I nodded. He led the way.
• • •
“If Mmuo isn’t able to alter the file, will they arrest us down here, do you think?”
“Me, but not you,” Saeed said. “If anything happens, leave.”
Minutes later, we were in an underground tunnel that led us to Special Collections and Archives. The man at the help desk had looked at us with such scrutiny when we’d asked about the Tower Records that I thought it was over right then and there. Then he’d said, “Right this way.” We followed him through the stacks to a glass door. He typed in a code, pushed the door open, scrutinized us again, and then held up a portable. He touched the screen and the face of another guard appeared, “You’ve got two, today,” the help desk man said.
“Ok,” the guard on his screen said. “Send them in.”
The pathway was long, the walls white. I shivered. It reminded me of the hallway in Tower 1. All it needed was the grey railing on the sides.
Only two people were allowed in at a time and clearance was tight. As we waited for the guide to check us out, I held my breath and looked through the second set of sealed glass doors into the sterile white room. The glass was most likely bullet-proof. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the ceiling. The guard only had his silver chair to sit in. I wondered how he withstood spending hours in this place.
He frowned at us. Then took Saeed’s library card and touched it to the flattest portable I’d ever seen. It looked like a hand-sized sheet of glass. It lit up a soft periwinkle then it turned green and said, “Prince Osama bin Abdullah of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and wife are allowed into Tower Records. One hour. No photos, please.”
• • •
I forgot about Saeed guarding the door. I didn’t think about whatever it was that Mmuo had to do to get me into the full system. I ignored the silver buttons that were security cameras stationed in every ceiling corner. I didn’t think about what would happen if anyone checked on us. I thought only about information. Answers. I thought back to my time in Tower 7 when I had their e-reader in hand. Before I began to heat.
These small stacks were arranged in an ancient format called Dewey Decimal. I’d studied it, so there was no need to ask the guard for help. I went to the card catalog in the middle of the room. I paused. “LifeGen Technologies,” I whispered. I knew the name, but this was the first time I brought it to my consciousness, the first time I’d spoken it aloud. I’d always called them the Big Eye, as had the other speciMen I knew. But this was the official name of the company behind the towers, the hand that grasped the lightning bolt.
I looked up Tower 7 and found much of what I’d already read in digital format. Histories, the mystery of The Backbone, architecture. I also found what we were looking for. A single volume containing the “speciMen files” of Tower 7.
I can read fast and retain just about every detail, so I didn’t need the pad and paper that Saeed gave me. As I read, I felt sweat between the feathers of my wings. Even though the room was kept at a cool temperature and low moisture level, I was burning up. My body felt as if it were on fire, but this time it was because I was burning so much as I processed what I read.
“What are you doing?!” Saeed hissed as I threw off my burka.
“Mmuo got us in, right? So, he had to also have done something to the security cameras,” I said. “I remember when I was escaping Tower 7. He’s thorough.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “I need air. It’s too hot.”
“Phoenix, what if . . .”
“We take the chance,” I snapped. “I need to breathe. This is a lot.”
Saeed bit his lip, glanced at the cameras on the ceiling and then quickly nodded. He picked up my burka and got it ready to throw back over me. “Ok.”
My eyes were watering from the stress of what I’d just read about Mmuo. Had they really peeled away all of his already special skin, injected it with some sort of sentient molecular shifting compound and then grafted it back on? I wiped my forehead as I read the most shocking part of his file. I glanced at Saeed.
“What?” he asked.
I shook my head and continued reading. He wouldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. But I could. I’d seen the red creature in the glass box in Tower 1. It had looked like a light dust until I broke the glass and it came out. Then it had shifted and solidified into a tall praying mantis-like creature. The more I read, the gladder I was that I’d freed it.
According to the information in Mmuo’s file the creature was an intelligent alien from Mars, befriended and then captured and brought to earth by a young man from the Mars colony. This young man had forced the creature to divulge its technological knowledge about molecular control and reorganization. This information was passed to Tower 7 scientists and then used to create Mmuo’s skin.
Mmuo had endured the peeling and grafting without any anesthesia. This was why he could slip through more than wood. He hated clothes because his skin wanted to see everything. I shuddered. Mmuo’s file marked him as “fugitive.”
The idiok baboons who could speak in sign language were having their brains tested and extracted. They’d been caught in the Congo and even then were able to fully communicate with their captors in perfect sign language. The Big Eye believed the baboons had quickly taught themselves the language in order to communicate with their captors. What got Tower 7 interested in them was the fact that they could tell the future. One of them, the only female, kept telling Tower 7 to stop doing what they were doing, that if they didn’t, they’d bring the end of the world. But no one listened to her. All the idiok were marked as “deceased,” most of them dying in Tower 7’s collapse.
Saeed was a weapon, as I was. In his file they called him, “The Seed.” (The play on his name was surely not a coincidence. The Big Eye scientists were known to have a sick sense of humor. Even The Backbone was created as a joke.) He was the prototype of the soldiers created to seed disaster zones after dropping nuclear bombs on enemies. “The Seed” were human killing machines who would go in and kill off survivors to make sure the enemies were fully defeated. Saeed didn’t know it but he was resistant to radiation, too. Or maybe he did know. Maybe this was one of the many ugly secrets he kept from me. Saeed could never die of cancer. His file marked him as “deceased.”
There was no file on the winged man. I hadn’t expected there to be. The winged man was someone that Tower 7 probably kept secret from even itself.
My file had its own LifeGen Technologies mini-booklet. My belly dropped. Why did I have so many pages? Why was I a company-wide speciMen, as opposed to just Tower 7? There was nothing more extraordinary about me than Mmuo or Saeed. Saeed was classified as a weapon, just like I was.
As I read, my legs grew weak, and my mind tried to grow cloudy. The information I learned was poison. How could I have no father? How could I be nothing but a cataclysm spurred by weapon engineers and scientists? I was nothing but the result of a slurry of African DNA and cells. They constructed the sperm and the egg with materials of over ten Africans, all from the West African nations of Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and Benin. Then they combined all that with DNA from Lucy the Mitochondrial Eve, the ten-year-old Ethiopian girl who carried the complete genetic blueprint of the human race. The girl who could remember every part of her life; the girl whom they tried to make immortal.
My eyes watered, but I read on. Something was coming. But I didn’t stop reading. An African American woman carried me to term, and when I was born, she wanted to keep me. They wouldn’t even let her kiss me goodbye. The woman had eventually gone mad and had to be committed to a psychiatric ward in New York, not far from Tower 7. The doctors could not figure out why she had grown so attached to me. They had told her nothing about the type of child I was, and they’d paid her and her family several millions of dollars; she’d rejected her portion after my birth. They gave the address of the psychiatric ward. I would remember it.
I died when I was 1 month old. I looked about two years old. I’d run a fever, begun to glow brightly, then simply burned up. Minutes later I came back, good as new, a naked two-year-old-looking brown child with a head full of black puffy hair. I don’t remember any of it. The Big Eye were so excited about me, and this excitement was expressed in the way my doctors and the scientists documented my case. They used words like “epochal,” “monumental,” and “revolutionary.” I could burn and then live again. A reoccurring small nuclear bomb. They raised me like an android, not a human. I hadn’t burned again until last year.
There was nothing about me sprouting wings. Not a word. I wiped my face and sniffed. “They didn’t predict that,” I whispered. I stretched my wings until they grazed the ceiling, loving them more than ever. “They hadn’t really predicted anything. They just let themselves think they did.” It was easy to see how they lost control of me.
I slammed my file shut. Then I opened it again and flipped to the very end. I was marked as “Fugitive and lethal. Acquire and manage before end of Solar Cycle.” Then there at the bottom of that page there was one small note. “Information to be used in tandem with HeLa, Tower 4, US Virgin Islands”.
“HeLa?” I whispered. “Interesting.”
Lastly, just before we ran out of time, I had a chance to skim the financial status of the towers. Billions and billions of dollars, euros, and yuan were poured into the towers each year. But here was the twist: even more money was earned through patents, research results, and other things that were called names like “Project X” and “Experiment 626” or simply coded numbers. I had very little time to read and process the information in the financial book but one thing did catch my eye. Eighty percent of the billions earned came from Tower 4 in the Virgin Islands, where Saeed had been sent when they thought he was dead. Tower 4 was the hub of the towers’ income. The money was accredited to the sale of 2839, 2840, 2842, 2843 and 2844. There was also a large portion accredited to “harvests.”
My mind was so full that I barely noticed when Saeed threw the burka over me. I wasn’t paying attention to the guard swiping Saeed’s card again. I didn’t hear him wish us a nice day. I barely felt Saeed’s bone grinding grip of my hand as we quickly, but not too quickly, exited the library. The taxi ride to the Pakistani restaurant twenty minutes away was a blur. Only when I spotted Mmuo at the table did I leave the ocean of Tower Records information that now lived in my head. I joined my two friends in a victory dinner.
Mmuo and I ate beef seekh kebabs and chicken biryani, and Saeed had only water. And at that corner table surrounded by gregarious immigrant men taking breaks from driving their taxies, I told them everything. We spoke of violence, revenge, revolution, and more violence. Mmuo stabbed at his kebabs with a fork and then ate the mangled pieces. Saeed had to hide his angry tears.
When it was all said, discussed, and done, we realized that our plan was the same. Tower 4 in the US Virgin Islands was going down next.
CHAPTER 14
Flight
The wind took me. It was warm like the breath of a kind yet wild beast. And it was fragrant from the city’s open night flowers and maybe The Backbone’s blooms, too. When I closed my eyes and inhaled the heady air, I saw the red of roses and the light soft purple of lilacs and hyacinth. In the sunny sky where no skyscrapers reached, I spread my wings and climbed higher.
I laughed deep in my chest and I wept. This was the first time I’d relaxed enough to do nothing but enjoy the sheer groundlessness of flight. Nothing was beneath me, and I was alive and reveling in it. The rush of air caressed my sensitive wings. I felt my blood reach every part of my body. The buoyancy of the warm air was like the hand of something that loved me.
I pumped my wings hard and flew higher. My cheeks ached from grinning so hard. Nothing was chasing me. Nothing was trying to imprison me. Below, Saeed and Mmuo waited on my return, talking about whatever it was they talked about when I was not there. Plans. Not for revenge, but for justice. For the first time in my existence, I felt balanced.
Was this what the birds felt every day? This joy? I hit a thermal, and I felt like I’d slipped outside of time; everything stopped and grew peaceful. The rush of air in my ears was gone, the gentle press of the wind ceased; I no longer had to flap my wings. The warm coil of air held me, gently. If there was a God, it was up here.
Slowly, I spiraled, up and up. Every part of me was alive, awake, in tune. Humming. And it was to the beat of the earth below and the stars above. We’d driven far enough from the city to escape the worst light pollution. So on top of all this, I could clearly see the stars. For the moment, I made complete harmonious sense. No matter the genetic selection, the forced fertilization, the careful cultivation, the skeletal molting. I made sense. I was natural. A child of The Author of All Things. I giggled in the silence. “Thank you,” I whispered.
In the distance I could see the city’s downtown skyscrapers, The Backbone standing tall and audacious, as if it belonged there more than the solid buildings around it. What must you have seen in Tower 7, I wondered for the first time. Of all the prisoners of Tower 7, only The Backbone had witnessed everything, because it grew through floor after floor. When I shined my light on it, the energy of its rage was the greatest, and it was no wonder. The Backbone knew all the secrets of Tower 7. It had borne witness. It had witnessed them make me. I want to know, too, I thought. How did they make me?
Mmuo once told me that his father was fond of this phrase, “When a student is ready, a teacher appears.” Mmuo’s father was an extraordinary man.
“Phoenix,” he said.
I screeched but I managed to hold my wings steady. Where had he come from? The winged man flew like an owl. His feathers and light clothing made not a sound as he flew above me.
After regaining my composure, I looked over at him for a long time. I wanted to frown at his invasion of my privacy, but that is the thing about the winged man, each and every time I saw him, instead of feeling fear, I felt relief. I pondered this for a moment. Was this what having a “father” felt like? The presence of relief? The presence of safety? I spoke the first question to pop into my mind.
“What do I call you?” I asked.
I could hear him chuckle, deep and amused. His voice was in my ear.
“Always, people must categorize those things that defy their understanding,” he said. “They must name. Without a name, how can one command or control?”
“That is not what I meant,” I said.
“We should fly lower,” he said. “We are not astronauts.”
He was right. I hadn’t noticed how high we were. The air here was thinning, and it was harder to breathe. I followed his lead, and we flew out of the thermal column, swooped close to the ground and caught another thermal.
“It is good to fly,” he said after several moments. “There is freedom in it. I’m a firm believer in freedom, Phoenix.”
“And justice,” I added. “You love justice.”
“I do.”
Saeed had collected several newsfeed articles written up about “the winged human speciMen on the loose” who stalked the skies and repeatedly came to the rescue of people in need—from people in car accidents, to mugging victims, to attempted suicides. They were calling him “Seven” because everyone knew he was one of the experiments who’d escaped from Tower 7. His escape had been caught on camera.
Mild speciMen, especially clones who’d emerged from the experiments too normal to
be of use, were a tiny accepted part of the American population. This was common knowledge. However, rogue extreme speciMen like myself, Mmuo, Saeed, and the winged man were fugitives. Why the winged man had decided to become the city’s vigilante was beyond me. True justice was in freeing those in the remaining towers.
“Call me what the newspapers call me. Seven,” he said. “That is not my name but it will help you with your problem.”
“Ok,” I said.
“I wanted to speak to you alone,” he said. “Before you three leave for the island.”
“Aren’t you coming with?”
“No.”
“Why?! We need you!”
“There is something I must do here,” was all he said.
I frowned, fighting back tears of frustration. We’d all assumed the winged man, Seven, would know of our plan (the way he always knew how and when to find us) and come with. If he didn’t go with, then maybe it wasn’t a good idea. Maybe.
“Phoenix, you all must go,” he said. “You will find something there. I need to find something here, too.”
“Is it in The Backbone?”
“No,” he said. “But you are right to think in that direction. It is not done here with Tower 7. But above all things, above what I find here and what you three find there and what the others find—”
“Others?”
“You need to find that which is in you,” he finished, ignoring my question.
“What? I don’t understand.”
“You didn’t understand how to slip, either,” he said. “But you could do it.” He paused. “Why do you want to destroy the rest of the towers?”
“To free the others.”
“But you don’t know what lives in them.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I know enough. I know the specialties of all the towers. I have read about them. I had access to the information. The Big Eye were so stupid, they thought I would remain content, so they never really worried about what I read.” I considered how right they’d been for the two years of my life. Until Saeed and the apple. “Freedom. We all should have it.”
The Book of Phoenix Page 16