Flight

by Neil Hetzner

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Flight and Fight

  Despite her persistent attempts to uncover her parents’ past, both by direct questioning and more than two hours of ogling before she fell asleep, Prissi woke up the next morning feeling frustrated. She decided to get out of the apartment to see if she could clear her mind. Although she felt too distracted to fly, the winger cheated as she walked down 21st Street toward the East River by slightly spreading her wings to let the following wind give her a push. She crossed First Avenue and climbed the stairs to the FDR levee. Once on top, she took a deep breath of salty air and stared across the mile wide soup of gray water to the misty ghosts of what had been Brooklyn.

  When the world’s waters began to rise, a decision was made that Manhattan was too important to the psyche of the country to abandon all of it. When the same argument was made to save the other New York boroughs, southern senators, who had been forced to abandon New Orleans early in the century, voted against providing funds for any other part of the city that was below sea level. Walkers continued to live in Brooklyn in the heights, as well as in Manhattan south of Houston Street, but that lifestyle was a complicated one of illegal squats, small boats, unpotable water, hydrocycles and dodging the house hawks.

  Standing on top of the levee, Prissi watched a pod of dolphins cavorting in the choppy waters near the base of the Williamsburg Bridge. Ferries and a handful of pleasure boats, as well as a couple of gypsy water taxis, were tatting frothy gray lace with their wakes. The teener tried to think of a good reason why her father would be so close-mouthed about her mother’s early years as a scientist. After failing to breach that wall, she had badgered him about his own early life. She had circled around and back to those years for over an hour before giving up. It was obvious that he was hiding something, but what that something was remained a mystery. Prissi couldn’t decide whether it was fear or shame or something more benign that was making her honest, forthright father deflect her questions. What she did know was that if she couldn’t get the truth from her father about his past, she certainly had no chance of getting him to divulge anything about her mother, especially about how and why she had died.

  Prissi celled Nasty Nancy to tell her that she had spent her first day home at the NYPD digging around in the Joshua Fflowers papers trying to find out about a company Dr. Smarkzy had talked about. Prissi ignored her friend’s sniff when Nancy heard Smarkzy’s name. Knowing that Nancy would have no intrinsic interest in helping her do research, Prissi dangled bait. The records she was going through were supposedly off-limits to the public. Some kind of mystery about Joe and Jack’s grandfather. Prissi inveigled her roomie by playing up Nasty Nancy’s great detective skills. Could, would Nancy fly over to NYPD and dig around with her? Lunch would be Prissi’s treat?

  Nancy didn’t say anything for awhile.

  “What’s the name of the company?”

  “Centsurety.”

  “What business were they supposed to be in?”

  “Something with meta-mutation.”

  “Sounds more like a life insurance company. I’ll bet there were a million of those kinds of companies back then. How long ago?”

  “Maybe sixty.”

  Prissi fought off the twinges of guilt that were making her cheeks tighten.

  “If they don’t show up much, they must have been really unimportant. What’s that noise?”

  “Outdoors. I’m over on the FDR.”

  “Well, Cilly, that’s certainly banal. Are you feeling your spirits lifting as you commune with nature?”

  Although she hated Nancy’s nickname for her, Prissi managed a laugh, “More my scraggly hair and dirty wing tips, but, you know something, Nano, the longer I’m at Dutton, with all of that space, the harder it is to stay in the apartment for days on end.”

  Hearing a nickname Prissi didn’t use much anymore softened Nancy’s edge.

  “Migod, Prissi, don’t go native. Actually I’ve got cabin fever, too. Two days with my parents is about thirty-six hours too long. Come to NJ and we’ll shop.”

  “No. Shopping makes me crazy. I only want what I can’t afford.”

  The silence was so long Prissi looked to see if she had dropped the call. Finally, Nancy whispered, “Look, I’ll meet you in…two hours and help you track down your mysterious company.”

  “Do you really think you can help?”

  “No, Prissi, it’s my snarky self coming out. I can’t go another minute without seeing you. My heart pines. My lips….”

  “Yuck, Nancy. Don’t do that. It gives me the creeps.”

  And it did give Prissi the creeps even though she was 99…well, maybe 91%, sure that Nasty Nancy did it just to get the response that Prissi had just given her.

  “By the lions.”

  “By the lions, unless it starts raining.”

  Although Prissi was eager to have Nancy’s help, she didn’t mind having two hours to kill, or probably more, since her roomie was always late. Since it was such a beautiful day, the pent-up adolescent decided to go for a fly-about. Standing at the edge of the levee, she took a moment to pre-flight herself. She eye-hooked her vest and clipped her hair back from her face. She checked to see that her wrist and ankle cuffs were tight. She pushed and tugged her kanga-pak to be sure that everything in it also was snugged tight. She pointed a hand into the air, oriented it north and pushed the anemometer button on her mypod—west southwest at 12 knots. Prissi figured that was enough wind to give her a good workout without exhausting herself. She flapped, kicked and was in the air. She was feeling so upbeat she considered immediately flying out over the water, but all wingers were trained to fly for at least three minutes before going anyplace where it might be difficult to land. Usually, Prissi was intrepid, but, with her shoulder having popped twice lately, she decided to be cautious.

  Winging was no different than swimming. A muscle pull, a charley horse, low blood sugar or volatile weather, and what should have been fun, could turn life-threatening in an instant. Prissi dropped her right shoulder, half tucked that wing and veered south. She climbed to just over twenty meters and followed the levee.

  When the waters around New York first had begun to rise, Francis Phange, a senator from Massachusetts and leader of the Ecoists’ caucus, had managed to stall federal permitting by the Environmental Projection Agency to the Army Corps of Engineering to construct a levee around the entire island of Manhattan. His argument, and that of his party, had been that since it was Big Business that had caused, or accelerated global warming and it was Big Business that had used its political clout to delay taking action against GW until it was too late, then it was Big Business that should suffer the consequences. Big Business needed to be taught a lesson. Since the lesson was to be taught to the arrogant people of New York, the representatives of many of the Big Ag and Big Service states joined forces with Phange. Even after the permits finally were issued, Phange and his allies managed to stall federal funding.

  The young governor of New York, DeWitt Clinton, the mayor, and a coterie of major New York City business leaders tried to put together a regional coalition to fund the rescue project, but both New Jersey and Connecticut saw the situation as an opportunity, after two hundred fifty years, to get out from under Gotham’s shadow. After a ten-year battle, the federal government did provide funding, but the enabling legislation specified that the levee was not to extend south of Houston Street. Wall Street was to be sacrificed to expiate the capitalist pride and greed that had cost the country years of economic well-being during the Great Foreclosure Exposure of 2008-2016.

  Since it was just after the morning rush hour, Prissi was one of the few wingers in the air along the FDR. Of those who were flying, almost all were going uptown. As she flew further south toward Houston Street, the buildings along the levee began to be more rundown. Piles of trash dotted the curbs. The people below her who were walking on the levee or riding their bikes seemed to be mostly from the southern hemisphere.

  Once she flew past whe
re the levee turned west along Houston Street, Prissi entered a twilight area of the city. All of the buildings south of the levee had been declared uninhabitable more than forty years before; however from the number of small boats in the streets and the number of vegetable gardens and grills on the roofs, it was obvious the area in what once had been called Little Italy and the Bowery, still had lots of people living above the water line, although below the poverty line.

  A few blocks further south, the number of boats shrank and the shorter buildings canted in all directions as a result of the water-soaked land beneath them. The taller ones, since they had been more valuable at the time, had been interlaced together with steel girders and guy wires as a temporary measure while the political battles had been fought. Now, decades later, the steel beams holding them together were a rusted web. Every couple of months an adventurous, usually newly fledged, winger, would be killed trying to nightfly through the maze of corroded steel. Prissi herself had felt a tug to try her skills in that deadly puzzle, but if something happened—she was hurt or stopped by a housing hawk overflying the ruins—she would get her wings clipped until she was twenty-one. Even though she had only been flying for a year, the young winger could not imagine going back to being earth-bound.

  Prissi raised her chin, dropped her feet and flew toward a sun clawing its way up a ladder of clouds in the eastern sky. At seventy-five meters the air was appreciably colder—her mypod displayed an effective air temperature of 42. When EATs got below forty, wingers had to be extra careful of becoming exhausted. The girl climbed until she was higher than most of the decrepit ruins along the edge of the island. She spread her wings as far as she could, then tilted them slightly forward to get more lift. As she went into a sustained glide, she opened her mouth wide and shouted, “Freeieekin fenomenal!” A second later she began singing a horribly off-key rendition of the Dylantones anthem from the 70s, “Blown in the Wind.”

  “How many years must a girl look up, before she can fly in the sky?”

  Prissi began alternating wing beats so that she slalomed back and forth, from over the river to almost brushing against the sides of the buildings. As she sang and slalomed her way south, the buildings got worse. Some structures remained intact but a corner had sunk into the sludge beneath so that they seemed to lean forward in anticipation. Others had huge cracks which ran from ground level up to their crenellated tops. The sight of so much destruction wrought by the world’s rising seas began to depress Prissi and caused her to change her plan. Instead of circling around the tip of the island, she banked toward the river and felt the westerly wind shift behind her. Taking advantage of those winds, she beat hard as she followed the skeletal remains of the Williamsburg Bridge east into Brooklyn.

  As she flew farther east, she began to climb, first past one hundred fifty and then two hundred meters. The EAT dropped to 14 degrees. Her cheeks felt like they were on fire from the cold. Two hundred fifty meters was the highest she had ever flown and almost twice as high as her teener permit allowed. The view was spectacular. Looking east, she could see Long Island with its scores of islands, formed from where the waters had risen along the low lying areas, looking like an immense bolt of polka dotted material. Far to the east she thought she could see an intense, unbroken green which she guessed was the Pale, the area of wilderness that grew up after the Great Fire ended the Ticklish Situation. Prissi flew east until she could see the details of broken windows and rusty stains on the abandoned JFK airport towers and terminals jutting out from the waters on the northeast corner of Jamaica Bay.

  After checking the time, Prissi made a sweeping turn away from the sun and to the south and west until she was flying above the coast line. Looking down, she witnessed a giant school of fish, changing shape like an amoeba, as it followed the contours of the shore. When she got to Sheepshead, she dropped down to one hundred meters and turned north. She flew over Prospect Park, then, crossed back into Manhattan by flying over the triple towers of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  From Prissi’s height, the southern tip of Manhattan looked as if it had been destroyed by bombs. Twenty-story high piles of interlocked debris were the cairns created when Wall Street skyscrapers had fallen. They reminded Prissi of the drip castles she had made with the sands on Lake Tanganyika’s shore. Dropping down to twenty meters, Prissi skirted the southern edge of the island, dismissed the urge to swing out to Liberty, and began flying north along the west edge of the island just above the wide brown swath of the Hudson River.

  By the time she flew over the Holland Tunnel Memorial—one of the early victims of the rising water—Prissi wasn’t sure that she could make it to the datarium. Fifteen seconds later, the exhausted girl wasn’t sure she could even make it back to the relative safety north of the levee. Prissi berated herself for being so stupid and for pushing the limits with her high flying antics. She veered right so that if she faltered, she would be over land, but a forced landing in the area beneath her was almost as dangerous, although of a very different type, than being forced down over the Hudson. Prissi’s growing fear began to crowd out her goal. The teener fought the urge to pant. She fought the urge to give in to the cold that had found its way deep into her bones. She pushed back the notion that her wings were too heavy to lift. She yelled at herself that she wasn’t tired. She whispered to herself to set a goal. Ten more beats. She made that. She paused for one beat to rest, lost altitude, then set another goal. Eight beats. She made that, too, but her wings were quivering and her altitude had dropped to less than five meters. Six more. Prissi could see the wavering shadow of the levee just two blocks ahead. Four. Five. Three more beats….

  When Prissi landed on the broken surface of the Houston levee, she landed hard. She caught a toe, started to plunge forward, but managed to avoid disaster by grabbing a corner of a levee bench. She spread her wings and leaned forward so that her elbows rested on her knees. Over the next three minutes her breaths went from white hot, to fiery red, to warm. As the pain and nauseating fear slowly subsided, it was replaced with a pride that made her muscles glow like after a deep tissue massage. She had made it. She unclipped her hair and worked shaky fingers though the damp tangled strands.

  To be sure she was okay and to give the last of her fear a chance to evaporate, Prissi decided to walk for a couple of blocks before making the last leg of her flight.

  She was taking slow steps on Eighth Avenue, just north of Walker Park, when three keds with dirty hands and over-sized clothes came lurching out of an alley and across her path. Prissi guessed that they weren’t more than twelve or thirteen years old. With their glazed eyes, soggy plastic bags and over-sized sneaker shuffle, she guessed they had to be high on ethanol. Prissi considered veering toward the other side of the street, but she figured that, even if they wanted to roust her, their reflexes were so moked that they wouldn’t be able to do much more than the shuffling they were doing. The boys stopped as soon as they realized Prissi was alone. As they stared at one another, the shortest boy, who had greasy black strands of hair framing a wraith-thin face and piggy eyes, which now were fighting off the vacancy he had spent the morning acquiring, scuttled sideways. The other two, featureless in the shadows of their hoods, reluctantly dropped their bags of dreams and took two steps closer to Prissi in an attempt to herd her toward the building. Despite her total exhaustion just minutes before, Prissi could feel a runnel of adrenaline begin flowing through her body.

  The waifwraiths took another half-step. Their quarry bared her teeth, barked, and surprised them by leaping toward the building rather than away. Prissi planted her left foot high on the wall, pushed and flapped. She dug her right foot into the rough brownstone and flapped again. By the third flap, she was three meters in the air. The boys jumped forward to catch her heels, but their coordination was gone. They crashed into one another and then into the wall. Prissi took another step up the wall, then pushed off with both feet, dropped her right wing to turn and began flying up the avenue.

  She barked a
nd barked until her throat grew sore. One girl. Three boys. Bad odds for odd badboys. The chemical rush was more than enough to sustain her all the way to her destination. Coming up Fifth Avenue, she climbed, flipped a double somersault, dove, and came in at such a steep angle for her landing that her momentum bounced her up a half-dozen of NYPD’s venerable steps. She yiked twice after completing that foolish stunt.

  Because she was intent on picking at a new excrescence on her nose, Prissi didn’t notice Nasty Nancy getting off a uni-bus until her roomie yodeled. When Nancy got closer and saw Prissi’s bright eyes and ruddy cheeks, she asked, “What happened?”

  “Had to beat up some boys.”

  “Life’s little joys. Where?”

  Prissi pointed south

  Nancy interpreted that to mean that Prissi didn’t want to talk about it any more, and Prissi interpreted her normally self-absorbed roomie’s questions to mean that Nancy didn’t want to talk about why she had come on a bus instead of flying. Prissi kept her eyes averted from Nancy’s wings because she knew if she looked, she’d see that Nasty Nancy Sloan’s growing weight had finally resulted in her pinions being clipped.

  “Let’s go find Centsurety.”

  They climbed past the lions—Patience and Fortitude—now so worn by the patience and fortitude of New York’s air and water pollution that they were more like the smooth shape of sheep rather than their predators. Just inside the datarium’s massive doors, they paused to look in the display cases. Prissi had been to NYPD many times, but every time she passed the display cases, she stared in amazement at the diversity of the books that used to be published—books as small as her thumb and as large as a desktop.

  Leading Nancy back through the library’s maze of corridors, Prissi told her friend about the pix Pequod Jones had shown her. When they arrived at the datarian’s desk, Prissi returned Jones’ smile with her brightest eyes and a smile twice the size of the old cherub’s as she explained why she needed Nancy’s help. Prissi thought her cheek stretching product might be losing its power because it took Jones a long minute before he nodded his approval.

  Although Prissi herself had made her first acquaintance of a microfiche reader two days before, it only took her a couple of minutes to teach Nancy what she had learned about operating the ancient, temperamental machines. Prissi was a little surprised when Nancy proved to like the archaic technology as much as she herself did. Part of the attraction was the novelty of the clunky moving parts of the reader itself, but a bigger part of the charm for Prissi was looking at the grainy images before her. She could almost feel the poor quality paper that once was used to deliver the newz. Taking a break for her research, she scanned back and forth to see how many pages of print were contained in one day’s edition, then, multiplied that by the circulation figure she noticed on the masthead. The number astounded her. It was hard for her to fathom the resources of lumber, water, electricity, petroleum and who knew what else to produce 61 million pages of newzprint a day, three hundred sixty five days a year—and that just for one city. It was while calculating those resources that Prissi noticed that the logo she was familiar with, “All the Newz Fit to Cast,” had once been something different.

  Their search was slow, mostly boring, but not totally unproductive. A series of small articles in The Times surfaced. Nancy found a research note in a mutancy journal. There were two Cygnetic foundation filings.

  Three hours after they started, the girls took a break to put together what they had found. Not without a couple of roomie arguments, the girls came to the conclusion that Centsurety had been a small research-oriented company, or more accurately, institute, which had been funded with a series of grants awarded by Cygnetic and the Fflowers Family Foundation. As Dr. Smarkzy had said, Centsurety had been based in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, but was not directly affiliated with the famous research center located there. The research notes indicated that Centsurety scientists were pushing against some of the more intractable limits of mutancy, including delayed fledging. Centsurety’s director, a man named Richard Baudgew used the phrase “meta-mutancy” to describe a process of combining the major organ systems of different organisms. Centsurety was waiting a license to pursue research in that area.

  A later article in The Times reported a whistleblower had provided documentation to suggest that some of the science being done by Centsurety was going beyond the ethical limits established by the Bio-ethics Standards Taskforce. In response, BEST had arranged for two Yale bio-ethicists to investigate the work that the Centsurety scientists were doing; however an explosion and fire had gutted the facility two days before what was supposed to be an unannounced visit. Two scientists, Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby had died in the fire. An investigation concluded that the catastrophe had started with a pinhole leak in a tank of hydrogen.

  It was Nancy who found a pix published in Newsday showing a group of mostly young scientists hovering close to a grinning Joshua Fflowers. She poked Prissi who was leaning close to the screen of the reader next to her to take a look.

  “Do you recognize any of these?”

  Prissi studied the fuzzy image of a number of people standing around in a laboratory. In addition to the woman she thought might be her mother, some of the other faces were familiar because of the picture she had been given by Pequod Jones. Joshua Fflowers was the only person named. The others were noted as his colleagues. The accompanying article described rumors, denied by Fflowers, that Centsurety scientists had made a breakthrough in delayed fledging.

  “A couple.”

  “Look at Fflowers. He certainly looks smug, doesn’t he? Handsome, too. Like someone else in the family. What did your dad say about Fflowers?”

  “He said he had seen him a couple of times at conferences, but didn’t know him, but when I mentioned Centsurety, he blew a mother chip. Told me to get interested in something else.”

  First, Nancy chortled, “There’s nothing like a parental no to motivate.”

  “He’s hiding something.”

  Nasty Nancy patted Prissi on the arm, “Just like his daughter.”

  Nancy’s tone suggested that she was getting ready to drop one of her patented brain bombs.

  “Meaning?”

  “You and…ta-da…Jack Fflowers. You’ve been so coy about your budding…friendship… with the grandson of the planet’s nearly richest man. What happened after we had our tiff?”

  Prissi knew that what Nasty Nancy was really asking was for Prissi’s to tell hery that what had happened at Bissell wasn’t a big deal, but the way Prissi saw it, the fact that she had invited Nancy to help her said that all was forgiven. She wasn’t inclined to do or say any more than that. Instead, she gave Nancy a roomie rap on her shoulder

  “I don’t want you overwhelmed with joy for me. It ain’t like that.”

  “Ah, protecting me from love, the one emotion I can’t handle—unlike jealousy, envy, hate, anger and depression.”

  Prissi forced herself to laugh, then, stared hard at Nancy.

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to make a decision.”

  Prissi looked at her friend, looked down at the information Nancy had helped her gather, and allowed herself to be overcome by the events of the last twenty-four hours. She mentally shuffled through the images of her mother’s death certificate, Jack’s appearance, his disappearance, her father’s strange behavior, the attack by the keds before she asked, “If you had been Judas, what would have been your price?”

  “You mean to reveal to the entire Dutton student body that you broke your personal code of cynical honor and became enamored of a rich, arrogant Bissellian?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I wouldn’t. I couldn’t…even if I wanted to. I’m a member of AA.”

  Prissi nodded, “Amours Anonymous.”

  Nancy’s body contorted in an exaggerated slump.

  “I, too, am lost.”

  Prissi was used to Nancy having weekly swainswoons.

&n
bsp; “Who, now? Electron-boy?”

  “Migod, no. He’s such a prion. Twisting and turning and folding everything around.”

  “Then who?”

  “Guess.”

  “I thought I just did.”

  “Guess again.”

  Prissi went for the dark horse.

  “Dog Dalmain.”

  Nancy batted her crew-cut eyelashes as she flashed her village idiot smile.

  “I think he wants to have my baby.”

  “It’d be a beautiful gob of protoplasm.” Prissi weighed the possibilities before asking, “Secret share?”

  Nancy nodded and said, “Deal. Tell all.”

  When Prissi remained silent, Nancy gave in and gave the correct response, “Words ensnare.”

  “I saw Jack last night.”

  “Ultra epic uber-shock!”

  Before Prissi agreed to tell Nasty Nancy the story she was begging to hear, she insisted they scan all of the material they had discovered and input it into both of their mypods. As soon as they finished, Prissi delayed further by suggesting they leave to get something to eat.

  They walked around the corner of the library so they could sit in the sun in Bryant Park. The small park was about half full. At the north end, near the Indian and Cote d’Ivoire vegan stands, a flock of wingers were slumped on their castplast perches drinking frothy emoos and picking at eggplant kebabs, lafels and small balls of deep-fried bosmotic rice. On the other side of the park, the tables were filled with walker workers drinking Irn Bru and scarfing Jersey9s with kraut and catzup. Prissi and Nancy made their way to the Middleground where tall stools for walkers were placed alongside perches. In a silent reminder that Prissi had offered to pay for lunch, Nancy climbed up on a stool and tossed her pak on the counter space next to her to save a place for her roomie.

  “What do you want?” Prissi asked.

  “Something unhealthy, please.”

  “Unhealthy caloric or unhealthy chemical?”

  Nancy flared her clipped wings in defiance.

  “Both, if they have it.”

  Prissi came back with batter fries and a tube of Bakon-Cheez Sqrt for Nancy and pom seeds and a bottle of AO Storm for herself.

  Nancy looked at Prissi’s tray with a frown and whined, “Traitor. I read those anti-oxidant drinks can kill you.”

  “I almost fell out of the sky today. I have to be good.”

  Prissi froze at the implication of what she had said. She sighed in relief when Nancy smiled ruefully and said, “Yeah, well if you have to be good, I have to be beyond perfection. I’m starting to look like a bumble bee. I have to lose eight kees before I can flap a wing. Which deprezzes me, which makes me want to eat. So, I’m eating. And if you were a trueblu friend, you’d eat with me. C’mon eat. Be like me. Be deprezzed. Skru up. I know you, too, have a deep-seated wish to be a walker again.”

  “No, I have a not as sub-conscious as it once was wish to be a big-butted LT winger, which doesn’t work very well.”

  The food was mostly gone, as was the sun, before Prissi finished her story. She opened her hands into a finger bloom, “So, what do you think?”

  “I think Jack is coy.”

  “That’s it? Coincidences, inexplicables, freeieekin codes and all we have is Coy Jack?”

  “We, especially you, don’t have Coy Jack. I don’t think anyone has Coy Jack. God, he is so oompa… but I don’t trust him. Why is he doing what he is doing?”

  Prissi offered up Jack’s implausible excuse, “To help find Joe?”

  “And why would he do that? You’re the one that told me they didn’t mesh.”

  “Maybe because Jack wants to be a hero. If he found Joe, he’d be that, plus it would be a way to rub Joe’s face in it. Obviously, he came to see me because he knows Joe was my NQB. He thought if I knew, then, with his charm, he could get it out of me.”

  Nancy laughed, “And plenty more probably.”

  “Yeah, when the poles freeze over.”

  “Hey, could be happening. Check the weather. You said you didn’t get to finish your talk with Jack. If your theory is true, then why would he leave before he had any information about Joe? And where did he go?”

  The way Nancy asked the question, Prissi knew that her friend had a better answer than what she had been able to come up with.

  “I don’t know. Maybe homing with friends.”

  Nancy bellowed so loudly that several people looked toward where the girls were sitting.

  “You’ve used that word twice. Friends? Cilly, think of what you’re saying. People as rich as Jack and Joe Fflowers don’t have friends. They don’t have friends because they can’t have friends. They either have enemies or sycophants or Bambi-eyed dreamers, or predators. Even if they could have a friend, it would have to be a putinly rich friend, otherwise Jack or Joe would always question whether it really was a friend or just another person trying to get something. And if the friend is a rich kid, then think about that for a second. What rich family is going to hide a kid from another, even richer, family?”

  “So, Joe and I aren’t friends?”

  “You’re his, but he isn’t yours. Friends trust each other. Like us. Did Joe trust you enough to tell you what he was going to do? No? So, if he didn’t do that, it meant he didn’t trust you, and if he didn’t trust you, then, by definition, he ain’t your friend. QED.”

  Even though Prissi had ambivalent feelings about Joe, it still wasn’t easy for her to hear Nancy’s logic. More in her defense than because she believed it to be true, she said, “Maybe he was protecting me.”

  “From what? “

  “Maybe from lying. If I knew where he had gone and a hawk or teacher asked, then I’d have to lie.”

  “Which is what a friend should be happy to do.”

  Prissi was sure she didn’t want to go down a path she and Nancy had traversed before in late night lights-out sessions. Instead, she asked, “So what do you think?”

  “My guess is that Jack may be trying to connect with some rad-eco walker group that might have been part of, or know about, Joe’s going underground. Maybe that’s why he looked so graggy. Playing the part. “

  “Maybe he’s sincere.”

  When Nancy chortled a half-eaten fry exploded from her mouth, flew past Prissi’s shoulder and crashed into the back of her perch.

  “Ick.”

  Nancy rolled her eyes in a way that reminded Prissi of a Qatar doll.

  “My poor lost fry is disgusting, but a dirty, stinking boy warms your soul.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m fifteen.”

  “Well, I’m fifteen and I can easily help it.”

  “You’re an anomaly.”

  Nancy smiled in appreciation at Prissi’s compliment.

  “Tell the lovely anomaly again about the numbers on the paper.”

  “213? SFE-B/TZT/K.”

  Nancy wrote what Prissi said on the counter with a finger dipped in catzup.

  “K is probably Jack. So if K is a J, then we go back a letter in the alphabet and TZT becomes SYS, see you soon, which really just confirms that you’re on the right track. And he wants to see you at 213 something street in a lower apartment or basement, or, if the numbers are off by one like the letters, 212 or, maybe, 102.”

  “But what about the SFE-B?”

  SF could be about safety. Or San Francisco—what’s left of it. Or, the arrow refers to those letters and not the numbers. So one down from SFE-B would be TGF-C. Does that do anything for you?”

  “No.”

  Well, he’s not a genius and I am, so let’s see if the skip a letter backward rule also applies to the SFE-B, which would be… RED-A. Oh, yeah. Red A. Red A.”

  Nancy scooted off her perch and did a quick war dance.

  “And what, my boarding school friend, what would be the very first thing a boarding school student would think of if I said Red A.”

  Prissi shook her head, “I have no idea. Ready? Does Red-A mean ready?”

  “
C’mon, Cilly, think. If a not too smart boarding school guy, you know, a Bissell kinda guy, was making a bad pun, what would a Red A mean?”

  Prissi jumped off her perch and did the same dance that Nancy had done.

  “Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne.”

  “Right. Hawthorne. Probably the name of the street. Let’s see if I’m right.”

  Both girls pulled out their mypods and raced to see who could be first to input “Hawthorne.”

  Prissi slunk back on her perch in defeat. “Aw, stinkin’ freesia. Eleven Hawthornes. That’s a lot of possibilities. How are we supposed to figure that out?”

  Nancy shook her head as her fingers kept flying over the mypod pad. When she finally looked up, she was grinning in triumph.

  “Let me ask you, my occasionally sagacious friend, if you were looking for a lost soul, where would you be more apt to look? Uptown or Mudtown?”

  “Mudtown.”

  “Correct. And since he is boy and, worse, a Bissell boy, you can figure the code is not too, too cypherotically cryptic. So, to hell with all the Hawthorne permutations, my deb card is bet on a little street in Mudtown. If, my beauty, if you want to limb-lock your mysterious scion, fly your not quite fat butt down to 213 or 102 Hester Street and look in the basement window.”

  “Scarlet Letter. Hester Prinne. And there’s just one Hester Street?”

  “Just one, and it’s in Mudtown, so that has to be it.”

  “What about the arrow? What’s that mean?’

  When Nancy’s shoulders went up in a shrug, the corners of her mouth drew down in a frown.

  “Don’t know. Maybe Cupid. Cupid with his arrow.”

  Again, Nancy leered and, after a second, Prissi leered back.

  “I can’t go there. I already got attacked today in the village and Mudtown’s even worse.”

  Prissi wrapped her arms around her wings. “Ooooh, ooooh, it’s far too dangerous for me. Maybe, just maybe, you could go for me? You know…as my best, bester, bestest friend.”

  Prissi accompanied this improbable suggestion with a simpering smile. As soon as she saw the anguished look on Nancy’s face, Prissi knew she had made a horrible mistake.

  Nancy seemed on the verge of tears when she said, “Stop it. You know I’m can’t go with you. The only place I’m going is home.”

  Prissi apologized, “I’m sorry, Nano, I forgot you’re clipped. It’s hard to imagine us not flying to Waterville to get good bad food.”

  “I've got to get home.”

  Nancy made a theatrical tata with her hand.

  “Okay. Maybe, I’ll let him languish for a day or so. I can use the time to figure out what devious things Jack’s grandfather was doing sixty years ago. Or, maybe I can track down some of the people mentioned in the stuff we found…you know, maybe get more names for the people in that pix…. Sound okay?”

  Nasty Nancy nodded approval of the plan as she threw their trash down the co-gen pipe. On their way out, Prissi read the plaque at the park’s entrance.

  “I wonder why it used to be called Needle Park.”

  Nancy did a community theater imitation of furrowed brows.

  “Maybe because scholars sat out here after a long day researching or writing about something of interest only to themselves and four other people in the world. They staggered out of NYPD, came here, got hyper-caffeinated on triple eso’s and needled one another.”

  Prissi shook off Nancy’s explanation like a catcher with an over-eager pitcher.

  “You don’t think it was a place filled with immigrant or grandmotherly knitters?”

  “Nope, that would be Needles Park.”

  “Maybe an Egyptian obelisk used to be sited here.”

  “Probably just some guy who donated something, or maybe it had a lot of pine trees here once. Ooops. Look. You want that one?”

  A yellow rubberized bi-bus, with its lower deck of perches nearly empty while most of the upper level seats were full of walkers, pulled up to the curb. Nancy nudged her head into Prissi’s wing.

  “Tytle.”

  “Tytle back and thanks a lot.”

  Nasty Nancy scuttled toward the bus looking, to Prissi, like a baby beaver returning to the comfort of its mother. When the bi-bus made a huge sigh as it pushed itself back up on its air cushion, Prissi felt like the words had been taken out of her mouth.

  After the bus disappeared into the twilight, Prissi opened her kanga to make sure everything was secure. When she was satisfied, she started to read the winds for pre-flight. As she flew south toward Gramercy Park, Prissi fought the urge to make a quick detour over the Hester Street area of Mudtown. Her eyes and mind were tired from hours at the fiche reader and puter screens, but the fatigue from the tedium of what she had been doing only reinforced her desire for physical exertion. The thing holding her back was the fear left over from the morning. It wasn’t so much the attack by the keds as the fear she had felt when she was over the Hudson and her body was refusing to do her bidding. She flew a half-dozen tight figure eights as she considered what to do. The sun, defeated by the day, was glowing orange behind New Jersey’s hills. To the north, strips of L&L lights, green for launch and red for landing, illuminated office buildings. The sky was swirling with wingers leaving work. To the south, the decrepit buildings of Mudtown had already fallen into a shadowy murk. Prissi considered how, if she waited a few more minutes, she would be able to douse her light and fly as a shadow against shadows.

  Prissi slowly flapped her wings as she keyed in the Hester Street address into her mypod before dropping a wing and heading down Broadway. As she crossed 14th Street and Union Square, she fought a flutter in her chest which she told herself was nerves and nothing else. She counted down to First Street. Broadway ended in the next block where it ran into the Houston Street levee. Prissi doused her lights and looked down the crepuscular tunnel made by the dark and decrepit buildings slung along both sides of the canal made by a submerged Bowery Street. The small girl canted her wings to rise above the height of the abutting buildings. She wanted to avoid guy wires and bracing girders as well as to keep an eye on those citizens who hovered around the coproquette roof fires cooking their dinners. When she came within a half klik of her destination, her mypod screen displayed five small amber arrows. She continued flying over the Bowery before making a wide right turn onto Hester Street—a narrow duct of oily backwater. The last arrow disappeared and a star flashed on her screen.

  Prissi dropped down until she was less than three meters above the sludgy canal. As she flew close to a five-story brownstone with rotting wrought iron balconies, which reminded Prissi of kids’ braces on the crooked French doors they protected, the mypod squeaked like a mouse in a cat’s mouth. Prissi passed the house, climbed, looped and dropped back down until she was flying just above the lintels of the first floor windows. In the dying light it looked like every window pane in 213 was missing except for two on the fourth floor. The building listed toward the sidewalk like an old bum staring at a coin in the gutter. A peeling red door sat at the top of a set of shopworn granite steps. Using the burned-out street lights, which tipped in every direction like the candles on a week-old birthday cake, as a yardstick, Prissi estimated that the first three steps of the stairs were underwater.

  The cautious girl was looping back to make a third pass when something passed through the pinions on her right wing. Panicked, she side-slipped and slammed into the headless remains of a streetlight hidden in the murk. Her right shoulder popped. She slid down the pole into the cold waist-high water desperately fighting to keep the undersides of her wings dry. It took almost no oil to keep a set of wings from flying. She started to swear, but thought better of drawing even more attention to herself. Her injured wing begged to be lowered, but Prissi knew that if she gave in to that, it could take an hour of grooming before she could fly again.

  After swiveling her head to see if she could see who had shot an arrow at her, Prissi began slogging her way down the street to the nearest stoo
p. She tried to angle across an open space but was stopped by a submerged wrought iron fence. She changed direction and began hopping to keep her wings dry. By the time she reached the nearest stoop, she was breathing heavily. She half-flapped to knock the water from her wingtips, and used her hands to squeegee water from her pant legs.

  Prissi’s refuge was a five story brownstone with missing windows and a smashed front door. As Prissi climbed the front steps, she peered into the darkness behind the broken door and wondered whether it was more likely that a ten kilo rat or a sexually-starved criminally insane alcoholic would be coming out to make her acquaintance. She took two steps closer to the opening, listened, stared, and finally decided that it was probably safe. She leaned against the building and took a dozen deep breaths. Her whole body began to quiver as she considered how stupid she had been. She took a Cran-slam from her kanga and drank the whole thing in five gulps. Within a minute the glucose, oxygen-enriched drink had stopped her shakes. She pushed her shoulder against the building, but nothing happened. That setback did make her swear, but she did so quietly. As she stepped back to get a running start on a second attempt to relocate her wing, she heard a high-pitched squeal. She leaned out over the edge of the stoop to see an obviously cannibalized, graggy looking hydrocycle, with its right pontoon nearly buried in the murky water, hurtling around the corner from the Bowery end of the block. Prissi took two quick steps and slammed herself against the building. The fire in her shoulder burned twice as bright. The shoulder half-popped back in and then stuck. The burning pain blistered sweat onto her forehead and somersaulted her stomach.

  She whispered, “Don’t puke.”

  The cycle was less than a hundred meters away and coming fast. A rooster tail of water being thrown high above the rear paddle wheel intermittently caught a shard of light. Prissi ignored the nearly paralyzing fear of what would happen if she launched herself from the stoop and her wing failed her. The two blue-jay winged men on the cycle shook their fists at her as they veered her way. The one in the back, who was wearing some kind of huge furry hat that made him look like a mythical beast with the head of a buffalo and the body of a man, reached down. Prissi hurled herself against the building again, and pushed off as hard as she could. Her first flap was lopsided and she pitched toward the water. With her second, her shoulder snapped back into place and she gained a meter of height. As the cycle slid beneath her, Prissi looked down to see buffalo man reaching up with a homemade grappling hook. The hook caught her ankle. Prissi dropped a wing and spun herself. Her ankle twisted out of the hook’s grasp. She kicked backwards, flapped and was free.

  The hydrocycle whined as it made a sharp turn, but it was too late. It slammed into the submerged fence. Both men were thrown and the riderless machine began an erratic course down the street. Prissi, absolutely sky high on adrenaline, was swerveingback toward the men with the idea of taunting them, when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow, something blue and white, point something at her. She beat her right wing up and down to turn sharply, then, pounded both as she climbed toward the top of the buildings. Something whizzed past her. Without thought she mashed her wings toward the bruised sky as the arrow arced higher before falling back into the water. In eight beats Prissi was high enough that she could pass over the tops of the buildings on the north side of the street. Flapping as fast as she could, praying that she wouldn’t hit a wire or clothes line, Prissi skimmed north over the wrecked tops of Mudtown’s furzy homes toward the lights and safety of her home.

  As Prissi flew she wondered at the blue and white splotch she had seen. Jack’s wings were blue and white…and there was an arrow in the code he had left. A shiver, like a cold snake, slithered from Prissi’s head all the way to her feet.

  That night, Prissi had to wait until after eight before her father came home. She had a thousand questions for him, and even started to show him the things she had found in the library, but he cut her off. He had work to do and he had already told her to find a different hobby. If she didn’t want to listen to him, if she wasn’t willing to be responsible for the freedom he had given her, if she didn’t appreciate all of the sacrifices he was making to send her to Dutton, then he would take her back to Africa, where, at least, he would be happier.