Джеймс Паттерсон: Hawk

I broke into a run, and so did they. I did a fast left turn and really started running, backpack thumping against me as I went. We were just two blocks off the main street and it was already completely dead back here; people who couldn’t afford the main drag didn’t get streetlights. I passed several Opes, talking to themselves, curled up in doorways.

I turned right at the next corner, and crossing this street was easy because it was barely more than a garbage alley. Two kilometers upwind was the prison. Three kilometers as the crow flies, southeast, was the city hospice and the factory where they made the dope for the Opes.

I just had to make it to the last building on this block.

“Girl, wait!” one of the men yelled.

Sure! Why not! That’s a great idea!

With a sudden screech, Ridley swept down and did a power dive on the two men. They ducked and swore, one of them taking out a gun and shooting. Ridley turned sideways and swooped out of reach.

Then I was at the building, rushing into the darkness, swerving to avoid once-ornate columns and chunks of ceiling. The men were right behind me. I was breathing hard, sweating, and starting to think about plan B in case this one didn’t work. Pushing through a fire-exit door, I grabbed the stairway handrail and headed up two steps at a time. I had passed the second story before the door banged open. There was some muffled discussion, then they started up the stairs after me.

Well, I knew which treads were rusted out and when to let go of the handrail because it had come loose. I was faster than them, even with a twenty-pound backpack. I was on the fourth floor before they’d gotten to the second, and I rounded the sixth floor when they had barely made it to third.

My heart was pounding in my throat—despite my grade-A fighting skills, I didn’t want to deal with two determined men with guns. First thing a girl learns on the street is that when men are after you, being fast is your best bet because you’re usually not going to be stronger, and if they’ve got guns, the game’s already over.

Eighth floor. My feet were slamming down on the rusted metal treads, my calf muscles screaming from the strain. From long practice I automatically jumped over ones that weren’t safe. A yell below told me one of the men hadn’t been so lucky. I thought of the rusted metal scraping against skin, maybe puncturing, getting caught up in some muscle.

Finally, finally, the tenth floor. I burst through the metal door and rushed out onto the roof, starting to pant, my hair plastered to my head with sweat. The men were at least five stories below.

I climbed up on the roof ledge, looking down at the City of the Dead. Whatever my parents had intended, this was my city now.

Ridley was swirling in circles above me with a hurry-up expression in her eyes. Smiling at her, I threw back my poncho and extended my wings, almost groaning with pleasure at finally being able to stretch them out. The constant ache between my shoulder blades released with them. Tip to tip, they were almost four meters across, but I might grow some more.

I jumped off the roof and felt my wings fill with air. As always it was an amazing feeling—the feeling of being free and strong in a city where no one wanted you to be. Laughing, I swooped away from where the men struggled on the stairway, far below me. They might give up; they might make it to the roof to find that I was somehow just gone. They might assume that like so many others, I’d taken a long, last leap down to the pavement below. Anyway, I never needed to think about them again. I rose above the greasy mix of fog and clouds that blotted out the moon, breathing in cold, clean air. Ridley looped in big arcs around me as if I were slowing her down.

“Get stuffed, Ridley!” I yelled, laughing to feel so free above the City of the Dead. Even if it was just for a little while.

CHAPTER 7

I soared upward, moving my wings strongly, feeling their power as I worked out the kinks I got from keeping them hidden all day. This was—just so great. It was cool and dry and quiet up here. Down below was always warmish, always wettish, noisy, crowded, dangerous. Everything below was old and rotting; everything above fresh and new.

But up here—no one up here but us birds.

I flew higher and higher until the air thinned and it became harder to breathe. From up here I could barely see the City of the Dead—it was hidden by the ever-present mucky clouds. I couldn’t see anything else, either. For a good twenty, thirty kilometers, I saw land—bare, rocky, treeless land. No other cities, no other lights, no other clumps of clouds where another city might be hidden beneath. No escape.

Ridley matched me stroke for stroke, obviously enjoying stretching her wings, too. I called to her, “Better be getting home. The kids’ll be getting hungry.”

As if we were connected by a string, we coasted in a huge circle, curving downward. We closed our eyes as we went through the clouds, then saw that we were over the factory that made dope for the Opes. There was a line of them waiting now outside the door, but it was too late for them to get anything tonight. They would camp until morning, a long line of huddled, miserable people who would stand through falling rain, pelting snow, or blistering heat. Anything to get their next fix.

We headed north to the McCallum Complex. It was big, covering several city blocks and surrounded by three-and-a-half-meter cinder-block walls topped by razor wire. Which was nothing to me, of course. Ridley flitted down to clamp her talons around a streetlight—I usually didn’t take her indoors.

The McCallum Complex had even more vidscreens than the city did—everywhere I looked, he was onscreen, smiling or angry or teasing or silly. I didn’t know why he was everywhere, I didn’t know why his name was on everything—McCallum Incarceration, McCallum Laboratories, McCallum Children’s Home.

I waited till the yard outside the Children’s Home was empty, then gently let my wings slow till I came down in the deep shadows behind the trash dumpsters. Sighing, I folded them, hot from exercise, back under my poncho.

Even before I got to the double glass doors, the kids had pushed them open and were running to me.

“Hawk!” “Hawk!” “Hawk!”

“Hey, hey, hey, wait a sec,” I commanded, unhooking hands from my backpack. “This is it, and we have to share it. Let’s get inside.” These were the people I lived with. Not so much my friends as my kids. I was the only one of them who could leave, who could bring back food. I was the only one whose experiment had worked.

My wings. I’d guessed I was either a genetic freak, or that I’d been experimented on, had wings grafted on. It was probably why my parents had dumped me here. Who’d want a freak for a kid? Anyway, my wings worked great, and I was glad to have them. Some of the kids, my fellow lab rats, hadn’t been so lucky.

“Okay, Clete, this is for you,” I said, divvying up the bits of food I’d snagged during the day. Clete came forward slowly and awkwardly—in the last two years, he’d suddenly grown three-quarters of a meter and was now about two meters tall. Too bad his weight hadn’t kept up with him. He looked like a tall, camel-colored drinking straw.

He was my age but seemed younger and had come here when he was still an Ope. I’d seen him OD and almost die at least twice. Now, though, he was pretty okay. I mean, okay for him. I don’t know if the dope did it to him or if he was born that way, but he sort of had trouble dealing with people. Even us, sometimes. We’d all learned not to sneak up on him and to be patient while he talked because he had trouble getting words out sometimes. He got upset super easily and just wanted things to be the same all the time. On the other hand, you could give him any two numbers, no matter how big, and he could multiply them or subtract them or anything, like lightning. He knew how computers worked, more than any of us. He read stuff, like news and science books. “Thanks,” he said, shuffling off to eat it.