Flight (38 page)

Prissi shook her head as if that physical
movement might magically straighten out the conflicting thoughts
going on inside it.

She didn’t know what to do. And, she was
afraid to do another wrong thing.

In-bound air traffic grew heavier the closer
she got to the Hudson. Prissi was making up her mind about going to
the NYPD when something suddenly darkened her vision. Someone
shrieked a curse. Prissi threw the same phrase back so quickly it
might have been an echo, except it was an octave higher. Even as
her anger spiked, she realized it was she who was in the wrong. She
had been so absorbed in her thinking that she had drifted over into
the outbound corridor. The teener dropped a wing, swooped right and
rejoined the stream of in-bound travelers. She scolded herself to
focus on the flying. If she didn’t, there would be no need to think
about the future. Before she was half-way across the Hudson, a
second winger screamed and horned her because she was floating up
into his flight line. Prissi’s heartbeat tripled and her blood
pressure doubled. She realized that if she couldn’t get control
over herself, she was more apt to be killed by her inattention and
ineptitude than by any enemy. Again, she swore at herself to pay
attention and concentrate on her flying. But paying close attention
to thousands of wings was equally nerve-wracking.

In the year since she fledged, nothing gave
Prissi a greater sense of freedom than flying in an empty sky in
fair weather. But, few things felt more claustrophobic than flying
in the middle of a dense flock. Even though she herself was the one
who had made two mistakes in two minutes, as soon as she really
started to focus on her flying, she became hyper-conscious of all
the possible ways the wingers around her could do something
thoughtless, aggressive, or stupid—all acts which could cause her
to plummet into the riverr below. Not for the first time she
pondered how meta-mutationists had figured out how to give humans
wings, but they hadn’t figured out how to give them the group
brains necessary to safely fly within a flock.

The chemicals that had blasted through
Prissi’s body from being horned didn’t readily dissipate. Instead,
as she approached the tangle of Manhattan buildings before her, a
skyline that reminded her of an old hyena’s worn and broken teeth,
Prissi’s heart continued to pound so hard she thought it might tear
itself into two. Her fingertips tingled and a cluster of black
spots, like the black funeral balloons gay men released when a
partner died, bobbled in front of her.

Before her thoughts threw her into a full
panic, Prissi remembered to say the old mantra from her wing
instructor: Fast wings. Slow breaths. Fast wings. Slow breaths.
Fast wings. Slow breaths…. Help me, Dad. Help me, Mom. Jay Seuss
Christy. Help me, Dad.

It may have been the brain cells freed up by
slowing down that let the confused fugitive notice two wingers in
the outbound lane. She had not seen the faces of the wingers who
had attacked her two nights before and started the nightmare she
was trying to escape, but something about the orange-feathered pair
coming her way triggered a strong neural response. She veered south
and increased her wing beats. She watched to see what response her
evasions might have. The pair kept their altitude and continued
toward New Jersey. Prissi increased her speed. She turned her head
back twice, but the orange wings kept beating their way west across
the Hudson. Deciding that she was paranoid, but nodding her head
that she had every right to be so, Prissi kept up her pace.

As thousands of wingers approached the
Manhattan shore, the discipline of the flock broke down. A dozen
flyers, and then twice that, mostly younger and all male, flying on
the south side of the torrent suddenly cut sideways against the
grain to head uptown. The blare of horns and a Babel of curses
followed them. Both because she wasn’t used to flying in rush hour
and because she had left Burgey’s house with only the vaguest of
plans, Prissi slowed her speed.

She was less than a half klik from shore when
she heard the squawk of horns coming from behind her. Craning her
neck, she saw a flash of orange far back in the flock in the
in-bound lane.

A third blast of adrenaline exploded through
Prissi. She instantly converted it to kinetic energy.

Fight or flight?

After the events of the last couple of days,
the answer definitely was flight. Prissi pounded her wings so hard
she began to rise. In the fog of fear, it took her a second before
she realized that rising up would make it easier for her pursuers
to follow her. She pitched back down into the thick of the flock
where it would be the harder for her enemies to spot her. Despite
feeling her blood sugar starting to drop, Prissi sped over the
freighters docked at their piers along the edge of the river, flew
two blocks further onto the island, and made a tight
pinion-rattling turn south onto Eleventh Avenue. She flew for just
a block before heading back west. She canted her wings and nailed a
one hop landing just shy of the edge of the building at the end of
the block. Moving forward, she peeked around the corner just in
time to see the duo of orange wingers cross onto Manhattan. Prissi
leaned against the building to catch her breath. She was wondering
how they could have known she would be crossing over from New
Jersey. She had gotten rid of her old clothes and her mypod. She
was thinking about other ways to track her, like her i-tag, when a
peripheral splotch of color informed her that the pair of orange
wings was sweeping around the corner. Prissi leapt, launched and
flew north, but a half-second later she realized that if she were
to escape her assailants it would be from her wits and darting
ability and not from the speed of her wings.

She dropped a wing and cut sharply left
toward the hulking superstructure of a Liberian freighter. When she
snapped her head around, her attackers were less than twenty meters
behind her. Prissi flew directly over the narrow gap between the
freighter’s scabby hull and the edge of the pier, drew up her
knees, folded her wings and cannon-balled toward the black opening.
She passed through the narrow gap with just a scrape to a leg. Just
before she plunged into the Hudson’s oily gray water, Prissi
snapped her wings half-open and tattooed a humming bird beat. Even
though she was forced to trim her wing span so that she could fit
in the narrow span between hull and pier, her rapid stroke was
powerful enough to keep her aloft for the seconds it took for her
to reconnoiter where she was and what she had to do.

Flying along the flaking hull of the ship
back toward the river, Prissi studied the width of the openings
between the pilings supporting the pier. She thought that she might
be able to dart between them. The problem wouldn’t be getting
between the spans, but rather making the necessary sharp u-turn
before she crashed into the hull of the next ship.

Prissi heard muffled, metallic shouting. She
had guessed right. Her attackers’ wingspans were too wide to allow
them to follow her between hull and quay. She sped the length of
the freighter, swept under the curve of the stern and pounded her
way back toward the wharf. At the bow end of the second ship, she
lowered her remiges to slow her speed before dropping her left wing
and smacking sideways into the end of the pier.

Like an exhausted bat, Prissi hung onto the
slimy wall. After a dozen deep breaths, she dropped almost to the
water before she flared and flew under the bow of the next ship.
Continuing her zigzag, the flagging teener headed back toward the
river. As she swept around the hull of the third ship, she caught a
glimpse of a pair of orange wings patrolling above the Hudson. She
assumed that the other winger was flying a quay-side reconnaissance
pattern. She considered keying her replacement mypod with the
emergency code to bring the hawks, but, she wasn’t ready to
compromise its signal. With yesterday’s blue jay attackers, who had
killed her father, and today’s orange wingers, it was obvious that
her enemy, who she thought had to be Joshua Fflowers, had plenty of
people to keep chasing her despite anything the police might do.
Plus, since she didn’t know what secret she had other than it must
be linked to the two fractured crystals hanging around her neck,
Prissi had no idea what she would tell any hawk that would be any
different from what she told the ones who had interviewed her at
the hospital after the first attack. She thought a better plan was,
first, to get herself out of the jam she was in, and, then, find
out how she was being tracked. That was what she thought, but her
body was having a different idea from her mind. The nearly spent
winger was drawing her breaths in great gulps. She had been using
her energy up too fast by flying with less than her full wingspan.
Given how she felt, Prissi guessed that she might only be able to
keep up what she was doing only for a couple of minutes more, and,
even that depended on her shoulder not betraying her again. With
semi-spread wings, she was putting enormous strain on the same
joint that has dislocated itself three times in the last week.

To get some distance from her growing
fatigue, Prissi told herself that what she was doing was just a
game. Like 3D-FRZ-B. Just another air-borne game. To win, she just
needed to come up with the right strategy.

As she rounded a fourth ship, Prissi thought
there might be a solution. For it to work, however, she had to get
herself to the 39th Street ferry terminal.

To distract herself from her dwindling
energy, Prissi counted wing flaps to the accompaniment of an old
African counting song. As she got closer to the terminal, she tried
to guess what her pursuers might do. She thought that the one now
flying over the river might move closer to shore to seal off any
chance of her escaping back into the city. Prissi curved around the
gleaming hull of an enormous Chinese ship and pounded her way
toward the swirling gray of the Hudson. As soon as she passed the
stern, she banked her wings and flew south just a couple of meters
above the water. She thought that she must have guessed right
because she saw no orange.

Prissi was hoping that there would be a ferry
close to departing for the Jersey shore or one just coming in to
berth. Her plan was to fly on board and let the crowd keep her
safe, but looking to the south, she could see that her plan was
flawed. The two ferry boats in port were empty having already
disembarked their cargo of walkers and injured, obese, or old
wingers. Looking west, Prissi could see two more ferries coming
from the Jersey shore, but neither was past mid-river. Prissi
dropped her primaries and rose in the air up so that she could see
what other options she might have, but before she had climbed ten
meters, two patches of orange were streaking toward her. Prissi
smashed the air with her wings as she dashed south.

Three blocks away, a small freighter, colored
mostly in patches of rust and a few flakes of green, flying the
orange, white and green stripes of Cote d’Ivoire, was making a slow
turn into a berth.

When she looked behind her, Prissi could see
the orange wings were flying from two angles so that they could
pinch her. Responding exactly as if she were in a game of 3D-FRZ-B,
Prissi let them close, then, at the very last moment, she darted
right, then left, then right again before she threw her wings back
and floated up out of their reach. Her pursuers snapped half rolls
and came at her from the front. This time she folded her wings,
cannonballed, pulled out just above the river and began climbing as
fast as she could.

Despite their bigger wings, in general, men,
with their more heavily muscled bodies, could not climb as fast as
women. Prissi rose until she was sixty meters in the air. Looking
forward, she could see that the freighter was just over a block
away. As she bee-lined toward the ship, she shrieked and pummeled
the button on her flight horn.

Thinking that Prissi was welcoming them to
Noramica, some of the sailors clustered on the deck of the battered
ship began waving back at her.

A quick backward glance let Prissi know that,
despite her maneuvers, the orange wingers were right behind her.
From playing fly games with the boys at Dutton, Prissi knew that
while a male’s bulk might slowehis climbs, it helped his dives. It
was obvious to Prissi that unless she changed her tactics she was
going to be caught before she made it to the tanker’s deck.

Calling on the last of her reserves, the
teener snapped her head down and her butt up as she collapsed her
wings. Two thirds of the way through a barrel roll, she flared her
wings, ignored the fire that erupted in her right shoulder and came
up behind her attackers. She beat her wings, corrected her path and
picked the assailant to the right. She accelerated until she was
just behind him. Just as she passed over, she pulled her wings
tight, bent her knees, and snapped her legs into his left side wing
joint. He made a sound like a cheap seat cushion when a fat man
sits before falling toward the water. His partner took a split
second deciding which target to pursue before following his partner
down.

Prissi looked toward onto the freighter deck
and its mystified crew. Seeing that they were bewildered at what
they had seen, she shrieked again and let her right wing drag.
Gravity took hold even as her body slipped sideways through the
air. She gave her audience more horn and more screams. The sailors,
realizing she was injured, began yelling back to her and running
along the deck to where they estimated she might crash. Prissi
fluttered her left wing just enough to correct her course and
closed the vents on her primaries to give herself as much drag as
possible. Thinking it would help her cause, Prissi continued
shrieking, dropped her wing even further, slipped sideways again to
slow her speed, skimmed just over railing and did a stumbling three
hop landing. Whimpering, Prissi staggered forward with a limp wing
in a bravura performance that would have shamed a killdeer.