Crow - The Awakening (37 page)

"That's amazing. Mom is going to go crazy over the veggies. Really broke her heart to see the last gardeners leave." Richard looked around.

"I should show you how to take care of things up here. You know, just in case," Steven offered.

"You going somewhere?" Richard looked aside at him. Steven shook his head and Richard smiled. "I'm good at killing plants. That's as far as I've gotten."

"Eh, it's really no problem. I'll be your teacher." Steven walked out to the garden. "See, I've got the irrigation mostly automated, and I've made charts for planting what, where, and when. It's really very easy." He looked over at a large building jutting from the roof. "Is anyone using that apartment over there?" Steven pointed to the roof-top building.

"That was the storage shed for the garden. He had a small apartment in there too, but used it mainly to store his stuff." Richard walked over to the building and Steven followed. Inside the building was a main room that was full of various parts of the raised beds, trellises, and irrigation. Steven dug through it and found a few things he could use right away. "Cool. This will work."

"Here's the apartment," Richard said, going through a door into a modest one bedroom efficiency apartment. It was divided by a bar counter that marked the border between the kitchen and the living area and had a small bedroom and bathroom at the back. From the way things looked, the initial room they entered was at one time the living room before it was walled off. There was thick dust everywhere and seedling trays stacked up on the bar.

"If I clean this up, can I use it?"

"Sarah's paintings getting to you?" Richard smiled. He could remember the constant and sometimes overwhelming smell of paint, and that was only when he was there to fix something. He wondered how Steven was dealing with it living there.

"It's not that bad once you get used to it. She really likes having me there, but I'd like to have a place to hide out if I need to," Steven explained.

"Sure. It was for the gardener anyway." Richard tossed him a key.

"Sweet. This is going to be great. I really appreciate this."

"I appreciated you mucking out the elevator shaft today, so it balances out." Richard went to the breaker box and powered the apartment up. It was sparsely furnished, but Steven didn't care. Sarah and Charley were nice and he called their apartment home for the most part, but this would be his tree house, a home away from home.

"Ouch! Careful with that thing," Migalo snarled as Sirel fined tuned the shaving job. Nearly all of his fur was removed, and his hair was cut short, but there were still patches that needed more attention. The floor around him had huge mounds of fur piled up and he looked at it, forlorn. This was one of the worst parts about these missions. Having to pretend to be Terran.

Sirel snickered as she ran a glowing razor over his ebony skin, singeing off the last stubble. "Then sit still, silly." She kept singeing his hair off. "I could do this faster without this thing, you know." She touched a patch with her finger and it immediately puffed into acrid smoke.

Migalo flinched and frowned at her. "I like my skin." He fidgeted as she raised his arm to get to his ribs. "Careful. Remember last time." He looked down as she deftly burned off stray patches of fur.

"Oh, that healed just fine, you big puppy." Sirel poked his rib, making Migalo squirm. She sat back, looking at her handiwork. "You look like a wet cat." She giggled. Migalo glared at her and growled.

Penipe walked by. "Behave, you two." She looked at Migalo critically. He looked very Terran without the fur, as long as he didn't open his mouth or show anyone his claws. If only he didn't appear to look like he was thinking of eating you whenever he looked at you.

"Remember the training. Keep your teeth out of sight." His canines may provoke some unwanted attention, usually in the form of manic screaming and running away. She leaned over and tweezed a stray hair out of one of his eyebrows with her fingers.

"Ow! Do you really need to do that?" Migalo flinched, rubbing his eyebrow. Penipe grabbed his face and tweezed another couple of stray hairs while Migalo fumed, jumping each time she plucked. "You're enjoying this, aren't you?" he grumbled. Penipe looked in his face and smiled, nodding.

"We can't attract any attention to ourselves, Migalo. No detail must be overlooked," Lohet said as he walked into the bathroom to evaluate their progress. He had applied a makeup that very convincingly hid his pallid countenance. Looking critically at Penipe, he handed sunglasses to her. "You will need to wear these." Penipe sighed. Her eyes would definitely be a distraction. He looked at her as he turned her around. She had just finished shaving and brought her unruly hair under control when Sirel and Migalo distracted her. "Other than your eyes, you'll pass."

"I feel naked," Penipe complained, rubbing her shoulders with her hands.

"You are naked," Sirel pointed out as she teased Migalo's head of hair. She had left a little fuzz up there to emulate a close-cropped haircut.

Penipe looked down. "Besides that. It feels really weird." Penipe reached for her clothing and got dressed while Sirel put away the shaver then tossed Migalo's pile of clothing to him. He frowned as he pulled a sock off his head.

"It's so... Terran." Migalo held up a pair of boxer shorts. His own clothing was far more functional, allowed for better movement and was robust enough for him to hunt in. The Terran clothing looked flimsy and like it would fall apart the first time he tackled an elk.

"That's the idea," Lohet said as he examined his paint job in the mirror and tested his smile, finding just where he had to stop before showing his own canines. There was nothing he or Migalo could do about their teeth except to do their best to just hide them. Penipe's were not nearly so pronounced and were much easier for her to hide. Practicing his smile, he stood up and straightened his clothing. He, too, had dressed the part, opting for a sports coat over a turtleneck sweater and a modest pair of slacks.

Sirel sat on the tank of the toilet, sullen when Lohet turned his attention to her. He picked up a small case and stood in front of Sirel who tried not to look at him. "Smile." She complied reluctantly, doing her best to hide her own teeth. "That won't work, Sirel. You will need to cover them."

"I hate those things!" Sirel complained, pointing to the set of caps that were meant to cover her rows of sharp shark-like teeth.

"You should try shaving," Migalo grumbled, grinning at her. She made a face at him.

Lohet looked at him, then the other two. "We're very close. This is no time to lose focus."

Sirel pouted, then put the upper and lower caps on her teeth one at a time. They clipped onto her razor sharp teeth tightly and she made a face, feeling distinctly uncomfortable with them in her mouth. Lohet nodded while she felt them with her tongue and scowled.

"Now you look like Migalo with that frown." Penipe grinned as she inspected the teeth. Sirel snapped at her finger. "I think they'll do okay."

"They're hard to get off to eat." Sirel played with them with her fingers. Penipe looked at her, sympathetic. All she had to do was shave and wear a pair of sunglasses. So long as people didn't look too closely, she easily passed for a Terran. Provided she resisted the urge to jump up into a tree, that is. But while being hairless was disconcerting, she wasn't really uncomfortable.

"Okay. How's the tracking going?" Lohet was eager to get back on the hunt for Steven. They had a big city to search and their time was running out. He was developing faster than they had planned for, thanks to the couple of years of medication, so their window of opportunity was all the more narrow.

Sirel walked out of the bathroom and the rest followed, with Migalo bringing up the rear as he tried to figure out the buttons on the shirt. They went into the living room of their safe house where Sirel had set up her tracking station. A holographic monitor was hovering over the table, and on it they could see everything Steven was doing digitally, but still no hint about where he was doing it from. "We can't track him through the network anymore. He's using the Sadari network exclusively now. We can see what servers he cracks, however. He's been focusing on the servers of the company Meruk and Lelana worked at with the Crows.

Lohet leaned over, peering closer at the screen. "He hasn't been able to get into the old physical archives. He may try to go onsite."

"I'll tap into their surveillance," Penipe said, cracking into the security servers that monitored that company. "If he tries to break in, we'll see it."

"Pull up schematics and list the possible entry points he may try." Lohet pointed at the screen. "We can focus on those points and anticipate his ingress."

Penipe moved data blocks around and frowned. "We have some blind spots."

"Those are the spots he'll try to exploit if he goes for it," Lohet said.

"The deviant may not go after those archives," Sirel piped up, wondering if it could be a diversion. He had already sifted through the company pretty thoroughly. Why was he hitting them again? She examined the data stream he was pulling off the servers. "There are the video files, too. He's acquiring the old surveillance archives."

"They were deleted before we could get to them, however. But not by him." Lohet paced around the table. "Could someone be feeding him these archives?" He looked at Sirel. "What if the Sadari have been leading him on all this time?"

"For what purpose?" Sirel asked. If they knew where he was, they could just pick him up at any time. Lohet shook his head. But he found the ramifications troubling. There was a lot they didn't know about their enemy's motives. It could very well be they had no intention to pick him up at all.

"We need to canvas area hotels. Perhaps homeless shelters," Penipe brainstormed as she pulled up lists. "And seismological stations. If we're close he may have another dream."

"How close do we need to be to affect him that way, though?" Lohet asked himself as much as them, looking over a map of the Seattle area. "We may need to activate more safe houses and rotate through them to better incite the deviant into a dream."

"Isn't that dangerous?" Migalo piped in. "He could bring down the city."

"Given the troubling questions we have, it's a justifiable risk." Lohet looked at him.

"Better a city than worse." Sirel looked at Migalo, who looked down to avoid her gaze. Her world was reduced to a seething ocean of magma because of a deviant.

Steven took in a deep breath, enjoying the scents of the forest. It wasn't quite as wild as the deep forests he grew up in, but it was still extremely pleasing to be in. Towering trees enclosed him and ferns and underbrush blanketed the forest floor. He was thrilled to have found this at the end of one of the bus routes that passed by his apartment. Until he got to the forest, he didn't really appreciate just how deadening the city was to him. The forest was life to him, and he soaked it in.

Looking up into the treetops, Steven found a tree and scaled it easily up into the canopy. He pushed off the trunk and grabbed the branches of a neighboring tree, and swung in to land on its trunk. It may have been several weeks since he was last in the forest, but it still remained with him and before long he was traveling through the treetops rapidly and almost silently until he came to a small clearing. He dropped out of the tree and landed on the soft detritus that carpeted the forest floor and walked around the perimeter of the clearing, savoring the scents of the flowers blooming in it.

As he walked through the clearing, he noticed another one of those tropical dandelions. He stopped for a moment, looked at it, and remembered the meadow. Rolling his eyes, he walked on. He wasn't going to let that ruin his forest experience. He was too thrilled to be in the forest and doubted anything would be able to put a damper on that. The day was gorgeous, perfect for a romp through the forest. He felt almost intoxicated from the energy that was flowing around him.

He did see some other plants that he sorely missed from home and dug up a couple to take back to the rooftop garden. He searched through his pockets and found a couple of sandwich bags and stuffed the root balls in them, then started trotting back to the trail. As he re-entered the forest he could swear someone was dodging between the trees like a shadow. He considered chasing the person, but was a little creeped out so maintained his course. He couldn't feel that person, which disturbed him even more. Normally when in the forest he was connected to all life in it and he could feel everything, even down to the smallest creatures if he focused.

If he was paying attention, he would have known that a puma had been stalking him and was about to jump out of the underbrush up ahead. However, he was distracted by the renewed flood of life around him, like a starving man given a table full of food. He looked around for the shadow, but was suddenly tackled by a puma just as he felt her presence at the last moment. The mountain lion pounced on him, roaring with a sound that reminded Steven of a screaming woman. He reacted, trying to divert the attack but she hit him square in the chest and knocked him to the ground, and they rolled in the underbrush for a few minutes until they both jumped up, facing each other. Steven dove in, getting the puma in a headlock and started poking her ribs. She squirmed free and pounced back on him, knocking him against a tree and started biting at his neck.

"Ow, that hurt." Steven rubbed an old painful spot that he had gotten from the robbery attempt. He swatted at the puma who dodged, spun around and lay at his feet on her back, swatting at his legs. Sitting down, Steven scratched the large cat on the belly, realizing just how much he missed his friends. She wiggled and gnawed at his arm as he pet her, enjoying the attention. Smiling, Steven pet her face and scratched behind her ears. "I should have come out here weeks ago," he said to the mountain lion. He had not noticed just how intensely the concrete of the city seemed to suck out his vitality and felt positively euphoric to be back in the forest. It was a feeling of being home.