The Book of Phoenix (17 page)

“HeLa?” I whispered. “Interesting.”

Lastly, just before we ran out of time, I had a chance to skim the financial status of the towers. Billions and billions of dollars, euros, and yuan were poured into the towers each year. But here was the twist: even more money was earned through patents, research results, and other things that were called names like “Project X” and “Experiment 626” or simply coded numbers. I had very little time to read and process the information in the financial book but one thing did catch my eye. Eighty percent of the billions earned came from Tower 4 in the Virgin Islands, where Saeed had been sent when they thought he was dead. Tower 4 was the hub of the towers' income. The money was accredited to the sale of 2839, 2840, 2842, 2843 and 2844. There was also a large portion accredited to “harvests.”

My mind was so full that I barely noticed when Saeed threw the burka over me. I wasn't paying attention to the guard swiping Saeed's card again. I didn't hear him wish us a nice day. I barely felt Saeed's bone grinding grip of my hand as we quickly, but not too quickly, exited the library. The taxi ride to the Pakistani restaurant twenty minutes away was a blur. Only when I spotted Mmuo at the table did I leave the ocean of Tower Records information that now lived in my head. I joined my two friends in a victory dinner.

Mmuo and I ate beef seekh kebabs and chicken biryani, and Saeed had only water. And at that corner table surrounded by gregarious immigrant men taking breaks from driving their taxies, I told them everything. We spoke of violence, revenge, revolution, and more violence. Mmuo stabbed at his kebabs with a fork and then ate the mangled pieces. Saeed had to hide his angry tears.

When it was all said, discussed, and done, we realized that our plan was the same. Tower 4 in the US Virgin Islands was going down next.

The wind took me.
It was warm like the breath of a kind yet wild beast. And it was fragrant from the city's open night flowers and maybe The Backbone's blooms, too. When I closed my eyes and inhaled the heady air, I saw the red of roses and the light soft purple of lilacs and hyacinth. In the sunny sky where no skyscrapers reached, I spread my wings and climbed higher.

I laughed deep in my chest and I wept. This was the first time I'd relaxed enough to do nothing but enjoy the sheer groundlessness of flight. Nothing was beneath me, and I was alive and reveling in it. The rush of air caressed my sensitive wings. I felt my blood reach every part of my body. The buoyancy of the warm air was like the hand of something that loved me.

I pumped my wings hard and flew higher. My cheeks ached from grinning so hard. Nothing was chasing me. Nothing was trying to imprison me. Below, Saeed and Mmuo waited on my return, talking about whatever it was they talked about when I was not there. Plans. Not for revenge, but for justice. For the first time in my existence, I felt balanced.

Was this what the birds felt every day? This joy? I hit a thermal, and I felt like I'd slipped outside of time; everything stopped and grew peaceful. The rush of air in my ears was gone, the gentle press of the wind ceased; I no longer had to flap my wings. The warm coil of air held me, gently. If there was a God, it was up here.

Slowly, I spiraled, up and up. Every part of me was alive, awake, in tune. Humming. And it was to the beat of the earth below and the stars above. We'd driven far enough from the city to escape the worst light pollution. So on top of all this, I could clearly see the stars. For the moment, I made complete harmonious sense. No matter the genetic selection, the forced fertilization, the careful cultivation, the skeletal molting. I made sense. I was natural. A child of The Author of All Things. I giggled in the silence. “Thank you,” I whispered.

In the distance I could see the city's downtown skyscrapers, The Backbone standing tall and audacious, as if it belonged there more than the solid buildings around it.
What must you have seen in Tower 7,
I wondered for the first time. Of all the prisoners of Tower 7, only The Backbone had witnessed everything, because it grew through floor after floor. When I shined my light on it, the energy of its rage was the greatest, and it was no wonder. The Backbone knew all the secrets of Tower 7. It had borne witness. It had witnessed them make me.
I want to know, too
, I thought.
How did they make me?

Mmuo once told me that his father was fond of this phrase, “When a student is ready, a teacher appears.” Mmuo's father was an extraordinary man.

“Phoenix,” he said.

I screeched but I managed to hold my wings steady. Where had he come from? The winged man flew like an owl. His feathers and light clothing made not a sound as he flew above me.

After regaining my composure, I looked over at him for a long time. I wanted to frown at his invasion of my privacy, but that is the thing about the winged man, each and every time I saw him, instead of feeling fear, I felt relief. I pondered this for a moment. Was this what having a “father” felt like? The presence of relief? The presence of safety? I spoke the first question to pop into my mind.

“What do I call you?” I asked.

I could hear him chuckle, deep and amused. His voice was in my ear.

“Always, people must categorize those things that defy their understanding,” he said. “They must name. Without a name, how can one command or control?”

“That is not what I meant,” I said.

“We should fly lower,” he said. “We are not astronauts.”

He was right. I hadn't noticed how high we were. The air here was thinning, and it was harder to breathe. I followed his lead, and we flew out of the thermal column, swooped close to the ground and caught another thermal.

“It is good to fly,” he said after several moments. “There is freedom in it. I'm a firm believer in freedom, Phoenix.”

“And justice,” I added. “You love justice.”

“I do.”

Saeed had collected several newsfeed articles written up about “the winged human speciMen on the loose” who stalked the skies and repeatedly came to the rescue of people in need—from people in car accidents, to mugging victims, to attempted suicides. They were calling him “Seven” because everyone knew he was one of the experiments who'd escaped from Tower 7. His escape had been caught on camera.

Mild speciMen, especially clones who'd emerged from the experiments too normal to be of use, were a tiny accepted part of the American population. This was common knowledge. However, rogue extreme speciMen like myself, Mmuo, Saeed, and the winged man were fugitives. Why the winged man had decided to become the city's vigilante was beyond me. True justice was in freeing those in the remaining towers.

“Call me what the newspapers call me. Seven,” he said. “That is not my name but it will help you with your problem.”

“Ok,” I said.

“I wanted to speak to you alone,” he said. “Before you three leave for the island.”

“Aren't you coming with?”

“No.”

“Why?! We need you!”

“There is something I must do here,” was all he said.

I frowned, fighting back tears of frustration. We'd all assumed the winged man, Seven, would know of our plan (the way he always knew how and when to find us) and come with. If he didn't go with, then maybe it wasn't a good idea. Maybe.

“Phoenix, you all must go,” he said. “You will find something there. I need to find something here, too.”

“Is it in The Backbone?”

“No,” he said. “But you are right to think in that direction. It is not done here with Tower 7. But above all things, above what I find here and what you three find there and what the others find—”

“Others?”

“You need to find that which is in you,” he finished, ignoring my question.

“What? I don't understand.”

“You didn't understand how to slip, either,” he said. “But you could do it.” He paused. “Why do you want to destroy the rest of the towers?”

“To free the others.”

“But you don't know what lives in them.”

“I don't care,” I said. “I know enough. I know the specialties of all the towers. I have read about them. I had access to the information. The Big Eye were so stupid, they thought I would remain content, so they never really worried about what I read.” I considered how right they'd been for the two years of my life. Until Saeed and the apple. “Freedom. We
all
should have it.”

“All things are a part of The Whole,” he said. “All things can heal. All things have a spirit. Everything is powerful, Phoenix Okore. But the towers are violating all that is natural, they are endangering life on earth in its totality—animal, plant, soil, sand, iron, stone, and sky. You three are correct, something must be done; the others need to be freed. You know this instinctively. Even when you freed me in Tower 7, so unsure of what you were or your destiny.”

“What's my destiny?”

He laughed.

“What's yours then?” I asked. “Why were you in that glass prison?”

“You don't ask the right questions,” he said, growing serious.

I gasped, suddenly understanding. “You let them capture you,” I said. I tried to think of a better question but nothing came. My mind was too full of wind.

“Fly,” he said, looking at me. He looked toward the downtown of the city. “I must go.”

Before I could say more, he was gone. I wanted to ask him who he
was
,
where
he came from,
what
he was. I wanted to ask him why he'd allowed them to catch and “crucify” him. How long had he been there? And how much did he know about
me
. What was he and what was I? He'd said I had to understand myself but . . . when I thought about it, well, what was I, really? How'd they
make
me? There were only three ways I could get these answers—from Seven, the Big Eye, or The Backbone. None of them would give me any answers. In the meantime, I wanted justice.

I rode three more powerful thermal columns. In the third one, I was joined by a large brown and white sea hawk. We flew together in silence for five minutes. It gave a few sharp whistles when it finally flew off. The gesture was so sweet that my heart ached. I had friends. I decided to return to my friends on the ground.

Saeed and Mmuo were leaning against the hood of Mmuo's car rental. Saeed was eating from a bag of rust flakes and crushed glass, and Mmuo was peeling and eating a mango.

“What did you talk about?” Saeed asked me, shielding his eyes from the sun as he looked at me.

So Seven had been to meet them either before or after me. “He said I should call him Seven.”

Saeed and Mmuo laughed. “It doesn't matter what you call him,” Saeed said. “No name will ever suit him.”

We had a plan. A good one. The first step was to get on the ship.

They were calling my name.

We'd been too busy doing what terrorists do to realize it was all over the newsfeeds. How did they even
know
my name? “The Phoenix Okore burned our chains!” they shouted, waving what I recognized as the Ghanaian flag, their fists in the air. Some of those fists were flesh, some were metal and some were claws. I stared out the tiny window at the ocean, trying to ignore the broadcast Mmuo and Saeed were watching on the jelli telli stretched across the entire back wall of the small room. But how could I ignore revolution?

The speciMen who were calling themselves the “Ledussee” (“let us see”) must have hacked into the system of the Big Eye. Or . . . the footage Kofi recorded of me just before the Big Eye came to his house for us, it must have automatically uploaded to a page online. Yes. How else would they know to call me “okore”? Why else would they wave the Ghanaian flag? “I'm Phoenix Okore, and I am in Wulugu, Ghana,” I had said, looking into the eye of Kofi's portable.

“This isn't a bad thing,” Mmuo assured me. He grinned. “Phoenix, this is a
movement
. You started a movement.”

“No,” I said. “
We
did. You opened that elevator for me, didn't you? Saeed, you tried to destroy that evil machine.” I narrowed my eyes, feeling my anger with him flare. A part of me was still upset at him, though I knew it wasn't his fault. “You threw the ‘apple of knowledge' at the devil's machine.”

“Someone had to,” Saeed said, looking me in the eye. My fury didn't bother him. “But they are not shouting
our
names, are they? Just yours.”

“What?!” Mmuo exclaimed. I turned around. He was staring at the jelli telli with his mouth agape. “But that can't be!”

Now there was a well-dressed African anchorwoman on the screen speaking directly to us as she sat behind a desk. “ . . . just breaking, but the standoff between Nigerian soldiers and the Anansi Droids 419 has been going on for days. Sources say that these spider-like artificially intelligent robots, whose job is to protect the nation's oil pipelines, are malfunctioning and the only person preventing a bloodbath is a woman named Eme. She is a local from the Niger Delta and she seems to have managed to befriend one of the droids. The local people here call the droids ‘zombies' after the song ‘Zombie' by afro-beat legend Fela Kuti, a song about corrupt government officials who do not think and only kill.

“All of Nigeria's pipelines have been shut down by the droids and no human being is allowed near them. This standoff will affect the world. Expect fuel prices to increase. American President Chan will speak tonight on how the United States plans to help Nigeria with this crisis.”

Mmuo laughed ruefully. “When the roots of a tree decay, it spreads death to the branches. Trust me, this is happening elsewhere.”

Saeed called up the jelli telli's virtual controls, when he shifted to search mode and they turned blue. “Most likely the speciMen have made it to Mexico or even managed to get on planes,” Saeed said. “The United States isn't the only country producing us.”

“Anansi Droids will cross the ocean, ready to hate whatever human beings they find,” Mmuo added. He shook his head.

I turned from the jelli telli and smoothed out my dress. I looked at the open door into the night.

“You don't have to do this,” Saeed said.

“Stop saying that. I know,” I snapped.

“You'll really be all right?” Saeed asked.

“Of course. I'll be
flying
.” I paused, anxious to get going. “ I can't believe I've even set foot on this ship. It's only for you two that I do. If you two were black Americans, you'd understand better.”

“But you could lose the ship,” he said. “What if there's a storm and you get blown away?”

I laughed, turning back to him. He looked embarrassed, but still expected an answer. “I've crossed the ocean twice,” I said. “The second time, I followed the Big Eye's ship. It was easy.”

“But this time, during the day, you can't let them see you,” he said.

“I know. I'll just fly very high.” I kissed him on the lips and forehead. “I'm going.”

Saeed only frowned.

“And food?” Mmuo asked, as I stepped toward the door that led outside to a service walkway on the side of the ship. “I know we've been over this, but you're really ok without food?”

“I can go the whole three days without food,” I said. “My body will take care of it. But I'll stop in every night, to see Saeed and eat.” The sun had gone down and the ship was setting off. I stepped out onto the narrow walkway on the side of the ship.

Can you hear me?
Mmuo asked just as I took off.

“I hear you,” I said, flying into the night.

“Good,” he called after me from the walkway. I glanced back and saw that Saeed stood behind him. But it was too dark to see his face.

I flew with the stars and the early full moon, alone and away from everything and everyone, the ship a twinkling mass of lights below as it waded out to sea.

 • • • 

We'd driven hours from New York down to Port Carnival, a Florida cruise ship, cargo and naval port not far from Orlando. Mmuo's congressman connection had come through for him a second time by procuring a ticket and false papers for Saeed on a Disney Cruise Ship leaving from Port Canaveral. Saeed effortlessly got through customs and onto the cruise ship with his suitcase carrying all of our things. Once onboard, a man wearing a white uniform with copper-colored skin and the jet-black hair of a TV star had stepped forward and immediately escorted him to room 31 in the servant quarters. This man was named Andres.

Mmuo had to use other means to get to room 31, a room right next to a door that led outside to a narrow walkway linking to another part of the ship. First Mmuo dove and swam to this side of the ship and entered from its bottom. Once inside, he had to find room 31. He was naked; Mmuo could not pass through walls with clothes. All he had were the room number the congressman had given him, of the dining room, and his memory of the detailed 3D image of the ship. The plan went smoothly until he was onboard. He'd passed his hand through both Saeed and me giving us his nanomites; in this way we could hear him as he searched for us. He ran about, passing through wall after wall before he found our room.

My job was less complex. I waited until night and then flew around the ship until I saw the narrow walkway on the starboard side of the ship where Saeed stood waiting for me. The ship was over a thousand feet long, 125 feet wide and could carry 4000 passengers. My job wasn't nearly as difficult as Mmuo's, but finding a small walkway on such an enormous vehicle wasn't easy, either. I flew back and forth several times, and there were people on deck and on the busier main walkways, as well. I had to stay out of sight.

The cruise ship would take three days to get to the Virgin Islands. I could have slipped or flown, but neither of those ways allowed me to travel with Mmuo and Saeed. It was too risky for anyone of us to take an airplane. There was a rebellion of speciMen cyborgs happening and they were calling my name. Saeed was considered dead. And both Mmuo and I were also all over the news for being spotted near the White House.

The whole country was on high alert for the “two escaped and dangerous African speciMen” and the Big Eye were scouring the nation for us. As far as we could tell, they had not figured out that we'd been in the library. Not yet. If I separated from Mmuo and Saeed now, we'd never find each other. So this was the best option, Saeed and Mmuo on the ship, me in the air. I finally had to set foot on an actual ship. Our plan was to destroy Tower 4; good enough reason.