Flight (31 page)

A whole rack of discount Kurdistan cabernets,
bottles ejecting from the racks like torpedoes in a submarine, shot
across the path in front of Prissi. She yelped and half beat her
wings to get over the hurdle.

From ahead, Jack screamed, “Goal!” as he
burst from Isabel’s out onto 21st Street. Prissi beat her wings
again, but she had too much adrenaline flooding her body. In a
split second, she was two meters in the air. Her head banged into a
light fixture.

“Freeieekin Hesus Mimi.”

Her wings paused. She lost her balance and
fell into a safety cushion of snack bags. Dozens of bags
simultaneously exploded from her weight. The air filled with
things, mainly orange and yellow-colored, spewing the smells of
dehydrated onion and garlic, smoke and chipotle. Prissi tried to
get up, but slipped on the debris. Tried again. Took an
outstretched hand. Rose. Tried to disengage her hand from what she
now saw was a red-faced clerk. She screamed in terror, “My baby! My
baby!! Tia crushed my baby!” and snapped her hand free from the
clerk, now paralyzed in shock, as he imagined a collision of Isabel
and baby. Prissi juked left to freeze the last clerk, then,
side-slipped through the doorway. She flapped her wings, and went
airborne trailing orange, yellow and red particles like the tail of
a comet.

No Jack.

Prissi flew low to the ground and as close to
the buildings as she dared until she came to the end of the block.
As soon as she turned up First Avenue, despite the throbbing ache
in her shoulder, she elevated as quickly as she could. Prissi flew
north to 22th Street before swinging back south and flying so low
over the tops of the buildings that her shoes barely cleared the
roof. Prissi landed back from the edge of the building facing onto
21st Street directly across from Isabel’s and scuttled forward
until she could scrunch down in a corner behind the worn limestone
parapet. She shifted her gaze from the skies above to the sidewalks
and doorways below.

No Jack.

Prissi slunk down even tighter against the
crumbling brick when three hawks swooped down and landed. Two of
the officers book-ended Isabel’s entrance while the third dropped
down into the shadow of the alley. The hawks pushed into Isabel’s,
then came out a few seconds later with the red-faced clerk who had
grabbed Prissi’s hand. He gesticulated in such a dramatic way that
Prissi thought that he might be an out-of-work mime. Finally, he
pointed west. The breathless teener guessed he was indicating which
way Jack had gone. Seconds later, two people holding coffee mugs
like weapons burst from the KaffeeKiosK and ran toward the hawks.
Within five minutes, six more hawks arrived. Prissi watched them
search the alleyway and cordon off the KaffeeKiosK. A roto arrived
and two medics jumped out and started to go into Isabel’s, but a
hawk pointed them toward the KKK.

Prissi decided that she couldn’t watch was
going to be brought out of the coffee shop. Plus, her African
neurons were telling her it wasn’t safe to stay; however just as
she was preparing to leave the safety of the shadows, she noticed
an aero-lim cruising slowly down 21st Street west of First Avenue.
It came to a stop, but stayed hovering outside a storefront whose
signs announced it as the Phosphor Essence. Since Prissi rarely saw
a limo this far south and, when they did, lighting and lamp shops
weren’t likely to be their destinations, the girl drew back and
continued to watch.

The Phosphor Essence door opened and a blur,
but a blur whose size, shape and blue and white wings reminded
Prissi of Jack, bolted across the sidewalk and dove into the car.
Prissi got a sickening feeling deep in her guts.

The aero-lim floated off. Prissi waited a
couple of minutes more for the nauseous feeling to pass before
flying uptown. By the time she was north of Thirtieth Street, she
had formulated a plan. She swept down into Thirdtown and bought a
Tibetan hat, which smelled like sour milk, to cover her hair and a
bamboo vest that only a dwert would wear. She landed on a
secu-booth on Thirty-sixth Street and debited everything left in
her savings account after going through her father’s wallet and not
finding the pin code for his debit card.

Prissi flew up Fifth Avenue into traffic
heavy enough that she had to pay more attention to her flying than
the events of the last hour. Arriving at 42nd Street ten minutes
before her proposed rendezvous with Jack, Prissi reconnoitered a
block north, then looped the loop so that she was headed back
south. She flew two blocks back the way she had come, looped north
again, did a short glide, landed on the battlements of a twenty
story building and fought the push from the thermals streaming up
the building’s face before scrambling behind a winged gargoyle
keeping watch from its Gothic aerie. Removing her hat, Prissi
stared down at the well-worn lions protecting the entrance to the
NYPD.

Twenty minutes later, from her coign of
vantage, Prissi’s attention was drawn from the cramp in her thigh
to a cleaned-up, confident Jack getting out of a beat up hack and
moving quickly up 5th Avenue toward the datarium. Squinting her
eyes, the teener thought she could make out another passenger in
the hack. She also thought that Jack was looking good, very good,
for a run-away. When he got to the first lion, he sprinted up the
steps, taking them two at a time.

Prissi wasn’t exactly sure what she should
do. The after-effects of the attack and escape pulsed in her
temples and tingled her fingertips.

Jack. Jack? Friend? Foe? Rescuer? Turncoat?
The evidence was mixed. He showed up outside her apartment and in
the next two days she was attacked three times. Today, what was the
probability that he just happened to be outside the place where her
father was killed?

There. She had thought it. The thought she
had been keeping at bay. Pushing off and swatting away—like
mosquitoes, like bees, even while she was hurling bottles and
running and smashing chips and flying in fear.

Dead.

She couldn’t fathom that.

Coffee and plans, admittedly scary plans, one
minute and a snapped neck the next.

Paying for something she had done…or was
doing, whose importance remained in shadows.

Her father.

Her boring, irritating, aloof, pedantic,
all-wise and ever-ignorant father.

Gone.

Prissi felt something slide up and out of her
stomach, but this time it didn’t churn up her throat and burst from
her mouth. This time it got caught at the top of her rib cage where
it shook the bars of that prison until it broke free. She sobbed
until her throat was raw, her eyes burned like open wounds from her
salts and her chest ached as if she herself had stopped Isabel’s
bat.

Finally, she forced herself to think of Jack
because the answer was important.

Friend? Foe? Or, neither? Maybe a pawn?
Or….?

“Century.”

Is that what he had said? What did that
mean?

A broken neck.

Prissi couldn’t keep the thoughts of her
father’s neck from intruding. Rather than deal with them, she
hurled herself from the parapet and shot across the street to a
botched one hop landing at the top of the NYPD’s worn steps. Prissi
wiped the blood from her palms, ignored the tears in the knees of
her aeros and went inside.

Prissi found a perplexed Jack looking at a
display of covers from a defunct inkzine called The New Yorker.
Before he could say a word, Prissi banged his shoulder.

“C’mon.”

She hurried off to the Spears Reading Room.
She walked past the scanners and sniffers and made her way under
the arched windows and ornate gilt ceiling to the back of the
immense room. With the heavy reassurance of a d-TERROR-ence door
close by and the entrance to the room so far away, Prissi felt
relatively safe being with Jack. When she looked at him, he stared
back. She knew that he was studying her red eye rims, blotchy skin
and a still leaking nose. Before he got past, “Are you….?” Prissi
shook her head so emphatically that fluid flew from her
nostrils.

“No. Not at all. Dad’s dead. They killed my
dad.”

Jack’s horrified look seemed real.

“Who?”

To keep from crying again, Prissi relied on
an old stand-by, “Ecoists, Afro-nationalists, crypto-Christians,
radico-greens, nihilists, the spawn of Mordor, Satan, Fifth World
Marxists. Who knows…?”

Prissi paused her protective stream of
sarcasm, then narrowed her eyes, which made them burn even more, to
a dark beam of inquisition, “Maybe, and most likely, your
grandfather.”

As far as Prissi was concerned, Jack’s laugh
was too loud and too sharp to be natural.

“My grandfather? How? He’s an old man about
two breaths from death himself.”

“Is there some natural separation between age
and power? Lear seemed to have some trouble with that. Listen,
Jack, ever since I started looking into Centsurety, your dear
grandfather’s pet project, things got bad, then worse, and, now,
horrible. My dad’s dead as well as a man in New Jersey. I’ve been
attacked twice, I think by the same guyz, and the only thing that I
can see that connects all of the data points is a company that went
up in smoke a long time ago.”

“Prissi, you’re wrong. My grandfather is a
good man. I know….”

“No, Jack, you’re wrong. The only thing you
really know is that Joshua Fflowers is a good grandfather. You
don’t know any more than that. Look at me, in the last few days
I’ve learned that I don’t know anything for sure about my parents.
I’ve got pix of someone who looks a lot like my mother might have
looked like a long time ago and guess what Jack—this woman who
looks so much like my mother doesn’t have my mother’s name. She has
the eyes and nose and chin and smile of my mom, but not her name.
Which is just a teeny bit interesting to me, Jack. Intriguing.
Mysterious. But with both of them dead, what happens to the
mystery, Jack? And if I don’t figure out the mystery, then what
happens to me, Jack?

“Of course, your grandfather is
involved.”

Prissi slammed a fist into Jack’s upper
arm.

“And if I had any brains, I’d get as far away
from you as possible because you’re just too much of a coincidence.
You’re like one of those guys running on and off stage in a Moliere
play. Except it’s too scary to be a farce. I should either get
away, fast, or,” Prissi grabbed Jack’s arm, “kidnap you and trade
you for my own safety.”

Jack crossed his arms onto the library table,
then, dropped his head onto his arms.

“You’re completely wrong, Prissi. My
grandfather, if he can even think, is worried about what organ is
going to fail next. Have you seen the newz? He’s busy dying at the
Juvenal Institute. You said two attacks. What was the other
attack?”

When Prissi told him of the details of her
flight down the West Side levee, Jack said, “Why do you think those
two events are even connected? Isn’t it more likely that, rather
than my grandfather reaching out from a coma to ruin your life,
that you happened to get mugged flying around at night when you
should have been home? And the thing today? Couldn’t that have been
a robbery?”

“Yeah, sure. They wanted my coffee. Look,
Jack, I like caffeine more than most, but I still don’t see myself
killing anybody for their Kona. My dad’s dead, Jack. And if I
wasn’t such a dambed plucky young heroine, I might be, too. And
you’d be worried over who was going to dance with you at Winter
Ball next year.”

At Prissi’s levity, Jack lifted his head, but
Prissi’s face, streaming with tears, belied her tone.

“Gotta go, Jack.”

“Where? Where are you going, Prissi?”

Prissi looked at Jack and tried to read his
face. But whatever was written there was indecipherable to her. She
gave him a half-pat, a half-smile, a half-sigh, and a full shrug
before she pushed him away from her perch and started across the
room. When she was halfway across, without looking around, she gave
him a half-wave. She hurried out of the NYPD, even though hurrying
through a public place often brought unwanted attention from guards
and cameras. As soon as she was outside, Prissi launched and flew
back to her previous perch. It was fifteen minutes before Jack came
out. He stood above the two NYPD lions for a moment, almost as if
he were posing, before launching off the top of the steps, flogging
south to the end of the block, and making a lazy turn onto 41st
Street. Less than a minute later a black aero-lim pulled out of the
same street and eased into traffic. Prissi looked to see if she
could see a patch of blue and white, but the windows were tinted
too darkly for that.

Prissi sat in her aerie and thought about her
next move.

She could go back to the apartment.
Dangerous. Or, try to find where her father’s body had been taken.
Dangerous. She could see if she could stay with Nancy. Deprezzing.
Or, go back to Al Burgey’s house to try to find…what…something that
made some sense. Dangerous and deprezzing. Or, she could dart back
across the street to the library to see if she could find more
pieces to the puzzle. Boring, but…. Or, she could call Dr. Smarkzy
to see what he would suggest. Maybe.

Prissi wasn’t sure whether she was being
tracked or followed, but she also certainly wasn’t willing to
concede to Jack’s notion that the events of the last two days were
mere coincidence. Coincidence was too easy. Prissi remembered how
in honors lit, Mz. Carbarari, after praising the humanity,
psychological insight and extraordinary language skills of
Shakespeare, had derided him for his dependence upon coincidence to
move so many of his plots forward.

Not a Safe-House

It took Prissi another twenty minutes before
she found the energy to launch herself into the air. Being careful
to favor her right wing, she flew north to Spicetown. Although it
made her nervous to be just a few blocks from where the creepy
Richard Baudgew lived, she figured that Spicetown was the best
neighborhood she knew to do what she needed to do. As soon as she
landed, she began walking as fast as she could along the crowded
streets. Lots of people looked at her wings, but she ignored them.
After three blocks, she darted into a narrow store selling
ethno-clothes. Inside, the lights, oozing like an oil spill, made
it almost impossible for Prissi to tell what color of clothing she
might be buying. Between glances to see if anyone was staring
through the windows, Prissi pawed through racks of brightly dyed
poorly made clothes until she finally found two tops and two pairs
of yurskins dyed a polluted river brown. She handed the clerk, who
looked to be Ethiopian, cash, then vibrated while he processed her
purchases in African time. Six blocks away she found a pair of used
brown lightweight flight shoes. Two blocks closer to the river,
Prissi bought socks and underwear. Still walking toward the river,
she stopped at a CiVViS and bought a pak of bubble tags. A block
from the river Prissi ducked into a run-down KaffeeKiosK and
ordered a Turbo-kona. She walked out through the back of the store
and into an alleyway. Turning right, she trotted toward the river.
She made her way through the maze of quayside debris until she
found a relatively isolated spot. She drank her coffee and
downloaded her mypod to two of the bubble tags as she listened to
two Jamaicans crooning Carib gospel while they filleted fish from
two big blue bins. When the download was complete, Prissi walked
back to 139th Street and made a bee-line toward a store she had
noticed earlier as she had done her other shopping.