A Boy Called Hawk (Annals of Altair Book 1)

by Kate Stradling

  “Todd, Crystal,” said Principal Gates to the pair, “this is Oliver Dunn all the way from Prometheus-A. He’ll be working with us to resolve this incident as quickly as possible.” The man and woman exchanged a nervous glance. Even though they both nodded at Oliver, they didn’t look excited about the prospect of working with him.

  Principal Gates ignored their lack of enthusiasm. “In here, please,” he said. To Emily’s astonishment, everyone hung back to give Oliver precedence. “Have a seat at the desk, Oliver. You—Miss, uh… there’s a chair over there in the corner.” In his first real acknowledgement of Emily’s presence, Gates gestured vaguely to a hard, metal-frame chair that stood just behind where Oliver was to sit. She hid her annoyance as she obediently took that place; it was even less comfortable than the rock-hard sofa downstairs.

  From all appearances, this room was the principal’s own office. It was thus strange to see Oliver occupy the main seat—the only comfortable chair in the whole place—while the adults all stood in front of him. Much as she resented being shuffled off into the corner, at least she had a good view of everyone but Oliver. And really, she didn’t need to see him. He was only going to frown anyway.

  Principal Gates paced back and forth as though that action helped his thoughts form coherently. “First of all, thank you for coming, and on such short notice. No doubt you’ve observed the rather rudimentary state we’ve been reduced to here.”

  “Your computer network has been compromised,” Oliver said. “That would reduce anyone to a rudimentary state.”

  Behind him, Todd and Crystal exchanged another glance. Principal Gates only nodded and continued. “That’s hardly the worst of our problems. The real issue is that we have a couple of truants. They left behind the damage to the computer, among other things, to slow our pursuit of them.” From the wire basket on one corner of his desk he extracted two thick files, which he handed to Oliver. “These are their official files, not the abridged versions we give to handlers. You’ll forgive us for having to supply the hard copies—the digital ones have been completely sabotaged.”

  Emily leaned forward and caught sight of the name “Jefferson Rush West” written along the edge of the top file before Oliver spread it open. Next to it, he opened the second and she just made out “Franklin Adams West” on its heading. The accompanying pictures showed eerily similar faces, right down to their grim expressions. Did any of the Prometheus children ever smile in their ID photos?

  “So Hawk and Hummer flew the coop,” said Oliver in a bored voice. “How?”

  Principal Gates raked one hand through his thinning gray hair and laughed bitterly. “By causing a horrific amount of damage, that’s how. Two nights ago, just after dark, they snuck into the electrical engineering lab and set off an e-bomb there. They escaped in the chaos that followed.”

  Oliver seemed suitably impressed. “You had an e-bomb in your electrical engineering lab? Or did they sneak that in with them?”

  “Our seniors were building it for their class studies. It was never meant to be used—it’s been promised already to a professor down at one of the California universities—I have no idea what we’re supposed to tell him. Hawk and Hummer had no regular access to it. They shouldn’t have even known it was there, let alone how to activate it.”

  “This is Prometheus,” Oliver said flatly. “Everyone knows what everyone else is studying—we all brag about it to one another. And I guarantee that if Hummer ever caught so much as a glimpse of the plans he’d know how it worked, and probably how to build one of his own. You administrators are so focused on the few projectors in your midst when you really should be paying more attention to the mechanical genius with a photographic memory.” For emphasis, he rapped his knuckles against the second file, the one labeled as belonging to Franklin Adams West.

  “Obviously,” said Principal Gates, “but we’ve never had an incident like this, not since Prometheus’s inception. We didn’t anticipate it at all.”

  “Obviously,” Oliver echoed with withering insolence. “But the two of them couldn’t have gotten very far on foot. The e-bomb would have knocked out all the electronics for miles, but only for a couple of minutes at best. Although, I suppose it would have fried the more delicate circuits, depending how strong it was…” His voice trailed off as he considered this point. “Anyway, they couldn’t have taken any transportation from here.”

  “They stole an old military jeep from the automotives building,” said Gates. “It was a model that pre-dated the complex electronic circuitry we have nowadays, a relic we had acquired for our History of Automotives class—of which Hummer was a member. It would’ve required a minimal amount of tweaking, if any at all, to get it working again after the pulse.”

  “So it would have a gas engine as well. That still limits how far they could get. I assume the tank was kept empty?”

  “Yes, but they filled it and took about half our reserve fuel supply in containers. They knew exactly what they were doing.”

  “And how did they get past the security guard? Or maybe they opened the front gate on their own and drove straight through.”

  Principal Gates was about to implode in his efforts to contain his annoyance at the pint-sized interrogator. He pinched the bridge of his nose, took a couple of deep breaths, and then said, “Perhaps I should tell you the events from our perspective at the time. At 9:12 on the evening of June 30, an electromagnetic pulse ripped through the campus. Two minutes of dead silence followed, then the system kicked back in, and the main computer rebooted to reconnect with the greater Prometheus network. We naturally assumed that the attack had come from domestic insurgents, and according to protocol, we locked down the entire campus. A preliminary search of the grounds showed no intruders, though, and the source of the e-bomb was quickly traced to the electrical engineering lab.

  “Most of the students were already in their dormitories for the night, and we ordered them to remain there for the time being. Unfortunately, there were a handful of older boys who weren’t in their rooms. We thought, perhaps, that they had set off the e-bomb either by accident or as a misguided prank, so we sequestered them for interrogation. As it turns out, they were in the middle of a prank, but it had nothing to do with the engineering lab. We just… didn’t believe them when they told us as much.”

  “You didn’t look beyond them as your primary suspects,” said Oliver.

  Principal Gates rolled his eyes, a mute acknowledgment of the accusation. “In the meantime, there were calls to be made and repairs to begin. We thought we were lucky that our main servers were shielded in the basement—we were prepared for an electromagnetic attack in that regard, thanks to government buildings standards—but we didn’t know that during the reboot, a series of rogue programs had been triggered. According to our surveillance screens, our two little perpetrators, Hawk and Hummer West, were sitting obediently in their room, waiting for any word on what had caused the blackout. The pulse had been strong enough to destroy all the personal ID chips on campus—which was quite painful, I might add,” he said, and he absently rubbed his left hand where the government-mandated information devices were customarily placed. Emily noticed a fresh set of stitches there. “We made it our first priority to replace those. A box of them arrived from Great Falls somewhere around 3AM, and we began the replacement process for the staff and students. Unfortunately, according to our emergency protocol, we went alphabetically.”

  Oliver glanced down at the two files in front of him. “West,” he said. “You didn’t discover they were missing until someone actually went to retrieve them.”

  “It was around 5:30,” Gates bitterly confirmed. “We performed another search of the campus and discovered that the jeep was missing, along with the fuel reserves. The security guard at the back exit had been found asleep at his post earlier in the night—we later discovered that he’d been drugged.”

  “How?” asked Oliver, skepticism in his voice.

  “Would you like to see for
yourself? It’s worth watching, if I can get everything to work.” Principal Gates crossed to the wall and pressed a button by the light switch. A wooden panel retracted to reveal a flat screen, which immediately hummed to life.

  He extracted a keyboard from the recessed panel and tapped a few keys. “Most of the security cameras came back online after the blackout. We didn’t know at the time that our computer had been spiked to show us an old feed of the back gatehouse for that first hour after the pulse. We recovered the actual footage yesterday afternoon. While we saw a calm, collected security guard and nothing suspicious at all, this is what actually happened, starting when the electricity came back online.”

  The screen flashed, and the interior of a small guardhouse appeared. The guard there was on the phone, anxiously talking into the receiver. Behind him, an open window looked out into the dark night. A black shape fluttered into sight and perched on the sill. It took Emily a moment to figure out that it was a bird—a crow or raven. Unbeknownst to the distracted guard, it silently hopped onto the counter. One beady eye looked up at the camera, and its dark beak was parted, carrying a white tablet. This it shamelessly dropped into the guard’s coffee mug. Then it hopped back to the window and let out a raucous caw. The guard jumped violently, wrenched around to shoo away the bird, muttered something into the phone, and then took an unwitting drink from his mug to help calm his flustered nerves.

  “The sedative was traced back to Hawk’s chemistry lab, though he seems to have used another student’s workspace to concoct it,” said Principal Gates. “The guard loses consciousness within five minutes. About half an hour after that, the two boys pass through with the jeep. I won’t bother to show you that part, since they make some rather crude faces at the camera.”

  “How on earth did they train a bird to drug someone?” Emily asked in awe.

  “They didn’t have to train it,” said Oliver scornfully. “It was Hawk. All he had to do was tell it what he wanted.”

  She looked in confusion to Principal Gates, who unhelpfully clarified, “Hawk is a projector.”

  “I keep hearing that word, but I don’t understand how you’re using it.”

  There was an awkward silence before the brunette, Crystal, asked, “You’re new?”

  Emily huffed. “Yes. I’m new, all right? What is a projector, aside from an old piece of multimedia equipment?”

  Maggie cleared her throat. “About five percent of Prometheus students have a peculiar genetic trait that allows them, shall we say, enhanced communication. We call it projecting, because they’re able to push their feelings onto other living things. Hawk West—Jefferson West—has the innate ability to communicate with birds.”

  “For real?” said Emily skeptically. “That sounds like something out of a science-fiction movie.”

  “It’s a genetic anomaly,” Maggie assured her. “In previous generations, it was called ‘charm’ or ‘charisma’ or some such thing, but all of our testing shows a higher brain function that we can’t fully explain.”

  “Any knowledge of it is, of course, completely classified,” Principal Gates added. “It must never be spoken of beyond the Prometheus Institute.”

  At some point Emily had scooted her chair forward so that she sat right next to Oliver. “Are you a projector as well?” she asked with interest.

  He grimaced. “No.”

  “Oliver’s a null-projector,” said Principal Gates with an approving look at the pale, sour-faced boy. “That’s a lot rarer. It means that he’s not influenced by those projectors who can affect humans.”

  “And it doesn’t explain at all why you dragged me across the country to deal with a bird-projector,” Oliver said.

  Gates bit his lips and turned expectantly to the pair behind him. “Todd? Crystal?”

  Each held a folder similar to the two already open on the desk. In answer to his look, they jumped from their respective seats and placed these as an offering to the young null-projector. Oliver’s frown deepened as he opened the first one. Emily shamelessly peered over his shoulder and was astonished to see the picture of a familiar little girl smiling sweetly back at her, just beneath the name “Madison Ellery West.”

  “That’s Maddie!” she cried. “Maddie North!”

  Oliver glanced over at her, clearly questioning her sanity.

  “You’ve been watching the news,” said Gates. “Maddie North is the name we released to the public. Her real name is Madison West.”

  “She goes by Honey,” said Crystal. When Todd shot her a nasty look, she added defensively, “What? She asked me to call her that.”

  “She’s not here right now.”

  “My two months are almost up. I’m not about to try to change that habit.”

  “So what about Alex?” Emily asked in concern. “Maddie and Alex North disappeared together, early yesterday morning.”

  Oliver had already reached for the second file, though, and opened it now to reveal the stoic face of six-year-old Alex North. Except that the file identified him as Washington Alexander West.

  “I suppose his parents couldn’t bring themselves to name him Hamilton and used Alexander instead,” said Oliver. “Odd combination, Washington and Hamilton. But then, all the names are odd combinations. Maybe that was the point.”

  The pair across from him stopped squabbling and stared. Emily frowned. “What do you mean?”

  A scornful, superior look flashed across his face as he gestured to the four files now laid out across the surface of the desk. “Jefferson Rush, Franklin Adams, Madison Ellery, Washington Alexander—all their names are derived from among the Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John or Samuel Adams, James Madison, William Ellery, George Washington, and presumably Alexander Hamilton. I suppose ‘Washington Hamilton West’ really doesn’t have much ring to it. What are they, cousins?”

  “Siblings,” said Gates tightly.

  Everyone in the room turned incredulous eyes upon him, but Emily was the one to voice their collective confusion.

  “Four kids? That’s illegal.”

  “Were their parents Prometheus breeders or something?” Oliver asked.

  Gates cleared his throat uncomfortably. “No. The population control laws do allow for a third child under certain circumstances: the first two children must be the same gender, the parents have to have achieved a certain level of education, and they must prove that they’re financially stable. It’s a loophole that’s not well publicized, for obvious reasons. In the case of the Wests, a permit actually was obtained for Madison, but then they went and had a fourth child outside the law. The judge was lenient and instead of jail time issued only a fine, which the parents paid in full. It does happen occasionally, some family that slips through our bureaucratic fingers. Actually, if they hadn’t had a fourth child, we probably never would have discovered that the children were so gifted.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Emily.

  “Big surprise,” Oliver muttered ungenerously.

  “Entrance into the Prometheus Institute is reserved only for children of a certain intellectual prowess, one that we have to determine by genetic testing,” Gates told her. “However, it was only about seven or eight years ago that the federal government finally made universal genetic testing a requirement at birth. Before that, each of the states had their own standards, their own tests, and some of them even had a ridiculous ‘opt-out’ clause for overly paranoid parents.”

  “So,” Emily said slowly, “Jefferson and Franklin—Hawk and Hummer?—ran away from here, went home, and kidnapped their own little brother and sister?”

  Oliver scoffed, and the derisive sound set her teeth on edge. “If you’re going to hover over me like that, you should at least read the file. These two were taken from Prometheus-B, near Seattle. Hawk and Hummer must’ve driven straight there, all night long. They probably had a sure shot in that jeep, too, no matter how old it was.”

  “Yes,” said Gates, his mouth at a grim s
lant. “We’d kept the license up-to-date. One look at that military plate and any law enforcement officer who saw it would’ve turned a blind eye.”

  “But—” Emily started in confusion. “What about their parents? I saw them on the news…”

  Gates expression turned contemptuous. “We hired actors. We didn’t have any other choice. Any happenings at the Prometheus Institute’s various campuses are classified. Right now we don’t have the means of bringing these children back, so the best we can do is start up a network of information for the direction they’re going.”

  “So one of these two is the projector you’re worried about?” Oliver asked. His gaze lingered on the two files of the younger siblings. “This one goes by Honey. What’s the little one?”

  “Happy,” said Todd, who had originally held that file, and bitterness infused his voice. “Man, I hate that kid.”

  “That’s only because he hates you,” said Crystal. “Honestly, who could hate such a sweet little boy?”

  “Did Honey tell you to like him?” Todd sneered with unconcealed disdain.

  “To answer your question, Oliver,” Gates said before the pair could devolve into further bickering, “both the younger Wests are human-projectors, and we’re very worried about them. Happy in particular is especially volatile right now. We’re going to need your help to bring them home safely.”

  “What about Quincy?” said Oliver. “She’s here, at your disposal. She’s a null-projector just like I am. Are you expecting us to work together?”

  Gates considered this question as though he wanted to choose his words carefully. “Quincy is… too close to the situation,” he said at last.

  “She was friends with Hawk, as I recall. You’re worried that might cloud her judgment,” Oliver guessed.