The Book of Phoenix (16 page)

“Do you think we don't have places to go?” Mmuo asked.

“Sir, if you would . . .”

“Why do you people think you should control everything?” he snapped.

“We're not trying to do that, sir,” another man said. They pressed closer, and I began to feel anxious.

“Not yet,” Mmuo said to me.

“We're authorized to use force, if we must,” the man in the jogging suit said. “All of us here deem your responses as suspicious activity.”

Mmuo's portable vibrated in his hand and made the sound of a rooster crowing. In that strange moment, I was reminded of Ghana, again, where the roosters crowed at all times of the day. The seven police surrounding us jumped into motion, pulling out guns and shouting.

“Put your hands in the air!” The woman was screaming in my ear.

Mmuo handed the portable to me and it instantly started emitting an acrid stench of burning circuits and computer chips. I dropped it. Mmuo met my eyes, and I didn't wait for him to sink quickly through the concrete into the sewer system directly below us.

 • • • 

I slipped.

 • • • 

I arrived in the corner of the Great Hall on the first floor. This was a public area, so the 3D map I'd studied gave me the knowledge that I needed to arrive in the exact spot, not an inch off mark. Once I could imagine it, I could arrive there. I cannot tell you how I did what I did. It is not something words are equipped to describe. However, I could guide it. When I was so close, merely miles away, I could arrive on a specific spot. When I stepped into time, I carried my essence with me. So when I stepped out, I remembered they were malleable, both time and space. The closer, the softer.

I heard a gasp as the cool air hit my face. Then someone grabbed my hand and squeezed.

“Act natural,” Saeed said. “Adjust. You're my wife. Meek, poor English. I am just curious about the towers. Walk with me, Phoenix.”

Saeed and I started walking. My sandals softly tapping the shiny floor. When we reached the center of the elaborate hall, I stopped. “Wait,” I whispered. “Mmuo needs time to get here, anyway. So give me a moment.”

The hall was spectacular with Renaissance art carved into embroidered white columns and staircases. There were colorful panels in the archways and the ceiling reached high above the second floor. I was overwhelmed by the shift from being outside in the balmy air surrounded by Secret Service men and women outside the White House to being in the Library of Congress. I looked down at the floor to stabilize and orient myself. Marble, like Tower 7's but not white. Brown and yellow with brass inlays. I looked across the floor. The design that we stood on looked like a blooming sun.

“We were surrounded,” I whispered, staring at it.

“Secret Service?”

“Yes.”

“That fast?” he asked. “They must really hate our kind.”

I chuckled despite myself.

“I think the library is on alert,” Saeed said. We started walking again. “About a minute ago, I saw some guards jog past. They looked like they were heading to the front of the building, and they looked worried. But they haven't asked anyone to leave, so I think we're ok. They're likely focusing on the White House and the area around it.”

If so, our plan had worked. This was why Mmuo and I had been at the White House in the first place. A diversion.

“Did Mmuo make it?”

“I don't know,” I said. He had to catch a cab and this thought did not set me at ease.

We looked at each other and then looked away. I nervously surveyed the room. We were the only people of color in the Great Hall. I was an oddly shaped woman in a black burka, and I didn't have a library card. I felt ill. What would they do to Mmuo? And what would we do without him here?

My eyes fell on a tapestry on the wall. It was of a tall regal woman holding a scroll. This was the Minerva mosaic that I'd read about when studying the building's layout. Minerva was the protector of the United States. But I focused on the smaller statuesque woman standing on some sort of globe just below the regal woman's scroll. She had wings. This was Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. I stared at her realizing that I'd admired this image on the screen at Mmuo's apartment yet, for some reason, I hadn't connected her to myself. But now I did.

“They told me it's that way,” Saeed said.

I nodded. He led the way.

 • • • 

“If Mmuo isn't able to alter the file, will they arrest us down here, do you think?”

“Me, but
not
you,” Saeed said. “If anything happens, leave.”

Minutes later, we were in an underground tunnel that led us to Special Collections and Archives. The man at the help desk had looked at us with such scrutiny when we'd asked about the Tower Records that I thought it was over right then and there. Then he'd said, “Right this way.” We followed him through the stacks to a glass door. He typed in a code, pushed the door open, scrutinized us again, and then held up a portable. He touched the screen and the face of another guard appeared, “You've got two, today,” the help desk man said.

“Ok,” the guard on his screen said. “Send them in.”

The pathway was long, the walls white. I shivered. It reminded me of the hallway in Tower 1. All it needed was the grey railing on the sides.

Only two people were allowed in at a time and clearance was tight. As we waited for the guide to check us out, I held my breath and looked through the second set of sealed glass doors into the sterile white room. The glass was most likely bullet-proof. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the ceiling. The guard only had his silver chair to sit in. I wondered how he withstood spending hours in this place.

He frowned at us. Then took Saeed's library card and touched it to the flattest portable I'd ever seen. It looked like a hand-sized sheet of glass. It lit up a soft periwinkle then it turned green and said, “Prince Osama bin Abdullah of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and wife are allowed into Tower Records. One hour. No photos, please.”

 • • • 

I forgot about Saeed guarding the door. I didn't think about whatever it was that Mmuo had to do to get me into the full system. I ignored the silver buttons that were security cameras stationed in every ceiling corner. I didn't think about what would happen if anyone checked on us. I thought only about information. Answers. I thought back to my time in Tower 7 when I had their e-reader in hand. Before I began to heat.

These small stacks were arranged in an ancient format called Dewey Decimal. I'd studied it, so there was no need to ask the guard for help. I went to the card catalog in the middle of the room. I paused. “LifeGen Technologies,” I whispered. I knew the name, but this was the first time I brought it to my consciousness, the first time I'd spoken it aloud. I'd always called them the Big Eye, as had the other speciMen I knew. But this was the official name of the company behind the towers, the hand that grasped the lightning bolt.

I looked up Tower 7 and found much of what I'd already read in digital format. Histories, the mystery of The Backbone, architecture. I also found what we were looking for. A single volume containing the “speciMen files” of Tower 7.

I can read fast and retain just about every detail, so I didn't need the pad and paper that Saeed gave me. As I read, I felt sweat between the feathers of my wings. Even though the room was kept at a cool temperature and low moisture level, I was burning up. My body felt as if it were on fire, but this time it was because I was burning so much as I processed what I read.

“What are you doing?!” Saeed hissed as I threw off my burka.

“Mmuo got us in, right? So, he had to also have done something to the security cameras,” I said. “I remember when I was escaping Tower 7. He's thorough.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “I need air. It's too hot.”

“Phoenix, what if . . .”

“We take the chance,” I snapped. “I need to breathe. This is a lot.”

Saeed bit his lip, glanced at the cameras on the ceiling and then quickly nodded. He picked up my burka and got it ready to throw back over me. “Ok.”

My eyes were watering from the stress of what I'd just read about Mmuo. Had they really peeled away all of his already special skin, injected it with some sort of sentient molecular shifting compound and then grafted it back on? I wiped my forehead as I read the most shocking part of his file. I glanced at Saeed.

“What?” he asked.

I shook my head and continued reading. He wouldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. But I could. I'd seen the red creature in the glass box in Tower 1. It had looked like a light dust until I broke the glass and it came out. Then it had shifted and solidified into a tall praying mantis-like creature. The more I read, the gladder I was that I'd freed it.

According to the information in Mmuo's file the creature was an intelligent alien from Mars, befriended and then captured and brought to earth by a young man from the Mars colony. This young man had forced the creature to divulge its technological knowledge about molecular control and reorganization. This information was passed to Tower 7 scientists and then used to create Mmuo's skin.

Mmuo had endured the peeling and grafting without any anesthesia. This was why he could slip through more than wood. He hated clothes because his skin wanted to see everything. I shuddered. Mmuo's file marked him as “fugitive.”

The idiok baboons who could speak in sign language were having their brains tested and extracted. They'd been caught in the Congo and even then were able to fully communicate with their captors in perfect sign language. The Big Eye believed the baboons had quickly taught themselves the language in order to communicate with their captors. What got Tower 7 interested in them was the fact that they could tell the future. One of them, the only female, kept telling Tower 7 to stop doing what they were doing, that if they didn't, they'd bring the end of the world. But no one listened to her. All the idiok were marked as “deceased,” most of them dying in Tower 7's collapse.

Saeed was a weapon, as I was. In his file they called him, “The Seed.” (The play on his name was surely not a coincidence. The Big Eye scientists were known to have a sick sense of humor. Even The Backbone was created as a joke.) He was the prototype of the soldiers created to seed disaster zones after dropping nuclear bombs on enemies. “The Seed” were human killing machines who would go in and kill off survivors to make sure the enemies were fully defeated. Saeed didn't know it but he was resistant to radiation, too. Or maybe he did know. Maybe this was one of the many ugly secrets he kept from me. Saeed could never die of cancer. His file marked him as “deceased.”

There was no file on the winged man. I hadn't expected there to be. The winged man was someone that Tower 7 probably kept secret from even
itself
.

My file had its own LifeGen Technologies mini-booklet. My belly dropped. Why did I have so many pages? Why was I a company-wide speciMen, as opposed to just Tower 7? There was nothing more extraordinary about me than Mmuo or Saeed. Saeed was classified as a weapon, just like I was.

As I read, my legs grew weak, and my mind tried to grow cloudy. The information I learned was poison. How could I have no father? How could I be nothing but a cataclysm spurred by weapon engineers and scientists? I was nothing but the result of a slurry of African DNA and cells. They constructed the sperm and the egg with materials of over ten Africans, all from the West African nations of Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and Benin. Then they combined all that with DNA from Lucy the Mitochondrial Eve, the ten-year-old Ethiopian girl who carried the complete genetic blueprint of the human race. The girl who could remember every part of her life; the girl whom they tried to make immortal.

My eyes watered, but I read on. Something was coming. But I didn't stop reading. An African American woman carried me to term, and when I was born, she wanted to keep me. They wouldn't even let her kiss me goodbye. The woman had eventually gone mad and had to be committed to a psychiatric ward in New York, not far from Tower 7. The doctors could not figure out why she had grown so attached to me. They had told her nothing about the type of child I was, and they'd paid her and her family several millions of dollars; she'd rejected her portion after my birth. They gave the address of the psychiatric ward. I would remember it.

I kept reading. There it was. My surrogate had given birth the day after a sizable solar flare. There was a black out, and I'd been delivered in the darkness. When I was born, I was the brightest light in the room. They didn't know what happened or how it happened. They speculated that maybe there was a chemical reaction because of all their mixing and the solar flare. What they quickly understood was that I was special. And they could cultivate my specialness.

I died when I was 1 month old. I looked about two years old. I'd run a fever, begun to glow brightly, then simply burned up. Minutes later I came back, good as new, a naked two-year-old-looking brown child with a head full of black puffy hair. I don't remember any of it. The Big Eye were so excited about me, and this excitement was expressed in the way my doctors and the scientists documented my case. They used words like “epochal,” “monumental,” and “revolutionary.” I could burn and then live again. A reoccurring small nuclear bomb. They raised me like an android, not a human. I hadn't burned again until last year.

There was nothing about me sprouting wings. Not a word. I wiped my face and sniffed. “They didn't predict that,” I whispered. I stretched my wings until they grazed the ceiling, loving them more than ever. “They hadn't really predicted anything. They just let themselves think they did.” It was easy to see how they lost control of me.

I slammed my file shut. Then I opened it again and flipped to the very end. I was marked as “Fugitive and lethal. Acquire and manage before end of Solar Cycle.” Then there at the bottom of that page there was one small note. “Information to be used in tandem with HeLa, Tower 4, US Virgin Islands”.