UnDivided (25 page)

“Starkey's gone?” asks one of the youngest, smallest storks—one whom Hayden recalls having trouble wielding his weapon at the last takedown.

“I'm sorry,” says Bam. “There was nothing we could do.”

And to Hayden's amazement, Bam's eyes begin to cloud with tears. Either she's far better at deception than Hayden ever gave her credit for, or at least part of her emotion is real.

“What do we do?” someone asks.

“We go on without him,” Bam says with subtle authority. “Gather everyone on the turbine floor. We have decisions to make.”

Word quickly spreads, and the somber sense of hopelessness lifts as everyone begins to grapple with the idea of a world without Starkey. The three girls in his personal harem alternate between comforting and sniping at one another. They are inconsolable, but they are the only ones. Even Garson DeGrutte and Starkey's other supporters have quickly overcome their grief, and are now promoting themselves, jockeying for a leadership position in the new hierarchy. But when Bam addresses the storks later that morning, she's a commanding presence that makes it clear who's in charge. No one has the audacity to challenge her authority. From here on in,
all the jockeying will be for positions beneath her leadership.

She doesn't so much give a speech as tell everyone how it is. It's not a rallying hyperbole-filled war cry like Starkey might have delivered, just a bracing dose of harsh, heavy reality. She drives three key points home:

“We're a fugitive mob of unwanted kids with a price on our heads.”

“Our friends, the clappers, are worse than our enemies.”

“If we're going to stay whole and alive, we're going to have to stop taking down harvest camps, and disappear. Now.”

And although there are some who bluster about vengeance, and what Starkey would want, those voices are weak and find no resonance among the storks. With Bam's declaration, their suicide run has ended, and their new mission is to live. Hard to argue with survival.

“Well done,” Hayden tells her, catching her alone in one of the ammunition storerooms. “Are you going to tell me what really happened?”

“You know what happened. Your plan happened, and he fell right into it, just like you said he would.”

Bam tells him about the video, carefully recorded and duplicated, and stashed in various virtual locations like defensive nukes, should Starkey launch an offensive.

“Are you really sure he won't just come right back here?” Bam asks.

Although nothing is ever 100 percent, Hayden is pretty sure. “In the battle between ego and vengeance, Starkey's ego wins. His image is more important than his need to get back at you. He might try, but not until he he's scrounged himself up a new murder of storks to follow him.”

She gives him the sneering curl of her lip that feels less intimidating than it used to. “It pisses me off that you know him better than I do.”

“I'm a savant when it comes to character judgment,” he tells her. “For instance, most people wouldn't see anything in you besides attitude and a need for stronger deodorant, but I think you can handle the storks almost as well as Connor handled the Graveyard.”

Bam gives him a halfhearted glare. “Can you ever give a compliment without also making it an insult?”

“No,” he admits. “Not possible. It's the essence of my charm.”

Bam turns to restack some of the weapons piled in the room, and Hayden helps her, checking to make sure that they are all unloaded and safeties are in place. Can't be too careful when it comes to deadly automatic firepower.

Bam pauses for a moment, looking at the weapons piled before them. “There's no question that power blew out Starkey's brain,” Bam says, “but what he did . . . it wasn't all bad. We have more than five hundred kids who would have been unwound, and that doesn't even count the nonstorks we freed from those harvest camps.”

Although Hayden isn't big on apologetics for tyrants, he offers her the benefit of a shrug. “Maybe in the big picture the end justifies the means, and maybe not. All I know for sure is that no one else is going to be hanged, shot, or otherwise executed for Mason Starkey's version of justice. And don't forget we just prevented a major massacre of innocent kids.”

“Who will now be unwound on schedule,” Bam reminds him.

“But not by us.”

Several storks come into the storeroom to deposit their weapons. Bam thanks them, and they hurry out, relieved to make the guns someone else's problem. The plan is to keep only enough weapons for defense, should defense be needed. The rest will be left behind when they leave the power plant—and they'll have to leave soon. Once the bigwigs in the applause department know
that Starkey is gone, it's anyone's guess what they'll do. Perhaps descend from the skies in a mass of unmarked helicopters and snuff them all. Hayden wouldn't put it past them.

“I've pegged Garson DeGrutte as my second-in-command, since you've made it clear you don't want the position,” Bam says.

“You're kidding me!”

“He was a nuisance under Starkey, but he respects authority and follows orders. With Starkey out of the picture, I think he'll be an asset. And besides, we've got to keep him busy now that Abigail broke up with him.”

Hayden laughs. “Shucking corn can kill any relationship.” Then he finds himself getting uncharacteristically serious. “So what's next?” he asks, because his plan for the Stork Brigade only went so far as Starkey's removal.

“I have storks working on finding us somewhere safe,” Bam tells him. “There are lots of places to hide. We'll find one, hunker down, and make it work.”

“I wish you luck,” Hayden tells her.

She eyes him with the old suspicion. “You're not coming with us?”

Hayden presents her with an overexaggerated sigh. “As much as I would enjoy being éminence gris to your striking figurehead, it's time I left for greener pastures. Actually, I've been considering setting out with a small crew of my own and reestablishing my broadcast radio show, since the podcasts keep being squelched by the Juvenile Authority a few hours after I post them.”

Bam laughs at that. “Hayden, your broadcast never reached beyond the Graveyard, and even then, no one was listening but you.”

“Yes, I do love to hear myself talk—but I think I can get a wider audience with the help of Jeevan and a few choice members
of a special-ops team. We'll be the Verbal Strike Force. VSF, for short, because initials are always much more impressive.”

Bam shakes her head. “You're an odd bird, Hayden.”

“This coming from a stork named Bambi.”

Bam offers him a genuine smile. Something he's rarely seen. “Call me that again,” she says, “and I'll deck you.”

It's night when he regains consciousness. The tranqs stole the whole day from him. He's shivering from a mild but constant rain and is near hypothermia, but he forces clarity to his thoughts. He knows his actions now are crucial if he's going to overcome this new dire circumstance. He borrows heat from his burning emotions to drag warmth into his body. The adrenaline of anger.

One would think that to be dethroned—to be torn from power—would bring unbearable humiliation . . . but not to Mason Michael Starkey. Perhaps because the core of his being has taken on a potent yin-yang of ambition swirled into righteous indignation. Those driving forces have become the essence of who he is, and they leave no room for humiliation. All Starkey can feel is fury at the betrayal, and a burning desire to reclaim the leadership that is rightfully his. The leadership he has earned. Treason is the highest crime of any culture, and he is determined to make the traitors pay.

He will lead the storks once more. Maybe not today, but soon. He'll have to bide his time. He has the money and the power of the clapper movement behind him, and he knows how to contact them, so he is not without hope, or friends. Dandrich gave him a phone number to use in case of emergency, and he can think of no emergency greater than this.

But first things first. Right now, he's got to get himself out of the cold. He must find some sort of shelter. In his darkest moments, he never dreamed he'd be thrust back into basic survival mode again.
They've taken everything away from me,
he thinks, but he strangles the thought before it can take hold. He despises those who feel sorry for themselves. He will not stoop so low.

He knows it won't be easy for him now. He's America's most wanted. There's nowhere he can go where he won't be recognized instantly. He'll be prey for anyone with a phone, looking to cash in on the huge reward being offered for his capture. Now the price on his head is far greater than the value his adoptive parents ever saw in him.

His future will all come down to a phone. The first one he sees will be either his salvation or his ruin depending on who gets to dial it first: him or the phone's owner, who will most certainly be calling the police.

Still dizzy from the tranqs, he makes his way through the woods to a highway, forcing his stiff legs to walk at a brisk pace, generating body heat, but still shivering with every step. A mile and a half up the road, he comes to a service area and hurries into the glorious warmth of a convenience store. He quickly sizes up the people there. A grisly looking clerk, a family deciding on snacks, and an old man in filthy jeans trying to scrounge up enough coins for a lottery ticket. No one looks at him as he slips into the bathroom and locks the door behind him. He sits on the toilet, fully clothed, too dehydrated to even pee, and gets his shivering under control. It takes longer than he thought it would, and finally the clerk bangs on the door.

“You okay in there, dude?”

“Yeah, I'll be out in a second.”

He takes another minute, flexing the fingers of his good hand, and stands, noting that the last of his tranq vertigo has
worn off. Then he steps back out into the convenience store, where another family argues about snacks, and a woman baffled by the coffee machine tries to figure out which is decaf and which is regular. The clerk is busy ringing up a fat man's gas, and Starkey gets down to business.

He goes outside, where the fat man's car waits, the gas hose still in the tank. Lo and behold, there's a phone plugged into a charger on the console inside. Starkey opens the door, but as he reaches for the phone, a kid in the shadows of the backseat yells, “Hey! Get outta here! Dad! Help!”

Starkey flinches, but it's too late to abort.

“Sorry, kid.” He grabs the phone, disconnecting it from the charger, but the kid continues to scream, and the father bursts out of the shop.

Starkey curses himself for the clumsiness of the theft. As a magician, he always prided himself on his ability to slip things like watches, wallets, and phones in and out of pockets without being noticed. It's demoralizing to be so desperate that he must steal so inelegantly.

With the man taking chase, Starkey sprints into the dark brushy field behind the convenience store, continuing to run long after the cries of the kid and his furious but ponderously slow father can no longer be heard.

When he's sure he's too far away to be seen or followed, he checks the phone. For a moment, he thinks its interface is locked and he won't be able to use it, but luckily, the man was not expecting his phone to be taken from the safety of his vehicle. Starkey pulls up a dial screen and keys in the emergency number he'd been given. It rings twice, then a nondescript voice answers the phone with a standard, “Hello?”

“This is Mason Starkey,” he says. “Something's happened. I need help.”

He quickly explains the situation as best he can in a single
breath. And calmly the voice on the other end of the line says, “Stay where you are. We'll come to you.”

Following the instructions he's given, Starkey keeps the phone powered on, to be used as a homing beacon, and within an hour, a helicopter descends from the night sky like the proverbial stork to carry him to a place of greater safety.

•  •  •

Starkey has no idea where he's been taken. It's a city. That's all he knows. He's not so sophisticated as to know the silhouettes of a skyline at the earliest hint of dawn. All he knows for sure is that it's near a large body of water, and that it's colder than where he was, as evidenced by the blast of chilly air when they open the helicopter door and escort him from the rooftop heliport. It's a tall building, but not the tallest. Average, as far as skyscrapers go.

He knew the clapper movement was well funded and well organized, but to have such headquarters in plain sight gives Starkey pause for thought. In his own imagination, the clapper movement was far grittier and more counterculture. Hiding, perhaps in the dangerous backrooms of questionable clubs. That they have their own office building, however, is somehow more unsettling. The logo on the building—he saw it as the helicopter approached—is a simple design he did not recognize. It featured the initials “PC,” which seem fairly generic and could stand for a great many things.

He's escorted down a flight of stairs and into an elevator by two men in dark suits with chests too well developed for them to be anything but security boeufs. The elevator takes him down to the thirty-seventh floor, and he's brought to a conference room with black leather chairs and a long table of blue marble. No one is present.

“Wait here,” one of the guards says. “Someone will be along shortly.”

The room has only one door, which the men lock as they
exit, leaving him alone. There are east-facing floor-to-ceiling windows, but they're made of the kind of frosted glass that diffuses light while denying a view. Translucent rather than transparent. The rising sun is little more than a golden haze.

He was alone in the helicopter, too. The pilot, sequestered in the cockpit, never spoke to him after letting him into the craft, other than to say, “Buckle in.” The fact that they sent him a rescue craft so quickly, and that they've placed him in such a richly appointed room of their inner sanctum, tells Starkey that he's respected and valued. And yet, there's unease in him as diffuse and ill-defined as the light coming through the frosted windows.