Fugitive

Midnight woke once again with a start, expecting the terrible deed to have already been done. But she could still feel the wings inside her. Was she having phantom limb symptoms, now? She had heard of the idea in school, and shivered to think of it applying to herself.

But no, she was not in a hospital room, either. By the looks of it, she was in a storage closet in the hospital. The walls were lined with towels and sheets, and a dim light overhead threw everything into shadow. She sat up slowly, and looked down at her arm, noticing that the IV needle was gone. Forgetting everything else of importance, she reached around quickly to feel her shoulders... the lumps were still there. The skin felt slightly tender now. Midnight breathed a momentous sigh of relief. She didn’t know how it had happened, but all would be well, now.

Her sigh woke her rescuer. She saw pale golden feather tips over the sides of the gurney she was still on, and with a shock, realized that it was Kuléo.

“Kuléo? What are you doing here? How did you...”

“Hello, Midnight. ’Thank you’ would suffice,” he said jokingly. “Something felt strange to me, like you were standing behind me and crying out... Then I heard something in the screening clinic about someone missing her shift. I only had to wait about half a second after hearing your name before I just jumped straight out the window and flew over here, following that cry.”

Something was slowly working its way through her consciousness. She gave a little gasp when she realized what it was. “My name... you know my name.”

“I do,” he said with a little smile.

“Then...” she started uncertainly. “You work for L’aide Alchemique,” she continued.

He nodded. “And?”

Midnight thought about it for a moment. “You’re one of those wonderful, accepting Na’aulele like Dr. Halalo who want to help humanity?”

“Oh, definitely,” he said with a grin. “And?”

“For some reason you took a personal interest in me at the ski village...”

“Among other things, you know, you are quite beautiful,” he said, causing her heart to skip a beat. She stared wonderingly at his face and his beautiful feathers. “And you’re fun to be around,” he continued with another smile, which brought another skipped heart beat for Midnight.

“Non, mon amie,” he said, suddenly serious. “I had other reasons for being so interested in you. You see, I wasn’t born with mine either.”

This took a few moments to soak into Midnight’s brain, and then she realized. Her eyes widened. Kuléo. Pierre. He had been like her at one time.

She just hugged him and started crying silently.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said a few moments later, when her tears had run their course.

This turned out to be slightly more difficult than she’d expected. When Kuléo had stormed the castle, so to speak, he had caused somewhat of a ruckus. He needed a diversion, and had paid several kids hanging around in the lobby of the hospital to take off toward the restricted areas in a certain direction and start screaming. They did their job admirably, and in the chaos that ensued, he was able to slip by even with his remarkably visible wings. A little help from the Song didn’t hurt either, as he was now learning how to use it in a practical way: to turn attention away from himself.

Kuléo had overheard “Molyneaux” at one nurse station and looked at their papers, and worked his way quickly from station to station. He’d just managed to luck into the room where she had been newly drugged and left unattended, and he simply unplugged her and wheeled her out before anyone came back. He found a linen closet and wheeled her in to wait until the heat had subsided a bit.

“So now we’re in a bit of a bind,” he finished lamely. “But I think I can get us out, if I can teach you to turn attention away from yourself using the Song.”

“Sounds like fun, and I could use something magic after all of this,” she said, waving her hand around to indicate the hospital.

“It’s called a cloaking glamour. The first thing you need to know,” Kuléo started, “is that this won’t work if people are alerted, or have just seen you, things like that. It relies on them not paying attention to you. You might be able to do it if you were a master, turn someone’s sight away from you who had just seen you in the room. But all you will be trying to do, today, is make yourself uninteresting. We will have to rely on luck not to run into your parents or someone else who is specifically looking for you.”

“Okay,” she said.

“What I want you to do first is just listen. Listen to the Song. Feel it running through you. Listen until you can actually hear it.”

Midnight listened for a few moments until she was actually hearing tones, curious but pleasing to her inner ear, like spheres rotating around each other, or shades of light melding into each other. Both, neither, and many other things. “Got it.”

“Now you have to realize that the Song is running through everything and everyone else, too, even if they can’t consciously sense it. Many people in this world can’t, though that’s changing.”

Midnight looked at the walls and the sheets and towels, and tried to sense the Song in them, too. It felt like she was floating in it, like the aurora in the Temple of Change.

“Good. Now the last thing you must realize is that every thing, every being, contributes its own melody to the Song in an area. You do, I do, the towels and sheets do, everything. What I want you to do is focus on your melody for a moment. Try to sense the Song in me or elsewhere in the room, and see how it differs from the Song inside you.”

She listened for over a minute and was nearly driven to despair on this step, but suddenly she heard it. Like a little trilling and tumbling counterpoint to the rest. She felt her name there again, and sensed again her destiny spiraling ahead of her. She looked up at Kuléo with a look of silent wonder on her face.

“That’s it. It always makes you feel that way the first time,” he said with a wistful smile, “and every other time for that matter. Now here comes the tricky part. Tricky because we can’t really test it very well before we leave, but it’ll have to do. You want to sort of hold your breath, inside. It’s not that you’ve really stopped your Song, but that you’re taking an extra long pause before the next bar. Does that make sense? You want to hear and feel all that Song around you and make it your own, for now. No Midnight here, no escaped girl. Just us uninteresting people.”

She tried to do what he said, and ended up mimicking his Song instead, which left them both giggling quietly. But after a few more tries, Kuléo said that she had it as well as she was going to, at least on such short notice.

“I think there are some scrubs in here too,” he said. Of course Midnight was still in her hospital gown. “You might find something in here that fits you if they run small enough...”

She rifled through them and found something that was only slightly too large. Kuléo dutifully turned his back while she dressed.

“Here we go, then. Make sure you keep it up as we go.”

He opened the door, and they stepped out into the hallway.

“Be nonchalant,” he said to her in a quiet, conversational, but not secretive voice. “Remember, we are totally normal people. Nothing to see here but us walls and tables and...”

Midnight walked along, nervous. She involuntarily tensed at each encounter; each time, the person would glance over at her as if they were confused, but then look away and shake their heads. They would always ignore Midnight and Kuléo in the end, as if they were uninteresting, but it made for an uneasy walk.

“They’re doing that because you’re tensing up,” Kuléo said. “Breathe in and out, slowly and calmly. Remember that you will project outward; and what you want to project is ’nothing interesting here’.”

She breathed deep and tried to relax. The next group they passed went a little bit easier. She looked down a side hallway and saw Kai, and had to repress both the physical and mental shudder that wanted to come with it. But they passed without incident.

At last the two of them reached the elevator, and Midnight pressed the down button. The first elevator that stopped had several people inside, and there was no way that both she and Kuléo, with his large wings, would fit. Midnight and Kuléo just stood there, looking quietly, and the people in the elevator seemed somewhat perplexed that no one was waiting outside. Someone pressed the close-door button, and they slid shut. Midnight let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, and pressed down again. This time the elevator was empty, and they stepped inside.

“Almost there,” she said, crossing her fingers. The doors slid open, and she almost lost her calm, quiet cool.

“Those are my parents,” she said quietly. “Over there by the counter, arguing with them. Apparently they noticed that I’m gone.”

Kuléo just quietly reached over and pressed a button for another floor, and the doors slid shut.

“Close call,” he said. “They would’ve seen us for sure, especially since they’re looking for you. And they probably have a hatred for anyone with wings now...” he finished sadly, gesturing at his own. Midnight sighed, thinking about the implications of that.

“We’ll have to find another entrance,” Kuléo said. “We can’t depend on them leaving in time for us to make our way out, without seeing us in the elevator until then. We could be here all day, and they’d definitely have time for a search by then.”

When the elevator opened again on the second floor, which looked to be a sort of visitors’ center with a cafeteria and some sitting areas, they resumed their cloaking glamour efforts and walked toward another set of “exit” signs. Eventually they found another elevator and took it down to the first floor. This time there was nothing but an empty lobby with a front desk, which was staffed by some bored-looking people. They didn’t even glance up when Kuléo and Midnight walked by.

The automatic doors opened, the outside air hit her face, and Midnight finally relaxed. She knew she was free again.

Jean and Adeline had apparently driven her to the hospital in their car or taken an ambulance. They were not in the neighborhood of her home, but it only took her a few moments to realize where they were. The two of them took a train back to her apartment.

“I figure that this is one of the few times you can be sure they won’t be here,” he had said. “There are sure to be some things you’ll want in the coming days... clothes, that sort of thing.”

They arrived and did a quick window inspection, and indeed no one seemed to be home. She opened the door with a spare key from under a garden gnome, and they headed back to her room.

It was only when she sat down on her bed that she realized the full gravity of the situation. She was a young teen, now without parents or home, a fugitive. She ought to be spending her time on slumber parties and mooning over boys, after-school athletic teams and worrying about grades. She didn’t even have a school anymore; there was no way she could keep going to her current one. This deep into the pit, she wasn’t even sure that this wing thing was all it was cracked up to be; was it really so dire for her? After being in the hospital, she really felt the seriousness of what she was doing to herself as she never had. Was there some other way? Did she really need it so badly? Some part of her knew that the answer to that question was yes, but it was hard to accept.

The police would be on the lookout for her, so she didn’t even have her own name anymore.

“Yes, yes I do,” she muttered out loud.

“Yes you do, what?” Kuléo asked.

“Have a name,” she replied quietly. “My name is Aila.” She paused. “I am Aila,” she said more firmly, looking him in the eye.

“EYE-lah,” Kuléo carefully pronounced. “It’s a lovely Ka’aulele name, Aila. But... we’d better hurry before they get back.”

She nodded and got back to work.

Aila grabbed a backpack and stuffed a few more of her Ka’aulele curios inside, a stuffed teddy bear, a picture or two, some socks and underwear, several pairs of pants, and a couple of tops. The latter would not be much good to her soon, but they had sentimental value; perhaps she could modify them. Kuléo left the room and stood guard while she changed back into something besides scrubs. Remembering the chill of the Catacombs, which would be her new home now, she grabbed a hoodie from her closet and threw that on as well. She nearly left without her key card for the hidden door in the Métro station, but went back to get it.

When she reached the entryway, Aila was struck once again by the thought that she might never come back here. She should have spent the rest of her school years here, getting in the normal kind of trouble, sneaking out, dating older boys. She’d watched the romantic growing-up movies. She’d sit in the little patch of yard out back with Papa on the bench, staring at the clouds, and saying, “Hmm, hmm, that’s so, isn’t it?” as they both grew older. She shook her head a little to avoid another crying spell.

“I should leave them a note,” Aila said finally. “They deserve that much. Despite the terrible thing they were trying to do... they only had my interests at heart, I guess.”

She rummaged for paper and a pen, scribbled something out, and left it on the table.

And with that, she walked the rest of the way out of her old life.

The Catacombs facility had many things to take care of its seekers, for all the reasons that Aila had just discovered. They had schooling, they had a cafeteria, and they even had some small recreational facilities. She quickly fell into a routine, and volunteered on most of her evenings to keep her mind off of where she was, and what it implied about her recent life.

Her nascent wings were not so nascent anymore. Her new joints poked at her skin, and she was now able to move them a little bit and feel the creepy sensation of something wiggling inside her. The skin was stretched out to near breaking point, and looked barely thick enough to contain anything. She was in constant pain and was putting ice on it quite frequently. The nurses they had on staff, at whom she could not look without a mild shudder after her tumultuous hospital visit, told her that it was fine to use the ice more often now, since they were more well formed.

Finally one day, working in one of the offices on some paperwork, the pain was too much for her, and the urge to stretch her wings out, to stretch, stretch, stretch, and reach straight out, was almost unbearable. She started to do so unconsciously, and then felt something wet on her back. Her old nightmares came rushing back to her again, and she nearly panicked.

“Aila?” the woman sitting next to her asked at the look of pain and distress on her face. “Aila! Mon Dieu! It’s time! Quickly, this way!”

Aila was led through corridors back to a room. Alerted by the woman, other volunteers had come ahead and made sure everything was ready, with barrier sheets on the bed, low natural lighting, and lit candles around the room. Kuléo was there as well. Aila was laid down on the bed, on her front, and was now moaning constantly. Her shirt had been removed to make way for the wings. Finally, Dr. Halalo himself was there.

“We could help this break with an incision,” one of the helpers said.

“NO KNIVES!” Aila managed to yell at him.

Dr. Halalo nodded. “Not with her experience at the hospital being so recent,” he said. His hands hovered above her back as if he were probing with some unseen force. Blood continued to trickle out as her skin broke farther.

Then, suddenly, it all seemed to happen at once.

The skin on her back started to split, and she screamed a scream of primal pain.

She stretched.

And something went whoosh, splattering blood all around the room.

There, on her torn back, were little wings about the width of her back. They were covered in light gray, downy feathers.

The limbs spasmed a few times, and Aila passed out.

Kuléo had sat with her through the night, dipping a soft brush in a bucket of water and cleaning the blood from her wings and hair. Her tortured skin was seen to after she passed out, with some stitches and gauze with tape. It was hard to believe that, from such a tiny and pitiful looking set of limbs, huge and beautiful adult wings would form. But they would.

She woke some time in the middle of the night and started to roll over, only to jump painfully back to where she was. Kuléo had fallen asleep in his chair, and Aila was touched to see him there.

She walked over to the mirror and looked at herself. This time, unlike the nights after her nightmares, the image was right. Her wings, her pitiful little not-really-formed wings, were there; and to her they were the most beautiful thing in the world.

Kuléo woke just in time to see her stretch them out for the first time with a beatific smile on her face.