Chapter Eight
While Harper had been inside the hangar, Grey had been outside staring at the crumbling remains of The City. This place had once been huge, swallowing up everyone who came near it. He remembered the rare visits he had assisted with whenever President Bachmann, his former leader and boss, had dared to travel into the depths of this place. Then, it had been broad streets crackling with heat. Families were packed into tiny homes while the President and his cronies sprawled out in giant mansions in on top of the mountain that overlooked them all. He remembered being curious why the humans in The City didn’t rage against the wealthy, why they let them live peacefully while the poor struggled to make their way.
As he got older he had understood - their spirits had been broken by crippling poverty a long time ago and they simply accepted their lot. They believed the rich were better off because they were better people and deserved their fortunes. Without even realizing it, he had done the same in the compound. For years, he and his father could have left, walked out and lived on their own in the wilderness. But they didn’t. They stayed and let Bachmann and all of his associates and employees tell them what to do.
It wasn’t easy finding freedom. Sometimes a creature had to lose everything in order to see just how free they were.
“You guys live in The City when it was around?” He searched the guards faces for any sign of an affirmation, but they remained silent, watching the horizon. “Oh, right. You’re on duty. Forget I asked.”
He resumed his own silence, crossing his arms and staring back in the direction of the forest. As he watched, three small figures emerged. He could hear them before he could see them properly. They were hooting and jeering as they skipped and ran out of the trees.
The group made their way over to the hangar, getting louder as they approached. Grey squinted a little to see who it might be, but they were three young boys he didn’t recognize. “Huh,” he said to himself. “Here’s three little guys who think they’re three big guys.” He turned to the guards. “You know them?”
The two signed and rolled their eyes. “Unfortunately,” one of them mumbled, prompting the other to elbow him hard in the ribs.
“Hey security guards! Security! This boy is a thief! He’s breaking into treehouses at night and stealing toys. Aren’t you going to do anything?” The littlest of them all, who seemed to be the leader of the crew, was calling out his accusations as he ran up. “Hey! I’m talking to you!” He bent to pick something up and threw it through the air with a flick of his wrist. It whirred past Grey to hit the guard on the left in the arm.
The guard winced, but otherwise didn’t react. The boys fell down laughing, rolling on the ground. The bigger two boys started to yell out requests for their little friend’s next attempt.
“Kick him this time!”
“No, tell him he stinks.”
“Nah. That’s no good. I dare you to slap his belly!”
Just talking about these things got the boys giggling so hard they couldn’t stop. They tossed and turned on the ground and kicked their legs up into the air. After a hearty round of laughing, the small one leapt up and made a beeline for the guard on the right.
“He’s going to do it! He’s going to slap his stomach!”
Grey looked at the guards. “Do something.”
The guard on the right steeled himself for contact, gritting his teeth. “We can’t. It’s not allowed.” He tensed up a little more as tiny feet sent grass flying and the little demon sped towards him.
“Well, I’m not on duty,” Grey said to the men and bent down to scoop the little boy up.
“Aah! Aah! Help! Help! He’s got me!” The boys flailed in every direction while Grey held him high enough that none of his kicks or slaps landed, only fought the air around him. He inspected the boy’s face to see if he could recognize the little troublemaker, but he wasn’t sure he knew this boy.
“Alright, big man,” Grey said in his sternest voice, “who are your parents?”
The boy didn’t answer, just kept crying out to his friends who watched from the grass, uncertain whether to run away or help.
“Stop screaming,” Grey tried again, keeping his voice a little more gentle. It made no difference. “If you stop screaming I’ll put you down.” Still no luck. He’d had enough and kneeled down, bending the boy over his bent leg. He put a hand on the boy’s flank. “Do I have to spank you?”
“No! No, don’t spank me. Please, please don’t. I’ll tell you.” Angry, frightened tears came to the boy’s eyes. “My mom is Minerva. Minerva Miner. I’m Shep. Please don’t tell her about this. She’ll be so mad!”
“I tell you what, Shep,” he said, putting a hand on the little boy’s shoulder, “I won’t. Not if you apologize to these nice guys and promise to never come back here again. Can you say sorry?”
Shep looked up at the guards with big, sad eyes, playing the innocent child as much as possible. “I’m sorry,” he said with defeat in his voice. “I won’t come back anymore.”
The guards thanked him for his apology and then went back to their work of standing still. Grey took Shep’s hand and walked with him to his friends in the grass. “Alright now, you boys have to find somewhere else to play.”
“We want to play here,” Shep whined. “The forest is where Marcus died. What if I die next?”
Shep sounded panicked at the thought and Grey stopped him, holding him by his hand so he couldn’t run off. “Wait, you were friends with Marcus?”
“Yes. And it’s a mystery and no one knows what happened but it happened in the forest. We can’t play there anymore. We don’t like it.” He ripped his hand away from Grey and ran to the trees, his two associates in hot pursuit. The three glanced over their shoulders as they tore across the ground at top speed to see if Grey was following. He wasn’t; he wanted them to go. He wasn’t sure what he had just tapped into but it frightened him.
He wandered back to the door and found the guards smiling a little.
“You alright, man?” He surreptitiously checked the arm of the left guard. It was red but otherwise fine.
“Yeah. Thanks. And thanks for getting those kids to leave. They’re here every other day.”
“Really?” They nodded and Grey let that sink in a moment. “Hey, any chance there used to be four of them?”
The two thought about it and then nodded. “Yeah,” the right guard agreed, “now that you mention, there was four. I just wrote them all off as annoying. I figured one of them got sick of being a jerk.”
“No,” Grey said, staring off at the trees, “that’s not what happened.”
The door behind them began to swing up from the ground and revealed Harper and Alex, the latter carrying a little girl who was sleeping against his chest. The two of them looked fine and Grey got no indication that he had any reason to worry. He got just a glimpse of the inside and was surprised to find how populated it was, but had no time to ask about it.
“Here she is, safe and sound.” Alex stepped forward and shook Grey’s hand. “I think a lot of people get the wrong impression about us. We’re trying to change that.”
“Well, we appreciate any help you can give us.”
Alex shrugged. “Sure. I told Harper everything I know. I’d stay and chat but I’m on daycare duty today. I have to get all the little ones down for a nap. Next time,” he said, slapping Grey on the back, “you two come for a meal and meet everyone properly.”
They all smiled politely and made open-ended plans for their next visit, none of them committing to a date or time. The couple left the guards and the partially open hangar full of families and inventions as they crossed the open field back to the forest.
“I have so much to tell you,” Harper confided to Grey, taking his hand. “I’m not even sure where to start.”
“You really want to come back and visit this place?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Oh!” She stopped and put a hand on her stomach. “I felt something!”
Grey’s face lit and up and he knelt down in front of her stomach. “Movement? I mean, is it moving? Oh my gosh, already. I can hardly believe-”
Another jolt through Harper’s body made him fall silent. He felt the little shifter inside her moving around in swift little jerks, like a little bird trying to flap around in a cage. His breath caught and he laughed, then gasped, then fell silent.
He looked up at Harper’s face. “I felt it. I felt it move. Oh, sweetheart,” he stood and kissed her. “It’s really happening. We’re going to be parents soon!”
“Then let’s get on this mystery. Okay, here are the high points.”
She gave him an abbreviated version of the talk she’d had with Alex, only filling in details that were absolutely necessary. He listened without interrupting, doing his best to keep the whole story straight.
“So,” she said at the end, “it’s possible a relative of mine, or at least someone who wants the Bachmanns in power, is behind the whole alcohol scheme. I have a feeling that it connects to Marcus somehow, but I can’t be sure. It’s just a hunch.”
“You have good hunches. Let’s follow this one.” They started to walk and then realized they weren’t sure where they were headed.
“Where are we going?” Harper asked, her head a little fuzzy from the strain of the long day.
“We should go…” Grey thought about it, replaying the morning’s events, the new information, trying to think of somewhere that might be helpful. “To Marcus’ secret spot. You remember you said you smelled rotting food there?”
“Yes! Fruit. He had a pile of rotted fruit as if he’d been saving it. But maybe…” She drifted off and shook her head. “Come on, brain. Help a lady out. Okay, he had fruit. He had a friend who knew about the bar. The alcohol is made from fruit skins. Someone felt they had to kill him…”
The two fell silent as they walked again, certain that they were just touching on the tip of the solution. The clues and tidbits of information felt as if they were swirling around their heads, almost settling into a clear narrative but not quite. There were blank spaces, pieces out of place. All they needed was the connection.
Harper and Grey made their way back into the familiar part of the forest, both of their faces screwed up in concentration as they went. No one said hello to them this time; their expressions and air of tension made them less than approachable. Harper looked up and saw Emily, the boar, looking down at them. She waved but Emily didn’t wave back, just disappeared back into her house.
If they were under Emily’s tree, it meant they were nearly at the little enclave behind the bushes. Grey shifted into bird form and flew off to find it. Once he’d spotted the clear circle, he flapped his way back over to Harper and she followed him. His internal guide helped him zero in on the spot without any hesitation and she was able to use her more familiar, human vision to tag along.
Once they were in the open circle, Grey shifted back. They looked around, trying to see if Marcus had left them any other piece of information. Harper thought back to the drawing of the monster. She had written it off as pure fantasy, but maybe Marcus had seen something.
“Grey,” she asked with hesitation, “did you see anything that wasn’t real while you were drunk on that clear stuff? Any magical creatures, that sort of thing?”
He considered the question, then remembered the wall. “I saw a wall dance. I remember someone yelling about the magic of the liquor. If I saw anything else, I don’t recall. Why?”
She looked at the rotted fruit again. It wasn’t randomly thrown into a spot. The pieces were stacked up on top of one another and the edges of the food was crushed. It had been in a container.
“Help me look for any kind of bowl or box. I think this fruit got dumped out of something.”
Grey started to ask why, but held the question back. It was clear to him that Harper had deduced something and they had no time to waste.
The two opened the tiny trees around the space, wandering out beyond the little circle. The ground was a bit swampy but they could still stand without any problem. As they walked out further, Grey felt something jab at his toes.
“Ow!”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. It’s just a…” he looked and saw that it was a broken piece of wood. Not a log or a branch, but wood that had been formed into something. A splinter of the stuff was in the tip of his toe. He looked around and found more pieces as well as a metal ring. Two metal rings.
“Harper! Harper, I found your container.”
She ran over and he had to stop her a few feet away from the mess so that she didn’t get a splinter herself. Grey shifted back to bird form and took in the view from a few feet up. It was clear - someone had dumped out a barrel full of fruit and then smashed it on the ground. He turned and looked beyond the swampy part of the earth and saw something else - a large, metal structure with two men standing outside of it. They didn’t see him, but he zeroed in on one of them.
With his bird vision, Grey watched the man as his wings beat the air and carried him in a circle. He passed over Harper’s head several times, not responding to her calls. He made one final pass and confirmed what he had thought the first time.
The man outside of the odd building looked just like President Bachmann.
He made his way back into the forest, Harper struggling to keep up. He shifted back to human form and stood with a hand on a nearby tree to steady himself. His knees buckled a little under him and his stomach lurched. Had he really just seen the person he thought he saw? No. It couldn’t be. Harper herself had seen him killed.
“Hey! What happened?” Harper was out of breath and had to stop and gasp for a moment at the same tree. “Did you see something?”
He nodded and straightened up. “I did. I saw that someone had broken a big, wooden barrel. The old-fashioned kind people used to store things in. The president kept wine in his in a special basement.”
“I knew it,” Harper said, straightening up. “I think I know what happened. At least, I have a good guess.”
“Okay. tell me.”
Harper brushed her hair back out of her sweaty face and smoothed her dress down. “Alright. In Marcus’ things, I found a drawing of a funny looking monster. Then there’s the blanked, which tells me that sometimes he fell asleep out here. Finally, the fruit, which was rotting. I believe that Marcus heard about the bar from his friends and got curious. He saw the men drinking and thought, I want some of that. Somehow, he got an idea of how it was made. Maybe he found the people making it by accident.” She stopped, checked Grey’s face. He was with her so far.
“So, most likely after a few failed attempts, he figures out how to make the stuff. I’m guessing he either found or stole that barrel. Whomever was in charge of the stuff didn’t want some kid knowing how to make it - if he could figure it out, anyone could. Then, the people who want all this money, who want us all killing each other over it don’t have an advantage. So,” she paused, swallowing, “they took care of the problem.”
Grey and Harper looked at one another without speaking, each imagining the events that could have led up to Marcus’ death. Harper put a hand on her abdomen and Grey pulled her in for a tight hug.
“I think I know who he found,” he whispered. He kissed her and held her tight, feeling their unborn child moving in the tiny space between them.