Flight (21 page)

As she flew farther east, she began to climb,
first past one hundred fifty and then two hundred meters. The EAT
dropped to 14 degrees. Her cheeks felt like they were on fire from
the cold. Two hundred fifty meters was the highest she had ever
flown and almost twice as high as her teener permit allowed. The
view was spectacular. Looking east, she could see Long Island with
its scores of islands, formed from where the waters had risen along
the low lying areas, looking like an immense bolt of polka dotted
material. Far to the east she thought she could see an intense,
unbroken green which she guessed was the Pale, the area of
wilderness that grew up after the Great Fire ended the Ticklish
Situation. Prissi flew east until she could see the details of
broken windows and rusty stains on the abandoned JFK airport towers
and terminals jutting out from the waters on the northeast corner
of Jamaica Bay.

After checking the time, Prissi made a
sweeping turn away from the sun and to the south and west until she
was flying above the coast line. Looking down, she witnessed a
giant school of fish, changing shape like an amoeba, as it followed
the contours of the shore. When she got to Sheepshead, she dropped
down to one hundred meters and turned north. She flew over Prospect
Park, then, crossed back into Manhattan by flying over the triple
towers of the Brooklyn Bridge.

From Prissi’s height, the southern tip of
Manhattan looked as if it had been destroyed by bombs. Twenty-story
high piles of interlocked debris were the cairns created when Wall
Street skyscrapers had fallen. They reminded Prissi of the drip
castles she had made with the sands on Lake Tanganyika’s shore.
Dropping down to twenty meters, Prissi skirted the southern edge of
the island, dismissed the urge to swing out to Liberty, and began
flying north along the west edge of the island just above the wide
brown swath of the Hudson River.

By the time she flew over the Holland Tunnel
Memorial—one of the early victims of the rising water—Prissi wasn’t
sure that she could make it to the datarium. Fifteen seconds later,
the exhausted girl wasn’t sure she could even make it back to the
relative safety north of the levee. Prissi berated herself for
being so stupid and for pushing the limits with her high flying
antics. She veered right so that if she faltered, she would be over
land, but a forced landing in the area beneath her was almost as
dangerous, although of a very different type, than being forced
down over the Hudson. Prissi’s growing fear began to crowd out her
goal. The teener fought the urge to pant. She fought the urge to
give in to the cold that had found its way deep into her bones. She
pushed back the notion that her wings were too heavy to lift. She
yelled at herself that she wasn’t tired. She whispered to herself
to set a goal. Ten more beats. She made that. She paused for one
beat to rest, lost altitude, then set another goal. Eight beats.
She made that, too, but her wings were quivering and her altitude
had dropped to less than five meters. Six more. Prissi could see
the wavering shadow of the levee just two blocks ahead. Four. Five.
Three more beats….

When Prissi landed on the broken surface of
the Houston levee, she landed hard. She caught a toe, started to
plunge forward, but managed to avoid disaster by grabbing a corner
of a levee bench. She spread her wings and leaned forward so that
her elbows rested on her knees. Over the next three minutes her
breaths went from white hot, to fiery red, to warm. As the pain and
nauseating fear slowly subsided, it was replaced with a pride that
made her muscles glow like after a deep tissue massage. She had
made it. She unclipped her hair and worked shaky fingers though the
damp tangled strands.

To be sure she was okay and to give the last
of her fear a chance to evaporate, Prissi decided to walk for a
couple of blocks before making the last leg of her flight.

She was taking slow steps on Eighth Avenue,
just north of Walker Park, when three keds with dirty hands and
over-sized clothes came lurching out of an alley and across her
path. Prissi guessed that they weren’t more than twelve or thirteen
years old. With their glazed eyes, soggy plastic bags and
over-sized sneaker shuffle, she guessed they had to be high on
ethanol. Prissi considered veering toward the other side of the
street, but she figured that, even if they wanted to roust her,
their reflexes were so moked that they wouldn’t be able to do much
more than the shuffling they were doing. The boys stopped as soon
as they realized Prissi was alone. As they stared at one another,
the shortest boy, who had greasy black strands of hair framing a
wraith-thin face and piggy eyes, which now were fighting off the
vacancy he had spent the morning acquiring, scuttled sideways. The
other two, featureless in the shadows of their hoods, reluctantly
dropped their bags of dreams and took two steps closer to Prissi in
an attempt to herd her toward the building. Despite her total
exhaustion just minutes before, Prissi could feel a runnel of
adrenaline begin flowing through her body.

The waifwraiths took another half-step. Their
quarry bared her teeth, barked, and surprised them by leaping
toward the building rather than away. Prissi planted her left foot
high on the wall, pushed and flapped. She dug her right foot into
the rough brownstone and flapped again. By the third flap, she was
three meters in the air. The boys jumped forward to catch her
heels, but their coordination was gone. They crashed into one
another and then into the wall. Prissi took another step up the
wall, then pushed off with both feet, dropped her right wing to
turn and began flying up the avenue.

She barked and barked until her throat grew
sore. One girl. Three boys. Bad odds for odd badboys. The chemical
rush was more than enough to sustain her all the way to her
destination. Coming up Fifth Avenue, she climbed, flipped a double
somersault, dove, and came in at such a steep angle for her landing
that her momentum bounced her up a half-dozen of NYPD’s venerable
steps. She yiked twice after completing that foolish stunt.

Because she was intent on picking at a new
excrescence on her nose, Prissi didn’t notice Nasty Nancy getting
off a uni-bus until her roomie yodeled. When Nancy got closer and
saw Prissi’s bright eyes and ruddy cheeks, she asked, “What
happened?”

“Had to beat up some boys.”

“Life’s little joys. Where?”

Prissi pointed south

Nancy interpreted that to mean that Prissi
didn’t want to talk about it any more, and Prissi interpreted her
normally self-absorbed roomie’s questions to mean that Nancy didn’t
want to talk about why she had come on a bus instead of flying.
Prissi kept her eyes averted from Nancy’s wings because she knew if
she looked, she’d see that Nasty Nancy Sloan’s growing weight had
finally resulted in her pinions being clipped.

“Let’s go find Centsurety.”

They climbed past the lions—Patience and
Fortitude—now so worn by the patience and fortitude of New York’s
air and water pollution that they were more like the smooth shape
of sheep rather than their predators. Just inside the datarium’s
massive doors, they paused to look in the display cases. Prissi had
been to NYPD many times, but every time she passed the display
cases, she stared in amazement at the diversity of the books that
used to be published—books as small as her thumb and as large as a
desktop.

Leading Nancy back through the library’s maze
of corridors, Prissi told her friend about the pix Pequod Jones had
shown her. When they arrived at the datarian’s desk, Prissi
returned Jones’ smile with her brightest eyes and a smile twice the
size of the old cherub’s as she explained why she needed Nancy’s
help. Prissi thought her cheek stretching product might be losing
its power because it took Jones a long minute before he nodded his
approval.

Although Prissi herself had made her first
acquaintance of a microfiche reader two days before, it only took
her a couple of minutes to teach Nancy what she had learned about
operating the ancient, temperamental machines. Prissi was a little
surprised when Nancy proved to like the archaic technology as much
as she herself did. Part of the attraction was the novelty of the
clunky moving parts of the reader itself, but a bigger part of the
charm for Prissi was looking at the grainy images before her. She
could almost feel the poor quality paper that once was used to
deliver the newz. Taking a break for her research, she scanned back
and forth to see how many pages of print were contained in one
day’s edition, then, multiplied that by the circulation figure she
noticed on the masthead. The number astounded her. It was hard for
her to fathom the resources of lumber, water, electricity,
petroleum and who knew what else to produce 61 million pages of
newzprint a day, three hundred sixty five days a year—and that just
for one city. It was while calculating those resources that Prissi
noticed that the logo she was familiar with, “All the Newz Fit to
Cast,” had once been something different.

Their search was slow, mostly boring, but not
totally unproductive. A series of small articles in The Times
surfaced. Nancy found a research note in a mutancy journal. There
were two Cygnetic foundation filings.

Three hours after they started, the girls
took a break to put together what they had found. Not without a
couple of roomie arguments, the girls came to the conclusion that
Centsurety had been a small research-oriented company, or more
accurately, institute, which had been funded with a series of
grants awarded by Cygnetic and the Fflowers Family Foundation. As
Dr. Smarkzy had said, Centsurety had been based in Cold Spring
Harbor on Long Island, but was not directly affiliated with the
famous research center located there. The research notes indicated
that Centsurety scientists were pushing against some of the more
intractable limits of mutancy, including delayed fledging.
Centsurety’s director, a man named Richard Baudgew used the phrase
“meta-mutancy” to describe a process of combining the major organ
systems of different organisms. Centsurety was waiting a license to
pursue research in that area.

A later article in The Times reported a
whistleblower had provided documentation to suggest that some of
the science being done by Centsurety was going beyond the ethical
limits established by the Bio-ethics Standards Taskforce. In
response, BEST had arranged for two Yale bio-ethicists to
investigate the work that the Centsurety scientists were doing;
however an explosion and fire had gutted the facility two days
before what was supposed to be an unannounced visit. Two
scientists, Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby had died in the fire. An
investigation concluded that the catastrophe had started with a
pinhole leak in a tank of hydrogen.

It was Nancy who found a pix published in
Newsday showing a group of mostly young scientists hovering close
to a grinning Joshua Fflowers. She poked Prissi who was leaning
close to the screen of the reader next to her to take a look.

“Do you recognize any of these?”

Prissi studied the fuzzy image of a number of
people standing around in a laboratory. In addition to the woman
she thought might be her mother, some of the other faces were
familiar because of the picture she had been given by Pequod Jones.
Joshua Fflowers was the only person named. The others were noted as
his colleagues. The accompanying article described rumors, denied
by Fflowers, that Centsurety scientists had made a breakthrough in
delayed fledging.

“A couple.”

“Look at Fflowers. He certainly looks smug,
doesn’t he? Handsome, too. Like someone else in the family. What
did your dad say about Fflowers?”

“He said he had seen him a couple of times at
conferences, but didn’t know him, but when I mentioned Centsurety,
he blew a mother chip. Told me to get interested in something
else.”

First, Nancy chortled, “There’s nothing like
a parental no to motivate.”

“He’s hiding something.”

Nasty Nancy patted Prissi on the arm, “Just
like his daughter.”

Nancy’s tone suggested that she was getting
ready to drop one of her patented brain bombs.

“Meaning?”

“You and…ta-da…Jack Fflowers. You’ve been so
coy about your budding…friendship… with the grandson of the
planet’s nearly richest man. What happened after we had our
tiff?”

Prissi knew that what Nasty Nancy was really
asking was for Prissi’s to tell hery that what had happened at
Bissell wasn’t a big deal, but the way Prissi saw it, the fact that
she had invited Nancy to help her said that all was forgiven. She
wasn’t inclined to do or say any more than that. Instead, she gave
Nancy a roomie rap on her shoulder

“I don’t want you overwhelmed with joy for
me. It ain’t like that.”

“Ah, protecting me from love, the one emotion
I can’t handle—unlike jealousy, envy, hate, anger and
depression.”

Prissi forced herself to laugh, then, stared
hard at Nancy.

“What?”

“I’m trying to make a decision.”

Prissi looked at her friend, looked down at
the information Nancy had helped her gather, and allowed herself to
be overcome by the events of the last twenty-four hours. She
mentally shuffled through the images of her mother’s death
certificate, Jack’s appearance, his disappearance, her father’s
strange behavior, the attack by the keds before she asked, “If you
had been Judas, what would have been your price?”

“You mean to reveal to the entire Dutton
student body that you broke your personal code of cynical honor and
became enamored of a rich, arrogant Bissellian?”

“Something like that.”

“I wouldn’t. I couldn’t…even if I wanted to.
I’m a member of AA.”

Prissi nodded, “Amours Anonymous.”

Nancy’s body contorted in an exaggerated
slump.