“It was the element of surprise and nothing else.”
“I’m annoying you with all my questions again,” Emily said perceptively. “I’m sorry. You’ve had a long day, and you’re probably very tired.”
“Patronizing,” Oliver muttered as he shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’m not tired at all. I’d like to figure out where those little miscreants are so that I can go back to Prom-A where I belong.”
Article IV, Section 2
Reflection
July 6, 8:42am mst, Flagstaff
“I’m bored,” Honey said loudly. She leaned back in the only chair in the room, an old, beat-up office chair that was missing its wheels but still swiveled. One foot tipped against the wall and pushed to make the chair spin an aimless circle.
Happy looked on with interest, eager for his turn.
“What would you like?” Hawk asked laconically. “Should Hummer and I make up a tumbling routine to entertain you?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?” Honey’s voice held that dangerous hint of sweetness that warned she might make a request they couldn’t refuse.
“No, thank you,” cried Hummer.
“We’re all bored, Honey,” said Hawk. “Try to bear with it.”
“How long does it take for a couple of birds to get reconnaissance?” Honey asked.
A perturbed expression flashed across Hawk’s face, but he suppressed his instinctive sigh. “It takes them as long as it needs to take them. Happy, don’t go near the window, please.”
Happy backed away guiltily and looked at his older siblings with an expectant gaze.
“If you want something to do, kick Honey out of the chair so you can spin,” Hummer said.
Honey made an indignant noise, but the next moment she voluntarily left the chair and gestured for Happy to enter. “Here you go,” she said generously.
Happy was the only one in the room she would have made such a deferral for. He took her vacated position. When his feet didn’t reach the wall, Honey obliged him by pushing the chair into a spin. Happy’s resultant glee was infectious enough to have all four children giggling, whether they wanted to or not.
“Stop, stop, stop,” said Hawk, doubled over and fighting tears. “Happy, please!”
“Go somewhere else if you don’t like it,” said Honey through her own laughter. “The whole floor’s empty. You don’t have to wait here for your birds.”
Under normal circumstances, Hawk wouldn’t have considered leaving, but Happy was enjoying the swivel chair too much. As he walked away, he felt Happy’s sphere of influence ebb and his self-control return. Behind him, the other children continued to laugh and play. Hummer seemed somewhat torn between whether he should follow his older brother or stay behind to watch the two younger ones, but Hawk was glad he chose to stay behind. Leaving those two to their own devices would only invite trouble.
The smile finally slipped from Hawk’s face as he crossed through the dim hallway beyond that room and into another. By all logical accounts, they should have fled the town the moment after he had hit the send button on that email to Oliver. Instead, they had staked out a place to remain undetected. The location they had chosen was a commercial building only a block away from the local GCA office. Half of its floors were unoccupied, while the rest were taken up with call centers and cubicles. Plenty of people came in and out of the building during the daytime, but there was enough space that was currently on the market to rent that the four children would be able to go days without anyone noticing their presence.
It was a dangerous ploy. They had decided to stay in Flagstaff because they wanted to see how the GCA reacted to their provocation. If they were going to continue to outrun the government agency, they would need to know how it operated, what its standard procedures were when provoked, and so forth. Hawk had enlisted a local flock of pigeons to help. The birds had already reported on various agency activities, including its fruitless search of the nearby university campus.
The further reasoning behind this decision to stay rather than continue on the lam—and it was reasoning that relied upon a rather tenuous premise, Hawk would readily admit—was that the GCA might know or reveal something about Altair that the West children could not discover on their own. It was a long shot, but with nothing else to go on, the kids decided to take the risk and lay low for a few days. Armed with a supply of blankets and snacks from the local supermarket, they had all hunkered down in an abandoned office suite for the night. Now they were waiting for word back from the morning crew of birds.
Traveling day after day with no end goal in sight was exhausting. Tensions had begun to manifest between the siblings, and Hawk was grateful that so far, everything had been relatively easy to resolve. They needed a plan of action, though, something more than “stay away from Prometheus and the GCA.” He wasn’t sure how much longer any of them could last without a home base. They needed somewhere to settle down, even if it was only a place they could cycle through during their search for their parents.
For the next few days, this office suite would have to suffice, but eventually they would need something more secure, something that wasn’t up for rent to the local community. Hawk absentmindedly stared at the window as he tried to create a mental list of their options.
“Are you mad?”
The quiet inquiry startled him. He twisted around to discover Happy in the doorway, a hesitant expression on his small face.
“No,” said Hawk gently. “I think it’s great that you can laugh. I want you to. I’m just trying to think about serious things right now.”
“So I should be serious too,” the boy said.
He was such a good kid—considerate of others, aware of how his moods affected them. He shouldered an immense burden in that consideration, though. No six-year-old should have to check his laughter because someone else didn’t want to share in it.
“You can go play as much as you want,” Hawk told him. “If I want to be serious, I’ll go off on my own.”
“I don’t want you to go off on your own,” said Happy. Hawk knew he meant it, too, because this was the longest conversation the boy had had with anyone since escaping from Prometheus. Even at such a young age he didn’t waste his breath on trivialities. “I can be serious.”
“I want to find us a place where you don’t have to be serious,” Hawk said. “I want to find us a place where we can all be free to be whoever we want to be. I just don’t know enough about the real world to take us right there yet.”
Happy nodded, a curt, solemn gesture that made him seem sixty years old instead of six. “I’ll help,” he said.
A wistful smile touched Hawk’s face. If anyone in their little group deserved reprieve from helping, it was Happy. With such a candid offer, though, he could hardly refuse. “Thanks.”
“So you’re not mad?” Happy asked again.
The smile broadened. “No,” said Hawk.
“He’s not mad,” Happy yelled back into the hallway. Behind him, Honey and Hummer piled in through the door, having waited for the all-clear.
Hawk eyed them both suspiciously. “You sent Happy in?”
Honey sniffed. “No. We just followed him.”
“I wasn’t going to risk talking to you if you were angry,” Hummer said unrepentantly. “You have terrible sulks.”
Hawk made a face but didn’t deny the charge. “I wasn’t angry. I just needed to think clearly, that’s all. It’s probably time for me to head outside and see if any of my birds have something to report.”
“By yourself?” Hummer asked sharply.
“We’re not all going,” Hawk said.
Before Hummer could respond, Honey piped up. “I think I should go with you,” she said. “Hummer and Happy can stay here.”
A worried furrow appeared on Happy’s young face, and Hummer outright scowled. “Why you?” he asked.
“Because you’re more responsible and can watch after Happy while I go with Hawk,” said Honey, and she tossed her hair o
ver her shoulder in a superior gesture. “Besides, we’re almost out of money, and I’m the one who collects it.”
“Steals it, you mean,” Hummer muttered.
She stomped on his foot and followed this act with a sickly sweet smile. “It’s called begging. I can’t help it if my methods are more effective than most people’s. Do you want us to go flat broke and have to dig through dumpsters for food? Or maybe you think you could find someone to hire you to fix their car or something.”
“I could fix loads of ’em,” he retorted. “At least it would be honest work.”
“No one’s going to hire a kid, regardless of how smart you are,” said Honey scornfully.
“She’s right,” Hawk interjected before they could pick at each other anymore. “I know you don’t like it, Hummer, but we don’t have a lot of options right now. How much money do we have left, Honey?”
“Seventeen ameros, plus change. If we stay here for the next week, it might last us that long, but if we want to go anywhere, we’ll definitely need more than that—unless you want to mooch food and stuff. We could do that too.”
“I’d rather we bought our own,” said Hawk. “C’mon. Try to practice a little moderation in your begging, though—ask for spare change or something, not twenties and fifties like last time.”
Honey rolled her eyes but obediently followed.
“Will you two be all right here?” Hawk asked in the doorway. “If anyone comes, you remember what to do, right?”
“Take the fire exit down to the back alley,” Hummer said in a bored voice. They had worked out the escape route the night before. “We’ll be fine. Just go.”
“Be safe,” Happy said.
Article IV, Section 3
Captive and Captivated
July 6, 10:13am mst, GCA regional office, Flagstaff
“I won’t be gone long,” said Emily to Agent Wilkes. “I just need to buy a few things, and everything seems pretty quiet right now. Oliver’s doing his schoolwork, and I have my cell if you need to contact me for any reason.”
Agent Wilkes was less than interested in Emily’s departure. He didn’t even glance up from his magazine, but merely hummed a vague acknowledgement of her words. She took that as encouragement that she was allowed to go. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach as she slipped out the front door in search of a nearby ATM and a big-box store.
She hadn’t received permission from her superiors at Prometheus for this little jaunt, but it would be silly to call them up just to ask whether she could leave Oliver at the GCA office for half an hour. She needed some money and a decent change of clothing. Oliver didn’t need her at his side for every waking hour of the day, especially when he was tucked away at such a secure location.
Besides, he’d already told her to beat it, and the GCA locals seemed to have no problem with keeping an eye on him while she ran her quick errands. It wasn’t as though she was going to be gone all day.
She found the ATM soon enough and extracted a nice sum of cash. Tucking the bills into her pocket as she went, she made her way down the street, in the direction of a shopping complex if the information she had procured from an apathetic Agent Marsh was correct.
Flagstaff lacked the busy sophistication of New York. As far as Emily was concerned, it was little better than a small town, but the long strip mall was more active than she expected. The entire population was probably at this one location this morning.
And she had the happy prospect of mingling among them. What joy.
“Spare some change, lady?”
Emily flinched away from the dirty old bum who thrust a tattered cup under her nose. “No, I don’t have any change,” she said, trying to contain her disgust. “Sorry.”
He didn’t acknowledge her apology but continued on the way she had come to accost another passerby.
“Ugh,” she said under her breath as she watched his retreat. He looked as though he hadn’t seen a bar of soap in years. The government had gone out of its way to provide shelters for the mentally ill and jobs to anyone who really wanted one, so she could only assume that the man was indigent by choice and thus undeserving of her compassion. How could people be so lazy and selfish as not to work?
She continued onward, thankful that she had a job and a future that didn’t include panhandling on the streets of a pathetic little city in the middle of nowhere.
“Can you spare some change, ma’am?”
She had been distracted by her thoughts and not paying any attention to her surroundings. As this reiterated question fell upon her ears, a small hand darted into her vision. Before she realized what she was doing, Emily stopped and dug her own hands into her pockets to feel around for the requested coins.
“I don’t have any change,” she said in disappointment, and she dropped her eyes to frown at the little girl who stood in front of her, sunglasses perched atop her head and a hopeful expression on her face.
Just as the dirty bum before, the little girl had no problem with her refusal. “Okay! Thanks anyway!” she chirped, and she bounded past.
Something clicked in Emily’s brain. “Wait!” she cried, and she snagged the girl’s arm. She knew that face. “You’re Honey!”
For a bare second the little girl froze. Then, a slow, friendly smile spread across her lips. “I’m not who you think I am,” she said, and she gently pulled free of Emily’s grasp.
Of course she wasn’t, Emily dumbly thought. What was the chance that Honey West would be wandering along the sidewalk of a strip mall in Flagstaff, asking people for spare change?
“Sorry,” she said aloud. “I must’ve—”
“What’s your name?” the little girl interrupted.
“I’m Emily,” she said. “What’s yours?”
“I meant your whole name.”
“Emily June Brent.” She didn’t know why she’d given her middle name. She didn’t like it and had a personal rule of never telling it to anyone. It rolled off her tongue before she even thought about it.
The little girl’s perceptive eyes darted around the crowd, and she asked, “Can you talk to me for a minute? How do you know about Honey?”
Oh. She must know about Honey too. Suddenly Emily wanted nothing more than to answer every question the little girl had. “Oliver’s looking for her.”
“How do you know Oliver?”
“I’m his child-life counselor—his handler.”
“Where is he now?”
“Back at the GCA offices, doing his schoolwork. I left him there so I could run some errands. I need to buy some new clothes. I’ve been wearing these slacks for the last four days, and I’m sick of them.”
The girl’s eyebrows shot up. “So you’re alone?”
“Yes.”
“No one followed you?”
“No, no one did.”
“And you have some money with you?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have it?”
Emily promptly reached into her pocket and handed over her newly procured funds. In the back of her mind she thought there was something off about the conversation and something wrong with giving all her money to a child, but those nagging suspicions weren’t enough to stop her.
“Can you come with me?” The little girl gave a winsome smile.
Emily’s heart melted. “Of course,” she said. How could she refuse such an adorable request? “Where are we going?”
“Just over there. C’mon.” The girl clasped her hand and tugged her along, down the sidewalk and around the corner. A boy, a young teenager, crouched in the alleyway amid a flock of pigeons, but he looked up at their approach. Shock and alarm registered across his face, and his expression triggered something similar in Emily’s brain.
She dug in her heels. “You’re Hawk!”
“No he’s not,” said the little girl at her side, and her concerns immediately faded. Of course he wasn’t Hawk West.
“Honey! What have you done?” he cried to the little girl. “That’s Oliver�
��s handler.”
“I didn’t know until it was too late,” the girl replied. “She’s alone right now, and she recognized me. What was I supposed to do, let her wander off back to the GCA and report us as soon as my projection wore off?”
“So you are Honey?” Emily asked in confusion. Her brain was terribly muddled.
“Not that Honey,” said the little girl with another smile. “And he’s not that Hawk. There’s nothing to worry about, Emily. We’re very nice children that you’ve never heard of before, and you’re safe right now.”
Emily nodded. Of course she was safe.
“What are we supposed to do with her?” Hawk asked.
Honey shrugged. “Didn’t Hummer buy some duct tape?”
For a moment, the two children stared at one another. Through her mental fog, Emily tried to comprehend the meaning behind their interchange, but failed.
“It’s not like we have a choice anymore, Hawk,” Honey said at last, her voice low. “We were sunk the moment she recognized me.”
Emily looked to the boy expectantly for his response. He seemed upset but also resigned. “Fine,” he said flatly. “Come on.”
“Where?” Emily asked with rising suspicion. She didn’t want to go with him.
“Can you come with us?” Honey asked pleasantly. “Let’s play a game. Close your eyes and I’ll lead you!”
This prospect was far more exciting than simply following the older boy. Emily promptly obeyed. The nagging voice in the back of her head had all but vanished. She didn’t bother to count her steps or the number of twists and turns they took, but she could honestly say that being blindly led around at that moment was the most fun she’d had in years.
Honey chattered at her as they went, often asking whether she was happy and reminding her to keep her eyes closed. Emily didn’t need the reminder. Nothing short of a catastrophe could have induced her to open them and spoil the moment.
They passed through a door, and then up some two or three flights of stairs. “Where are we going?” Emily finally mustered enough curiosity to ask.
A Boy Called Hawk (Annals of Altair Book 1) Page 18