Firebirds Soaring (15 page)

Slowly, Tory approached the coop. All the hens except Rainbow now clustered at one side of the pen, as far from the border collie as possible. Feeling cold despite her warm coat, Tory walked up the ramp and peered in.

Rainbow was on her perch, head tilted, watching her with a glassy eye. Tory saw nothing else, no other gleaming animal eyes in the dimness. She heard no scrabble of claws or hiss of panicked breath. She flipped on the overhead light, and the shadows receded to the corners.

Tory approached the nests, where she could see several eggs. As she lifted the first of them into her basket, she felt a prickle on the back of her neck, as if someone had drawn a feather across it. She had tied her hair up in a sloppy ponytail, and the exposed short hairs at her nape rose as if static electricity had drawn them upward.

Tory whirled, the egg basket before her like a shield.

She opened her mouth to call to Ethan, but no sound came.

The woman’s face was just as she had thought it would be, narrow and sharp featured. She smiled, and she lifted one hand to push back the long black hair that fell over her shoulder. Her fingers were long and thin.

“Hello, Tory,” she said. Her voice was slightly hoarse. “Do you know who I am?”

For a long moment Tory couldn’t draw breath into her lungs. Rainbow, behind her, shifted her feet on the perch and fluttered her feathers.

The woman took a step forward, not quite into the light. She wore a loose caftan in a shiny material, and her eyes . . . her eyes were as dark as midnight. As dark as Tory’s.

“The eggs,” Tory breathed.

The woman smiled again. “Oh, yes,” she said, with a ghost of a laugh. “The eggs.”

“I don’t understand them.”

The woman waved a hand. “I didn’t want you to forget me.” She laughed again, lightly.

“Are you—” Tory hardly dared ask it. She felt Rainbow’s beak on her shoulder, pecking hard once, twice. “Are you my mother?” she breathed.

The woman nodded. “I am. In my way. I haven’t been much of a parent.”

Tory gazed in amazement at the woman she had wondered about for so long. She found, now that she was face-to-face with her, that she couldn’t think of her as her mother. “Magda,” she said. The woman nodded again. Tory blurted, “Why did you leave me?”

Magda lifted the heavy hair from her neck with both hands. Her sleeves floated around her slender arms. In the shadows she looked fragile and beautiful. “My kind don’t have children, in the normal run of things,” she said.

“But—but Dad . . .”

Magda shrugged. “Poor Henry. He just couldn’t understand.”

“He’s married now.”

“Oh, I know, Tory. I know all about it.”

Tory adjusted her grip on her egg basket. “How?”

Another shrug. “I’ve been here once or twice. Well, three times, actually. Don’t you have three eggs?”

“Yes.”

Magda grinned and moved forward into the light. Tory saw that she wore heavy gold hoops in her ears and a gold choker around her neck. There were lines around her eyes, and her lips were painted a harsh red. Her fingernails were dirty.

“What are you?” Tory heard herself ask the question she had held in her heart since Rainbow’s first egg had showed her the image.

Magda gave a throaty chuckle. “Come with me and find out.”

Again Rainbow pecked at Tory’s shoulder. “Come with you?” Tory’s voice cracked, and her mouth felt dry. This was what she had wanted, what she had dreamed of, but . . . “Now?”

“This is the perfect time.” The woman came closer. She smelled of something like woodsmoke and musk, utterly unfamiliar. “Come with me,” she said.

“I can’t.” Rainbow pecked her shoulder, and Tory stepped out of the hen’s reach. “I have responsibilities,” she said.

“Oh, responsibilities!” Magda’s tone was light, but there was an edge to it. “Just why I left, Tory. I hate responsibilities.”

Tory stared at her mother. “Everyone has responsibilities,” she muttered. She sounded, she thought, exactly like Rosalie. This wasn’t going at all the way she had imagined it would.

“We don’t!” Magda laughed and waved her hands, making her sleeves flutter.

“We? ”

“We!” Magda winked. “The witches!” she hissed.

Tory gasped. It was as if this woman had read her mind, as if she had dipped into it and picked out her thought. “You’re not a witch,” she protested, her voice faint with dismay. “You’re a gypsy. Dad told me.”

“Are you sure? ” The woman stepped past Tory and lifted a cloud-pink egg out of the nest beside Rainbow. She held it out on her palm. “Do you know how old this stupid hen is?”

Tory gaped at the egg. All she could think of to say was, “Rainbow’s not stupid.”

“Oh, I think she is. She wouldn’t leave with me! Insisted on staying here, with you, in this silly, boring place.”

She laid the elongated egg neatly on top of the other eggs in Tory’s basket. “You’re going to come, though, aren’t you, Tory? You don’t want to stay with these dull people!”

“No, no, I don’t, but right now . . . I can’t leave.”

Tory heard Ethan calling her name. He must have come back outside. She stared down at the patterns of rose and gray swirling on the surface of Rainbow’s egg.

Ethan called again. “Tory! Tory?” She took a step toward the door and stopped.

“This is our chance, Tory. There’s no time to waste!” Magda seized Tory’s wrist with cold, strong fingers. “They’re waiting for us!”

Rainbow cackled and jumped off her perch to strut at Tory’s heels.

Tory stared at the chicken and then at Magda. Ethan called again. Tory pulled her arm free. “I can’t leave the boys,” she said weakly.

Magda lifted both hands, palms up. “Yes, you can,” she said. “Who’s to stop you?”

Tory took a shaky breath. “It’s wrong. They need me.”

Magda leaned close to her, her dark eyes widening. “Who needs you, Tory?” The smell of musk intensified. “Come with me, travel, see the world. . . .”

A horn honked from the driveway, and Tory heard the slam of a door. She backed to the door of the chicken coop and looked out. Rainbow followed.

Charlie Williams came around from the front of the house and was just going up the steps to the porch, where Ethan was waiting for him. Tory saw Ethan talking, gesturing to the chicken pen, and Charlie turned and started across the yard.

Charlie’s tall, thin figure, so familiar and normal, gave Tory courage. She turned back to Magda. “My brothers need me,” she said haltingly. “My—their—Rosalie is in the hospital.”

“She’ll be fine,” Magda said with confidence.

“How do you know?”

Magda shrugged her thin shoulders, making her caftan ripple. “It’s the sort of thing I know.” She laughed again, and the sound was suspiciously like a cackle. “You need me, Tory—need me to take you away from this!” She gestured at the chicken coop, but somehow Tory knew she meant all of it, the house, the town, the school—the family.

Tory shook her head. “I’ve needed you lots of times, Magda,” she said. “When I started to walk, when I learned to ride my bike, when I started school! Where were you then?”

Magda’s smile faded, slowly, and her dark eyes glittered. She looked a bit like Rainbow at that moment, Tory thought, thin and old and mean. “I told you, Tory,” she said in a low tone. “My kind aren’t good with children.”

Tory lifted her chin. “Not my fault,” she said.

Magda gave a slow nod. “Quite right.” She looked down at Tory’s heels, where Rainbow glared back at her. “You stupid chicken,” Magda said. “Are you coming with me this time?”

Rainbow craned her neck, opened and closed her beak, and took two mincing steps backward.

Magda waved a dismissive hand. “I guess that settles it,” she said. She pointed a finger at Tory. “But I’ll see you again. When you’ve had enough of all this.”

“Tory!” It was Charlie, coming in through the gate. “Are you okay?”

Tory hurried down the ramp. Snowflakes had begun to fall again, dusting Charlie’s hair as he frowned up at the chicken coop. His face relaxed when he saw her. “Tory! Gosh, your brother was really worried. I came as fast as I could. Everything okay with your hens?”

Tory crossed the pen to meet him. “Yes,” she said. “Thanks for coming, Charlie.”

“What’s going on in there, Tory?” Charlie looked past her to the coop.

Rainbow strutted slowly down the ramp, alone. There was no sign of the visitor. Rainbow marched to the wire fence and stared out. In the lane beyond the driveway, a dented, multicolored van rumbled past on its way to the county road. Tory turned her head to watch it until it disappeared, and then she smiled up at Charlie.

“Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh, nothing, really. Just my old hen raising a fuss.”

LOUISE MARLEY
is a Campbell Award and Nebula Award finalist, and a two-time winner of the Endeavour Award. Three of her novels have been named ALA Best Books of the Year. Her Singers of Nevya series, which includes the novel
Singer in the Snow,
reflects her first career as a classical concert and opera singer. Her novels
Airs Beneath the Moon
and
Airs and Graces
, about girls who fly winged horses, draw from the experiences of her country girlhood.

She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and son. Visit her Web site at
www.louisemarley.com
.

A
ppomattox Kim leaped out of bed the instant her alarm began to shout, “Eat my dust!” in Mandarin. She didn’t bother waiting for her mind to get in gear. Bathroom first. On the way, she hit the hotkey at her workstation that sent an e-mail to the coffee shop on the ground floor of the mod-tower. She went to the toilet in the tiny bathroom, pausing a moment to stare at herself in the mirror in all her dark-haired, bedhead glory. “I am so goddamn lucky,” she said in the usual morning affirmation. Funny how she’d been hitting the “goddamn” harder than usual lately.

By the time she emerged, the light by the little dumb-waiter door in what passed for a kitchen in her high-tech “cubio” was blinking. Appie extracted her cup of hot liquid intelligence and took a few steps more out onto her deck.

Older residents of the mod-tower called theirs the “holodeck” based on some old television show. Unlike decks in traditional apartments, this one was probably nowhere near the outside of the building. Three walls of Appie’s deck were flat-panel displays linked to her workstation. Most cubio dwellers had scenery like Mount Rainier or Hawaii or Paris as their default, but Appie liked the feed from the Worldtree Agency’s satellite. Right now it showed a ring of dawn emerging behind a darkened Earth. It made her feel like she was sitting on top of the world. But lately that feeling had a taint of loneliness—as though she were adrift out in space, alone and forgotten. She felt old. She was all of eighteen.

Appie sat in the plastic ergo-chair and put her feet up on the picnic table, allowing herself fifteen minutes to sip at her extra dark coffee-plus-whatever-other-stimulant-the-agency-could-legally-acquire-this-week. She felt the effect hit after six sips this time, like a door bursting open in her brain.
Yowza! Good stuff this morning,
Appie thought, blinking and sighing in appreciation.
Props to the barista.

She glanced at the time glyph in the corner of the screen to her right. 7:25 A.M. Pacific Standard Time. Good—she could still have a little wake-up time and log on well before eight. That would look good to Worldtree. Every bit of edge counted. Appie was already a three-star employee, but it still wasn’t wise to slack. Ever. “Yep,” she sighed, “lucky.”

Lucky that she had been plucked right out of high school. Colleges were full up, all the time, and you had to know someone or have the bucks to get a spot. But the smart megacompanies had their own plans, were forming their own schools, and had built the towers of modular cubio apartments to get their employees young, eager, trained their way, and working all the time. Training came with the job, and for a business-minded kid, was tons more relevant than what you got in college. For the young person who could hack it, the cubio gigs were the best—highly paid independence and the best resumé entry you could ask for.
If
you could hack it.