“Change McCallum?” I asked. “No one’s ever seen him. For all we know he’s a hand puppet. There’s no way to get close to him.”
We pushed through the doors and started heading back to the Children’s Home. This was the creepiest part—this long, poorly lit hallway back home. It was late now—I was beat and it was hard to stay alert. This hallway ran along the back of prisoner cells, and every once in a while, one of them would tap on the high, narrow windows and startle the crap out of me. Usually this was followed by a laugh, or suggestions that made my ears burn.
Suddenly I heard the whoosh of—wings? I spun around, but Ridley wasn’t inside, wasn’t in this hall. I walked faster.
“The way to get closer to McCallum is through… computer lines,” Clete said serenely.
But I was hardly listening. What if… what if they’d already experimented with erasing memories? What if they’d experimented on me?
CHAPTER 10
We all slept jumbled together in what had once been a large closet. Over the years I’d collected sleeping bags, blankets, tablecloths, pillows, you name it. If it was relatively soft, it was in this closet, and we slept in and around and on it, our body heat pooling together to keep us warm, breath mixing as we slept in a pile, like a litter of puppies.
Our common room, where we did everything else, was basically a big, depressing space with a couple tables, a bunch of chairs, and some broken furniture that the orderlies had stashed here. The walls had once been white, probably, but now were tinged with yellow and almost gray with years of dirt and dust. There were splashes of dark brown that might have once been red, but I tried not to think about that.
That night, my dreams were horrible. I was fighting my way through the clouds over the City of the Dead, voices filling my ears. Unseen hands grabbed at me, snatching feathers from my wings.
I bolted upright, damp with sweat, still twitching from my nightmares. A thin, pale strip of light at the bottom of the door showed me the sun was up, so I extricated myself from various lab rats, easing my arm out from Calypso and untangling my legs from Clete’s, and tiptoed out. In the common room the sun looked like it was leaking through the dirty windows. I remembered last night, standing there, watching the new prisoner. The worst of the worst. Feeling like he’d been trying to pry into my brain.
That had been super creepy. I hoped they were keeping him locked up tight.
It was when we were scavenging leftovers for breakfast that Calypso suddenly looked at me, her eyes round. “Soldiers,” she said.
Soldiers meant one thing: they were coming to get us.
“Okay, guys, scatter,” I ordered.
And just like rats, they did.
Moke pulled a bookcase away from a wall to reveal the hole we’d chipped out of the cinder blocks. He shooed Calypso and Rain through it and pushed the bookcase back. That small space was full now, so he climbed up on the table, jumped, and pushed one of the big ceiling tiles out of place. Another jump and he was through and setting the tile back down.
The sound of marching feet was loud now, and I watched as Clete went back in our nest, pulled some bedding aside, and opened a trapdoor in the floor. He crawled through and closed it, pulling on a thread so that bedding would cover it again.
Two seconds later one of our doors opened with a clang, hitting the wall behind it. Four soldiers stood there, hands clutching automatic rifles.
“Hey,” I said calmly, and popped the rest of my peanut butter cracker in my mouth. “I didn’t know there was a parade today.”
A man wearing the black lab coat of a doctor stepped around the soldiers.
“Where is everyone?” he asked, and I shrugged. “Don’t just stand there,” he snapped at the soldiers. “I know there’s some kids left around here. Search the place!”
I stood and casually started drifting toward the doors to the outside. They were here because we were lab rats, after all. Some experiments were better done on kids instead of prisoners or some poor Ope. Sometimes they needed a healthy body in order to get the results they wanted. The McCallum Children’s Home used to have more than five of us in it—years ago there had been maybe twenty-five or thirty. In twos and threes, kids had been taken away by one doctor or another. Usually they didn’t come back. The few who did come back were in bad shape and didn’t last long.
Which is why we had come up with a bunch of escape routes—the three the kids were using this time weren’t the only ones.
The soldiers clumped around and I tried not to laugh as they looked under tables, in shelves, behind broken furniture, like maybe we thought it was a game, like hide-and-seek. We knew better. It might be a game, but if you were found, you died.
One soldier, a mean-looking woman with scars on her face, went into our sleeping closet and kicked at piles of stuff, stabbing the end of her rifle down into the pillows and sleeping bags. Like maybe they were hiding by lying really flat in the one place that made sense.
“Where are they?” the doctor asked me angrily.
“Who?” I said, rocking back on my heels. Any second I was going to have to bolt—there was no way the doctor was getting between me and the door.
The doctor nodded to the soldiers. “Take this one, then search outside.”
That was my cue. I spun and bolted through the heavy glass door, hearing pounding boots behind me.
“Get her!” the doctor howled, and I raced for the one tree in the yard, a decrepit wreck that was going to fall over any day now. I leaped up into its brittle branches and climbed till I could spring on top of the twelve-foot concrete wall, this one place where I’d cut the razor wire. Bullets sprayed around me, taking out stone chips as I dropped lightly down outside.
“Open the gate, you idiots!” the doctor shouted, and almost instantly I heard the rusty, scraping whine of the metal gate being pulled to one side. I was halfway down the block by then but could still hear the soldiers running after me. A quick left, and then the old, broken sewer grate was right there. I slid sideways feet first, fitting neatly through the narrow opening, then braced myself for what I knew was a ten-foot drop.
Silently I chuckled as the boots above slowed in confusion. I didn’t wait around, but headed quietly down the dark tunnel, a tunnel I knew as well as my own black eyes.
CHAPTER 11
There were hundreds—maybe thousands—of kilometers of sewer tunnels beneath the City of the Dead. I’d been down every one. Despite all the crazy people on the surface, I was the only bird-kid I’d ever seen. So I’d made sure that no one but the lab rats saw me fly.
It had been a lot easier to map the tunnels when I was smaller. Now I was fifteen, almost two meters tall, and my wingspan was just about four meters wide. Only the biggest, main tunnels were wide enough for me to still fly through them. But running was almost as easy as flying, and I could still cover a lot of ground fast, even if my shoes did get all kinds of stuff on them that I’d rather not think about.
In less than fifteen minutes I was right beneath my corner. When I realized that I had instinctively come here I punched the wall, my knuckles coming back smeared with mold and dirt. I’d been coming here so long my feet took me whether I wanted to or not, whether I was aboveground or below, muscle memory so ingrained I didn’t have a choice. I had promised myself I would never come back, yet here I was.
But I had promised them, too.
Anyway. More important stuff to worry about: there were a lot of abandoned buildings in the wheezing, dying downtown of the City of the Dead. I liked to explore them, steal what I could, sell it on the street to buy food for the kids. There were also huge trash heaps to go through, people to spy on—my days were just packed.
But then it would come time for me to be on my corner. Again. Giving the ghosts of the past their half hour. So stupid.
“Ask yourself, what have I done to make my community better?” McCallum was booming on a vidscreen when I surfaced. “In the City of the Dead, you are given everything you need for suc
cess! But what are you doing to earn your success?” As usual his voice was much too loud, inescapable, his broad face pixelated like he gave off interference himself.
By late that afternoon I had done a lot to earn my success. The morning had been great—I’d broken into a forgotten locker near one of the old, unused underground train tracks. Got all kinds of neat shit. I’d taken it to market square and sold all of it. Bought food. Now it was just about time for my vigil. Even though I’d said I wasn’t doing it anymore, my body took me there anyway. How could I fight that? Might as well be there for the usual time. If nothing else, I could scope out the people. Sometimes it helped to know what people needed, to better judge what I should steal. I might even see Pietro.
But no, I shook my head. I didn’t want to think about Pietro and the dead Chung prince, lying broken on the sidewalk, even though he had survived the duel. I sighed, scratching at a flea bite on the back of my knee. At least I had Ridley to keep me company.
“Got any money?” The Ope’s dirty, desperate face came at me from a shadow.
“Nope,” I said. “You want a banana?”
The Ope’s eyes turned crafty and I instantly realized that she would take the banana and sell it to another Ope, then save the pennies for her next fix.
“Yes,” she said eagerly, holding out two shaking, freckled hands.
I held it out of reach. “You can have it if you eat it right now, in front of me,” I said. “Otherwise go bug someone else.”
The Ope frowned, thinking, then held out her hands. I gave her the banana. Once she started eating it, she wolfed it down, cheeks puffing out. I gave her some stale bread and she ate that, too.
“Is that a chicken?” she asked with a full mouth, pointing at Ridley on my shoulder. “You gonna eat him?”
Ridley squawked indignantly as I tried not to laugh.
“Not a chicken,” I said, feeling her talons cling a bit too hard. “Not gonna eat her.”
“We live in the best city anywhere!” McCallum shouted as the Ope shuffled away. “But I can’t make it the best all by myself!” His unnaturally white smile stretched across the vidscreens. “What are you bringing to the table? Why do you deserve the space you’re in?”
The space I’m in, ha. Not only did I deserve it, but I couldn’t freaking get away from it. It’s like my parents willed that corner to me, or something.
“Freakin’ nut,” I muttered, heading toward the next street, the main street. As usual, Ridley took off to do an overview of the street from above. I knew she’d join me later.
At my corner a big, muscle-y guy was waiting for me. He was twitchy, jacked up, his fingers tapping the wall behind him. He knew it was my corner. Hell, everyone did. But everyone likes to pick on Hawk.
I could just do a U-ie, fade into the crowd, slip into an empty building, jump off the roof, and head home. That would make sense. It was the only thing that would make sense.
Rolling my eyes, I kept walking, aware of a few regulars on the street stopping their convos, looking up, waiting to see the fight. This guy had probably been paid to be there, to fight me. He was bigger than Clete, and Clete was dang big. I was close enough now to judge his pale skin, the grayish circles under his eyes. He was an Ope. He needed money. Someone had def set this up.
I was able to get real close while he was scanning the crowd in the other direction. I don’t believe in fighting fair, so I trotted up to him, pulled my fist back, and then—wham!—punched him in the side of his head. He staggered, almost losing his balance. I stayed close and snap-kicked the side of his knee, knocking him to the ground, where he lay looking up at me, confused and mad. The whole thing had taken six seconds.
“You bitch!” he sputtered, getting clumsily to his feet.
“Stay down,” I warned him, but he didn’t listen. Like an angry bear he hulked toward me, his large, meaty hands curled into bricklike fists. I’m tall but super thin and really fast. It was easy for me to duck his wide swing, but he couldn’t stop and he punched through the air and right into the concrete wall. I heard his grunt of pain.
Jumping high, I wheeled around and kicked his head, knocking that into the wall, too. He sank down again, blinking.
“I’m not afraid of you!” he snarled, rubbing his temple.
“I don’t know why not,” I said. “I just kicked your ass.”
He started to get to his feet, and I backed up in case he swung again. “I just don’t want to hurt Pietro’s girlfriend,” he said tauntingly.
I frowned. “I’m not anyone’s girlfriend!” Just for that, he got a left uppercut punch that snapped his jaw shut and made the back of his head hit the wall. Again. Then I socked him in his gut. He hadn’t had time to tighten his abs so his breath left him in a painful whoosh. This time he staggered around the corner, leaving my spot free at last—the spot I didn’t even really want but kept coming back to, like a trained dog.
And my day went way downhill from there.
CHAPTER 12
Every time I took my place on my corner, a new wave of embarrassment and rage washed over me. Fury at my parents for abandoning me, of course, but an even hotter anger at myself for being stupid and gullible every day for ten years. I would never forgive them. I could never forgive myself.
The minutes passed with miserable slowness. I tried to distract myself by people watching—there was always some drama going on. Up the street, two women with rival plastic-goods stands were shrieking and hitting each other with toy umbrellas, rain boots, packages of cups.
Every so often an Ope came up to me, begged for money. Sometimes they took the food I offered—crackers, corn nuts, some kind of jerky that might be real meat—and ate it in front of me. Mostly they refused and went on begging. Whatever. I’d always give food to people, but if they didn’t want it, it just meant more for us.
I smiled, thinking about the haul I’d made this morning. Had I already checked every underground train stop, along all the lines? Probably not. I tended to stick to sewer pipes and mechanical access tunnels. I’d been down all the underground train lines—I was sure of that—but hadn’t fully explored them. They hadn’t been used in so long that some of them were collapsing. Once I’d been in one, trying to check out its abandoned stops, when I heard a rumbling. I looked up to see a heavy chunk of plaster ceiling drop down on an Ope, knocking him across the third rail. Amazingly the third rail was still alive and the tunnel had filled with the Ope’s agonized screams and the gross smell of burning flesh. He’d popped like a tick, and I got out of there.
So I hadn’t checked them out as thoroughly as I probably should—the memory of that smell kept me away. I was mulling this over when I became aware that people in the street looked agitated, ducking back into their street stalls, disappearing down side streets, jumping inside and slamming their doors shut. Straightening up, I scanned the street, listening to the cries, the harsh whispers of warning.
Soon I saw why: A bunch of Chung thugs were ransacking the street, knocking over stalls and tables, breaking glasses at a tea pub. If anyone was in their way, the thugs knocked them down, felling grown-ups with one punch, kicking kids to the side. They left behind them a street of destruction and a lot of bruised and bleeding people, the ones that weren’t quick enough to get out of the way or hadn’t paid attention to the changing mood on the street. I stepped onto the boarded-up stoop of the building on my corner, totally out of their way. My fists automatically clenched, my feathers bristled.
I counted at least eight of them, male and female, all pretty young. They had razored haircuts and tattoos and other body mods, like stubs of horns put under the skin of their foreheads, twenty rings in one ear, piercings through upper lips, eyebrows, the septums of their noses. I looked like a cuddly kitten next to them.
They stopped not far from me and made a circle, their backs to one another.
“We’re looking for witnesses!” a guy bellowed.
“One of our own was murdered yesterday!” The woman’s bl
eached-blond hair contrasted oddly with her smooth tan face. “We know some of you must have seen it!”
Murder. They weren’t going to pretend that the duel had been fair, weren’t going to slide back into the shadows and accept defeat. That meant trouble for Pietro and the Sixes. Big time.
I thought back to when one of the Pater henchmen had snapped the Chung prince’s neck, after Pietro had spared him. Had that been only yesterday?
One of the Chungs’ people took out a semiautomatic pistol and shot it into the air. People scattered. I calculated the angle of the bullet and followed its trajectory downward. It fell against a window, breaking the glass. When I looked up again, one of the Chung soldiers was looking right at me.
I glanced away quickly, trying to seem unconcerned, but he was headed my way. I could run, but unlike most regular people and Opes, these guys were probably genetically enhanced as much as they were physically altered. The Chungs took security very seriously.
“You,” the guy said, pointing his gun at me. “You’re a street rat. Is this your corner? Did you see it?”
A woman came up next to him, her long black hair hanging down in two braids tied with silk ribbons to match the Chung uniform. “Don’t make us cut it out of you,” she said, pulling out an eight-inch hunting knife, the kind used to skin deer or wild pigs. “My name is Ki-Iseul. It was my brother, Prince Chul-Gun, who died yesterday. You will tell us what you know.” Her voice was icy and a bit raw, as if she had been crying.
“I don’t know anything,” I said firmly. “I didn’t see it.”
“Grab her!” ordered Ki-Iseul.
CHAPTER 13
I jumped up, but from a still, standing position managed to get only about two meters high. Hands clamped onto my ankles, dragging me down to the waiting group. When I landed, many arms grabbed me. I twisted free, punching, kicking, knocking heads together, but as soon as I downed one, two more would take his place. Someone cracked my head with the butt of her pistol and I saw stars but didn’t fall over.
Hawk Page 4
