Azizi fell backward in the dirt, scrambling away in terror, but Nuru was grinning at me.
“You are a gift to us!” she exclaimed.
I had to smile. In the rest of the world, mutants were old news, but here, I was still a novelty. Here, people still thought I could help.
35
I STRETCHED MY limbs out on the woven rug. I felt the dried grasses poking through my sweatshirt, but I didn’t mind.
The earthy scent of the walls filled my nostrils, along with the musk of bodies packed close and old cooking spices—the smells of community.
I’d always thought of myself as so independent, but as I listened to Nuru’s and Azizi’s slow, steady breathing across the room, I realized just how terribly I’d missed my flock, and I finally felt some comfort.
In the moment before I drifted to sleep, the peaceful snoring stopped. Instead, I heard a ragged, nervous inhale, and my peripheral vision caught the arc of the blade swinging down behind my left shoulder.
My wings exploded outward, and I burst up through the mud roof before the knife could find its mark.
From twenty feet up in the air, still bewildered, I stared down through the wide, crumbling hole I’d torn in the hut. Nuru was on her feet, looking up at me, slack-jawed.
She was holding a machete.
I swooped back through the hole and tore it away from her, then glided out the door with it before my feet had ever touched the ground.
Nuru ran out of the hut, her brother trailing close behind.
I held the weapon in front of my face and plucked a cleanly halved feather off the blade. I exhaled a shaky breath.
So. Close.
When I looked back at Nuru and Azizi, the brother and sister I’d talked and laughed with, my temper exploded. “What were you doing with this thing?” I demanded, gesturing wildly.
“We are sorry,” Azizi said quickly, trying to smooth it over. “It is a mistake, you understand, a misunderstanding, that is all. Do not be angry with my sister.”
“We were only hungry, you see,” Nuru explained.
“You were going to eat me?” I asked, incredulous.
“Of course not!” Azizi answered. “We are not cannibals.”
“Just your wings,” Nuru admitted.
Call me crazy, but I didn’t find that very comforting.
“I told you I would help you find food,” I said sadly, turning away from the little bit of warmth I’d yearned for.
Obviously hoping my offer was still good, Azizi called, “Come back! We are sorry!”
“No doubt,” I answered, but I was already halfway across the desert by then.
36
NOW WHAT?
I had flown long enough for the cannibal creepshow to be far, far behind me, but my strength was giving out. I hadn’t seen anybody or anything for miles—no trees, no water, and definitely no food. I landed on a big pile of hard-packed dirt and thought. I was hungry and dehydrated, on the wrong continent, and completely alone. No flock, no Fang, no Dylan, no nobody.
Our island in the Pacific had been destroyed, apparently Australia had been destroyed, and now here I was in eastern Africa, which seemed extra destroyed.
That was a hefty chunk of the world. What in the heck had happened, to cause so much destruction on such a huge scale? Could any one being mastermind such a thing?