by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Avenging Angels
Prissi thought it might have been a minute, but, in actuality, it was two days later before she woke. She returned as she had departed. In the dream she was flying through clouds so dark and thick that they seemed to grab at her wings. She was straining. She could feel her muscles tiring. She had to get below the clouds before she was so exhausted that her wings would falter and she would fall out of the sky. After she tipped her wings and began to descend, she started looking for the bottom of the cloud cover. Lower and lower she flew, but, even though she could feel herself dropping, her altimeter read the same. She angled her wings more. She flapped harder. The air was tearing at her hair as she hurtled downward. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She knew she had to be close to crashing into the earth, but the clouds were just as thick and dark.
No, she realized, they were thicker. Her skin began to burn and she became aware that there were things in the clouds, sharp things, like the claws of small birds, that were tearing at her. She was surrounded by a swarm of small orange birds. They were raking her with their talons, but she couldn’t tell if they were attacking her, or trying to slow her plunge.
Prissi awoke to a damp cloth wiping her cheeks and forehead. Jiffy Apithy’s eyes moved across her face at the same speed as the cloth he was using to cool her brow.
“Jiffy,” Prissi sighed in relief. “You’re okay. I was so sure something had happened to you. Something that would be my fault.”
Although his face was devoid of humor, Prissi thought that she caught the slightest undertone of teasing as he said, “I’m not okay. Look at this.”
Jiffy twisted his neck so that Prissi could see the twelve centimeter square bandage on the back of his head.
“Is that from the rock?”
Jiffy nodded, “Six stitches, although a real doctor might have used twice that. I’d be angry, but I figure a big scar on my head might help my soccer game or, maybe, my reputation.”
When Prissi laughed, the noise sounded to her like a chicken trying to escape from a bag, “Any better and you’d be the best. That header you gave me saved my life.”
“Maybe the first time. Yoli and Lavie La saved you the second time. I thought you were dead when they dragged you in and I hadn’t even seen that thing on your leg, that bite. When I did see it, I chucked. Can you imagine what was growing in that wound between the germs in that zie’s mouth and all the stuff that must be in the water? If they hadn’t found you and brought you here, you’d definitely be dead.”
“Who are they?”
“A mix, but mostly from Darfur.”
“Where are they?”
“They waited as long as they could to see how you were doing, but they had to go to work. You’ve been out for two days.”
Prissi was stunned.
“Two days? How can that be?”
“Quite a vacation.”
Prissi had a hard time comprehending how she could have gone somewhere for two days and not know it. What had happened in that time? As soon as she asked herself that question, she knew it was the wrong one to ask. The right question was, “What hadn’t happened?”
The first, and very reassuring answer to that, was that she hadn’t been found.
“Are we really safe? Am I safe? Who is Yoli and the other woman, the one who is so thin?”
Jiffy grinned and when he did, his bright pink gums and blazingly white teeth lifted Prissi’s spirits like some exotic tonic.
“They’re friends of my friends. Someone from Darfur found this place a couple of years ago. It’s hard to know what it was. Maybe, a place to fix things. Like a machine shop. Or, a room where there was a lot of equipment. It’s dark and the air isn’t exactly enriched with oxygen, but none of us are walking around with headaches unable to remember our names. The big lady, Yoli, is a healer when she isn’t hidden in the back of a Togoan restaurant on West 46th chopping vegetables. The skinny one is Lavie. She’s sewing shirts down in Mudtown for a street vender. There are fourteen more of them living here. Some working. Some not. It’s like a village. Some work. Some cook. All share. They pool money. As soon as they have enough saved, they buy a set of ids for whoever’s been here the longest. Then, when that person goes above, she has to send back twenty percent of her earnings until there is enough for the next set. When that happens the first person’s obligation is done. Two of the women down here, Samosking and Winnie, have their papers, but they haven’t left because they still have family below and they figure they can save money faster by staying down here.
“You’re safe, I think. The zies took off after you burned their village and none of the stragglers have been seen down this way. I’ve been back to the store twice to work my shifts. My father says everything is quiet and I haven’t seen anything. You probably can stay down here as long as you want…as long as you’re willing to help.”
With more edge to her voice than she intended, Prissi said, “I’m willing to help, but I don’t know how long I’m willing to hide.”
Jiffy took the cloth away from Prissi’s face and held it tightly in a fist.
“What else can you do? If you go back up, how long will it be before your enemies find out? Hours? A day?”
“That’s what I have to figure out. Someway they have been tracking me. I got rid of everything I was wearing and threw my mypod away. I thought that would do it, but they still found me. I’m guessing that they must have found my i-tag code.”
“How could they get the code? I thought it was so secret.”
“Maybe it was in my dad’s stuff.”
“But, if it was in your dad’s stuff, how did they find you the night before?”
“I don’t know. But what else can it be?”
When Jiffy shook his head, it looked to Prissi like a dandelion flower gone to seed blowing in the wind.
“Who knows? But, the important question is what can you do about it.”
”I have to shut it down.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, yet. I don’t even know where it’s implanted, so getting it out could be a little messy.”
Jiffy’s laugh was much deeper than his small body would have suggested.
Hating the feeling of missing something that was supposed to be funny, something that happened too frequently at the Dutton dining hall for a girl raised in a vidless life in Africa, Prissi had to work to keep an angry edge from her question, “What’s funny?”
“Anyone looking at you—all of the bandages, stitches, cuts and bruises—would think that someone already had gone to great efforts to find your tag.”
Begrudgingly, Prissi’s laugh joined Jiffy’s.
“Zeusus Mimi. I sure do hurt. I don’t even want to think of anyone poking and prodding at me anymore. I wonder if there is some way to shut it off while it’s still inside me. What do you think?”
Jiffy shrugged. “I don’t know. My kind of people are looking to get to where we’re the kind of people who could afford an i-tag.”
Prissi, again, got the feeling that Jiffy was making her pay another installment on the debt she had accrued the night she had gone to the EZ-Lam Market for food for Jack. Thinking of that night took Prissi back to the fluttery feeling she had when first she was alone with Jack in the basement…and how that feeling had turned to revulsion as she watched him eat. She recalled the long hug he had given her. An embrace she had wished for before it happened, but soon wished it would end as it had dragged on.
“Wait. You’re right. My troubles started before my dad was killed. They started right after I saw Jack. Jiffy, I think Jack might have stuck a bug on me. In my feathers. Do you think anyone down here would have a pinion or down comb?”
“Gee, Miss Scarlett, I sho’s hope so. Prissi, yours are the only feathers down here. If you don’t have a feather comb, no one else will. But, …if you could possibly make do with a fro-pull, I think my people may be able to help.”
Jiffy left and came back a minute later w
ith a carved wooden, wide toothed comb. When he offered it to Prissi, she had another spasm of guilt.
“Do you think you could do it? If I try, I’m going to miss a lot.”
Jiffy said, “Will our families approve?” as he stood behind Prissi and began to carefully comb through her pinions.
Although Prissi knew that Jiffy was joking, she decided to counter the guilt Jiffy was making her feel by throwing out some of her own.
“Since I no longer have a family, it won’t be a problem on my side.”
The movement of the comb paused for a moment but Jiffy said nothing.
Instead of feeling good that she had gotten back at her friend, Prissi felt even guiltier that she had baited him. But, she didn’t apologize.
It was nothing more than a small snag in the down on the backside of her right wing. As soon as Jiffy found the bug, Prissi could almost feel Jack’s arms around her, how he had hugged her tight while he insinuated the device that led to her father’s death. While it was good that Jiffy found the bug, it would have been better for Prissi if the combing had continued until a second TRK-R, the one planted by Dicky Baudgew, had been discovered.
Prissi’s first inclination when Jiffy put the pea-sized device in her hand was to release her rage at Jack’s betrayal upon it; however a second later she thought she might be able to put it to a better use.
In the two days that it took to arrange the details of her plan, Prissi courageously, but ultimately, unsuccessfully fought off Yoli’s efforts to tend to her wounds. On the morning of the third day, after telling Jiffy goodbye and thanking him for his help, Prissi followed three members of the village south along the subway tracks. Her accomplices, Yoli, Lavie, and a tall woman with rickety looking arms carried sticks, knives and a Fifth World artifact made from First World materials. South of Prince Street, the group left the subway. For the next quarter hour, they followed a circuitous path to the surface that reminded Prissi of the descent she had made five days before. The only differences were that this time, as they ascended, the air felt too rich with oxygen and the unease came from the threat of leaving her underground haven for the danger of the surface, rather than vice versa.
Prissi pulled herself up the last steps of a scarred ladder, which was attached inside an immense brick chimney, until she emerged into the gangrenous light of a second floor brownstone apartment. She skirted close to the moldy window and looked down at the sluice of water idling along the street. Not knowing how much time they might have, Prissi encouraged her friends to set the trap.
Prissi made a nest for herself with an old hand-woven tribal blanket in the corner of what once had been someone’s small street-side living room. After the teener was in place as bait, the Africans set the trap and disappeared. Yoli wedged herself into a coat closet. The rickety woman backed herself into the fireplace and descended the ladder until the only clue to her presence was a thick stick which emerged from the hole. Lavie folded herself into a small cupboard built under a set of bookcases, pulled her stick against the baseboard and pulled close the cupboard doors.
Jiffy had doubted that Prissi’s plan would work because he thought there was a good chance that when the TRK-R was submerged in the water in the subway that it might have been damaged. Prissi was sure that Joshua Fflowers would not have given Jack anything less than the best, most reliable technology.
As she lay on the mossy floor, Prissi tried to gauge how much healing her body had done. She was sore. Muscles ached and there were a dozen places on her legs and arms where she could press a finger and feel the dull pulse of a deep bruise. The bite was worse. It throbbed as regularly as her heart beat except that it had spiked higher as she climbed the ladder.
As Prissi had made her plans for revenge, she also had taken time to consider her escape. She had to get to Africa. That was clear. Everyone who had helped her—the ship’s crew, Jiffy, Yoli and her friends—were Africans. The people who had attacked her and killed her father were not. Once she looked at it that way, it became simple. She needed to hurt those who had hurt her, then, escape to the place from which her true friends came.
As she had tended the wound the zie had made in Prissi’s calf, Yoli had told her patient about the extraordinary efforts her people from Darfur, refugees from a hundred years of war, had made to come to Noramica. Yoli couldn’t understand how anyone would want to go back to that benighted continent. Noramica, even looked at from two hundred meters below ground was a paradise compared to the fields of Darfur— field which were fertile with nothing but corpses. Prissi had heard what Yoli had said, but it didn’t change her mind that her chances of survival were much higher in Africa than where she was.
Even though Prissi was in a state of high alert, she was caught off-guard when Yoli tapped the closet door with a fingernail in warning. It wasn’t until a minute later that she heard the slightest of rustlings. A minute after that, a stair tread squeaked. The door opened just a crack. A moment later, however, it was thrown violently open and two blue jay wingers burst inside. As her attackers, knives in hand, leapt into the room, Prissi jumped up from the bundle of rags where she had been feigning sleep. The men were less than a meter from their intended victim when they suddenly lost their balance. The three hidden tribeswomen had begun to jerk and twist their sticks. The fishnet, which they had woven from the finest fishing line, so fine that it was nearly invisible on the floor beneath the wingers’ feet, was attached to the sticks. Yoli, being the biggest, had kicked open the closet door and used her prodigious weight to yank the net toward her. It was that first sudden movement of the net beneath their feet that caused the wings to totter. A second jerk from the chimney and a third from Lavie caused the two attackers first to tilt toward one another and touch shoulders, like tango partners, before crashing to the floor. As soon as their quarry was down, the women rushed forward and tossed their sticks across one another to secure the net. Prissi slipped a noose around the neck of the trap. When the noose was tight, the women freed their sticks. When one of the wings began slashing at the net with his knife, Yoli smashed him across the back of the neck with her stick. He slumped. To insure compliance, Yoli hit him a second time and delivered a similar blow to his partner. After Lavie La had collected their knives, Prissi came within a step of her captured enemies and began to shout questions.
“Who are you? Why did you kill my father? Why are you chasing me? Who do you work for?”
When the wings were slow to answer, Yoli prodded them with her staff. When they still maintained their silence, all three of the women pummeled them with their weapons. After another period of silence, unbroken except for harsh rasping breathing, Yoli sat down on the net. The men groaned beneath her weight. Yoli took the long slender wooden hook she had used to work on the net from a pocket of her skirt and put the first three centimeters of it into the nearer man’s nose. Lavie put her hook in his ear.
Prissi again asked why they were trying to kill her. After five seconds of silence, the hooks went in another centimeter. A bubble of bright red blood blew out of the man’s nose when he struggled. Yoli settled her weight more comfortably.
When there still was no answer to Prissi’s questions about who was after her and why, the hooks explored a little deeper
Prissi hesitated when she saw the stream of blood running from the man’s ear. Her anger and primal urge for revenge began to drain from her as quickly as his blood flowed. Those feelings were replaced by feelings of horror at the cruelty of the Africans’ acts. The teen wavered between asking another question and calling off the interrogation when Yoli said something under her breath. The rickets woman sat down on the second winger as carelessly as if he were a tussock and put her hook in his left eye.
Immediately, the answers began to come.
The information Prissi got was not what she expected. Joshua Fflowers was not involved. Jack and his father were, but Joshua Fflowers was not. In addition, the two bleeding blue jay wingers had no knowledge of a pair of orange-feathered win
gers. The triumphant but astonished girl and Yoli had a brief conversation. Prissi handed her rescuer a scrap of paper. After that exchange, the small girl hugged the huge woman and thanked her for everything she had done. She hugged the rickets woman and Lavie La. After Prissi left, Yoli rendered both wingers unconscious by holding a rag, wetted with the contents of a small bottle she drew from her dress, to their noses. She opened the net and the three women began plucking feathers from Prissi’s enemies. Within an hour their wings were bare. Their job finished, the three Africans collected their gear and descended back into their subfusc world.