"You know it is. I've said so often enough. I've dreamed it."
She reached out and placed her hand over his. "Your dream is an old one, Hawk. Guiding others to safety, finding the Promised Land. As old as time, I imagine. It has been dreamed and told hundreds of times over the years in one form or another. I don't pretend to know all the particulars of your vision. You haven't shared them with anyone, have you? Not even Tessa. So how can I steal them from you? Besides, I would never do such a thing."
"I know." He flushed, embarrassed by his accusation. "But hearing that story made me uneasy. Maybe its because I don't know enough about what's
supposed to happen. I don't know how we'll know when it's time to leave. I don't know how we'll know where we're supposed to go. I keep waiting to find out, waiting for someone to tell me. But my dreams don't. They only tell me that it will happen."
"If your dreams tell you that much, then you have to believe that they will eventually tell you the rest." She patted his hand. "I won't tell the story again. Not until you tell me to. Not until you know something more yourself."
He nodded, realizing he was being petty, but at the same time feeling a need to be protective, too. The dream was all he had. It was the bedrock of his leadership, the reason he was able to hold the Ghosts together. Without the dream, he was just another street kid, orphaned and abandoned, living out his life in a post apocalyptic world where everything had gone mad. Without the dream, he had nothing to give to those who relied on him.
"You'll dream the rest one day soon," Owl reassured him, as if reading his mind. "You will, Hawk."
"I know that," he replied quickly.
But, in truth, he didn't.
IT IS TESSA who brings Owl to him when he is still new to the city and living alone in the underground. He is just fourteen years old, and Owl, who is called Margaret then, is an infinitely older and more mature eighteen. Hawk has gone to meet Tessa for one of their nighttime assignations, and she surprises him by bringing along a small, plain, quiet girl in a wheelchair.
They are standing in the lee of the last wall of an otherwise collapsed building, not a hundred yards from Safeco, when Tessa tells him what the older girl is doing there.
"Margaret can't live in the compound any longer," she says. "She needs a different home."
Hawk looks at the girl, at the chair, and at the outline of her withered legs beneath a blanket. "It's safer in the compounds," he says.
Margaret meets his gaze and holds it. "I'm dying in there."
"You're sick?"
"Sick at heart. I need air and space and freedom."
He understands her right away, but cannot believe she will be better off with him. "What about your parents?"
"Dead nine years. I have no family. Tessa is my only real friend." She keeps looking at him. "I can take care of myself. I can help take care of you, too. I know a lot about sickness and medicines. I can teach you."
"She is the one you are looking for," Tessa says suddenly.
She cannot walk, Hawk almost says, but keeps the words from slip–ping out, realizing just in time what son of judgment he will be passing.
"Tell her what it is you want to do," Tessa presses. "Let her tell you what she thinks."
He shakes his head. "No."
"If you don't, I will."
Hawk flushes at the rebuke. "All right." He speaks without looking at
Margaret. "I want to start a family. I don't have a family, and I want one."
"Tell her the rest."
She wants him to speak of his dream. She is determined about this, he sees. She is like that, Tessa.
His gaze shifts back to the older girl. "I want to gather together kids like myself, and then I want to take them away from here to a place where they will be safe." He feels like a small boy as he speaks. The words sound foolish.
He has to tell her something more. He takes a deep breath. "I saw that I would do this in a dream," he finishes.
Margaret doesn't laugh at him. Her expression does not change at all, but there is a flicker of recognition in her eyes. "You will be the father, and I will be the mother."
He hesitates. "You believe me?"
"Why shouldn't your dream be as real as anyone else's? Why shouldn't you do what you say you will? Tessa says you're special. I know what she means. I can tell by looking at you. By listening to you. I don't have dreams anymore. I don't even have hope. I want both again. If I come with you, I think I will find them."
He shakes his head. "It is dangerous in the ruins, outside the compound walls. You know what's out there, don't you?"
"I know."
"I can't be with you all the time. I might not be there to protect you when you need it."
"Or I you," she replies without blinking. "Life is a risk. Life is precious. But life has to be lived in a way that matters. Even now." She reaches out her hand. "Take me with you. Give me a chance. I don't ask for anything else. If you decide it isn't working out, you can bring me back or leave me. You are not bound to me. You owe me nothing."
He does not believe this for a moment, knowing that if he agrees to take her with him, he is accepting responsibility for her on some level. But the force of her plea moves him. The intensity of her eyes captivates him. He sees strength in her that he has not often found, and he believes it would be a mistake to underestimate it.
"She does not belong in the compounds," Tessa says quietly.
"Nor do you."
But in the end it is Margaret who goes with him and Tessa who stays behind.
IT WAS MIDMORNING when he departed with Cheney for the waterfront. The day was overcast, but not rainy, the air thick with the taste of chemicals and the smell of putrefaction. The wind was blowing off the water, the ocean waste spills making their presence known. It was like this on the coastlines when the wind was blowing the wrong way. The spills, which had taken place even before the start of the wars, had all but overpowered the natural cleansing ability of the oceans and left millions of square miles fouled. Their poisons were dissipating, but the detritus washed back up regularly through the estuaries and inland passages to clog the shorelines and remind the humans that the damage they had done was mostly irreparable. Some of those poisons were carried onshore by the wind, which was what Hawk could taste on the air. He closed his mouth, put a cloth over his face, and tried not to breathe.
A futile effort, he knew. The poisons were everywhere. In the air, the water and the land, and the things that lived in or on all of it. There was no escaping what had been done. Not for the humans alive now. Maybe for those who would be born a hundred years down the road, but Hawk would never know.
He had waited with Owl until the others awoke, eaten breakfast—a meal consisting of oatmeal, condensed milk, and sugar, all of it salvaged from packaging that time and the weather had not eroded–then called the others together to give them their marching orders. Panther was to take Sparrow,
Candle, and Fixit and try to retrieve the stash of bottled water that the latter had discovered with Chalk on the previous day. Bear was to take Chalk up on the roof and retrieve the water storage cylinders, which would have absorbed their purification tablets by now. River was to stay with Owl to help look after
Squirrel. He had given strict warning that no one was to go outside alone or to become separated from the others if out in a group. Until they found out what had done such terrible damage to the Lizard they had stumbled across yesterday, they would assume that everyone was at risk.