She began working in the kitchens of the compound and sleeping in a back room on a cot. It was a dreary, unrewarding existence, but her choices were limited. In the compounds, everyone over the age of ten worked if they wanted to remain. If you did not contribute, you were put out. So she worked. But she was unhappy, and she began to question whether the life she was living was the best she could hope for. She began spending time on the walls, looking at the city, wondering what was out there.
Which was how, five years ago, she had met Hawk.
A growl sounded from the common room. Cheney, head lowered, ears flat, and hair bristling, faced the iron–plated door that opened onto the outer corridors of the underground city. He didn't look like a fur ball now; he looked like a monster. His muzzle was drawn back to expose his huge teeth, and the sleepy eyes of a moment earlier had turned baleful. Owl rotated away from Squirrel and moved her chair back down the ramp and into the common room, where lamps powered by solar cells gave off a stronger light. Sparrow was already there, standing next to Cheney, gripping one of the prods. Sparrow was small, and the big dog, even crouched, stood shoulder–high to her. Owl maneuvered over to the door and waited, listening. Moments later, she had heard the rapping sound–one sharp, one soft, two sharp. She waited until it was repeated, then reached up and released the locking bars and unlatched the door.
Fixit and Chalk pushed through, soaked to the skin and looking like drowned rats. Cheney quit growling and took himself out of his crouch. Sparrow lowered the prod.
"He fell in the storm sewer," Chalk announced, gesturing at Fixit.
"Then he fell in trying to help me out," Fixit finished.
"You were supposed to be on the roof," Sparrow pointed out, her blue eyes intense. "The roof is up, not down, last I heard."
"Yeah, yeah." Fixit brushed the water from his curly red hair and shook himself like a dog. Both Cheney and Sparrow backed up. "You can't do much with solar cells when it's raining. We switched out the collectors from the catchment system, threw in the purification tablets, and were done. Then we decided to forage for stores. Found a big stash of bottled water two blocks south. Too much to haul without help."
"It'll take all of us and the wagon," Chalk added. "But a good find, right, Owl?"
"Better than good," Owl agreed.
He grinned, then looked around. "Where are the others, anyway? Aren't they back yet?"
Owl shook her head. "Soon, I expect. You better get out of those clothes and dry off or you'll end up like Squirrel."
"I'd have to be pretty stupid to end up like Squirrel," Chalk declared, and Fixit laughed.
"It's not funny," Sparrow snapped. She crossed to confront them, not as big as they were but a whole lot more unpredictable. "You think it's funny that he's sick?"
"Stop it, Sparrow," Chalk said, turning away from her. "I didn't mean anything. I want him to get well as much as you do. I was just teasing about how it happened."
"Well, tease about something else," Owl suggested gently. "What happened to Squirrel was an accident."
Which was true, so far as it went. It had been an accident that he had cut himself on a piece of sharp metal and that the cut had become badly infected.
But he had brought it on himself by trying to salvage a box of metal toy soldiers that Hawk had told him not to touch.
"Besides which, where do you get off calling anyone stupid?" Sparrow demanded.
Chalk was so fair with his pale skin and white–blond hair that he almost wasn't there. Now he flushed with the rebuke and spun angrily back on Sparrow.
"Let it alone, Chalk," Owl said, intervening quickly. "Just go change your clothes. You, too, Fixit. Sparrow, you go back into the bedroom and sit with Squirrel. Let me know if he needs anything."
There were a few more pointed looks and some grumbling, but everyone did as asked. Owl was the mother, and you don't argue with your mother. She hadn't asked for the position, but there was no one else to fill it, and as the oldest female member of the tribe she was the logical choice. Most of them could barely remember their real mothers, but they knew what mothers were and wanted one.
Hawk provided leadership and authority, but Owl gave them stability and reassurance. In a world where kids believed that adults had failed them in every important way, other kids were the best they could hope for.
Owl wheeled toward the kitchen, beginning to think about dinner. Cheney was back in place between the leather couch and the game table, eyes closed, flanks rising and fall slowly beneath the thick mass of his patchwork coat. Owl watched him for a moment, wondering if he was dreaming and if so what he dreamed about. Then she angled herself into the makeshift work space that served as the food preparation area and began rolling out prepackaged dough. Tonight she would serve them a special treat. Hawk would be bringing back apples, and she would make pie. They lacked electricity, but could generate sufficient heat to bake from the woodstove Fixit had built for her.
She thought about the boy for a minute. An enigma, he defied easy categorization. He was a talented craftsman and mechanic; he could build or repair almost anything. He had constructed the makeshift appliances in the kitchen and the generators and solar units that powered them. He had rebuilt her wheelchair to make it easier to maneuver and laid down the ramps that allowed her to reach all the rooms. The catchment systems on the roof were his. Using scrap and ingenuity, he had constructed all of the heavy security doors and reinforced window shutters that kept them safe. He claimed to have learned his skills from his father, who was a metalworker, but he never talked about his parents otherwise. He had come to them early, when he was not yet ten, but already knew more than they did about making things.
Now, at fourteen, he was old and capable enough to be given responsibilities reserved for the older members of the tribe, but he had a problem. As he had proved repeatedly, he was unreliable. He was fine when he was working under someone's supervision, but terrible when left on his own–prone to forget, to procrastinate, even to ignore. Sending him out by himself was impossible. The last time they had done so, he hadn't come back for two days. An old broken–down machine had distracted him, and he had been trying to find a way to make it run again. He didn't even know what it did, but that didn't matter.
What mattered was that it was interesting.
His closest friend was Chalk, which made a sort of sense because they were polar opposites. Chalk was easygoing and incurious, uninterested in why anything worked, only that it did. He liked to draw and was very good at it–hence his name. But he was not a dreamer, as so many artists tended to be. He was practical and grounded in his life; his art was just another job. Fixit was something of a mystery to him, a boy of similar age and temperament who could make everything run smoothly but himself.
Inseparable, those two, Owl thought. Probably a good thing, since each boy had a steadying effect on the other and neither was much good alone.
She was midway through the piecrust assembly when Cheney scrambled to his feet and stood facing the iron–plated door once again. This time he did not growl, and his posture was alert and un–threatening. That meant Hawk was coming.
Her hands covered with pieces of dough, she called to Sparrow to open the door. Moments later Hawk and the others surged into the room, laughing and joking as they hauled in the boxes of apples and plums and deposited them in the kitchen where some could be separated out and the rest put into cold storage.