Flight (9 page)

After Joe left Prissi pulled books from the
shelves, studied their covers, read their steamy blurbs and
wondered what was wrong with her. When her eyes began to blink in a
desperate attempt to stop whatever was trying to occur, she hurried
outside and launched herself into the air. Her muscles ached as she
flapped hard to achieve altitude. By the time her mypod showed one
hundred meters, Prissi was high enough that she could see Joe
racing up the hill toward the school. Although from her height and
his distance, Joe looked small, his presence tugged at her like the
draw of a black hole. The frustrated girl shouted to the wind at
how stupid she had been to succumb to Jack Fflower’s slippery charm
and how stupid she was to push Joe’s amateur affections away.

Now, on Monday afternoon, with six matrix
algebra problems still to be solved, Prissi stared out of the
window and wondered what might have happened to Joe. Her
concentration was such that it took her several minutes to realize
that a scattering of snow-flakes had turned into a storm. Being
careful not to harm her wings, she pushed herself up from the
leather perch. She stood at the window and marveled at the large
flakes, like a billion albino spiders, scurrying down from the
sky.

Snow in southern New England, even in the
dead of winter, was a rarity. To have snow three times in March was
unseen and unheard of in the last fifty years. Prissi’s thoughts
turned from Joe to the recently reported possibility that a decline
in green house gasses was leading to a new ice age. She stared with
her nose pressed to the glass thinking of an icy world—flying in
rain, which turned to ice, which caused her to plummet as her wings
froze and faltered. As she watched, the storm strengthened and the
snow began to swirl, eddy, cling and cover.

Staring at the dervish flakes, Prissi
wondered if Joe was out in the storm. She worried at the danger he
could be in until she suddenly realized that if Joe had disappeared
for the reason she guessed, the snow would be a help in his
escape.

In their talk the previous day, Joe had given
her all of the details of how he had scored a hat trick in the game
against Choate on Saturday afternoon. He had continued with how
much he loved the speed, the lack of friction, the intensity of the
play. He liked the feeling of holding nothing back. He anticipated
the split second when a moment of incredible physical grace was
summarily stopped by an act of explosive violence. He told Prissi
how he had absolutely crushed Choate’s leading scorer twice on the
boards the day before. When Prissi suggested for the tenth time
that Joe could keep playing hockey even after he fledged, he told
her he had no interest in winger hockey. They played on ice with
sticks and a puck, but it was too slow and too dull. With wings,
there could be no checking. When she insisted that he was going to
have to make the change, he looked at her for a moment before
dropping his eyes to stare at the hands clasped in his lap. After a
long pause and without looking back up, Joe said that he was
thinking of delaying his fledging. He had heard that there was a
way. A way to delay. Play now. Fly later.

Looking out the window as the tumble of
flakes, Prissi became embarrassed a second time as she remembered
how, when Joe had brought up delayed fledging, her snort had shot
something wet against the stair’s door. Her voice had risen as she
told Joe that he already was pushing the edge as much as he safely
could. There was no way for him to delay further. If he didn’t
fledge soon, the window closed forever. Prissi reminded Joe that no
one in his family was going to allow him to get away with that. A
walker in the family that invented fledging. That couldn’t be. When
Prissi started to press him even harder, Joe closed his face.

As her bright, celadon-flecked eyes gawked at
the cascade of flakes, the agitated teener tried to recall Joe’s
exact words. After thinking about it, she was sure he had used the
word delay. Looking out at the sculpting of the groomed lawn as it
became covered in snow, Prissi wished Joe well, but bet against him
hiding safely long enough to get past the fledging window. She
guessed that, if he had run away, he would be caught that day. Any
kid whose parents had the money was i-tagged. Three hawkers would
fly a grid with their transmitters and receivers. They’d home in on
Joe’s signal, triangulate the results, swoop down, make the catch,
and pass him off to his parents and let them turn the key.

Unless…unless he had a lot of help in getting
someplace where it was hard for the hawkers to fly, somewhere the
i-tag’s signals would be blocked. Prissi shook her head. Joe’s
chances for escape were less than her chances of fitting into a
size two glass slippers…or, dambit, dress.

Suddenly, Prissi whirled away from the
window. She grabbed her things and hurried outside to catch
snowflakes on her wings. Doing that would be easier than working
through the question that had just come to her. Did any of Joe’s
motivation to run away come from anger or disappointment at her?
For betraying him with Jack? Rejecting his kisses? Prissi dropped
her bag in the snow and, uncaring of how many gigs it would cost
her for flying over campus on a school day, flapped hard and flew
fast toward the west, into the heart of the storm.

Sticks and Stones

Two hundred kilometers to the north, in an
unending, unbroken Adirondack Mountain forest, fifteen-year old Joe
Fflowers swears as he slips and falls in the new snow. Rubbing his
arm where it has struck an up-thrust of rock hidden alongside the
overgrown path, he takes advantage of the moment to take a deep
breath. He is still on his knees when, from ten meters feet ahead,
his guide, Seka, imperiously barks, “C’mon. Hurry up. I don’t want
to use the lumenaids.”

In the growing gloam, Joe pats his aching
hands together to remove the snow and catch his breath. Adrona, his
other guide, coming up the trail behind him, taps his hip with a
walking stick.

“Hurry, hurry. We want to be undercover
before hawks fly.”

“How much farther?”

“Wishing for wings?”

Despite the twelve hours a week that Joe
spends training with the hockey team, his chest aches from the pace
they have been keeping. His knee has grown much worse.

As planned, Joe walks away from The Dutton
School just before lunch. His rendezvous with his railroader in a
little used parking lot behind the Waterville Fire Department
building goes smoothly. The railroader puts him inside a kafir
board tool box that takes up most of the bed of what Jack guesses
is a 2050 vintage truclet. The vehicle whines and groans as its
tiny electric motor climbs through the hills of northwest
Connecticut, then screams in outraged protest as it fights its way
through the higher elevations of the New York mountains. Since the
truclet has almost no springs left and his railroader hasn’t
thought to put anything soft in the box, Joe bounces around
throughout the trip. The farther north they go, the worse the roads
become. Joe is twisting around trying to make himself more
comfortable when the driver hits a huge rut. Joe flies through the
air and smashes his head against a corner of the box. When he comes
back down, his left leg twists under him. His knee pops.

After four hours, a cold, bruised Joe, with a
throbbing knee, is helped from his hiding place. Two people dressed
in well-worn green Microx are waiting in the shadows of an enormous
fir tree. Joe guesses the older of the two, whom the truclet driver
calls Seka, to be over two meters tall and weigh upward of eighty
kilograms. A small head with red leather cheeks, jewel-like blue
eyes and an osprey’s nest of white hair, nods at the introduction.
The second guide, Adrona, is less man than boy. Joe thinks that he
might be no more than two or three years older than Joe
himself—certainly no more than twenty. His hair is as unkempt as
Seka’s, but it is reddish gold. The piercing blue eyes are the
same.

Joe’s driver points, “Seka will take you from
here, “ He extends his knuckles as he says solemnly, “Stars
aligned.”

An embarrassed Joe taps the outstretched
knuckles with his own and mutters, “Stars benign.”

The railroader leaps toward the truclet as
the runaway hurriedly settles his pak on his shoulders before
running under the protection of the thick boughs of the forest.

Seka hands Joe a satin-smooth, knobbed
walking stick before jogging up a steep hill through a dense forest
of tall, scarred white pine and hemlock. The thick layer of pine
needles beneath their feet muffles the sounds of their passing. At
first, the cushion of needles seems to lessen the pain pulsing in
Joe’s knee; however as they continue to climb through the
clean-smelling woods, the flagging boy realizes that the give of
the needles is wearing him out just like a walk in deep snow.

Near the crest of the hill, the trees begin
to thin. Seka stays ten meters below the ridgeline and begins to
move laterally. Within minutes, the added pressure from running
along the canted land causes Joe to slow and, finally, to stop. As
the escapee leans over to rub his kneecap, which feels like it’s
been put on upside down, Adrona taps his spine.

“Jump.”

An angry Joe pushes the stick away.

“What?”

“Jump the pain. People think pain is a wall.
It’s not. It’s a fence. Jump it.”

From a few paces ahead, the sound of Seka’s
walking stick being quickly rapped on a tree reminds Joe of the way
Coach Deirken pounds his hockey stick to get the team to skate
faster in the ice rink. Despite the incentive, Joe doesn’t
move.

Adrona makes a sound of disgust and moves
off.

Joe kneels on his good knee as he watches
them hurrying away through the woods. For a moment, his anger and
defiance convince him to let them go, but, as soon as his guides’
backs disappear from view, the satisfaction fades and the fear of
being lost in the woods forces Joe to his feet. As he begins
limping after his keepers, the boy thinks of how, if he had wings,
he could fly out of the forest to safety. That thought confuses
him.

Twenty minutes later, the wind picks up. It
tries to free itself of the snow it is carrying by darting left and
right, up and down, swirling around. It teases the fearful boy. It
reminds Joe of the twists, turns, spins, jukes and dekes he does on
the ice to confuse his opponents. Despite his efforts, when he
looks ahead, he can’t see Seka or Adrona but only the line of their
tracks quickly disappearing as the wind fills them with new snow.
With his knee pounding, his chest heaving and his mouth whispering,
“Jump,” the boy pursues his rescuers.

When Joe finally catches up, the snow has
stopped, the wind has died and the light is all but gone. His
guides are standing at the edge of a precipice. Joe carefully
approaches and looks down into a pit whose bottom is lost in
shadow. Seka nods, “Stay on the path.”

With their knees bent and sticks planted,
Joe’s guides begin their descent. As Joe tries to follow the spot
where he wedges his walking stick gives way. As he begins to slide
down the cliff, Joe rolls onto his stomach and throws out a hand as
his toes try to dig into the scree. When he finally stops, he
twists his head to stare down the cliffside to where Seka and
Adrona, black ghosts against a near-black background, hover.

“The path. Of course.”

With his heart still pounding, Joe carefully
gets up, and, poking his walking stick before him like a blind
man’s cane, begins a barely controlled slide toward the black maw
below.

Shaking from fear and fatigue, Joe’s relief
at making it to the bottom of the immense pit disappears as soon as
he looks around and neither sees nor hears his guides. He turns a
full circle trying to pull a shape or two from the darkness.
Looking up, outlined against the rough black edge of the cliff far
overhead, he sees a flattened oval scattering of faint new stars
shining against the blue-black mussel shell sky. He shifts his
attention from the distant sky to the immediacy of his wounds. His
feet are bruised and his hands are raw. The pain in his knee is
worse. The weight of his pak seems to have doubled.

Joe tilts his head again to stare at the
stars above. He takes a tentative first step, groans, takes a
second, wails at the pain, and, then, stops. In a knot of emotion
that he can’t untie, he beats his arms at his side like the wings
he hasn’t wanted. Beats them in anger, beats them to forestall any
more pain, beats them in hope and despair, beats them in
frustration. After a minute, he stops to catch his breath. As he
drags cold air into his hot lungs, Joe reconsiders the elements of
the decision that has brought him to this point: Knife-edged blades
slicing ice in a cold, frictionless world. Crowds roaring in
muffled applause behind the rink’s thick plastic walls. Prissi,
chastised, teary, sorry for how she has treated him.

Won’t Break My Bones

Joe Fflowers wipes away icy tears as he
stumbles across the slag and scree-covered floor of the abandoned
Adirondack iron mine. He is freezing cold, feels faint from hunger
and the pain in his knee just keeps growing. Despite that pain, Joe
tries to hurry across the pit floor; however his guides are nowhere
to be seen. He walks a half-moon arc twenty meters out from the
bottom of the path thinking that he will pick up their tracks, but
he can find no prints in the flurrying snow. After he trips and
falls on a low mound of snow-slick tailings, Joe sits down on a
rock, which looks like a cupcake with its frosting of snow, to
gather his thoughts.

The longer he sits, the more overwhelmed he
becomes with regrets. He does not hate his parents, but he is
estranged. For more than a year he has felt an enormous chasm
between their wishes and his own wants. But, regardless of those
differences, when he thinks about the enormity of what he is doing,
it makes his stomach churn, and, despite the cold, his hands
sweat.