Flight (29 page)

“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!!!