“She sent me to find you,” Razor told Billy. With the pain of Billy’s grip, only pride kept Razor from squeaking like Theo. “It’s not safe for her to come here herself.”
Billy slowly set Razor down.
Theo backed away, glaring at Razor. The effect, however, lost any potency because of his height and because of his squinting and because of the bruises that made him look like a raccoon. “Next time I’ll bite you,” Theo said. “Where’s Caitlyn?”
“You’ll have to come with me,” Razor answered. Nobody nearby had paid any attention to the small drama. In the world of Industrials and Illegals, people minded their own business.
“Nice try,” Theo said. “We don’t trust anybody.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Razor said.
“Theo is not stupid,” Billy said.
“What I mean, is how else would I know to look here for you unless she sent me?”
“You could be someone from the government.” Theo said. “Tracking us down.”
“She told me to tell you the last thing she said to you,” Razor said to Billy, “beside the river, where you rescued her from drowning. If I’m right, you know she sent me.”
Billy’s eyebrows furrowed.
“She said she would look for you on the Outside,” Razor said. “And she called you William.”
SIXTY-FOUR
Caitlyn! Caitlyn!”
From two steps away, Theo threw his little body as fast and as hard as he could at Caitlyn, and she rocked backward with the impact.
Caitlyn had been standing outside the shanty. Razor had made it clear that her safety here, unlike in the tunnels, depended on anonymity among the thousands of Industrials and Illegals. As long as she stayed in one spot and didn’t draw attention, no one would find her. There were men around who listened to Razor. Not too many, otherwise it would have been noticeable. Enough to handle most trouble. Enough to make sure Caitlyn didn’t leave.
As Razor had led Theo to this spot, he’d watched Caitlyn grin as Theo got so close he almost ran into her before he recognized her.
Theo continued to clutch Caitlyn.
She smiled as she looked down on his thatched hair, and Razor realized it was the first time he’d seen her smile with this kind of warmth. All he’d ever been given was the cold, tight version.
“What happened to your eyes, Theo?” Caitlyn asked.
“Nothing important,” Theo said.
Billy stood nearby in the classic shy stance. Head down, his toes suddenly far more interesting than Caitlyn.
“William,” she said softly. “Come here.”
He loomed over her, but she drew him in, and for a moment, they were a joyful family.
“Got to keep moving,” Razor said, more gruffly than he expected. Yeah, he felt jealous but didn’t want to sort out why. Not now. Probably not later.
Theo was the first to break the embrace, squeezing out from between Billy and Caitlyn.
“Hey,” he said to Caitlyn, pointing at Razor. “Who is this guy? Wouldn’t answer any of my questions. Wouldn’t even tell me his name.”
“Hundred and two questions,” Razor said. “I counted.”
“Some were repeats,” Billy said.
Razor couldn’t tell if Billy was being sardonic. His speed of talk matched his size. Either the guy was brilliant and hid it well. Or he was transparently not so brilliant.
Caitlyn began to speak. “His name is—”
“T. R.,” Razor jumped in before Caitlyn could finish. He was beginning to figure out the chemistry between Billy and Caitlyn. Irrationally, he didn’t want Billy even knowing his nickname. “T. R. Zornenbach. We’ve got to keep moving; we’ve got to keep safe.”
“Great,” Theo said. Heavy sarcasm.
“We can trust him,” Caitlyn admonished Theo.
“No,” Theo said. “Great. My glasses. We’re not going back to the soovie park, and that’s where I left them.”
“You can’t see much without them,” Caitlyn said. “How would you manage to forget to wear them?”
“We were at a soovie camp.” Theo spoke in his usual hyper rush. “Strange there. Real strange. Then a death doctor came and Billy tried to stop him from killing the mother. Made people mad. My glasses got broken when Billy was fighting one of the soovie gang guys. Thought we were dead. Then government came in with a helicopter and pulled us out of there. Billy almost didn’t make it. We were in the hospital all night. Government asked us to go back to the soovie park and spy for them. But we knew that was a lie. Billy said they must be tracking us, otherwise how could they know we left Lynchburg? Billy said it was strange they made sure to fix my glasses and give them back to me. Sure enough, that’s how they found us. So when we don’t want to be tracked, we leave the glasses behind. Right, Billy?”
Theo looked to Billy for confirmation, a satisfied look on his face that indicated he’d told the entire story, or at least the important parts of it.
“You need glasses bad?” Razor asked.
“Real bad,” Theo said. “Once, before I had them, I tried to eat a skunk. Really. Ask Caitlyn.”
“I’ll get you a new pair,” Razor said. “But I need to go back and get the old pair. Tell me how to find them.”
“Why?” Billy asked.
“He won’t answer,” Caitlyn said. “But you can trust him.”
Billy was shaking his head. Not to trust Razor.
Caitlyn put a hand on his arm. “Really. The same way you can trust me.”
SIXTY-FIVE
Pierce stood in a hallway facing a closed door. Avery and Holly behind him. They were in an apartment block in one of the low-income quadrants. In theory, only work permit holders were licensed to occupy the units. In his rookie days, when he was JAA—just another agent, like the two behind him—he’d been to places like this enough times to know that a large percentage of wealthier Illegals found places inside the city. In situations like this, he wondered what it would have been like before thermal imaging and before technology made it possible to restrict firearms. He hoped he would still put himself in front, when a closed door would have ratcheted the tension exponentially, agents wondering what weaponry was waiting on the other side, how many people waiting and their positions in the room. When bursting into a room meant adrenaline-filled suspense before kicking the door down and instant decisions that determined life or death in the microseconds after.
Nothing like that now.
Pierce knew from thermal imaging that it was a one-room unit. Kitchen, bedroom, and living room all in an open floor plan.
Thermal imaging also showed one person inside. Small. On a bed. No objects in hand. Which meant no weapons.
Pierce even knew the kid’s identity. Theo. Via a tracking chip in the kid’s glasses, they’d had tabs on him since releasing him and Billy from the hospital. The two were rarely separated. But thermal didn’t show anyone else. So Billy wasn’t here. Something Pierce would deal with later.
Unlike pre-thermal days, they wouldn’t have to kick open the door either. The agent behind Pierce had just used a laser drill to silently take out the door lock. Wisps of smoke were all the warning that the kid inside would get.
Pierce nodded at his two agents, then pushed open the door.
Squeaky hinges.
The kid looked up, either at the noise or at the movement. It wasn’t Theo. Some other kid about the same size. Who didn’t seem too concerned about three strangers pushing their way into the apartment.
“Nice,” Pierce said. Meaning the opposite.
Pierce stepped inside, but waved the two agents back into the hallway.
The unit had about as much ambiance as a warehouse office. Just the bed. Plain table. Nothing on the walls.
Pierce saw Theo’s glasses sitting on the table. That’s where a tracking device had been imbedded. Since it was next to impossible to successfully send surveillance agents into a soovie park, they’d been relying on the glasses to track Theo’s movements and confirm th
e whereabouts of Billy and Theo when they wandered away from the agent mole inside the camp. When GPS had shown movement outside the park and back into the city, they’d picked up surveillance again. When Pierce had heard Billy was absent and there was no sign of Caitlyn, he’d decided to have a talk with Theo.
“Kid, you steal those glasses?” Pierce asked. He’d prefer that to be the answer. Pierce had gambled two things. That the kids from Appalachia were too new to this world to suspect a tracking device and that Theo needed the glasses almost as much as he needed oxygen.
“Razor gave them to me,” the kid answered.
Pierce didn’t have to give that much thought before asking his next question. “He told you to tell me that?”
“Yup.”
“What else?” Pierce asked in a resigned voice.
“It don’t make sense to me, but what he said is, if you want the flying girl, follow these directions to where you’re supposed to go and wait for Razor.”
In the crowded coffee shop, Pierce thought about how technology would always take second place to organics.
The last hundred years had gone from rotary dial to vidphone, dial-up Internet to broadnet, pirated movies to interactive pirate movies. But coffee beans were still coffee beans, and the satisfaction of taking that first sip of a dark, rich beverage was probably just as good now as it had been five hundred years earlier.
This was the place of Razor’s choice. Downtown core, near the Pavilion. Pierce anticipated that Razor had information to sell or negotiate, so Pierce had delayed getting here long enough to have agents set up in place for a quick swoop. Razor was going to lose a lot of leverage once he was in custody.
Pierce was halfway through the first cup of coffee when an Illegal sat down beside him. She was tarted up, and her profession was obvious. The days of pimps were long gone. Handlers were instead Enforcers who had the local power to decide when and where they could operate.
“First thing,” she said, leaning forward and setting her elbows on the table, “is I got something for you from Razor, and it’s going to cost you one hundred even. This is a cash transaction.”
Holly was across the coffee shop. Pretending to read an e-book. Pierce didn’t want to think what Holly would have to say about this later.
Pierce found a bank note. She held her hand out for it, nail polish as uneven as her penciled-in eyebrows.
Pierce extended the bank note but didn’t let go as she gripped it. With a quick twist of his wrist, he ripped it in half, leaving each of them with a portion.
“That’s cold,” she said. “You don’t trust me?”
“Payment on delivery.”
“First thing, then, you put your vidphone on the table. And leave it there.”
Pierce did.
“Now I check you out for wires. Best is in a bathroom. But I’m fine here too.”
Sure, Pierce was going to step into a bathroom with an Illegal dressed like her. With Holly watching.
“I’m not wired,” Pierce said.
“I trust you like you trust me.”
She reached under the table and ran her hands up and down his legs. Then she stood behind him, lifted his shirt. She reached around and ran her fingers up his belly and chest.
“Get a room,” Pierce heard someone say. It was Holly. The café laughter that followed was probably more enjoyable to her than it was to Pierce.
“Like I said, not wired,” Pierce told the Illegal. “Satisfied?”
“Usually that’s my question,” she said.
“Funny. Now what.”
“How do you take your coffee?” she asked.
“Black,” Pierce said.
“Good. Leave it for me. Across the street is public transport. Next high-speed to New York arrives in one minute. You get on it. Alone.”
SIXTY-SIX
There’s something I need to tell you,” Billy said to Caitlyn. “Before Theo gets back. I don’t want you to hate me for it.”
Billy was hunched on a chair that he’d backed into the corner of the shack, obviously uncomfortable.
“I couldn’t hate you,” Caitlyn said softly. “Not ever.”
The softness around the edges of Billy’s face was gone. He’d begun to lose his boyishness. Caitlyn couldn’t help but compare her feelings in Billy’s presence to the attraction she had to the edgy darkness of Razor. Billy was a man. Big and solid in more than body. Someone who would comfort and protect, give her a safeness she’d never have with Razor. Billy would stop the trembling; Razor would cause it.
“You’re beautiful,” Billy blurted. “I thought of you every day since Appalachia. I wished I wasn’t so big and stupid. You know, like some giant that would accidentally crush a beautiful bird.”
Caitlyn had no experience with men, except for the instinct that told her how amazing it would be to hold and kiss and lose herself in an embrace. Kneeling close, she put her hand on Billy’s arm, thinking if he reached for her, put his arms around her horrible hunch, she’d find a way never to think about Razor again.
Billy looked down at her hand and smiled sadly. “I can’t bear to talk about it, but I have to. But you need to know that there’s no one more beautiful, no matter what Swain told me.”
She recoiled slightly. “Swain?”
“He told me what I had to tell you about being…”
Billy put his head straight down so that she was looking at the top of his short hair. Then he rose again, finding the courage to look her in the eyes. “About being different.”
She had no reply.
“I know you’re different. You know I know it. That’s why you got to believe I think you’re the most beautiful woman. Not that I’m thinking you’d ever look at me the way I look at you. But if I got to tell you what Swain said, then I got to tell you how I feel, no matter how much you might laugh at me or feel sorry for me for saying it.”
“William,” Caitlyn said. With Razor in her mind, not wanting to step forward and betray both Billy and Razor. “I think about you too. A lot.”
Then more quietly, she said. “You visited Swain?”
“In Appalachia, before Jordan put me into the river, he asked me to protect you. He told me what he wanted for you. He wanted you to live normal so you wouldn’t have to hide your whole life. He said when you were little, surgery wouldn’t have helped. That he had to wait until you were grown up, but once you were grown up, if you had surgery in Appalachia, you’d get caught. He said only one person would be able to help you. Swain. Outside. He made me promise I’d help you get to Swain, told me how to find him and what to say. But when you and me didn’t meet in that first week, I thought maybe you went to Swain, so I went there to look for you. And Swain, he told me stuff. About you. That you would need to know before you made your choice. Then I went back to Lynchburg to Theo and waited for you.”
“You couldn’t tell me about it when we met in Lynchburg?”
“We were in a hurry because we were afraid government might find you. And once you found us I knew you were going to Swain anyway, so I didn’t have to tell you. I thought all we’d have to do is wait for you to meet us. After the surgery.”
“I kept trying to find the courage to do it,” she told Billy. Which was almost a lie. The truth was she thought she’d made her choice. To live as an outcast and freak, to angrily revel in her solitude, to hold on to her wings, to reject what Jordan had wanted for her, a punishment for his betrayal, a refusal to give him a chance for redemption.
“I thought for a while I might want to keep my wings,” Caitlyn said, easing the lie. “But now it looks like I’ll be hunted forever. If I don’t lose my wings, I’m dead. And probably anyone who hides me.”
Or loves me, she thought.
“There’s more,” Billy said. “It’s not your wings. It’s about your blood.”
SIXTY-SEVEN
Okay, Pierce told himself as he stepped onto the train, trailed by a couple of women, the kid isn’t stupid.
In contras
t to the previous generation’s inspections, which had been limited to airports, body-scanning technology no longer relied on metal detectors and human inspectors. Passengers stepped through a portal that blended thermal imaging and x-ray; software analyzed the result within microseconds. The convenience had extended inspections to all public transport.
It meant the kid would be assured that Pierce had no weapon.
More importantly, by sending a message to get on the train in under a minute, it gave Pierce no time to set up a plan or have agents remain in surveillance position. The train car was set up so that passengers departed from the opposite-side door new passengers entered from. From inside, the kid would be able to watch Pierce’s approach and decide between staying on the train or leaving in a crowd going the opposite direction.
But it wasn’t foolproof. The train was on a track, going in a predictable direction at a predictable speed. With Pierce on the train, he expected that Holly was smart enough to make some calls and have people in place at every stop ahead.
Pierce found a place to sit.
Five stops later, with no contact made, it occurred to him that maybe the kid had bolted.
Ten stops later, with the train thinning of passengers, he was almost sure of it. The train was well outside the city and headed north to the New York stops.
He was just about to exit at the next stop when he realized there might not be any agents in place. Impossible to spread out agents at every stop on a trip of hundreds of miles and dozens of stops.
That’s when he realized he’d probably been outsmarted again.
And he settled back to wait a while longer. It would be interesting to see how Razor intended to play this out.
The corridor train hummed at near maximum velocity, cushioned on air less than half an inch above a magnetic rail. At three hundred miles an hour, the light poles along the tracks seemed to pass Carson Pierce in silent swooshes, leaving comet tails on his retinas as he stared without focus at the blurred background.
Flight of Shadows: A Novel Page 22
