Freefly (7 page)

I walk past several small tables, manned with people pecking at their laptops, to the long black counter.  Taylor is washing mugs at the sink.  He has brown hair, spiked up in the front, and glasses with square rims.  He yanks off the tap and shakes out his hands, dripping water onto the floor. 

“Hey, Taylor,” I say. 

He whirls around, a grin on his face.  “Where ya been, Sammie?  I missed you yesterday.” 

I shrug.  I’d been in New York City yesterday morning, dropping off a brown package of God-knows-what at a law office.  “Around.” 

He shrugs back.  He’s about 30, I would guess, and every other morning his wife accompanies him behind the counter.  Taylor was one of the first people I ever had a normal conversation with, after the train wreck of my childhood.  I shudder.  No need to dwell on that. 

“The usual?” he says. 

I nod. 

He swings around and thrusts a cardboard cup beneath the big coffee jug, then flicks up the nozzle to let the brown liquid pour.  I reach into my pocket and pull out a crumpled ball of cash, which I set on the counter.  Taylor clacks the steaming cup down in front of me, and I grab it and head for a round table in the back. 

“Change, Sammie!” Taylor calls.

“Keep it.” 

After stirring two cylinders of cream and three packets of sugar into my coffee, I sit at the table and sip.  It’s a half-hour to eight.  Yellow school buses rumble past the window, packed with children.  My breath moves easily in and out of my chest.  This is the easy part of the day.  The hard part, the Code Black, comes later. 

A man with a baseball cap shielding his eyes pauses in front of the window.  The visor of his cap swings back and forth as he scans the coffeeshop, and I lift my hand.  The man wrenches open the door and walks inside, his long coat dragging on the floor. 

He pulls out the chair across from me and sits down.  His black eyes narrow on me, stubble spiking out of his chin.  “Did you deliver it?”

I nod.  “It’s a thousand extra, because I had to knock out the security guard on the first floor.” 

“Extra?  No way.”

“That’s the policy.  Your guy was supposed to leave the window open so I didn’t have to go past the security desk.  He didn’t.  You pay extra.”

He blows air out his nose.  “Ridiculous.” 

“Not my rules.” 

He sighs and digs through the pocket of his coat.  A trio of ladies in business suits enters the coffeeshop, conversing loudly.  Behind them, a man in a black suit, with sunglasses over his eyes, slinks through the door.  I stiffen.  There is something about his face that I recognize.  The jut of his chin, the small scar slicing through his left eyebrow
—
they bring me back to a place with white walls, white floors, and bright fluorescent lights.  A dreaded place, the backdrop of my childhood.  The man cuts toward the counter, though his sunglasses remain on me the entire time.

I jump out of the chair.  It scrapes across the floor and bashes into the wall.

“What the heck?” says the guy in the baseball cap. 

“I have to go.”

I bolt out of Taylor’s without the money, leaving the door flapping open behind me.  I smash into someone as I burst into the sidewalk traffic and send her suitcase flying onto the cement.  The person screams at me, but I’ve already exploded to the right.  I fly down the sidewalk (not literally), darting between all of the people, my heartbeat booming in my ears.  After I sprint across a street and nearly get nailed by the bumper of a car, I glance backwards.  The man with the sunglasses speeds after me, pushing people out of the way to get through.  He’s much faster than I am and is closing the distance between us quickly. 

I let out a little cry, then try to force myself faster
—
but it’s no use.  Fear and adrenaline already flame through my muscles, powering them as fast as they can go.  If I continue the way I am, the man will soon be close enough to grab me from behind. 

I lurch down a side street, where two women with baby carriages stroll.  Aside from them, the street is empty.  This will have to be good enough.  I take one more gigantic step and launch into the air.  The women screech, but eventually their voices are lost to the roaring of the wind.

As I approach the clouds, I stop rising and hover, pulling myself into a sitting position.  My hands tremble.  Someone from my past has found me.  There aren’t a whole lot of worse things that can happen. 

I rub my hands up and down my arms and try to focus on what to do.  The right thing would be to fly straight back to the Tower, tell the boss what’s happened, and hide out there until he tells me to do otherwise.  Surrounded by the Tower's many armed inhabitants, there’s no way they'd be able to reach me.  But I also know that if I tell the boss they’ve found me, I won’t be allowed to leave the Tower, and I don’t know for how long.  All my hard-earned freedom: 
gone
.  Plus, I need to warn Damien.  If the people from my past found me at Taylor’s, odds are they know other places I go.  Like Damien’s house.  What if somebody hurts him, or kidnaps him, or...something even worse?  They already know I hang around Boorsville
—
that’s where they shot me with the arrow last year. 

I’m going to go on with my day as planned, then hurry back to Damien’s house to warn him.  After that, I’m never going to go back to his house again.  I’ve already put him in too much danger. 

I glance at my wrist and point myself toward Philly, then rocket forward.  Flat, wispy clouds have formed, and I veer around them, occasionally feeling the moist tickle of one grazing my arm.  There’s a plane nearby
—
droning from somewhere behind me
—
but it’s far enough away that I’m not worried.  I focus on the task at hand:  the Code Black. 

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to ignore the fact that a cold lump has solidified in my gut.  I can’t kill anybody, let alone Ronnie, a real skeeze but not a totally bad guy.  That’s my problem, the boss says.  That’s the reason he threatens to send me back where he found me.

Today is a test, and I know it.  The boss tested me last year with a Code Black, too, and I failed big time.  Jiminy had to plead with him not send me back to the white place, telling him I would get the hang of it, I just wasn’t ready yet.  But the boss was no nonsense.  When someone wasn’t doing what they were supposed to do, he got rid of them. 

Because Jiminy was one of the few people the boss listened to, I got spared, got to have another year doing delivery work and collecting money.  But doing deliveries isn’t the reason the boss has a flying girl on staff.  He wants me there so I can get through a window and put a knife in someone’s back without leaving a footprint.  Toss a bomb at a plane and see it spiral toward the sea.  Drop chemicals over a campaign event and watch the candidate choke, without radar ever picking up someone hovering overhead. 

The skyscrapers of Philadelphia tower below, clustered like a team of giants.  I skim around one and slowly sink, landing in an alleyway.  I cut into the sidewalk traffic and walk with the crowd, down a street lined with small restaurants, a grocery, and a laundromat.  The sun burns brightly in a sky almost perfectly blue, except for some puffy clouds the shape of lambs.  I am about to murder someone. 

Ronnie’s apartment slumps ahead, a rundown place with the shutters slanting off.  I stop in front of it, gazing at the second-story windows, which gape open.  I don’t need to fly to get in, though.  I snatched a key off his desk last time I was here. 

Trying hard to breathe even, I climb up his stoop and jam the key into the door.  It whines as I open it.  Inside, a ragged carpet sits beneath a stained couch, while a television blares
The Simpsons
.  I hover across the room to avoid making any noise, making my way toward a dimly lit kitchen. 

Ronnie slouches at the table, his back to me, jabbing his spoon into a bowl of cereal.  The kitchen is nasty.  Green grime covers the sink, and the garbage bin overflows.  The smell of rotting food wafts from the dirt-covered refrigerator.  Ronnie chews loudly, not aware of me, his mousy brown hair shiny with grease.  I have no weapon, no gun or knife.  At the Tower, I’ve been trained to kill with my hands.  The boss likes it better this way.  No murder weapon.

A floorboard behind me creaks, and I whip around, expecting to see one of Ronnie’s pals coming at me with a knife.  But there’s no one. 
Bam! 
Something slams into the side of my face.  I fly into a wall and slide to the floor, drenched in something wet.  Milk and cereal.  Ronnie stands above me, clutching the empty bowl over my head. 

He snarls, though his skinny arms shake as he raises the bowl higher.  “What do you want?”

I clutch the side of my face, which aches to the touch.  I wonder if he’s broken the bones in my cheek.  I should have seen that coming. 

Ronnie lunges toward me, the bowl aimed at my head.  I roll out of the way, then shoot into the air and kick him in the chin.  He slams into the wall.  I swoop toward him and smash him with my fists, and he sinks to the floor.  I land on top of him and kneel on his arms.  He struggles beneath me, thrashing around, but I’ve got him pinned.  I put my hands around neck.  His eyes widen. 

“Please, don’t kill me,” he hisses.

I breathe hard.  My fingers tremble.  I know what I’ve got to do, if I don’t want to get sent back to the white place.  

“Please,” he hisses again. 

I fling myself off of him and curl into a ball near the ceiling.  Gasping, Ronnie sits up and bolts into the other room. 

I press my face into my knees.  This is the end.  I’ve...I’ve
—

“Failed.” 

I whip my head up.  Lederman marches into the room, a cruel glint in his eye.  Behind him, several men trail.  Each of them packs a gun.  I launch toward the screened back door and am about to blow straight through it when a man steps into the frame.  I scream.

It’s the boss. 

He whacks open the door and grabs hold of me, wrenching me to the ground.  I get one look at his face
—
a square jaw, wrinkles around his mouth and eyes, gray hair trimmed to a buzz
—
before someone puts a bag over my head. 

Damien

I wake because the delicate feet of a butterfly alight on my arm, its black and orange wings lit from behind by sunlight.  I remain as still as I can, fascinated by the butterfly’s wiry black body and long antennas.  I turn to show Sammie, and that’s when I realize she’s gone.  I sigh.  The butterfly jerks into the air and flies out the window. 

I climb into the shower and let the water run cool.  I think about Sammie’s face last night, the way it was filled with fear as she told me she didn’t know when she’d be back.  What will she be doing between now and the next time she soars through my window?  Will she return with bruises, or broken bones, or a cut across her neck?  I dump shampoo into my hair.  Something in my bones
—
something deep and urgent
—
tells me she is simply not coming back.  I scrub my scalp and try to ignore this feeling. 

School is fairly typical.  There is a physics exam during second block, and my blood runs hot as I swirl the (certainly correct) answers into the sheet of blank bubbles.  In the afternoon, as I walk to fourth block, two of the Leslies pin me to a wall while Joe Butt punches me in the gut.  I’m beginning to wish I had the ability to vomit on command. 

That night, Sammie does not return.  I sit at my desk, examining my laminated sheet of practice questions for my GLOBE interview, telling myself this is completely normal.  She doesn’t come by every night, after all.  Just most nights.  I’m sure she’s fine.  (Except I’m not.)