A Boy Called Hawk (Annals of Altair Book 1)

by Kate Stradling

  Everyone at the table exchanged glances, mute acknowledgement of the truth of his words. Oliver sighed heavily. “You haven’t found one solitary thing? Like, where did Hawk come up with that bicycle he was on last night?”

  “That was a rental,” said the balding man. “I recognized the brand—it’s popular with a lot of the central city tour shops. But if he did rent it, then he would’ve used cash, and there’re a hundred different shops it could’ve come from. Even if we went and showed his picture to the clerks at each one, there’s no telling that the person who rented him the bike would even be working today. It is—”

  “A holiday,” Oliver finished for him impatiently. “Yes, we’re all fully aware of that. It would be a waste of your time to do that anyway. I already told you earlier, they’ve left the city.”

  “But there’s no record,” said another agent impatiently.

  “You have access to every truck, van, or car that leaves Las Vegas?” Oliver asked. “You have access to all the tour buses and the private planes and helicopters? Just off the top of my head, I can think of a dozen different ways that they could’ve gotten out of here. There’s no reason for them to stay—they know they can’t go anywhere near that relative of theirs, and there was no one else on their list of contacts that lived anywhere near the city. It’s fine if you want to try to track their movements to understand how they’re getting around, but you won’t find the Wests. If that’s what you’re trying to do, you might as well give it up and go home.”

  Several of the agents at the table perked up in favor of this idea.

  “So where would they have gone next?” asked their supervisor, and they wilted back down in resignation.

  Oliver shrugged. “I can’t help you there.”

  “Why not? You’re a genius—you should be able to make a guess, at the very least.”

  He shifted wary eyes in Emily’s direction, an odd, self-conscious gesture. “I don’t really understand their motivation. That is, I understand what their motivation is logically, but they’re not acting logically. They’re acting out of emotion, and I can’t understand that. It would be too difficult to predict where they would go next—to another close relative? To one of their parents’ old friends? There’s a whole list of people they could try to contact, but we’re already watching all of them, and after last night, Hawk knows as much. If it were me,” he concluded pensively, “I think I’d just disappear at this point. If you want to know where they are, you’re going to have to wait until either you get a lucky break, or they slip up and show themselves.”

  A stifling silence enveloped the room. Finally, the supervisor in charge heaved himself from his chair and slapped the file in his hand down on the table. “That’s that,” he said sourly. “No point in keeping you all here late on a holiday. Go home, everyone.”

  There were several sighs of relief. The anxious balding man actually whooped with glee. In no time whatsoever, the table of underlings all scrambled out the door.

  Emily turned to discover the supervising agent regarding her with a stern expression. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “You’ll need to stay with the boy up in your rooms for the rest of the evening,” he said. “Tomorrow you’re returning to Prom-F, unless we hear otherwise.”

  “What, no fireworks for us?” she asked.

  He grunted. “You might be able to see a few from your window. Make certain the boy is kept safe and sound upstairs.”

  And by that, she took him to mean, “Don’t give that kid any chance to escape like these others did.” She wished he could understand that Oliver would never do such a thing. He had nowhere to escape to, after all.

  Article III, Section 2

  In Search of Stars

  July 5, 9:43am mst, Cline Library, NAU, Flagstaff

  “Did you know that Altair means ‘the bird’ in Arabic?” asked Hummer without taking his eyes from the book he was perusing.

  “So it’s an Arabic organization that we’re looking for?” Honey asked.

  “Probably not,” said Hawk. “The star name is Arabic in origin, but so are most star names. It’s pretty universally known. There’re about forty different corporations listed here that have Altair in their name.”

  “Like a needle in a haystack,” said Hummer. “How are we supposed to know what entity we’re meant to look up? Why couldn’t Cousin Paul have given a better clue?”

  Hawk frowned. “Give him a break. He had government types surrounding him. I was lucky to get what I did and not end up in a GCA cell.”

  They were sequestered in an unobtrusive corner of the library. Hawk was using the computer to search contemporary references to the star, but Honey and Hummer were looking through various books on mythology and astronomy. In stark contrast, Happy had discovered a collection of old comics and was cheerfully flipping through the pages, enjoying the pictures even if he didn’t always understand the punch lines. Since his mood was good, no one protested his choice of reading materials.

  “What else does it say about Altair in there?” Hawk asked Hummer, who had his nose stuck in an astronomy textbook.

  “It’s an A-class star—A7 IV or V, it says here—and probably about eight times brighter than the sun. It’s about seventeen light years away, and it’s the alpha star of the constellation Aquila. There’s nothing here that we didn’t already know, unless you want me to recite all the little details like absolute magnitude and radial velocity and such.”

  “Do you think those numbers might be worked into some sort of code?” asked Hawk, speculating on the many possible avenues of thought they could explore.

  Hummer raised apprehensive eyes from the text. “If they are, I certainly don’t want to have to figure it out.”

  “What about you, Honey?”

  “I don’t want to figure it out either,” she promptly said.

  “I meant, have you found out anything about Altair?”

  She shook her head. “The star is used in a lot of myths from different cultures, but the specific name ‘Altair’ doesn’t figure prominently in any of them so far.”

  Hawk thought for a moment before he turned back to Hummer. “What if we plugged in the right ascension and declination of Altair as latitude and longitude? Where would that put us?”

  Hummer arched his brows and his eyes flitted toward the computer screen as if to say, “You’re the one with the resource to do that.”

  With a long-suffering sigh, Hawk pulled up a web tool. “Read me the numbers,” he said.

  “Right ascension is nineteen hours, fifty minutes, 46.9990 seconds,” Hummer recited. “Declination is plus-eight degrees, fifty-two minutes, 0.959 seconds. Where does that put you?”

  Hawk scowled. “Niger, Africa. Or, if I switch the numbers—” he fiddled with the computer”—it puts me in the Atlantic Ocean. So, barring some underwater secret lair, that theory’s a bust.”

  “You want to hear the origin of the constellation Aquila?” asked Honey abruptly.

  “Shoot,” said Hawk.

  “It represents Zeus’s pet eagle, who was commissioned by the god to swoop down and kidnap a mortal boy he wanted as his cup-bearer. It was Zeus’s eagle that pecked the liver from Prometheus as well,” she said, “although this doesn’t specify that it was the same eagle. Anyway, if I was going to create an underground organization that wanted to torment the Prometheus Institute, I think naming it after a star in Aquila would be pretty poetic, don’t you?”

  Hawk grunted. “And pretty unsuspicious. Like I said, there’re at least forty registered companies that have some mention of Altair in their name.”

  “If it’s an underground organization, would they bother registering as a company?” asked Hummer. “I mean, if they’re working to subvert the government, why would they bother with the legality of registration?”

  “It might not even be a company,” said Honey. “It could be a code word or someone’s nickname, for all we know. Have you checked for internet handles or emai
l addresses?”

  “I think if it were anything really obscure, we would’ve been told more than to look up Altair,” said Hawk, somewhat perturbed by their utter lack of progress in this search. “I could be wrong, but if Altair is someone who can help us, maybe we should just send out feelers and let them find us instead of us having to weed through a hundred leads to find them.”

  Hummer’s brows arched. “That would be pretty dangerous. Altair’s not looking for us, but there’re plenty of bad guys who are. How would we know if the right people got the message?”

  “We wouldn’t. That’s why we’d need to tread carefully.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  Hawk pursed his lips as he pondered how best to put his idea into words. “Let’s look at this logically,” he said at last. “If we assume that Altair represents some organization that can offer us shelter or lead us to our parents, then they probably are subversive to the government, right?”

  The three younger siblings exchanged a glance. “I think we all agree with that assumption,” said Hummer.

  “So, logically, they’d be really secretive as well. They probably aren’t listed in a phone directory. But, if they have any sort of influence at all, who’s most likely to have information on them?”

  “The government,” said Honey promptly. “They’d be on a watch-list for sure.”

  Hummer was immediately on edge. “What’re you suggesting, Hawk? Most government agencies have their digital files kept on an intranet, not anything accessible to the general public. The really confidential files don’t have a digital form at all, and they keep ’em under several layers of security. It’s not like we can go ask some random agency for the information we want.”

  “I can,” Honey said.

  “No,” said Hawk. “As much as I appreciate what you’ve done for us so far, I don’t think it’s necessarily right for us to keep using you to get things, especially when the stakes are so high.”

  “I don’t mind,” she insisted.

  Hawk shook his head, though. “You don’t mind right now, but isn’t this the very reason that you wanted to get away from Prometheus? They were trying to use you to further their interests.”

  “Their interests, not mine. If you start using me for your own interests and not mine, I might ditch you too.” She tempered her harsh words with a candid smile. “Hawk, one of the few memories I have of Mom is her telling me once when I was really little that I had a gift, but that I had to be careful how I used it. Prometheus wasn’t letting me be careful. They were forcing me to work for them. Even so, if they’d wanted me to do good things, I wouldn’t have minded so much. And if they’d left Happy alone, I probably wouldn’t have said anything at all.”

  “Eventually they would’ve wanted to use Happy like they were using you,” Hummer said, and his eyes shifted to where their youngest brother intently listened to the conversation.

  Honey’s expression was deadly serious. “I know. That’s why I don’t mind taking risks to get the information we need.”

  “That’s exactly why none of us should take risks like that,” Hawk said. “We know what we’re going back to if we fail. We can’t take a direct approach.”

  “What else are we supposed to do?” Honey asked. “You think if we just hover near a government building, someone’s eventually going to drop some information about Altair in the trash or something?”

  He didn’t immediately answer, carefully considering their options. “What we need is a way to raise some red flags without throwing ourselves more into the path of danger. We’ve already got the GCA to worry about, and Prometheus has lent them Oliver to help bring us in…”

  “I still don’t understand how one person is going to change the game,” Honey interrupted. “So this Oliver kid can’t be affected by human projection. If he shows up, all we have to do is tell the people around him to tie him up and let us go, right?”

  “That’s not how it works, Honey,” said Hawk. “If it were Quincy, we might get away with that, but this is Oliver we’re talking about. Just like with human-projectors, there’re different levels of null-projectors. Or, at least, the three at Prometheus all have different abilities.”

  Honey perked in her chair. “There’s another one?”

  “There’s a seven-year-old at Prom-C who’s a null-projector,” said Hummer. “I heard Oliver and Quincy talking about it last year, that they weren’t the only two anymore, but he’s still just learning to control it, so he wouldn’t be of any use in catching us.”

  “And Quincy has a localized null-projection,” said Hawk. “She isn’t affected by human-projection, and neither are the people immediately around her.”

  Honey suddenly looked nervous. “What about Oliver?”

  “He has a broad null-projection. I don’t know how broad, but during the exhibition last year, there were several human-projectors that refused to be in the same building as him. Honey, if Oliver gets anywhere near you, you won’t be able to talk your way out of anything. It’s like your brain sends out one specific wavelength, and his sends out the exact opposite, and they cancel one another.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “So we need to eliminate him,” she said. A fragment of hope lit up her eyes. “Do you think he could be convinced to join us?”

  “No,” said Hummer with scorn. “Not Oliver. He’s totally in the administrators’ pockets, their little pet. He’ll do whatever they tell him to, even as he sneers down his nose at them.”

  “Why do you dislike him so much?” Honey asked.

  Hummer bristled. “He tried to get my entry kicked out of the mechanics exhibition last year, and on a complete technicality. The look on his face when I won top honors was priceless, though. He looked like he’d swallowed a bug.”

  “So it’s safe to say he doesn’t like you either,” Honey guessed.

  “He hates Hummer,” said Hawk. “I think everyone from Prom-A hates Hummer. Kids from Prom-F never get highest honors—we’re supposed to be the flunkies that make everyone else feel superior.”

  Hummer shrugged with false innocence, pleased to have garnered such a reputation.

  “So he’s the teachers’ pet with a grudge against you guys. We definitely need to eliminate him,” said Honey. “But you’d think if he really was so smart, he’d be able to be reasoned with.”

  “Most smart people are too caught up in their own importance to listen to reason,” Hummer said. “Oliver’s no different.”

  “He could be useful, though,” said Hawk. “As I see it right now, we have three immediate goals if we want to stay free.” He ticked off the items on his fingers. “Get information on Altair, keep away from the GCA, and get rid of Oliver. That last one seems the easiest.”

  “How so?” asked Honey.

  “The powers-that-be trust him enough to chase us. All we have to do is break that trust. If we can get them to call his loyalty into question, they’ll send him back home to Prom-A and bring tranquilizer guns on their hunt for us instead.”

  “Oh, they haven’t gotten out the tranquilizer guns yet?” Hummer asked sarcastically.

  “You don’t know that they’ll send him back to Prom-A,” said Honey with a dark expression. “They might force him to do what they want anyway and make his life miserable in the process if he doesn’t. Trust me—I’ve got personal experience with that.”

  Hawk and Hummer exchanged a speculative glance. “Do we care if Oliver’s life becomes miserable?” Hawk asked.

  “From where I’m standing, his life already is miserable,” said Hummer. “He just doesn’t know it yet. I do think it would be a good thing for us to enlighten him. How should we go about it?”

  A slow smile spread across Hawk’s face. “Start simple. We can wrap our minds around the more complex schemes later.”

  “What are you thinking?” Honey asked suspiciously.

  “Hey, Hummer,” he said in response, “do you happen to remember Oliver’s email address?”

  “As
if I could forget,” said Hummer with a grimace.

  Article III, Section 3

  Such a Tease

  12:33pm pdt, in transit to McCarran International Airport

  “What are we supposed to do back at Prometheus-F?” Emily asked. “Couldn’t you research the West kids just as well in New York, at Prometheus-A?”

  Oliver didn’t look up from his homework. “Their general direction of retreat has been southerly, not eastern. Sending me all the way back to Prom-A would add an extra couple of hours in transit time if we catch wind of where they are. It would make more sense to send me to Prom-C in California.”

  “Then why aren’t we going there?”

  “Probably because Genevieve doesn’t get along with Rupert,” said Oliver absently. When he looked up to find Emily frowning over this explanation, he clarified. “Principal Jones doesn’t get along with Prom-C’s principal, Rupert Carter. They’re in a constant power-struggle. Principal Carter thought he should get the job over at Prom-A when it was given to Principal Jones, and they’ve been at odds ever since. He likes to tell her that the only reason she’s gotten anywhere is because she’s a belligerent woman and everyone is too afraid she’ll sue them if they don’t give her what she wants.”

  “That’s awful!” cried Emily.

  Oliver half-heartedly shrugged and returned his gaze to his homework. “It’s probably true, not that Principal Carter has any room for accusations. He did look into a lawsuit when he didn’t get the job. That’s why he’s principal at Prom-C.”

  “How on earth do you know all of this? You’re ten!”

  His eyes narrowed at the mention of his age, but he chose not to take offense. “Rupert used to be an administrator at Prom-A,” he said. “It’s amazing the sort of gossip you can pick up. Anyway, that’s why I probably won’t be going anywhere near Prom-C, unless Hawk and the others show up there, which is next to impossible. I’m not even sure how far the tale of the runaways has spread, whether the people at Prom-C are even aware that it happened. Generally this sort of thing is kept under wraps as much as possible.”