Eyes on me, I felt them. To my left, another abomination of a being.
Flapping above me, higher, higher, it was gathering power, readying to strike.
RUN, SHIT TURD, RUN.
A black wave of crows swarmed around it, mobbing it from all angles, beaks and claws aimed for its red, red eyes. I heard its beak clapping at crows. Two beautiful black bodies lay motionless on the ground in front of me. Fallen crows. My heart felt stuck with a needle.
RUN.
Go, Shit Turd, go.
I ran on, the copper beech roots bumping up and down in my vision, my heart in its limbs. I was a black-winged bird risen from the ashes. And then a voice in my head—I’m just an earth bird; how can I do this? I blocked out doubt and pushed harder, Dennis and Big Jim running beside me—I could feel them.
“Come on, Shit Turd! You can do it, buddy!” boomed Big Jim in my ear.
“Booooowwooooooooo! BooowwOOOOOOO!”
I reached the roots of the copper beech and looked up to the skyscraper, a challenge even for King Kong. My legs shook and I flapped my wings.
“Come on, Bad Wing, we have to do this!” I commenced a determined climb using my beak and the plucky part of me—dinosaur DNA. I scrambled up the slope of the bark, flapping like a fledgling, feet scraping for purchase.
I’m coming, Dee. I’m coming.
I made it up to the limbs of low branches, my legs on fire. No time to stop. I ran along the branch, picturing Big Jim clapping below, Dennis racing around the base of the tree in jubilance, and now I was King Kong, heart bigger than Manhattan. I tackled the hurdle up to the next branch, bark splinters biting my feet. I bit the rounded nub of a burl and used it as leverage, shimmying up onto a higher branch, and another. Even Kong scaled the Empire State Building bit by bit, but I felt like giving up, the effort too much for my brain and heart and body. But the leaves around me shivered out a rallying rustle. I felt the old copper beech willing me to go on, rooting for me. Conspiring for my success.
“Gooooo,” I heard her say. And I gave it everything I had, flinging myself up to each jutting lump of the copper beech’s bark. I made it to the next level of branches.
And I slipped.
My foot swung out from under me. I rolled off a branch. The last thing I saw as I tipped was the distance I was about to drop. Bone-hard ground, stone, and roots below.
The wind blew my feathers upward as I plummeted.
Dee, Dee.
The fall stopped. My stomach stabilized. My back had support.
I opened my eyes. I was in a bed of fingers.
Dark, soulful eyes stared at me, squinting to make sure I was still breathing. Dexterous fingers that paint one-of-a-kind prints smoothed the feathers of my chest. I looked up to spectacular strong arms, dark hair, and a brilliant mind, filling with relief, wonder, gratitude.
The young gorilla let out a soft grunt and tucked me into her armpit. She moved nimbly, with careful placement of each foot and hand, and we ascended into the tall branches of the mighty copper beech. Up and up we went, and I didn’t dare look down, since a bird admitting to a fear of heights is a shit fest I’d managed to keep pretty quiet since I’d crapped out my wing. And then we reached the horrible nest, a tumor in the copper beech tree. Cruel lumps of metal and an empire of rust. And she let out another gentle “ooff ooff” and placed me on the end of a broken tentpole sticking out the side of the nest. She gave me a last look. Maybe she knew from the social groom-time stories of her family that once, it was almost her kind we lost.
“Thank you,” said the inky bird reflected in the shine of her eyes.
The gorilla looked down at a war and bravely started her nimble descent.
I hobbled along the squalor of metal and glass in shambles. Dee was in the middle of the nest, her back to me. Her sealskin parka was partially shredded. She was bone-dry but caught in a current, staring into bleak sadness. The Black Tide crashed violently inside her like an Echo storm that once nearly killed us. She was drowning.
A memory sank quick fangs into me.
Big Jim, me on his shoulder as he slumped from the Ford F-150. The driver’s door swung lackadaisically. Big Jim shuffled to our front door on lead-pipe legs. We had just left the hostile lights of a hospital—lights that had confused me with their cruelty; why were they interrogating such delicate bodies?—but Big Jim was still there. His mind was grappling with how Tiffany S. was just a shell, lying in a white bed with lights all around but none inside her. He was replaying what the doctors said.
“Coma.” A word that sounded like a faraway state where they grow juicy corn and raise chickens. “Her family has asked that you don’t return. They’re dealing with a lot now—Tiffany’s sister is—well, we don’t have concrete answers. She’s been flown to D.C. to see a rare treatment specialist. She’s contracted something…unusual. Both daughters need full-time care. I can appreciate that, but the family is going through an exceedingly difficult time; I’m sure you can understand? No, you can’t come back here. Tiffany’s coworkers are due to arrive. Sir, it’s time for you to leave! Sir!” Big Jim was being banished from the chambers of his heart.
Tiffany’s coworkers. Big Jim sweated even more than usual around them. Their shiny Boeing badges seemed to make him shrink. They were MoFos who laughed a little too hard when he called champagne “fancy beer” and at the way he pronounced hors d’oeuvres (“whores dooves”). It didn’t matter how much Tiffany S. squeezed Big Jim’s arm or steered the conversation back to him, he never felt like he was enough for her. Big Jim was always Pabst Blue Ribbon—he was never going to be fancy beer.
When we got out of the truck, Big Jim was still time traveling, infiltrating a dark night when Tiffany S. had wandered the street alone. A late trip to a Walgreens in Ballard, streets slick with rain and the pulsing glow of neon reflections. Hair done, dress nice, always heels. There had been three of them, three hungry predators lurking in the shadows. Three splintered souls who felt entitled to take things that didn’t belong to them. To whom fine bones and a flair for the feminine is an invitation, fruit ripe for the plucking. And Big Jim knew that if he had just been there, he could have taken three of them on, ten of them, twenty of them for her. That’s what his big hands were good for—to protect the ones he loved. In the gutter, under neon glow, the pregnancy test she’d bought soaked up tears from the sky.
Big Jim fell through our front door and stared at his big beautiful hands, hands that hadn’t been there for her, big hands that had no purpose—what good were they? He dropped to his knees and sobbed. A tsunami of Black Tide crashed into him and he fell apart, his body quaking with pain. Dennis, who usually greeted us exuberantly by peeing in a mighty McDonald’s golden arch, watched for a moment. His droopy eyes registered the broken bits of Big Jim. He disappeared calmly into the kitchen with clicky claw plods and returned with a favorite toy, a squirrel Big Jim imaginatively named Sqrl. Dennis carried the toy up to his favorite being on this big beautiful blue, sat so close there was no space between them, and dropped slobbery old Sqrl into Big Jim’s lap. Big Jim flung his arms around bloodhound bulk and he wept from somewhere so deep I thought we’d never get him back. And I carefully preened his unwashed hospital-smell hair and the new harvest of stubble that had sprouted on his face. I checked his ears and swallowed up some of his tears. We took care of him the best way we knew how.
Big Jim didn’t drown that day. And Dee would not drown this day. It was so easy to forget—she was only human. And they are not unbreakable.
“Dee! Dee! It’s me!” I cried.
Dee lifted her head to face me, the edges of her mouth curled down like parchment paper. Her eyes were filled with salt. Her arms were covered in angry slices, bruises like the ones a banana suffers. Some of the cuts were swollen and angry. How silly of me to worry about infection and invisible assassins when the real deal was at our door.
“I’m here, Dee!” I called, hobbling over metallic lumps, inelegantly tripping over the butt of a glass
bottle. I rolled down the side of the nest into its palm. I felt sharp nicks in my skin and I didn’t care. Dee hung her head, tears streaming down her sweet, muddy cheeks. I pushed my head up into her hand and felt a flicker of fire in her finger. I peered at those fingers, the magic of her entire species distilled down into the half-moons of her nails. I ran my beak along her palm, where the lines were. MoFos could read futures in those lines, and I wished I could have drawn hers longer, so that she could have more of life. She sat there in shards, stuck in a glass nest, because I had broken her. I knew these were my last moments with Dee, so I was careful not to tangle up my words, make thorns and blackberry snarls of them.
“I am so proud of you,” I told her. “Dee is perfect.” I made a guttural crow sound for gratitude. I smoothed my beak along her fingers, and I hoped she could feel even an acorn of what was inside me.
She spoke. “Dee—” she stopped, struggling with the words that splintered on her tongue. A tear splashed onto my head. She pointed a swollen finger to the terrible creatures below.
“No,” I told her. “Dee is like S.T. I am proud of you every day.” I puffed up my feathers to show her just how big my pride was.
Her eyebrows huddled together like gossiping caterpillars. “Dee is crow?” she said, looking for permission. Her hunger to belong broke me.
“Dee,” I told her, “is the best crow I know.” I stopped talking to her in MoFo, a language I had mostly forced upon her. I talked to her in crow, a language of body and sight and sound altogether. Another tear slid down Dee’s cheek, only now her cheeks lifted, the corners of her mouth rising like oven-baked bread. She lifted me to her face. I nuzzled my cheek against hers. And she knew how much I loved her. It was warm and shone bright and bathed her in a spider-spun gold. It scorched off the darkness and fucking barricaded the waves of The Black Tide. And she forgave me in that way the pure of soul and the very courageous can, the way her Uncle Dennis would. I was an idiot for taking this long to figure it out, to tell her. I’m sorry, I told her with tail pumps and gentle rubs of my beak. I’m sorry. I was wrong.
I wished for more time. I’d lived a very big and bushy life, but Dee was the future and I yearned to do better for her. Was I ready to die? Fuck no—I hadn’t seen the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu, or even that penis museum tucked away in the thigh folds of Iceland. And I wouldn’t get to see what Dee looked like as she grew up to be Big Dee. When she got to use her wings and fly. But it was worth everything I’d ever been through to get here—even that terrifying Echo storm and when Big Jim’s eyeball bungee jumped from his head—and I was grateful for the moments I had left. For every flicker in the day’s colors I got to spend with her.
The sounds around us intensified.
Dee stood up, flinching as something punctured her foot. A nest, by nature a sacred and softest place—even that, The Changed Ones had made hostile and barbed. Dee padded gingerly to the edge of the nest and lifted me so I could see over its saw-toothed edge. I got a bird’s-eye view of pandemonium below. The crows mobbing the bird creatures. Primates in the trees around us. A horrifying insect in control of it all.
“Danger,” said Dee. She let out the corvid alarm. “CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW!”
“Yes,” I said. “Dee, we won’t hide anymore.”
She made a sound, that clever, clever mimic. The clattery clack tack of antlers colliding. The sound of Toksook caribou sparring. I spread my wings in answer: Yes.
“Show them, Dee.”
Dee paused and bent over, wrapping her fingers around a neck that stuck out in a nest of nails and jagged things. The moody barrel of a gun.
“No,” I said to her. “Show them Dee’s way.”
It was my turn to coax my nestling from the nest. Down the stoic arms of the copper beech.
Dee lifted me to her face. And if it was the last thing I ever saw, well, as the old adage goes, the light of heart is free to fly. Picture the last MoFo, the apple cheeks and sparkly space-dust eyes. What a bright and brilliant star. Look at her ears—auricles, they called them, just like pearly seashells or the Auricularia auricula-judae hugging the hardwood of an old beech tree. Survival suits her. Look at how alive she is; doesn’t the world seem better with her in it? Supernatural. Super natural. Notice that power in her, those natural instincts. Look at how she wears that fierce glow. She is lit up from the inside by the sun.
Chapter 30
West Coast transient orcas
Puget Sound, Washington, USA
We stream through the salt world in black and white. Emerald kelp bows as we pass. Silverfish dart for cover.
Urgent sounds—thousands of pings against our slick skins—sharp and small as shrimp have summoned us.
The Beast is here.
The Beast of our legend has shown himself. He is borrowing skins from the creatures of Echo.
We swim past a hybrid hagfish, coughing up sludge. Its sound is thick and pink. Glub. Glub. Glub. Pints of pink slime fill the salt world around us. We slice through its cloggy goo. Other creatures—seal and Dall’s porpoise, cod and rockfish—float, aquarium-eyed and belly-up. They have choked on pink poison. The hagfish are coming up from the deep. The Beast has many forms.
We have no time; we race to follow the sounds. Never has there been a call like this.
All sea wolves heed the call. It has come from the resident orcas of Puget Sound. We transient orcas, orcas of the deepest ocean, the traveling sea wolves, the ones who feed on seal, walrus, and otter, go to them. We speed through the salt tunnels, sending back bright rays of sound in bold colors.
We are coming. Fast as we can.
Other great black-and-white bodies are here; other orcas flank us. We speed together, speed of sound. More orcas and more.
Up ahead. There. The resident orcas huddle together close to the waterline.
Incandescent colors swirl and spike, spin and shimmer; the ocean glows with bioluminescence.
It is Tallulah. The great matriarch floats on her side. She is black and white and red. Her pod is still. Their whines are sharp as fishing wire. We are all caught in the net of grief.
Tallulah was the oldest among us. She lived one hundred season cycles. Tallulah held us all together with her tales. Tallulah is gone from us now. Taken. We have lost time and love and her gentle guidance. We have lost her voice, the feeling of it flowing through us, wrapping silkily around our bones. Her fluke and fin will wave no more. She has gone where the water goes.
Her majestic son—glowing sounds dappling his great black-and-white body—opens his rubber mouth wide. We see his necklace of barnacle teeth. The bubbles he releases are steely blue and storm silver, slick as a wolf eel.
“The Beast,” he says. “The Beast has come.”
Chapter 31
S.T.
Chateau Ste. Michelle, Washington, USA
Dee placed me on the edge of the nest. She studied the scene below. I had the impulse to tell her that after we’d descended the copper beech, we should slink away, just Dee and me, safe shadows. But those were old inclinations, the sentiments of a yellow-bellied marmot. We had to help the hominids in the trees and stop a pending carnage of crows, black beauties who mobbed with ferocious agility. The MoFos didn’t name one of their greatest fighter jets Blackbird for nothing.
Dee made a high-pitched fluting sound.
Could it be? A chittering bounced back from the clouds and burst around us. I called her name out in joy. “MIGISI!”
And there she was, like a McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. Head in winter white and pregnant as fuck. She looped around us, detouring to dive and unleash her talons on the eye of a Changed One for the shit of it. Our adventure eagle shot back up and landed on Dee’s outstretched arm with as much elegance as one can when incubating a clutch of tennis ball–sized eggs.
“What are you doing here so pregnant?” I asked her. She stuck her face in mine and screamed supersonically. I bowed my head in apology. Listen, I’ll always be a work in progress. She bumped my ch
est with that glorious buttercup beak.
“No,” I told her. “I’ve missed you more.” Migisi and Dee then shared a look whose meaning I didn’t comprehend until I was snatched up in Migisi’s talons, dangling in the sky next to a glass nest and the fuckity plummet-drop to below. My view—little black crow feet and the bird Changed Ones, orange and black apes in the trees, and crows whirling and diving, everything in miniature from up so high. Migisi set me back down onto the maple branch for safekeeping. She thrust her salmon-filleting beak into mine and shrieked. Stay put. I mean it.
Migisi was airborne again, gliding over the fray, returning to the branch that held part of the great nest. Near Dee.
The two horrible transparent insects emerged from the doors of the Chateau. My liver quivered thinking about what the tall one in front of the great doors was capable of. What might three of them do?
“SCRREEEEEDEEEEE!” All eyes up at the nest. Dee was standing, her torso and the imposing look on her face visible. She lifted the metal pole she had dislodged and struck it three times against glass and metal. A hauntingly hollow sound.
The crows instinctively retreated to safe spots in the trees.
All eyes on the feral creature. A lively young animal standing tall on two legs. A species that once roamed the plains of this big beautiful blue. Now, she was the last. A burning sun.
I looked at the Insect Creature. The compound eye was trained on Dee.
Dee screamed, “FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!” No one, not primate nor wood louse, made a sound.
“Astee!” she yelled. That’s me. I’m Astee. That’s how Dee says my name, the name she never uses, a name like a too-big apple in her mouth. I never told you that because I was ashamed, desperate for her to say it properly like Big Jim and Nargatha and Tiffany S. did. But now, it was the sound I most loved in this world, a warm apricot sound shaped like home. We—all of us—watched as Dee appeared at one side of the gargantuan nest, tiptoeing over barbed wire and glittering glass.
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