Flight (61 page)

Prissi’s actions take Joe by surprise. As a
result, he isn’t prepared for the crash. As the bass boat’s
momentum carries it up the bank, instead of jumping free, Joe
reflexively holds on. When the boat flips over Joe is caught
beneath it. Looking down, Prissi sees Joe’s situation, but commands
herself not to care. The wingers are after her, not Joe. She slides
hand over hand until she is close enough to the trunk of tree that
the underbrush thins out. She drops down safely. As soon as her
feet touch ground, she starts looking for a way through the woods.
She knows she needs to hurry. The wingers are no more than fifty
meters from shore, but Prissi also knows that she must be careful.
She’s already been caught in the brush once. She keeps her wings
furled as tightly as she can before she begins to twist and turn
through the dense thorny maze.

When she had escaped by flying between the
ships on the Hudson and had climbed down the rabbit hole to the
subway and, even when she was fighting the zies, Prissi had been
confident that her wing size and shape gave her an advantage over
her foes. Now, the forest is so thick and intertwined, and she
feels so weak, that she can’t think of any advantage that she might
have. In fact, she is feeling the same helplessness as on the night
when she crashed, but, despite her despair, she has no notion of
quitting. In so much of what she has done, especially in her
sports, the fact that she knew she was going to lose had never ever
given her an excuse not to compete as hard as she could.

Semi-crouched, with her wingtips just short
of touching the ground, Prissi swings herself around the trunk of a
tree so that she can take a glance backward. The wingers have
beached further upriver from Olewan’s boat and already are climbing
the bank. Prissi wriggles forward another ten meters before she
turns around again. As she has guessed, the wingers are paying no
attention to Joe. She is their sole prey. For the first time in her
life, Prissi wishes that her wings were not the silver and red that
she had had to beg her father to approve. If only she had been
smart enough to get brown wings, then she might have a chance.
Instead of hoping that she can make her way far enough into the
woods to find a trail and escape, she could have been looking for a
place to hide her brown among all the other browns in the woods.
The girl twists and turns, snags a wing, slows and carefully frees
herself.

Suddenly, for some reason which she cannot
explain, Prissi feels incredibly calm. It seems to her that
everything is moving in slow motion. The thorn she has between her
fingers has a brilliant clarity. Its tip is a rosy ivory which
darkens to a chocolate brown at its base. The shape reminds her of
a sliver of moon. She watches her fingertips turn pink when she
squeezes the thorn’s base. She works the barb free from a feather
whose vane is speckled with small glistening cabochons of river
spray. She studies the twig that gives birth to the thorn and sees
where buds are struggling to break free into bloom. Her eyes follow
the twig back to where it joins a branch. She is fascinated by its
latticed architecture…until it suddenly comes to her that she is
being chased by two men who want to kill her. The shell-shocked
girl wonders how much time she’s wasted studying the thorn, but she
has no sense of whether it’s been a milli-second or a minute. When
Prissi turns her head, she sees the two wingers are only a
half-dozen trees away. She lunges forward and begins to wrestle her
way through the woods. Within seconds the feeling of preternatural
calm returns. Prissi sees the world around her as a giant maze.
But, instead of feeling trapped or confused, she feels like she has
a perfect lucidity as to where to put her foot, what branch to hold
with which hand, and how to twist her body so that she can slip
under or around the next impediment.

Joe is flabbergasted when the two wingers
pass him by. Because he sees himself as Prissi’s rescuer, the
teener can’t understand why her attackers are not confronting him.
The idea that they consider him either non-threatening or
ineffectual enrages the boy; however, at the same time, he feels
much relief that he has been ignored.

From his limited vantage point beneath the
overturned boat, Joe watches the two sets of black ankle-high
frylon boots scramble up the bank and disappear. As soon as the
coast is clear, Joe looks around for some kind of weapon. He thinks
that if the wingers are engrossed with catching Prissi that he
might be able to sneak up behind them and…. The end of the thought
won’t come. He’ll sneak up on them and …. Joe finally tells himself
that the reason that he can’t think what to do is because he hasn’t
found a weapon. Obviously, a rock would call for a different
strategy than a club. Joe scours the riverbank, sees a number of
fist-sized rocks, and decides that throwing them from a distance
makes more sense than trying to get close enough to hit someone
with a club. As he gathers his arsenal, his thoughts go back to the
rocks and pebbles that he threw at Adrona and Seka—rocks thrown in
anger…and futility.

It is not until the boy climbs to the top of
the riverbank that his plan falls apart. The woods are far too
dense to accurately throw a rock more than a few meters. If he is
going to be of any use to Prissi, Joe realizes that he is going to
have to attack from close quarters. As the young Fflowers looks
around for something he can use as a cudgel or spear, the beached
boat of the wingers catches his eye. With a relief he refuses to
acknowledge, Joe considers whether he might be more help from
farther away. Joe drops back down the bank to gauge how much the
trees overhang the river. Reassured by the protection the trees’
canopy provides from an overhead attack and how little room to
maneuver there would be for a large winger trying to fly under the
drooping boughs, Joe grabs the bow of the bass boat and begins to
lift it. Once it is high enough, he gets himself underneath and
pushes up until the boat flips right side up. A minute later he has
the bass boat tied to the wingers’ launch. He jumps into the launch
and makes sure that he knows how to operate it. Leaving the motor
running in neutral, Joe climbs back up the bank. He can make out
flashes of orange and knows that the wingers are too deep into the
woods to be able to easily fly out. The boy cups his hands and
yells to Prissi, “Three keds.” Hoping that she will understand and
her attackers won’t, Joe yells his instructions a second time,
drops down the bank, jumps into the launch and heads downstream
with the bass boat towed behind. Joe keeps close to the shore and
under the protection of the overhanging canopy as he speeds
away.

It takes Prissi only a second to translate
keds as “kilometers downstream.” She snorts in derision that her
escape could be as simple as making her way three kilos downstream.
Her legs are quivering in exhaustion and her ribs feel like someone
has buried a stone spearhead between them. Her pursuers, who she is
sure, are the same ones who attacked her on the West Side Highway
and the Hudson, are using the same tactics that they used before.
They have split apart so that they can flank her.

As her enemies have gotten closer, Prissi has
had premonitions when she is sure that a bullet is speeding toward
her. She has imagined how, in the split second before she dies, as
her body is slammed forward by the projectile’s force, she will
hear the flat whine announcing her death. After her last moment
comes and goes four times, Prissi begins to wonder whether her
assailants are armed.

Guns in Africa were ubiquitous. A ten-year
old boy or girl who had not pulled the trigger on a weapon was the
exception. Even though guns in Noramica are illegal and extremely
rare, Prissi has just assumed that the wingers who were chasing her
would have them. Now, as she threads her way through the kudzu and
bullbrier snarled woods, she tries to decide whether she hasn’t
been fired on because the wingers don’t have guns or because they
want to capture, not kill, her.

In the middle of slinking around a tree trunk
covered in poison ivy, Prissi stops dead. If it was Schecty’s men
who wanted to kill her and Schecty worked for Joshua Fflowers as
Olewan thought, then these two must work for Dicky Baudgew. But
what is puzzling is why, if both groups want the same thing, the
crystals around her neck, why does one group want to capture her
and the other to kill her?

Prissi is navigating her way through a narrow
thorny crease between two ancient uprooted swamp maples when her
foot slips on a patch of mud. As her leg slides out from under her,
her arms snap out to recover her balance. The girl lists, balances
precariously for a split second, then, falls. Like Br’er Rabbit in
the brier patch, Prissi is trapped in the clasp of the brush. She
immediately knows that she won’t be able to free herself in time to
escape. She can feel hundreds of small sharp talons holding her in
place. As was true just minutes before when Joe had to help to free
her, she knows that struggling will only make things worse. Knows
it, but doesn’t care. She cannot lie still and do nothing while the
two wingers close in. Prissi arches her back, kicks her feet and
finds a black satisfaction as she makes her situation worse. She is
still thrashing when a winger grabs her hair and commands her to
stop struggling. In response, Prissi’s body goes deathly still, but
her mouth opens and a low wail, like the last long note of a dirge,
comes out, hangs for a second, and, then, like fog, drifts across
the forest.

Prissi’s assailants are well-prepared. The
amount of gear they keep removing from their paks and pants as they
work to free her remind her of magicians. Folding saws,
short-handled loppers, rope and water tubes appear. Despite the
loathing she feels for these strangers who can touch her, command
her, and, even, rescue her without her permission, Prissi is
grateful when they share their supply of water. Her throat is
extraordinarily dry, which she hopes is more from the medications
she has been taking than from fear. It takes twenty minutes before
the wingers have cut her free from the brush. Looking down, Prissi
guesses that it would take twice that long to pick out all of the
thorn-covered stems stuck in her wings and clothes, but that is a
moot issue. Her captors get Prissi to her feet and tie a rope
around her waist before they begin backtracking toward the
river.

As the wingers slowly make their way through
the puzzle of limb and vine with Prissi sandwiched between them,
the exhausted girl strains her ears for any sound of a boat. She
has been thinking that Joe’s instructions must have been meant to
deceive the wingers. Joe has not fallen so far in her esteem that
she can believe that he has done no more than run away downstream.
If that really is what he has done, then Joe Fflowers has not made
an escape plan, but only an excuse. Even though Prissi hears
nothing, she holds onto her waning belief, by panning her eyes
across the woods in hopes of spying some small patch of Joe
preparing an ambush. But, despite her efforts, she hears and sees
nothing that can sustain hope.

As she stumbles and is tugged along, the
captive considers and rejects a dozen ideas, each more improbable
than the one before, of how, without help, she might escape. At
last, she gives up on any idea beyond that of slowing her captors’
progress. She trips, stumbles and struggles, moans and swears,
while being careful not to use up too much of her energy, nor
irritate her captors to the point of violence.

While Prissi has been frantically devising a
means of escape, Dicky Baudgew’s minions have been discussing their
own escape. They had heard the diminishing whine of their boat’s
motor as Joe raced it downstream. As they wend their way back to
the water, the two wingers decide that the smaller one, Whir, will
stay behind with Prissi while the larger, Edgee, will fly
downstream, deal with the boy, retrieve the boat, and come back to
get Prissi and his partner. Whir reminds Edgee to be sure to say
please when he asks for their boat back.

When they arrive back at the river’e edge,
the brush along the bank is so heavy that there is almost no room
to move. Whir holds Prissi back as Edgee removes some of the gear
he has been carrying and slurps down more water before launching
himself into the air. Once his partner is gone, Whir pushes Prissi
out to the edge of the bank to give himself enough room to lean
against a low-hanging branch as a kind of perch. He looks Prissi up
and down before asking, “What makes you so valuable?”

Prissi considers her response for just a
second, “I make fabulous eleven layer bars. Your evil boss wants
the secret recipe.”

The small squirrel-faced winger smiles at
Prissi. The smile grows to a sharp-toothed chuckle and then a
full-blown laugh. The man’s foot lashes out so quickly that Prissi
has no chance to do anything but scream as she shoots backward off
the bank into the river. Prissi is wet past her waist and her
floundering wings are soaked before Whir uses the rope attached to
his captive to violently pull her back on shore.

Pride, rather than any real strength, gets
Prissi back on her feet. She chances a glance before she turns away
from her assailant and stares at the river. Again, like while she
was attempting her escape in the woods, Prissi waits for the blow
that doesn’t come. Finally, the anticipation becomes too much, but
when she turns her head, she sees the winger looking downstream and
not at her at all. Prissi begins to clean her wings.

It’s less than fifteen minutes later that a
slight movement tight against the bank upstream catches her eye.
The girl wonders if Joe has abandoned the boats and somehow circled
around. If it is Joe, he is moving faster than she would guess he
could. The form hugs the shore and shadows as it makes its way
down-stream. It’s not until the object is less than fifty meters
away that Prissi figures out that what she is seeing is a swimming
centaur.