Ariel’s eyes glittered with moisture. “He didn’t. Take it back.”
“What is this, high school?”
“Gideon did his job,” Lara said quickly. “I’m the one responsible for. for the mission.”
An uncomfortable pause.
“That’s al right then,” David said. “I mean, you work for the headmaster.”
“Not anymore,” Ariel said with satisfaction.
Lara’s throat tightened.
“Lara? What’s she talking about?” Jacob asked.
“I hear your friend is in real y deep shit.” The girl with Ariel tittered. “Literaly.”
“She’s working in the bird house,” Ariel said with gleeful vindictiveness. “With Crazy Moon and the other cuckoos.”
“Oh, hey.” David’s good-natured face creased in sympathy.
“That sucks.”
Lara swal owed. “It’s only temporary,” she said again.
And heard Simon saying, “Until I can trust your judgment, you cannot work for me. ”
Her hands shredded her napkin in her lap. He would forgive her, eventualy. Everything could go back to normal.
If only she’d be quiet, if only she’d be good.
“From now on, you cannot see him, cannot speak to him, cannot visit him, is that clear?”
She stared down at the bright pattern of fruit on her plate, al appetite gone.
Dust motes danced in the diffused brightness of the raptor enclosure. Lara’s rake rattled over the gravel subfloor, turning up broken bones and hardened pel ets, the remains of smal dead rodents, digested and undigested.
The big bird perched in the corner turned its wicked head, surveying her with a bright, suspicious eye.
Lara froze like a rabbit. Moon said the bird wouldn’t attack.
But Moon was crazy. Everyone knew that.
As if summoned by the thought, the mews keeper appeared in the door of the cage. She was tal, like most of their kind, and striking, like al of them. But her wavy hippie hair was tied back with a leather jess, her strong, angular body swal owed by a shapeless brown tunic. Her blue eyes were cloudy and vague.
“When you’ve finished sweeping, you can scrub out his bath.” Moon flapped her hand at the metal pan weighted by an old tire in the middle of the cage.
Lara eyed the scummy water without enthusiasm.
Self-knowledge and obedience, she reminded herself.
She didn’t know what Simon expected her to learn in this dirty, shadowed hole. But she knew what she had to do.
“Okay.”
The keeper padded across the enclosure, her slippered feet silent on the newly raked floor. “There’s my lovely boy, then,” she crooned to the bird. “You’re one of Simon’s girls, aren’t you?”
It took Lara a moment to realize Moon was speaking to her.
She flushed. “I work for him, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t care if you dance for him naked,” the keeper said.
“But he found you.”
“Yes.”
“Thought so. I’m good with faces,” Moon said with satisfaction. “Better with birds, but stil, I remember. You came in here with your class, a dozen years ago.”
Lara’s heart beat faster at the memory. Bria had made her stay behind in the shadowed mews when the rest of their cohort had escaped to sunlight and safety. Her friend had been fascinated by the birds, their daggered feet, their cruel, curved beaks, their caged grace.
She shrugged to hide her discomfort. “Everyone comes once. It’s part of the life science unit.”
“But I remember you,” Moon said. “You were friends with that little blond girl. The flyer.”
Lara’s mouth jarred open. No one talked about the flyers.
Ever. After Bria ran away, it was as if the other girl had never been. Lara had grieved for her friend in silence and alone. “She was my roommate.”
Moon cocked her head. “Never came back.”
“No,” Lara whispered.
“I meant you.”
“Oh.” Lara fought an absurd urge to apologize. “No, I. ”
“Most of them don’t,” Moon said frankly. “Unless they want to use the birds in the flight cages to practice spirit casting.”
Lara shivered. Under the Rule, only Masters had the authority to project their spirits into other creatures. The Gift was too close to the demonic power of possession, too much like usurping free wil, to be considered quite safe.
Even Masters were restricted to using it on birds, fel ow children of the air.
She glanced at the large golden-eyed raptor in the corner.
“They do that. here?”
“Not so much. Al of the Masters at least try it. Most don’t have the knack. And even fewer have the inclination.”
Raising her arm, the keeper pressed against the bird’s haunches until it either had to step back or be pushed from its perch. Lara held her breath as, with a disgruntled flap, the bird hopped onto Moon’s glove.
Moon stroked its breast. “A lot of our birds come to us because they’ve been injured — trapped, maybe, or shot.
That’s why they leave us alone, the Masters. They want to fly, but they can’t stand to be reminded they’re no different than my birds.”
“Hunted?” Lara ventured.
The keeper met her gaze, her vague blue eyes suddenly sharp and clear. “Caged.”
Lara stared, speechless. She had a mental flash of Justin, lean and golden, balancing against the bright blue sky, plunging into the sea in a flourish of foam and daring. Free.
Until now.
She moistened her dry lips. “But. the birds are al freed eventual y. When they’re wel enough to survive on their own.”
“That’s what they teach in your life science unit, is it?”
Lara nodded slowly. She had never questioned the school masters’ expertise.
“It’s true for some. The ones that aren’t hurt too badly to be rehabilitated and released.” Another sharp glance, bright with pity or derision. “Or so used to being locked up and hand fed they can’t adjust to life outside.”
Lara’s heart thumped. The tawny raptor on Moon’s arm watched her with wicked, golden eyes.
“What about him?” she asked. “What wil happen to him?”
“Tuari?” The keeper stroked the bird’s bronze plumage.
He opened his beak softly against her fingers. “He won’t have an easy time of it. He doesn’t belong here. He’s not like the others.”
“He’s not one of us,” Zayin had said last night about Justin.
Not human. Not nephilim either.
“What difference does it make?” Lara asked fiercely. “If he needs care.”
“Oh, we can care for him. But he doesn’t have a place here.
Or out there. The others are al native species, hawks and owls. Tuari’s a golden eagle. God knows what brought him to us, but he’s total y out of his range, poor boy.” The keeper’s eyes clouded again. “Even if I set him free, he’d be lost.”
Moon’s words hung in the air like the smel of newts, pungent and impossible to ignore. They haunted Lara as she raked flight pens and scrubbed birdcages, breaking her nails and her heart. “He doesn’t have a place here. Or out there.”
She rubbed her forehead, but the words kept circling, picking, attacking. They kept her company at dinner when no one else would. They whispered in the carrels during evening study and fol owed her up the stairs after lights out.
She held on to the banister as she climbed. The darkness of the stairwel suited her mood. After her so-cal ed period of reflection, she was dirty and exhausted and more confused than ever. What she needed was a hot shower and an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Everything would look better in the morning.