Flight (28 page)

Sliding her eyes sideways, Prissi was
surprised to see her mypod still on her wrist. Her understanding
was that mugger’s always took them, not only because they were
valuable, but, more importantly, because it kept their victims from
immediately calling for help. She stopped to consider…if it wasn’t
a mugging, then…. Prissi reached inside her pak and was amazed to
find the two crystals still there.

What was going on?

With as much care as if she were on a swaying
tightrope, Prissi keyed her mypod. “Dad, can you come? I’m hurt. On
the West side levee, maybe around 80th. I can’t see where I am. I
got mugged. Just come.”

In less than two minutes, two hawks, with
their aug-pacs hissing and green-gold halo lights searching through
the shadows, swooped up the levee. Two minutes after the hawks
landed, a roto-rescue landed thirty meters away. Moments after
that, feeling overwhelmed by their attention, Prissi began to
wonder if the police team’s barrage of questions were meant to
distract her from what the medical team was doing to her.

Just as Prissi was being gurneyed to the
small roto, Beryl Langue, blood-red face almost black in the
phosphor light, so short of breath his sentences had the gaps of a
bad phone connection, interrupted his only child’s rescue to try to
find out what had happened. Even after he had identified himself to
the hawks, they insisted that he curtail his questions and concerns
until after they got his daughter to the hospital.

Reluctantly, Beryl Langue allowed himself to
be cordoned off from Prissi.

Ss Prissi was strapped inside the roto’s
bubble, she felt a primal magic flowing from the IV into her arm as
the pain in her body flowed out.

The roto coughed, hummed, then rose in the
air and bee-lined its way to Columbia-Unitarian Hospital. Once the
dust and gravel of the departed roto’s wash had settled, the two
hawks followed. It took another five minutes for the octogenarian
Langue to feel recovered enough from his desperate flight uptown to
be confident that he could safely make it to the hospital.

Prissi missed her admission and first hour at
the hospital. It wasn’t until a flash of self-awareness caused her
to pause in the middle of a sentence, that she even realized that
she had resumed consciousness, and, obviously, the power of speech.
Two hawks, one on either side of her head, each just a half-step in
from the edge of her peripheral vision, hovered expectantly while
Prissi tried to figure out what she was saying and, more
importantly, what she already had said. Had she kept it to just the
mugging; or, had she been blurting things out about Centsurety,
Richard Baudgew and Jack?

As Prissi started to talk again—to relieve
the room of the growing pressure from her silence—a shadow moved
forward and morphed into her father.

“Prissi, was it a robbery? Or did
they…assault you?”

Thinking as fast as the medicine clogging her
synapses would allow, and making use of the things that had
happened over the last several days, Prissi said, “I think it was
just teenerz. When they flew over me, they were kind of wobbly,
maybe just fledges, you know, just being flerks.”

From the left side hawk, “How many?”

“Three.”

From the right side, “If they flew past you
and weren’t very good flyers, how did they catch you? Your father
tells me that you’re a very good winger, much better than your
license would suggest.”

“Another one, in front, came right at me. I
slowed down to see which way he was going. Left side, right
side.”

“Is this a third or fourth one?”

With the hawks alternating their questions,
it gave Prissi a couple of extra seconds, as she turned her
wide-eyed innocent face from one to the other, to formulate her
answers.

“Just three. The two who flew over and the
one in front.”

“Not four?”

“”No…I don’t think so.”

“And you didn’t recognize any of them?”

“No.”

“Three people, young boys, strangers, attack
you, but don’t molest you, nor, if my eighteen years experience
means anything, do a great job of robbing you. If you had money,
it’s gone, but your mypod is still on your wrist. It strikes me
as….”

Before he could finish his conclusions,
Prissi interrupted, “But if they were fledges, maybe after they
knocked me out, they got scared…at what they had done… and just
took off.”

Happy with the way that sounded, even though
a part of her thought it might be dialogue she had heard in a vid,
Prissi said encouragingly, “That has to be it, right?”

The hawk on the left shook his head as he
concurred, “Right. Has to be. Miss Langue, we don’t have much to go
on. We’ll check the air-cams to see if we can get more of a handle
on this. And, of course, it needn’t be said that if you happen to
remember more, or remember differently, that you’ll be in touch. I
would caution you to be extra careful. My experience is that it’s
the improbable that is most likely to repeat itself.”

With the irritated voice of a logician once
again being forced to counter the illogical, Beryl Langue asked,
“Why would you say that? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Because what happens only seems improbable
because we don’t have all of the information, sir.”

“Are you insinuating that my daughter isn’t
being truthful?”

The left-side detective stuck out his hand to
Beryl Langue, “Good night, sir. Even fledglings can get away if
they have enough of a head start.”

Reluctantly, Beryl Langue shook the hawk’s
hand.

Although Prissi was pleased with how well
things had gone with the hawks, she was less sure about whether to
continue along the same path with her father when he asked in an
angry voice, “What were you doing? Why were you in New Jersey? Why
didn’t you let me know where you were?”

“Daddy, I thought you might be busy, like
last night, so I didn’t want to bother you. My friend, Nancy,
remember Nancy, we got together to work on something for school,
but… and I was going to stay over…and I was just about to call you
when Nancy was…rude to her…mother and her dad had been drinking,
her dad had been drinking, and he got angry so I couldn’t stay
over. So I figured I could be home in an hour so I just left…in
such a hurry…I was kind of upset…because of the drinking, so I
forgot to call.”

Prissi forced herself to take a deep breath
as she surged across the finish line. Her father wavered between
angry and relieved, then, opted for relief.

“How do you feel?”

The face Prissi made for Beryl Langue was a
mosaic of her words.

“Stupid, sore, very happy you’re here, angry
at those boys, and…safe.”

She reached for her father’s hand, and hoping
to end her performance, said, “Really, really safe. And, really,
really sleepy.”

Prissi’s father snapped his fingers to turn
off the bedside light. As he held her hand, Prissi matched her
breathing to that of her father. Beryl Langue quickly drifted back
into the sleep he had been startled from two hours before. His
daughter, fighting the chemicals wandering around her body, stayed
awake replaying every minute of her day. Who had attacked her? How
did they know where she was? When had they begun tracking her? And,
most confusing, what was it that they wanted? Why hadn’t they
wanted the crystals? As she prepared to surrender to the sleep her
body was demanding, Prissi decided that Al Burgey was right. It had
been a huge mistake to pay Richard Baudgew a visit. Worse, she had
the strongest feeling that many of the effects of that misjudgment
were still ahead of her. Prissi’s last thoughts before falling back
into her iv-deepened sleep were of the undeniable wisdom of wiping
her nose clean, putting her head down, returning to Dutton as a
bright, energetic, not so inquisitive, fifteen-year old girl.

Day of Reckonings

When Prissi woke six hours later, she knew
where she was and what had happened to her. She turned her head
expecting to see her father slumped in the chair beside her bed,
but the chair was empty except for his thermajerkin. When she
looked at her mypod, which she found on the bedside table rather
than her wrist, it was just past seven a.m. She guessed her dad
might be getting breakfast. As soon as she had that thought, she
herself became ravenously hungry. She wondered if the ward she was
on was one of those at Columbia famous for its concierge services.
She let her mind drift—corn muffins baked long enough that the tops
were crusty and nearly brown, sweet butter, one of the
multispensers that held six kinds of honey, a bowl of black
raspberries with a swirl of whipped cream, and a choco-latte with
more whipped cream…and something good to read. She was toying with
a Pagrath Ghaib, Dickens, Michael Flynn, Bryce Pynchon, when a
rough rogue wave rising a dozens of meters higher than the
surrounding dreamy seas slammed into her.

Centsurety.

It was the only thing she wanted to read
about or know about. She wanted to understand every jot and sliver
about Centsurety. The people who had worked there. The work they
had done. And why poking around in events from long ago was
important enough to someone to ride her into the ground. Then, like
turning suddenly and feeling a deep bruise, Prissi remembered her
last thought before falling asleep. She tried to visualize opening
her hand and letting Centsurety go, but that vision wouldn’t come.
In fact, when Prissi thought to look down, both of her hands were
clenched tight into fists.

What was the secret?

Prissi slid sideways on the bed and stretched
her tubes and wires far enough that she could reach her mypod. She
typed in a directory search, got Allen Burgey’s number and pulsed
the call button.

The line chirped and chirped before pitching
higher as the call was forwarded. More chirps, but no answer. No
answering machine. At a house whose owner could barely walk.
Although Prissi could not believe what was happening to her, she
was instantly sure that she wasn’t the only one who had been
attacked the night before. But, how could that be? What was it that
she had started?

Dr. Baudgew has called her Pandora. Could it
be true?

To take her mind off questions she couldn’t
answer, Prissi picked up the housefone. By the time Beryl Langue
returned to the room, Prissi was picking at a half-eaten lox and
cream cheese omelet. A half-hour later, her IV’s had been
disconnected and she was dressed in her freshly laundered clothes.
When she tried to talk to her father, he ignored her except to tell
her to hurry it up.

To conform to hospital policy on discharges,
Prissi was forced to segue along the hospital’s corridors in an
ancient two-wheeler, whose severely nicked and scratched frame
suggested she might be safer walking from her room to the hospital
exit. They got into the first of the Wingcabs lined up outside the
hospital and belted themselves onto their perches. As soon as the
driver, a Darfurian ex-pat Prissi concluded from the looks of his
clothes, put the cab up on its air cushion, she knew she would have
a headache before they were halfway downtown. The engine for the
front jet was sputtering. The hack threw the van into gear and they
lurched forward. He drove with the front end canted up so that
every time the fore jet sputtered, it had more room to drop down
before its emer-wheels smacked onto the road. Bounding up and down
in a way that reminded the teener of a camel ride she had taken on
an Egyptian vacation when she was eight, Prissi gave a small smile
of satisfaction when the headache she had predicted arrived before
they crossed 59th Street.

The caroming cab ride and the close presence
of its captain kept Prissi and her father from saying more than the
occasional banality—made just frequently enough to stave off
embarrassment—on their way home. However, as soon as they crossed
the threshold into the apartment, Beryl Langue was instantly
transformed. A finger pointing to the couch, face dark with anger’s
rich blood, voice rising, he asked, “What is going on? What have
you done?”

Prissi, unbalanced by a version of her father
she had never witnessed before, and could scarcely imagine, moved
to the couch with the boneless slink of a remorseful dog.

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“Pandora’s flung open the lid, and she
doesn’t even know what she’s done? Sit,” he commanded when she
hesitated before the couch. “Sit! And I’ll tell you what you’ve
done. You’ve opened a door that’s been sealed for sixty years.
You’ve angered, no, incited, a powerful and vindictive man. You’ve
endangered yourself, and, probably, others. Without a thought, with
appallingly feckless ignorance, and the most naive foolhardiness.
You have amused yourself with a game that could prove deadly.”

With her throat so dry that the rough edges
of her words caught, Prissi coughed, “Deadly?”

“What do you think would have happened, if
your attackers hadn’t found whatever it was they were looking
for?”

Relying on bravura as a strategy, Prissi
countered, “What things?”

Her father’s howl made Prissi jump. She had
never seen him like this before.

“What things? I don’t know. But, you had
something and your attackers got it because if they hadn’t, you
would either be dead or being held somewhere being tortured.”

Even though her father’s words only confirmed
what she already had guessed, as tears burst from her eyes for the
second time that morning, Prissi realized that some part of her, a
large part, had been holding out hope.

“Why would anyone want me dead?”

Her father’s stare stung Prissi as much as if
he had slapped her in the face.

“Tell me what you have been doing.”

“I already told you. It started out as a
school project. I was interested in blind alley science. But then I
found some things…about Mom…that got me off on a tangent.”