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  Ridley matched me stroke for stroke, obviously enjoying stretching her wings, too. I called to her, “Better be getting home. The kids’ll be getting hungry.”

  As if we were connected by a string, we coasted in a huge circle, curving downward. We closed our eyes as we went through the clouds, then saw that we were over the factory that made dope for the Opes. There was a line of them waiting now outside the door, but it was too late for them to get anything tonight. They would camp until morning, a long line of huddled, miserable people who would stand through falling rain, pelting snow, or blistering heat. Anything to get their next fix.

  We headed north to the McCallum Complex. It was big, covering several city blocks and surrounded by three-and-a-half-meter cinder-block walls topped by razor wire. Which was nothing to me, of course. Ridley flitted down to clamp her talons around a streetlight—I usually didn’t take her indoors.

  The McCallum Complex had even more vidscreens than the city did—everywhere I looked, he was onscreen, smiling or angry or teasing or silly. I didn’t know why he was everywhere, I didn’t know why his name was on everything—McCallum Incarceration, McCallum Laboratories, McCallum Children’s Home.

  I waited till the yard outside the Children’s Home was empty, then gently let my wings slow till I came down in the deep shadows behind the trash dumpsters. Sighing, I folded them, hot from exercise, back under my poncho.

  Even before I got to the double glass doors, the kids had pushed them open and were running to me.

  “Hawk!” “Hawk!” “Hawk!”

  “Hey, hey, hey, wait a sec,” I commanded, unhooking hands from my backpack. “This is it, and we have to share it. Let’s get inside.” These were the people I lived with. Not so much my friends as my kids. I was the only one of them who could leave, who could bring back food. I was the only one whose experiment had worked.

  My wings. I’d guessed I was either a genetic freak, or that I’d been experimented on, had wings grafted on. It was probably why my parents had dumped me here. Who’d want a freak for a kid? Anyway, my wings worked great, and I was glad to have them. Some of the kids, my fellow lab rats, hadn’t been so lucky.

  “Okay, Clete, this is for you,” I said, divvying up the bits of food I’d snagged during the day. Clete came forward slowly and awkwardly—in the last two years, he’d suddenly grown three-quarters of a meter and was now about two meters tall. Too bad his weight hadn’t kept up with him. He looked like a tall, camel-colored drinking straw.

  He was my age but seemed younger and had come here when he was still an Ope. I’d seen him OD and almost die at least twice. Now, though, he was pretty okay. I mean, okay for him. I don’t know if the dope did it to him or if he was born that way, but he sort of had trouble dealing with people. Even us, sometimes. We’d all learned not to sneak up on him and to be patient while he talked because he had trouble getting words out sometimes. He got upset super easily and just wanted things to be the same all the time. On the other hand, you could give him any two numbers, no matter how big, and he could multiply them or subtract them or anything, like lightning. He knew how computers worked, more than any of us. He read stuff, like news and science books. “Thanks,” he said, shuffling off to eat it.

  I looked at Moke, the only lab rat who was older than me. “He okay today?” I murmured, making sure Clete couldn’t hear.

  Moke nodded and took the food I held out. Most people are shorter than me, but Moke and I saw eye to eye (and Clete was twelve centimeters taller). “Or as okay as that freak can be,” he said, not bothering to lower his voice. Clete looked up but kept eating, slurping a bit.

  Moke was pretty normal; he’d never been an Ope, and he didn’t have wings or anything else. It’s just—he was bluish. His skin was sort of blue, his hair sort of a dark brown-blue, the whites of his eyes were the blues of his eyes—you get the picture. Something about them trying to meld his DNA with silver? The metal? Why? Who would think that was a good idea? A moron! Anyway, Moke was kind of blue. So him calling Clete a freak was lame, at best.

  Rain smiled one of her fast, distant smiles, holding out her hands. “We already ate in the cafeteria,” she said, pulling back so my hand wouldn’t touch hers. “It was gross.”

  “Duh,” I said, and deliberately took her arm, sliding my hand down until I clasped hers firmly. Rain cringed as if it caused her pain. “Rain,” I said, and waited until her brown eyes looked into my black ones. “You are beautiful,” I said, and she jerked her hand away.

  “Stop it,” she muttered, and grabbed her portion of my take. Stalking to one corner of the room, she sat with her back to me and everyone else.

  I did think Rain was beautiful. She just—looked like rain. Once Clete had mumbled something about her getting caught outside in acid rain, but I didn’t know the whole story. She had puffy hair almost as dark as mine and dark skin that looked like a watercolor picture that had gotten rained on—kind of melty. There were long drips in some places and spots and flecks. She’d broken the only mirror we’d had and usually wore a gray hoodie pulled low over her face.

  “Hi, Hawk,” Calypso said cheerfully, sitting on the table next to me.

  “Hey, sweetie,” I said, and split the last of the food with her.

  She bit into a bruised apple and crunched. I followed suit, testing my newly loose tooth against the apple.

  “What did you do while I was gone?” I asked.

  “Hid,” she said matter-of-factly.

  I nodded. That was what most of the lab rats did, most days.

  Calypso was around eight, I thought, and had been dumped here in the Children’s Home when she was maybe three? She’d been wearing a diaper and a dirty T-shirt that had a picture of a sunset and the word Calypso on it. I’d been taking care of her ever since. I gave her another apple and she ate it, expertly avoiding the bruise.

  Moke always said that Calypso looked like a match, right before you light it. She had curly, bright red hair, really white skin, freckles, and green eyes. I’d taught her to read and write her letters, and Clete was still teaching her numbers. Moke let her tag along when he snuck into the abandoned gym between here and McCallum Incarceration. He said she could climb anything and lift almost as much weight as he could, and he was almost twice as tall and three times as heavy, at least.

  “Want me to check your back?” I asked, and she nodded. I got closer and pulled out the neck of her shirt. Peering down, I saw her small black antennas, four of them, arranged in two neat rows against her white, white skin. I reached a few fingers down and stroked them lightly.

  “Can you feel that?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I can feel more and more,” she said, rummaging in my backpack for something else to eat.

  “Okay, they’re about maybe fifteen centimeters long now?” I said. “Should we cut little holes in the back of your shirts, or do you want them more protected? Gotta say, you’re lookin’ a little insecty.”

  Calypso grinned, liking the idea. “I want them to be more protected,” she decided.

  “Good enough,” I said, and jumped off the table to throw our trash away.

  Take that, I thought, pretending I was throwing away my parents. These lab rats are my family now.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Victory! We have victory!” McCallum shouted at us from at least four screens.

  “Yay,” Moke said sarcastically.

  “Stay still,” I said, holding the clippers away until he quit moving.

  It was family haircut night—we all kept it pretty short. Why? Because we were on the edge of fashion? No. Because of lice. We lived next door to a prison, and the less hair you had, the better.

  “My citizens,” McCallum said, “today we have achieved a goal I’ve been working toward for two years! In a brilliant sting operation devised by myself, our own CD Police Officers have apprehended the worst of the worst.”

  “Oh, he was squawking about this earlier,” Clete said. Sometimes he talked out loud, but not aimed at anyon
e, you know? Not looking at anyone. We didn’t know how to respond sometimes. “They caught some huge criminal.”

  I looked up. “One of the Six?”

  “No,” said Clete, facing the wall, rocking slightly on his feet. “Someone else. He killed a bunch of kids and some other stuff.”

  “Whoa,” I said, pushing Moke out of the chair.

  “They’re bringing him here,” Calypso said suddenly, her eyes bright. She looked off in the distance and held up one finger.

  Twenty seconds later we heard the whining sirens of cop cars. A minute after that their flashing green and yellow lights flashed across our faces.

  “How bad is this guy?” I wondered out loud.

  “This is the worst, biggest criminal we’ve ever caught!” McCallum shouted, almost like he was answering me specifically. “He’s going into our maximum-security lockdown at McCallum Incarceration. We do prison right!”

  “Huh,” I said, mystified. “And he’s not one of the Six. Amazing.”

  “They’re in the courtyard,” Moke said, and we all ran to the big windows overlooking what passed as our play yard.

  A green police van, siren and lights still going, stopped and two cops got out. They unlocked the van and yanked out their prisoner.

  “He’s gonna be a troll,” Rain said, watching from under her hood. “Guy like that… he just sounds nasty.”

  Suddenly I gasped. “Ridley!” My hawk had just come down and landed on the creep’s shoulder! She’d never done that to anyone but me. “Oh, my god, she’s gonna take his eyes out!” I predicted with excitement.

  “Go, Ridley, go!” I shouted, urging my bird on. I knew I sounded just like the crowd the other night, excited at the idea of blood. But this guy had killed kids. He deserved whatever he got.

  But Ridley didn’t attack. She pushed her beak through his black hair, then took off into the night. My mouth open, I watched as the worst of the worst turned around. Of course he could see us—we were standing in front of big, brilliantly lit windows. Quickly I pushed my lab rats aside and flicked our lights off.

  “Why’d you do that?” Clete asked.

  I shrugged. “Better for them not to see us, no?”

  Since Ridley had left, the horrible murderer had been staring right at us, like he was memorizing our faces. Like we would be his next victims. A shiver ran down my backbone and I realized the covert feathers at the top of my shoulders were bristling. I stepped farther backward into the darkness.

  Still the murderer seemed to see right through everything, right through me. The guards prodded him along, and the gate to the long walkway leading to the prison opened on the other side of our play yard. True, we had never used the play yard much—it was a quarter of an acre of depressed grass and eager weeds, but who had thought it would be good to put a prison right on the other side? A MORON.

  Until he had to turn and go through the tall iron gates, the murderer seemed to keep his black eyes on me intently. Was he looking at my black mohawk, the ring in my nose, the feathers tattooed above my eyebrows? I didn’t look that unusual—lots of kids looked like me. Without the actual wings, I mean. Which were hidden.

  And me—I couldn’t look away from his angular, strikingly handsome face. He was the furthest thing from a troll, despite his evilness. My feathers were bristling, my wings itching to expand, and my breath was coming faster, almost like my body was responding to him.

  What was the deal between this horrible killer—and me?

  CHAPTER 9

  My gang was talking about the murderer like it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened. Maybe it was. But I felt uneasy, maybe a little afraid, and I didn’t want to show it.

  “It’s time, Hawk,” Clete said in my general direction. He tapped the watch on his wrist, the watch I’d stolen for him. He was intense about time and schedules.

  “Right, right,” I said, and took off my poncho. Everyone here was a freak—my wings didn’t make anyone blink.

  “Will you be gone long, Hawk?” Calypso asked.

  I pushed my fingers through her short red curls. “Depends on how much laundry there is, kid,” I said.

  “K,” she said.

  The manager of the Children’s Home—a woman named Stella Bundy—had put us to work a couple years ago, once she realized there were some freakish misfit kids still living in the McCallum Children’s Home. She couldn’t turn us out into the street ’cause then McCallum couldn’t claim a charity Children’s Home as one of his good deeds, but I bet she thought about it. Instead, they came up with the next best thing—free child labor. During the day, Clete fixed the office computers and phones and stuff. Moke did like plumbing and electricity. I could never be found, for some reason . During the night Moke sometimes helped out in the gym when the prisoners were allowed to use the equipment. I wondered if the prison manager would let the new murderer use the gym.

  Anyway, at night Clete and I did laundry in the huge industrial machines.

  When we were all together, Clete faded into the background, but when it was just me and him, he never shut up.

  “I’m really close, Hawk,” he said happily, enjoying our time together, as usual.

  “Oh yeah?” I said automatically, dumping bins of laundry into a wheeled cart. Most of the laundry was from the prison, and most nights we saw bloody sheets, jumpsuits, towels. Everything in this city has blood on it, from the sidewalks to the washrags.

  “Yeah,” Clete said. “I had to install some updates at the offices and it was takin’ forever so I was workin’ on my own stuff an’ I mean, Hawk, I swear I’m close.”

  “Close to what?” I could work without thinking. I could usually talk to Clete without thinking, because he didn’t require a lot of interaction. I’d heard it all a million times before: He was close to a breakthrough. He was about to change the world, and no matter how many times he failed, he kept trying. I kept listening because I thought he really might change the world. Someday.

  “It’ll be an app,” Clete said, lowering his voice. “If I install it on the office computers, it’ll start replicating and infiltrating other computers. Hawk—it’ll change everything.”

  I gave him an absent smile. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah! It’ll totally change the balance of power, for one thing,” he said. “Everyone could have power, not just McCallum. I hate McCallum and his Voxvoce. It’s awful. It hurts my ears.”

  “I know, bud,” I said, adding extra bleach to this load. This was his biggest idea yet, and while I loved hearing about it, it felt like a daydream. Kind of like mine, about my parents coming back to my corner to get me. It’s hard to get excited about something you know is never gonna happen.

  “Yeah. I’m close.”

  The other workers, mostly Opes hired by the day, shuffled in and started mechanically picking up mops and brooms, then shuffled out again as if they hadn’t seen us. That made sense, since we weren’t two giant bags of dope.

  “Another thing,” Clete said later. We stood opposite each other at one of the large folding tables, each with baskets full of towels. Usually we raced to see who could get them all folded fastest, just about the only entertainment around here that didn’t involve something illegal or somebody getting hurt.

  “Okay, go!” I said, and we started folding.

  “I heard about these really cool experiments, over in the Labs,” Clete said, expertly folding towels in seconds like a machine.

  “Really?” I said, looking at him. This was different. Anytime I heard the word experiment, my ears perked right up.

  “They’re messing with memories,” he said. “Like, memories are stored in your DNA, right? It depends on how the chemicals are laid down, first you got the glutamate activating the neurotransmitters—”

  “Cut to the chase,” I said gently.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “Anyway, so they’re taking murderers and trying to erase the memories of the bad things they’ve done, to help them rehabilitate. If they wipe
out just those memories—”

  “Is it working?” I asked, eyeing his pile of towels. Clete was getting involved in his story, and if I could keep him talking, I might win our little competition.

  He shrugged. “It might, someday. Right now it’s hard for them to just choose a few memories to erase. A couple lifers got wiped completely.”

  I slammed my hand down on the empty table. “Done!”

  Clete’s face fell a little bit, but he perked right back up. “Count!” He demanded. “I know I did more than you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Fine,” I said, as I touch-counted my towels. “What do you mean, wiped completely?”

  “Like they don’t know their own names, completely,” Clete said, his own fingers flying through his pile. “Seventy-eight!”

  I was still counting. “Oh, my god—seventy-seven!” I hated to admit it, but Clete beamed. He didn’t win often. Suddenly his smile disappeared and he clapped his hands over his ears, sinking to the ground. The Voxvoce had started, was filling this room, this building, this city with unbearable, painful, eardrum-breaking noise. I went away inside myself till it was over, a pleasant daydream like Clete’s, where he saves the world with his app. I guess I’m selfish, but I don’t want to save the world. All I want is my parents back.

  If they could erase memories, could they also uncover memories? It killed me that out of all the stupid info my brain had chosen to squirrel carefully away, it had somehow let all the memories of my parents slip through its coils. When my parents had left me I’d been old enough to understand instructions. Understand promises. Old enough to understand that Ridley was a friend, not a pet. But I couldn’t remember anything before the day they’d stood me on that street corner. Couldn’t remember their faces. Their names. What they’d smelled like.

  Clete stood, shaking his head, which told me the Voxvoce was over. “God!” he said, massaging his ears. “It’s so horrible! McCallum is such an asshole! My program is gonna change all that.”