by Terry Brooks
Then it occurred to her that these kids were not from here at all, but had come from someplace else. They were nomads. That was why they were living on the freeway in abandoned vehicles rather than in a building where they could be better protected.
“What are they, Owl?” Chalk asked from behind the wheelchair, his voice uncertain.
“Children,” she answered him, “like you. Only they have had a much harder time of it.” She glanced at the other Ghosts. “Don’t do anything to threaten them. Stay close to me. Do what I tell you.”
Despite her orders, Bear was already taking out the heavy cudgel he favored for close-quarters combat, an old, gnarled staff that could crack a skull with a single blow. The others looked uncertain, glancing at one another and back at the approaching shapes. In her lap, Squirrel stirred slightly, restless in his sleep. She considered handing him to one of the others, but decided against it. He was safest where he was.
“Candle?” Owl called out. “Can you sense anything?”
The little girl with the preternatural instincts turned. “I’m not sure. I can’t tell if they mean to hurt us or not.”
Owl hesitated, then said, “Move me to the front, Chalk.”
The boy wheeled her forward, but she could sense his reluctance. He eased her wheelchair past Bear with his cart and Fixit and River with their litter and stopped. Ahead, the strange collection of street kids continued to advance. She held Squirrel tighter in her lap and stroked his fine hair.
“Who are you?” she called out.
The advance halted immediately. For a moment, no one said anything. Then a strong voice answered, “Who are you?”
“We are the Ghosts,” she said, speaking the litany of greeting. “We haunt the ruins of the world our parents destroyed. This city is our home; we live down by the water. But an invasion force has landed to attack one of the compounds, and we are leaving.” She paused. “You should leave, too.”
“Everyone says that to us,” the voice answered, laced with unmistakable bitterness. She could tell now who was doing the speaking, a tall figure near the front of the advance. “Maybe you’re just like all the others, telling us lies to make us go away.”
“I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m telling you the truth. We’re all in danger here. You should get away. If you want to stay, though, at least let us pass. We need to go farther down the ramp and wait for our guide to come for us.”
The speaker for the newcomers came forward and stood directly in front of her, a thin, ragged boy with scars everywhere, the right side of his face so badly mutilated that it looked like melted candle wax. His hand was resting on the butt of a strange black weapon, a handgun of some sort, that he had stuck into his belt.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “Maybe you should turn around and go back.”
Those with him began to advance again. Owl glanced at them. There were an awful lot of them if it came to a fight, even if they did seem half crippled. Already the other Ghosts were tensing. Bear had stepped away from the cart. River and Fixit had put down the litter with the Weatherman and brought out their prods. Even Chalk had stepped up beside her protectively. If she didn’t find a way to calm them all down, things were going to get out of hand quickly.
It was at times like this that she wished she weren’t confined to the wheelchair, that she could walk around like everyone else.
“We didn’t come here looking for trouble,” she said to the speaker. “Maybe you should think about where this is leading.”
“Maybe you should give us what you’ve got in the cart,” the other replied. “Then we might let you go.”
And he drew the weapon from his belt and pointed it at her.
“PANTHER!” Sparrow cried out, her voice sharp with desperation.
He risked a quick glance over from where he was fighting his own battle. One of the Croaks had caught her from behind and pinned her against a pole. She was trying to bring the tip of her prod around to jolt it, but it was holding her off with one arm while it strangled her with the other.
He was at her side in seconds, fighting through the two that had been trying to trap him, his prod shedding electrical charges as the tip raked the metal surfaces of a series of trash containers. He slammed its heavy length into the Croak’s head, and it staggered back, releasing its grip. Panther grabbed Sparrow’s arm and pulled her after him, trying to find a clear space in which to run as other Croaks appeared from the shadows. The battle careened down the length of the cross street and into the path of those coming uphill from the waterfront. All at once they were in the thick of the exodus, and there were Lizards and Spiders and more Croaks and street kids, too, all about them. There was yelling and screaming and growling, and Panther couldn’t tell whom he was supposed to be fighting. Sparrow latched on to him as if he were a lifeline, her prod gone and her face spattered with blood and as pale as Chalk’s. He had never seen her look afraid, but she looked afraid now.
“Hold on!” he shouted over the sounds of the crowd.
He used his strength and weight to bull his way toward the far side of the climb, seeking a small measure of space in which to catch his breath. He could no longer tell if anyone—or anything—was chasing them. A clutch of Lizards was tearing at a handful of Croaks that had crossed its path and foolishly decided to attack, and the Croaks quickly disappeared from view. To his astonishment, Panther thought he saw Logan Tom off amid a scattering of street kids, but the other disappeared from sight almost immediately. Unable to look further, Panther continued to fight his way through the rush, Sparrow pinned tightly against him, until they broke through and were able to take refuge in a doorway.
“Frickin’ brainless stump heads!” he shouted angrily. “Hey, I think I saw that guy, the Knight of whatever back there!”
“Doesn’t matter. The Croaks are still coming!” Sparrow cried.
He looked to where she was pointing, brushing dirt and sweat from his dark face. A handful of Croaks was pushing through the crowd, eyes fixed on them. “Damn!” he muttered.
Sparrow grabbed his arm and pulled him up the sidewalk and into another alleyway. Free of the surge of the crowd, they ran down its dark length, found an opening into one of the buildings, and began making their way through a tangle of corridors, dodging piles of broken crates and garbage of all sorts. Sparrow set the pace, running as if she had caught fire, heedless of the strain.
“Not so fast!” Panther gasped as the pace began to tell on him. He was the one who was tiring now. “Ease off, Sparrow!”
“Just another block or two until we reach the freeway!” she called over her shoulder. “Come on!”
They burst out of the building and found themselves back on a cross street not a hundred yards from where the crowd continued its uphill climb. Panther exhaled sharply in relief, and then an instant later caught his breath. The Croaks had reappeared, come out of the crowd like rats out of the shadows, eyes gleaming, claws and teeth sharp and ready.
Panther glanced down at the readout on his prod. Almost empty. He looked at Sparrow. They could run, but only by going in the wrong direction. If they wanted to reach the others, they would have to find a way past the Croaks.
He looked into Sparrow’s eyes.
“I’m through being chased,” she declared, as if she had read his mind, as if she knew what he wanted to hear.
Wordlessly, they turned to face the onslaught.
Then abruptly a stream of white fire surged out of the darkness behind them, lancing into the Croaks and exploding across the entire width of the street ahead.
Panther had not been mistaken. Logan Tom had found them.
OWL STARED down the short black barrel of the handgun and fought to stay calm. She saw that wires attached to its handle ran to a solar pack strapped to the boy’s waist. Some sort of stun gun, a variation on a prod. It would shock its victim if fired. Maybe it would kill. In any case, she didn’t want to find out the hard way.
Around her, the other Gh
osts had frozen in their tracks, no one wanting to do anything that would cause the kid with the weapon to hurt her. But they wouldn’t stay still forever.
She took a deep breath and said, “What’s your name?”
He scowled. “What does it matter?”
“Just tell me, I want to know.”
“You don’t need to know my name.” He looked uncomfortable, his ruined face tightening further. “Are you going to give us the cart or not?”
“My name is Owl,” she said, ignoring him. “I am mother to the Ghosts. It is my job to protect them. Like it is your job to protect those who travel with you. Sometimes people make that very hard. Sometimes they make us feel foolish and weak and even helpless. They do this by threatening to hurt us because they don’t like us. That’s happened to you, hasn’t it? That’s what you were talking about when you said everyone always tells you to go away.”
She waited for him to say something, but he just stared at her, the gun steady in his hand.
“Tell him to quit pointing that at you,” Chalk said at her elbow.
“The thing is,” she continued, keeping her eyes fixed on the boy’s face, “you are doing to us what others have done to you. You are acting just like them, telling us we have to do something we don’t want to. You are stealing from us and telling us to just turn around and leave. Why are you doing that?”
Again, no answer, but she could see the confusion and anger mirrored in the boy’s one good eye.
“Don’t you see that you are no better than those people you don’t like if you do this?”
“Stop talking!” he shouted suddenly.
Everyone tensed. Bear came forward a few steps until he had moved between the cart with their goods and the street kids who wanted it. He didn’t say anything, but she could see the determination in his eyes. A few of the street kids glanced his way uneasily.
“What do you expect us to do?” she asked the boy with the gun. “Do you expect us to just stand here and let you take everything we have?”
“Everyone takes everything we have,” he snapped angrily. “Everyone calls us Freaks! We’re not Freaks!”
“Then don’t act—”
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
There was sudden movement to her left, and he shifted his weapon in response. Owl raised her hand to stay his, saying, “No!” The boy flinched, turning back to her as quickly as he had turned away. Seeing her raised arm and mistaking her intent, alarm flooded his face.
Then he shot her.
FOUR
I T WAS THE WAY that everything changed so suddenly that shocked Hawk the most.
One moment he was falling from the compound walls, the hands of his captors releasing him for the long drop, his stomach lurching as he struggled in vain to find something to hold on to, his fate a dark rush of gut-wrenching certainty flooding through him. He glimpsed the rubble waiting below, the sharp outline of the bricks and cement chunks clearly visible even in the fading light of the sunset. He caught sight of Tessa tumbling away next to him, her arms windmilling and her legs kicking, her slender body just out of his reach. He wanted to close his eyes to shut the images away, to escape what was happening, but he could not make himself do so.
A moment later he was surrounded by the light, gathered up by its white brilliance as if cradled in a soft blanket. He was neither standing nor sitting but sprawled out, his muscles becoming lethargic and leaden, his mind drifting to faraway places that had no identity. He was no longer falling, no longer doing anything. Tessa had disappeared. The compound and his captors, the city and the sunset, the entire world had vanished.
He didn’t know how long this cocooning lasted because he lost all sense of time. His thoughts were as soft and image-free as the light that bound him, and he could not seem to make himself think. All he could do was revel in the feeling of the light and the welcome hope that somehow he had escaped dying. He waited for something to happen, for the light to clear and reveal his fate, for the world to return—for anything—but finally gave in to his lethargy and closed his eyes and slept.
When he woke, the light was gone.
He was lying on a patch of grass so bright with color that it hurt his eyes to look at it. Sunshine flooded down out of clear skies that seemed to stretch away forever. Gardens surrounded him with a profusion of colors and forms and scents. He blinked in disbelief and pushed himself up on one elbow to look around. Wherever he was, he clearly wasn’t anywhere in Seattle or even anywhere he had ever been in his life. He had seen pictures of gardens in Owl’s books and listened to her read descriptions of them to the Ghosts. He had imagined them in his mind, spreading away from the edges of the pages that framed them in the picture books.
But he had never imagined anything like this.
And yet…
He stared off into the distance, off to where the gardens disappeared from view, going on and on in a rough carpet of plants and bushes, of petals and stalks, their colors so vibrant that they shimmered against the horizon in a soft haze.
Yet it was all somehow very familiar.
He frowned in confusion, sitting up for a better look, trying to understand what he was feeling. His mind was clear now, his limbs and body fresh and rested. The lethargy was gone, dissipated with the light. He felt that he might have slept a long time, but could not account for how that might be. Everything had changed so completely that there was no way he could make sense of it. It was magic, he thought suddenly, but he had no way of knowing where such magic might have come from.
Not from himself, he knew.
Not from Logan Tom, the Knight of the Word.
His confusion exploded into questions. Why am I alive? What saved me from the fall off the compound wall? How did I get here?
Then he remembered Tessa, and he looked around for her in a welter of sudden fear and desperation.
“She is sleeping still,” a voice said from right behind him.
The speaker was so close and had come up on him so quietly that Hawk jumped despite himself, wheeling into a defensive crouch without even thinking about what he was doing. Breathing hard, arms cocked protectively in front of him, he stared up into the face of the old man who stood there.
The old man never moved. “You needn’t be afraid of me,” he said.
He was ancient by any standards, rail-thin and bent by time, his body swathed in white robes that hid everything but the outline of his nearly fleshless bones. His beard was full and white, but his hair was thinning to the point of wispiness, and his scalp showed through in mottled patches. His features were gaunt, his cheeks sunken, and his brow lined. But all of this was of no importance to Hawk when he looked into the old man’s eyes, which were clear and blue and filled with kindness and compassion. Looking into those eyes made the boy want to weep. It was like seeing a reflection of everything that was good and right in the world, all gathered in a perfect vision, bright and true.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Someone who knows you from before you were born,” the other answered, smiling as if having Hawk standing before him was the most welcome of sights. “Someone who remembers how important that event was.” His eyes never left Hawk’s face. “What matters is not who I am, but who you are. Here and now, in this time and place, in the world of the present. Do you know the answer?”
Hawk nodded slowly. “I think so. The Knight of the Word told me when I was locked away in the compound. He said I was a gypsy morph and that I had magic. I saw something of what he was talking about in a vision when I touched my…my mother’s finger bones.” He hesitated. “But I still don’t know if I believe it.”
The old man nodded. “What he told you is the truth. Or at least, the part of it he knows. It is given to me to tell you the rest. Walk with me.”
He started away, and Hawk followed without thinking. Together they moved down the pathways and grassy strips that crisscrossed the gardens, passing through rows of flower beds and flowering bushes and trellises
of flowering vines. They moved without purpose and without any seeming destination, simply walking, first in one direction and then in another, the boundaries of the gardens—if there were any—never drawing any nearer, never even coming into sight. They continued for a long time, the old man moving slowly but purposefully, with Hawk matching his pace as he tried to gather his thoughts, to give voice to the questions swimming in his head. Spoor and tiny seedlings drifted in the air around him, shimmering with a peculiar brightness. Hawk could hear insects buzzing and chirping. He could see flashes of bright color from birds and butterflies. He could not stop looking.
“Did you bring me here?” he asked the old man finally.
The old man nodded. “I did.”
“Tessa, too? She’s all right? She’s not hurt?”
“She sleeps until we are done.”
Hawk scuffed his tennis shoes on a patch of gravel, looking down at the skid marks, still trying to make what was happening feel real. “I don’t understand any of this,” he said finally.
The old man had been studying the landscape ahead, but now he looked over. “No, I don’t suppose you do. It must all seem very strange to you. A lot has happened in the past few weeks. A lot more will happen in the weeks ahead. You are different from who you were, but not as different as you will be.”
He made a sweeping gesture at the gardens. “This is where you were conceived, young one. Here, in these gardens. A small, unexpected gathering in the evening air of magic from earth and water brought you into existence, a wild magic that only happens now and then with the passing of the centuries. I have seen it before, but not like this. The brightness of the gathering was unusual, the joining quick and sure, the suddenness and the frantic need so apparent that it caught me by surprise. That takes something special. I have been alive a long time.”