Hawk Read online

  Max reached across me to rub Io’s ears. Io preened and closed her eyes. “Total is one of the Flock, and so is his… wife. Yes, he talks. He’s a small, black, Scottie-like dog. You don’t remember him? He used to crawl into your crib all the time so you could nap together.”

  I practically gave myself a hernia from trying to remember this, and I couldn’t. Not even a little bit. Now I had Io to deal with. I didn’t like animals. I had never cuddled with a dog—the only ones I’d seen, besides pompom dogs in fancy cars, had been street curs with fleas, ticks, diseases.

  “You can pet me if you like,” Io said in her little-kid voice. “Everyone says I’m totally silky.”

  “Oh.” I made my hand into a flat shape, experimentally, then lowered it to Io’s head. I gave a couple of hesitant pats, and then Max took my hand in hers and drew it down Io’s head to her side.

  “Whoa, you’re all fur!” I said. I’d thought she was chunky because she was basically melon-shaped, but beneath the fluff I felt little ribs, her small shoulder joints. And… something else. Some kind of weird growth on her back. I drew my hand away, not sure what was wrong with her.

  “That’s my wing!” Io said proudly and stood on all fours. She screwed up her muzzle and shut her eyes, and I almost jumped when two small wings popped out of her fur. They were each about thirty centimeters long and folded only once, not twice like ours.

  A talking dog with wings, I thought in a daze.

  “My dad has wings, but my mama doesn’t,” Io said, turning her head to look at hers. “So not all of us have ’em. But I do! Watch!” She fluttered her little wings, then took a jump off the sofa. She stuck the four-paw landing. “See?”

  “Oh, that’s… cool,” I said. Had someone put Rainbow in the food? What the hell was going on?

  “Okay, Io, my turn to talk,” Angel said, pulling up a chair to face me and Max. “You guys, come over here so I don’t have to shout.” Iggy, Nudge, and Gazzy got chairs, and Fang sat next to Max, their hands immediately intertwining. Io scrambled back up on the sofa and curled up next to me, resting her head on my leg.

  “Isn’t this nice?” she whispered up at me again, and I nodded.

  “Let’s talk about liberating the city, okay?” Angel asked, and everyone nodded.

  I frowned, now positive that they had put Rainbow in the food. Max had mentioned Freedom, their “worldwide group.” But Angel was barely older than I was, and let’s face it, this was a pretty scruffy group of weirdos we were working with, myself included. I mean, they don’t make plans or carry knives so I’m unsure how a worldwide group sprung from all of this.

  Angel smiled at me then, and too late I remembered that she seemed able to read minds. Goddamnit.

  Still smiling, Angel went on, ticking things off on her fingers. “Now, one, McCallum keeps control of the people by being everywhere, all the time. Two, he uses the Voxvoce as a punishment and warning. Three, he runs the factories that make the dope that keeps a large percentage of the people addicted and docile. Basically, he controls, directly or indirectly, everything. Especially the mass communications equipment.”

  Everyone was quiet, digesting this.

  I didn’t know how this worked, so I cleared my throat and held up a finger.

  “You can just speak, sweetie,” Angel said.

  “I know something McCallum doesn’t control,” I said.

  CHAPTER 79

  “Go on,” Angel said.

  “The Six,” I said. “They don’t seem to answer to McCallum. They run a lot of things in the city, but just for themselves.”

  “The Six,” Angel said thoughtfully. “Nudge?”

  “They’re the six most important families in the City of the Dead, like Hawk said,” Nudge clarified. “There’s the Harrises, the Chungs, the Stolks, the McLeods, the Diazes, and the Paters. Between them they’ve carved up all the import-export businesses, banking, loan-sharking, and drug supply for more than just dope. Like some of the uglier street drugs.”

  Had I just betrayed Pietro? I felt a pang in my heart—I’d been purposely trying not to think about him. Was he thinking about me? Had he even realized I was gone?

  “They’re run like the old mafia families, from Before,” Nudge went on. “They have the family heads, then captains, soldiers, freelancers. I think the Pater family is the biggest, or at least most powerful.”

  I kept my mouth shut, concentrating on Io’s fur so Angel couldn’t read my mind.

  “How do they fit in with McCallum?” Fang asked.

  “We’re not positive,” Nudge said, “but we assume they pay him a percentage of their profits or help him in law enforcement. We don’t know for sure how it works—it’s just what we suspect.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Iggy asked.

  “Well, we want to bring McCallum down,” Angel said, as if this was actually doable in some way on some fantasy planet. “And we want to balance out the Six. If they can run the city without doping people or extorting them, we could work with that.”

  “‘Extorting’ means making them give you stuff,” Io whispered, squirming closer so she was almost in my lap.

  “Okay,” I whispered back.

  “So what are our plans?” Gazzy asked.

  “It would be great if we could just blink McCallum out,” Angel said, rubbing her forehead. “If I could get close to him, I could take him down. But no one seems to have ever met him in real life.”

  “My friend Clete might be able to help you with that,” I said hesitantly. Clete always talked about his big plans—now he had to put up or shut up. I hoped I wasn’t going to embarrass him by putting him on the spot. “He’s a whiz with computers, and he said that he’d tapped into the city’s mainframe.” He had said that, hadn’t he? I realized that I usually tuned him out when he spoke.

  “Go get Clete,” Angel said to Fang, and Fang nodded and left. “Any more ideas, Hawk?” She smiled and said, “It’s weird for me to call you Hawk—I knew you as little Phoenix. And now here you are, tall and badass. I’m so happy Fang found you.”

  So, Angel was a person who spoke her mind and didn’t screw around—just like me. Now I saw why sometimes people were uncomfortable around me; I didn’t know what to say.

  “Ideas?” she prompted me.

  I thought for a moment. “Getting the Six to agree on something—anything—is going to be hard. They hate each other.”

  “And yet I think I can get them to agree to be in a room together,” Angel said, grinning. “Somehow.”

  “Is that… I mean, is that a good idea?” I asked doubtfully. “Like, wear a bulletproof vest.”

  “We’ll be okay,” Angel said firmly. “And you’re coming, too.”

  CHAPTER 80

  After seeing the ocean and Tetra and the grassy plains and a forest, to go back to the City of the Dead felt like a huuuuge step backward, let me tell ya. As soon as we got near, the pollution hovering over everything and the permanent smog that blocked out the clear sun made my chest hurt on the inside. I hated leaving the white, fluffy clouds that until last week I hadn’t known existed.

  Angel flew point and I was proud of myself for automatically taking my place in the vee, staying in her slipstream as best I could. It was getting easier. Angel’s wings, of course, were pure white, top and bottom. Last night, she had explained more of what needed to happen in the city, but most of it had to be done by the citizens themselves, once they were free of dope and McCallum and any controls the Six had over them.

  I’d thought Angel was dreaming, like way too optimistic about being able to help the city, but I didn’t say anything. Mostly I just nodded at Io, who whispered explanations—some I needed, and some I didn’t.

  When Fang had come back with Clete, Angel took Clete into a far corner to talk privately. Clete got really excited, rocking back and forth and flapping his hands. They talked for almost half an hour, and when they finished I realized that Io had completely climbed onto my lap and fallen asleep and I w
as forced to hold her like she was a basket of eggs—a hot, fuzzy basket of eggs—until she woke up.

  Now here we were, flying back to the place I’d never wanted to see again, the place I thought of as filthy, rotten, evil, unsavable. How could Angel see anything different? Why were they bothering? I remembered Max saying, “It’s what we do.”

  My gut clenched as we flew over buildings I knew as well as Calypso’s freckles. They had seemed normal, before—but after the clean, natural, beautiful caves and caverns and rooms of Tetra, I saw these buildings as they were: filthy, gross. The unfinished skyscrapers looked like the skeletons of huge animals that had died in place and hardened.

  “There,” I said, pointing. “That’s the factory that makes the dope. You see the people lining up?”

  Angel nodded. “McCallum—the government—supplies dope to anyone. If you’re on dope, you can’t think. If you can’t think, you can’t get angry about what the government’s doing.”

  I’d never looked at it that way. I’d never looked at it in any way. It was just how things were. I’d never thought of McCallum as the government. He was just McCallum. I’d been blind my whole life. Blind or stupid. I hadn’t thought about anything except getting food for the kids, how to keep the cops off my trail. I should have known something was wrong here. I should have been smarter.

  My face heated and I was so mad at myself. Why did the Flock even want me around? What had Gazzy said? We don’t have to know you… We don’t even have to like you. So… maybe they didn’t like me. Maybe they thought I was stupid, just a street punk.

  Angel turned to look at me again. “Staaaaahhhhp! Oh, my god, you’re giving me a headache!”

  Startled, I stared at her, then glanced at the others to see if they’d heard.

  “They didn’t hear. I’m only talking to you.”

  Oh… sun, her mouth wasn’t moving.

  “Listen,” Angel’s voice said inside my head. “We think you’re amazing. You survived in one of the worst cities on this continent, all by yourself. For ten years. That’s incredible. Not only that, but you are, without a doubt, the kid of two of my favorite people. You’ve inherited the best, and maybe the worst, parts of both Max and Fang. I would want you around forever just to watch that play out.”

  I looked down, embarrassed.

  “We can talk more about this later,” Angel’s voice said. “Right now, we’ve got work to do. We’re here. Got your bulletproof vest on?”

  “No! I don’t even have one!” I burst out, and five heads turned to look at me in surprise.

  Angel’s eyes laughed at me. “Lol,” she said.

  CHAPTER 81

  The meeting was in a building I’d never landed on. It was a super-fancy restaurant that I’d only walked by like twice. Up in this part of the city they didn’t like strangers, and I would have stuck out like a… dirty street punk.

  We landed in the alley behind the restaurant. This felt more homey—it was all concrete and bricks, dirty, smelly, with three trash dumpsters lined up. I knew that at the end of the alley, I could turn right, then left, and about twenty meters down was a manhole that would drop me into a tunnel that would connect up with other tunnels that would eventually lead to the Children’s Home. It took a lot of willpower to not paw through the dumpsters, see if there was any good food in there. You wouldn’t believe what some places threw out.

  “Okay,” Nudge said briskly, “I’ve had confirmation that at least two representatives from each of the six families will be here. So everyone keep alert, and if this goes south, get out and meet up outside the city.”

  “Oh, this is definitely going to go south!” Gazzy said cheerfully, patting his pockets.

  Angel stopped him with a hand to his chest. “Brother, we spoke about this. We’re here to reach a peace agreement.”

  “Sister,” Gazzy said in a singsong voice, “I know that. But I’m always prepared. Just in case.”

  Angel gave him a narrow-eyed look, then turned and opened the back door, which led to the restaurant’s kitchen. Several cooks and waiters nodded at Angel as if they knew her. Maybe they did. If Angel told me she knew everyone in the entire city, I’d believe her.

  A guy in a waiter suit said, “They’re in the private room upstairs.”

  Angel nodded and led us to the most amazing staircase I’d ever seen—fancier even than the one I’d caught a glimpse of at Pietro’s house. Pietro. Would he be here tonight? I hadn’t seen him since he’d patched me up… oh, sun, that had been only four days ago? Five days? Impossible.

  Restaurant sounds of plates clinking and polite people talking followed us up the carved wooden stairs covered with blood-red carpet so thick, even Clete could sneak down them.

  The meeting was in a big room that had glass all around it. Anyone could see what was happening in it. That was smart. Angel pulled open the door and we all filed in. Everyone here was well dressed, and clean. They looked smart. They looked capable. They looked… nothing like me.

  Oh, man, I was in way over my head. I stared at my feet. Why had Angel wanted me to come? I didn’t know anything about this kind of situation.

  “Staaaaaahhhhp,” Angel’s voice said. I didn’t even look up—she was talking only to me, inside my head. “You’re here to learn.”

  Oh. That made sense.

  “My name is Angel,” she said out loud. “Thank you for coming. Can everyone introduce themselves?”

  “Kieran McLeod,” a big man with red hair said. “This is my brother, Mike.”

  Angel nodded.

  “My name is Mark Chung.” He was older, with straight gray hair and four earrings in his right ear. In the Chung territory, you pierced your ear for every person you killed yourself. They must have thought I was a goddamn maniac because my ears were all pierced, my nose was pierced, my eyebrow…

  “I’m Koi Chung,” said the woman next to him. She was pretty, but one cheek had a slight dent in it as if it’d been knocked in and not set right.

  Next were the Harrises, Shiv and Chris. Shiv looked just like her name, like she’d been made out of something else, in prison. Chris looked nervous, twisting the tablecloth in one hand.

  “I’m Kim Stolk,” said the next woman, who looked as if her face would crack if she smiled. “This is my son, Trevor.” Trevor was maybe twenty, brown eyes, tightly curled blue hair, and had a “Gonna kill Mom soon” air about him.

  “Santino Diaz,” said a dark-haired man. He seemed impatient, his gaze on the others dismissive.

  “Dom Diaz,” said a guy who looked like he might be Santino’s twin. But his smile was easy, he was chewing a toothpick, and he clearly thought this whole thing was a joke.

  “Pietro Pater,” a strong, clear voice said, and my head jerked up. It was him. My heart lurched and I took in a shallow breath. He was one of the Six. I shouldn’t even like him. I’d seen him involved in a killing that happened just to keep the family’s pride intact.

  “Pietro’s uncle, Felipe,” said a dry voice.

  “Good, everyone’s here,” Angel said, pulling out a chair. “Now, we all have the same objectives,” she began.

  And then the door blew open, Pietro’s father filling the doorway. And he was not happy.

  CHAPTER 82

  “What the hell is this?” Giacomo Pater roared, and spit on the floor. He gestured to Angel, then looked around the room. “This stranger crooks her finger and you weaklings come running? And for what? For peace? Is that what you’re telling me? Peace? We got peace here! All of you dumb shits stay out of my territory, we got peace, eh? I don’t care what you do on your own turf, you don’t poke your noses into my business on mine. Bam! We got peace! See? We don’t need a little girl to come here and call us to a fricking meeting! What’s wrong with you guys?”

  Every one of the Flock was tensed and ready for action, including Angel and me. We felt the heavy, thudding footsteps in the hallway before we saw them, two of Giacomo’s soldiers. They slammed through the doors, their long
rifles out in the open.

  “Mr. Pater,” Angel said firmly, “your population is aging and dying, and dying too young. How many children do you see around? How many people that you send to the Infirmary come back? They die there, even with minor wounds! Your air is dirty, your water polluted, and almost half the population is addicted to something! You call that peace?”

  Giacomo waved a meaty hand at Angel. His wavy dark hair was streaked with white, but he still looked youngish somehow. “You’re seeing things! Come to my house, at the top of the Pater territory—my air is clean, my water sweet. You’re making too much of minor problems!”

  Angel stood up, bracing her hands on the table. Giacomo’s bodyguards dropped their weapons into a shooting stance.

  “These problems aren’t minor,” she said mildly. “And just because they don’t affect you doesn’t mean that they don’t affect tens of thousands of other people. The City of the Dead is a good name for this place.”

  “Look, you,” Giacomo said, pointing his finger at Angel. “You keep your nose out of our business, eh? You’re a stranger, maybe you’re not seeing things properly.”

  “I’m seeing them fine,” Angel said, her voice flat.

  “What my father is trying to say,” Pietro began earnestly. I automatically winced, wondering why he was so stupid—this was not the time to speak up.

  “Your father says what he means to say!” Giacomo Pater shouted at Pietro so loudly that the windowpanes shook. “You don’t ever explain for me, boy! Why are you here in the first place? I just found out about this meeting! Ready to knock your old man out of the nest?”

  “No!” Pietro shouted. “Not at all! But when you’re out of town, I represent the family!”

  “You represent the soft, spoiled, weakling that your mother made you!” Giacomo screamed back. “Not my family! Not me and surely not the family business! Not the one I built from the ground up!”