by K A Riley
“Down, boy,” I whisper to Arlo.
His face melts from knotted to sheepish, and he tries to laugh the moment off. “I just don’t like her picking on…people,” he mutters.
Libra, ever the peacemaker, restores the mood. “I think Arlo’s right,” she coos, her eyes on the line of vultures like she’s scoping out a litter of wayward puppies. “There’s something kind of charming about them.”
“Charming?” I laugh. “Is that honestly the most accurate description you could come up with?”
“No. I’m serious. Okay. So they’re not peacocks. It’s like they don’t care what they look like. They’re just happy being who they are. There’s something attractive about that.”
“They’re survivors without the weakness of self-awareness,” Angel Fire muses. He pauses to give us a chance to take in the queue of fat, slouching animals, and I forget for a second that he’s just a boy.
As we continue through the Market Garrison, I start noticing more and more vultures. Not just the birds, although there seem to be plenty of those—in windows, on the rooftops of many of the campers, and swaying and wobbling on cylindrical wooden or steel perches drilled into the aluminum sides of many of the RVs, flatbeds, motorhomes, and vehicle transport carriers.
In addition to those and to the few wide-winged vultures soaring and banking overhead, there are also vulture images all over the place.
Apparently Matholook notices, too. Following Libra’s lead, he starts pointing out objects sitting on shelves, in bins, on windowsills and in display cases as we pass: vulture-shaped mugs, handmade vulture-headed walking sticks, fat canvas bags with white drawstrings around their necks and a green silhouette of a vulture on their sides, and, of course, all the vulture crests that are stamped, embroidered, or branded into half of the surfaces on the crawling vehicles.
“What is it about having something on your mind that makes it start appearing everywhere you look?” Matholook asks.
“Maybe you’re manifesting it,” Sara half-jokes, giving Matholook an elbow to the meat of his upper arm. “Maybe the fact that you’re thinking about them is exactly what’s making them appear everywhere. Maybe you’re an Emergent, after all.”
Sara starts walking ahead with Angel Fire while Matholook and I drift toward the back of our procession.
“That wouldn’t be so bad,” he says after a minute of quietly plodding along together, my shoulder against his arm.
“What wouldn’t be so bad?” I ask.
“Being an Emergent.”
“I couldn’t say. As far as I know, I’ve never been anything else.” I take a deep breath and decide to see if Matholook will let me ask him something a bit more personal.
“Sure,” he grins, as if he’s flattered by my question. “Anything.”
“What are we going to do after this?”
“You mean after whatever war is coming?”
I don’t answer because I don’t need to. As a Caretaker with the Devoted, Matholook has an uncanny level of empathy, and I can feel how much he gets me.
“I don’t know,” he sighs, reaching over to take my hand. “I’m a lot of things. Worried isn’t one of them.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have an evil albino preparing to blow up the world just to get his veiny, chalky hands on your genetic code.”
“I didn’t mean I wasn’t worried about me.” He pulls my hand up to his lips and kisses it. “I meant I wasn’t worried about us.”
My face and neck go glossy with perspiration, and it’s not from the heat.
“Besides, Epic’s not evil,” Matholook insists. “He’s just trying to survive. Like all of us. Like all of you up at the Academy. Like the Devoted. Like the Unsettled.” He sweeps his arm at the ominous lineup of four vultures, perched gargoyle-like on the edge of a pick-up truck’s tailgate. The birds shift and sway along with the motion of the truck and seem almost hypnotized into a gruesome stupor. “Like them,” Matholook says. “They may look like alien-dinosaur pillow stuffing, but they don’t wake up in the morning thinking about how they’re going to take over the world. They just want to survive.”
“Ugh,” I groan with an eyeroll. “I hope you’re not defending Epic. If my Asylum hadn’t gotten me out of his underground lab, I’d probably be hooked up to a dozen machines right now while he plays shuffleboard with my DNA.”
“I guess I just mean I don’t think I’m worried because I still have faith in all the positive possibilities.”
“Like what?” I laugh. “That it’s possible the Devoted and the Unsettled kill each other before Epic has a chance to kill all of us Emergents? Or that it’s possible that Kress and the rest of my teachers at the Academy can somehow restore this wasteland to its former glory?”
“No,” he says softly, “None of that.”
“What, then?”
“I think we’re possible.”
I beam and blush and give his hand a squeeze.
What is it about everything he says that makes me want to get closer to him?
“Hey lovebirds!” Ignacio calls back. “Keep up, or you’re going to get run over!”
Heeding the advice but ignoring the “lovebirds” taunt, Matholook and I pick up our pace and reunite with Angel Fire and the rest of our Asylum.
As we near the end of the long and frenetic Market Garrison, I do a double-take and point at the squat, pink-beaked vulture sitting by itself, mascot-like, on the hood of an oversized blue pickup truck. The lone, swaying bird has got an oversized beak and a neck like a bleached garden hose. Until just this second, I thought that all vultures looked pretty much the same and were sort of anonymous Gothic monsters. But this one—scaly-headed, blister-faced, and prickly-necked, with flecks of bile green and murky purple streaked through the tips of its coat of leathery-looking feathers is actually familiar.
“Holy frack!” I shout, grabbing Matholook by the arm. “I think that’s Jeff!”
32
Jeff
Everyone—and I mean all five members of my Asylum plus Matholook and Angel Fire—say, “Jeff?” at the exact same time.
And then, slowing down to a shuffling walk, they proceed to stare at me like they’re two seconds away from fitting me with one of those white canvas jackets with sleeves that buckle in the back.
“Did you say, ‘Jeff’?” Libra asks, her eyes darting back and forth between me and the vulture.
“Remember?” I ask in a spirited huff. “Jeff. That vulture War is always going on about back at the Academy!”
“What about it?” Arlo asks, leaning over Libra’s shoulder to catch my eye.
I stop in my tracks as the caravan of the Unsettled continues to grind along all around us. Because of the way the army moves, it’s perfectly possible that we’ll all get run over by some giant, lumbering rig or another, but right now, I don’t care. Either I just saw the most unexpected familiar face, or else I’m going banana-pants crazy.
No. I know what I’m seeing.
“That’s him!” I insist with a stomped foot and a stabbing finger. I start walking again and match my pace with the blue pickup truck and its squat, avian accessory. “That’s Jeff!”
“Wait a minute,” Ignacio asks through a mocking grin and with a wag of his finger in the vulture’s direction, “you’re saying you think that’s War’s long-lost pet?”
“No. I don’t think it. I know it. And War wouldn’t be too happy about you calling Jeff a ‘pet.’”
“It’s true,” Libra says in a sharp aside to Angel Fire. “War gets mushy talking about his friend, Jeff.”
Angel Fire squints hard enough to bring his hairline down close to his eyebrows. “You really think that could be the same vulture?”
“I don’t see why not,” I gush. “We lost track of him after a big fight on our way here from D.C. over five years ago. We never did find out what happened to him.”
“And he means that much to you?” Ignacio asks, his face plastered with skepticism.
&nbs
p; “Well, no. Not exactly. But he means that much to War.”
“War is one of our teachers. He’s about the size of that dump truck over there,” Sara informs Angel Fire. We all stare at her for a second, and she shrugs. “Just trying to give our host some context,” she smiles apologetically.
“I don’t know where that particular vulture came from,” Angel Fire confesses. “But I know someone who will. And he’s on our way to the Security Garrison. Just over there, actually.” Pointing to a cluster of four campers driving in a diamond pattern, Angel Fire urges us along.
He takes a sharp turn between a pair of smoking, pebble-spitting asphalt-spreaders and beckons for us to follow him. “His family’s been with us since the beginning,” he calls out through the dense smoke and the roar of engines. “Whenever anyone needs help with any of the vultures, he’s the go-to guy.”
The smoke clears as we jog along, and I ask Angel Fire who this person is, exactly.
“He’s our resident Vulturemaster.”
“Vulturemaster? You mean, like, a Ravenmaster?”
“What’s a Ravenmaster?” Angel Fire asks.
“She is,” Sara says, giving me a small push to the shoulder as we round another bend. “She controls ravens.”
“I don’t do anything of the sort,” I pout. “I have a partnership with them. Well, with one of them anyway.” I run my free hand along Haida’s back, and she bobs her head in appreciation.
“Don’t be so modest,” Sara teases. “Show him.”
“Show me what?”
“She and the white raven kind of share a brain,” Arlo offers.
I remind him that that’s not entirely true. “But it’ll do for now,” I say with a smile.
Tapping into Haida Gwaii, who’s now tucked like an American football in the crook of my arm, I’m happy to find her receptive to our telempathic bond. As my Asylum and I have discovered, something strange has been going on lately. There’s been a sort of static shield, a disruptive force that seems to act as a dampener on our Emergent abilities. I don’t know what it is—or even if it actually exists or if in our state of stress and grief, we’re all just imagining it.
Angel Fire ducks as Haida—her white feathers a stark contrast to the grime and grimness of the endless fields of moving machines—launches herself from my arm and rises high into the pink, sizzling hot sky. At my request—which I call out inside my head and repeat out loud for the others to hear—she banks, dips, and climbs even higher before embarking on a brillie series of overlapping barrel rolls before plummeting down from the sky and skimming just over Angel Fire’s head and alighting again on my outstretched arm.
He says, “Impressive!”
“I’m in training,” I announce, with royal grandeur, my voice rising to compete with the churn of a fan-blade land-skimmer next to us, “to be a Ravenmaster.”
Angel Fire makes a little bow toward me and then to Haida and says he’s “honored to meet a Ravenmaster and a Humanmaster,” and we all laugh when Haida answers with a harsh bark and a wet gurgle-clack.
“She says, ‘Knowing yourself is ultimately the only mastery that matters,” I interpret as we slow down to a brisk walk and then to a shuffling stroll next to a giant camper with alternating green and white stripes running in “V-shaped” chevrons down its side.
Angel Fire says, “This is it” and raps five times with his knuckles on the door.
We walk along next to the camper for a minute, and I’m starting to think maybe this wasn’t such a grand idea, after all. We’re still unarmed. We’re still technically behind enemy lines. We’re still being led along by a boy who might very well be stalling while he figures out what horrible things he’s going to do to us. My Asylum still doesn’t seem to be appropriately panicked about any of that. And I may have just sealed our fate. And for what? Just because I think I might have recognized my teacher’s long-lost bird?
Angel Fire knocks again. Just when I think no one’s home, the latch clicks, and the dusty white door swings open with an angry, grating screech.
A boy—small and round and with his bulbous neck polished and smooth as a river stone hanging over the open collar of his unbuttoned, short-sleeved linen shirt—retreats a full step back in startled surprise at the sight of us.
“G-G-Governor,” he stammers. “How…why…I wasn’t expecting…”
“Take it easy,” Angel Fire says from behind a raised and calming hand. “These are—”
“The Freed!” the boy exclaims. “I heard over the Waves, not more than ten minutes ago.”
Angel Fire’s eyes dart inside the camper. “Can we—?”
“Come in! Yes, of course!”
The boy waddles backward, summoning us all in with big circles of his pink, hairless arm.
Following Angel Fire’s lead, the six of us hop up, one at a time, into the oddly small and cramped room of what, from the outside, looked like a football-field sized camper, “The Waves,” Angel Fire clarifies, “is our communication system.”
“I could hardly believe it when I heard,” the boy gushes, his cheeks blushing rosy-red with undisguised delight.
“The Waves never lie,” Angel Fire reminds him. “If it’s not true and verified,” he explains, turning to us and joined by the boy who echoes his words, “it doesn’t make the Waves.”
“Bondo,” the boy says, introducing himself and reaching out to give each of us an energetic handshake. His fingers are thick, soft, and weirdly warm. “My name is Bondo. I’m the Vulturemaster. This is my Aviary.” Turning, he skims his hand over a holo-panel floating six inches above a narrow, silver lab table. The shimmer from the panel lights up his fingers (and their unexpectedly manicured nails) with a soft turquoise glow.
With a clunky grind, the corrugated steel wall behind Bondo rolls up, one long segment at a time like a giant garage door, to reveal the rest of the camper. The length of the container is divided into two columns of glass cubes stacked three high with a walkway down the middle and small, neatly organized workstations set up every ten feet or so.
Bondo skims his hand over another input panel, this one embedded in the camper wall, and the gloomy length of the long vehicle springs to life under an instant, blinding white light.
Illuminated all at once and as if by magic, the glass cases—all riddled with even rows of small breathing holes—reveal their contents with each one containing a single, shuffling, grumpy-looking vulture.
“They’re not pets,” Bondo insists. “These are incredible survivors with intricate social structures and some higher-level thinking we’re only beginning to fully understand.”
“That’s a huge flock,” Libra says, scanning the impressive collection of birds.
Bondo makes a disapproving clicking sound with his tongue. “They’re not a flock. When they’re eating, a collection of them is called a ‘wake.’ Otherwise, a group of them is called a Committee.”
“Hey!” Ignacio exclaims. “I knew that one!”
“We have a Committee of Vultures back at the Academy,” I explain to Bondo, apologizing for Ignacio’s giddy, over-the-top enthusiasm.
“The students at the Academy are divided into Cohorts,” Arlo adds.
“Usually about six students per Cohort,” Libra chimes in with a goofy grin, and now I’m wondering if she and Ignacio are competing to see who can be the most idiotically gushy. “We’re the Asylum of Loons,” Libra says proudly, her thumb pressed to her puffed-out chest.
“Each Cohort has a bird as its symbol,” I explain, stroking the smooth feathers on Haida’s head. “And one of our teachers used to have a vulture named Jeff.”
Angel Fire gives Bondo a showy wink and a loud whisper from behind his hand. “And Branwynne here thinks she just saw him.”
“Who?” Bondo asks. “Her teacher?”
“No,” I tell him. “Jeff. His vulture.”
Bondo looks around at all of us and then finally over to Angel Fire who nods his confirmation.
“And you wan
t me to tell you if the vulture you saw is the same vulture that used to accompany your teacher?”
“I know it sounds strange,” I admit. “But yes.”
“I know every vulture in our army,” Bondo brags. “I think I can help you.”
We all hop down from the moving camper, and Angel Fire leads us back to the market where Jeff—and I’m even more sure now than ever that it is Jeff—is still perched in a squat lump on the hood of the blue pickup truck.
Bondo runs a hand along the side of the vulture’s body. It makes a quiet, rolling buzz, somewhere between a kitten’s purr and a rattlesnake’s hiss.
“Incredible miracles of evolution,” Bondo beams with fatherly pride. “There are seven New World vultures. Here, we have mostly California condors and Turkey vultures. But we also have two types of yellow-headed vultures and three full families of Black vultures. And we have a whole trailer full of Old World vultures—Andean condors, Himalayan griffons, African whitebacks—mostly from abandoned or destroyed zoos.”
“So…,” I ask. “Is this Jeff?”
“I remember when he came to us,” Bondo says absently, as if he’s reminiscing about some old childhood memory. “I could only feel one thing from him. I could only hear a single thought passing from his mind to mine.”
“You can hear his thoughts?” I ask.
“Sometimes. Mostly it’s just feelings. Moods. Things like that. Being a student of their behavior enables me to read them like most others can’t.”
I know Angel Fire could probably just order Bondo to hand Jeff over, but he seems to be enjoying watching the red-cheeked boy fret over the possibility of turning one of his vultures over to six total strangers.
Bondo goes on to rattle off a long litany of unsolicited trivia about vultures: “Turkey vultures have the best sense of smell in the animal kingdom. A vulture’s stomach acid is more corrosive than acid from a car battery. If something fits in their mouth, they can probably digest it. Andean condors can have an eleven-foot wingspan. Cape Griffon vultures, like this one here—the one you call ‘Jeff’—are part of the Old World species and live mostly in the southern and central countries of Africa.”