Flight

by Neil Hetzner

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 s
tern, 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 eas
t 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.