Flight (44 page)

Even though she knew that it would be costly
both in terms of time and her reserves of energy, Prissi could not
resist the urge to keep climbing until she could see the water on
both sides—the lacy green of Long Island Sound and the limitless
gray of the Atlantic Ocean—that made the land below an island.
Looking at the water to her north, Prissi considered whether she
should alter her course and go to Cold Spring Harbor where, a
half-century before, her mother had worked at Centsurety. But, as
she looked at the green paisley of coves and bays, she guessed that
it could take hours, hours which she didn’t have, to find the
former meta-mutational lab. Deciding that it made more sense to
rendezvous with Allen Burgey, Prissi turned her head back toward
the east. She would find Burgey and insist that he tell her
everything he knew about her mother and those long ago discoveries.
If, after all that, she still didn’t understand what was going on,
or couldn’t come up with a plan to stop it, then she would give up
on her quest and start figuring out how to get back to the safety
of Africa.

Within seconds of thinking about Africa and
the comfort of its familiar dangers, Prissi was fighting a stitch
in her side. She spread her wings so that she could glide while she
massaged the burning coal of knotted muscle. When the fire remained
hot, she closed her eyes and slowed her breathing to the slightest
sigh, then rhythmically kneaded, caressed, and kneaded again. When
the pain finally drifted away, like the long linger of summer
thunder, and she opened her eyes Prissi found that she had drifted
uncomfortably close to the ground. Climbing back to a safe
altitude, the teener’s body soldiered along well enough and her
mind was so occupied with splinters and shards of thoughts and
ideas, that stopping didn’t even enter her consciousness.

It wasn’t until a charley horse in the arch
of her right foot suddenly set her thrashing and screaming that the
folly of ignoring her plan for regular rest became clear. She
slip-slid through the air as the tips of her toes strained to touch
the heel of her foot. She pushed the ball of her right foot against
the ankle bone of her left leg trying to break the muscle
contraction, but the only result was that she plummeted fifty
meters.

“Suffer! But, fly!”

Her screams helped to re-orient her. She told
herself that despite the excruciating pain, no one died from a
charley horse, but they did die from falling out of the sky. Prissi
moaned in pain and screamed in frustration that another body part,
not just her wing, was conspiring against her. She canted her wings
and plummeted as fast as she could without totally losing control.
As she plunged back to earth, she searched for the best place to
land. It wasn’t until she looked that she realized that she had
been so lost in her thoughts that she had passed not only into an
area of sparsely populated outer villages, but also that she had
gotten away from the worn cracked snake of the expressway. The
houses swooping up to meet her were dilapidated. The street they
bordered was a narrow lane of crazed asphalt sprouting tussocks of
weeds. Despite all the poverty and neglect, Prissi consoled herself
that she didn’t see any of the burned out homes that characterized
so many poorer neighborhoods where pro- and anti-green factions had
fought their battles.

The crippled teener took a hurried look to
see if there were a flat roof close by, but all the houses were
gabled. Although she wasn’t eager to land in the road, she wasn’t
about to attempt a landing on a peaked roof while one foot was
twisted in a knot. Looking ahead, she decided that she would touch
down in the middle of the next intersection. At least, at a
crossroads, if trouble came, she would have four ways to
escape.

Prissi landed hard on her left foot, twisted
something, yelped, hopped, yelped, hopped again, and came to a
graceless stop. Even as she was turning around to see if her
appearance had drawn any undesirable attention, Prissi hobbled over
to the worn, chipped curb. She stepped up on the pocked asphalt
using just the toes of her feet. After getting her balance, the
winger slowly lowered her heels toward the road’s surface. The pain
was excruciating, but by the time Prissi had stretched her arches a
fifth time, she could tell the cramp was starting to loosen up.

Even before the pain had subsided by half,
Prissi started to laugh—partly, in relief and, partly, in
reliving.

It had been the end of the first week of
cross country practice. In the middle of the night she had been
ripped from sleep by the very same cramp in her arch as she was now
experiencing. Shrieking in pain, she had flung herself from the
lower bunk and crashed into Nasty Nancy’s desk. As Prissi had
thrashed about in the dark, shoes, styli, mugs and music had flown
around the cramped room like shrapnel.

Prissi shrieks were joined by Nasty Nancy’s
terrified screams at whatever horror had gotten into their
pitch-black room. The wild teener ripped open the door, staggered
into the dusky lighted hallway, and banged against a wall. She
grabbed the cramping foot, staggered, hopped, hoped, then fell
against the opposite wall and slumped to the floor.

Moaned.

Wailed.

Writhed.

Then, heard the clicks and slams of hallway
doors and frightened whispers of floor mates.

The slap of bare feet and the calm honeyed
tones of Ms. Hepenny.

“You’re fine, dear. Just fine.”

Felt soft fingers on her cheeks, stroking,
stroking, then, suddenly squeezing hard and prizing open Prissi’s
tightly clenched jaw. Something soft and fuzzy—a sock, no, a towel
stuffed into her mouth. Again, the dulcet tones belying the
violence used to open her mouth, “You’re fine, dear. Just
fine.”

Not fine.

Agony.

“Where are your medications?”

Then, a hall floor fish-eye lens view of Miss
Tronce’s famous teal chenille slippers. Scuffing rapidly.
Stopping.

“What? What?” in Tronce’s best, and most
incontrovertible, bark, “What is going on?”

“Langue’s had a seizure. Petit mal, I’d
guess. I’ve first-aided her.”

Thrashing about. Shaking her head. Grabbing
her foot.

“Oh my, here comes another one.”

Ms. Hepenny stooping to provide more
help.

A bellowed, “Move.”

Miss Tronce on her dock piling knees catching
Prissi’s flailing foot as neatly as a polar bear his salmon.
Holding the ankle tightly in the dense warmth between her massive
upper arm and her more massive breast shelf.

Pushing…omagod…bending…ohohmagod…pushing…ohohohmagod…pushing until
Prissi’s pain turned into shooting stars, an Independence Day
finale…omaaa…and, then, as suddenly as it had come, like summer
hail, the cramp was gone.

Tronce’s growl of satisfaction.

“Climax and curtain, girls. Back. To.
Bed.”

Tronce, in a way that defied both age and
gravity, brought both herself and Prissi to a standing
position.

“To bed, girls. Now.”

Holding her by the arm, Tronce walking her
back toward her own apartment. When Prissi hesitated, Tronce
ordering, “Walk, Langue, walk.”

Tronce’s living room. A smallish room with a
dangerous maze of book stacks. Petra after the quake. Victorian
deep red walls fighting the good orderly fight against dozens of
parrot-colored Fifth World paintings. Tronce making Prissi step on
a russet brick used as a door stop.

“Step, lower, stretch. Again. Good. Keep
going.”

Prissi worked.

Tronce disappeared.

Came back with a large mug of warm milk.

“Milk for calcium. Warmth for comfort.”

Pointed a breadstick-sized finger at
Prissi.

“If you’re going to run, you’ll need lots of
calcium to keep from cramping. When it happens again, as it will,
if it’s your arch, get all of your weight on your toes. If it’s a
calf, point your toes away and then pull them back as far as you
can. If it’s the back of your thigh, well, just scream until you
pass out. It’ll make you feel better to do something violent.”

Milk finished, Prissi hovered. Something deep
stirred by Tronce’s no nonsense care.

Tronce, again, pointed her finger, like God
to Adam, “Be gone. Remember, never fear pain. Fight it. Or, accept
it.”

A small tic appeared in one corner of Miss
Tronce’s thin-lipped mouth and Prissi realized that she was seeing
a smile.

Half-way back to her dorm room, Prissi had
felt a twinge in her foot. She had slowed her pace and lightened
her step, but only for a step or two. The rest of the way she had
stomped. And had felt safer than she had at any time since her
mother’s death.

Prissi brushed the thoughts of Miss Tronce
away from her eyes and kept stretching her arch until the pain was
gone. Instead of immediately returning to the air, however, she
decided to walk until she was sure the cramp really was gone.

Although there were cars and truclets in a
few of the driveways she passed, there didn’t seem to be anyone
home in any of the houses. As her fingers unwove the snarls in her
hair, the teener wondered what people did in such a desolate place
so far from the city. Since Prissi had been in Noramica for less
than three years and that mostly in the environs of Manhattan and
Dutton, she only had a cursory knowledge of how the rest of the
country lived. If she were in Burundi, she would intuitively know
whether a village was empty because of war, disease, pestilence or
because the villagers were in their fields planting or
harvesting.

Here, the silence and emptiness around her
carried no information. It could be that all of the children were
in a daycarium or school and every parent was working. Or, as
easily, a plague could have wiped out the inhabitants. Prissi
remembered walking with her father into a village just west of
Mount Heha at the end of the dry season and finding all the
inhabitants dead. It had only taken seconds to know that they had
died from dysentery from drinking mud water after the government
troops had stolen all of their LifeStraw© water purifiers.

After walking less than two blocks, Prissi
flared her wings, did a dozen deep knee squats, stretched her
calves and arches and flew.

Once the village was behind her, Prissi felt
better; however those good feelings weren’t buoyant enough to get
her much more than ten meters off the ground. As a result, she
wasn’t high enough to get a fix on the Long Island Expressway.
Again, she considered activating her mypod, but quickly put that
thought aside as she remembered the orange-winged men who had
attacked her twice already. She now knew for sure who had sent the
blue jays and knew that they had intended to kill her, but the
orange wingers and their less than deadly behavior was still a
puzzle. Prissi told herself that it had to be Dr. Baudgew behind
those attacks, but she couldn’t understand what his ends might be.
However, whatever they were, it was better to stay off the grid and
deal with the problems lack of information would bring than to risk
another attack. She wished that she had thought to take a compass
when she and her father had fled their apartment. In Africa, she
had carried a compass more often than she had worn a watch. Now,
she didn’t know what to do beyond looking ahead, picking a point,
flying to it and picking another point.

Twenty minutes later, Prissi was back on the
ground digging the tips of her thumbs into a knot in her right
calf. Fifteen minutes after she had gotten herself back in the air,
she again was forced to descend. This time the only place to land
was on a hillside covered in small trees, low scrub and Gordian
knots of raspberry briers. In the few seconds the floundering girl
had to make her decision of where to land, after the muscles
controlling her right wing started spasming like an eel out of
water, Prissi opted to suffer the briers rather than smash into a
tree. By the time she got herself stopped, extricated from the
tenacious thorns, back on her feet and standing upon a small
outcrop of blue-gray rock, where she could massage her wing
muscles, she was having second thoughts about missing the trees.
She looked back at the thick trail of feathers caught in the briers
and wondered how those losses would affect her flying.

After the cramp was gone, even though the sun
was drifting lower, Prissi stood on the rock and took her time
smearing away the blood on her legs and arms. Even after her wounds
were tended, the teener remained motionless and just stared at the
sky. For the very first time since she had fledged, Prissi Langue
was afraid to get back into the air. She didn’t trust her wings,
nor her muscles, nor her lungs. Even though daylight was fast
fading and she knew that she had no option but to fly, that
knowledge failed to free her frozen feet.

Prissi was still staring at the sky, a
darkening vastness where those she most loved had gone, when a
flock of cedar waxwings landed in the brier patch. Prissi’s gaze
drifted down to watch the small brown and yellow birds. Their black
masks, cockily crested heads, and intriguing habit of passing the
last of the winter dried berries back and forth among one another
made Prissi think of a band of merry thieves. Her old friend Jiffy
and her new friends, Yoli and Lavie La, too, had shared what they
had with her.

As Prissi continued to watch the waxwings,
her breathing calmed and some of her courage began to return. When
the flock of birds suddenly flew off, Prissi knew that it was time
for her, too, to go.

For a third time, the rested traveler stared
at her mypod. She knew she could turn it on and in less than a
minute know exactly where she was and how far she had to go. The
whole reason she had dumped her old mypod and bought the one
strapped to her wrist was so that she could use it. But, she wasn’t
positive that the gap-toothed man in Spicetown hadn’t done
something to the mypod so that she could be traced. More worrisome,
she didn’t know how the orange-feathered wingers had found
her…twice. Plus, as far as she knew, anyone asking for a location
fix from out in the middle of nowhere might trigger some kind of
rescue effort. She didn’t need to be sitting in a police station
somewhere answering questions from suspicious hawks while malignant
forces gathered round.