Flight (43 page)

“Wait. You’re right. My troubles started
before my dad was killed. They started right after I saw Jack.
Jiffy, I think Jack might have stuck a bug on me. In my feathers.
Do you think anyone down here would have a pinion or down
comb?”

“Gee, Miss Scarlett, I sho’s hope so. Prissi,
yours are the only feathers down here. If you don’t have a feather
comb, no one else will. But, …if you could possibly make do with a
fro-pull, I think my people may be able to help.”

Jiffy left and came back a minute later with
a carved wooden, wide toothed comb. When he offered it to Prissi,
she had another spasm of guilt.

“Do you think you could do it? If I try, I’m
going to miss a lot.”

Jiffy said, “Will our families approve?” as
he stood behind Prissi and began to carefully comb through her
pinions.

Although Prissi knew that Jiffy was joking,
she decided to counter the guilt Jiffy was making her feel by
throwing out some of her own.

“Since I no longer have a family, it won’t be
a problem on my side.”

The movement of the comb paused for a moment
but Jiffy said nothing.

Instead of feeling good that she had gotten
back at her friend, Prissi felt even guiltier that she had baited
him. But, she didn’t apologize.

It was nothing more than a small snag in the
down on the backside of her right wing. As soon as Jiffy found the
bug, Prissi could almost feel Jack’s arms around her, how he had
hugged her tight while he insinuated the device that led to her
father’s death. While it was good that Jiffy found the bug, it
would have been better for Prissi if the combing had continued
until a second TRK-R, the one planted by Dicky Baudgew, had been
discovered.

Prissi’s first inclination when Jiffy put the
pea-sized device in her hand was to release her rage at Jack’s
betrayal upon it; however a second later she thought she might be
able to put it to a better use.

In the two days that it took to arrange the
details of her plan, Prissi courageously, but ultimately,
unsuccessfully fought off Yoli’s efforts to tend to her wounds. On
the morning of the third day, after telling Jiffy goodbye and
thanking him for his help, Prissi followed three members of the
village south along the subway tracks. Her accomplices, Yoli,
Lavie, and a tall woman with rickety looking arms carried sticks,
knives and a Fifth World artifact made from First World materials.
South of Prince Street, the group left the subway. For the next
quarter hour, they followed a circuitous path to the surface that
reminded Prissi of the descent she had made five days before. The
only differences were that this time, as they ascended, the air
felt too rich with oxygen and the unease came from the threat of
leaving her underground haven for the danger of the surface, rather
than vice versa.

Prissi pulled herself up the last steps of a
scarred ladder, which was attached inside an immense brick chimney,
until she emerged into the gangrenous light of a second floor
brownstone apartment. She skirted close to the moldy window and
looked down at the sluice of water idling along the street. Not
knowing how much time they might have, Prissi encouraged her
friends to set the trap.

Prissi made a nest for herself with an old
hand-woven tribal blanket in the corner of what once had been
someone’s small street-side living room. After the teener was in
place as bait, the Africans set the trap and disappeared. Yoli
wedged herself into a coat closet. The rickety woman backed herself
into the fireplace and descended the ladder until the only clue to
her presence was a thick stick which emerged from the hole. Lavie
folded herself into a small cupboard built under a set of
bookcases, pulled her stick against the baseboard and pulled close
the cupboard doors.

Jiffy had doubted that Prissi’s plan would
work because he thought there was a good chance that when the TRK-R
was submerged in the water in the subway that it might have been
damaged. Prissi was sure that Joshua Fflowers would not have given
Jack anything less than the best, most reliable technology.

As she lay on the mossy floor, Prissi tried
to gauge how much healing her body had done. She was sore. Muscles
ached and there were a dozen places on her legs and arms where she
could press a finger and feel the dull pulse of a deep bruise. The
bite was worse. It throbbed as regularly as her heart beat except
that it had spiked higher as she climbed the ladder.

As Prissi had made her plans for revenge, she
also had taken time to consider her escape. She had to get to
Africa. That was clear. Everyone who had helped her—the ship’s
crew, Jiffy, Yoli and her friends—were Africans. The people who had
attacked her and killed her father were not. Once she looked at it
that way, it became simple. She needed to hurt those who had hurt
her, then, escape to the place from which her true friends
came.

As she had tended the wound the zie had made
in Prissi’s calf, Yoli had told her patient about the extraordinary
efforts her people from Darfur, refugees from a hundred years of
war, had made to come to Noramica. Yoli couldn’t understand how
anyone would want to go back to that benighted continent. Noramica,
even looked at from two hundred meters below ground was a paradise
compared to the fields of Darfur— field which were fertile with
nothing but corpses. Prissi had heard what Yoli had said, but it
didn’t change her mind that her chances of survival were much
higher in Africa than where she was.

Even though Prissi was in a state of high
alert, she was caught off-guard when Yoli tapped the closet door
with a fingernail in warning. It wasn’t until a minute later that
she heard the slightest of rustlings. A minute after that, a stair
tread squeaked. The door opened just a crack. A moment later,
however, it was thrown violently open and two blue jay wingers
burst inside. As her attackers, knives in hand, leapt into the
room, Prissi jumped up from the bundle of rags where she had been
feigning sleep. The men were less than a meter from their intended
victim when they suddenly lost their balance. The three hidden
tribeswomen had begun to jerk and twist their sticks. The fishnet,
which they had woven from the finest fishing line, so fine that it
was nearly invisible on the floor beneath the wingers’ feet, was
attached to the sticks. Yoli, being the biggest, had kicked open
the closet door and used her prodigious weight to yank the net
toward her. It was that first sudden movement of the net beneath
their feet that caused the wings to totter. A second jerk from the
chimney and a third from Lavie caused the two attackers first to
tilt toward one another and touch shoulders, like tango partners,
before crashing to the floor. As soon as their quarry was down, the
women rushed forward and tossed their sticks across one another to
secure the net. Prissi slipped a noose around the neck of the trap.
When the noose was tight, the women freed their sticks. When one of
the wings began slashing at the net with his knife, Yoli smashed
him across the back of the neck with her stick. He slumped. To
insure compliance, Yoli hit him a second time and delivered a
similar blow to his partner. After Lavie La had collected their
knives, Prissi came within a step of her captured enemies and began
to shout questions.

“Who are you? Why did you kill my father? Why
are you chasing me? Who do you work for?”

When the wings were slow to answer, Yoli
prodded them with her staff. When they still maintained their
silence, all three of the women pummeled them with their weapons.
After another period of silence, unbroken except for harsh rasping
breathing, Yoli sat down on the net. The men groaned beneath her
weight. Yoli took the long slender wooden hook she had used to work
on the net from a pocket of her skirt and put the first three
centimeters of it into the nearer man’s nose. Lavie put her hook in
his ear.

Prissi again asked why they were trying to
kill her. After five seconds of silence, the hooks went in another
centimeter. A bubble of bright red blood blew out of the man’s nose
when he struggled. Yoli settled her weight more comfortably.

When there still was no answer to Prissi’s
questions about who was after her and why, the hooks explored a
little deeper

Prissi hesitated when she saw the stream of
blood running from the man’s ear. Her anger and primal urge for
revenge began to drain from her as quickly as his blood flowed.
Those feelings were replaced by feelings of horror at the cruelty
of the Africans’ acts. The teen wavered between asking another
question and calling off the interrogation when Yoli said something
under her breath. The rickets woman sat down on the second winger
as carelessly as if he were a tussock and put her hook in his left
eye.

Immediately, the answers began to come.

The information Prissi got was not what she
expected. Joshua Fflowers was not involved. Jack and his father
were, but Joshua Fflowers was not. In addition, the two bleeding
blue jay wingers had no knowledge of a pair of orange-feathered
wingers. The triumphant but astonished girl and Yoli had a brief
conversation. Prissi handed her rescuer a scrap of paper. After
that exchange, the small girl hugged the huge woman and thanked her
for everything she had done. She hugged the rickets woman and Lavie
La. After Prissi left, Yoli rendered both wingers unconscious by
holding a rag, wetted with the contents of a small bottle she drew
from her dress, to their noses. She opened the net and the three
women began plucking feathers from Prissi’s enemies. Within an hour
their wings were bare. Their job finished, the three Africans
collected their gear and descended back into their subfusc
world.

Waxwings and Waning Wings

It was hard for Prissi to leave Yoli and
Lavie, but, it was even harder for her to leave the top step of the
dilapidated building. She had left the murk of the ancient
brownstone and stepped into the brilliant sunlight of a spring day.
But, as Prissi stood in that warming light, she looked at the deep
shadows of the buildings across the street and shivered. Nothing
above ground felt safe. Years before, Prissi Langue had spent a
couple of afternoons in a soggy hemp hammock in Africa listening to
her mother read a story, a story her mother said had been a
favorite of hers as a child, about a girl far, far from home. The
girl was lost, overwhelmed, and beset by worries and dangers.
Squeezing her eyelids tight to keep back the tears, Prissi did as
the girl in the story had done. She clicked her heels together and
made a wish. Even with that potent magic, it was more than a minute
before the fifteen year old found the courage to beat her wings and
launch herself into the air.

Within minutes the aching winger was leaving
Manhattan and flying across the East River. Prissi figured that
even with no tail wind and with three rest breaks, she should be
able to get to the place indicated by the coordinates the
mysterious Allen Burgey had left for her before dark. She hoped to
find him safely there when she arrived and with answers to all her
questions.

For the first hour, not sure whether she
could trust her right wing, which had been dislocating even before
her fight with the crazie, Prissi flew no more than thirty meters
above ground. She followed the route of the long-abandoned Long
Island Expressway as it crossed Queens and dug deep into the
moldering towns that lay beyond.

Despite the serious doubts Prissi had about
her safety and her body’s capabilities, after a week of hiding and
healing in an abandoned subway, it felt wonderful to be above
ground. The air was balmy and filled with spring perfumes—lilac,
mock orange and kudzu. The wind was blowing out of the south west.
Prissi dropped the front edges of her wings, drew up her legs and
felt the soft breeze sneak past the cuff of her pants. The sun
beating on the back of her neck felt as sensuous as the heat
massage a Dutton School trainer would give her after she pulled a
muscle. However, despite her good feelings, Prissi was not even out
of Queens before she began to feel tired. The wounds she had
suffered fighting off the zies were not yet healed. She considered
resting, but, she told herself that what she was feeling was the
kind of fatigue that could be overcome if she just kept her wing
beats and breathing regular.

In Prissi’s first year at Dutton, after the
soccer season was over, she had opted to run winter cross country.
Although she was used to running from her years playing soccer, she
had never run competitively before. It took daily practice and lots
of advice from Coach Cardana for Prissi to understand that her body
had both limitations and limits and that she was not to confuse the
two.

Coach Car repeatedly had lectured the team
that limitations were a set of physical checkpoints and mental
hurdles. Limitations were where a body, or, more often, a mind,
wanted to quit. Limits were far beyond those points. Limits were
where the body stopped, despite what the mind wanted. The essence
of cross country was running past limitations to find the
limits.

Prissi’s shoulders ached and her breathing
was ragged, but she was sure that if she could accept those
conditions, and keep flapping her wings and feeding her lungs, that
her body had a lot left to give.

Prissi was right. Ten minutes later, her
compact body had metamorphosed into a machine. With her mind clear
and her spirits exhilarated, Prissi increased her altitude.

Afraid of giving the men who had killed her
father any clue as to where she was going, Prissi had kept her
mypod turned off. As a result of staying off the grid, it was just
a guess that she was over four hundred meters in the air. She was,
however, high enough that when she looked down, she could see how
automobile traffic once had surged in and drained out of Manhattan.
The wider, relatively straight thoroughfares were in the middle of
Long Island, where land was cheaper and more people could afford to
live. At the northern edge of the land the roads were narrow and
sinuous, almost as if they were meant to shake off the poor as the
rich made their way toward their waterfront homes on Long Island
Sound.