CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Day of Reckonings
When Prissi woke six hours later, she knew where she was and what had happened to her. She turned her head expecting to see her father slumped in the chair beside her bed, but the chair was empty except for his thermajerkin. When she looked at her mypod, which she found on the bedside table rather than her wrist, it was just past seven a.m. She guessed her dad might be getting breakfast. As soon as she had that thought, she herself became ravenously hungry. She wondered if the ward she was on was one of those at Columbia famous for its concierge services. She let her mind drift—corn muffins baked long enough that the tops were crusty and nearly brown, sweet butter, one of the multispensers that held six kinds of honey, a bowl of black raspberries with a swirl of whipped cream, and a choco-latte with more whipped cream…and something good to read. She was toying with a Pagrath Ghaib, Dickens, Michael Flynn, Bryce Pynchon, when a rough rogue wave rising a dozens of meters higher than the surrounding dreamy seas slammed into her.
Centsurety.
It was the only thing she wanted to read about or know about. She wanted to understand every jot and sliver about Centsurety. The people who had worked there. The work they had done. And why poking around in events from long ago was important enough to someone to ride her into the ground. Then, like turning suddenly and feeling a deep bruise, Prissi remembered her last thought before falling asleep. She tried to visualize opening her hand and letting Centsurety go, but that vision wouldn’t come. In fact, when Prissi thought to look down, both of her hands were clenched tight into fists.
What was the secret?
Prissi slid sideways on the bed and stretched her tubes and wires far enough that she could reach her mypod. She typed in a directory search, got Allen Burgey’s number and pulsed the call button.
The line chirped and chirped before pitching higher as the call was forwarded. More chirps, but no answer. No answering machine. At a house whose owner could barely walk. Although Prissi could not believe what was happening to her, she was instantly sure that she wasn’t the only one who had been attacked the night before. But, how could that be? What was it that she had started?
Dr. Baudgew has called her Pandora. Could it be true?
To take her mind off questions she couldn’t answer, Prissi picked up the housefone. By the time Beryl Langue returned to the room, Prissi was picking at a half-eaten lox and cream cheese omelet. A half-hour later, her IV’s had been disconnected and she was dressed in her freshly laundered clothes. When she tried to talk to her father, he ignored her except to tell her to hurry it up.
To conform to hospital policy on discharges, Prissi was forced to segue along the hospital’s corridors in an ancient two-wheeler, whose severely nicked and scratched frame suggested she might be safer walking from her room to the hospital exit. They got into the first of the Wingcabs lined up outside the hospital and belted themselves onto their perches. As soon as the driver, a Darfurian ex-pat Prissi concluded from the looks of his clothes, put the cab up on its air cushion, she knew she would have a headache before they were halfway downtown. The engine for the front jet was sputtering. The hack threw the van into gear and they lurched forward. He drove with the front end canted up so that every time the fore jet sputtered, it had more room to drop down before its emer-wheels smacked onto the road. Bounding up and down in a way that reminded the teener of a camel ride she had taken on an Egyptian vacation when she was eight, Prissi gave a small smile of satisfaction when the headache she had predicted arrived before they crossed 59th Street.
The caroming cab ride and the close presence of its captain kept Prissi and her father from saying more than the occasional banality—made just frequently enough to stave off embarrassment—on their way home. However, as soon as they crossed the threshold into the apartment, Beryl Langue was instantly transformed. A finger pointing to the couch, face dark with anger’s rich blood, voice rising, he asked, “What is going on? What have you done?”
Prissi, unbalanced by a version of her father she had never witnessed before, and could scarcely imagine, moved to the couch with the boneless slink of a remorseful dog.
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“Pandora’s flung open the lid, and she doesn’t even know what she’s done? Sit,” he commanded when she hesitated before the couch. “Sit! And I’ll tell you what you’ve done. You’ve opened a door that’s been sealed for sixty years. You’ve angered, no, incited, a powerful and vindictive man. You’ve endangered yourself, and, probably, others. Without a thought, with appallingly feckless ignorance, and the most naive foolhardiness. You have amused yourself with a game that could prove deadly.”
With her throat so dry that the rough edges of her words caught, Prissi coughed, “Deadly?”
“What do you think would have happened, if your attackers hadn’t found whatever it was they were looking for?”
Relying on bravura as a strategy, Prissi countered, “What things?”
Her father’s howl made Prissi jump. She had never seen him like this before.
“What things? I don’t know. But, you had something and your attackers got it because if they hadn’t, you would either be dead or being held somewhere being tortured.”
Even though her father’s words only confirmed what she already had guessed, as tears burst from her eyes for the second time that morning, Prissi realized that some part of her, a large part, had been holding out hope.
“Why would anyone want me dead?”
Her father’s stare stung Prissi as much as if he had slapped her in the face.
“Tell me what you have been doing.”
“I already told you. It started out as a school project. I was interested in blind alley science. But then I found some things…about Mom…that got me off on a tangent.”
“And I told you to leave it alone.”
“And I was going to, but….” Prissi wavered over what she should say next. The silence grew before she decided that her fate and, maybe, the fate of her father, demanded that she tell the truth.
When Prissi finished telling the story of the lost path, Jack Fflowers, her mother’s notebook, Richard Baudgew, Al Burgey, the crystals, the attack and the unanswered phone at Burgey’s house, her father opened his mouth, then, closed it. He opened his hands, then, closed them back into the fists that he had been clenching during most of her tale. He had hovered and hulked over Prissi the whole time she had been talking. Now, he stepped back from her, extended an index finger at his daughter and touched his lips. He left the room, but was back in less than a minute. When he hurried back through the door, he had a pad of paper in hand. He motioned to Prissi to move over before sitting down beside her. Again, he touched he lips before showing his daughter the pad upon which he had written, “We have to go. Get what you need.”
When Prissi had called Burgey’s home, she had understood when there was no answer that something bad must have happened. She had pushed back the possibility that the old man might be dead, but she couldn’t deny that something bad had happened, and that that something probably had happened because of her. Now, for the second time that morning, Prissi had the feeling that her father was right, she had started something that was endangering herself and others. But, mortal danger is a very hard thing for a fifteen-year old, even a fifteen-year old who had grown up in Burundi, to comprehend. Prissi knew that her father was right, but, at the same time, she knew he must be wrong. Somehow, the danger wasn’t real. Could not be real. It was just a shadow. Something that would change with a slight shift in the sun. She had made a mistake and, like all teenerz, Prissi thought that all mistakes could be corrected.
Lost in her thoughts, Prissi jumped when her father touched her shoulder, then, tapped the paper.
Prissi nodded and whispered, “Where?”
Her father whispered, “Go. Now.”
Prissi tipped her head and mouthed, “Where?”
Beryl Langue slapped Prissi’s cheek—something she never could
have imagined.
“Now!”
Feeling like she was moving within the syrup of a dream, Prissi nodded.
In her room, the frightened girl looked at the little that was there. Unlike her friends, for example, Nasty Nancy, whose room was filled with clothes, jewelry, childhood drawings, music, old invitations, pix, a thousand shoes, Prissi owned little. Most of what she did still have was sitting in her room at Dutton. Now, she was being told to choose among the few things left. For an instant, she had the image of a hot air balloon, unladened, then, untethered, floating away, away and even farther away. She quickly touched things that once had meant so much to her, in part because they were so few: a shell necklace, a panther mask, her rag stick and string dolls so beloved among the rag-clothed, stick thin children in Burundi’s villages.
Nothing in the room called to her. Rather than make choices, it was easier just to leave it all. Finally, energized by her despair, the shell-shocked teener grabbed socks and underwear and the small box with her mother’s pearls and rings. She looked for her mother’s notebook, but couldn’t find it.
As she pondered how she could have mislaid that, Prissi hurried to the bathroom for toothbrush, floss and eye shadow. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, stopped dead to look at her complicated face, and stayed in place until she thought her face looked more determined than afraid.
Once outside the Gramercy Arms, too burdened down by their belongings to fly, Beryl Langue grabbed his daughter’s arm and steered her east on 21st Street at a fast pace. Three blocks away, just after Prissi asked him if he had moved her mother’s notebook, he shoved her under the awning and through the doors of a KaffeKiosK. Prissi ordered a Sumo-Sumatran and followed her father to a perch near the back of the room. Before she got to him, Beryl Langue edged off his perch, strode to the door at the back of the room, opened it, and carefully looked around before sitting back down. He twisted on his perch so that he could keep an eye on the entrance.
“Dad, what’s going on? What was Centsurety? And why is it so important so many years later? Is everything that has been happening because of me, because of something I did? Or, is it because of Mom and something she did in the past?”
Prissi reached out to touch the pale tips of her father fingers. Despite the physical connection, her father’s stare, looking at something far beyond the confines of the KaffeKiosK, didn’t change.
“Dad. Dad! You have to tell me. Why would someone want to hurt me?”
Prissi’s hand moved from Beryl Langue’s fingers to his wrist. She squeezed hard.
“Dad?”
Her father shook his head.
“I’m not sure what is going on. Do you remember when Pandora opened the box, more than just Despair escaped? I think that may be happening here. Joshua Fflowers, or that man you saw in New Harlem, Baudgew, or some rival of Cygnetics, any or all or even others could be involved.”
“Involved in what? I’m positive Mom worked for Centsurety, but I don’t know what she did or was trying to do or how that can be important sixty years later.”
Beryl Langue withdrew his wrist from Prissi’s grasp. His hand encircled his coffee cup. He lifted it to his lips, but put it back down without taking a drink.
“You have to understand the times, Prissi. Back then, science was moving much faster than other aspects of society, especially government. Many scientists felt thwarted. We used to talk about how the times we were living through weren’t much different from the 16th century when Middle Age scientists like Copernicus and Galileo were constrained by the Church. As our frustration grew over not being able to do science as we wished, some of us became disdainful, arrogant. People who seemed to stand in our way were our enemies, unenlightened Luddites. When Fflowers set up Centsurety, I imagine that the people who went to work for him figured that his power and money would be able to keep the pagans at bay.”
Prissi had been tapping her thumbs against the table’s edge waiting for her father to get to the point.
“You’re saying Mom worked for Fflowers, right? But, why? What was she working on?”
“My understanding is that the stated goal, the white hat research, was delayed fledging. And, you have to understand that that was a very real goal. There was a growing political backlash concerned with children and their parents being forced to make such an important, expensive and irrevocable decision at such a confusing period in a child’s life. DF would have solved a lot of problems.”
“If there was a front door, Dad, there must have been a back door.”
Beryl Langue slowly, and, seemingly, reluctantly nodded.
“Youth is arrogant. Your mother was an extraordinary scientist, and an extraordinary human being, but….”
“Dad.”
“Flowers had wanted to be a classicist, but he grew up poor. In boarding school he had studied Greek and Latin, but he knew if he chose the life of a classicist, he would starve. He became a scientist, a very good scientist, but he never quite let go of his first love.”
Langue pursed his lips tightly together as if he had finished saying what needed to be said. His eyes drifted past Prissi and out to the world beyond.
Prissi took a sip of her coffee. The drink was bitter, like burned Kona, then, somehow oily, with just a soupcon of ashes. She laughed silently at the irony of that.
“You’ve been looking at some paths of science that seemed promising, but didn’t go anywhere. Sixty years ago, your…” Beryl Langue stopped as if he were having trouble remembering…”your mother was working on something…a problem that seemed intractable, impossible but that had fascinated people for eons. Fflowers insisted that the time was right for the problem to be solved. Your mother was intrigued by the problem and also by the chance to work with Glen Laureby, who was on the fast track for the Googleheim Prize. I remember your mother telling me that conducting their research was like ascending the face of an unexplored mountain. She and Laureby began at the base, went up a little way, and began to climb what seemed to be a promising path. They were doing science, with a small s, like science usually is. Plodding forward, sliding back, taking a breath, adjusting gear, and then plodding forward two steps beyond where they had been.
“Your mother told me that one day they hit some particularly bad footing and slid all the way back down to where she and Laureby had begun. They were burned out. She went to their boss, not Joshua Fflowers, but a horrible little man, the man you met yesterday, Baudgew, who went to Joshua Fflowers to ask him to let them do something else until they got their energy back for the real task. The request was denied…if it was ever even brought to Fflowers. This Baudgew was a very vindictive man. If your mother and Laureby didn’t succeed, Baudgew’s career would suffer.
“Your mother considered quitting. She thought that she would leave Centsurety and go to work at a university. Any university in the world would have wanted her. She was that good. But Fflowers wife, Elena, a brilliant scientist in her own right, found out what was going on and took them under her wing. She gave them some time to think and putter. And she worked with them. The result was absolutely unexpected and entirely serendipitous. Your mother, Glen Laureby and Elena Fflowers found a way to do what they had been hired to do. But rather than that being the end, it was just the beginning. But what they discovered was so illogical, so counterintuitive, so unlikely a place to find an answer, that they were certain they must have made some monumental error. It was like finding the disease was the cure.”
A frustrated Prissi interrupted, “Like inoculation. That illogical?”
Beryl Langue nodded, “Your mother said that it was like she had slid all the way back down the mountain, given up and was walking away when, all of a sudden, she found a set of steps carved into the stone which climbed all the way to the peak.”
As her father talked, Prissi fidgeted—both from the jolt of caffeine but more so from the opacity of her father’s words. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she grabbed his sleeve to interrupt, “But,
Dad, what was it? What did Mom find? And, why is it important now?”
Beryl Langue stared at Prissi, but seemed to see something else as he weighed his words, “She found a key…not just her…it can’t all be blamed on her…she forgot that, I think…they… they found a key and used it to open a box…Pandora’s box.”
“Daaad,” Prissi whined, “Be specific. People are trying to kill me, and you’re trying to shield me with euphemisms. How can I be careful in I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be careful about?”
Prissi tugged on her father’s arm as she implored him to tell her the truth.
“They were working on a kind of meta-mutancy. A change, but a kind of change that would take you back to where you were. Almost like a Mobius strip.”
“What kind of mutancy? Wings?”
“No, not wings, not unless angels really have wings. Do you know….” Beryl Langue suddenly stopped talking before ripping his arm from Prissi’s grasp. When she turned to see what the matter was, he was staring through the KaffeeKiosK’s window.
“Run, Priscilla! Run! Now! Out the back. Now!”
Two blue jay-winged men were staring through the window.
“Now!”
Prissi pushed off from her perch and bolted toward the rear door. She heard the front door ripped open. Someone yelled, “Stop!” Then, a crash.
As Prissi pushed into the back room, she twisted her head enough to see her father following behind her but taking the time to knock over each perch as he passed it. She rushed toward a door on the far side of the small room which was crowded with a half-dozen machines set up to roast, grind, and make coffee. Prissi smashed the back door open, but stopped in her tracks when she heard a scream that she knew must be her father’s—a high-pitched noise filled with pain and fear. She jumped back inside the doorway and darted behind a short dented steel counter holding tall equally dented coffee brewalators. Just as she ducked down, the door flew open and a broad-chested winger, with a shock of silver hair leaping up in the middle of his head, rushed through and bolted out the half-opened back door. Prissi exploded from behind the counter, jumped to the back door, yanked it closed and locked it. She whirled around, rushed back and stared through a crack on the hinged side of the dining room door. Her father lay crumpled on the floor with another blue jay winger, this one taller and too bald for a crest, holding him down with a foot on his neck. Prissi froze. She stared indecisively for a few seconds until someone began pounding at the back door.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The man standing over her father looked up.
Boom! Boom!
Her father’s assailant, himself indecisive, hovered for a moment before sprinting toward the back room. Prissi let the attacker get almost through the entrance before she slammed the door against his wing as hard as she could. He shrieked. Prissi ripped the door back. The man’s motion carried him forward. Prissi leapt on him from behind. He stumbled from the momentum of her weight before falling to the floor. Dazed at her success, Prissi stood for a half-second in triumph.
BoomBoomBoom!!!
The man on the floor started to rise. Balancing her weight on the end of a counter, Prissi jumped up as high as she could and landed on the man’s outspread wing just below his shoulder. Something bent. She leapt a second time and felt the bone beneath her feet break like a green limb in the woods. Prissi bounded off the screaming man. As she came back into the dining room, she noticed two people near the front door, as paralyzed as Lot’s wife, holding cups half-raised to their lips. Prissi bent over her father.
“Dad. Dad!”
In a mumbled, weirdly dreamy voice, Beryl Langue implored, “Nora!”
“C’mon, Dad. C’mon. Get up!”
Prissi got one hand under her father’s shoulder.
“Centuries.”
Boom! Boom! Boom! Crack!
Her father groaned. Prissi eased her other hand under Beryl Langue’s head and began to lift. His head came up far too easily. A feeling, as if she had just touched the slimiest thing on earth, swept over Prissi.
Her father’s neck was broken.
His eyes rolled toward her and fluttered in recognition. He whispered, “Wallet.” His lids dropped down.
When Prissi rolled her father so she could reach into his back pocket to get his wallet, his head slipped from her other hand and smacked against the floor.
Screaming first and, then, vomiting just as she passed the frozen coffee drinkers, Prissi rushed out the front door of the KaffeKiosK, took two strides, bent her knees and….
“Here, here, Prissi. Prissi, here!”
Prissi was a few meters in the air. Two buildings away, with his body in shadow and his head just far enough forward to be painted with sunlight, was Jack Fflowers waving a hand to draw her closer.
“Quick. Over here.”
Prissi flung her wing up so quickly in order to change directions that she felt the joint half-pop. As she careened toward Jack on a wing and a half, she felt like her mind, as well as her body, was being pulled in too many directions at once. Her touchdown by Jack was more controlled crash than landing. She sprawled forward. He caught her in his arms, held her tightly for a long moment, flashed a snowy white smile, and pulled her into an alley. Halfway down the shadowy corridor Prissi could see a bulkhead with its doors thrown open. Holding her shoulder to diminish the pain, Prissi raced down the alley-way a step behind Jack.
“In here. Quick.”
Jack stood aside so that Prissi could go down the dark steps into a darker gloom. As she hurried past him, Prissi turned too quickly and caught the lower portion of her dislocated wing against a sharp corner of the steel door. An excruciating pain shot from her shoulder to her stomach and the rest of her coffee shot from her mouth and nose.
“Puking Pluto.”
“Go. Go. Go.”
The panting winger staggered down the ancient worn metal steps, which clanged in protest at her weight. Jack followed her for three steps then turned to close the metal flaps above him.
The small space at the bottom of the stairs smelled of rust and rot. In the dim light sieving through the rusted bulkhead doors, Prissi studied the building’s door for a split second before yanking its handle. Nothing happened. She violently twisted the handle and shoved the door. Nothing happened. She tried again, then snapped her head around to Jack
“What’s going on. It won’t open.”
“Probably locked.”
Prissi’s voice pierced the small space with the sharp crack of an ice break in the Arctic.
“What? You brought me here? To a dead end? What a freeieekin feeb.”
She shouldered Jack aside and started back up the stairs. Jack grabbed her wing, the dislocated one, and Prissi gave a high-pitched moan. Jack dropped the wing as if he had been shocked.
“Shut up. They’ll hear you.”
Prissi was so incensed at Jack’s stupidity in bringing her to a place with no escape, and his arrogance in touching her, that she was vibrating. Finally, to keep from exploding, she aimed a punch at his head before veering off and smacking the side of the stairwell.
“Prissi, stop it,” Jack whispered as he took her arm and led her back down the stairs. Prissi pulled away, darted back up three steps, whirled around and flung herself into the air. She smashed into the rotting door, felt it give and simultaneously felt her shoulder snap back into place. Cautiously, she half-flared her wing in the enclosed space. She was satisfied that, if necessary, she would be able to fly—although for how long was another matter. The feeling that one thing was going better stopped when she heard the sounds of footsteps crunching over the alley’s carpet of broken glass and gravel. Jack held a finger to his lips in a way that reminded Prissi of her father just minutes before. The tears that instantly welled in her eyes as she thought of her father further blurred the door handle as she half-knelt to inspect it.
More steps.
Prissi tugged on Jack’s sleeve and whispered, “Push.” She pointed to w
here a crack in the door, seemingly new, probably from her slam, showed above and below the lockset.
A muffled, “Down here,” came through the door.
Prissi placed her hands above and below the doorknob and wedged her feet back against the edge of the second step. When she twisted her neck to see what Jack was doing, he was just standing there. For a brief second, Prissi thought that he didn’t seem to care if he were caught. She hissed and jerked her head at the door. Jack slowly followed her example. Despite the fear and adrenaline boiling within her, Prissi was distinctly aware of Jack’s shoulder alongside hers and the long patch where their two thighs touched.
The crunching outside stopped and the light inside the bulkhead dimmed, then, brightened as someone moved about in the alley.
“Hurry up.”
The command shot through the rusty holes and caromed inside the stairwell like a marble in a box.
Prissi twisted her head toward Jack’s face just three inches away. Making her gaze move up from his lips, she looked into his eyes and nodded. Both sucked in deep breaths and began to push. The door creaked.
“She’s in here.”
Crunch, crunch, crunch as someone ran down the alley.
Prissi groaned, a sound which reminded her of the sound her father had made on the coffee shop floor, as she pushed with all of her strength. Jack’s efforts and sounds joined hers and together they sounded like spatting cats under a full moon. The door cracked. A narrow beam of light split the door they were pushing against as the bulkhead door above was partially opened.
Prissi grunted in a voice she herself didn’t recognize.
“C’mon down, hero. I’ll break your freeieekin’ wing, too.”
A muffled whisper, “Get on that side.”
Another crack. Prissi felt like she was doing most of the work. She thought the veins in her forehead were going to burst through her skin like broken springs. Crack. The door gave way, but Prissi’s triumphant yell lasted only a quarter second. The door had opened just ten centimeters before it was held in place by a security chain. The beam of light from above widened.
“NOW!”
Prissi, her whole body turned to energy like some graphic novel heroine, propelled herself off the step and smashed her good shoulder into the door just at the chain. The rusted screws holding the jamb plate in place ripped loose. The door hurtled open and Prissi hurtled after it. She barely managed to keep herself from sprawling across the floor by grabbing at the door frame as she sped by. Regaining her balance, she could see in the light coming from the bulkhead row after row of cheaply made shelves and scores of pallets stacked with open and sealed cases of wine and liquor. Immediately, Prissi knew where she was. Isabel’s House of Spirits, was the largest liquor store in Manhattan. The frantic girl ran to the first open case she saw, a case labeled Veuve Cliquot, and grabbed two bottles from it. When she whirled back toward the entryway she almost took Jack’s head off as she windmilled both bottles toward the pair of legs coming down the bulkhead steps. Both bottles fell short of their target, but they did explode, sending flying shards of glass and spumes of glistening pungent bubbles everywhere. Someone shouted. Maybe in anger. Maybe in pain. As Prissi retreated to get more ammunition, Jack scrambled past her with a bottle.
“Dumbnation, Jack, is your other arm broken?”
As Prissi grabbed more ammo, she caught the label—Corton Charlemagne—out of the corner of her eye.
Two nearly simultaneous explosions. Then, three closely spaced individual ones. Jack finally followied Prissi’s lead and returnedcame back with two bottles in each hand and one tucked under an arm. A half-case of Pommery exploded. Then, more explosions. More shouts. A detonation of Haut Brion brought on a scream. The wine went from a splash to a puddle to a pool spreading across the floor. Suddenly, there was a loud noise from behind, and the whole basement jumped into relief as six banks of ceiling lumos came on.
“What the….”
Feet came pummeling down a set of protesting stairs behind where Prissi and Jack, now holding two sets of legs at bay, were waging war. Prissi jerked her head at Jack. They unloaded the bottles in their hands and skittered sideways down an aisle to hide. A behemoth of a woman, refrigerator big, with a head of blowzy black hair so froed it made her head seem disproportionately large compared to her immense body, waddled, ran, something, fast and implacable toward the battleground Isabel came swinging an immense aluminum bat like it was a kitchen spoon. The owner saw the damage, the assault on her most precious vintages, the finest wines northern Europe had to offer, and shot forward with a speed that should have been impossible considering her obesity. She took a roundhouse swing at the one set of legs. The resulting noise reminded Prissi of walking on wet peanut shells. She and Jack didn’t wait to see the fate of the second set of legs. Moving quickly and quietly, they headed toward the stairs, which still vibrated from Isabel’s descent.
Prissi whispered, “Tiptoe.”
With the exaggerated movements of amateur clowns in a small town farce, they silently mounted the stairs and entered a small office with a large window opening onto Isabel’s immense display of the world’s harvest of fruits and grains.
A slam and a scream from down below.
“My Pommery. My God, my Pommery. You slug.”
Jack started to grab the door handle, but Prissi stopped him.
“Plan?”
Jack shrugged.
“Go slow. Look normal. If that doesn’t work, then….”
“Run like hell. I’ll meet you at…at…NYPD in an hour. Okay?”
Jack nodded. He started to step aside, but Prissi shook her head.
“No, you go first. If my wings catch something or screw up some new way, it won’t affect you. Go. Go. Go.”
There were four clerks on the floor, as well as dozens of customers, when Jack eased through the door. Prissi watched his jittery non-nonchalant walk through a store forbidden to anyone under the age of twenty-three.
A clerk looked up, wondered where Jack had come from, appraised him and immediately started on a diagonal to cut the under-age interloper off before he could escape. Through the glass Prissi saw the clerk mouth something. Jack froze and a second clerk approached on his flank.
Prissi opened, then, slammed the office door as hard as she could. Customers and clerks both looked to see what had caused such a noise.
Prissi pulled at her hair as she churned forward.
“Omagod, omagod. She’s fallen. Aunt Izzy. Tia Izzy, she fell down the stairs.”
Several customers, obviously regulars, looked above the check-out lanes to where a huge hologram of Isabel, deeply cleaved in an operatic red dress with hair much blacker and more controlled that what Prissi had just seen, smiled down benevolently on her customers like a mahatma on his initiates. The clerk closest to Jack wavered, then, as he saw two other clerks hurry toward the back of the room, he turned his attention back to the teener. Jack broke his beeline so he could put a large display of Iowa chardonnays between himself and the clerk.
Prissi intentionally staggered against a row of nano brews. Green and brown beer bottles went tumbling.
“Her leg. Omagod. Omagod. Her poor leg. Blood.”
Twenty more bottles crashed to the floor.
Catching Prissi’s diversion out of the corner of his eye, Jack took up the same tactics. A large, slowly spinning globe held paks of the world’s snacks—banger and egg crisps from Scotland. Algae green styro-flavored peapod shapes from Japan. Setting sun orange cumin and cinnamon flavored extrusions from India. Other extrudings, improbably pink, of a meat-like texture, from east of the Urals. Crunchy fried and fiercely spiced not-yet-endangered insects from the Fifth World. Jack toppled the globe and tromped through the destruction. Bags burst and sharp smelling shrapnel flew in all directions.
Jack was less than four strides from the door. Prissi was thrice that distance away. People were moving in all directions. Short people, unable to see over the counter to determine
the cause of the explosion assumed terrorists and either dropped to fetal positions or stampeded toward the doors. The clerks, knowing the eponymous owner’s wrath at the destruction they had not been able to prevent, began dropping to their knees, like grief-stricken mothers after a natural disaster, to salvage unbroken bottles of wine and beer.
Prissi picked up the pace even as her eyes dartedback and forth, up and down, trying to pick a path through the maze of obstacles to freedom.
“The baby! The baby! Tia fell on the baby.”
A whole rack of discount Kurdistan cabernets, bottles ejecting from the racks like torpedoes in a submarine, shot across the path in front of Prissi. She yelped and half beat her wings to get over the hurdle.
From ahead, Jack screamed, “Goal!” as he burst from Isabel’s out onto 21st Street. Prissi beat her wings again, but she had too much adrenaline flooding her body. In a split second, she was two meters in the air. Her head banged into a light fixture.
“Freeieekin Hesus Mimi.”
Her wings paused. She lost her balance and fell into a safety cushion of snack bags. Dozens of bags simultaneously exploded from her weight. The air filled with things, mainly orange and yellow-colored, spewing the smells of dehydrated onion and garlic, smoke and chipotle. Prissi tried to get up, but slipped on the debris. Tried again. Took an outstretched hand. Rose. Tried to disengage her hand from what she now saw was a red-faced clerk. She screamed in terror, “My baby! My baby!! Tia crushed my baby!” and snapped her hand free from the clerk, now paralyzed in shock, as he imagined a collision of Isabel and baby. Prissi juked left to freeze the last clerk, then, side-slipped through the doorway. She flapped her wings, and went airborne trailing orange, yellow and red particles like the tail of a comet.
No Jack.
Prissi flew low to the ground and as close to the buildings as she dared until she came to the end of the block. As soon as she turned up First Avenue, despite the throbbing ache in her shoulder, she elevated as quickly as she could. Prissi flew north to 22th Street before swinging back south and flying so low over the tops of the buildings that her shoes barely cleared the roof. Prissi landed back from the edge of the building facing onto 21st Street directly across from Isabel’s and scuttled forward until she could scrunch down in a corner behind the worn limestone parapet. She shifted her gaze from the skies above to the sidewalks and doorways below.
No Jack.
Prissi slunk down even tighter against the crumbling brick when three hawks swooped down and landed. Two of the officers book-ended Isabel’s entrance while the third dropped down into the shadow of the alley. The hawks pushed into Isabel’s, then came out a few seconds later with the red-faced clerk who had grabbed Prissi’s hand. He gesticulated in such a dramatic way that Prissi thought that he might be an out-of-work mime. Finally, he pointed west. The breathless teener guessed he was indicating which way Jack had gone. Seconds later, two people holding coffee mugs like weapons burst from the KaffeeKiosK and ran toward the hawks. Within five minutes, six more hawks arrived. Prissi watched them search the alleyway and cordon off the KaffeeKiosK. A roto arrived and two medics jumped out and started to go into Isabel’s, but a hawk pointed them toward the KKK.
Prissi decided that she couldn’t watch was going to be brought out of the coffee shop. Plus, her African neurons were telling her it wasn’t safe to stay; however just as she was preparing to leave the safety of the shadows, she noticed an aero-lim cruising slowly down 21st Street west of First Avenue. It came to a stop, but stayed hovering outside a storefront whose signs announced it as the Phosphor Essence. Since Prissi rarely saw a limo this far south and, when they did, lighting and lamp shops weren’t likely to be their destinations, the girl drew back and continued to watch.
The Phosphor Essence door opened and a blur, but a blur whose size, shape and blue and white wings reminded Prissi of Jack, bolted across the sidewalk and dove into the car. Prissi got a sickening feeling deep in her guts.
The aero-lim floated off. Prissi waited a couple of minutes more for the nauseous feeling to pass before flying uptown. By the time she was north of Thirtieth Street, she had formulated a plan. She swept down into Thirdtown and bought a Tibetan hat, which smelled like sour milk, to cover her hair and a bamboo vest that only a dwert would wear. She landed on a secu-booth on Thirty-sixth Street and debited everything left in her savings account after going through her father’s wallet and not finding the pin code for his debit card.
Prissi flew up Fifth Avenue into traffic heavy enough that she had to pay more attention to her flying than the events of the last hour. Arriving at 42nd Street ten minutes before her proposed rendezvous with Jack, Prissi reconnoitered a block north, then looped the loop so that she was headed back south. She flew two blocks back the way she had come, looped north again, did a short glide, landed on the battlements of a twenty story building and fought the push from the thermals streaming up the building’s face before scrambling behind a winged gargoyle keeping watch from its Gothic aerie. Removing her hat, Prissi stared down at the well-worn lions protecting the entrance to the NYPD.
Twenty minutes later, from her coign of vantage, Prissi’s attention was drawn from the cramp in her thigh to a cleaned-up, confident Jack getting out of a beat up hack and moving quickly up 5th Avenue toward the datarium. Squinting her eyes, the teener thought she could make out another passenger in the hack. She also thought that Jack was looking good, very good, for a run-away. When he got to the first lion, he sprinted up the steps, taking them two at a time.
Prissi wasn’t exactly sure what she should do. The after-effects of the attack and escape pulsed in her temples and tingled her fingertips.
Jack. Jack? Friend? Foe? Rescuer? Turncoat? The evidence was mixed. He showed up outside her apartment and in the next two days she was attacked three times. Today, what was the probability that he just happened to be outside the place where her father was killed?
There. She had thought it. The thought she had been keeping at bay. Pushing off and swatting away—like mosquitoes, like bees, even while she was hurling bottles and running and smashing chips and flying in fear.
Dead.
She couldn’t fathom that.
Coffee and plans, admittedly scary plans, one minute and a snapped neck the next.
Paying for something she had done…or was doing, whose importance remained in shadows.
Her father.
Her boring, irritating, aloof, pedantic, all-wise and ever-ignorant father.
Gone.
Prissi felt something slide up and out of her stomach, but this time it didn’t churn up her throat and burst from her mouth. This time it got caught at the top of her rib cage where it shook the bars of that prison until it broke free. She sobbed until her throat was raw, her eyes burned like open wounds from her salts and her chest ached as if she herself had stopped Isabel’s bat.
Finally, she forced herself to think of Jack because the answer was important.
Friend? Foe? Or, neither? Maybe a pawn? Or….?
“Century.”
Is that what he had said? What did that mean?
A broken neck.
Prissi couldn’t keep the thoughts of her father’s neck from intruding. Rather than deal with them, she hurled herself from the parapet and shot across the street to a botched one hop landing at the top of the NYPD’s worn steps. Prissi wiped the blood from her palms, ignored the tears in the knees of her aeros and went inside.
Prissi found a perplexed Jack looking at a display of covers from a defunct inkzine called The New Yorker. Before he could say a word, Prissi banged his shoulder.
“C’mon.”
She hurried off to the Spears Reading Room. She walked past the scanners and sniffers and made her way under the arched windows and ornate gilt ceiling to the back of the immense room. With the heavy reassurance of a d-TERROR-ence door close by and the entrance to the room so far away, Prissi felt relatively safe being with Jack. When she looked at him, he stared back. She kn
ew that he was studying her red eye rims, blotchy skin and a still leaking nose. Before he got past, “Are you….?” Prissi shook her head so emphatically that fluid flew from her nostrils.
“No. Not at all. Dad’s dead. They killed my dad.”
Jack’s horrified look seemed real.
“Who?”
To keep from crying again, Prissi relied on an old stand-by, “Ecoists, Afro-nationalists, crypto-Christians, radico-greens, nihilists, the spawn of Mordor, Satan, Fifth World Marxists. Who knows…?”
Prissi paused her protective stream of sarcasm, then narrowed her eyes, which made them burn even more, to a dark beam of inquisition, “Maybe, and most likely, your grandfather.”
As far as Prissi was concerned, Jack’s laugh was too loud and too sharp to be natural.
“My grandfather? How? He’s an old man about two breaths from death himself.”
“Is there some natural separation between age and power? Lear seemed to have some trouble with that. Listen, Jack, ever since I started looking into Centsurety, your dear grandfather’s pet project, things got bad, then worse, and, now, horrible. My dad’s dead as well as a man in New Jersey. I’ve been attacked twice, I think by the same guyz, and the only thing that I can see that connects all of the data points is a company that went up in smoke a long time ago.”
“Prissi, you’re wrong. My grandfather is a good man. I know….”
“No, Jack, you’re wrong. The only thing you really know is that Joshua Fflowers is a good grandfather. You don’t know any more than that. Look at me, in the last few days I’ve learned that I don’t know anything for sure about my parents. I’ve got pix of someone who looks a lot like my mother might have looked like a long time ago and guess what Jack—this woman who looks so much like my mother doesn’t have my mother’s name. She has the eyes and nose and chin and smile of my mom, but not her name. Which is just a teeny bit interesting to me, Jack. Intriguing. Mysterious. But with both of them dead, what happens to the mystery, Jack? And if I don’t figure out the mystery, then what happens to me, Jack?
“Of course, your grandfather is involved.”
Prissi slammed a fist into Jack’s upper arm.
“And if I had any brains, I’d get as far away from you as possible because you’re just too much of a coincidence. You’re like one of those guys running on and off stage in a Moliere play. Except it’s too scary to be a farce. I should either get away, fast, or,” Prissi grabbed Jack’s arm, “kidnap you and trade you for my own safety.”
Jack crossed his arms onto the library table, then, dropped his head onto his arms.
“You’re completely wrong, Prissi. My grandfather, if he can even think, is worried about what organ is going to fail next. Have you seen the newz? He’s busy dying at the Juvenal Institute. You said two attacks. What was the other attack?”
When Prissi told him of the details of her flight down the West Side levee, Jack said, “Why do you think those two events are even connected? Isn’t it more likely that, rather than my grandfather reaching out from a coma to ruin your life, that you happened to get mugged flying around at night when you should have been home? And the thing today? Couldn’t that have been a robbery?”
“Yeah, sure. They wanted my coffee. Look, Jack, I like caffeine more than most, but I still don’t see myself killing anybody for their Kona. My dad’s dead, Jack. And if I wasn’t such a dambed plucky young heroine, I might be, too. And you’d be worried over who was going to dance with you at Winter Ball next year.”
At Prissi’s levity, Jack lifted his head, but Prissi’s face, streaming with tears, belied her tone.
“Gotta go, Jack.”
“Where? Where are you going, Prissi?”
Prissi looked at Jack and tried to read his face. But whatever was written there was indecipherable to her. She gave him a half-pat, a half-smile, a half-sigh, and a full shrug before she pushed him away from her perch and started across the room. When she was halfway across, without looking around, she gave him a half-wave. She hurried out of the NYPD, even though hurrying through a public place often brought unwanted attention from guards and cameras. As soon as she was outside, Prissi launched and flew back to her previous perch. It was fifteen minutes before Jack came out. He stood above the two NYPD lions for a moment, almost as if he were posing, before launching off the top of the steps, flogging south to the end of the block, and making a lazy turn onto 41st Street. Less than a minute later a black aero-lim pulled out of the same street and eased into traffic. Prissi looked to see if she could see a patch of blue and white, but the windows were tinted too darkly for that.
Prissi sat in her aerie and thought about her next move.
She could go back to the apartment. Dangerous. Or, try to find where her father’s body had been taken. Dangerous. She could see if she could stay with Nancy. Deprezzing. Or, go back to Al Burgey’s house to try to find…what…something that made some sense. Dangerous and deprezzing. Or, she could dart back across the street to the library to see if she could find more pieces to the puzzle. Boring, but…. Or, she could call Dr. Smarkzy to see what he would suggest. Maybe.
Prissi wasn’t sure whether she was being tracked or followed, but she also certainly wasn’t willing to concede to Jack’s notion that the events of the last two days were mere coincidence. Coincidence was too easy. Prissi remembered how in honors lit, Mz. Carbarari, after praising the humanity, psychological insight and extraordinary language skills of Shakespeare, had derided him for his dependence upon coincidence to move so many of his plots forward.