Subject Nightingale 1: Birth and Death

by Tim Cody

  The walls and ceiling looked sturdy enough—mostly individual planks nailed together, and reinforced over time. There didn't appear to be any gaps for a breeze to slip through. “Whoever lived here before us took good care of the place,” Elise commented to herself. She looked down at the floor, and couldn't even see the ground through any gaps.

  On the other side of the street, Whisper was telling the Grants about their amazing find. “It's totally awesome, you guys! I love it! It's big enough for all three of us, there's so much space! We could even put a couch in there if we wanted!”

  Mister Grant chuckled. “What a sight, the day I see you girls hauling a couch home from the pit!”

  “Hey, it could happen!” Whisper insisted. “People throw out all sorts of stuff! I bet we could find a bed, too! Just you wait and see, Mister Grant, we're gonna have a fireplace, a couch, a bed, and a TV!”

  “A fireplace?” Misses Grant said next, bundled up extra warm in the chilly morning air. “No rough housing near the hearth, alright? You'll have to invite us over one of these evenings.”

  “Actually, Whisper,” Mister Grant began, “we wanted to say goodbye to you girls. It's about time for us to be moving on, too. Our friends on the other side of the city have got a nice, warm spot ready and waiting for us!”

  “Aw, that's too bad!” Whisper said. “I'll tell Elise, she'll come by later today.”

  “We're not leaving until tomorrow afternoon, so she can put it off. Don't wanna ruin her move-in day!”

  Nightingale rushed by Whisper, then, with practically all their possessions in her arms. She was wearing two backpacks, carrying several blankets and Whisper's sleeping bag, and was telekinetically balancing a stack of pillows on her head (partly for practicality, but mostly because she was in a good mood and thought it would be hilarious).

  “Hey, how are you doing that, Nightingale!?” Whisper asked, amazed at the balancing act.

  “Go grab the rest of our stuff!”

  “Right!” Whisper ran back to their hut, waving at the Grants. “I'll talk to you later!”

  Nightingale returned to the shack to find Elise placing the nest on a small shelf built into the wall, opposite the window. She dropped all the blankets, sleeping bags, and pillows into a pile in the center of the room, and then Whisper came rushing in with the rest of their belongings (minus the items used to construct their hut—she wanted to leave it standing there so someone else could hermit crab into it).

  “Elise, did you see Nightingale's awesome balancing trick!?” She shoved the items into a corner to keep them out of the way.

  “No, I must've missed it,” she answered.

  “She had a hundred pillows on her head!” Whisper said as she grabbed a brick from the pile. She retrieved a wooden plaque from her shoebox, and then found a nail that was half sticking out of the floor. She bent over and grabbed it with her fingers, straining as she tried to pull it out of the wood.

  “Hey, quit pulling the place apart!” Elise said. “We need those nails to hold this shack together, you know!”

  “It's just one nail, and it's—hnng!—already sticking out! It's a safety hazard!”

  When Nightingale saw Whisper struggling, she gave the nail a bit of a telekinetic nudge. It slipped out of the floorboard and Whisper fell back onto her rear with an Oof!, but immediately picked herself back up.

  “Well, okay...” Elise said, uncertain as she felt the floorboard with her foot. It seemed like it was still sturdy enough. “But if this all comes crashing down on our heads in the middle of the night, I'm blaming you.”

  “Nightingale, hold this up!” Whisper said as she stood at the door, holding the plaque against it.

  “Roger!” Nightingale said as she grabbed the wood, and held it in place.

  Whisper positioned the nail at its top, and hammered it in with the brick. Once she was finished, she took a step back and wiped some sweat from her brow, hands on her hips as she admired her handiwork.

  The plaque read Whisper and Elise, carved a bit crudely into the wood with a pocketknife. A bit smaller (to compensate for the lack of space) beneath those words, Whisper had recently carved, and Nightingale!

  “It's official!” Whisper said excitedly as Elise joined them at the door. “We're not homeless anymore!”

  Chapter 23

  Building a Home

  “What sort of stuff are we looking for?” Nightingale asked as they approached the pit. They had decided to run and grab a few things before settling into their new home.

  “We've gotta find things to make a fireplace,” Elise answered.

  “We're actually making one?” Nightingale frowned thoughtfully, eyebrows pulling together.

  “Of course,” Whisper said as she scoped out a spot to jump into the clutter. “We gotta keep warm, that's the point of having actual solid walls and a roof!”

  “We just need a few things,” Elise said as Whisper jumped a small gap, landing safely on a mattress.

  “Hey, can we take this mattress, too?” she asked once she landed, dropping to her knees to feel it. “I think it's a good one!” She couldn't detect any rogue springs, stains, or peculiar odors.

  “I'm not sure it'll fit,” Elise said as she stepped onto it, followed by Nightingale. It looked big enough for two of them to lay comfortably.

  “Sure it will!” Whisper insisted, springing back up to her feet. “It'll just take up a lot of the standing space, but we don't need to stand while we're home, anyway.”

  “She has a point,” Nightingale said to Elise.

  “Don't tell me her little kid logic is rubbing off on you.” Elise looked between the two, and then shrugged with a bit of a sigh. “Oh, alright, but this means you'll need to find a smaller couch.”

  “Sleeping accommodations!” Nightingale and Whisper shared a high-five.

  “But,” Elise said as they headed deeper into the pit, “the fireplace comes first. We need some sort of fireproof box, like an oven. We need a metal tube long enough to reach the roof, and we need something sharp enough to cut a hole in both the roof and the oven.”

  “Won't cutting a hole in the roof ruin the shack for whoever moves in there after us?” Nightingale asked.

  “After us!?” Whisper exclaimed. “Yeah, right, I'm gonna die in this place! We're gonna make it so awesome, why would we ever move?”

  Elise laughed quietly at Whisper's comment, and shook her head in response to Nightingale's question. “If we do wind up moving in the future, we'll leave the fireplace. After these renovations, we'll have the most popular shack in the park.”

  “Property value!” Whisper and Elise shared a high-five.

  “We'll just have to make a couple trips today to carry all this stuff back,” Elise commented as they continued tromping through the clutter, looking all over for something resembling an oven. “I've never lifted an oven before, but I bet they're kind of heavy.”

  “I'm sure it'll be fine with the three of us carrying it,” Nightingale said. She wasn't worried about the weight at all, already planning to covertly lend her powers to their remodeling cause.

  She had briefly considered telling Whisper and Elise about her abilities, but an exceptionally violent bout of yelling from that voice one night convinced her otherwise. The police—or the Lab, or the Council, or whoever might want her back—didn't seem to be coming after her, but at least one clearly unstable individual seemed to want her blood. She decided that the fewer people who knew, the better; she didn't want anyone getting caught in any potential crossfire, and she didn't want to ask anyone to keep a secret.

  It made using her powers to help out a little trickier, but keeping them secret was still pretty easy. She chalked most things up to luck or natural talent, and that was the end of it.

  “Do you wanna go look for an oven?” Nightingale asked her bird, and it chirped and fluttered off her shoulder.

  “Does she know what an oven looks like?” Whisper asked as she watched the nightingale fly away.


  “I guess we'll find out if she starts leading us to old boots instead.”

  “We should split up,” Elise said. “Call out if you find something, okay?”

  “You got it!” Whisper said, and split off from the group.

  “Roger,” Nightingale replied and headed in the opposite direction of Whisper.

  She only walked for a few more yards, though. Once she looked back and saw Whisper and Elise far enough away, she knelt and touched the old desk she was standing on. She shut her eyes and concentrated, and images of the desk's past flew through her mind. She filed through them the way one would a Rolodex, just skimming for the relevant information—she didn't need to see the oak being manufactured, she didn't need to know that the desk had belonged to a once-successful lawyer, and she didn't need to know that it was thrown out after he was arrested for shady business practices.

  The information only took a few seconds to process. Soon she saw herself kneeling on its surface, one set of fingertips on its top, and then she could see everything it touched—and everything those items touched. The path spread like a web over the entire pit, until she finally spotted an oven. It was just a short distance away from where she was, but was buried under several feet of clutter. It looked to be in good condition, though.

  She focused on it in particular, and then swapped to her bird's-eye view. There wasn't anyone around the oven's location, so with another thought, it dug itself out and hurled the surrounding objects into the air in the process. She saw it fly a few feet into the air and land on its side, and then her bird swooped down to perch atop the long ventilation shaft attached to its surface.

  Nightingale opened her eyes and rose to her feet. She lifted her hand to her brow and looked toward where she sensed her bird, and spotted it in the distance. “Hey, I found one!” she called out, and then glanced back to see Whisper and Elise heading toward her.

  A few minutes later they were circling the oven, inspecting it as if they knew what they were looking for. The tall ventilation shaft—just a long piece of sheet metal wrapped into a wide tube and attached to the surface—looked about the right size for their shack. It was probably a few feet taller, but that just meant they would have a short chimney. The box itself was constructed of the same material, and they could see its interior through the open grate on its front.

  “I don't think this is an oven,” Elise said after a few more minutes, and after opening up the door and sticking her head in for a look.

  “Aw, why not?” Whisper asked, disappointed.

  “There's a grating for the ventilation shaft,” she said, slamming the thick steel door shut, “and also, it's got a ventilation shaft.”

  “So, what, ovens don't have ventilation shafts?”

  “I think this is an actual fireplace.” Elise crouched down and braced her shoulder against the shaft, and strained as she struggled to stand it upright. “Oof, it's heavy!” It hardly budged until Nightingale helped ease it onto its base with a mere glance. Elise leaned against its side and caught her breath.

  “You mean, someone threw out an entire fireplace?” Whisper asked, looking the thing up and down.

  “Yeah, I guess it was a portable one, or something. Good find, Nightingale.”

  “Well they probably tossed it out after they realized how heavy it is,” Nightingale said, giving the fireplace a firm shove. “It doesn't exactly feel portable.”

  “Let's take it back!” Whisper said, and immediately crouched down and grabbed its base to lift.

  “Hey, be careful!” Elise grabbed Whisper's shoulder. “It's really heavy, you'll hurt yourself.”

  “I think we'll be fine,” Nightingale said, crouching and grabbing its base. “Just each grab a side and lift slowly, okay?”

  Elise sighed and ran her fingers through her hair, shaking her head slowly. “This is gonna take forever to haul back there.” She grabbed an edge as well, along with Whisper, and then Nightingale counted them off.

  “Ready? Three... Two... One, lift!”

  Whisper and Elise strained and prepared for some heavy lifting, but were surprised at how easily the three of them were able to heave it off the ground. Nightingale kept her concentration steady, levitating the fireplace as easily as that old book.

  “I swear, this felt much heavier,” Elise insisted.

  “That's the power of teamwork!” Whisper exclaimed as the three of them carried it off.

  It was a peculiar sight, the three girls hauling a fireplace down the street, but the residents of White Rain Falls usually kept to themselves. Nobody gave them as much as a second glance, and the three simply carried on as if it was normal daily business for them.

  When they finally arrived home they set it down by the door, and then Whisper headed inside. “We need to go back for—” She cut herself off when she found two middle-aged men in their shack, setting up the blankets and looking through her shoebox. “Hey, that's my stuff!”

  Elise rushed in immediately after her, and Nightingale followed close behind. The intruders' clothes were exceptionally dirty and their unwashed odor filled the shack; Elise could tell just by looking at them that they weren't from around here. In all likeliness, they had wandered over from the city's outer ring.

  “What the hell are you guys doing, get outta here!” Elise yelled.

  “What do you mean get outta here,” the shorter man of the pair said as they stood up and faced the girls. “This is our place.”

  “It is not!” Whisper shouted, and pointed to the plaque on the door. “It's got our names on it, we moved in this morning!”

  The taller man looked at the plaque and shrugged. “Well I'm sure we can come to some sort of agreement.” A lascivious grin swept across his face, and he reached one hand out to caress Whisper's cheek. “You girls have a nice little nest here, I'm sure we can make it nice and cozy for all five of us.”

  Elise's temper instantly flared and bubbled over; her face burnt red, and Nightingale was a little frightened by her expression. She drew her pocketknife and flipped the blade open, then slapped the man's arm away from Whisper. She put herself between the two, clenching the knife tight in her fist and pointing it at the intruders. “You keep your %$#@!^& hands off my sister, or I'll cut your goddamn @^#% off, you hear me!?”

  “Oh, the girl's got a mouth on her,” the other man said, and he drew his own blade. He flipped the butterfly knife open with a bit of flair, and the taller man did the same. “Just the way I like 'em.”

  Elise's glare faltered suddenly, and she and Whisper each took a step back.

  “No, stop!” Nightingale shouted, and the two men looked at her. She clenched her quivering fists and took a step forward, and yelled some more. “Get outta here, both of you, and don't come back! Ever!”

  “Yeah, let's get outta here,” the taller man said as he folded his knife shut and pocketed it.

  The other man did the same, and the two headed for the door.

  “Leave your knives!” Nightingale added as they stepped outside, and they tossed their knives to the ground without thinking about it. She didn't want to take any chances, though, so she followed them outside a few steps, and continued shouting after them. “Go turn yourselves in to the police! Tell them whatever crimes you committed!” She figured it was a safe bet that they were both guilty of something.

  As they walked away, she heard one of them mutter, “We gotta find a cop, need to tell them we robbed that corner store.”

  When Nightingale entered the shack, she found Whisper and Elise embraced. Whisper was crying quietly into Elise's jacket, and Elise was stroking her sister's hair.

  “Shh, it's okay,” she said, her voice gentle and soothing. “We're fine.”

  “I thought they were gonna hurt us, Elise,” Whisper muttered through her quiet sobs.

  “It's okay,” Nightingale said. “They won't be back, I promise.”

  “Thanks, Nightingale,” Elise said, smiling and looking up at her. “I guess you're a pretty persuasive person w
hen you wanna be, huh?” She had a definitively knowing look in her gaze—she just wasn't sure what she knew.

  The way she regarded Nightingale, though, she got the sense Elise was figuring out that something was up... But were any of the rationalizations running through her mind plausible? No way she's considering that Nightingale actually has mysterious powers, right?

  Whisper interrupted her thought process by wrapping her arms around her waist in a sudden hug. “Thank you, Nightingale!”

  Nightingale gasped and then smiled, looking down at Whisper. She tousled her hair playfully, and then hugged her. “Hey, you're welcome. We gotta look out for each other, right?”

  Whisper nodded and took a step back, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. She took a deep breath to settle her nerves, and then gave Nightingale a very enthusiastic thumbs up. “Roger!”

  Chapter 24

  Renovations

  “What should we do with these?” Whisper asked, showing Elise the two black-steel butterfly knives the intruders had left behind.

  “Keep them out of reach of little girls,” Elise answered as she snatched them away. “These are dangerous, they're butterfly knives—they're not like my folding knife.”

  “Aw, come on, Elise!” Whisper pouted. “Don't you think it's time I had some way of protecting myself?”

  “That's what I'm for,” Elise answered. “If there's trouble, all you need to do is hide.”

  Whisper huffed and folded her arms.

  “I think she's right, Elise,” Nightingale said as she shut the door to their shack, and then shoved a sturdy block of wood through the latch she had just finished nailing to the door frame. She gave the door a firm shove to test the sturdiness of their new lock. “We need to be able to look out for ourselves, too.” She turned to face the others.

  “Yeah!” Whisper said. “I need to be able to look out for myself, too! What if I come home one day and you're not here, what am I gonna do if some pervs wanna try to kick us out again?”