from the apartment building's entrance taking an interminably long time trying to re-pak his chest pak. Joe watches him and as soon he sees the flick of the old man's hand, he picks up the pot and starts for the door. When Bob Tom picks up the pak and shakes it as if to settle its contents, Joe picks up the pace. As he gets close enough to see in the lobby, he adjusts his pace. He watches the elevator light switch from 2 to L. Three seconds later the elevator doors slide open. Joe reads the speed of the roly-poly woman leaving the elevator with the instinct he has honed in hundreds of hockey games so as to perfectly time his arrival. As the woman reaches for the handle on the door, Joe hefts the pot to make it more difficult for the woman, whose eyes have the shallow bright shine of costume jewels, to see past the ficus leaves to his newly bald head and the red welts where his eyebrows should be. When the woman's hand falters, Joe wiggles the tree a second time. The door opens. Joe tips the tree away from his face and, grinning like a drunken monkey, staggers in. Seeing what she has let in, the woman begins swatting away Joe's word of thanks, like they were midges on a muggy night, as she totters out the door.

Joe walks toward the elevator, but as soon as the woman is out of sight, he hurries back to the door. Bob Tom is already half-way across the street. Once the old winger is safely inside, Joe dumps the pot in a corner of the lobby and races to the stairway door. He and Bob Tom have agreed that Joe should stay two flights of stairs above the old man to warn him if the improbable—someone using the stairs in the middle of the morning—is happening. When Joe arrives on the fifth floor, he waits behind the stairway door until a wheezing Bob Tom catches up with him.

Once both invaders are in the quiet, low lighted hallway, Joe stands guard as Bob Tom hunches over the door handle to do whatever magic he is going to do to get into the Langue's apartment.

In the action vids Joe infrequently watches, thieves use sophisticated sensors and decryptors to get past locked doors. Joe doesn't expect to see those kinds of tools get pulled from the old man's pak, but he realizes that he won't be surprised to see Bob Tom bring out some small box with a glowing screen and lots of buttons. Instead, the riverman taps the wall alongside the door frame a half dozen times with a knuckle. When he is satisfied, he tells Joe to take off his coat and spread it on the floor beneath the door handle. When that is done, he pulls out a worn canvas scabbard from his pak and withdraws a shiny fish gutting knife. Bob Tom stabs the wall and begins hacking downward.

Debris falls onto Joe's coat.

"That orta kill the alarm."

The old man withdraws the knife and flips it around so that the serrated edge is down and begins sawing away at the wall until he has three sides of a rectangle cut out. He scores the bottom edge, then, pushes in that section of the wall like it's the flap on a cat door. The old man's arm disappears into the hole and he begins cutting through the interior side of the wall. A minute later, Joe watches the old man's arm disappear into the hole up to his elbow. There are two clicks and Bob Tom opens the door with his free hand. He steps back and makes a gracious sweep of his hand.

"Gordian knot. Who's got time for all the fancy stuff? Grab your coat and careful with them scraps."

Before he enters the apartment, Bob Tom taps the exterior wall flap back in place.

"Noby, find me a piece of paper, and a pen."

As soon as Joe returns with the supplies, Bob Tom folds the sheet in half, scribbles a note about hemming the curtains and writes, "Ms. B" in large block letters on the outside.

"Noby, tape that over the cut, will ya, while my nose starts workin."

Joe has been in Prissi's room at Dutton so, despite the open drawers and scattered papers, it takes a minute for him to decide whether he is just seeing a bigger version of her dorm room or whether someone has been searching the apartment. It also takes him awhile to find any tape, but after he does, Joe covers the evidence of their break-in with the note.

While Bob Tom remains standing in the middle of the living room, the teener wanders aimlessly around the five-room flat, touching things and thinking about how different Prissi's life is from his. When Joe gives him a look as he passes by in his meanderings, Bob Tom declares, "Ya gotta let em come to you. A good dog's a still dog."

The old man does the same motionless inquiry in each of the other rooms. Finally, after a quarter hour he says, "Well, she ain't here."

Joe sputters.

"So, I guess we'll go where she was."

"And where's that?"

"Well, I reckon we orta take a look at that liberry she was at and that market where them food wrappers come from in the kitchen and, probly, that school where them kids in the pitcher in her room go to. I'd say that's a start."

Joe goes back to look at the pix in Prissi's bedroom of a dozen kids of various sizes and colors standing close together. Prissi is in the background with a half-grin. A skinny black boy with a keyboard wide smile, holding a soccer ball tightly to his chest, stands front and center.

The boy in the pix, but two two years older, and, with his shorn scalp and rough-sewn stitches, looking somewhat the worse for wear, is standing behind the counter when Joe and Bob Tom come through the door of the EZ-Lam Global Market. As they walk up and down the aisles, Bob Tom keeps whistling through his teeth and muttering "Jeezm" as he looks at the diversity of food for sale.

"Makes squirrel and coon and even bear look pretty damall tame. My gut's haingry, no denyin that, but I ain't so sure my mind is gonna let it eat most here all of this stuff."

Joe reaches for a package of mbatata biscuits.

"Let's try these. Prissi told me she loved them."

Bob Tom draws back a step as if Joe is holding a mongoose cage, which might spring open at any second.

"What is it?"

"Biscuit."

"Damall, boy, who you foolin? I growed up with biskits and these here shore don't look like any bisket I ever et before. What's in im?"

An exasperated, but laughing, Joe says, "Damall your own self, Bob Tom, you shore ain't much of a city man. I reckon flour or sumpin pretty close to flour's in im."

"Well, hells bells, Noby, lime, lye and rat pizen look sumpin like flour. Here, give em to me."

Bob Tom grabs the box and stomps toward the front of the store with Joe in his wake.

The young man behind the counter looks at the pair warily.

"Excuse me, young'n, what's in these here?" The riverman rattles the box like a maraca.

Joe interrupts, "Bob Tom, they're fine. They're Prissi's favorites."

"Well, there ain't no easy way to verify that, now is there, since she ain't around to ask."

"Which is why we need to get something to eat and get moving if we're going to have any chance of helping her. Let's just pay and go."

Joe looks at the young man behind the counter whose face is flash frozen with distrust. The teener reaches into his pocket and pulls out the pix they have taken from Prissi's room. Acting as if he doesn't realize that the clerk in front of him is the same person holding the ball in the pix, Joe points, "This girl. Prissi Langue. She's a good friend of ours. She lives a couple of blocks from here. We think something bad may have happened to her. Do you recognize her? Have you seen her lately?"

As he tries to figure out what is the right thing to do, Jiffy reaches out a hand for the pix. He studies it for a long time before he murmurs, "Yes, I think, she comes in here sometimes."

"Lately?"

"I don't think during the last few days."

Jiffy pauses while he considers whether to say more. Prissi doesn't need any more enemies, but she certainly could use some friends. While she was healing, Prissi had told Jiffy about how Nancy had abandoned her. She also told him who she thought was after her.

"Son, you're taking a long time thinkin. How bout you let us in on what's got yore tongue."

Jiffy's body shifts slightly to the right so that his hand is closer to the p-button. Joe notes the movement and figures he knows what it means.

"Stop, Bob Tom. That's not doing any good." Joe turns back to the counterman. "If you know Prissi very well at all, you probably know she goes to a school in Connecticut. A school called Dutton. I go there, too. Here. See. Here's my id-card." As he hands over the card, Joe keeps talking. "Prissi and I, we're good friends. Bob Tom and I, we know someone, maybe even someone from my family, may be after her. See my pix, how it doesn't look like me? It's because I ran away. Maybe you heard? Now, I'm hiding, but, when I found out from another friend what was going on, Bob Tom and I thought that we should try to help. If Prissi doesn't need help, that would be great. But, if she does, then we want to do what we can."

Jiffy makes up his mind.

"She went below. To get away. I helped her."

Bob Tom looks at Joe, "What's below?"

Joe shakes his head, "I don't know."

Jiffy nods his head, "Below. There's a world down there. In the old subway tunnels."

"Son, I'm old, but I ain't feeble. You can't tell me livin in a sewer is safe."

Jiffy's hand rises to his head. As he touches his stitches he says, "Not always."

"No, I reckon not. So, why did she go below?"

"Because she thought it would be safer than being above. She thought whoever was after her knew her i-tag code, but it wasn't that. Someone....." Jiffy paused and stared at Joe, "... put a TRK-R on her. I found it, the TRK-R."

"Whoa." Bob Tom leans across the counter. "Pup, you've more'n seen her, you've helped her."

"I did."

"So, where is she?"

Jiffy shakes his head. "I don't know. I left her three days ago. She'd been hurt. She was getting better. She was planning to come back up and try to get away."

"Away where?"

"She wouldn't say. I don't think she wanted anyone to know."

Bob Tom's face darkens, "Because she didn't trust you."

Jiffy's anger propels him forward a step, but after looking at the old man's face, he retreats, "No, because she didn't trust herself. People who have tried to help her, like her father and me, have gotten hurt. She didn't want that to happen again."

Although Joe has a restraining hand on Bob Tom's arm, most of the riverman's torso is leaning across the countertop. Jiffy's body is pressed against the wall.

"How bout you take us where she is...or, was, if that be the case."

Jiffy shakes his head emphatically, "I'm not going back down there. I'll help you get down, but I won't go with you."

"Because yore feart?"

"Because I doubt Prissi is down below, but I'm fairly sure there are people down there that I don't want to meet again."

"What kinda folks?"

Jiffy begins to tell the story of what had happened to Prissi and himself with the zies.

After the bleeding, disoriented Jiffy had been discovered in the tunnel by Yoli and Lavie La, and nursed for a day, they had shown him another way back to the surface which not only lowered the boy's chances of running into the zies but also offered an easier exit.

That path presents no difficulties in Bob Tom and Joe in their descent and their going remains smooth until the approach the Lafayette Street station. Even before they can see into the station, they can hear a stew of shouts, songs and screams. They approach the end of the tunnel cautiously. From where they remain hidden in the darkness, they watch something that is less than a melee but more than an Italo-Irish wedding. Two stocky boys with round heads, no necks and ears as big as conch shells are pounding something raggedy and hairy with rough-cut swords of badboard.

"I guess the circus has reassembled. You ready, Noby?"

"We're not going in there."

"Of course, we are. I'm eighty-one, have never missed a party, and don't reckon to start now."

"It's not a party. It's a fight."

As Bob Tom strides into the light, he turns back toward Joe, "Well, Noby, scuse me, but where I come from, there ain't much difference."

A second later, a small group of zies, dividing their attention between the thrashing and a roaring fire fueled with a mattress, notice the winged stranger walking toward them. Without a word spoken, like a nest of ants, the whole group mills in agitation for a few seconds before some rush to collect rocks, bottles and clubs. As the armed crowd begins to surge toward the riverman, Bob Tom stops and bellows, ""We welcome you today. We welcome you to play. We see. We say...."

As the old man yells out the word, "Pray," he leaps forward toward the motley of zies, flares his wings, and commands, "Kneel. Kneel and obey or wear my wrath like a fiery garment."

The crowd slows, then huddles like cows in a summer storm. Bob Tom strides forward and, trailing behind, with guilt as a propellant, Joe emerges from the shadows.

"Kneel or suffer, my weak and wounded troth. Kneel before my magic fells you like lightning slays the tallest tree."

The stunned Joe, who is now tagging along a couple of steps behind the old winger, is even more astounded when Bob Tom pulls the butt end of his fly rod from its case and whips it through the air. Except for two old men who drop to their knees, the rest of the zies retreat several steps. As the rod slices through the air, the riverman yells, "Beware. Its hiss is nothing compared to its bite. Kneel in thrall, churls, or bid this sunless day adieu."

The riverman beats his wings and launches himself toward the mob. Before his wings have flapped twice, all of the zies have prostrated themselves onto the pocked and filthy subway concrete. After Bob Tom lands at the edge of the cowering zies, he whips his fly rod back and forth like a manic d'Artagnan. Finally, Bob Tom spreads his legs, stomps a foot, then, with a voice loud enough to echo from the curved ceiling high above, bellows, "Call me king."

"King, king," is heard from the crowd. But, other words, "Kill im. Kill em," can also be heard.

A small monkey-like man, leaps from the crowd and catapults himself toward Bob Tom. Bob Tom slashes his face with the rod and the zie falls to the floor. Bob Tom bows before he turns to Joe and using one wing as an impromptu cloak waves the boy forward.

"Give way to the prince."

Joe pauses alongside the momentarily leaderless crowd, which is beginning to wriggle on the floor like maggots on a trash can lid, before he hurries toward the opening at the far end of the station. Bob Tom stands guard until Joe is safe inside the tunnel, then he walks over to an over-stuffed chair, which looks to have begun its life in the lobby of the Black Hole Hotel. When Bob Tom smacks it with his rod a mushroom cloud of dust arises.

"I claim my throne. Any subject who dares touch my throne forfeits his life. I will return aneigh with food, freedom and foolery."

As Bob Tom flies toward the tunnel opening, he murmurs, "Awright, boys and girls. Show's over. Git up and git back to your kind words and deeds. Thank ya all for your attention and homage. I could git used to it, but King Damall's got to carry on the quest."

As Bob Tom flies deeper into ancient inky tube, he spies Joe ahead running alongside the moldy curved wall at full tilt. He languidly beats his wings until he catches up, "Damall, Noby. I never had no one beat a retreat from one of my performances, a right good un I might add, as fast as you done."

"You're crazier than they are."

"I certainly hope so, Noby. I surely do."

When they come to the door that Jiffy has described, they are not surprised to find it locked. Joe rattles the lever handle before pounding on the door itself. Nothing happens.

"Move aside, son."

The old man pushes down with all of his weight onto the handle. When the door remains closed, he puts his shoulder to it and pushes until his groans begin to sound like a locomotive leaving a station. The ancient steel door finally moves a half-centimeter in its rust-covered frame. The old winger grunts in approval.

"Where's your cue card, Noby?"

Joe keys his mypod and listens to what Jiffy has entered. He whispers under his breath, falters and then tries again. When he thinks he has it, he puts his mouth close to the edge of the door and shouts in garbled Arabic.

Joe and Bob Tom hold their breaths, but hear nothing. Joe repeats his lines in a voice so loud that he is afraid that the syllables will be distorted beyond meaning. They wait another minute in silence before Bob Tom bangs on the door with his mallet-sized fist. After a dozen strikes that grow to two dozen with their echoes, he gets a small battered lumenaid from his pak and methodically drags the narrow beam over the seams where the door fits into its frame.

"What are you doing?"

"Seein if there's a good place to go fishin...." He inspects the entire perimeter of the door looking for a vulnerability. After a minute he returns the intense light to study a spot on the rusted edge of the door about thirty centimeters above the door handle. "...and I think I mighta found one. Here, boy, hold this."

While Joe trains the narrow beam of halogen, the old man uses his knife to scrape away at the scabby section of steel. When he is satisfied with the slight gap he has made, he pulls three meters of line off his fishing reel and ties the ends together. He hands his knife to Joe.

"Wedge it in the crack, but, by God, Noby, if you break the tip off my most favorite knife, you'll find whatever's left stuck deep in yore gizzard. Are we clear, son?"

Joe grins, "I'm just glad we're good friends and you've cut me a break."

"That could change, little un, that could change."

While Joe carefully pushes on the handle of the knife to make the opening between door and frame as wide as possible, a kneeling Bob Tom begins threading a loop of fishing line into the crack. When half of the fishing line is through to the other side, he hums as he works the line down toward the handle.

Suddenly, Bob Tom's hands stop. He whispers, "I do believe I've got a nibble."

The river-man leans back on his heels as he slowly withdraws the line. He shows Joe the two ends where the loop of line has been cut.

Joe leans his mouth close to where the knife is still acting as a wedge.

"Yoli? Lavie La? My name's Joe. I'm Prissi's friend. Please, let us in. My friend, Bob Tom and I, we want to help. Jiffy said to come. We got past the zies to get here."

A noise like the buzz of flies trapped behind blinds comes through the crack.

"What? Oh. The zies. The ones that hit Jiffy on the head and bit Prissi on the leg."

As if the mention of the wounds is a magic incantation, the door jerks open and Joe and Bob Tom are studied by a dozen black-skinned, weapon-holding, rag-wearing women. An out-sized woman, whom Joe assumes is Yoli, holding an out-sized staff, which Joe assumes may be for more than walking, beckons the two males to come through the doorway.

Joe responds immediately, but Bob Tom, who is still on his knees, hesitates. Joe hears him whisper, "Damall, man, show some heart."

Slowly, the ancient fisherman gets to his feet, but once he is upright, he stands frozen outside the doorway. Not hearing any footsteps behind him, Joe turns back. Bob Tom waves a hand dismissively, "You go on, boy. I think I'd better stand guard."

As Joe continues to stare at him quizzically, Bob Tom stutters, "Just in case them crazy folk get an idea they want to pay homage to prince and king."

When Yoli takes a step forward to re-extend her invitation, Bob Tom skips backward like a skittish horse. Joe doesn't even pretend to know what the old winger is up to. Instead, he walks up to the large woman and asks if she is Yoli. After her nod, Joe begins his story. Before he is twenty seconds into it, Yoli interrupts to tell him to follow her. She and the woman turn and walk to a narrow door at the far end of the room. Joe looks to Bob Tom for a cue. When the river-man shrugs, Joe follows the Africans.

Once the room is empty, a less tentative Bob Tom comes through the doorway and lets it close behind him. After a minute of slow breathing, Bob Tom ties one of the strands of fishing line he is still holding into a loop, drops it over the handle of the door and carefully pulls up. The line either slips off the handle or slides all the way to where the post enters the door more than a dozen times before it finally catches on a slight burr on the ancient metal. When that happens, Bob Tom feels vindicated that if he had fished long enough and with enough patience, he would have been able to open the door.

After the fishing, there is little to do. The old man tries to stay calm, but the thought of somehow being trapped in the room with the women he has just seen keeps returning to him. The notion of being trapped underground with them tugs at him like briers in a feverish dream. There is little Bob Tom fears—not precipitous heights, not stormy flights, nor surging water, nor winter's sharp fingers digging through his campsite bedding. Not bear, nor violent men. But a group of women, of single purpose, a hydra form of female, has come to spawn a mindless terror in him that can't be calmed. When that re-awakened motion overwhelms him, Bob Tom bolts from the empty room to the safety of the subway's tunnel's dank gloom. He stands at the rail, drenched in shame. His hands grasp the handrail and twist and turn on the pipe so that flurries of brown and orange flakes drift through the air.

The old man's body is tired. Beyond tired. He can feel that his courage is fast slipping away. He's running out of tricks. His pretence to youth and vigor has cost him dearly. He thinks that Joe is no more than a slight flutter of the curtain away from seeing the shabby truth behind. He, who has courted danger like a cow-eyed swain, knows that however true those old acts were, now, they are no more than artifice and dream. His sigh echoes in the tunnel. He has disappointed himself, but he knows that regardless of how badly he feels, that feeling's sound would be nothing compared with what would wail from him if Blesonus were to learn of his weakness and failure. He knows that to go further is to fail. He is just too old for heroics. But, to quit is to fail completely. He can't accept that. He wants and needs a final trick even as he wishes he could be free of the quest. He want and needs Joe's admiration and adulation even as he wishes he were sitting on a fallen log, his back against the smooth warm bark of a birch tree with his fishing line dancing along the surface of a spring swollen pool.

The palms of Bob Tom's hands are sore and caked in rust when Joe half-opens the door. As the old man brushes his palms against his pants, Joe says goodbye to Yoli and her friends. While Joe is busy, Bob Tom clears his face of any evidence of what his heart still feels.

Joe grins to the old man as he waves a piece of paper.

"I've got it. We've got it...I think. Here. Look."

"Well, Noby, this is mighty pore light for reading. Just tell me what it says."

Joe reads the numbers Prissi had given to Yoli, the same numbers Prissi herself had found in Al Burgey's freezer.

"What do you think? It has to be the co-ordinates for where she's gone. Don't you think? What else can it be?"

"I don't know, son. Let's get out of this hellhole and sit in the sun for a spell and parse and ponder it."

The climb out is not much easier than their descent, but it is safer. Yoli has given Joe directions to another egress that brings them to the surface without contact with the zies. However, after Joe climbs out of the fireplace, steps through a blizzard of blue jay feathers and looks out the window, he realizes that whatever happens next is going to be easier for Bob Tom than himself since the street below is underwater. When Joe turns back to tell Bob Tom about the water, he can hear the old man wheeze and groan as he clambers up the ladder. As Joe sits by the entrance waiting for his friend and listening to his efforts, he worries about the toll their search is taking on the ancient riverman.

When Bob Tom approaches the light at the top of the ladder, he stops so that he can catch his breath. He hangs on with one hand and uses the sleeve of his shirt to wipe the rivulets of sweat from his face. After he feels that he has recovered enough to be presentable, he finishes his climb. He emerges from the chimney with a happier smile on his face than is present in his eyes.

"Nothing better than a little exercise, huh, Noby? Keeps us fit."

Joe shakes his head, "I don't like being underground. I didn't like it with the Greenlanders and I didn't like it down there. How did you live inside that mountain for years?"

Bob Tom's smile gets pinched off, "It warn't nothin. I figure it's just like livin in a basement, only a little deeper."

To change topics, Bob Tom says, "Tell me about that paper. Iffen it's co-ordinates, where does it put her? Did you check?"

"No, I wanted to wait for you."

"Mighty gracious. Well, plug em in and see what comes up."

Joe keys the mypod. When the map fills the screen, he studies it for a minute, but when he doesn't recognize any landmarks, he reverses the zoom. He has to scale it down twice before Bob Tom, who is leaning over his shoulder, exclaims, "Damall, Noby, it's all the way out on Long Island. That ain't gonna be much fun."

"Bob Tom, it can't be as far as we've already come, can it?"

"No, son, it ain't as far, but if memory serves, all you had to do to get where we are is sit on your butt and let me and them damfool pirates and the mighty Hudson carry you along. Getting to where you think we orta be getting next is gonna be just a tad more difficult. At least for you. If you don't mind, boy, bob Tom Damall's gonna take a wee minute and be wistful."

"What about?"

"About how my life woulda been a site easier lately iffen you'd a gotten yourself a pair of wings instead of a poor attitude."

Joe has a rejoinder on the tip of his tongue, but he restrains himself as he tries to imagine what will be required for him to get to the eastern end of Long Island. Bob Tom can fly—even if he has to make frequent stops. But, what Joe doesn't have an easy answer for is how he is going to go where he wants to be. From what he has seen on the mypod, where Prissi has gone is beyond the Pale. He won't be catching a cab. From what he knows, that area is nothing but impenetrable growth and disease. But if that is where Prissi is, he has no doubt that is where they have to go.

"Let's rent a car and stop when we can't go any further."

"What are we gonna do with a dang car? I cain't drive. Can you?'

Joe considers telling the truth, but decides that that makes little sense.

"Sure. I can drive."

"You own yourself a license?"

"No. I'm too young."

"Well, I don't either. Once I got my wings, I never felt the need. Without a license, no one will rent us a car. I'm not sure, even with your new looks, that you should be in a public place much, so busses are out.

"I'm thinking this here may be the end of the road for us, Noby. At least, for the two of us. I'm thinking you orta go home, Noby. See your folks. You done what you could do. There ain't nothing more for you to do. I can go off my own and do a little more lookin around while you go git yore wings."

"Before we decide that, can we just get out of here?"

"And how you wanna do that? Me pullin you again?"

Joe barely keeps his anger under control. He doesn't like feeling helpless, but he finds he is having a harder time taking Bob Tom's help.

"No. That water's not much more than a meter deep. I can slog through it. You go ahead. I'll meet you on the levee."

Forty minutes later, as Bob Tom pulls the soaking Joe from the water, they begin to argue. Their disagreement over what to do continues as they walk north on the levee wall and make their way onto the Queensboro Bridge. After a long, drawn-out debate, a discussion that is loud enough to draw the attention of the occasional passersby as they walk across the ancient rickety span, Joe still refuses to turn back. When they finally get to the Queens side of the river, Bob Tom's chest is heaving from his exertions. Joe can't tell if his friend is serious or just doing more acting when he snarls, "Now, what? We're gonna go somewhere where no one's gonna take us? That don't mean much to me cuz I can fly. But it certainly puts a cramp on what you can do. Now, there's a decision to be made. She's yore friend, but the way you are, yore bout as helpful as a hound dog in a hurricane. Caint be helped. We done what we could, but now it ain't we no moe, it's me. That little un needs help and I mean to help her. And I cain't help her if I got someone helpless holdin me back."

Joe starts to argue, but Bob Tom ignores him as he puts his rod in his pak.

"Bye, Noby. You larned a lot these last days, but you gots lot more to larn. I hope to see you around the river sometime."

Before Joe can say anything, Bob Tom flicks a wave of his hand and he is in the air, beating his wings eastward. Joe is shocked. He can't believe Bob Tom has just left him. The stunned boy watches the old man until he is no more than a dark dot on the horizon; however before the dot becomes too small to see, it becomes blurry. Joe takes a deep breath and holds it.

The teener's companion has been gone less than five minutes, but Joe's chest aches at the loss...and at how lost he himself feels.

# CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Flagging and Flogging

Bob Tom's plan is to fly east until he is out of sight before veering north and west. He'll fly over the northern end of Manhattan to the Hudson. His figures he'll save his dwindling strength by hitchhiking a ride back to Albany on a tug. After that, he should be rested enough that it won't be a problem to make his way home.

As the old man slowly flaps his wings, he thinks of all the things that will bring him comfort. Hot coal coffee, charred meat, a rising moon breaking through the river's fog, the skirrying sound of his feet in winter dried weeds. Home and habit.

Bob Tom sighs, but, suddenly, a bellow, a mix of anger and anguish, explodes from his lungs.

He's choking on his lie. Home won't be home, and there will be no comfort found if he doesn't finish what he has started. That thought, which he knows to be true, adds an immeasurable weight to the old man's wings. In the middle of the giant blue bowl of sky, Bob Tom Damall feels as trapped as a mink in one of his snares. He cries out a second time. He cants his wings and edges north. Seconds later he is back on an easterly heading. As his indecision grows, so does the weight of his wings. The old man wastes energy in the open sky as he slaloms back and forth between the dangerous demands of Scylla and Charybdis.

# CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Webs

With the inexplicability of a wavering top regaining its equilibrium, Joshua Fflowers' pancreas, which had pushed him to the verge of death, suddenly pulls him back from that last border. Where his pancreas leads, his liver and other functions soon follow. Dr. Blaine explains to Illiya and Adaman that there is no scientific reason for this propitious change. Sometimes things of the spirit, be they human or something more spectral, transcend the flesh. For now, Fflowers flesh is weak, but it is stable.

The momentum of Fflowers approaching death, like an oil supertanker, had pulled much into its wake. Now, as it changes course, so must much else. The media experts—medical, political and business—who got it wrong are quickly replaced with new experts who explain how and why the old ones misread the algorithms and paradigms, portents and tea leaves. Those at Cygnetics, who had been told to take the elevator down, punch Pause and wait. Those who had been assured of ascent skulk into the shadows.

Fflowers is so little out of the woods that metaphorical leaves, twigs and thorns still cling to him when, to distance himself from all that has gone wrong and to distract himself from all that still must go right, the old man smells the glove, gets the scent and begins tracking down the girl whose image and acts had floated in and out of his drugged dreams and nightmares, conscious, subconscious and conscience.

At the first hurdle he can't get himself over, the impatient patient calls on the friend of his youth. Surprisingly, Fflowers catches Smarkzy in Manhattan at the New York Public Datatarium. And, in an even bigger surprise, Smarkzy is going there for the exact same reason that had triggered the old man's call. Who is Prissi Langue? And where is she? Smarkzy has received a cryptic message from an unknown source that his favorite student is in dire trouble. He has spoken to his friend Pequod Jones who has confirmed that Prissi, despite her initial enthusiasm to do research on Fflowers past, has not been to the NYPD in several days. Nor has he seen her friend. When Smarkzy questions Pequod about the friend, he soon divines from the description that it must be Nancy Sloan. A call here, a call there and Smarkzy learns what Nancy knows about the attacks, Beryl Langue's murder, which has not been in the newz, Jack and Joshua Fflowers possible involvement, and Prissi's visit to a ghost from the distant past, Dicky Baudgew. What Smarkzy learns he relays to Joshua Fflowers, albeit in an edited form. That old man, still master of the spinnerets despite his weaknesses, begins to spin his web.

* * *

Jack Fflowers had been only slightly reluctant to do as his father first had asked. Deceiving Prissi, besting her, appealed to him. Admittedly, his father had been oblique. The plot, just lightly sketched, was that, with his grandfather ill, there were bound to be seismic changes at Cygnetics. If Adaman were not to be swept away in those changes, there were things that needed doing. Jack might be able to help his father's, and his own, future. Adaman would take care of Uncle Illiya, but Jack needed to neutralize Joe. But, to be able to neutralize his cousin, he first had to be found. On that first night home on Spring Break, Jack had left the family game room thinking that bird-dogging Prissi with a bug, in the hope that Joe would get in touch with her, was nothing more than a lark.

In the NYPD, an hour after he had led the charge through Isabel's House of Spirits, which had felt like such a prank, Jack learned that he had become an accomplice to Beryl Langue's murder. After Jack absorbed that knowledge, he, too, lost his father.

* * *

When he discovered that Prissi had been attacked and ended up in the Columbia-Unitarian Hospital, Adaman realized that he and his dying father were not the only persons who had an interest in the girl. Adaman's first assumption, which made sense given the cards he held, was that Illiya was behind the attack. What he couldn't understand was why the girl was neither abducted nor killed. It was when he tumbled to the possibility that the attack was about getting something from the girl rather than the girl herself that he decided to alter his plans.

After the FDR attack, Adaman told Jack to lure Prissi to go with him. Adaman's plan was to get Prissi away from her father and then for Jack to use his charms on her to find out what might have been stolen and what she was doing that would be of interest to others. Adaman ordered Schecty to have his men find out who else was following Prissi. Obviously, that message either had been relayed poorly or had been seriously misunderstood because Beryl Langue was dead.

Now, not only had the girl disappeared, but Jack hated him and held him responsible for Beryl Langue's death.

Adaman Fflowers was in a panic.

When Joshua Fflowers began to recover, Adaman's panic turned to pure terror. If Joshua Fflowers found out what Adaman had tried to do, and Adanan suspected that Jack might be the one to relay that newz to the old man, Joshua would ban him from Cygnetics before he disinherited him and make Prissi Langue an heir. Just like so many of the Unbonny Prince's, Adaman's plan was unraveling and with it a grand future.

Adaman Fflowers was a Bissell alumnus. He had been taught the classics and had read his Shakespeare. Even though all seemed gray and he knew not which way to turn, he also knew that the worst thing he could be was indecisive. Unsure though he was as to what might be the proper course, he knew had to act. And, so he did.

# CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

A Change in Plans

Bob Tom Damall admits that he has done many stupid things in his life. He left the mountains of Tennessee instead of staying with kith and kin. He went to MIT instead of TSU. He studied molecular neurology instead of re-forestry. He worked for Bionatics instead of taking the job with Opti-Global. He left that lucrative job at Bionatics instead of lying to the investigators from CDC. After being black-balled and retreating from those wars, instead of clearing his name, he had pursued a Ph. D. in political philosophy at Harvard. He had taken the job at Yale instead of Ohio State. It was at Yale that he had his epiphany and, once again, recreated himself—as a forest prophet. Then, instead of retreating from the battlefield, when wisdom screamed to do so, he had married Rholealy. He had lived crazily in the cave with those crazy women instead of taking Blesonus and going back to Tennessee. He had made a big mistake rescuing Noby One, and made a bigger one by abandoning him, and, now, probably, was making the biggest by changing his mind again and going back to find the naïve teener.

The decision to turn back, however, isn't made by the old riverman until he is north of Poughkeepsie. He has been leaning over the stern rail on an empty veg barge, staring at the churning water below to distract himself from his guilt, when, abruptly, he sees something in the murky brown froth five meters below his feet which he divines as if it were a scattering of tea leaves.

His fate, maybe inexplicably, but indubitably, is bound to the boy's.

Seconds later, Bob Tom is twenty meters in the air and heading southeast toward the Connecticut coast. The message he has received is so powerful that it won't allow him to fly back down the Hudson, across the Manhattan and out Long Island. Instead he will make a bee-line toward the Connecticut coast and cut across Long Island Sound. He knows where the coordinates they have been given lead and he also knows that Joe, somehow, despite the folly, is on his way there. Even as he contemplates the folly of an old man, a tired old man with nascent doubts and resurgent fears, of flying across kilometers of open water, he knows that Noby's salvation, as well as his own, depend upon him making that journey.

After the sedentary hours he has spent on the barge, Bob Tom's body feels fresher and stronger than it has since the night before he pulled Noby to safety. His wings beat strong and steady atop the eight knot westerly wind. However, regardless of how steady those wing beats are, Bob Tom's mind is in turmoil. The attack of fear outside the African's subway sanctuary caused a crack in that ancient vessel and that crack has spider-webbed until the contents, so tightly held inside for years and years, are spilling free.

It has been almost a half-century since Robert Thomas O'Malley has flown along the Connecticut coast. He is amazed at the changes carved in the shoreline by the rising waters. He can see that most of what had been called the Gold Coast is gone. He assumes that those expensive homes were too expensive to preserve. The new coastline from Darien to Bridgeport is mostly barren sand and rock with an outline of scrub. From two hundred meters, Bob Tom can see that this section of the almost unbroken band of shoreline sprawl, which once ran from Delaware to north of Boston, has moved twenty kilometers inland. The coast-hugging sections of that once venerable highway of progress, Route 95, has been chopped out and stitched back together beyond the twenty kilometer limit. Looking at the ruins, the geri winger can see some of that civilization had been snatched back by rising waters, and some had been flattened by federal fiat and bulldozers, but most simply had crumbled away from economic desuetude and neglect.

In New Haven, even though the cranes and tank farms, which he remembers covering much of the harbor like yellow and silver algae, are gone, the high hills which shape the Housatonic are still occupied. When the old winger swivels his head to study the divided community high on the hills, their turrets and towers remind him of Buda and Pest. When he realizes what he is seeing, the old man bursts into laughter.

The Elis. Arrogant Elis. Yale University, intellectual mother of presidents and their pawns, though defeated, has refused to surrender. New Haven, sacred New Haven, might have fallen to the rising seas. Yale, however, has taken her billions and made a tactical retreat to higher ground.

Bob Tom's laugh nearly carries across the river.

When he gets to Bluff Point, Bob Tom lands and rests, drinks and eats. Ever since he left Joe in Queens and made his escape, he has felt that he is doomed. How his fate will manifest itself he doesn't know, but a deep part of him, a part different from and far wiser than his intellect, knows his life is done. Surprisingly, that knowledge does not weigh as heavily on him as he would have guessed. Although there have been many moments of joy in the Adirondacks, on, above, and alongside her rivers and mountains, those singular moments have been outweighed by a profound loneliness, a recognition of his life as caricature, a sense of the emptiness of his acts.

After the winger catches his breath and gets back into the air, he looks out over the sun silvered water and recalls when and where he was, and how he felt when he made the decision to enter the verdant half-world of the mountains as a Ph.D.-burdened reincarnation of Tolkien's jolly woodsman, Tom Bombadil.

...He had been grading term papers for his graduate seminar, Machiavelli in a Non-Machiavellian World. In a way, the seminar had been no more than a retelling of the tale of the serpent in the garden. Is evil irresistibly attractive? All nine of his students, the brightest master students in Yale's political science department, had argued that evil could be resisted. He had finished his grading, stacked the papers alphabetically, and, then, reread the conclusion of each student. When he finished he knew that one of two things must be true. Either he was a miserable failure as a teacher or he was a miserable failure as a citizen of the world.

Robert O'Malley had pondered which might be the correct answer. Some of that pondering had been done in long walks along the same coastline he has just flown over. He can remember walking barefooted in the sand at Hawk's Nest Beach with his wings tightly furled to keep the turbulent off-shore breezes from flaring them.

When the thirty-eight year old professor had decided that he was the owner of a scarred soul without ever having had life wound it, he resigned from Yale. Deciding that truth was more apt to be found in fiction, he spent the summer reading novels in a New Hampshire cabin perilously perched on an outcrop looking out at the north face of Cannon Mountain. Summer ended, but he kept reading Leaves fell and he read on. Finally at first snow, he stopped. He looked around at the stacks and mounds of books and decided that, of all the stories which he had read, of all the characters with whom he had become acquainted, Tom Bombadil, a minor character in the Lord of the Ring, was the most attractive.

Some critics, and Tolkien himself, had indicated that Bombadil was god-like, a Beginner, a First. Although Robert Thomas O"Malley had plenty of ego, he certainly didn't think that he was god-like; however if the ring represented power, then he wanted to be like Bombadil, who was not affected by the ring. Over the next months, the former professor read Tolkien's poems about Bombadil as well as books on forest-craft, fishing and hunting. He went on two Inward Unbound retreats and played Professor Higgins to his own un-Pygmalion.

Then, like Thoreau, he went to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, to see if he could learn what it could teach and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived.

Now, decades later, he regrets his efforts. In a sense he has not lived. He had learned the ways of fish and fowl, but had learned little about himself. He had been a well-met hale fellow to his own soul. Blustery, boisterous, always positive, he had whistled his ways through the years. Until now.

As Bob Tom continues east along the Connecticut coast and the waters of Long Island Sound, he increases his altitude. He finally stops climbing at five hundred meters. A half century ago he could fly long distances at a thousand meters. With his skinwings, that altitude gave him the longest distance at the greatest economy of energy. Now, the effort to get to half that height far exceeds the energy savings once he has arrived. His wings have changed shape as he has aged, the same as his legs and hands, and that alteration in the shape of the leathery air foil has had big consequences in the efficiency with which way he can fly.

The reasons Bob Tom has flown so much higher than he has in years are two-fold—knowledge and insurance. He wants to study the far-off Long Island shoreline so that he can pick the closest point as a destination. And, he wants to give himself as much time as possible when things go wrong—which he knows will happen. From higher in the air, he can see farther and have a better chance of spotting a boat to land on when his wings, or will, fail. However, despite any precautions he may take, deep in his bones, the old man knows that this is going to be a one-way flight. He thinks how Voltaire was right when he had old Dr. Pangloss stay home and tend his garden. That he would like to do, but the part of him he has spent years creating won't let him.

An hour later, far ahead off to his right, Bob Tom sees what he realizes must be Fisher Island. His decides to fly to the island and rest before he continues on to Long Island.

For more than a century Fisher's had been a summer home and refuge for those too rich or well-bred to go to Martha's Vineyard. When the world's waters began to rise, many of those Fisher families lost their homes. Much like the victorious but spent British after World War Two who, with a certain defeated grace, had allowed their colonies to go, so, too, had the denizens of Fishers mostly eschewed any rear-guard action. Instead of fighting for what once was a sanctuary, a preserve of wealth, they had accepted their losses to a changed world.

As Bob Tom approaches the sanctuary, where he once had spent an uncomfortable weekend at the invitation of a fourth generation Yale legacy undergraduate, he is surprised at just how small the island has become. Few remaining houses. No landing strip that he can see. He wonders if there are summer nights now where there is no fourth for bridge.

By the time he crosses onto the island, the old winger is flying at fifty meters. It seems to him to be much less green that his memories. The land is mostly grays and browns except for what he sees are the bleached bones of thousands upon thousands of deer skeletons. As he comes over a small ridge, Bob Tom looks down on a herd of emaciated deer drinking from Buckland Pond. It hits the old man how a life without enemies can spell death. Other than the last years with Rholealy, his enemies have been confined to bear and briers. He understands how the lack of struggle has weakened him.

Bob Tom flies past the herd until he comes to a rocky spine where he lands. He stays twenty minutes catching his breath and fighting off a deprezzion which is enveloping him like dense fog.

The second leg of his flight across Long Island Sound, despite failing light and stiff winds blowing out of the southwest, goes smoothly. When he lands on the desolate coast of Long Island's north shore, he is tired, but not spent. His reckoning tells him that he has almost another thirty kilometers to fly. With dusk descending and anticipating an expanse of scrub broken only by ponds, streams and swamps, Bob Tom decides that it makes sense for him to spend the night on the beach.

The old man walks the wrack line looking for an indentation in the sand which will provide some shelter. After he finds one that is suitable, he collects sticks and wedges them into the ground to make a frame over which he drapes dried sea grass and ribbons of bleached kelp.

Although it takes more time than he normally would allocate for so temporary a shelter, the old man doesn't begrudge himself his efforts. It passes the time and, to a small extent, keeps his thoughts at bay. When his home is ready, the thoughts return.

He is dying. He accepts that. That knowledge is not news. What is different is the plaintive acquiescence. That acceptance is new. And that is wrong. His origins are in a place where living demands a tenacious grip. For more than eighty years he has known, and accepted that. He has held tight with an acrobat's hands, hard-callused and sinewy-muscled hands. Until now.

The old man waves his hands at the encroaching dark to disperse his thoughts. He gathers driftwood, hums, sings, lights his fire and feels a long lost joy at watching driftwood flames colored bright by the ocean's minerals. When his first wood begins to die, he gathers more and more again until his profligate flames light the shore around him and add a golden tint to the pair of eyes watching him through dense scrub.

Finally, as the moon begins its fall and his sadness has spent itself, the old man drifts into sleep. As the rasp and hack of the winger's breathing breaks across the sibilance of waves lapping on sand, his watcher, Mortos, builds his own gossamer dreams.

Bob Tom's body wakes refreshed, but his soul remains fatigued. While he chews his leathery breakfast, he paces the shore. He feels like an ancient agitated Agamemnon girding for war.

It is as he nears a thustle of rose hips that Bob Tom sees the hoof prints. No one hunts for decades without being watched himself, but Damall's spirits sink even lower when he realizes that he has been surveyed from less than twenty meters from where he has supped, sung and slept. If he is going into battle, which is what his nerve endings think, then it is not reassuring to know that he is so ill-prepared. The old man tells himself that if he had not built the crackling fire so high, and if the waves had not been breaking on the shore, he would have heard the horse.

Bob Tom is in the air flying over sinuous streams and tussocks of scrub when he claps his hands in sudden awareness. The horse had not been watching him. It, like Bob Tom, himself, had been sleeping. No horse ever stands in place for any length of time unless it is sleeping. As soon as the thought comes to him, some of the riverman's feelings of unease fall away as if they were no more than a pinion torn free by a huffing wind.

Despite feeling lighter and being intrigued with a landscape, which, if it were further south, he was sure could be called bayou, Bob Tom pays close attention to where he will land if something should go wrong. The ancient winger's shoulders ache from yesterday's work and his heart is racing as he nears the coordinates the Africans had given to Joe. It comes to him that he has assumed that his destination would be something recognizable, such as an abandoned building, dock or a meadow. But, as far as he can see, there is nothing but a uniform of green decorated with shiny ribbons and medals of water. The old man circles twice over his destination without seeing a place to land. As he comes around a third time, he thinks that the African women have deceived Joe and himself.

Why wouldn't they? Why would they trust two males? Two strangers? The Africans would have thought that if the girl really needed help, then she would have contacted them herself.

Bob Tom realizes that he and Joe have been sent on a wild goose chase. His anger at being deceived only lasts a moment. Almost immediately he is relieved. He is not going into battle today. He has tried to help the girl. He has done what he could. No longer is he duty bound. He can fly home to his simple life. He can see Blesonus and need not feel shame.

Something about the sleeping horse has continued to bother Bob Tom as he flies. It is not until he has crimped his wings so that he can land on a small weedy spur of land jutting into a five meter wide stream that it comes to him that the horse might have stayed still, not because it was asleep, but because a rider had held it still. A rider on horseback is something the old man hasn't seen in years. Something about a watcher on horseback, something he thinks may tie into hobbit travels through Middle-earth, makes Bob Tom hold his breath as he tries to look through the thick foliage which surrounds him. Too tired to fly, too hinky to stay on the small outcropping, Bob Tom carefully slides down the two meter embankment and begins walking down the ankle deep clear water of the stream. He hasn't walked more than a half-klik when something flies out of the woods above him and drops over his head. Before he understands what has happened, a second lasso shooting out from the other side of the bank secures him.

At first, the ancient riverman struggles to free himself, but those efforts cause the tips of his wings to get wet. After a few seconds, the fatalistic riverman calms himself and waits for his captors to show themselves.

# CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Merrily, We Roll Along

Joe has to ask a half-dozen people walking the streets of Queens before he gets the answer he is looking for. That answer, a quick stop at an ATM, and a brisk half-hour walk bring him to The Razr's Edge. Joe takes his time looking at the solar-powered scooters. His initial inclination, one guided by the fact that he is a fifteen-year old boy, is to buy the thermest scooter in the store, a silver and black SPD-Z, but, then, a newly wakened maturity, something Joe is willing to attribute to Bob Tom, takes over. He goes to the FAQ screen and begins to key in his questions.

Joe has narrowed his choice down to an E-RAZ-R, a slow, heavy, solidly built scooter with an extra power pak that is capable of going forty kilos miles on a single charge, when a door at the back of the shop explodes open and a bandy-legged gnomish man scuttles past the secu-cams toward Joe.

"Watcha bizness?"

It takes Joe a minute to decrypt the powerfully built man's question.

Joe outlines his needs—sturdy, dependable, capable of going long distances. As Joe explains what he is looking for, the little man begins to shake his head, and, then, begins muttering, "No, no." Finally, like a compressed spring suddenly released, the man's short, thick arms fly up past his head and he yells, "Pizza gabbage. No, no, not this crap. No. You wait. You don't move. You hear? Don't move."

After Joe nods, the little man, looking like a fire hydrant on wheels, whirs around and scoots back through the door from which he had emerged. Joe wonders what it is about him that draws loony old men. When he turns back to the E-RAZ-R, he hears a muffled voice through the door, "He moved. Goddamighty, I say 'don't move' and he moves. This is my life?"

Something slams behind the wall, the door bursts open and an ancient bicycle explodes through the opening like a racehorse galloping from the starting gate. The bicycle, with the gnome atop pedaling furiously, speeds toward Joe. Just as the teener darts out of its path, the bicycle's front wheel comes a meter off the ground. Something that Joe thinks is meant to be a battle cry rips the air, the wheel rises even higher until the rider gracefully slides off the set and dismounts.

"Fuhged that pizza crap. Heahz the horse you wanna ride. SchwinnerTakesAll-450. Fastah. Lightah. Strongah. No crappy battry, just ya legs. Ya god legs, right? Ya not some kind a teenah-weenah, ah ya?"

The gnome takes a second to look Joe over.

"Whad ah ya? Lemme guess. Hockey, right? Am I right?"

A surprised Joe nods.

"I thot so. Big legs, but no kinda stamina. Am I right, am I wrong?"

Joe puffs up his chest at the little man's challenge.

"I can keep going."

"Yeah, sure whadevah. If ya can keep goin like ya say, den dis tings da ting to keep goin on. Garanteed ya legs ah gonna crap out before dis ting does."

When the bike first shot through the door, Joe thought it was a ridiculous idea, but now he is reconsidering.

"G'wan, kick da tires. Give it a spin. Whadever. Yule see. Dis is for you. Journey ya god ahead, dis is definitely for you."

The gnome's words freeze Joe. How can someone he's just met know where he is going?

"Whaddya think I'm stchtupid? You're ona island, right? Can't go far north or south. West is the city wheahs theahs no need for somethin like dis or a scoodah. So, whad's dat leave? Up, down, or east. Ya goin east and ya tole me ya need somthin that can go pretty far. That leaves just one ting as far as I can see, which bein such a short man mebbe you tink ain't dat far, but yore goin past da Pale. Ya runnin away. Fine, like I shoud care. Get tickbit. Hey, it's yore life. I go plenny of udder stuff to keep me worried. Go, but go on dis bike and you'll ged dere and my conscience, which ain't any bigger'n me, will be clear."

Joe accepts the seller's explanation, but he worries that if the gnome has figured out his destination so easily, then he may not be the only one. Joe decides that his best defense is to get moving as quickly as possible.

"How much?"

"Dis museum piece? A STA-450? Da Mona Lisa of two-wheelers? You can't pay me whad it's worth, and I can't bring myself to sell it ata loss."

"How do you know I can't pay you?"

"Cause runaways, even ones from very well-known, very rich families, don't carry dat kinda mool around."

Understanding that he is alone in a shop in an area of New York that he doesn't know, with a powerfully built man who seems to know who he is, makes Joe wish for Bob Tom to come striding through the door. However, rather than show fear, Joe feigns anger as he turns toward the door, "If you weren't going to sell it, then why show it to me."

The gnome darts past Joe and blocks the door, "How come da rich have evrythin—houses, boats, jewels, art, everythin, but never a sense of humor. Why's dat?"

Joe slides to the left with the thought that he will rush the shopkeeper, knock him aside with a shoulder check, and escape through the door.

As if he can hear Joe's thoughts, the homunculus takes a step away from the door.

"I god it. You can't afford da buy it. I can't afford to sell it at a loss. So, that leaves just one option as far as I can see, which bein short mebbe ain't...."

The man stops talking. Joe waits. The little man scurries past the boy, grabs the frame of the bike and gives it a push toward Joe.

"I give id to ya. No strings. But, you godda remember a stranger gave ya a gift. Okay? You god the kinda mind dat can keep a memry like dat?"

Joe freezes for the second time since he's been in the store. He realizes that it has been days since he has thought of Blesonus and all that she had done for him. A burst of honesty impels Joe to say, "I don't know. I don't think I've been too good at it. I'm pretty self-involved. Selfish."

"You're what?"

"Selfish."

"Really? How old?"

"Fifteen."

"Nodda lodda fifteeners even know what selfish is. Gwan. Take it. And work on da memry."

Not knowing what else to do, Joe says thank you, but in a voice as thin and fragile as a Meissen teacup.

Joe is ten minutes and six kliks away before the idea comes to him that the shopkeeper has set him up. The STA-450 is so distinctive that even in an area with thousands of inhabitants it makes him stand out, and, as he travels farther east and the population dwindles, it will make him stand out even more. If he tries to minimize his risk by traveling at night, the possibility still exists that the bike has a bug on it. Joe can continue making his way on foot, but in just the short time he has been aboard, he has become enamored of the speed and comfort of the STA.

The boy tries to think what Bob Tom might do if he were in the same situation. After another block of pedaling, he guesses the old man would enjoy the bike, minimize the risk, and have confidence in his ability to handle whatever was going to come his way. Deciding that he is going to emulate the riverman's thinking gives Joe a burst of energy, which he transfers to the STA's pedals.

In a little over three hours, Joe is more than seventy kliks east of the East River. He has ridden through the shopworn streets of Queens and past the overgrown trees and under-populated tract homes of the outer suburbs. As he travels east, the works of man grow smaller and less impressive while nature's efforts begin to take on a certain ragged and unkempt majesty. A motley of ancient trees stretch cloudward with their limbs spread in wide welcome to the masses of birds that fill the air. Despite the air whistling past his ears from the bike's speed, Joe still can hear their trillings, an octave higher than the bike's song,

As he pedals along, Joe watches his shadow race ahead of him. As the sun falls, Joe's shadow grows longer and leaner, but its sharp contrast with the world around it fades. Finally, the sun falters and the shadow disappears into the murk of dusk.

The 450 has lights and Joe uses them to guess his way along the road's broken surface while he waits for the moon to rise. After climbing a long hill, which leaves his calves aching and his lungs burning, Joe pauses at the crest. In the time it has taken Joe to pedal up the hill, the moon has finally shown up for work. While he catches his breath, he notices a line of silver outlining the next hill. He rides for another twenty minutes before he understands what it is he is seeing.

Behind the silvery line is an unbroken swatch of purple black. Joe realizes that somehow the silvery thread that rides along the land as far north and south as he can see is a warning the all the land beyond is an uninhabited jungle that has grown up in the fifty years since fires destroyed eastern Long Island during the Ticklish Situation.

As Joe remembers the story from grade school history, a mutant form of Lyme's disease had been discovered near the eastern tip of Long Island near Montauk. The new spirochete proved to be much more virulent than any of the previous forms of Lyme's. Within a year of discovering the first case, not only had that victim died, but several thousand others also had been laid waste. When the New York Public Health Services proposed a tick eradication program far more draconian than any of its earlier programs, the Noramican EPA had prevented the program from going forward because of fears of what the spraying program would do to indigenous wildlife, particularly the millennially endangered miniscule population of piping plovers. As the matter was being wrangled out in a federal court hundreds of miles away from the danger, another three thousand Long Islanders died. When Senator Stacy Clinton-Bloomberg called for hearings and summoned Bionia Adams, former Green candidate for president and EPA's chief administrator to testify, Adams countered the senator's charges of gross incompetence by noting that there were fewer than eight hundred plovers in existence while humans numbered in the billions.

Less than a month after that famous exchange, as the annual westerly mistrals blew strong and steady, a series of fires, obviously coordinated, were lighted across the width of Long Island on a north-south line just west of Islip.

The fires merged into a single fire which burned out of control for five days—many said purposely so—as a flotilla of boats from Rhode Island, Connecticut and the New York metropolitan area rescued more than three hundred thousand inhabitants. Nearly ten thousand died in the fire, but within a year, no one was dying of the new version of Lymes. In the fire's aftermath, the federal government declared the area an NVNS refuge. Westegg Preserve became the only No Visitor No Stewardship refuge on the east coast north of Virginia. In order to minimize the chance that any surviving ticks would infect or infiltrate the western half of Long Island and the country beyond, a fifty meter high laser curtain had been installed along the western end of the burned territory. The goal was that any tick bearing animal trying to pass through the curtain would be incinerated by the laser.

Although Joe has known of the barrier, he hadn't considered that he was going to have to get past the lasers in order to find his friend. That thought stymies him for a minute and makes him wish, not for the first time, that Bob Tom was still his traveling partner. The old man's absence, the darkness on all sides of him, the obstacle ahead and a sudden sharp hunger begin washing over him like torrents of rain. Joe finds it hard to keep pointing his small beam of light into the chilly night. At the bottom of the hill he slows his pedaling so that he can better look for a place to spend the night.

It takes the teener twenty more minutes, and his search brings him within a klik of the laser fence, before he discovers a narrow path carved into the wall of kudzu which borders the road. Using the bike's headlight to guide him, Joe follows the path's twists and turns until he comes to an opening, perhaps ten meters in diameter that is carpeted in tall grass. Joe centers himself in the meadow before he tromps down the grasses to make a campsite. When he finishes with his rude resting place, he rustles through the food in his pak and in the small camping bag suspended from the bike's handlebars and wonders what he had been thinking when he had dashed into a Qwikee on the eastern edge of Queens to provision himself.

After a day that started with him being towed across the Hudson River just as the sun was rising, traversing Manhattan, both above and underground, and bicycling for hours, he wants meat and potatoes or rice, or, better, mounds of both. Instead, he has high school happy food—Nougie-nuggets, Swirls&Kurls, apple chips, and warm Zzzoltkola. As he lays propped on an elbow eating what would have been fun at a bonfire before Bissell Day, Joe stares at the million stars in the sky above. Unlike the ancients, he sees chickens and rib roasts rather than bears, belts and archers.

Joe is lost in his food reveries when he suddenly realizes that in addition to the soughing boughs, the rustle of leaves, and the flutelike sound of some gregarious night bird, he is hearing a popping sound that reminds him of bacon frying on a camp stove. Occasionally, along with the unidentified noise comes the slightest whiff of a familiar but hard to identify smell.

Joe has finished his meal and has told his grousing stomach that what it holds is far better than twigs and berries in an Adirondack cave. Leaning back on a elbow, the boy vacillates between giving in to that part of him calling for sleep or obeying the part urging vigilance against whatever unseen dangers that may lurk nearby. Joe opts for the former and is nearly asleep when it comes to him that the popping sound and faint smell come from animals being incinerated by the lasers. That thought delays Joe's sleep until the birds themselves grow quiet.

* * *

The boy awakes before the sun itself. He lies on his side with his knees drawn to his chest and examines his discomforts with a private nurse's care. He is cold, especially a three centimeter-wide belt along his back where his shirt has escaped his pants. He tenses his muscles to trigger a shivering fit. He is famished. He pulses his stomach a half-dozen times until the organs begin writhing on their own. His guts churn, but find nothing to grind. His hands ache from the fists they have made throughout the short hours of sleep. Beyond those aches are the blisters at the base of his fingers from the hours of gripping the STA's handlebars. Some things hurt and others are raw, but of all those things, it is the deep muscle aches in his thighs that take pride of place. Joe gently touches the surface of his thighs, but hesitates to do more because of the fear that the slightest movement might cause them to lock up in a cramp that will leave him thrashing on the meadow.

To divert himself from his woes, Joe thinks back to the feelings of exhilaration he had had at the end of his first night on the Hudson River as the sun, in her slow stately processional, had bleached the sky of ink. Surviving that first night had given him a sense of competency, even maturity, different from anything he had ever felt before. He had done something dangerous and harrowing with no adult supervision or guidance. He had escaped the Greenlanders. Alone on the Hudson, without parents, coach, teacher or servant to rescue him from his mistakes, he had survived. That satisfying thought leads to the next, one much less reassuring, of being held underwater in the Hudson's implacable current. That thought leads to a question he has been keeping at bay throughout the hours since being abandoned by Bob Tom.

Is he too much the boy and too little the man to help Prissi? More directly: is he nutz?

That question, as unanswerable as it is, causes him to consider why it is that ever since he has decided to help her that he has been thinking less of Prissi Langue as a fellow Duttonian, a funny fascinating friend, and an irritating unknowable near-girlfriend and more of her as a quest, The Holy Grail, a catalyst for his metamorphosis into something heroic. In other words, Joe tells himself, what he has been doing over the last days is seeking a new Joe rather than a lost Prissi. And, that thought leads Joe back full circle to the question he has been avoiding: Does he have what it takes to help his friend?

Joe answers that question with action rather than more thought. He rolls onto his stomach, draws up his knees and pushes himself upright. He draws a deep breath as he stares at the bleed of red oozing along at the horizon. He holds the chilly air inside his lungs in the same way as he had on the Hudson.

In less than twenty minutes, Joe is sitting on his bicycle staring at a four meter high mesh fence. The fence, whose bottom is hidden by a pile of leaves and trash dropped by the westerly winds, is about ten meters away. Beyond it, perhaps twenty meters from where the boy balances on the bike, is a double mound. Joe studies the two humps and sees that it disappears into the distance, almost like an immense mole's mound. The nearer mound is much lower than the one behind it and seems to be composed of white almond and globular shapes. The higher mound behind is a dense puzzle of white sticks.

It takes Joe a minute to make sense of what he is seeing.

Animals from the east come under the laser screen. The beam kills them and then burns through the skeleton. The skulls fall forward to make up the smaller mound and the torsi remain behind. If, because of a malfunction with the fence, an animal happened to survive, it still would have to climb over the four meter fence to escape.

Dismounting his bike, Joe walks forward. As he reaches out to grab the fence he abruptly stops as the thought comes that the fence itself might be electrified. As he stares through the fine mesh, he sees a scattering of small delicate skeletons on the ground between the laser and fence, which he realizes are the remains of birds.

As Joe's eyes follow the length of the dead zone until it disappears in the dawn's mist, he is overwhelmed at how much life has ended here. The boy squats down onto the dew-drenched, but sere, grass as he tries to come up with a plan for how to get beyond the barrier. He assumes that Prissi was healthy enough to fly over the laser. He looks up to see the source of danger fifty meters above, but, even as he looks, a low flying wren suddenly stops its flight and begins a corkscrew fall to earth. Joe pushes away any thought of Prissi's fate matching that of the just fallen bird.

Joe sits without insight until he decides to stop thinking like Joe and start thinking like Bob Tom. As soon as he shifts his focal point, he can envision the old man using his fly rod to test whether the fence itself presents a problem. Moments later, Joe has removed his belt, made a noose to secure a wrench from the bike's repair kit and is swinging it toward the fence.

Satisfied that the fence isn't electrified, Joe tries to work his fingers into the fence's fine mesh, but with no success. The boy backtracks to the woods where he scours around until he finds a dead sapling. He works the small tree loose from the earth's hold, balances it across the bike's handlebars and rides back to the barrier. Joe uses his belt to strap the bicycle to one end of the tree. He wedges that end into the ground before leaning the other end against the top of the fence. After testing his improvised ladder, Joe begins to shinny his way up the sapling. When he gets to the top, he straddles the fence before he pulls the tree free from the ground and begins hauling. When the bottom of the bike's wheels clear the top of the fence, Joe carefully reverses his position and that of the sapling so that the bike now is suspended over the ground between the fence and the laser field. Joe's butt, the same butt that has held Prissi's attention during a class period, is beginning to ache from the pressure of the wire fence poking into it. When Joe hurries to lower the bike, he loses his grip on the sapling. The STA crashes to the ground with the sapling cudgeling it a split second later.

Joe's bitter swearing continues even as he flips around, dangles his feet and drops to the ground. Either the STA is an exceedingly well-made bike or there is power in Joe's words because, when the teener inspects it, the bike is unharmed. Joe swings his leg over the frame and ignores the cracking sounds as his tires crush bird bones. He rides south looking for some weakness in the laser curtain.

# CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Reparation

Even though her eyes are closed and the room is quiet, Prissi knows she isn't alone. She imagines opening her lids to find Jiffy Apithy smiling down on her, but in her heart, she knows that's not who she will see. The thought of Jiffy reminds the girl of her feverish time underground and the nightmarish feeling of having the zie's bite cleaned and stitched. Now, for a second time, that same dark presence is hovering near. Prissi slightly flexes her muscles, starting with the arch of her feet and working her way up her legs to her torso. Each time she changes her focus, the type of pain and intensity change, but nothing is without its hurt. When the teener tries to move her wings, she realizes that they are immobilized. She tries to lift a shoulder, but that, too, seems to be pinned down. An image of a butterfly, in a glass-faced case, wings spread, thorax riding on a silver pin wells over Prissi and causes her to mewl. She thrashes harder to move her wings and when she cannot, that sense of being pinioned elides into the desperation of her last seconds in the air before the crash. Her mewls turn to screams, which continue even after cool skin, as soft and smooth as chamois, brushes across her forehead and a raspy whisper tells her a dozen times, and then a dozen more, that she is safe.

Prissi knows that even if the whisper tells a truth and she is safe, that she is not sound. The thought slams her like a sledgehammer when it comes to her that she only thinks her wings are bound when, in fact, they are paralyzed.

Sitting across the room, two burning eyes looking out from a frazzle of white hair and a frumple of gray cloth, Olewan has watched her daughter come back to earth. Olewan has been expecting the girl to return—but not so much as a traveler certain to arrive on the landing strip at a specific time, but more as a 18th century trans-Atlantic voyager who has a modest chance of arriving within a certain span of weeks. The girl is tenacious. Olewan has spent hours looking at her daughter's face and she is sure the girl is not only tenacious, but also bright, competitive, cynical, teachable and impatient, very impatient. As Olewan sits through the hours and lets her body rock in rhythm with the increasingly steadier rise and fall of the girl's chest, she thinks of how that litany of words had been used to praise and contemn her so many years before.

As the old woman thinks of who and what she had been three-quarters of a century before and of the links between that long ago girl and the girl on the narrow hospital bed across the room, parts of her begin to fissure. In between the cracks, like a precious mold worming its way through cheese, grow feelings long suppressed. Loss. And love. And loss. And love. Like the double click of a metronome, love and loss kept a beat in Olewan's head, a beat so insistent that the beat of her own heart increases and over the hours becomes ever less steady even as the girl's grows more so.

Pride and anger have been Olewan's sustenance, her daily gruel for so long that the possibility of a menu change has been beyond consideration for decades. Until now, when, with the suddenness of the cherry blossoms' arrival, loss and love appear and with them the possibility of driving pride and anger aside.

The girl across the room, of her but not from her, of her but not hers, is destroying what had been inviolate for a half-century. From the sharp shards and bitter ashes of Elena Howe's life is arising a phoenix-like desire to love. To love so truly, to love with such abandon and determination that love's ever-present companion, loss—the loss of that love or the one loved—would make death seem a welcome dream. With twisted fingers twitching and withered arms forming a formidable X across a part of her that she now finds frightening, Olewan sits still while her insides fracture like tempered glass.

Holding a crippled hand to her heart, as if that frail claw could contain what is exploding within, Olewan shuffles across the room. She bends over the girl, bends deeper until pain jolts up and down her spine, bends even further so that the tendons at the back of her knees pulse with a white burn, bends more, touches the girl's wrist with the dry point of her finger tip and, then, touches her lips, lips that resemble earthworms trapped on hot concrete, to the lips of the girl.

Olewan has only backed off three steps before her kiss breaks the spell and the girl's eyes flutter, her own lips quiver, and she begins to thrash and scream.

Love's black magic at work.

Standing stock still, as if afraid of drawing closer, Olewan hushes the girl. She spins lariats of comforting words in the hope that words can heal, but her efforts have no effect. It isn't until a long minute of watching the girl's thrashing and listening to her tortured wails that Olewan realizes that her palliative words have been thought and not spoken. Olewan sucks air into her lungs and forces her feet to shuffle forward until she stands over the screaming girl. She rubs the scorched brow with the back of a walnut-sized knuckle and speaks her crackly, grinding words of comfort. The louder the girl screams and the more violently she fights to be free of her bonds, the surer the old woman grows in the knowledge that she is having her best day in more than a half-century.

# CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Resisting a Rest

The building where Bob Tom is imprisoned is a long, narrow, high-ceilinged concrete block structure with four massive overhead doors. He guesses that it might have started its life as a maintenance garage for a highway department. Bob Tom is tethered to his stall by a length of chain which circles his neck and passes under his wings before being padlocked to a stanchion. The shock of what, or who, his captors are is beginning to wear off, even as the shock of being captured keeps growing. Although there is enough slack in his tether to sit or lie down, the winger mostly stands so that his wings aren't harmed.

So far, he has counted six different centaurs. The one who first emerged from the thick foliage alongside the river after lassoing the old man seems to be the leader. He and Bob Tom have had several conversations; however despite hearing strings of sounds that seem like they could be English, Bob Tom has understood very little of what the centaur has said. When he asked if the centaurs had seen a girl with wings, they had become so agitated that he assumed that they had and, somehow, that is important to them. When he tried to describe Joe to find out about his friend, the response is much more subdued.

Most of Bob Tom's attention has been taken up with keeping panic at bay. He has been free for so long. Free to fly. Free to fish. Free to do neither. Free to sleep in his cabin or under a tree. Free to start the day with the idea of hunting, change his mind to gathering hickory nuts and change it again to riding the thermals high above Mt. Marcy. Now, he has the freedom to stand or lie down, to walk two meters to the left side of the stall or two meters to the right. Panic sits in the corner of the stall like a rabid badger, all feral teeth and claws, prepared to launch itself at any second. To keep that savagery at bay, the old man has sung everything from the first six stanzas of Yankee Doodle Dandy to eight of the Green Party's Hymns and Herms of Life. He repeats the sixty-three states of the union and the fifty-six capitals he can remember. He makes himself frantic with the capitals he cannot remember—like Alberta, Manitoba and North Dakota—but figures that frantic is better than panic. He takes hundreds of pieces of dried grass from his stall and begins to weave a mat. He looks at the moles and scars on his hands and tries to see shapes as if they were constellations in the sky. He smoothes the hairs on his arms, takes a thousand even-sized breathes while ignoring the fire-eyed watcher in the corner. Night is the worst because there is an eternity between the dark of the stall and the darkness of sleep. To sleep he must relax, but if he relaxes, the badger will sense it and spring.

The second night of his capture, the old man is half-sitting on a mound of straw he has shoved into a corner of the stall. His wings are spread. His head is resting against the concrete wall. His eyes are closed. He can see Blesonus combing out her shiny black hair while sitting on a boulder by the Bureas River. Her fingers are strong. The back of her neck where the hair has been pushed aside is very white. He starts to step from the shadow of the woods where he has been watching when she reaches down, picks up a shoreline rock that is as big as a baked potato, and holds it in the air above her head. Bob Tom waits for her to throw it into the rippling water. Suddenly, there is a scream, an earth shattering scream and his daughter smashes the rock into her face. Bob Tom bolts from the woods, bolts from his dream, tears at his tether and smashes his wings against the walls of his prison. He cannot see the badger, but he can feel the wounds the animal makes as it slashes at his legs with its claws and teeth. He smashes back to free his legs from the attack.

When the spectral attack finally stops, Bob Tom's spirit and two bones in his right foot are broken.

# CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Maternal Instincts

A surprised Prissi reached out with both hands to take the soup from the boy.

Each of the teenerz nodded, but neither spoke.

For Prissi, everything still hurt. Even lifting the mug to her lips involved more damaged parts than she could imagine. Prissi sipped and looked into the small coal black eyes and smiled at the boy whose hair reminded her of an osprey's nest. The boy did something back with his face. Prissi guessed that it might be a smile, too. Prissi paused between sips to say, "This is good. Thank you." After several seconds, the boy said something back. It took some effort on Prissi's part to understand that the boy also has said, "Thank you."

"Where am I?'

"Bury."

To be sure that she had understood, Prissi repeated, "Bury?"

The boy nodded and Prissi muttered to her soup, "That's reassuring."

Twenty minutes later Prissi was unsure whether to blame the fluids dripping into her, the language barrier between herself and the boy, or just to accept what she thinks she has been told. A woman who doesn't talk. Horses that do. A woman who is a mother, but doesn't mother. A boy who barely can say his name, but wants to know hers. A place called a bury, but with no prefix like Simsbury or Shrewsbury.

To give herself time to make some sense of what she had heard, Prissi yawned and yawned, then, closed her eyes and evened out her breath until the boy shuffled off.

Prissi was adrift in Africa when moist rough fingers caressing her wrist woke her. As soon as the girl opened her eyes, the boy said, "Your friend is here."

A startled Prissi blurted, "My friend? Jiffy?"

"Bob."

"Bob? Who's Bob?"

"Old Bob. Bird Bob."

"I don't know a bird Bob."

"Bird Bob your friend. You can have him. Mortos said. Olewan fix Mortos. You get Bird Bob."

Prissi drifted back to an afternoon at the family's camp in the highlands of eastern Burundi. The winds were blowing so hard the trees were talking. She had a fever. Not malaria. Something else. Her mother cooled her wrists with alcohol. That slightly nauseating smell, the jabber of the trees, the heat burning her cheeks like a sunbeam she couldn't escape, her mother's worried sighs sounding like an oscillating fan all floated through her mind, which tried, and failed, to make sense of those disparate threads. Her brain had panicked when it could not bring order to what was going on around and within her. She had felt like the world was fracturing. Her mother sighing like trees. The trees talking like the village elders. Cold wrists. Hot face. Nothing making sense. Not then...and, not now.

Prissi squeezed her eyes tightly shut and used her fingertips to flick away at the illogical words the inarticulate boy was flinging at her.

The next time Prissi woke the room was dark. When the girl took a deep sigh, sharp pain shot through her torso. That pain was followed by a disembodied voice from across the room.

"You have two broken ribs. Your right ulna has a greenstick fracture. You have a concussion. There is blood in your urine, most likely from a bruised kidney. You were very close to dying. First, I hoped, now, I know you will live. You are strong. You are healing much faster than could be expected."

Olewan stared at the girl, who remained silent. Despite the fact that Olewan assumed the girl's silence meant fear, rejection or dismissal, she still was happy to be in the room. For too many years, Olewan has been alone—except for the irritating distraction of the boy. For years she has looked at her future, her death and done nothing more than shrug. Now, that indifference has changed. Since her clone has been delivered to her in Mortos' arms, she has been considering the end of her life with very different insights, regrets and hopes.

The girl definitely is her clone. She has proved that. But to learn why the girl knew to come to the Bury, Olewan has had to wait impatiently until the girl became conscious and coherent. Now, that the girl was alert, Olewan hoped to have her many questions answered.

It took more than two hours—a time filled with long pauses and tears, with both angry and despairing words, and with many answers before Olewan's questions stop. Despite the girl's insistence, it made no sense to Olewan that it would be Joshua Fflowers' trying to harm her. When Prissi tells Olewan how she had come to the Bury through the kind acts of a crippled man named Allen Burgey, who she later learned once was called Glen Laureby, the old woman does not doubt that that seemingly kind act was fathered by a dozen darker motives. When the teener told her about the crystal pendant Laureby had given her and how it matched the one she had found among her mother's treasures, it made the crone's heart race with hope. Being given an opportunity to extend her years was a much more beguiling gift now that the girl was in her life.

As the girl watched, Olewan scuffled across the floor and put her spidery hands into Prissi's pak. It was hard to tell who was more disappointed when the pendants were not to be found. Prissi thought they must have been lost somewhere in the forest where she had crashed. Olewan was sure that Mortos had stolen them.

Not wanting the girl to see how disappointed she was, but also not ready to break off their visit, Olewan said, "While you are quiet, let me tell you a story."

The old woman paused as if gathering her thoughts.

"You are here because I am here. You were sent here. For a reason. I am an old woman. My name, Olewan, says that. I have been alone so long that I talk poorly and, I am sure, converse worse. If you have questions, and you will, they may not be answered. Because I can't, or because I won't.

"You are interested in me as I am interested in you. I am not yours, but you are mine.

"Before I was Olewan, I was Elena. When I was Elena, I was bright, but not wise. Much like you, I fear. Now, I am neither. But, I am alive.

"Is that a worthy goal? To be alive? Aren't all stories about being alive? Alive with love. Alive and alone. Alive with loss. Alive with Death stretching out its dark eager hand...to pull you across the river.

"You have met Joshua Fflowers. He, like me, also confused knowledge for wisdom. Many years ago, I was married to Joshua Fflowers. That was a mistake, but a worse mistake was that I was wedded to Joshua Fflower's ideas even more than I was wedded to the man himself. His idea of winging humans. His idea of creating a bestiary. His idea of extending life. I helped all of his ideas become real. We grew wings and centaurs and centuries of extra life."

Prissi was having a very hard time making sense of what the woman was saying. With each of the woman's words, Prissi's mind went off if a different direction. The sense of mental anarchy she had had with the boy and bird Bob returned with a vengeance.

"You said you were interested in a small company called Centsurety. That is what we did there. We altered wings and lives and life. We assured that there would be centaurs and we insured that a human life could be two centuries longer than it had been. That was our intelligence at play—mine and Vartan Smarkzy with the centaurs and Roan Winslow, Glen Laureby and my own with the longevity. It wasn't until we had accomplished what Joshua Fflowers had dreamed that we looked up and around long enough to realize that they weren't dreams at all, but fevered musings, nightmares, not that different from those that have been holding you."

Olewan's last words made Prissi catch her breath. That sound held up Olewan's tale for a moment and allowed Prissi to realize that the old woman's words and sentences have changed. The girl understands that there is more than a simple old woman before her.

"In the same way that a virulent disease grows into a pandemic, so, too, grew Joshua Fflowers' ego. What happened to him went beyond hubris into megalomania. My colleagues and I decided that things had to change, radically change. We decided to destroy our work even though we knew that after we did that we would have to hide from Fflowers' wrath for the rest of our lives. So we did, and so we have. We destroyed Centsurety with fire, faked deaths, and fled.

"I came here. Glen Laureby first went to India. The woman who raised you went to Africa."

Prissi's muscles went rigid.

"Why do I say it that way? Because it is true. If you were to see a picture of me at sixteen, you would know that you came from me and not Roan Winslow. You are my clone. My child. Mine."

Although it was easier to stay small and silent, Prissi pushed the words out past the raw burn at the back of her throat.

"How can that be?"

"It can be because your mother was the smartest of all of us. I had ovarian cancer when I was in my thirties. Before my surgery, my eggs were harvested so that Joshua Fflowers and I could have children, or, in his mind, geniuses, when it was convenient. When we, the others at Centsurety called us Trinity, decided to run away from our successes, I took my eggs and left others in their place. Now, what is obvious is that before I had that vengeful idea, Roan Winslow already had understood that if she were to have some of my eggs, it might act as life insurance, or at least a bargaining tool, if Joshua Fflowers found her...or if I decided to betray her."

The old woman's story didn't make sense to Prissi.

"If she wanted children, why wouldn't she have had her own rather than cloning you."

"I don't know. Perhaps, she was infertile. Perhaps, she may have wanted a child who could double as a pawn."

In spite of the pain it brought to her neck muscles, Prissi shook her head in denial.

The old woman shook her head in imitation of Prissi.

"No? Impossible? Well, perhaps, she adored me above all others."

The woman's snort reminded a horrified Prissi of herself.

Prissi rasped, "I don't believe you."

"I've often had the same feeling. One of the drawbacks of being a scientist is that it makes living our personal lives more complicated because we are so adept at generating alternative hypotheses for how and why things are."

To give herself time to think, Prissi looked across the room to the tale teller and asked, "Who is bird Bob?"

"Do you play chess?"

"Not very often."

"I used to decades ago. With some intensity. Sometimes, I found it restored me. Now, I feel like I might be playing on multiple boards again. If that feeling is true, then, Bird Bob is a piece in a game. My opponent seems to think that Bird Bob is powerful enough to checkmate me. My inclination is to treat him as a pawn. My understanding is that Bird Bob seems to consider himself a knight of some sort. Errant."

Prissi, who had been staring at the gray glazed ceiling above her, turned her head when she heard a shuffling noise.

"I've said too much. You have much to consider. You're agitated."

Prissi watched the old woman's fingers adjust the IV line attached to her. For some reason, it reminded her of someone tuning a guitar.

"Sleep...daughter."

Despite her best efforts to resist the medicine and the madness flowing in her, within minutes Prissi's mind was back in the hot red dust of Africa. Olewan, too, was wandering in memories from the past, however, knowing that she had much work to do, she didn't linger there for long. Instead, she began to construct a story that would make the girl want to stay with her. A story that would tell of maternal safety within the Bury and mortal danger without.

# CHAPTER FORTY

Woods and Won'ts

Joe pedals south along the laser curtain toward the Atlantic Ocean. Given that Noramica is not renowned for being a country where things work, unlike Korea or India, the longer the boy pedals alongside the unending pile of bones without seeing a single break, the more frightened he becomes of the danger he'll face on the other side of the fence. If the government has taken such care maintaining the fence, then it must be for a very good reason. He envisions riding through a land filled with thousand upon thousands of animals infested with hundreds of ticks, which themselves are infested billions of Lyme's spirochetes.

Kilometers pass and the skeleton mound continues unbroken. Joe has a vision of a woodsy paradise so over-populated with wildlife that millions of animals are forced to flee or starve. Yet, the unending scrubland and woods, broken only by the twists of water, suggest that there are not so many animals that they have destroyed the habitat.

To resolve the conflict of how so much animal life has died, yet the habitat appears sustained, the teener comes to the idea that some force might be driving the wild life out of its sanctuary and into the killing fields of the laser curtain. As he rides along, the boy notices that there seem to be areas where the jumble of bones rises higher. He guesses that could be used as evidence that something is chasing the animals from the woods. Or, it could be that something in the habitat beyond the curtain, something hidden by the deep foliage from his eyes, such as too much or too little water, or the wrong kind of plant-life, could be responsible.

As Joe bicycles further south toward the ocean, his pace must slows as the laser curtain passes over more brooks and streams. At those spots, the air is humid and misty from the steam created where the water passes under the laser. Since Joe himself must investigate every body of water to see whether he can ride through or if he has to remove his shoes, roll his pant legs and lift his bike on a shoulder, he takes the time to look for aquatic life. Some is floating on the surface like a piscine Ganges, but in the deeper streams, the fish seem to be able to survive running the laser's gauntlet.

As Joe approaches the waters of the Atlantic, the trees become fewer and exhibit ever more fantastic shapes from their daily battles with the winds. Scrub, vines and rosehips grow denser. Finally, the boy arrives at a beach where westerly winds are pushing meter high gray green waves onto the wrack and rock shore. The last pole of the laser fence rises from the waters twenty meters out from shore.

Joe takes off all of his clothes and packs them into a bundle. He attaches the bundle to the bike and lifts the bike over his head. Keeping far away from the laser line, Joe goads himself into entering the piercing cold water and begins to make his way out past the last pole. Before he is half-way there, the surf is past his waist. The swells push against him like a parade of bullies. By the time he gets past the end of the laser curtain, the water is slopping across his face. He has to hop to get his breaths. Despite the fact that his whole body is quaking from the Atlantic's cold, Joe's biceps are burning from holding the bike overhead. The shivering teener makes himself keep going forward until he is sure that he is past the point of danger. Finally, Joe turns and angles his way back toward shore. His teeth are chattering and his limbs are jerking like the first day in a marionette class. He is so consumed by his body's attempt to combat the frigid water that he misses a shallow trough in the sea floor and stumbles forward. Instantly, Joe is hit by all of the feelings that swept through him when the Hudson tried to swallow him up. But, as soon as the thought of opening his mouth wells up, Joe explodes from the water and frantically scrambles toward shore.

When he finally makes it, the first thing he does is put the Schwinner on its kick stand. Next, he wrings out his soaking clothes and hangs them out to dry on the frame of the bike. It is not until those tasks are done, that he squeegees his head, forearms and chest, and, finally, his legs. His intention is to stand naked until the sea-breeze dries him, but his shaking becomes so bad that he decides he has to get dressed. His pants are on and he has an arm inside his shirt sleeve when he stops himself. He knows wearing wet clothes is a dangerous idea, maybe even life-threatening if his core temperature drops too low; however he doesn't think that he can endure being naked much longer.

Joe screams STOP at the wind, then, a second, later, applies the same command to himself. He stands stock-still as he takes a series of deep breaths. The shaking becomes a little less violent. He closes his eyes to see what Bob Tom would do.

When Joe was rescued from the Hudson, there was a blanket and fire. Here, he has neither. When Bob Tom towed him from the barge to Manhattan, he dried off in a marina restroom and half-dried his clothes with the hand dryer. That won't bappen here.

He needs shelter. Joe scans the shore and sees where the wind has carved a shallow dip in a small mound of sand above the wrack line. He trots over, collects handfuls of dried seaweed, layers his nest, and curls up in the indentation. He pulls more ribbons of grass on top of himself. His hidey-hole isn't comfortable and it isn't warm, but it is warmer and more comfortable than standing wet and naked in a strong March wind. After awhile, the shivering stops.

As he waits for his clothes to dry, Joe considers how accurate Blesonus and Bob Tom have been when each, individually, told him he was naïve. As he huddles against the elements, two ideas come to him. A boy with a bike on a beach beyond the Pale with no blanket, no matches, little food, no extra clothing and no water is beyond naïve. Prissi. A collage of Prissi whispering about romantic love in the Waterville library, looping the loop in a clear blue sky, prankish eyes, shadowed eyes, snorts and snarls, and...kisses. Kisses that were there and then they weren't. Joe realizes that he has come a long way from home looking for someone he doesn't understand.

Joe is curled up tight in his hole thinking about Prissi and what keeps him bound to her when a noise different from the unceasing skirls of sea and wind intrudes. Rushing, skittering, pounding, howling, squawking, and crying, grow and subside as the winds gusts. Then, the skein of noise grows so loud that the wind can't suppress it. Finally, there is a blur rushing from the woods, across the broken ground and under the laser. Pops, hisses, other sounds that bring tears to Joe's eyes. Moments later the smell carries to him. He hides under the grass until he is sure whatever has caused the death flight is gone. When he finally emerges, the streaks of his tears are deeply outlined by the black of ash.

After his clothes are dry, Joe gets dressed and rides the bike along a path parallel to the laser's beams. His plans to go north until his mypod shows he is on the proper latitude to turn back east. But, after two hours of slow progress, Joe sees an opening in the woods with a beaten trail heading east and, on an impatient whim, takes it.

The narrow path starts out winding through a denseness of brush that grows to twice the boy's height. He enters the path walking alongside his bike, but with the trail being so narrow, he keeps snagging the handle bars in the vines. After a few minutes, he finds it is easier to ride than walk alongside the bike. However, riding means that he needs to be constantly alert for low hanging branches. In the first hour it seems he has to portage across creeks and brooks every five minutes. That is the bad part; the good part is that most of them are less than a half meter deep and none is more than two meters wide. As frequent as the streams are, so, too, are the numbers of junctions with other paths. Those other paths seem to be much the same as the one which he travels. Their frequency and similarity get Joe wondering what has made and maintained these passages. He is crossing what might be the seventh or eighth ribbon of water when he first notices the hoof print, half again as big as his palm, in the mud of an embankment. Once he sees the first ones, and he shifts some of his attention from the branches overhead to what is beneath his tires, he sees hundreds more. Although Joe knows little about horses, he wonders how conducive the habitat he is crossing through can be for horses. Ten minutes later, he stops the Schwinner so that he can shut his eyes to help his memory. He had spent more than two hours riding along the unbroken cairn of bones, but now he can't remember seeing a skeleton as big as that of a horse. He wonders what force can keep a horse from making the same mistake as thousands of other animals.

After awhile, the land rises, the brush thins out and individual and small stands of trees, ten to twenty meters high, appear. Despite the openness, the trail itself remains obvious. Joe crosses through a meadow of knee-high grasses a hundred meters wide. Fifteen minutes later, the land drops back down. The rivulets of water increase, as does the density of brush.

It is late in the afternoon and time is sliding into shadow. Joe is hungry, but not yet so hungry that he is willing to eat the last of his food. Although the traveler is bone-tired, he is hyper-alert. The further he has moved along the path, the thicker the hoof prints have become. Now, he is moving along a path that is little more than churned mud. The trail, though wider than before, has become so messy that he has stopped riding and begun walking again. Part of Joe's reason for dismounting is because of how difficult it has become to ride, but another motive is that if something happens, like a remuda galloping down the trail, he wants to be able to leap aside quickly. He is pushing his bike through a low spot filled with mud the consistency of cookie dough, when he hears sounds. Birds, thousands of birds, have been singing love songs and, like Eastern Europeans, arguing over territory. This is different. More speech-like. But, low and guttural. Rather than reassure the boy that he is not alone in the woods, that safety and sustenance are nearby, the sounds cause the skin on the back of Joe's neck to prickle. He moves forward as silently as he can while dividing his attention between looking ahead and looking sideways for a gap in the brush big enough to get himself and the STA off the path.

Before he has moved fifteen meters down the trail, Joe spies a low break in the undergrowth. When he stoops, the boy can see that it, too, is a well-kept path but one made by and for an animal much smaller than a horse. Joe squats down and makes his way five meters into the tunnel. It isn't comfortable to stoop down, as he must if he is to make his way, but seeing no hoof prints acts as a great motivator. The boy turns around and retraces his steps. While listening carefully, he lowers the seat and handlebars of the bike; however when he tries to pull the bike down the path, the handlebars catch. Joe backs out, loosens and twists the bars so that they align with the bike's frame and tries again. This time the profile of the bike is slim enough that he and it both can move along the trail.

Joe moves slowly. He stops frequently to listen. An image of Huck Finn comes to him. Pirates. The boy has been on the path for less than a quarter hour when it comes to him that he is moving away from the voices. He squats down on the damp ground to think. He is confused. The day before, as he rode his bicycle along the cracked pavement, a feeling of adventure, of derring-do, had been inside him, as well the feeling of loss that Bob Tom had left him. The night in the woods had been scary, but when the sun rose he had felt a return of courage. Following along the fence to the ocean had given him a sense of accomplishment, but that confidence began to shatter when he stumbled and the water surged over his head. Hearing and smelling the death of the animals being run out of the forest did more damage. Once he entered the woods, each time the trail intersected with another trail, another piece of his courage got left behind. The deeper he penetrated into the woods, the less sure he became that he could ever make his way back.

Now, Joe is feeling like a character in a fairy tale, except that instead of marking his trail with kernels of corn, he has been leaving behind dribs and drabs of courage. In a fairy tale, when a path is longer than the bag of corn is deep, problems, serious problems result. Joe thinks that that he might have very few kernels of courage left. The sensation of being alone and filled with fear, the same feeling he had had when hiking along the ridge with Seka and Adrona and, far worse, when he was lost in the bowels of the cave has a fierce grip on him. Joe shudders when he gets the notion that, if he doesn't get moving soon, he will become too afraid to move.

To energize himself, Joe makes himself think of what he and Bob Tom have been doing as an adventure. Other than Prissi herself, there can't be anyone else at Dutton having a...Joe pauses his thinking to be sure that he chooses the most appropriate word...more eventful spring vacation. He cottons onto that thought—that he is having an interlude—and, too soon, will be back in school.

Joe pushes the Schwinner off the low path and into the woods. He hides it at the base of a half-dozen river birch trees and covers it with a blanket of dried leaves. He marks the tree next to the ones where he has hidden the bike by scraping away a piece of bark near the base of the trunk. The teener looks around to memorize his embarkation point as best he can before carefully starting off in the direction of the voices.

As Joe crawls and crab-walks through the brush, the point from where the voices come shifts around. The boy hears what he supposes is the clopping of horse hooves. He considers whether the horses might be domesticated and he is listening to their owners. He wonders what kind of men would choose to live in the Pale. He tries to imagine what the male equivalent of the Greenlander women might be. The only idea that comes is a woodsy equivalent of the subway zies.

Joe becomes so involved with the voices that he forgets to blaze his progress. When he does remember, he is overwhelmed by a tangle of feelings whose strands include fear, shame, and being out of his depth. It seems impossible, so soon after getting lost in the Greenlander's mountain maze, that for a second time he has forgotten to mark his path. The chagrined boy whirls around and studies the woods until he spies his last mark. He quickly retraces his steps and adds two more blazes. When he is satisfied the trail is well-marked, the teener moves back to where he left off.

As he progresses, the land rises and, as it had before when he came across the meadow, the brush thins and the trees seem to grow taller. As Joe approaches the summit of the rise, the voices grow louder but no more intelligible. Just shy of the crest, the cautious adventurer slides down on his belly and stretches forward with his chin bobbing just above the ground. He slinks forward a meter and, then, another.

Poking his head over the ridge, Joe spies a ring of woods, mostly free of underbrush, surrounding an open area that he guesses to be a half-kilometer wide and twice that long. Joe's first thought is that it is another meadow, but a second look tells him that, although there are patches of tall weeds, there also are irregular plats of land which appear to be planted with spring crops. With the growing shadows, it takes Joe a moment to pick out the long low building tucked under the trees off to his left. A second later it is obvious that the voices he has been hearing are coming from there. The nervous boy decides that his best plan is to withdraw further into the woods and make his way around to the backside of the building. Joe has gone no more than a quarter of the way when he hears a metallic rattle and then a scrape. Carefully raising his head, Joe watches a garage door roll up. Even when the door is fully open, the lowering sun makes it hard to see into the gaping darkness. Several voices are talking at once. The voices grow louder and a few seconds later, louder again. Suddenly, two men on horseback gallop from the building.

Joe's breath disappears in shock when he understands that he is seeing something very different from men on horseback. The two centaurs' rear and their front hooves claw at the air. The larger centaur, whose head is totally bald, reaches down, picks up a large rock and hurls it at the building. With a resounding boom the rock smashes a metal door and ricochets to the ground. When the thrower reaches down for a second stone, the other centaur, a smaller, gray-haired man with a huge belly atop a dappled gray pony-sized body, grabs his arm. Joe thinks the words they are shouting at each other might be, "Not now," and, "Then, never."

After a few more seconds, the shouting slows and the decibels drop as suddenly as the rock from the bald centaur's hand. The two man-horses trot off to the far side of the meadow and disappear into the woods. Joe remains paralyzed by what he has witnessed. He is doubly shocked. The bigger shock comes from seeing a live man-horse. Something intriguing and attractive as a mythic creature is almost unimaginable in the flesh. Even though he has heard geris talk about how flabbergasted their parents or grandparents were when people first began to fledge, Joe can't imagine that their amazement could have been of a magnitude equal to his own at what he has just seen. Winging makes sense. Most humans revere freedom more than any god. Wings solved so many ecologic and demographic problems. Winging was mutation for a greater good. As far as Joe can comprehend, a centaur is a mutation strictly for mutation's sake. To the dazed teener, it seems an abomination. What causes his second shock and makes the first worse is the age and individuality of the centaurs. Joe has seen many imaginings of the mythical creatures. In those renderings, clean, good looking men with curly hair, rigid spines, golden skin and muscled chests did whatever they did. The creatures Joe has seen—fat, bald, wearing raggedy shirts, displaying the normal attributes of being human—are less mythic than just insanely bizarre.

As Joe lies on the ground recovering from his shock, he realizes that he is still hearing voices. Keeping so low that he chances a sneeze from his nose being tickled by fallen leaves, Joe begins making his way toward the shadows of the dusk-wrapped building.

The sun is down, but the moon is still off-stage when Joe carefully stands up just past the rear corner of the building. He is struck by how much he can see just from starlight and the faint glow dribbling from the bottom of the three heavily curtained windows. The boy wishes Bob Tom were alongside so that he could show off his skill.

No, he corrects himself, not show off. Just show.

Joe studies the ground to plot out a safe and silent path. It occurs to him that it has been several minutes since he has heard any voices. He wonders if the centaurs could have left the stable while he was working his way around back. A worse thought comes. What if the centaurs' silence comes from listening for him? That thought freezes him. He has no doubt that the centaurs can be very quiet when they choose. How else could they get old enough to be bald and gray? Immobilized, with his captured breath burning his lungs, Joe considers why the men-horses might become quiet. Awareness of his presence is one. To divert himself from that thought, Joe considers whether the centaurs might be sleeping. Don't horses sleep when the sun goes down? Given how early in the evening it is and the fact that the stable remains lighted, the notion escapes his grasp. He wonders if they might be eating, or.... The boy gives up. He has no idea what a centaur might be doing just after dusk on a fine spring day.

As he stares at the minefield of leaves and limbs that the winter winds have pushed against the back of the building, Joe tells himself and repeats it like a mantra that if the centaurs discover him, his escape route is to make it back to the low tunnel from where he emerged. If he can make it to the tunnel, the space is much too small for a centaur to follow him...unless they have weapons of some kind. Joe finds it hard to convince himself that anything human, or half-human, ever would be without weapons.

The agitated teener forces himself forward. A half-second later, Joe's foot snaps a twig and his mouth involuntarily blurts out a word that Shakespeare liked and Noramican teenerz have long loved. Joe immediately twists his neck toward where he made his last blaze. His body says bolt, but his mind makes it hold its ground. An interminable thirty seconds finally pass, but nothing happens. Finally, Joe makes himself approach the first window and the faint glow of light which has drawn him like a moth.

Through the narrow band of light at the bottom of the curtain, Joe sees three centaurs standing around a massive plank table eating what looks to be fried fish and baked potatoes, lots of baked potatoes. The man-horse who Joe best can see has four potatoes on a large square wooden plate. In the middle of the table is a beach ball-sized wooden bowl holding a mound of small green apples. All three of the centaurs are old. Their cheeks are mostly covered with gray, scraggly beards, but where the skin does show, it is red, weathered and wrinkled. After he notices them, Joe fixates on how huge the centaurs' hands are. They look like they have spent years in hard work. Even as Joe watches in awe at the most domestic of scenes playing out with the least domestic of actors, he sees just how burdened by age the centaurs are. Their hands move slowly and in ways that appear to be painful. The centaur nearest to Joe keeps raising his back left hoof as if to relieve an ache. When the centaur most nearly opposite to Joe opens his mouth to load it with potato, Joe can see that his teeth are mostly just memories. When he sees those empty gums, it hits the boy how much of a centaur's day must be spent with finding, preparing and eating food. With only a human's mouth and stomach to feed a horse-sized lower body, Joe guesses the centaurs must have to eat five or six times a day. Thinking about the centaurs' mouth and stomach lead Joe to consider what the centaurs' whole digestive system might be like, a thought he chooses not to linger on.

It is not until Joe's cold nose touches the even colder window casing that he realizes how dangerously mesmerized he has been become with the centaurs. He pulls back in terror. The foreign world he has been engrossed with instantly loses its power. With his knees quivering and mind struggling to keep his breath from blurting out of his throat, Joe scuttles backward until he feels safe enough to move to the next sliver of pale light.

With cautious step after cautious step, it takes Joe more five minutes to get close to the second window. He is crouching down reaching toward the sill when the world explodes in noise. The rattled adventurer whirls, runs, trips, falls and surrenders.

As the boy lies on the grass, the thunderous noise that has startled him, resolves itself into words—words that Joe first recognizes as English and, then, identifies as almost assuredly coming from an Adirondack riverman named Bob Tom Damall. Despite the urge to run to his friend, caution keeps Joe on the ground. It occurs to him that the yelling he has heard earlier may have been the centaurs arguing about the riverman.

As suddenly as he had begun, Bob Tom stops his lusty singing of the days and ways of Middle Earth. The shell-shocked Joe slowly gets to his feet and makes his way back toward the stable. When Joe looks through the window he sees his old friend tethered in chains leaning his elbows on the top of a slatted partition. Joe's first thought is to alert the riverman to his presence, but, after he hesitates to consider whether there is a way to do that safely, that idea gets pushed aside. The teener has enough experience to know that Bob Tom is not good at curbing his enthusiasms. Joe goes through his options. He can tap on the window and hope that Bob Tom hears him and the centaurs don't. If the tapping is successful, then what? The old man's chain doesn't look like it's long enough to let him get close to the window. But, even if it is, will Bob Tom keep quiet as he pulls back the heavy curtains and sees Joe? With each consideration, the cautious teener thinks it's a bigger mistake to knock on the window. Joe spends a couple of more minutes thinking of other variations of how he might alert Bob Tom before it comes to him that having Bob Tom know that he is there does nothing for the old man's rescue if he doesn't have a way to free him from his chains.

The boy backs away from the window and makes his way to the third and last narrow bar of light. As he approaches it, he can't think of anything but the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It's a leap from three beds that are too soft, too hard and just right to his situation, but there is something about sneaking peeks into the three rooms that is making a connection.

Joe feels an ache in his thighs when he squats down so that he can see under the bottom of the curtain. He considers how little hockey has prepared him for a quest.

No beds. No bears. Just two pot-bellied centaurs reading books by the green light of an ancient, battered phosphor lamp. Joe has only been in place for a minute or two before one of the centaurs, dressed in a drab green Free Lindsay Lohan sweatshirt, which bunches on his belly, yawns. Although the yawn only goes on for two seconds before the centaur raises his book to his face to cover it, the black magic is done. Joe's yawn is so big that his jaw pops. He realizes he's been clenching his teeth while he's been spying. A second yawn splits his face. As that one finally fades away like a cymbal's ring, Joe is overwhelmed with exhaustion. He doesn't want to rescue Bob Tom or outsmart a posse of centaurs. He wants to sleep. With a pillow that smells like his hair when his hair is clean, sheets that smell like soap, a mattress that doesn't sag. In a warm room. Maybe not at Dutton. Maybe not a home. But, somewhere...and before he sleeps he wants to eat three double bulgur burgers with lots of tahini washed down with a huge pom-ade.

Ten minutes later, the boy lies on a pile of leaves feeling extremely drained, somewhat safe, and absolutely guilty. After twenty minutes of listening hard and hearing nothing that sounds like humans or horses, Joe crawls back out of the tunnel, uncovers the bike and raids its panniers for two of his last three Nougie-nugget bars. As the teener eats, the moon rises and the chiaroscuro beauty of the forestscape attracts enough of his attention that some of his fear fades away. He is still hungry when he finishes his meal, but knows that he has to save the last of his meager supplies for tomorrow.

Despite his exhaustion, it takes Joe hours to fall asleep. Some of that insomnia comes from the cold seeping through the blanket of leaves he has buried himself in. Some comes from worries that the darkness hides a battalion of ticks coming his way. The rest comes from shame.

When Joe finally does fall asleep, it is a deep one because the bear had snuffled him several times and begun to brush back the blanket of leaves before Joe comes awake. The boy's dream-clouded blue eyes open to bright yellow ones, a long glistening brown snout and a sachem's hoard of teeth.

# CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Paternal Instincts

It has cost him a lot of money, but Joshua Fflowers has his freedom. He realizes that to many it might not look like freedom. After all, the trillionaire is tethered to a hospital bed with a half-dozen tubes and, seemingly, a one-to-one ratio of medical personnel to tubes to tend them. Fflowers' health is much better than it was a week ago, but it still is the second worse in his long life. What he has done is risky, but, as he pondered the decision, he reminded himself that every significant act of his life has involved risk. Dr. Blaine, and the rest of the school of doctors sharking about the institute, have insisted that he must stay. But, the Juvenal Institute is not where the old man wants to die.

Despite the many years of living, the many years of ill-health, the horrible boredom of the self-absorption that ill-health brings, Joshua Fflowers still, mostly, wants to keep living. But. But. But, if he is going to die, then, he doesn't want it to be in any place other than the Airie. His home provides both a haven and a special opportunity for his death.

Risk? At his age? He'll gladly take the risk.

After signing two sets of papers—one which funded a major program in mind biology resets with a Juvenal Institute staff member as the primary researcher and the other which relieved the Institute and its staff of any and all liability for the problems which have occurred with the rich man's rejuvenation—Fflowers prognosis becomes so rosy that the Institute can, in good faith and conscience, release him.

Fflowers makes his goodbyes, which are somewhat unnecessary since a significant contingent of the Institute's regen and rejuve staff is coming with him to the Airie.

Fflowers is absolutely forbidden to have visitors; however, within hours after arriving at the Airie, Fflowers summons Vartan Smarkzy. The old schoolmates spend two hours together.

Smarkzy appears to be forthcoming. He has known Prissi Langue for less than two years. After the fact, yes, he can suppose that a part, a small part, of his interest in her was that there was a resemblance to Elena Fflowers. However, since he had not known Elena at fifteen and his vision is far from what it once was, he wasn't, nor could he be expected to be, struck by the resemblance, like Fflowers himself has been. When Smarkzy asks Fflowers what he thinks is going on, the trillionaire says that he is persuaded that Prissi is a clone of Elena. When the Dutton teacher wonders how that is possible, Fflowers said because Elena is still alive. When Smarkzy asks how he knows that to be true, Fflowers answers, "Because I'm old, rich and patient. Enough time and money applied to any problem will usually bring an answer."

"How long have you known?"

"Much too long."

"Where is she?"

"Where she wants to be...away from me."

"Africa? Prissi says that she grew up in Africa."

"Not Africa. She didn't grow up with Elena. If she had, I would know. In fact, I doubt that Elena even knows that she exists."

"So how could she be cloned? Who else would have Elena's eggs?"

When Fflowers smiles, it makes him look like he is in excruciating pain, "You probably were interested in Priscilla not because her looks reminded you of Elena, but because her behavior reminded you of someone else."

"Who?"

"Laureby's old girl friend."

"Roan? Roan's been dead since the explosion."

Fflowers' bitter laugh quickly turns into a wracking cough.

"Vart, who was the smartest person we ever knew?

Smart is all ways. School smart. Science smart. Street smart."

"Roan Winslow."

"Gone without a trace. Burned to ashes except for a small fragment of bone and two teeth.

"Priscilla's mother was named Nora, an anagram of Roan. Elieson. Elide. To pass over or ignore. Nora Elieson emerged from the dust and shadow of Africa about thirty-five years ago. I've asked some very good...historians...and they tell me that Nora Elieson has no history. She was a good wife, a good mother and she died in an accident three years ago."

Smarkzy rebuts, "An unexpectedly dull third, fourth and fifth act for the smartest person we ever knew."

Joshua Fflowers shrugs his shoulders and twirks his lips down in answer.

"It could be that people change. For example, Beryl Langue, a mediocre scientist for decades with the GN, marries Nora Elieson, and, a decade later has figured out how to grow regenerative wings on guinea hens."

Now, it is Smarkzy's turn to laugh and his laugh, too, degenerates into a cough. When the old man gets himself under control, he says, "Some people change."

Fflowers leans his head back into his pillows and speaks slowly to the VA to adjust the hospital bed. He seemingly doesn't do a good job with his instructions to the voice activator because the bed fails miserably to execute his commands. Fflowers begins swearing in exasperation. Finally, his hands pat the bed covers until he finds a remote. Still swearing, he pounds on the remote. Like a badly trained dog, the bed refuses to do any of its tricks. It is not until Smarkzy takes the remote, and punches a short sequence of buttons that the bed obeys and Fflowers reclines.

Having suffered through these kinds of Fflowersian misdirections hundreds of times, Smarkzy has patiently waited for the question he knows is coming.

"Which am I?"

Smarkzy doesn't hesitate, "You've changed."

Fflowers waits. Smarkzy holds up a finger, "One. You've known where Elena is and you have left her alone. Two. You seem more interested in understanding Prissi than in possessing her. Three. You are old and sick, but you don't seem overly concerned with finding out whether the scattered knowledge that Trinity discovered is coming back together again."

Fflower's mutter barely carries to the chair where Smarkzy is sitting.

"Sometimes the blind are allowed to see. If only for a day. I am interested in what happens to the girl. You tell me her father has been killed and that she has disappeared. So I'll ask you what you asked me a couple of minutes ago. What do you think is going on?"

Smarkzy takes his time responding. "I think there is a good chance that she has enemies both because of who she is and because of what she may possess. If she is important to you, then, whoever controls Prissi gains some control over you."

"I have many enemies."

"And, if, somehow, she possesses a key to bringing Trinity's work back into the light, then, almost anyone could be interested."

Fflowers' sigh disturbs so much fluid in his lungs it sounds like someone thrumming a thick rubber band.

"I'm tired. Can you help me?"

Smarkzy's eyes grow bright at his old friend's request.

"I can try. If Trinity's work is awakening, then that must in some way involve Elena. Tell me where she is and I'll go there to find out if Prissi has also made her way there."

Fflowers' eyes are shut as if he already has abdicated his role.

"I can't do that. For twenty-three years, I have known where she is. There even have been periods when I have known what she was doing. More than anything I have ever wanted to do, I wanted to go there. To show myself. To stand before Elena's fury and her despite. To see the loathing in her eyes. To hear her tell me of how my pride poisoned us and poisoned her. I wanted to go before her and stand still long enough to absorb all of her fury until she herself would grow still. And, when that quiet moment finally came, where her emotions were exhausted, to tell her that since she left, 'I have been and always will be undone.'

"Vart, I have spent thousands of an old man's dwindling hours imagining myself in the clearing before her door saying, 'I am undone.' But, I can't go, couldn't go, shouldn't go, wouldn't go. Some harm is sufficient enough. And if I can't go, then neither can you."

While the Fflowers' histrionics have been going on, Smarkzy wonders if the old man hamming and shamming before him is even the slightest bit aware of his self-delusions. Telling himself that he will pay more attention to that later, but to focus now on getting what he wants, he raises the palms of his hands as if he is about to receive a beneficence.

"A humble megalomaniac. A pentitent, ecstatic in his remorse. When will delusion end? When will myth get turned aside for reality, Josh? The girl needs help, protection. You may have the means to do that. If you do nothing, and she is harmed or killed, then, not only do you destroy her, but you destroy Elena a second time. Where is she? Where's Elena?"

While Smarkzy has been speaking, Joshua Fflowers' face has remained closed in a barely breathing death mask. Even after Smarkzy finishes, Fflowers remains as if in last sleep.

"I need to know!"

Finally, the failing man's lips move and three syllables, quiet as a moth's flight, drift out, "Brookhaven."

Vartan Smarkzy hasn't heard that word in years. Brookhaven National Laboratory had been an immense research facility out on Long Island. As Smarkzy remembers, it had covered hundreds, if not thousands, of acres. The word that Fflowers has spoken would not be enough to find Elena.

"Where?

"Building Eight."

# CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Destruction

It had been a day since Prissi had been unhooked from her medical ganglia. After Prissi was free, Olewan had helped her to sit up and get her feet planted on the floor. After taking several minutes to gather her strength, finally, she stood, took a step and then another. At first, she was wobbly. The first half-dozen steps were done with Olewan's dry twisted fingers holding Prissi's elbow in a tight grip. But, after that, using more will than skill, she had managed to walk four times across her room and back by herself. She finished her walk, eased into her bed and fell deeply asleep.

The next morning after she had finished her breakfast, Prissi agreed to go outside with Olewan. Half-way to the door, Prissi winced and slumped. The old woman grabbed her arm and whispered encouragements, none of which reminded Prissi of Ms. Tronce's blandishments. Once they were through the door, the ancient woman let go. Prissi took over steadying herself for several more steps by trailing a hand along the cool walls of the hall. After getting some confidence, Prissi paid less attention to the walls and more to the end of the corridor where muted sunlight painted a pale yellow patch on the floor of the lobby. That shimmering patch drew Prissi forward like a trumpet vine draws hummingbirds. She suddenly realized just how much of the time since spring break began that she had spent away from the sun. In Africa, the sun was every day. Its presence lifted and lightened the death, poverty and disease that were everywhere. Prissi realized how much she counted on the sun when she saw those weak rays at the end of the hall. She felt like the days in this place, the days underground in the subway, even the hours spent in the Gramercy Arms basement and the library had blanched her, like asparagus.

Prissi picked up her pace. Her weakness itself seemed to weaken with each step she took. She was more than half-way down the long corridor when the sunlight on the floor was replaced by a pulsing shadow and a thunderous pounding.

Prissi came to a sudden stop when Olewan grabbed her sleeve.

"In here."

Olewan snapped a door handle and pushed Prissi into a pitch black room.

"Stay here."

As Prissi listened to the old woman shuffle away, she was reminded of lying in bed in her darkened dorm room on Sunday mornings at Dutton listening to the herd of hungry girls shuffling in their Drylons to the dining hall for brunch.

The pounding stopped and shouting began. After a few seconds, another pounding began, a different pounding, one that Prissi could feel through the bottom of her feet. Seconds later, Prissi heard glass being smashed. That was followed by a slapping sound which she recognized as footsteps running down the hall. Hiding in the dark was getting to be too hard. Prissi put a hand in front of her trying to find the door.

As Olewan had scuttled toward the door, she had expected to see a furious Mortos. He had been to the Bury the day before talking about a hostage, a good friend of the girl's, who he would trade for a guarantee from Olewan that she would produce twenty-four centaur clones and teach Mortos how to care for them. The old scientist had brushed aside the centaur's proposals with the same asperity she would have had for any ridiculous self-indulgence. It wasn't until later, sitting in the shadows looking at her own clone rhythmically raise and lower the worn blanket covering her chest that Olewan considered her own self-indulgence.

Olewan wanted to live. Forever and ever. With her daughter. Gift from the forgiving gods. She wanted to live. She wanted the crystals that would allow her to live.

Even before she was close to the door, Olewan was screaming at the centaur. She was sure that Mortos had stolen the crystals and her future when he found the girl. Olewan's rage, that the leader of the centaurs might be withholding the means for her to live another two hundred years with the girl whose elbow she had just held, caused Olewan's vision to fracture into faceted images, like an insect's, as she approached the door.

It wasn't until her hand, made unsteady from the chemistry of her wrath, reached for the door handle that Olewan saw that it was more than just Mortos on the other side of the filthy glass of the narrow sidelight to the heavy metal door.

The old crone's hand was quaking as her fingers grasped the handle. She shrieked, "What do you want?"

Even though Mortos' low drone was muffled by the door, his message was clear.

"Want a future. Like humans. Like you."

Olewan peered through the door.

"Give me the crystals."

"What? What crystals?"

"The ones you stole."

"Didn't steal. You're the thief. Steal our future. We have Bird Bob. Girl's friend. Here to trade."

Olewan looked at the ancient winger. The craggy-faced man was leaning on a stick. A worn rope was tied over his shoulders and under his wings before being attached to the neck of Portos. Something about the man's face enraged Olewan as much as the centaur's lies and demands.

"The crystals!"

Caught up in his own rage, Mortos rose up and smashed his front hooves on the cracked concrete in front of the door. The centaur's back hooves lashed out, and, if Bob Tom hadn't anticipated what was coming and stumbled sideways, they would have destroyed the riverman. When Mortos realized that he had almost killed what he had come to trade, he let loose with a tangle of noise twisted from strands of rage, frustration and remorse. The centaur reared up again and battered his hooves against the massive door. The door dented, but did not give.

From the other side, Mortos heard a muffled cry, "The crystals. The crystals."

The centaur didn't have any crystals. All he had was the old man. He continued his assault except that his anger had so robbed him of reason that after three or four more strikes against the door, his right hoof slipped off target. It smashed through the wire-reinforced glass of the sidelight and became wedged in a trap of glass and wire. The centaur reared back in fury at the pain, a move which only served to set his hoof tighter in its trap. Blood streamed from the deep gashes in his fetlock and followed the fault lines of the fractured glass to make a crimson web.

The centaur's torso writhed violently, seemingly willing, like a mink in a trap, to severe its hoof to regain its freedom. On the other side of the glass, Olewan stood frozen in shock except for her eyes which darted from the twisting, jerking hoof to the rivulets of blood to the hundreds of small pieces of tempered glass strewn across the floor like spilled treasure.

After an interminable two seconds, the old woman shrieked, "Stop! Stop!" in a way that seemed like a command to the hoof itself rather than the centaur. In an uncanny echo Olewan heard, "Stop!" screamed from beyond the door and also from behind her.

Bob Tom's jerk on his rope was so unexpected by Portos, whose attention was riveted on his leader's dilemma, that he staggered forward the two paces the riverman needed.

Working himself under the trapped right leg of the centaur, very well aware of the danger the flailing second leg presented, Bob Tom reached up and wrapped his hands around the bleeding leg and began pushing upward in an attempt to free it. The groan of Bob Tom's efforts, as he struggled against the weight of the centaur's leg, were drowned out by the anguished sounds the centaur himself was making. Bob Tom pushed and strained, but he couldn't quite get Mortos' leg up high enough to where the hole in the window widened. After the days of the quest, followed by two days of little water, less food, and an untended broken foot, the riverman could feel his strength quickly fading. Some of the gain Bob Tom had made getting the leg free was lost when Mortos, his own strength flagging from the loss of blood and loss of anger's quick burst of energy, had his back legs falter. Bob Tom reset his feet and pushed up with all of his might. The centaur's leg moved a little, but not enough.

"Help."

The riverman wondered why the centaur he was chained to didn't come to his leader's aid, but Portos could do nothing to help. A decade of arthritis had crippled his shoulders so that his hands could barely reach his mouth to feed himself.

Bob Tom groaned and shoved, but nothing happened except that the broken edges of glass seemed to cut even more deeply into the horse's flesh. The ancient riverman pushed with what he knew would be his last effort given how badly his knees and arms were shaking. Suddenly, his task became easier. The leg moved upward, first a centimeter and, then, two more. Bob Tom saw a wild-haired something, man, boy, simian, on the other side of the blood streaked glass. Another centimeter. Bob Tom looked up and saw that another three or four centimeters would be enough. He took a deep, hopeful breath and pushed, but nothing happened. Too much of his strength was gone. The anguished howl of the centaur shocked him. He pushed again. Nothing. Nothing. Then, something. The leg rose and rose and rose until it was centered in the hole. He heard a voice scream, "Now."

A force pushed the wounded hoof back through the window. Bob Tom started to scramble sideways to get out of harm's way as the dripping red leg came crashing down, but froze when he realized that there were two faces on the other side of the streaked and mottled window. The wild-haired boy had been joined by a wan-skinned, fierce-faced girl.

# CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Death

Joe's startled, convulsive response to its inveigling paws causes the bear to be as afraid as the boy. Each stares at the other through the dawn's pink mist with hearts racing and limbs more prepared for flight than fight. Joe's lungs are grabbing great gouts of the misty dawn air trying to keep up with his body's demands for oxygen. He can hear the bear's ragged breathing as well as his own. That sound reminds him of Doormat Doorley after doing a dozen sprints down and back on the ice. Except for his heaving chest, Joe stays stock still. Although his mind is drowning in adrenaline and epinephrine, he calms a tiny piece of it to try to figure out his next moves. Can he outrun the bear? No. Not unless he can get on the larger path with the Schwinner. Can he out-climb it? No. Out-think it? At the moment, he even doubts that. His only option seems to be to out-wait it.

After two minutes, Joe's breathing is much slower. So, too, is the bear's. Like Joe, it seems to have decided that its best option is to wait to see what the other, larger, animal will do. As Joe waits, he studies the bear while being sure not to catch its gaze. He thinks that is right. A direct stare will be seen as a challenge. A moment later, he is second guessing himself. Failure to look the bear in the eyes could be interpreted as fear and cowardice. As Joe watches, the bear starts shrinking. Its spine, which has been rigid, begins to slump. Its fur, which has been puffed out as if the bear had electrocuted itself, begins to droop. As the bear shrinks, Joe realizes that the animal before him probably is not an adult. He doesn't know whether that is good or bad news. A young bear should be less vicious. A young bear's mother, if she were to be close by, could be more so.

Joe's thinking is drawn sharply back to the creature itself when the yearling opens its mouth wide and displays an impressive array of teeth before making a disturbingly loud noise, but, fortunately, a noise that doesn't quite sound like a growl. The bear raises a paw to its face and vigorously rubs its snout. Two things come to Joe simultaneously. The first is that the bear has no claws on the paw rubbing its face. The second is that the bear has just yawned. Within moments, the bear is starting to look less like a life-threatening danger and more like something a lower-mid girl would bring to Dutton to decorate her bed and keep homesickness at bay. Joe lets his hand creep toward his pak. As the hand crawls across the leaf-covered ground, the bear cocks its head, seemingly in anticipation. Even before Joe's hand makes contact, the bear begins weaving its head back and forth as it sniffs the air. By the time Joe has the pak open and the wrapper off of the last Nougie Nugget, foam is dripping from ursine jaws. Joe breaks the bar into four pieces. The first he tosses so that it lands just behind the bear. A lightning fast snuffle, and even faster jaw snap, and the treat is gone. Joe tosses the second piece five meters behind the bear and the next even farther away. Joe throws the last piece as far as he can, then quickly reaches down, grabs his pak and picks up three rocks. Twenty meters away in the woods, after devouring the last piece, the bear whirls around with a black lab's anticipation for the next throw of its stick. Joe throws all three rocks as far as he can. He aims the first behind the bear, the second he throws to the left and the third even farther to the left. As the bear lumbers toward the nearest rock, Joe uncovers his bike and hurries away as fast as he can.

In a scene that might be from an inane kid vid, Joe is squatted down trying to see through the window into the stall where Bob Tom was being held, when the bear bounds up like the never-can-quit-playing-fetch family dog. When its snout nudges Joe's shoulder, the startled teener catches a complicated whiff of peanuts, rotten fruit, fish, and nougat. As soon as the boy reaches into his pak, which is strapped around his waist to see what might be left to give to his new-found friend, the bear begins tugging at the pouch with its teeth. Even though far from full-grown, the animal has a bear's legendary strength. Joe is pulled over. The bear begins walking backwards and dragging Joe with him. Trying to remain calm given his ludicrous position and the noise being made, Joe feels along the right side of the bear's slobbering jaw, finds the buckle, releases it and rolls away. The bear makes a noise like a fat man's chortle and lumbers back into the woods with its prize.

It takes Joe less than a minute to realize that the stable is empty. He creeps to its front edge expecting to witness some surreal bucolic scene of centaurs tending their crops, but the open space of interlaced meadow and gardens is empty. In front of the door from which he had seen the angry centaurs gallop the previous night, Joe stares at the ground until he finds what look to be footprints among the hoof prints. Having found what he was looking for, Joe races around to the back of the stable, grabs his bike and begins to follow the trail. As he gets further away from the building, where the earth is less churned, Joe finds Bob Tom's prints easier to see. It takes him several minutes before he solves the puzzle of the small hole that accompanies the old man's prints. As soon as he understands that Bob Tom is using a walking stick, Joe sees that one foot, the right one, is making a much lighter print in the dust than the left. Joe wonders if his friend is too injured to be able to fly away when Joe rescues him.

In the same way as had happened the day before, Joe hears the angry guttural voices of the centaurs long before he can see them. He has been on the centaurs' trail for almost an hour. Even though he is no woodsman, the imprint of his friend's shoes on the damp trail has been so obvious that Joe has been able to pedal with few interruptions other than creek crossings. The path itself has snaked around a dozen bogs and swamps and smooth-surfaced ponds.

Standing at the end of the trail, Joe can look across a clearing and see a large centaur, whom he doesn't recognize, rearing up and smashing its hooves into the rusty metal door of an immense low-lying vine-covered building. The centaur's attack resounds across the clearing. Bob Tom is roped to a second, still centaur. Even though the two centaurs seem fully engaged with the doorway of the building and his friend is less than a fifty meters away, Joe drifts back into the deeper shadows of the woods. When the hoof gets caught, Joe's sympathy moves him forward, but no more than a couple of meters before caution again stays him. Even when Bob Tom begins to rescue the centaur, Joe stays put. It is not until the man-horse finally struggles free, staggers and half falls onto Bob Tom, that Joe explodes from the woods pedaling the Schwinner as fast as he can. The wounded centaur is struggling to get back up, but can't manage it. Bob Tom, who is on his hands and knees, also is trying to scramble back onto his feet, but because his wings are splayed and the rope which tethers him to the toothless centaur has been shortened so much it is hard for the old man to get his balance. Joe is less than ten meters from the riverman when the injured centaur makes a violent effort to rise and its blood-covered hoof strikes Bob Tom in the head. The old man makes a sound that reminds Joe of kicking a half-deflated soccer ball and collapses, belly down, onto the ground. Joe screams, "No!" as he leaps from the bike. The bike outruns him and smashes into the buildings' viny walls before the boy can get himself to the riverman's side. Bob Tom has a massive curved wound on the back of his head, which, despite bleeding profusely, isn't bleeding enough to keep Joe from seeing crushed white bone.

Joe barely has his hands on Bob Tom's skull before the door to the building bursts open and he sees a small ancient, frazzled-haired woman scuttle out faster than the boy can imagine any geri moving. Her mobility is explained when a tall, wild-haired, raggedy boy follows right behind with one arm pushing the old woman forward. Joe's hands snap back from the old man's s head when a third figure, a smaller, bleached out version of Prissi, totters out the door walking with the care of a woman who has broken off a heel on her best dress shoes. Something black passes before Joe's eyes which causes him to think he might be fainting, but an instant later, the teener realizes that he himself has just missed being struck by the panicked flailing of the injured centaur.

Joe starts up from his knees, but a noise from Bob Tom, more like a gargle than a groan, holds him in place. Before Joe can decide which friend should be his focus, he hears the geri groaning as she kneels down next to him. Joe looks up to see the wild-haired boy and Prissi trying to get close enough to the writhing centaur to help him without endangering themselves. For no reason that Joe can fathom, the second centaur continues to stand in a motionless stoicism that reminds Joe of geri wingers, too old to fly, waiting for a bi-bus.

The old woman's crippled fingers fly over and around Bob Tom's wound like a butterfly over a patch of flowering cosmos before settling down on the riverman's skull just past the edges of the wound,

"Boy, leave Mortos. Help me get him inside."

The boy looks from the man-horse thrashing on the ground to Olewan and then back to Prissi. He still hasn't moved when Olewan barks her command a second time. Joe has just finished carefully folding Bob Tom's wings against his body when the raggedy boy drops down into a crouch and helps him carefully roll the old man over onto his back so they can carry him. Olewan tells them how she wants the old man lifted when all three of the rescuers realize Bob Tom is still connected to the immobile centaur by the rope tether.

"Hurry. Free him."

Joe realizes that the knot must be centered on the old man's back between his wing joints. Since he has just gotten the old man onto his back, the teener decides that it will be easier to untie the rope from the centaur's neck. Before he has gone two steps, the wild-haired boy pulls an ancient jack knife from a pants' pocket and begins hacking at the rope. Joe steals a glance and sees that Prissi has an arm on the wounded centaur's shoulder and seems to be telling him something. The man-horse isn't thrashing, but his leg looks horrible with the poultice of blood and mud it has acquired from crashing about.

The rope is cut and the two boys are lifting the old man when the catatonic centaur comes out of its fugue state.

"Help Mortos," he rumbles.

Olewan says that she'll care for the centaur, but not until she tends to the old man. His wound is worse.

"No. Fix Mortos."

"Not now. Later. I have to try to help the old man."

"No! Mortos first. Fix him!"

Olewan signals the boys with nervous hands.

"Pick him up carefully. I'll get the door."

Before he has taken two steps, Joe's hands are so slippery with his friend's blood that isn't sure he is going to be able to maintain his grip.

"Help us!" bellows the centaur.

"Hurry!"

Joe loses his grip. So does the wild-haired boy. But, it isn't from hands made slippery from blood. In fury at Olewan's rejection, the second centaur has bolted forward three steps, reared up and brought in forelegs down on Bob Tom's torso. Both boys fall back and the maddened centaur rises up and crashes down on the riverman over and over again until the ground grows so wet that the centaur slips. It catches itself before falling, pauses to take in what it has done, then, emitting a noise like a hurricane's moan, it lumbers across the clearing and disappears into the woods.

# CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Losses

The old woman plunges a needle into the centaur's wounded leg while Prissi holds his head. As soon as the painkiller begins doing its work, Olewan cuts away the shredded skin and debrades destroyed flesh. She cauterizes what she can to stop the bleeding. She stitches flesh and tendons where she can, but Mortos' enraged thrashing has done so much damage that much of it is irreparable. As she cuts and sews, the old woman and the centaur mumble words back and forth. Joe is not so far away that he couldn't have heard enough to get the gist of the conversation, but the presence of the live Prissi and the dead riverman leave little room in his confused mind for anything else. Every time Joe looks at Bob Tom's broken body, he feels like he weighs a thousand kilos. Yet, a second later, when he turns to watch Prissi, his spirits rebound.

Joe stays beside Bob Tom, looks from one friend to the other, silently communes with what is left of the old man but says nothing to Prissi until she gently places the centaur's head back on the ground. Even then, after having had the time to think of what he wants to say, Joe's words to Prissi are halting. His throat is choked with grief. His mind keeps wishing it had its own wings to fly away.

Prissi herself is tongue-tied. The wild screams, the rosaries of blood as the horse-man thrashed, the sudden inexplicable death of the old man remind her of Africa. Dramatic, tragic, incoherent Africa. She pines for it. The surprise of seeing Joe Fflowers, not quite boyfriend, obviously steadfast friend, is replaced by revulsion as she looks at the gore around her. She can't understand why everyone who tries to help her winds up hurt or killed. Prissi stares at the gray-haired mess in the mud beneath her and wants to bay at the moon, the sun, and all the mad stars that had to align to fate such a thing. But, instead of making the loud confused sounds that might slightly reflect what is going on inside her, Prissi looks at Joe, makes a slight sad smile, and shrugs.

Joe isn't even aware that the other boy has left until he returns with a wrinkled roll of blue tarp and two rusty shovels. Joe looks at the boy's tools and then at his friend's remains. He tries, but can't imagine Bob Tom's battered body moldering underneath a plot of weeds. Somewhere in the air, somewhere in water is conceivable. Buried in darkness beneath a thick blanket of mud is not.

When Joe looks back up at the boy, the boy is staring at Prissi.

"What's his name?"

Prissi raises both her eyebrows and voice in doubt as she says. "Fair?"

Joe spells out what he thinks she has said, "F. A. I. R?"

"I think so."

By now the boy's head is shifting back and forth as Prissi and Joe talk.

Joe catches his eye and asks, "Fair, how far is the ocean?"

The boy shifts from foot to foot before spreading his arms until his hands are about a half-meter apart.

Joe changes tactics, "Do you have a boat?"

Prissi, whose strength is beginning to falter and whose mind has decided to distance itself from what is going on, begins drifting back to the door. Even though Joe is talking to him, Fair follows behind Prissi, like a lamb with its dam.

Joe himself wants to follow, but doesn't. He stays with Bob Tom because he has to keep the flies from settling on his friend. Even as the teener's hands begin doing their job, his mind is on a river's current north of Albany. He is brought back to beyond the Pale when Olewan kicks his foot.

"Who are you?"

"Joe...Joe. Prissi's friend. We're at school together."

"And him?"

"Bob Tom Damall. Another friend."

"Why are you here?"

"To help Prissi. My...some people killed her father and tried to hurt her. We wanted to help."

"How?"

That question stymies Joe. In all the days since he and Bob Tom were in Albany and found out that Prissi's life was threatened, Joe can't remember asking himself that question. He knows why he wants to help, or thinks he does, but how to help is another matter. He realizes that somehow he and Bob Tom just assumed that if they could find Prissi they could help her. Now, he doesn't know how his presence helps.

"How?"

Joe stammers, "I don't really know. Prissi thought...someone in my family was after her."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I don't think Prissi knew either. She met my grandfather, got interested in a company...."

Olewan interrupts, "Your grandfather. Who's that?"

With a feeling that is part pride and part shame, Joe quietly says, "Joshua Fflowers."

The old woman's stare doesn't last two seconds, but it contains more information than Joe can process.

Olewan puts a finger in Joe's face.

"Leave."

"Do you have a boat?"

"Leave."

"I'm not leaving without my friends, and I can't take Bob Tom without a boat."

The old woman wags her hand at Joe's bike which is lying where it landed after smashing into the wall.

"The girl stays. You leave. Use that. Leave."

The woman's imperious and obviously insane behavior reminds Joe of Rholealy. As soon as he makes the connection, he wants to hit the woman before him, to rub her face in a plate of food. To keep from doing either, Joe takes two steps back. He stares at the woman, who has caused his friend to be killed, and without disguising his loathing, shouts, "A boat!"

Joe kneels down, takes the tarp that Fair has left and drapes it over Bob Tom. Once he has done the best he can to keep the flies from his friend, Joe stands back up, gives the old woman a challenging glare, and stalks off to the entrance of the building.

"Don't do that. Leave. You can't go in there."

Joe keeps moving. When the door closes behind him the woman's tirade is cut off.

# CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Compromise

When Prissi walks away from the dead winger, Joe, and the wounded centaur, her only thought is to get back to her bed in the quiet, dimly lighted room. She ignores Fair, who is following close behind, in the hope that he will go away. Her hope seems justified when she opens the door, passes through, closes it and it remains closed. Prissi stands over the narrow hospital bed and for the thousandth time ponders the Pandora's Box she has opened from which so much misery and sorrow has escaped. She can not fathom how hard the darker Fates have had to scheme, finagle and cajole to get Joe Fflowers out in the middle of nowhere so that his friend can be killed by a catatonic centaur.

Prissi tells herself that when she is around there is no sanctuary. None for her and none for those around her. She might argue at the injustice, she might complain at her unintended horrors, but she can not wriggle free of the fact that a live Prissi means dead family, friends, and, perhaps worst of all, strangers...like the one outside.

Prissi is planning what must be done when she hears the door open. Fair comes up close to her before he asks, "You stay?"

Prissi doesn't know what to say.

"You go?"

Prissi takes a deep sigh.

"You go."

Fair reaches into his left pocket, removes his hand, opens it and shows Prissi the two lost crystal pendants and offers them to her. Before she can reach out, Fair reaches into his other pocket and draws out a closed fist. Despite her intention to show no interest, Prissi leans forward. The girl is stunned when Fair opens his hand and reveals a third crystal nestled in his dirty palm. Whatever information the crystals contain, it is now back together for the first time in sixty years.

When Prissi told Olewan her story, the old woman had not said a word about possessing the final crystal. As soon as Prissi sees what Fair holds, and knows whose it must be and how it came to be in Fair's hand, the feelings of trust that had begun to bud in her as the geri nursed her back to health immediately disappear.

In an oblique, meandering way that reminded Prissi of her father, Olewan had suggested that Trinity had discovered a way to increase longevity. It didn't take someone of Prissi's intelligence and cynicism to understand the lengths people would go to get their hands on that information. However, knowing that people would want what they thought she might have still did not tell her who was after her. From the information the African women had been able to extract, Prissi knew that those attackers had been sent by a man named Schecty; however, those two wingers had endured much pain without ever admitting to knowing who Schecty was, or who he might be working for.

Since the captured wingers had no idea about the attack on the West Side levee, Prissi had decided that she had two enemies rather than one. That conclusion had led her to infer that Dicky Baudgew was one enemy and Joshua Fflowers was the other. Olewan had told Prissi that she was sure the blue jays had to have been sent by Joshua Fflowers, and from all that Olewan had told her of Fflowers, the teener could see how Olewan herself would be so sure it was her megalomaniac husband. However, she also wasn't sure whether it even made any difference. The critical fact was that she was the target, but, so far, it was other people who were paying the price.

Fair commands, "You stay!"

When Prissi hesitates, Fair jabs his hand with the third crystal toward her.

"Stay."

Prissi only hesitates for a split second before she nods, forces a smile and whispers, as if speaking softly will mitigate her lie, "Stay. I'll stay."

# CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Escape and Capture

The third time Joe asks Fair if he has a boat the feral boy slowly nods. Once Fair figures out that a boat might mean that Bird Bob's ferend, who he doesn't like, will leave and the girl will stay, Fair nods vigorously.

The boat is an eighty-year old bass boat with solar seats to recharge its 40 amp motor. For decades it had been kept tied up on the shore of a tributary of the Carman's River for decades to be used when Olewan made her infrequent trips to the outer villages of Long Island for supplies.; however when the centaurs started to become hostile, Olewan had Fair drag the boat all the way to the Bury to keep it safe.

Since the boat hasn't been used for months, the charge on the motor is low. Joe's inclination is to start the next stage of his journey right away; but after his problems on the Hudson, the teener is more attuned to the things that can go wrong with boats. Rather than relying on the accuracy of the charge indicator and hoping that the solar seat panels work, Joe drags the boat out of its shed into the sun to begin its recharge.

Prissi had been with Fair when Joe tracked the wild-haired boy down to find out about the boat. As soon as he started to talk about leaving, she had cut him off. Joe thought that she would follow him to find the boat, but she stayed behind. Although the teener is angry at Prissi's behavior, he focuses on what some new and unfamiliar part of him is telling him is his first duty—to get the remains of Bob Tom Damall off the ground and onto the waters of the world.

As the boat panels collect energy, Joe makes a shroud out of the large blue tarp. He folds edges and tucks in the ends in a way that has him thinking of assembling a huge burrito. The incongruous thought makes him laugh. That outlandish noise first horrifies him and, then, makes him wonder if he is going insane. Joe finds a coil of line in the boat which he uses to tie up the package. Once his friend's remains are encapsulated in blue plastic, Joe finds it easier to use the force necessary to get his friend's body into in the boat without worrying about doing further damage. Joe arranges the body so that Bob Tom's head is held in place by the vee of the bow and his legs hang over the first of the boat's three thwarts. By angling the old man's body, more than half of the solar panel seat remains uncovered. Joe figures that if he has Prissi sit on the middle thwart with her weight opposite to Bob Tom's, and if he himself sits in the middle of the stern, then the boat should be well-balanced.

Having Bob Tom draped the way he has may work once they are on the water, but, when Joe tries to pull the boat across the clearing, he can't do it. Changing tactics, he wrestles the riverman's body to the stern, but concludes, even with the weight shift, that he wouldn't be able to pull the boat as far as he must. The doubts about his sanity and, now, his physical weaknesses, paralyze Joe. He stands motionless in the dappled light of the late morning sun, which is wriggling its way through the canopy, like maggots in meat.

After a motionless while, Joe notices the Schwinner and feels its tug. A voice tells him to get on the bike. Go home. A quest with a fifteen-year old hero is a farce, a tragic comedy, a pitiable delusion. Joe stares at the bike and can see himself pedaling across the Queensboro Bridge while miniature distorted images of the rising buildings of Manhattan reflect off the handlebars. A second later all Joe can see are the bike's wheels. He runs to find Fair. Within an hour, the bike had been disassembled and its wheels attached to a long pole and the pole attached underneath the stern of the boat. Joe fashions a harness from the boat's painter and finds that with the weight of Bob Tom in the stern above the wheels he can easily pull the boat along.

Joe can understand why someone with the seemingly limited intelligence of Fair would be willing to let him have the boat, but he is less sure why the old woman hasn't tried to stop his preparations. As Joe is putting the bicycle wheel carrier together, he gets the idea that the old woman might want to have the boat gone to remove a means of escape from Prissi. He pushes back against that thought since it leads him to another. In all the time since he and Bob Tom began their quest, one thought that never had been asked was whether Prissi would want their help. They had just assumed that Prissi would come with them. Now, he realizes that they never any real reason for thinking that. When Joe had demanded that Prissi leave with him, she had refused even to talk about it. In fact, within seconds, she had disappeared. Joe decides he must make a second plea, but immediately wonders whether she isn't right to stay. She may be safer in the middle of nowhere with a crazy lady and slow-witted boy than she would be with him.

When the boat is fully charged and both Bob Tom and the Schwinner's frame secured, Joe studies Fair and the crone who stands protectively in front of the door that leads to Prissi. Joe says that he must see Prissi before he will leave. The old woman shakes her head gleefully and says that Prissi refuses to say goodbye. Joe wants to believe that the old woman is lying, but whether she is or not, the teener decides not to argue. He makes a decision. He will go. He will send Bob Tom on his journey and then come back for Prissi.

Joe listens to the old woman's directions of how to get to the stream as he slips the harness over his shoulders. As he begins making his way to the water, Joe shakes his head at how ludicrous everything he has done over the last two weeks has become.

From her hiding place in the woods, Prissi watches Joe get on his way. It hurts to walk. She can only imagine how much worse the pain will be if she has to run... or fly. She has taken a vial of painkillers from the operatory, but she desperately hopes her plan succeeds in a way so that she doesn't have to fly. She estimates that she has something between fifteen and thirty minutes before Olewan or Fair realizes that she isn't behind the door she has locked. She knows without a doubt that when Fair finds out that she is gone that he will come after her. But, how fast he can make up for lost time and whether it will be rage or sadness at her betrayal that will motivate him, Prissi doesn't know. She tells herself that the only thing she can do to end the harm she has been bringing to those who cross her path is follow the plan she has devised.

After Joe disappears into the woods dragging the boat behind, Prissi waits two minutes before following him. As she walks, she looks to find some weapon she can use to get the boat away from Joe. It's her intention to steal the boat, leave Joe the bicycle, take the boat down the Carman to the Atlantic, allow the old winger to find his grave and, then, to end the story.

She passes on a rock shaped like the head of a croquet mallet because it seems too big. She grabs a dead branch from the low crotch of a hickory tree, but decides that it isn't sturdy enough. She spies a second stick that looks stout enough, but finds it's half rotten. Finally, Prissi picks up a baseball-sized rock even though she can't conjure up a plan to use it that doesn't frighten her. Throwing the rock and missing her target will leave her weaponless. Throwing and hitting Joe, but in the wrong place, could cause to happen what she is trying to prevent. The winger is so caught up in the inadequacies of her plans that she is around a curve and within Joe's view before she knows it. He is stopped by the bank of a fast moving stream that is less than ten seven meters across. A half-skinned log acts as a bridge across the water. Prissi backs away, but it is too late. Joe has seen her.

When Joe twists to free his shoulders from the rope harness, he catches a glimmer of silver and red and instantly knows its Prissi. The fatigue he has been feeling in his shoulders from pulling the boat begins to lift. If Prissi has run away from the old woman, then, he must be quick. He calls her name and tells her to hurry as he unbolts the bicycle wheels from the boat. The bicycle's wheels are off and stowed in the boat and Joe is wrestling Bob Tom's weight from the stern to the bow when he looks around for Prissi to get her help. It's the twisting of his body that causes the blow to fall on his shoulder rather than its intended target. Before Prissi can even think what to do next, Joe, recovering with the speed of a hockey player with a put back shot, springs up, and knocks the rock from her hand.

"What are you doing? Are you frutz? Help me get this thing in the water."

In a response that stuns both Joe and Prissi, the girl actually does as she is told.

Three minutes pass before the boat is in the water and Joe and Prissi are in the boat. The boat strains to be free in the turbulent water. It takes both of Prissi's hands and Joe's right hand to steady the boat. While holding to a cluster of slippery roots jutting from the bank, Joe uses his left hand to start the motor. The ancient piece of equipment keeps starting, whining and stopping. Joe guesses it might have a short. He is considering what Bob Tom might do when Prissi screams. Joe looks up to see Fair pounding down the path with his ancient jack knife opened in his hand. A freeze frame image of a berserk skateboreder fills Joe's mind.

"Go! Go!"

When Prissi lets go an instant before Joe, the bow immediately swings away from the bank. Despite having swamped on the Hudson from a boat turned sideways to the current, Joe only hesitates for a split second before he, too, lets go. The bass boat, caught crosswise in the stream, hurtles away. Joe is distracted as Fair runs up to the bank and, without any hesitation, starts crashing through the brush alongside the stream bank after them. Joe narrows his focus so that the threat of Fair and the threat of the boat capsizing are left behind. All of his attention is on getting the motor running. He flicks the starter switch a half-dozen times, bangs the cowling and then rattles the frame up and down. Finally, he feels, more than hears over the water's roar, the motor engage. Joe throttles down figuring that it is safer to correct the boat's course slowly. After a few seconds, the stern of the boat begins to come round. As the boat responds, Joe increases the power.

"Duck!" Prissi yells.

Joe doesn't even look up to see what the threat is. All of his attention is on bringing the bow of the boat into alignment with the current. The rock Fair has hurled smashes into his shoulder in exactly the same place where Prissi has hit him.

Over the noise of the rampaging water, Prissi's incensed screams, and the scrambled noise from the pain in his shoulder, Joe can hear Fair shouting, "Stay. Stay. You said stay."

Within two minutes the figure of Fair running along the bank is no more than a small pulse of mottled browns. Once they are free of Fair and the boat is running smoothly with the current, Joe throttles back to conserve energy and shifts his attention to interrogating Prissi.

He asks question after question. Prissi only answers a few, and, of those, many are answered with just a word or two. Joe learns that Jack was involved in Prissi's father's death, and that the reason Prissi is in danger has to do with some science done by the old woman a long time ago. When Joe asks how the centaur's figure into the story, Prissi only shrugs. It is more than an hour later and Joe is wondering why Bob Tom had to die when his attention shifts back to the water to understand what he is seeing.

Because of the overhanging branches and the brush-edged banks, the water of the stream is mottled with the greens and browns of growth and blues, greens and blacks of growth's shadows. What he has seen downstream and thought was just a darker band of shadow resolves itself into a natural dam made from a couple of fallen trees and a snarl of driftwood. Joe needs either to turn upstream or beach the boat. The likelihood of accomplishing the first option, given the speed of the current, the narrowness of the stream and the limited power of the motor is not good. Joe reverses speed and runs the motor as fast as it will go. The bass boat slows, but not by much. Joe scans the bank, picks his spot and tells Prissi to hold on tight. As the boy runs the boat up on the steep bank, the bow bucks upward and Bob Tom, wings tightly cocooned in plastic, takes a final flight. The riverman's body hits the bank, rolls down into the water and heads down stream buoyed by air pockets in the tarp. Within seconds the body smashes into the dam, wriggles back and forth like a skunk getting under a fence, and disappears from view.

A stunned Joe just sits in the boat after Bob Tom's body disappears. It is Prissi who clambers out first and starts pushing aside the brush along the bank so that she can get to the dam. She is already using a long pole to prod for weak spots in the tangle of branches and broken trees by the time Joe joins her. Her exertions are causing her to pant and her sentences are broken as she tries to catch her breath.

"Let's push...the center. If we can...weaken it there...the whole thing might...wash away."

When Joe reaches for Prissi's pole, she knocks his hand away and tells him to get his own. The teener digs around until he finds a stout, fairly straight branch. He crawls out onto the dam and works the end of the pole into the knot of branches before pushing down with all of his might. When he manages to lever up the center of the knot, Prissi uses her pole to push part of the top layer of the dam outward. After a dozen attempts, small parts of the dam untangle. Within ten minutes, they have made a boat-wide breach in the interwoven branches, but the interlocked fallen trees have not budged.

"Freezing geezers, this isn't working"

Prissi would have thrown her pole away in frustration, but she is far too exhausted.

"Let's just stop, get in the boat and somehow work it over the trees."

Joe shakes his head in disagreement, "If we try that, we're going to end up in the water. This current is moving too fast."

"Yeah, well, if we stay here much longer, my strange friend is going to show up and something bad is going to happen."

Despite his misgivings, Joe follows Prissi as she works her way off the dam.

"He's long gone."

"As a pubescent female, I have a sixth sense about when a male is going to appear or disappear. I can assure you that if we're here much longer, I'm going to have a date to a woodsy spring fling with someone who probably doesn't own a tux. Move."

Although Prissi's manner angers him, Joe is both happy that she seems to have regained some of an attitude with which he is very familiar as well as happy that he is too tired to argue. He follows the girl as she scrambles her way back to the boat. She is about ten meters shy of her goal, fighting her way through the brush which grows to the edge of the bank, when her wing gets caught in a patch of bullbrier. Rather than take the time to work her wing free from the handful of thorns which claim it, Prissi's frustration, her fear of Fair, and her anger at not getting free from Joe boil over. She gives her wing an impetuous yank which both lets loose a flurry of feathers and sets the thorns even deeper.

Prissi's reason vacates her. She screams and thrashes until Joe pinions her tightly in his arms. His first thought is to talk to her to try to calm her down, but a wiser part of him guesses that he himself is a big part of what is setting Prissi off. The walker shuts his mouth as tightly as his grip. Once Prissi becomes still, Joe loosens his arms and begins to prize the thorns from her wing. By the time the wing is free, there are dozens of feathers, both pinions and remiges, strewn around the brush. As Joe leads his now docile friend to the boat, he remembers how he felt as Adrona and Seka led him through the mountain after he had had his tantrum.

The boy ends up completely wet but he manages to get Prissi in the stern of the boat before he uses his pole to push the boat back into the water. He tells her how to start the motor and where to steer. When they get close to the dam, Joe tells Prissi to flip the propeller out of the water before he uses his pole to push the boat over the obstruction. The boat rocks precariously and water slops over the gunwales, but finally slides across to the other side. Prissi aims the boat back toward the bank. As soon as she and Joe switch seats, Joe takes the helm and pushes the motor to its maximum speed. As the newly minted captain careers downstream, slopping in and out of the shifting currents, he keeps his eyes peeled for a blotch of blue. He hasn't gone far before a series of bends and switchbacks force him to slow down. When the stream finally straightens, Joe looks as far downstream as he can but he sees nothing blue. When the stream joins up with a much larger body of water, which Joe assumes is the Carman's River, the boy is convinced that he has somehow missed his friend. He slows the boat as he tries to decide whether to turn back. Joe is chilled by the idea that Bob Tom's body might be hung up on a snag or trapped underwater between a pair of rocks. It is too easy for him to imagine a blue bundle caught in a similar puzzle of limbs and logs as what he and Prissi have just gotten past. He can see how the bundle will become undone and what will happen to the old man's remains when the carnivorous animals of the woods find it. If he doesn't go back, he understands how the question of "what if" could bother him long years into his future. Joe begins to swing the boat upstream when he remembers to ask himself the same question that has guided him since his friend left.

What would Bob Tom do?

Although the answer is not without shades of gray, Joe is pretty sure that if it were his body upstream and Bob Tom in the boat with Prissi that the boat would be traveling downstream.

Joe completes a circle so that he is heading back toward the ocean.

Prissi twirls her hand as she asks, "What was that about?"

"I wanted to go back to find my friend, but then I decided that he wouldn't want that."

"Why not?"

"A live Prissi is more important than a dead Bob Tom Damall."

Rather than deal with the implications of that, Prissi snorts, "Bob Tom Damall? A woodsy kind of guy with a name like that? Is that for real? He sounds like the long lost cousin of the woodsman in Lord of the Rings. Tom Bombadil."

Joe is silent for a moment before he says, "I just assumed that was his name. I never thought about it."

"Did you ever read Tolkien?'

"Of course, everybody has to."

"And you never made that connection?"

Prissi's question is asked with so much disdain that Joe decides to keep his mouth shut.

"Where'd you meet him?"

As Joe tells the story of running away, staying with the Greenlanders and Blesonus, capsizing on the Hudson, being rescued by Bob Tom and the days since, Prissi doesn't say a single word. It may be the way that Joe tells his tale, in how he dismisses the danger and disguises his fears, or it may be that her experience has scarred her, but the longer she listens, the more it seems to Prissi that, even though Joe's life has been in real danger, some part of him also seems to think that the past days have been a lark, some kind of merit badge quest. She twists her head around so that she can look at Joe. She is looking for her NQB, a special friend, someone who has made both her lips and her brain tingle, but she has a hard time seeing anything other than a deluded rich boy on a Spring Break safari. Prissi's hands and feet begin jiggling and tapping in frustration that getting to where she has to go is taking so long.

Both adolescents are shocked when a rubberized launch of camo green sweeps around a curve and comes hurtling up the river. Joe doesn't slow his speed, but he does move the bass boat close to the western bank. His action gives the other boat plenty of room to pass by, but when the launch's path veers to intersect with theirs, Joe guesses that the two orange-feathered wingers standing up in the speeding craft are coming for Prissi. Her swearing, so filled with rage and despair that the words themselves are slurred, confirms Joe's guess.

"What do we do?"

"Get out of the boat. There's no way this will outrun them."

As a frantic Joe looks for a place to land on the high banked brush-covered shore, he yells, "Can you fly?"

Prissi's arms fly up like they have exploded from a Jack-in-the-Box.

"Probably not. And not against them. Freeieekin mimi, just land."

Joe is so slow to make a decision about where to run the boat up on shore that Prissi gets the same eerie feeling she had with Jack after her father was killed. With the same kind of data density that those near death supposedly get, Prissi's mind flashes on myriad images of all the people she's met since the whole disaster began. Except for Allan Burgey, the only people who have been helpful and trustworthy have been Africans.

Making the same kind of ululating wail she'd heard so many times in Africa, Prissi snaps her body back, dislodges Joe, grabs the handle of the motor, yanks it as hard as she can, and pushes herself up into a half-crouch. Just as the bow crashes into the bank and begins to climb its root thick muddy side, Prissi flaps her wings twice, stretches her arms up and grabs hold of a thick branch overhanging the water. The pain that brings to her cracked and broken ribs triggers a jet of slurry from her stomach.

Prissi's actions take Joe by surprise. As a result, he isn't prepared for the crash. As the bass boat's momentum carries it up the bank, instead of jumping free, Joe reflexively holds on. When the boat flips over Joe is caught beneath it. Looking down, Prissi sees Joe's situation, but commands herself not to care. The wingers are after her, not Joe. She slides hand over hand until she is close enough to the trunk of tree that the underbrush thins out. She drops down safely. As soon as her feet touch ground, she starts looking for a way through the woods. She knows she needs to hurry. The wingers are no more than fifty meters from shore, but Prissi also knows that she must be careful. She's already been caught in the brush once. She keeps her wings furled as tightly as she can before she begins to twist and turn through the dense thorny maze.

When she had escaped by flying between the ships on the Hudson and had climbed down the rabbit hole to the subway and, even when she was fighting the zies, Prissi had been confident that her wing size and shape gave her an advantage over her foes. Now, the forest is so thick and intertwined, and she feels so weak, that she can't think of any advantage that she might have. In fact, she is feeling the same helplessness as on the night when she crashed, but, despite her despair, she has no notion of quitting. In so much of what she has done, especially in her sports, the fact that she knew she was going to lose had never ever given her an excuse not to compete as hard as she could.

Semi-crouched, with her wingtips just short of touching the ground, Prissi swings herself around the trunk of a tree so that she can take a glance backward. The wingers have beached further upriver from Olewan's boat and already are climbing the bank. Prissi wriggles forward another ten meters before she turns around again. As she has guessed, the wingers are paying no attention to Joe. She is their sole prey. For the first time in her life, Prissi wishes that her wings were not the silver and red that she had had to beg her father to approve. If only she had been smart enough to get brown wings, then she might have a chance. Instead of hoping that she can make her way far enough into the woods to find a trail and escape, she could have been looking for a place to hide her brown among all the other browns in the woods. The girl twists and turns, snags a wing, slows and carefully frees herself.

Suddenly, for some reason which she cannot explain, Prissi feels incredibly calm. It seems to her that everything is moving in slow motion. The thorn she has between her fingers has a brilliant clarity. Its tip is a rosy ivory which darkens to a chocolate brown at its base. The shape reminds her of a sliver of moon. She watches her fingertips turn pink when she squeezes the thorn's base. She works the barb free from a feather whose vane is speckled with small glistening cabochons of river spray. She studies the twig that gives birth to the thorn and sees where buds are struggling to break free into bloom. Her eyes follow the twig back to where it joins a branch. She is fascinated by its latticed architecture...until it suddenly comes to her that she is being chased by two men who want to kill her. The shell-shocked girl wonders how much time she's wasted studying the thorn, but she has no sense of whether it's been a milli-second or a minute. When Prissi turns her head, she sees the two wingers are only a half-dozen trees away. She lunges forward and begins to wrestle her way through the woods. Within seconds the feeling of preternatural calm returns. Prissi sees the world around her as a giant maze. But, instead of feeling trapped or confused, she feels like she has a perfect lucidity as to where to put her foot, what branch to hold with which hand, and how to twist her body so that she can slip under or around the next impediment.

Joe is flabbergasted when the two wingers pass him by. Because he sees himself as Prissi's rescuer, the teener can't understand why her attackers are not confronting him. The idea that they consider him either non-threatening or ineffectual enrages the boy; however, at the same time, he feels much relief that he has been ignored.

From his limited vantage point beneath the overturned boat, Joe watches the two sets of black ankle-high frylon boots scramble up the bank and disappear. As soon as the coast is clear, Joe looks around for some kind of weapon. He thinks that if the wingers are engrossed with catching Prissi that he might be able to sneak up behind them and.... The end of the thought won't come. He'll sneak up on them and.... Joe finally tells himself that the reason that he can't think what to do is because he hasn't found a weapon. Obviously, a rock would call for a different strategy than a club. Joe scours the riverbank, sees a number of fist-sized rocks, and decides that throwing them from a distance makes more sense than trying to get close enough to hit someone with a club. As he gathers his arsenal, his thoughts go back to the rocks and pebbles that he threw at Adrona and Seka—rocks thrown in anger...and futility.

It is not until the boy climbs to the top of the riverbank that his plan falls apart. The woods are far too dense to accurately throw a rock more than a few meters. If he is going to be of any use to Prissi, Joe realizes that he is going to have to attack from close quarters. As the young Fflowers looks around for something he can use as a cudgel or spear, the beached boat of the wingers catches his eye. With a relief he refuses to acknowledge, Joe considers whether he might be more help from farther away. Joe drops back down the bank to gauge how much the trees overhang the river. Reassured by the protection the trees' canopy provides from an overhead attack and how little room to maneuver there would be for a large winger trying to fly under the drooping boughs, Joe grabs the bow of the bass boat and begins to lift it. Once it is high enough, he gets himself underneath and pushes up until the boat flips right side up. A minute later he has the bass boat tied to the wingers' launch. He jumps into the launch and makes sure that he knows how to operate it. Leaving the motor running in neutral, Joe climbs back up the bank. He can make out flashes of orange and knows that the wingers are too deep into the woods to be able to easily fly out. The boy cups his hands and yells to Prissi, "Three keds." Hoping that she will understand and her attackers won't, Joe yells his instructions a second time, drops down the bank, jumps into the launch and heads downstream with the bass boat towed behind. Joe keeps close to the shore and under the protection of the overhanging canopy as he speeds away.

It takes Prissi only a second to translate keds as "kilometers downstream." She snorts in derision that her escape could be as simple as making her way three kilos downstream. Her legs are quivering in exhaustion and her ribs feel like someone has buried a stone spearhead between them. Her pursuers, who she is sure, are the same ones who attacked her on the West Side Highway and the Hudson, are using the same tactics that they used before. They have split apart so that they can flank her.

As her enemies have gotten closer, Prissi has had premonitions when she is sure that a bullet is speeding toward her. She has imagined how, in the split second before she dies, as her body is slammed forward by the projectile's force, she will hear the flat whine announcing her death. After her last moment comes and goes four times, Prissi begins to wonder whether her assailants are armed.

Guns in Africa were ubiquitous. A ten-year old boy or girl who had not pulled the trigger on a weapon was the exception. Even though guns in Noramica are illegal and extremely rare, Prissi has just assumed that the wingers who were chasing her would have them. Now, as she threads her way through the kudzu and bullbrier snarled woods, she tries to decide whether she hasn't been fired on because the wingers don't have guns or because they want to capture, not kill, her.

In the middle of slinking around a tree trunk covered in poison ivy, Prissi stops dead. If it was Schecty's men who wanted to kill her and Schecty worked for Joshua Fflowers as Olewan thought, then these two must work for Dicky Baudgew. But what is puzzling is why, if both groups want the same thing, the crystals around her neck, why does one group want to capture her and the other to kill her?

Prissi is navigating her way through a narrow thorny crease between two ancient uprooted swamp maples when her foot slips on a patch of mud. As her leg slides out from under her, her arms snap out to recover her balance. The girl lists, balances precariously for a split second, then, falls. Like Br'er Rabbit in the brier patch, Prissi is trapped in the clasp of the brush. She immediately knows that she won't be able to free herself in time to escape. She can feel hundreds of small sharp talons holding her in place. As was true just minutes before when Joe had to help to free her, she knows that struggling will only make things worse. Knows it, but doesn't care. She cannot lie still and do nothing while the two wingers close in. Prissi arches her back, kicks her feet and finds a black satisfaction as she makes her situation worse. She is still thrashing when a winger grabs her hair and commands her to stop struggling. In response, Prissi's body goes deathly still, but her mouth opens and a low wail, like the last long note of a dirge, comes out, hangs for a second, and, then, like fog, drifts across the forest.

Prissi's assailants are well-prepared. The amount of gear they keep removing from their paks and pants as they work to free her remind her of magicians. Folding saws, short-handled loppers, rope and water tubes appear. Despite the loathing she feels for these strangers who can touch her, command her, and, even, rescue her without her permission, Prissi is grateful when they share their supply of water. Her throat is extraordinarily dry, which she hopes is more from the medications she has been taking than from fear. It takes twenty minutes before the wingers have cut her free from the brush. Looking down, Prissi guesses that it would take twice that long to pick out all of the thorn-covered stems stuck in her wings and clothes, but that is a moot issue. Her captors get Prissi to her feet and tie a rope around her waist before they begin backtracking toward the river.

As the wingers slowly make their way through the puzzle of limb and vine with Prissi sandwiched between them, the exhausted girl strains her ears for any sound of a boat. She has been thinking that Joe's instructions must have been meant to deceive the wingers. Joe has not fallen so far in her esteem that she can believe that he has done no more than run away downstream. If that really is what he has done, then Joe Fflowers has not made an escape plan, but only an excuse. Even though Prissi hears nothing, she holds onto her waning belief, by panning her eyes across the woods in hopes of spying some small patch of Joe preparing an ambush. But, despite her efforts, she hears and sees nothing that can sustain hope.

As she stumbles and is tugged along, the captive considers and rejects a dozen ideas, each more improbable than the one before, of how, without help, she might escape. At last, she gives up on any idea beyond that of slowing her captors' progress. She trips, stumbles and struggles, moans and swears, while being careful not to use up too much of her energy, nor irritate her captors to the point of violence.

While Prissi has been frantically devising a means of escape, Dicky Baudgew's minions have been discussing their own escape. They had heard the diminishing whine of their boat's motor as Joe raced it downstream. As they wend their way back to the water, the two wingers decide that the smaller one, Whir, will stay behind with Prissi while the larger, Edgee, will fly downstream, deal with the boy, retrieve the boat, and come back to get Prissi and his partner. Whir reminds Edgee to be sure to say please when he asks for their boat back.

When they arrive back at the river'e edge, the brush along the bank is so heavy that there is almost no room to move. Whir holds Prissi back as Edgee removes some of the gear he has been carrying and slurps down more water before launching himself into the air. Once his partner is gone, Whir pushes Prissi out to the edge of the bank to give himself enough room to lean against a low-hanging branch as a kind of perch. He looks Prissi up and down before asking, "What makes you so valuable?"

Prissi considers her response for just a second, "I make fabulous eleven layer bars. Your evil boss wants the secret recipe."

The small squirrel-faced winger smiles at Prissi. The smile grows to a sharp-toothed chuckle and then a full-blown laugh. The man's foot lashes out so quickly that Prissi has no chance to do anything but scream as she shoots backward off the bank into the river. Prissi is wet past her waist and her floundering wings are soaked before Whir uses the rope attached to his captive to violently pull her back on shore.

Pride, rather than any real strength, gets Prissi back on her feet. She chances a glance before she turns away from her assailant and stares at the river. Again, like while she was attempting her escape in the woods, Prissi waits for the blow that doesn't come. Finally, the anticipation becomes too much, but when she turns her head, she sees the winger looking downstream and not at her at all. Prissi begins to clean her wings.

It's less than fifteen minutes later that a slight movement tight against the bank upstream catches her eye. The girl wonders if Joe has abandoned the boats and somehow circled around. If it is Joe, he is moving faster than she would guess he could. The form hugs the shore and shadows as it makes its way down-stream. It's not until the object is less than fifty meters away that Prissi figures out that what she is seeing is a swimming centaur.

Prissi holds her breath as the man-horse draws closer. He swims to within twenty meters before he stops in a splotch of dense shadow. Prissi can make out movement, but doesn't understand what she is seeing. Suddenly, there is a streak of brown flashing toward her. It's accompanied by a slight hissing sound. Simultaneously with Prissi whipping her head around to make sense of what she has seen, Whir yowls before staggering forward with a brown-fletched arrow buried deep in his left wing below the shoulder blade. A second sound, anguished, precedes the winger tumbling off the bank into the river.

Prissi experiences a split second of overwhelming relief at her rescue before the rope around her waist tightens. The wounded winger thrashes against the current and his pain as the two conspire to pull him to a place he does not want to go. A second later Prissi is torn from the bank and joins Whir in his fight for a longer life.

Despite her frantic efforts, Prissi can't get her feet braced in the soft muck of the river bed. The force of the winger in his death throes drags her forward. She loses her balance and her face gets pulled under. She lunges forward to keep from drowning. She coughs and spits out bloody river water. She pedals her feet like she is on an invisible bicycle until one foot gets planted on something solid enough that she can spring forward. That movement is enough to put some slack into the rope. She uses that opportunity to lunge forward and spread her sodden wings. When she comes back down into the river, her half-submerged wings act like an anchor. She digs in her feet and, after a few tries, manages to maintain a precarious counter-balance against the river's pull on the dying winger.

Afraid of losing her footing, Prissi doesn't turn around when she hears the centaur approach from behind. The man-horse sweeps past her and cuts the tether that binds her to her captor. As the twitching winger is carried away by the current, Prissi is transfixed by the rosy contrail he leaves behind.

It takes a touch from the centaur to get Prissi to turn away. When she looks up into her rescuer's face, it is not, as she had supposed, the one who had killed Joe's friend. This centaur has a round face with mottled skin from too much sun, perfectly round pale blue eyes and a small nearly lipless mouth. When the centaur reaches out a hand, Prissi grabs it. The centaur cups his other hand and Prissi uses it as a stirrup to climb onto his back. Even though the centaur's shirt is little more than a filthy rag, his long gray hair smells of grease and smoke, and a quiver of arrows hangs in the way, Prissi can't help tightly pressing herself against the man-horse's back.

When she murmurs, "Thank you," in a voice that might be meant more for her than him, the centaur, whose name is Hortos, rasps, "You helped Mortos."

Those three words, words which tell Prissi that something she has done, finally, has helped rather than harmed someone, snaps her jaw open and eyes tightly shut as she shudders out her sobs.

Prissi cries as Hortos swims downstream at a fast, but, seemingly, effortless, pace. Just shy of a bend in the river, the centaur lunges his way out of the water. Although the bosky woods look impenetrable to the girl, they are not. Behind a thin barricade of dense brush begins a trail that is just high and wide enough for the centaur.

As soon as they are on the trail, Prissi's emotions calm as if the solid footing beneath the centaur's hooves is providing the same kind of foundation for her feelings.

"Where are we going?"

Although the centaur's words spill from his mouth as rough as gravel, Prissi understands him to say, "To find your ferend."

"Will we be in time?"

"To do what?"

"To save him."

"He need saving?"

"The other winger is going to hurt him."

"Course. He's angry. But...your ferend...he need saving?"

"What do you mean?"

"My herd dying, but don't need saving."

"I don't understand. Why would you say that?"

Hortos cranes his neck to the newly leafed trees overhead as he shakes his head, "I don't. She did."

"Olewan?"

"Old one. Yes."

"But why does her opinion count?'

"Only one can save us. But, won't. Didn't."

It's Prissi's turn to shake her head, "Why not?"

It sounds like the rumble of thunder, but Prissi interprets it as a laugh...a very bitter laugh.

"Don't need saving."

Prissi is so engrossed in the futility of that statement that she gets slapped in the face by a fan of twigs.

"How is your friend?" Prissi hesitates because she isn't sure that she has listened hard enough to remember his name. "Mortos."

The centaur's response is almost a whisper, "Gone."

Since she is sure she knows the answer, Prissi doesn't ask, "Gone where?" Instead, she says, "I'm so sorry."

"Me, too."

The centaur makes a keening sound and trots a half-dozen paces before he says, "Old one, too."

This time Prissi doesn't know the answer to the question she has on her lips, but an intuitive part of her brain keeps her mouth from asking it.

Hortos has trotted another twenty meters down the green corridor before he says, "Gone."

A vision, a violent African flash of the imperious old woman, her few day mother, shrieking as she scuttles away from enraged hooves flares in Prissi's mind, but using all of her will, she extinguishes it. She sees nothing but the maze of woods around her and hears nothing but unseen birds and the husky breathing of the centaur. She says nothing. The only sign that she understands what she has been told is that her grasp on Hortos' torso loosens.

# CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Flight

After he scuttles the bass boat, Joe stands rigidly at the helm of the launch. The quiet disturbs him because it gives him the opportunity to think and thinking, definitely, is not what he wants to do. Joe can provide himself with no coherent reason why he thought it was a good idea, let alone a plan, to take the boats and leave Prissi behind. He tries to tell himself that it wasn't fear for himself, but rather faith in her...her skills, intelligence and courage which led to his choice. When he had found a backwater close to what he had guessed was three kliks downstream, he had pulled in to shore. The first five minutes of waiting he could tolerate, but, now, as each minute passes, what he is feeling becomes more unendurable.

He is a coward. Prissi is dead. Prissi is dead...but, she would have been dead despite anything he could have done. He is not a coward, but he is a fool to sit waiting for the wingers to show up to reclaim their boat and take care of him. Prissi, somehow, is holding on, but waiting and needing his help. He has lost Bob Tom and Prissi and he will lose himself if he doesn't take action.

Joe sits in the boat, as frozen in inaction as Lot's wife, until he hears the sibilant notes of wings. Even when the winger's arrival forces him to act, Joe remains indecisive as to whether his chances are better staying under the canopy of tree limbs or trying to outrun his enemy. When his hand flips the ignition, that slight movement is less the result of rational thought and more an act of mindless fear. He accelerates into the river.

The red-faced winger is no more than ten meters behind Joe by the time he has the boat in the fastest part of the current. Joe has a moment of dark insight when he understands that his fear has led to his end. And that insight will prove true, but not in the way the boy has foreseen.

The winds, blowing to the northeast, slow the winger and the river's current, flowing south, adds several kilometers an hour to the launch's top speed. After five minutes the launch is a hundred meters in front of the winger. After ten minutes, the threat is no more than a dark speck in the sky.

Joe gets to the mouth of the Carman's River just before five in the afternoon. He slows his speed as he makes his way along the coastline of Long Island. He motors west until the water goes dark. Just before the sun slinks away for good, Joe veers into a small cove and secures the launch high on the shore. He takes a pak full of food he has found in a cubby, grabs cushions and blankets and heads inland to find a safe place to make camp.

Joe eats until he feels fuller than he has in many days, but he can't sleep. Thoughts of abandoning Prissi and losing Bob Tom's body take care of that. He lies on his back looking at the stars and ponders his fate and those of the others in his constellation.

Tired, and as mentally exhausted as he can ever remember, Joe swears a dozen revenges on his uncle and cousin. After hours, he falls asleep and, given the condition of his conscience, sleeps deeply. He wakes at sunrise and fills his belly for a second time before dragging the launch back into the water and a course that will take him home.

Joe makes it back to Manhattan early the next afternoon.

He calls his family. Bears the burden of their rage, relief and love. Visits his grandfather and, mostly, tells his story. Tells what Prissi has told him and how she has died.

Two days later he fledges. With red and silver feathers. Joe returns to Dutton ten days late from spring Break. Endures the stares, the gossip and his new bodyguard. Works hard at both his studies and keeping his memories at bay. With few exceptions, Joe Fflowers is as adept as most teenerz at moving so fast that the things that niggle and chase a heart or conscience get left behind...things and events once mountainous and momentous soon become memories no bigger than a pair of small wings in a great open sky.

# CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Flight

Joshua Fflowers leans back against a single pillow as he listens to his grandson Joe's story. His face betrays almost nothing of what he feels. Some of that sangfroid is from the medication he takes, some is the product from being so old, but most comes from the last dregs of a life lived with obdurate will.

From the boy, the old man learns of how, if he had allowed himself to play any part in Joe's life, how he might have known Prissi Langue, or, as he prefers to call her, Prissi Fflowers, for more than a year. He is chastened when he considers that if he had known who and what Prissi was earlier, he might have protected her, kept her alive. In a darker, more familiar, vein, he considers how he might have used Prissi as a key, an intriguing peace offering to Elena. If he had shown up in the Bury with a girl who looked like, and, from what his grandson is telling him, is...was...so much like Elena in her fierce intelligence and even fiercer will, Elena might have given him a word, a bit of a smile that would have ameliorated a half-century's bitterness, loss and remorse. Fflowers tells himself that if he had known that Prissi existed, of who and what and how she was, he could have insured that what he had built, his company, collections and wealth, would have been hers, rather than left to the schools, fools and foundations he has named.

If. **If.**

As Joe talks, one **if** after another come to the old man's mind. After Joe leaves, those ifs cause Fflowers to sift and re-sift memory. To look at what he has done—all of the things he has accomplished, all the people and things he has gathered around him, and, lastly, all of the things, despite the long years, monumental intelligence and Herculean efforts, that he has not done...respect his wife, love his sons, forgive himself.

Fflowers measures. He reviews. As the hours pass and the sun moves past its meridian to begin its own slow fall from grace, the old man listens to things in his head he has not heard in years.

He listens to cautions and secrets and words of praise. He hears the whispered concerns of the machines which surround him. The old alchemist weighs and balances and, at the end of the hours of doing that hard math, he concludes that he has just two things of true significance left for him to do. The fate of Cygnetics becomes background chatter. The active hands Adanan and Jack may have had in the deaths of Beryl and Prissi Langue is someone else's burden. His place in history will be shaped by hands other than his own and written by strangers.

As the afternoon begins to fade, Joshua Fflowers takes pen to paper and writes, "I am sorry." He seals that note and writes two sets of numbers, the very same numbers that Allan Burgey had left for Prissi. He puts that envelope into a larger one along with a note that it is his wish that the envelope be delivered to the location whose coordinates he has just written. He seals that envelope and addresses it to Thes Mason, his roto pilot.

Fflowers' finger pulses a button, and when a triad of attendants respond, he tells them that he wants to be disconnected from his support systems so that he can spend a few minutes in his gallery, loggia and gardens. His guardians protest, but Fflowers protests more.

The old man is freed of his tethers and placed in a wheelchair. When an obese, smoky smelling nurse tries to help him, the old man waves him away. He hooks the control knob with a claw like hand and drives toward the gallery. He takes his time admiring the idealized marble forms that have survived since they were carved by philosophers and fools three thousand years before. He studies the men and women with their perfect, smooth, white hard beauty and form...perfect humans, except for their missing limbs, half-faces, and hidden stony hearts. He moves out of the gallery, into the elevator, and up a flight.

Despite being one hundred thirty stories over Manhattan, Joshua Fflowers can smell spring as soon as he wheels himself outside into the garden. The air is so fine that he takes small sips as if he were drinking an old Calvados. He slowly motors down the loggia that runs alongside the gardens. His alternates his attention between the azaleas and hyacinths in the raised granite planters and the statues that run the length of the black and green marbled colonnade. He stares at his statues and wonders about those who could see such potential in the world around them that they felt compelled to invent gorgons, gryphons, harpies, unicorns and chimera. Krakens and centaurs.

Of all that Fflowers looks at, it is the man-horse, a white marble millennial old Etruscan statue standing three meters tall that holds his attention the longest. When he finally moves away, he whispers the same three words that he had written minutes before.

Fflowers rolls his way close to the parapet that surrounds the Airie. Manhattan is glowing from the reds and oranges a profligate fallen sun is splashing across half the sky. Far to the west, the spires of Newton and Screwton glisten. To the east, the old scientist can see where the interlacing of rivers and ponds and land has made urban islands which, from his vantage point, look like giant flagstones. To the south are the canted masts of Wall Streets' lost fleet. But, it is the open air beneath him that holds the most intriguing sight for Fflowers. Here and there, far below, solitary winged workers are leaving their posts a few minutes early.

Fflowers pushes himself to his feet. As his body wavers from the exertion, the old man is struck with how long is has been since he has stood on his own two feet—with no doctors, no nurses, no helping hands. Despite his fragile stance, the trillionaire revels in that small gift. He is upright and alone.

The old man stands in the warm light of the failing sun and waits his moment. And, when that moment comes, as thousands of his fellow humans below spread their wings for home, he, too, spreads his limbs and takes for himself, after decades and decades of jealous waiting, the gift, the complicated gift, he has given to so many. And, as Joshua Fflowers, finally, flies, as he leisurely flaps his rail thin arms, his ancient face breaks into a wide smile as he welcomes the freedom he has achieved in that last, late warm spring afternoon. And, as the seconds of his short flight into a longer journey pass, Fflowers, still the purveyor of dreams, thinks of how he and Elena, Reiklein and Grammai, damp from rain, bubbling over with excitement at what the future held, squeezed into a cab and rode away into a glistening spring night.

# CHAPTER FOURTY-NINE

Charlie Chapfallen

Unbonny Prince Charles.

Smirking at him.

The money is gone. Joshua Fflower's trillions are going elsewhere. The last swirl of an enraged father's willful pen. Gone to every kind of mundane goodness. Distributed like indulgences to shorten the time in whatever the old man's purgatory might be.

With the money, goes the power. Poof.

Oh, not all the money and not all the power. Adanan still has his billions and he still shares the presidency with Illiya. That hasn't been taken. Yet.

But.

The real money and the real power are gone.

As his wife is gone.

Because Jack had decided to tell his mother why he himself felt that he had to go. From accomplice to traitor.

And the girl, who had cost him the money and power and his wife and his son, she, too, is gone. Not a sighting since Schecty's men were plucked in Mudtown.

No crown. No throne.

All because of the girl.

Was he wrong to have gone after her?

Hindsight was hindsight.

He needed to look forward.

Much was gone, but not all.

What was left must be his.

He would not be Prince Charles. He must be king even if it be as ruler of a much smaller realm.

But for that to happen, Illiya had to go.

It would take some time and deep thinking to decide what kind of go would be best. But, patience was a virtue. And, patience would be repaid.

# CHAPTER FIFTY

Fright

If a winger had been able to hover outside the fifth floor window of Dicky Baudgew's apartment and see past the faded maroon damask curtains, he might have thought he was witnessing an aging actress auditioning for the part of a dowager princess in a Chinese court drama. Dicky's cheeks, forehead and chinlet are colored a whitish green from a thick covering of some emollient. He has clipped back tufts of his remaining hair to keep them safe from the cream. As he paces back and forth in his living room, the agitation of his steps make his bright paisley robe billow and flare. If the windows had been open on what was proving to be a warm, blue-skied day—the kind of day that entices all but the darkest of souls to come out, and once outdoors, to enchant them to slow their lives—through those open windows would have come the shuffle slap of Dicky's ancient red Moroccan leather slippers and the clicking sound his nervous tongue makes as it snaps against his worn cider-colored teeth.

Dicky's feet and tongue, and even the tips of his fingers, are moving fast. Dicky is moving all these things to distract himself from what he really wants to do. The ancient sprite paces and clucks and huffs and sighs, but, finally, all of these efforts fail.

With a dramatic flounce of the skirts of his robe, a flaring of material that would have done a matador proud, Dicky Baudgew plops into his favorite suede chair and begins to cry. His hands go to his cheeks and his agitated fingers began to smear the cream they find there as Dicky sobs and sobs.

Dicky Baudgew loves a puzzle..., but he hates to lose. Oh, how he hates to lose.

And lost he has and lost he is. As are Edgee and Whir.

It has been four days since his two...assistants... have gone beyond the Pale to capture the girl. Four days and he has heard nothing. Nothing! One day with no communication was to be expected and two could be explained. Four days, too, could be explained, too, but only by one word: disaster. The girl is gone, and Dicky Baudgew's ideas of what to do next are gone with her.

Because the girl is gone, but death remains.

The very idea of death has enraged Dicky as far back as he can remember.

Five years old, wide awake in an ice cold bed in a colder room where the idea of It, Death, the End, swells over him like an equinoctial tide. He splutters, but in rage, not fear. What force can be so malign, or, if not malign, then stupid, or, if not stupid, then horribly, horribly short-sighted as to want Dicky Baudgew dead?

It has taken decades of boredom and being ignored and enduring poor health and a limited wealth that feels like poverty, and more ill-health, that small, niggling, sap dripping kind of ill-health, before Dicky could even think about The End without being blinded by a bloody rage. But, when kind fate, in retrospect, a suspiciously kind fate, offered him the key to two more centuries of living, Dicky first had felt relief and, then, a giggly euphoria. But, then...but, now.... No word for four days and what could be the word, but Disaster?

Dicky Baudgew feels like a man condemned to death who, having been stood against the wall, is miraculously pardoned by some unknown benign force. Pardoned, yes, but only for a few seconds before being slapped back against the unforgiving wall with a bullet.

IT ISN'T FAIR.

Dicky Baudgew, who loves a puzzle, who loves a puzzle, but doesn't like to lose, HATES to lose...poor Dicky is sobbing and the colors in his robe, wet from tears, are running and that is what Dicky wishes he could do, too.

...But, Dicky knows that he cannot run because he has known since he was just a wee boy of five, that running just brings Death glee.

# CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Flight

They have been waiting at the river's edge less than five minutes before Hortos unslings his bow and nocks an arrow. The remaining orange-feathered winger is flying rapidly upriver. Prissi can only guess what has happened to Joe, but the fact that the winger is flying rather than piloting the launch gives her hope. Even though the winger is a dozen meters in the air, in the middle of the river and beating his wings furiously, all of that activity seems to have no effect on the centaur. He draws his bowstring so far back that Prissi can't understand why the bow itself doesn't crack. When the arrow releases, the bow string hums. Prissi listens to that locust-like sound die as she watches the arrow fly toward where there is no winger. Yet.

To an incredulous Prissi, the arrow and the left leg of the winger intersect. Wings stop beating as the winger looks to see what possibly can have happened. Edgee plunges toward the water, until, at the last second, his wings start to beat again. When Hortos steps out of the shadow of the woods, Edgee notices. He immediately drops his left wing and makes a sharp turn toward where Prissi sits astride the man-horse. For some unknown reason, later Prissi thinks it could have been pride or even despair, Hortos delays reaching back into his quiver to draw another arrow. As Edgee flies toward them, he reaches down to his wounded leg. Prissi assumes that it's the wound that draws his hand, but, instead, Edgee reaches into a pant leg pocket and withdraws the folding saw. Edgee is less than five meters away when Hortos' second arrow digs deep into the winger's chest. His wound will be mortal, but momentum and anger carry him forward. Prissi is thrown from the centaur as Hortos rears to protect himself from Edgee's attack. The centaur's hoofs strike as high as they can, but only catch the winger's legs. Edgee's wings cover Hortos' torso as his hand begins maniacally slashing at the centaur with the saw blade. The dying winger and the centaur, bleeding from a dozen cuts, thrash about in the dense brush. Prissi, caught for a third time that day among the vines and thorns, struggles to twist herself away from the battle. Edgee knows he is in his last minutes, but with hate and rage is how he wants to leave life. He frantically slashes and stabs, but each following stroke of the blade does less and less harm. Hortos bucks and kicks and finally manages to throw Edgee to the ground. His hoof lashes out and snaps the arm that holds the blade. The centaur places a hoof and his weight upon the winger's chest until the wildly pounding wrathful heart beneath grows still.

Although she is not wounded, Prissi is horrified that she is covered in almost as much blood as Hortos. She looks around and sees that she has been lucky because most of what holds her down is vine and not bramble. She twists and turns, plucks and pulls and manages to free herself. She uses the centaur's rear legs to pull herself up. At her touch, the skin on Hortos' legs quiver as if a horsefly had landed, but the legs themselves remain immobile. Once she is standing, Prissi works herself around Edgee's blood-soaked wings so that she can see Hortos' face. She reaches up to wipe the blood from the man-horse's face, but he flinches.

"Let me help."

"Going will help."

Prissi doesn't know whether the centaur means that her leaving will help or that his going, like Mortos and Olewan have gone, will help. She stands by, hands reaching out, but doing nothing until the man-horse bends his forelegs and, then, his hind legs so that he is sitting on the blood churned forest floor.

Prissi tries to catch his eyes, but Hortos is looking somewhere else. After a minute, he must have seen enough because he closes his eyes. Prissi closes hers, too and her hand reaches up to grab the crescent crystals hanging from her neck. She can wait for Hortos to die. Another one of her victims. Or, or she can move on.

More for Hortos sake than her own, the devastated girl starts off down the path. She has no idea of where she is going, and the idea that she is walking away from the water fills her with trepidation, but she feels she has no other choice.

She hasn't gone a half kilometer when she hears a long moan that three times rises up an octave before dropping back down. In respect, Prissi waits for the sound to disappear before she continues hobbling down the path. She doesn't stop until it is too dark to see.

Prissi, hungry, tired, near crippled Prissi, worms her way a few meters into woods, works her way under a clump of barberry, and spreads her wings to clean them as best she can before she folds them around her like a blanket. Exhaustion overrides all else—hunger, fear, remorse, sadness, even, hate. Her wounded body needs to heal as much as her mind needs relief. She takes three pills from the vial she had taken from the Bury, swallows them and falls deeply asleep.

The slivered moon is high in the sky, its light mostly filtered by spring's new leaves, when Prissi is rousted by a hand tugging on her ankle. Despite how deeply she has been sleeping and how rough the awakening, the girl opens her eyes without fear.

The hand belongs to Fair. Even when Prissi sits up, the boy keeps pulling on her. The broken light of the moon hides what his face might tell, but his hands are insistent. When Prissi folds her wings so that she can get herself to her knees, Fair backs his way out to the path. Once they are both on the path, Fair talks, but what he is trying to communicate is more effectively done with his hands than his words. Prissi gets the gist. Olewan, the old man, Mortos and Hortos are dead and Fair's world is crumbling. He has come to Prissi to seek salvation.

Since Prissi has no idea where she is, and since she has no desire to test her wings, even if she could find a break in what seems to be an unrelenting, unbroken, forest canopy, she snorts at the idea of the woods boy looking to her for help to make his escape. Although Prissi doesn't see how she might be useful to Fair, it only takes her a moment to get an idea of how he might be able to help her.

"I'm going to the big water, the ocean. I can help you, but, first, I have to get to the ocean. Do you know where it is? The big water?"

Prissi shakes her head in disgust as she listens to herself. Fair's nod is so tentative that the girl isn't sure whether he understands what she is asking.

She points along the path, "The big water?"

Fair points across the woods and begins moving down the path. Prissi wants to follow, but she isn't sure she trusts the boy. After all, he has no reason to trust her. She took Olewan's crystal, lied to him and then ran away. Fair turns after taking a few steps, sees Prissi standing still, makes a face which seems more grimace than smile, and beckons her forward,

They walk for hours in the dark. Despite the medication she has taken, Prissi's ribs ache. Her legs ache. Her heart aches. As she walks, the girl manages to ignore the first two, but not the third.

They change paths at least a dozen times. Each time they switch from one path to another, Prissi feels more out of control. To allay her fears, she begins to flex the muscles in her wings. She tells herself that she can, and, if she must, she will fly. Moving through the night's soggy murk, the winger spends as much time looking above as she does looking ahead. She wants to be prepared so that if the need arises, she will know which way to fly. Most of the girl's scouting is not reassuring. The woods on both sides seem dense and dark. As nearly as she can tell in the darkness, if she were to launch, she would crash into a tree in seconds. So, she plots and plods and is enervated by both. The only distraction from her thoughts comes when Fair talks. Prissi has a hard time understanding what he is saying, but she makes herself pay attention because she thinks it may help her later on. From Fair's telling of the day's events, it seems obvious to Prissi that life in the Bury is the same in its fundamentals as life beyond it. Anger, revenge, self-centered desire and love are what wind the clock.

Prissi's feet, which have been tromping along without her mind's guidance, are the first part of her to notice when the path changes. Walking is harder because the path is softer and the path is softer because it is sandier. It is not until she stumbles and throws her hands forward into Fair's back that Prissi's mind recognizes that they are getting close to the shore. Once recognition comes, all of Prissi's senses become alert to the changes. There is a briny smell to the air. The oaks and maples, pecans, and river birches have changed over to pines. The brush is thinner. There is a thump, as steady as a fool's heartbeat, pounding in the distance. They are still embowered when Prissi shouts as she looks down the path to where the woods tight clutch gives way to open horizon. The sight of featureless spectral gray works a chemistry in the teener that causes her to cry. She can not say why. Her tears are profuse, but her feelings, as they have been throughout the long walk, though intense, remain diffuse.

Two minutes later Prissi and Fair are standing on the high landward side of a wrack-littered beach. Driftwood and netting, bubblebottles, seaweed and shells, a shoe, scraps of badboard, another shoe, a deeply gouged buoy and a million smooth rocks are strewn in that part of the wind-sculpted shore which rises higher than the most recent tides. Below the belt of refuse is a band of smooth wet sand. The pale light from the sliver of a defeated moon mottles the beach in taupe, black and gray. The ocean beyond is simpler—just black and grays except far to the east where someone has drawn a pencil line of molten pink.

Prissi stares at the horizon and is mesmerized by all of the open empty space. All that unendingness makes her realize just how cloistered her last days have been. She watches the pink line's inexorable growing. She knows that as the dawn grows, the possibility that she can carry out her plan shrinks. She swivels her head so that she can look to the south and west. She sees nothing, but her years in Africa staring out at the vastness of Lake Tanganyika have taught her that bodies of water are slow to give up their secrets. Even though she is impatient, she forces herself to slowly study the darkness before her. Still, she sees nothing. She runs down the dune and across the surf swept sand to the water's edge.

Prissi's movements trigger a heightened wariness in Fair. He follows a step behind her with his hands poised in front of him like a shortstop with a good bunter at the plate. Prissi flares her wings to keep them dry as she carefully walks into the frothy gray surf. The water is so cold her ankles immediately burn. Despite the pain, she takes her time to carefully scan the horizon first and, then, the water in between. As she watches, a veil of fog far to the west shreds and she sees the faintest glow of lights. Without diverting her eyes, Prissi reaches behind her with an outstretched hand.

"It's so beautiful. Let's walk."

With canine enthusiasm, Fair takes Prissi's proffered hand. She squeezes his callused fingers in affirmation of her good intentions and begins walking fast along the shore. As they hurry along the smooth, hard, canted strip of sand, Prissi works to solve the most important math equation of her life. If object A traveling at x meters a minute....

Ten minutes later, although the sun itself still remains hidden, its bloody rays have leaked deeper into the gauze of the pale gray sky. The air is calm. Prissi is not. She is sure that all of Fair's feral senses are keenly aware of her agitation. Seeing the dark shadow of a massive boulder jutting from the sand far down the beach, Prissi picks up the pace.

When they get close to the rock, Prissi drops Fair's hand and in her most enthusiastic voice says, "Let's climb it so we can see the sun come up. C'mon hurry!"

Prissi half flares her wings to keep them safe from the rock's rough surface as she looks for a foothold. The boulder is more than two meters high, but less than that across. As Prissi begins to climb, a worried Fair circles the rock to find his own way up. By the time the girl summits and gets back up on her feet, she is disappointed to find that Fair is already there with a big smile on his face. She gives him her brightest most disarming smile and turns to the east as if to welcome the sun. As Fair turns with her, Prissi shoves his shoulder as hard as she can. Fair fights for his balance, but loses the battle. As the boy tumbles from the rock, Prissi flaps her wings. Before her victim can scramble to his feet, Prissi is five meters in the air. She circles Fair as she reaches into her kanga for the beat-up mypod she had bought what seems so long ago in Spicetown. She keys the mypod before throws it to the ground.

"I'm sorry. Sorry for everything."

This part of Prissi's plan depends on two things she can't control. The first is that Fair will keep the pulsing instrument, a memento of her deceit, and that he will start back to the Bury. She is hoping the thick canopy of the woods will keep the solar cell from recharging. If her enemies, the other ones, the shadowy ones who want to kill her, pick up the signal, she is counting that the mypod will have lost its signal by the time they arrive. The evidence will be that Prissi came ashore and walked north into the woods where something happened and she and her signal were lost.

As Prissi climbs to thirty meters above the ocean, she pinpoints the lights which are her goal. She knows that she must not lose sight of those tiny beacons, but as the sun rises, she also knows that it will be harder and harder to keep her course. It is this part of her plan that is either mortally stupid or brilliantly audacious. No one would expect a fifteen-year old girl to voluntarily give up her mypod with its GPS function to fly across open water in the dark.

Prissi knows it is audacious. She also knows that it is stupid. But, it is the only plan she could come up with that might let her be free. In the same way that Roan Winslow became free to become Nora Langue. Life from death. A shadow phoenix rising.

As she beats her wings, Prissi's thoughts shift from how painful it is to move her wings—she thinks she can actually hear the crack in her clavicle scrape back and forth—to what jubilation it is to be back in the air again. As she has counted on, the early morning winds are calm. The salt-soaked air is as joltingly invigorating as a meta-espresso. The sound of those light breezes sliding over the swells is like a lullaby.

When her fatigue increases and her pains grow sharper, Prissi tries to ignore that part of her mind which wants to calculate how far out from shore she can go before she would not have the energy to return. She pushes back the nattering voice that wants to relive her exhausted crash. She tries to escape the finicky monitor who wants to recount the number of times her wing has popped free of its socket in the days since she has left Dutton. She shakes her head to distract herself from the moral auditor who wants to tote up the damage—her father, the drowned zie, Bob Tom, Hortos, Olewan, Mortos, even Fair—and discuss payment.

Lull. Lull. Calm lullaby. Come, lullaby.

Since Prissi's mouth is too busy sucking in the damp sea air, her mind sings to itself. The song may help to keep her calm, but it doesn't hold back the dawn. When the girl looks over her left shoulder, she sees that an arc of yolk has risen above the horizon and the pre-dawn's red lava line is morphing into a sweep of orange. Prissi is hit with a jolt of pure panic when she turns back and, for a moment and, then, another, and, then, two more, she can not find her guiding lights. A deep relief, like the medicine that surged through her veins at Columbia Unitarian Hospital, sweeps through her when those guides finally, but very weakly, reappear from the endless murk.

The winger shifts her heading more to the west southwest to give herself plenty of leeway. She restarts the lull, lull, lullaby litany, but suddenly a geyser of youthful defiance explodes in her. She won't spend any more energy diverting fear. Instead, she imagines herself as the lead bird of a flock. She is out front, leading the others to a good place, a place of safety, a place of joy. She flies first, but in her flock her father follows. She turns her head and sees how happy he is to be with her, traveling along her path. As is Olewan. And....

Something drops from Prissi. Lightened, she rises in the air. The sense of her new lightness is so strong that she looks down to see if her kanga is still on her chest. The pak is there, but, somehow, a huge weight is gone. The winger climbs higher and higher, and, as she does, she feels ever lighter. She feels that, like an albatross, she could fly across the ocean to Africa.

Staring ahead, Prissi sees the ship's lights wink out as dawn spreads across the Atlantic, but as those pin points disappear, the blocky shape they outline begins to emerge from the gray.

As the foundering teener draws closer, she can see that the hulk emerging from the mist is a freighter, a beat-up scabrous freighter. Heaven in a hulk. Prissi is instantly positive that the ship she is flying toward is the same one whose crew offered her sanctuary on the Hudson. She knows beyond any doubt that when she lands that a rail-thin, hard-muscled Liberian woman will wrap her in her arms.

Now, Prissi is truly amazed. She has found a point, or a plane, a place between life and death, where will is all. Beating her wings is effortless. She can fly through the gloaming skies with no more than thought. Because it is so easy, and because she is so eager to see her freighter friends, to touch their smooth black skin, to smell the pungency of harissa on their breaths and the macassar oil in their hair, to be rocked in the cradle of their care, Prissi beats her wings faster. But, in a sharp and amazing display of the interconnectedness of the world and will, as she flies faster, the boat goes slower.

But that can't be. She and the boat, she and the crew, the African crew are meant for one another. She and Africa.

The freighter wallows, which will prove to be bad for the boat, but good for Prissi, because the exhilaration she is feeling is no more substantial than the fanciful bones and feathers of the Chimera. In actuality, the thrice-wounded teener is beyond exhaustion. She should have crashed and died minutes before. It is only an aberrant northeast wind, presaging a spring storm, lifting her wings and pushing her southwest, and the compromised speed of the disabled ship, that allow the girl and her goal to intersect.

A failing, wildly flapping, deliriously ecstatic Prissi approaches the Liberian freighter on its portside just behind the bridge. She clears the railings and makes such a poor landing that she bangs her shoulder and then her head against the rusty steel of that ancient tower.

A beaten heap of wet wings and worn will rises and falls as the freighter wallows in the low seas until a woman, an African woman, an African woman with thin hard-muscled arms, lifts the unconscious girl and carries her below deck to the relative safety of the crew's small quarters.

When Prissi finally regains consciousness, her ears listen to the drum-laden music pounding from a banged up speaker, then, her nose smells the mahlebi, bird pepper and nigella and finally she opens her eyes to see a rainbow of brightly colored clothes hanging around the small room like Fifth World flags.

Africa. Oh, Africa. She beckoned and Prissi couldn't wait. To go to her feverish, loving deadly bosom. Home. Where millions lived for the most basic of reasons. And millions died for no reason. Africa. Home. Prissi craved to be back in the land where she was born and raised, the land where cause and effect had disconnected dozens of decades before. Africa. Oh, Africa.

As Prissi sings her feverish hymn, the crew of the J.J. Roberts works to bring life back into a ship that is supposed to take them back the ten thousand kilometers to their war-torn home.

When they sailed into New York five days before to unload a cargo of coffee, no one had any doubts that the Roberts needed to undergo major repairs. The crew of West Africans contained a number of good mechanics, machinists, jerry-riggers and makers-do. The skills to make do were requisite for those sailing ships under Fifth World flags, but, the Roberts was in need of more than baling wire and ingenuity. She required money.

Money was requested, but money was denied. The owners, two-thirds of a Botswan junta once-removed, had other priorities. The captain of the Roberts, a wild-eyed Gabonese named Christian Bongo, was ordered to load his cargo of used clothing and make do. To insure that the captain understood his duties, the owners made mention of the health of Bongo's wives and children.

The Robert's wallows, but, to Prissi down below, that movement feels like rocking. Soon that rocking, along with a dreamy lullaby sounding deep inside her head, sends the girl into many hours of the deepest of sleeps. It isn't until a minor miracle, also below deck, involving an acetylene torch and some non-traditional and suspect plumbing is accomplished that the Roberts gets back underway. When Prissi awakes she hears the roar of the engines and knows she is bound for Africa.

The rested winger keeps her eyes closed and, at first, only concentrates on the grumbling of the engines and the thudding of the waves banging on the bow. When those sensations finally bore her, she imagines flying with a falcon's swift speed and sharp sight. Coming up over the hill and down across the soccer fields and, then, above the Mu and over Potter's Pond where she can pick out Nasty Nancy with her frizzy hair and clipped wings hiding her butt against the low wall outside The Jig. Her hands are waving as fast as her lips are moving as she tells Adam Lin of all she did to help Prissi stay out of trouble, of how she misses Prissi, but...fly on...there's Joe with his new wings and his alete's body in that puffy stage of the newly fledged and the expression on Joe's face looks as tentative as his body as he stands alone at the edge of the pond staring into its waters, but...fly, fly on...there's Dr. Smarkzy with a package tucked under his arm and he looks so old and frail and, he, too, as he makes his way along the path made of thousands of bricks, each with a graduates name pressed into the clay, looks tentative in both his walk and thoughts, but,...fly...and Prissi veers north to Lakeville, but before she even gets to the edge of the Bissell campus, knowing the smug, self-assured look she will see on Jack Fflowers face, she turns back and she is so high, a klik high in the sky that from the ground she must look like no more than a smudgy dot and she is back and forth over the top of the building at the bottom of Central Park yet, as hard as she looks, even though she can see a gorgon and chimera and a massive centaur, there is no sight of an ancient man in a wheelchair, but...fly on...seventy blocks north she hovers over Spicetown riding the thermals and watches and waits until her patience ends and she dives toward a window defending itself from the world with heavy, faded red damask curtain and she's through the glass and she has the simpering little evil doll man on the floor, but...no...fly, fly on...to a parking lot that hasn't held a car in a half-century, high above the Hudson, where darting, dipping, minnow fast, Jiffy Apithy brings the soccer ball up field and his bright round black face is split in two by brighter white teeth and he dribbles the ball from knee to knee and then to his scarred head and then squatting down he gathers his strength and just as all his opponents arrive he snaps upward and the ball sails into the air higher and improbably, impossibly higher and Prissi reaches out and catches it and looks down and sees Jiffy laughing and hears a metallic noise and looks up and sees a door open and a round-faced woman with ritual scars on her cheeks, looking at her.

"I'm Princy Piety. If this god maddening ship is gon sink, we gon sink with full bellies."

Princy Piety steps through the bulkhead with a battered tray and the smells from the food it holds make Prissi's nose explode. Hearing the injured girl's snort causes a blanketing laugh from deep in the African's small strong body.

Prissi gives the slightest twitch to her wings.

Fly on.......

