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CHAPTER TWENTY

  Adding Insight to Injury

  Throb, throb, spike. The pain in her wing joint cadged and cajoled. Throb, spike, throb. The pain played a child’s tune inside her skin. Throb, throb, spike. Even though the simple song was insistent, it still took Prissi several moments before she was willing to come back from the warm, quiet place where she had hidden. Throb, throb, spike. Finally, some part of Prissi’s beleaguered brain realized that the spiky note came when she took a breath.

  Prissi pushed open her eyes to see…nothing. She closed her lids, then, opened them again. Nothing. Fighting panic, Prissi turned her aching head and was relieved to see the pale glow of moonlight on the cracked concrete of the levee’s aged surface. When she turned, the pain’s tune changed. No, that was wrong. The tune remained the same. It was the tempo that changed.

  Prissi ignored the toddler’s music as she carefully drew her knees beneath her so she could back up enough to bring her wing down from where it had been wedged against the wall of the levee. The pain of that effort shot what was left of her Vegantopian lunch and her peetsa dinner with Nancy out her mouth and through her nose. To Prissi, her whimper sounded like a kitten’s cry. She stayed on her knees as she carefully backed away from the splatter she had just made. She drew out her breath until the needling pain subsided

  Sliding her eyes sideways, Prissi was surprised to see her mypod still on her wrist. Her understanding was that mugger’s always took them, not only because they were valuable, but, more importantly, because it kept their victims from immediately calling for help. She stopped to consider…if it wasn’t a mugging, then…. Prissi reached inside her pak and was amazed to find the two crystals still there.

  What was going on?

  With as much care as if she were on a swaying tightrope, Prissi keyed her mypod. “Dad, can you come? I’m hurt. On the West side levee, maybe around 80th. I can’t see where I am. I got mugged. Just come.”

  In less than two minutes, two hawks, with their aug-pacs hissing and green-gold halo lights searching through the shadows, swooped up the levee. Two minutes after the hawks landed, a roto-rescue landed thirty meters away. Moments after that, feeling overwhelmed by their attention, Prissi began to wonder if the police team’s barrage of questions were meant to distract her from what the medical team was doing to her.

  Just as Prissi was being gurneyed to the small roto, Beryl Langue, blood-red face almost black in the phosphor light, so short of breath his sentences had the gaps of a bad phone connection, interrupted his only child’s rescue to try to find out what had happened. Even after he had identified himself to the hawks, they insisted that he curtail his questions and concerns until after they got his daughter to the hospital.

  Reluctantly, Beryl Langue allowed himself to be cordoned off from Prissi.

  Ss Prissi was strapped inside the roto’s bubble, she felt a primal magic flowing from the IV into her arm as the pain in her body flowed out.

  The roto coughed, hummed, then rose in the air and bee-lined its way to Columbia-Unitarian Hospital. Once the dust and gravel of the departed roto’s wash had settled, the two hawks followed. It took another five minutes for the octogenarian Langue to feel recovered enough from his desperate flight uptown to be confident that he could safely make it to the hospital.

  Prissi missed her admission and first hour at the hospital. It wasn’t until a flash of self-awareness caused her to pause in the middle of a sentence, that she even realized that she had resumed consciousness, and, obviously, the power of speech. Two hawks, one on either side of her head, each just a half-step in from the edge of her peripheral vision, hovered expectantly while Prissi tried to figure out what she was saying and, more importantly, what she already had said. Had she kept it to just the mugging; or, had she been blurting things out about Centsurety, Richard Baudgew and Jack?

  As Prissi started to talk again—to relieve the room of the growing pressure from her silence—a shadow moved forward and morphed into her father.

  “Prissi, was it a robbery? Or did they…assault you?”

  Thinking as fast as the medicine clogging her synapses would allow, and making use of the things that had happened over the last several days, Prissi said, “I think it was just teenerz. When they flew over me, they were kind of wobbly, maybe just fledges, you know, just being flerks.”

  From the left side hawk, “How many?”

  “Three.”

  From the right side, “If they flew past you and weren’t very good flyers, how did they catch you? Your father tells me that you’re a very good winger, much better than your license would suggest.”

  “Another one, in front, came right at me. I slowed down to see which way he was going. Left side, right side.”

  “Is this a third or fourth one?”

  With the hawks alternating their questions, it gave Prissi a couple of extra seconds, as she turned her wide-eyed innocent face from one to the other, to formulate her answers.

  “Just three. The two who flew over and the one in front.”

  “Not four?”

  “”No…I don’t think so.”

  “And you didn’t recognize any of them?”

  “No.”

  “Three people, young boys, strangers, attack you, but don’t molest you, nor, if my eighteen years experience means anything, do a great job of robbing you. If you had money, it’s gone, but your mypod is still on your wrist. It strikes me as….”

  Before he could finish his conclusions, Prissi interrupted, “But if they were fledges, maybe after they knocked me out, they got scared…at what they had done… and just took off.”

  Happy with the way that sounded, even though a part of her thought it might be dialogue she had heard in a vid, Prissi said encouragingly, “That has to be it, right?”

  The hawk on the left shook his head as he concurred, “Right. Has to be. Miss Langue, we don’t have much to go on. We’ll check the air-cams to see if we can get more of a handle on this. And, of course, it needn’t be said that if you happen to remember more, or remember differently, that you’ll be in touch. I would caution you to be extra careful. My experience is that it’s the improbable that is most likely to repeat itself.”

  With the irritated voice of a logician once again being forced to counter the illogical, Beryl Langue asked, “Why would you say that? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Because what happens only seems improbable because we don’t have all of the information, sir.”

  “Are you insinuating that my daughter isn’t being truthful?”

  The left-side detective stuck out his hand to Beryl Langue, “Good night, sir. Even fledglings can get away if they have enough of a head start.”

  Reluctantly, Beryl Langue shook the hawk’s hand.

  Although Prissi was pleased with how well things had gone with the hawks, she was less sure about whether to continue along the same path with her father when he asked in an angry voice, “What were you doing? Why were you in New Jersey? Why didn’t you let me know where you were?”

  “Daddy, I thought you might be busy, like last night, so I didn’t want to bother you. My friend, Nancy, remember Nancy, we got together to work on something for school, but… and I was going to stay over…and I was just about to call you when Nancy was…rude to her…mother and her dad had been drinking, her dad had been drinking, and he got angry so I couldn’t stay over. So I figured I could be home in an hour so I just left…in such a hurry…I was kind of upset…because of the drinking, so I forgot to call.”

  Prissi forced herself to take a deep breath as she surged across the finish line. Her father wavered between angry and relieved, then, opted for relief.

  “How do you feel?”

  The face Prissi made for Beryl Langue was a mosaic of her words.

  “Stupid, sore, very happy you’re here, angry at those boys, and…safe.”

  She reached for her father’s hand, and hoping to end her performance, said, “Really, really safe. And, really, really sleep
y.”

  Prissi’s father snapped his fingers to turn off the bedside light. As he held her hand, Prissi matched her breathing to that of her father. Beryl Langue quickly drifted back into the sleep he had been startled from two hours before. His daughter, fighting the chemicals wandering around her body, stayed awake replaying every minute of her day. Who had attacked her? How did they know where she was? When had they begun tracking her? And, most confusing, what was it that they wanted? Why hadn’t they wanted the crystals? As she prepared to surrender to the sleep her body was demanding, Prissi decided that Al Burgey was right. It had been a huge mistake to pay Richard Baudgew a visit. Worse, she had the strongest feeling that many of the effects of that misjudgment were still ahead of her. Prissi’s last thoughts before falling back into her iv-deepened sleep were of the undeniable wisdom of wiping her nose clean, putting her head down, returning to Dutton as a bright, energetic, not so inquisitive, fifteen-year old girl.