Джеймс Паттерсон - Hawk

Suddenly I heard the whoosh of—wings? I spun around, but Ridley wasn’t inside, wasn’t in this hall. I walked faster.

“The way to get closer to McCallum is through… computer lines,” Clete said serenely.

But I was hardly listening. What if… what if they’d already experimented with erasing memories? What if they’d experimented on me?

CHAPTER 10

We all slept jumbled together in what had once been a large closet. Over the years I’d collected sleeping bags, blankets, tablecloths, pillows, you name it. If it was relatively soft, it was in this closet, and we slept in and around and on it, our body heat pooling together to keep us warm, breath mixing as we slept in a pile, like a litter of puppies.

Our common room, where we did everything else, was basically a big, depressing space with a couple tables, a bunch of chairs, and some broken furniture that the orderlies had stashed here. The walls had once been white, probably, but now were tinged with yellow and almost gray with years of dirt and dust. There were splashes of dark brown that might have once been red, but I tried not to think about that.

That night, my dreams were horrible. I was fighting my way through the clouds over the City of the Dead, voices filling my ears. Unseen hands grabbed at me, snatching feathers from my wings.

I bolted upright, damp with sweat, still twitching from my nightmares. A thin, pale strip of light at the bottom of the door showed me the sun was up, so I extricated myself from various lab rats, easing my arm out from Calypso and untangling my legs from Clete’s, and tiptoed out. In the common room the sun looked like it was leaking through the dirty windows. I remembered last night, standing there, watching the new prisoner. The worst of the worst. Feeling like he’d been trying to pry into my brain.

That had been super creepy. I hoped they were keeping him locked up tight.

It was when we were scavenging leftovers for breakfast that Calypso suddenly looked at me, her eyes round. “Soldiers,” she said.

Soldiers meant one thing: they were coming to get us.

“Okay, guys, scatter,” I ordered.

And just like rats, they did.

Moke pulled a bookcase away from a wall to reveal the hole we’d chipped out of the cinder blocks. He shooed Calypso and Rain through it and pushed the bookcase back. That small space was full now, so he climbed up on the table, jumped, and pushed one of the big ceiling tiles out of place. Another jump and he was through and setting the tile back down.

The sound of marching feet was loud now, and I watched as Clete went back in our nest, pulled some bedding aside, and opened a trapdoor in the floor. He crawled through and closed it, pulling on a thread so that bedding would cover it again.

Two seconds later one of our doors opened with a clang, hitting the wall behind it. Four soldiers stood there, hands clutching automatic rifles.

“Hey,” I said calmly, and popped the rest of my peanut butter cracker in my mouth. “I didn’t know there was a parade today.”

A man wearing the black lab coat of a doctor stepped around the soldiers.

“Where is everyone?” he asked, and I shrugged. “Don’t just stand there,” he snapped at the soldiers. “I know there’s some kids left around here. Search the place!”

I stood and casually started drifting toward the doors to the outside. They were here because we were lab rats, after all. Some experiments were better done on kids instead of prisoners or some poor Ope. Sometimes they needed a healthy body in order to get the results they wanted. The McCallum Children’s Home used to have more than five of us in it—years ago there had been maybe twenty-five or thirty. In twos and threes, kids had been taken away by one doctor or another. Usually they didn’t come back. The few who did come back were in bad shape and didn’t last long.

Which is why we had come up with a bunch of escape routes—the three the kids were using this time weren’t the only ones.

The soldiers clumped around and I tried not to laugh as they looked under tables, in shelves, behind broken furniture, like maybe we thought it was a game, like hide-and-seek. We knew better. It might be a game, but if you were found, you died.

One soldier, a mean-looking woman with scars on her face, went into our sleeping closet and kicked at piles of stuff, stabbing the end of her rifle down into the pillows and sleeping bags. Like maybe they were hiding by lying really flat in the one place that made sense.

“Where are they?” the doctor asked me angrily.

“Who?” I said, rocking back on my heels. Any second I was going to have to bolt—there was no way the doctor was getting between me and the door.

The doctor nodded to the soldiers. “Take this one, then search outside.”

That was my cue. I spun and bolted through the heavy glass door, hearing pounding boots behind me.

“Get her!” the doctor howled, and I raced for the one tree in the yard, a decrepit wreck that was going to fall over any day now. I leaped up into its brittle branches and climbed till I could spring on top of the twelve-foot concrete wall, this one place where I’d cut the razor wire. Bullets sprayed around me, taking out stone chips as I dropped lightly down outside.

“Open the gate, you idiots!” the doctor shouted, and almost instantly I heard the rusty, scraping whine of the metal gate being pulled to one side. I was halfway down the block by then but could still hear the soldiers running after me. A quick left, and then the old, broken sewer grate was right there. I slid sideways feet first, fitting neatly through the narrow opening, then braced myself for what I knew was a ten-foot drop.

Silently I chuckled as the boots above slowed in confusion. I didn’t wait around, but headed quietly down the dark tunnel, a tunnel I knew as well as my own black eyes.

CHAPTER 11

There were hundreds—maybe thousands—of kilometers of sewer tunnels beneath the City of the Dead. I’d been down every one. Despite all the crazy people on the surface, I was the only bird-kid I’d ever seen. So I’d made sure that no one but the lab rats saw me fly.

It had been a lot easier to map the tunnels when I was smaller. Now I was fifteen, almost two meters tall, and my wingspan was just about four meters wide. Only the biggest, main tunnels were wide enough for me to still fly through them. But running was almost as easy as flying, and I could still cover a lot of ground fast, even if my shoes did get all kinds of stuff on them that I’d rather not think about.

In less than fifteen minutes I was right beneath my corner. When I realized that I had instinctively come here I punched the wall, my knuckles coming back smeared with mold and dirt. I’d been coming here so long my feet took me whether I wanted to or not, whether I was aboveground or below, muscle memory so ingrained I didn’t have a choice. I had promised myself I would never come back, yet here I was.

But I had promised them, too.

Anyway. More important stuff to worry about: there were a lot of abandoned buildings in the wheezing, dying downtown of the City of the Dead. I liked to explore them, steal what I could, sell it on the street to buy food for the kids. There were also huge trash heaps to go through, people to spy on—my days were just packed.

But then it would come time for me to be on my corner. Again. Giving the ghosts of the past their half hour. So stupid.

“Ask yourself, what have I done to make my community better?” McCallum was booming on a vidscreen when I surfaced. “In the City of the Dead, you are given everything you need for success! But what are you doing to earn your success?” As usual his voice was much too loud, inescapable, his broad face pixelated like he gave off interference himself.