Fledgling(22)

Then Wright found something outside the houses more than half buried in the ground near one of the chimneys: a gleaming gold chain with a little gold bird attached to it—a crested bird with wings spread as though it were flying.

“I’m surprised something like this is still here,” he said. “I’ll bet plenty of people have been through here, picking up souvenirs.” He wiped the thing on his shirt, then let it side like liquid into my hand.

“Pretty,” I said, examining it.

“Let me put it on you.”

I thought about whether I wanted the property of a person who was probably dead around my neck, but then shrugged, handed it back to him, and let him put it on me. He wanted to. And he seemed to like the effect once it was on.

“Your hair is growing out,” he said. “This is just what you need to decorate yourself a little.”

My hair was growing out, crinkly and black and about an inch long, and my head was no longer disfigured by broken places. I’d had Wright trim the one patch of hair that hadn’t been burned off so that now it was all growing out fairly evenly. I thought I almost looked female again.

“Did you ever think I was a boy?” I asked him. “I mean when you stopped for me on the road that first time?”

“No, I never did,” he said. “I should have, I guess. You were almost bald and wearing filthy, ill-fitting clothes that could have been a man’s. But when I first saw you in the headlights, I thought, ‘What a lovely, elfin little girl. What in hell is she doing out here by herself?’”

“Elfin?”

“Like an elf. According to some stories, an elf is a short, slender, magical being—another mythical creature. Maybe I’ll run into one of them on a dark road someday.”

I laughed. Then I heard the helicopter. “He’s coming,” I said. “It’s early for him to be awake and out. He must be eager to meet me.”

“I don’t hear a thing,” Wright said, “but I’ll take your word for it. Shall I get out of sight?”

“No. You couldn’t hide your scent from him. Let’s wait over by that largest chimney.” It was a big brick chimney that rose from a massive double fireplace. It might shelter us if our visitor decided to try to shoot us.

The copter didn’t bother about landing in the meadow this time. I wondered why he had landed there before. Habit? Or was this stranger someone who would have come to visit the eight houses when they were intact and occupied?

The copter, looking like a large, misshapen bug, landed in what Wright said must have once been a big vegetable garden. He had been able to identify several of the scorched, mostly dead plants. The copter crushed a number of the survivors—cabbages and potatoes mostly.

The pilot jumped out, ducked under the rotors, and looked around. Once he spotted us, he came straight toward us. Wright, who had been checking the rifle, now stood straight, watching the stranger intently. I watched him, too. He was a tall, spidery man, empty-handed, and visibly my kind except that he was blond and very pale-skinned—not just light-skinned like Wright, but as white as the pages of Wright’s books. Even so, apart from color, if I ever grew tall, I would look much like him—tall and lean, probably not elfin at all.

“Shori?” the man asked. I liked his voice at once, and he smelled … safe somehow. I mean his scent made me feel safe, although I couldn’t say why. Then I realized that he was looking at me, had spoken to me. And what had he meant by that one word?

I stood away from the chimney.

“How did you survive, Shori? Where have you been?”

He was calling me “Shori.” I let out a breath. “You know me, then,” I said.

“Of course I do! What’s the matter with you?”

I breathed a little more, trying to decide what to say. The truth seemed humiliating, somehow, admitting such a significant weakness to this stranger, telling him that I knew nothing at all about myself. But what else could I do? I said, “I woke up weeks ago in a cave not far from here. I have no memory of anything that happened before then. And … I don’t know you.”

He reached out to me, but I stepped back out of his reach.

“I don’t know you,” I repeated.

Off to one side, I saw Wright come to attention. He didn’t point the rifle at the stranger, he pointed it downward. He held it across his body in both hands, his right forefinger near the trigger, so that aiming it at the man would only be a matter of moving it slightly.

The man dropped his hand to his side. He glanced at Wright, then seemed to dismiss him. “My name is Iosif Petrescu,” he said. “I’m your father.”

I stood staring at him, feeling nothing for him. I didn’t know him. And yet he might be telling the truth. How could I know? Would he lie about such a thing? Why?

“And I’m … Shori?”

“The name your human mother gave you is Shori. Your surname is Matthews. Your Ina mothers were distant relatives of mine named Mateescu, but in the 1950s, when there was a great deal of suspicion about foreign-sounding names, they decided to Anglicize the name to Matthews.”

“My mothers …?”

He looked around at the rubble. “Listen,” he said. “We don’t have to talk here in the midst of all this. Come to my home.”

“I lived … here?”