‘C’mon, Henryk, I wouldn’t endanger the kid. No, there’s something about this family. They wouldn’t cooperate, not yet anyway. But if I don’t get anywhere by close of business tomorrow, I’ll make sure they notify the police.’
Henryk grunted, his concentration back on the database. ‘So, what’s the hourly rate these days, mate? Nice fringe benefits? Well, what do you know—the girl’s not a shareowner. Surprise, surprise. Not on the electoral roll either. Underage?’
‘Seventeen,’ I said.
Henryk looked up. ‘Mind you, so few people in RaRA-land bother enrolling to vote anymore. Then they wonder why they’re ignored and their lives are shit.’ He looked at the screen again. ‘Hmm. No tax. No bank records, no real estate, no licences to fish, hunt, drive or own a firearm. Got a low profile, this girl. Oh wait. Fuck me dead.’
‘What?’
‘She didn’t just have a work permit. She’d been given permanent City residency!’ He fixed his gaze on me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No fucking way. Let me look at that.’ Peri’s residency was as astounding as her wings.
‘Nobody gets permanent residency,’ said Henryk.
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
Henryk shook his head. ‘This residency business—someone this girl knows has serious clout, Zeke. You said the family wouldn’t cooperate. I know about that. Fliers are a serious pain in the arse to deal with. Fortunately I don’t have to, most of the time. I’ve got Senior Constable Durack for that.’
‘Durack? Mick? So, he’s been promoted too.’
‘More than you know, mate. Can fly now. O’Hanlon calls him the Archangel Michael.’ He checked something on his slick. ‘Durack, you there?’
‘Durack. Wings. Why?’
Henryk snorted, got up. ‘Walk with me.’ I followed him into the corridor. ‘You don’t know? Thought the private sector was always at the cutting edge. New MOs to keep up with. Fliers assaulting non-fliers increasingly popular. Rob them. Or worse. What could be easier? They take some girl up high, poor thing can’t fight back, she’s got to get back to the ground in one piece. Sometimes they just grab non-fliers, dump them somewhere. Sometimes we find them. Sometimes we find them too late.’
‘Why would they do that?’
Henryk raised his eyebrows. ‘Forgotten the first law of human behaviour already? Why do people do anything? ’Cause they can. Don’t you follow the news?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Yeah, after the circus around the Charon case, I’d give it a miss sometimes too. Amazing those Origins nutjobs haven’t set fire to themselves or drunk poison yet. Or put something in our water supply.’
‘Well, there, you see, you profoundly misunderstand their mission,’ I said as I trailed Henryk through the squad room. ‘Which is to outbreed us all and be the only ones left standing when the global pestilence sweeps the world as they’re certain it must. They’ll survive because they alone have stayed pure according to God’s will.’
Henryk said, ‘So we do need to worry about our water supply then, in case they give God’s plague a helping hand.’
We entered the tearoom, that room too well-known from a dozen workplaces, with its eternal handmade signs threatening retribution for those who didn’t wash their own cups. Ah, the cup fatwa. Didn’t miss that. There was a training calendar, a poster for a charity run and a photo of an actor who looked a bit like the commissioner, warding off a horde of zombies. Underneath someone had printed: The commissioner negotiates a pay claim with the Police Association.
A group of men and women, detectives and uniform, many of them familiar faces, were milling around, grabbing something to eat, drink. Shift change already? A few sat at the table. I nodded at them.
‘Durack, you remember Fowler.’ Henryk made himself a cup of tea. His lunch, probably.
‘Oh, we are not worthy,’ said one seated detective, getting to his feet, bowing. ‘The famous Fowler, the avenger of Advent, honouring us with his presence. Oh wait, that’s right, you didn’t actually nail Jones, the big man with the teeny-tiny testicles.’
‘It’s alright, Lutz,’ I said. ‘I think you’re worthy.’
One of the women laughed.
Trinity Jones apparently did have tiny testicles—I’d never seen them—or microorchidism, as the doctors called it. As the leader of Origins and thus the poster boy for not interfering with God’s handiwork, he suffered from Klinefelter’s Syndrome, a genetic condition conferring an extra X chromosome so that his sex chromosomes read XXY rather than XY. He led Origins with an authority, his followers declared, derived from suffering his affliction humbly and penitently. I remained unconvinced. Klinefelter’s should make him sterile but I suspected that Trinity, given his momentous beard and muscular though fattish build, dosed himself with testosterone. The image of Trinity, forced to his knees in the rain, flared in my mind as if lit by a lightning flash.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Henryk, listening to someone on his slick.
Mick shook my hand. His wings shone green-black, like cockerel feathers. The only black flier I’d yet seen and the first one I’d seen in the force. So pigs really do fly.
‘Hey Fowler,’ said Mick. ‘How’s it going?’ He was standing with his cup of tea, his glossy wings creating a bowl of space around him, isolated in the circle of his own beauty. The wings were surreal in that cream-painted room; an element of the divine lighting up this drab place, like going into a public toilet and being startled by a stained-glass window streaming colour.
Henryk turned to Mick, still listening to someone else. ‘Any dealings with a flier family called Chesshyre?’
Mick shook his head.
‘Fliers,’ grunted Lutz. ‘Bloodsucking vampires. Might’ve known that’s what you’d be here about, Fowler. Talking to the flash new Raptor with his fancy new wings. Needs a whole fucking tearoom all to himself. With a perch and a bell. And a mirror.’
‘Give it a rest,’ said Henryk, not looking up from his slick.
‘Boss,’ said Lutz.
‘Fucking nuisance when they go bad,’ growled a senior detective, throwing his teabag in the sink. ‘They hang around the hostels and shelters, preying on poor kids. Claim they’re keeping the City free of RaRA-land scum.’
‘Let’s face it,’ said a uniform, ‘they are scum, mostly.’
‘Happen a lot?’ I said.
Mick shrugged. ‘Enough.’
‘Clip their fucking wings,’ said Lutz. ‘Cut them off.’
‘It’ll happen. They’re debating the bill even as we speak,’ said the senior detective. I remembered his name. Thanit.
Mick raised his eyebrows. ‘Amputation’s a bit crude, isn’t it, Lutz? Don’t see you saying the hands of thieves should be cut off.’
‘Aw, wings is different,’ drawled Lutz. ‘Wings are extra. Now, cut off a hand, you’re disabling someone. Me, I don’t have wings. You’re gonna tell me I’m fuckin’ disabled? Especially when my taxes subsidise your fucking treatments?’
Mick turned his back on Lutz, covered it by washing his cup.
I thought of the item I’d seen earlier, the campaign to list Zefiryn on the public pharmaceutical benefits schedule. Could see how subsidy for that sort of thing might make people resentful.
I checked my slick. There was a message from Cam saying I could meet her later that afternoon. My best chance of finding the next piece of the puzzle lay with her. As I checked for messages from Chesshyre, two messages came in from Lily. More harassment about the treatments.
Henryk walked me to the front door. ‘There was another reason I wanted you to see Mick. Did you notice anything different about him?’
‘What, aside from the fact he’s now the Archangel Michael?’
‘Did he look any different to that flier you met yesterday? Chesshyre?’
&nb
sp; ‘Well, I suppose he seemed . . . bigger. A lot bigger than when I knew him. How did he—?’
‘Too right he’s bigger. Raptor program,’ said Henryk. ‘The force has to pay for some of us to get wings. Someone’s got to do the patrols over the City. Can’t deal with fliers if none of us can fly ourselves. So, they set up the Raptor program. Military has one too. Done wonders for recruitment, especially from RaRA-land. The poor suckers don’t realise how few are going to be selected for Raptor training. Still, what other chance do they have to fly?’
‘I see.’ Had Henryk wanted to be on the program? He was too old.
‘I worry about Mick,’ Henryk said. ‘It’s not all one way, you know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean there are new crimes and we make damn sure there’s as little publicity about this as possible—don’t want to put ideas in anyone’s head—but whole regions of the City are no-go zones for fliers.’ He paused. ‘Just last week, down south. They’d put up a net. Chased him, caught him, pulled out his feathers, set fire to him.’
A moment.
‘You’ve been a great help,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘My point is that Mick’s solid. I think. Hope I can hang onto him. But some of the others . . .’
‘What?’
‘Raptor program changes them. Hardly surprising. They make me uneasy and they make the others uneasy. Hard to keep them, for a start. Many become private muscle for flier clients, who pay them three, four times what they get on the force. Pisses me right off—they’re modified and trained at public expense and then . . . but what can you do?’
I winced at that as he continued. ‘Raptors are targets for non-fliers, so they tend to identify with other fliers anyway. And besides them leaving the force for other jobs, we just lose a lot of them.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We lose them, Zeke. They disappear.’
‘You mean they go Wild?’
Henryk shrugged. ‘Officially no. But it’s like the old Scottish verdict: Not proven. Neither guilty nor innocent. Not enough evidence. Anyway, disappearances are a particular problem with Raptors, military and police. More go missing than any other kind of flier. The treatments are different, more extreme. From what you’ve told me about the case, you should be careful. I see why Chesshyre hired you but he’ll be covering his bets. He hasn’t come to us so that means he’s probably got himself some sort of rogue Raptor. To catch yourself a pigeon you need a hawk. And these hawks are very big and very nasty. Do you see what I’m saying?’
I did see what he was saying. Taj’s black-winged flyboy was no ordinary security guard. He’d been put on the case before I’d even met Chesshyre.
Outside the police station I rang Chesshyre. Forty-eight hours since Hugo’s disappearance. Had he heard from Peri, or from anyone else, about Hugo? Nothing, he said. I promised him an interim report at the end of the day.
‘Thank you,’ said Chesshyre. He sounded exhausted, even more colourless than when I’d met him the day before. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘you will try to find my son as quickly as you can?’
‘Yes,’ I promised. ‘Of course I will. I’m doing everything I can.’
It was raining as I walked towards the light rail, looking up at fliers navigating the skyscraper canyons. I tipped my head back, staring up at the clouds, rain whirling down onto my face, thinking how long it had been since I’d stared at the sky. As if fliers had colonised it, as if it belonged to them now.
Something flashed into my eyes. The sun sailed out from behind a cloud bank and struck light off a glassy cliff that rose sheer above me. The cliff was not anchored to the earth but set, blue as an ice shelf, between two towers. Rain slid down its sides. Fliers beat their way up to a high arched entrance, their forms showing as distorted slips of colour through the clear walls, like the twists in the centre of old-fashioned marbles. A rope of mist slid over one flank of the cliff, braiding itself into patterns as it fell. The patterns changed constantly. Perhaps fliers especially liked to see the movements of air made visible.
Then I knew what I was looking at. This was the flier church Sunil wanted me to investigate. At least, he wanted me to snoop on someone who was part of it. This was the church Chesshyre had designed, the Church of the Seraphim.
Fascinated, I craned my neck. Someone had vandalised the tower next to the church at street level. In dripping gold letters three metres high ran the words: if GOD wanted you to FLY, he’d have made you RICH. Not surprising the church had been attacked. When it was built there’d been a City-wide scandal because there was no entrance for non-fliers and that was against the law. Still, the stuck-up bastards went ahead, no-one stopped them and there it was, inaccessible. Sunil had told me the Church of the Seraphim was a cult that believed fliers were the next, more heavenly stage in human development. Fliers were chosen beings, full of grace, above the muck and mire of the earth. They were the future.
I turned away from the church. I couldn’t blame fliers for the fact I didn’t take the time to enjoy the sunrise or the full moon, sunset, clouds, stars. That was middle age, busyness, numbness. Thomas had made me look at the stars. Once I was carrying him from the street to our flat late at night when he was just a baby and he looked up, exclaiming joyfully, Bubbles! Dada! Bubbles! And there they were, pouring overhead into a river of silver foam, glinting on the wind.
Janeane knelt down, briskly taping up one of Peri’s outer primaries. ‘Not broken, just bent.’
‘Lucky you only nicked me then,’ said Peri, leaning forward, her wing spread out along the old couch on the verandah.
‘Lucky I wasn’t trying to hit you,’ said Janeane, standing up, brushing the knees of her dark green pants. Her red cattledog pup was watching her from the bottom of the steps. ‘Just scare you off.’
‘Yeah, you did that real well. Couldn’t you see I had a baby?’
Janeane frowned. ‘Eyesight. Not what it used to be obviously. Gave me the fright of my life when you dropped out of the sky like that. Jesus, thought I’d have a body to hide.’
‘It was safer to drop,’ said Peri. ‘I had to get you to recognise me, quickly.’
‘Yeah,’ Janeane said. ‘I was doing you a favour, really, warning you off before my neighbours shot you down for real. They don’t like prying eyes and most of them aren’t as friendly as I am. It’s not safe for you. You can’t stay here, Peri.’
‘I know. But if you want to get rid of me you’ve got to help me.’
Janeane stared at Peri’s outstretched wing, at Hugo, as if seeing them for the first time. She whistled softly. ‘Such a skinny little thing. Now look at you. How the hell have you done all this?’ She shook her head. ‘How’d you even make it to the City? Heard some whinge from Cody a couple years ago saying you didn’t work for him anymore, said you’d gone to the City but you couldn’t—wouldn’t—explain. Good for you, I thought. Where you belong.’
‘Mama’lena,’ said Peri.
‘Don’t know her,’ said Janeane. ‘Know of her. Cody has—had—dealings with her. Moved on, he said. But why . . . how did she help you get to the City?’
Peri closed her eyes. Mama’lena gone. Had she had enough of the Venice, used her connections to smooth her way to somewhere else? Maybe she’d served them long enough. ‘It’s a long story, Aunty Jan. Anyway, I can’t go back to the City. I have to go far away where no-one knows me. Has to be another city. Like you say, RaRA-land’s impossible.’ Her eyes snapped open. ‘So, I need you to help me get to where Ash lives.’
Janeane snorted. ‘Far away! Ash’s hometown isn’t far away, Peri. It’s off the edge of the known fucking world. Either you’re actually insane or . . .’
Or you’re in real trouble.
A deep breath. ‘I can help you as long as you don’t tell me what this is all about.’ Janeane picked
up her rifle and headed down the steps, where the cattledog chased his tail in excitement at her approach. She whistled and he trotted after her.
‘These for eating?’ Peri picked a banana from the large greenish-yellow hand sitting by the door.
Janeane nodded without turning. ‘Be back in a couple of hours,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Don’t go anywhere. And don’t let anyone see you.’
Peri peeled the banana and gave chunks of it to Hugo. When she set Hugo down on the couch, he pulled himself up, holding onto the back. He liked to pull himself up and he liked to cruise, gripping Peri’s hand, but she was glad he wasn’t walking yet.
‘Buh-buh-buh-brrrr,’ said Hugo. He stared at her solemnly, his head wobbling slightly. A baby’s life might seem carefree but it looked like hard work. There was so much to do: sounds to perfect, muscles to strengthen, hands to get under control.
Peri dug out a Zefiryn gel from her waistband, stripped away its backing, and swallowed the gel with a mouthful of banana. She pulled out her AquaPad, drank, and offered it to Hugo, who sucked water from it eagerly. ‘Time to change you, clean you up, little man.’
‘Ba,’ Hugo said. ‘Ba-ba-ba-ba.’
Janeane and the dog were walking up the hill that rose behind the farmhouse. The Zefiryn was starting to work, Peri’s eyes focusing with the power of an eagle, the euphoria of such seeing spreading warmth, pleasure through her body. Janeane and the dog disappeared into the sea of banana trees lapping up to the hill’s crown. Peri could have counted every hair on the dog’s coat, every glossy tatter of the green flags fluttering by the trees, every yellow comma in each hand of fruit. The bananas. The business. The reason I couldn’t stay with Janeane, the reason she can never leave. Janeane’s lived outside the law for years; she can help me do it too.
With Hugo on her hip, Peri walked down the steps to the rough grass she’d landed on an hour earlier and set Hugo down in the shade of the trees. He crawled over the grass, stopping to pull up a tiny yellow flower. Peri followed him, catching him in her arms and kissing the top of his head; he smelled rich and dry, like a sweet buttery biscuit. She put him down to let him continue exploring. He cooed with pleasure. He liked the grass, the light through leaves making shadows on his hands.
When We Have Wings Page 9