Chapter 173: Fledgling

/Kara’s Third Person POV/

Nora looked at her sister over the top of the ThinkPad for a long second, then closed it on all three of her books at once.

"My drone is watching the church... and by the look of you, I’m guessing you don’t want to take out the big loud ones..." She held out her hand for the tablet anyway. "If the pastor does anything interesting while mine is gone, I want it entered into the record that this was your idea."

"Enter it." Kara put the tablet in her hand.

She stayed on her feet in the middle of the Ascender, coat zipped to her chin and arms folded tight across her chest, while the heater ticked away under the dinette.

She’d been worried ever since June told her about the three helpings drying out in the warming oven, and that annoyed her.

A grown man who owned a literal system did not need anybody worrying about him.

She worried anyway.

It was past nine now, which made it at least seven hours without breakfast, and for him these days that was close to a medical emergency.

Nikki didn’t hunt, and he’d never needed to. He had a shop in his head that sold everything from tanks to toothpaste, and he could have had a whole deer delivered, skinned and cut, without getting out of bed.

So whatever he was doing out there, it wasn’t hunting. He’d told the System to say he was, which meant he’d known one of them would ask, and he’d wanted them to stop asking the moment they had an answer.

In the penthouse, she’d have had him on the radio inside a minute, telling him off until he came home just to make her stop. These days she didn’t know what she would even say to him, and she hated that more than the worrying.

And she could only think of one place he wouldn’t want them to know about.

He had stood on that wall every day looking east, toward the willows, at a church none of them could even see from the ground, with the cold face on him that she couldn’t read anymore.

Ever since the pastor walked up their drive, she’d been sure there was a plan behind that face, and that her conscience would hate every part of it.

If he had gone over there in the dark, alone, to start it...

She didn’t let herself finish that one.

Nora brought her drone home from the church.

On the tablet, the churchyard slid away behind it, then the thirty dark houses of Coldwater, then the willows, then the white fields, until the farm came up out of the snow and the drone hung a hundred meters over the RV row.

It was the little black one Nikki had given Nora on the steps, no bigger than a dinner plate, and you couldn’t hear it from five meters away.

With his ears, out in a forest that quiet, it was the only thing they had that he wouldn’t hear coming.

Kara wanted it that way, because she wanted to see where he was before he got the chance to tell her where he was.

Nora dropped it to twenty meters, and his boot prints came up on the screen at once.

They came out of the side door of the very truck the two of them were in, crossed the yard to the stairs beside the gatehouse, and climbed it.

Up on the walk, Dean’s prints were everywhere from his watch, going up and down and back again all night.

Nikki’s only went in one direction. They ran the full length of the west walk to the corner furthest from the gatehouse, and stopped at the knee-high lip.

Nora tipped the drone out over the edge and down the outside face of the wall, ten meters, to the foot of it, where a crater sat in the snow with a scuffed mess on one side where he’d climbed back out.

Ten meters, onto frozen ground. Before the Enhancers, that would have been two broken ankles at the very least. Kara would have bet money on a hip as well.

A single line of prints went out of that crater and west across the field.

It went straight between the Infected standing eleven meters out from the wall, close enough to touch them, and not one of them had turned its head to watch him pass.

Kara sat down slowly on the bench beside her sister and looked at that.

He had walked out through them in the dark with a cat in his pocket, and every one of them had stood there and let him.

Leo had done the same thing only yesterday, in daylight, walking down the drive to the mailbox, and Kara had thought she understood it then.

One line of prints going out through them in the dark was different. She was afraid, sitting in a warm truck with the heater on, of a walk he had finished hours ago.

Nora’s free hand found the sleeve of Kara’s coat and held on to it, and neither of them mentioned it.

The prints went on across the white field, west, away from the church.

That was one thing off the list, at least.

They ran on to the black line of the woods, where the ground started climbing toward the mountain, and went in under the pines, and the drone lost them.

Nora took it up over the first of the trees, pine and birch, and swept it along the edge of the woods, slow, while Kara leaned closer to the screen than she needed to.

Twenty meters in, the trees opened up into a clearing, and a second line of prints came down into it from higher up the slope.

He’d been up the mountain, then, and come back down. She didn’t know what he’d been doing up there all night in the cold, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

At the end of the prints was Nikki.

He was sitting in the snow at the foot of a big pine with his back against the trunk and his rifle across his knees, Tikki’s head sticking out of the pocket on his shoulder, and neither of them was moving.

Kara’s shoulders came down from around her ears. She hadn’t noticed they were up there until they came down, and she was so relieved that she had to look away at the frost on the window for a second before she could look back.

Nora took the drone closer, and the camera found his face.

Snow in his hair, his collar turned up, and dark rings under his eyes, which Kara hadn’t seen on him once since the Enhancers.

He looked as though he hadn’t slept. He looked worse than she’d seen him look since the penthouse.

And for the first time all week, he wasn’t looking east toward the church.

He and the cat were both looking at the same thing, on the snow a meter in front of his boots.

-Kip-! -Kip-kip-!

It was a fledgling, a round, streaky, grey-brown thing about the size of a plum, with a stub for a tail and half its feathers still growing in, sticking up every which way. It sat on the snow with its beak wide open, yelling.

Above it, on a side branch of the pine, an olive-yellow bird hopped back and forth along the bark, yelling back down at it, its beak crossed over at the tip, the top half over the bottom.

"Crossbill." Kara had the name out before she knew she was going to say it.

Nora squinted at the screen. "Its beak is broken."

"That’s how they come." Kara put her finger on the little one. "The baby’s will cross in a few weeks."

Crossbills nested whenever the pine cones were good, snow or no snow. The female built high on a side branch of a conifer and lined the nest heavier in winter. The young left it before they could fly, living out on the branches while the parents fed them for a month.

It had all been in the avian elective she’d taken in second year, mostly because it fit her timetable, and she’d highlighted every page of the textbook in four colors anyway.

Kara had done the reading, and Nikki hadn’t.

On the screen, Nikki let out a sigh big enough to see from twenty meters up.

He leaned his rifle against the trunk, got up onto his knees, and picked the bird up off the snow in both hands, cupped together, as carefully as he could.

Then he looked up at the nest, high out on its side branch, eight meters up if it was one.

"It won’t stay," Kara told the screen, as if that would help.

"What?" Nora didn’t look away from it.

"Once they’ve left the nest, they don’t go back."

Nikki climbed the pine one-handed with the bird held against his chest in the other, bark coming away under his boots, and halfway up, a branch dumped its whole load of snow down the back of his collar. Tikki got the rest of it on his head and told him so.

"Mea!"

"I know, I know..." Nikki muttered up at the branches, and the drone’s microphone caught every word of it.

"Should he be doing that?" Nora asked the screen.

"No." Kara didn’t take her eyes off him.

"Should we tell him?"

"No."

She wanted to see what he would do when he thought nobody was watching. She hadn’t seen that in weeks.

He leaned out along the side branch, set the bird in the nest with two fingers, waited a second to watch it sit, and dropped the eight meters to the ground.

He landed in a crouch, snow rising around him in a cloud, then stood and brushed off his knees.

-Kip-!

And the very next second, the bird stepped up onto the edge of the nest and hopped straight off it.

Nikki’s head snapped up, and for one second he only stood there and watched it come.

Then he panicked.

He went for it in three big lunging steps through the deep snow with both arms out, slipped on the third, and still got under it, his hands going down with it as it dropped, so that it landed in his palms with no speed left in it.

Kara could have told him it didn’t need catching. Fledglings fluttered down out of trees all day long and bounced, and they were built for it.

He didn’t know that.

He dropped to one knee in the snow, hands cupped together, and stayed there.

The bird sat in his palms, yelling and trying its best to jump off them, while he looked at it for a long time.

"...Dude."

-Ek-ek-ek-ek-!

Tikki leaned out of the pocket as far as he could go without falling out of it, his eyes gone enormous, making the noise cats make at birds through a window.

"Absolutely not." Nikki didn’t take his eyes off the bird.

Then he lifted it up to his face, nose to beak. "Listen... I climbed a tree for you... I don’t do that. I have a helicopter... I got magic powers too, I can literally fly... I can’t fly right now, but the point still stands."

Nora laughed so hard she had to put the tablet down on the table.

Kara didn’t laugh, and she couldn’t have if she’d tried, with her throat closed up on her.

She was looking at a man kneeling in the snow with a baby bird in his hands and a cat he’d forbidden to eat it, and she understood what she was looking at, all at once.

He had never gone anywhere at all.

It was that simple, so simple that for about a second she was angry with herself for needing a bird to see it.

She had seen him, and that was the worst part. She’d seen him over and over again, and she had explained him away each time.

In the penthouse, he’d come home from the city with blood on his boots, then sit down at her table and eat four of her sandwiches. He answered every curfew she ever gave him with "Yes, mommy..." just to watch her splutter at him across the room.

At Sanctuary, he’d killed a man with a rock one morning and spent an hour that same afternoon arguing with Bill about tomatoes.

And in that moment, watching him through the drone’s feed, she understood something, like an epiphany.

Every time he got a few days away from the Infected, the killing and the arithmetic, the old Nikki came back up, and she saw him every single time.

And every single time, she told herself it was a moment, and a moment wasn’t the man.

Then this morning, an old dog who couldn’t get up the porch steps yesterday had trotted out of the hay barn and stuck his face in a snowdrift, because Nikki had spent a fortune on him, handed it to Dean in the dark, and gone off without even staying to see if it worked.

And here he was now, alone in the woods where he thought nobody could see him, climbing trees for a bird.

The cold man on the wall was armor, and that was all he was.

The boy who’d fallen in the pig trough was wearing it, and he had been inside it the whole time.

He probably didn’t know that himself. He probably thought the boy from the pig trough had died back in that other life of his, the one Kara didn’t remember.

He was wrong, because she was looking right at that boy.

She had asked him once, at the penthouse kitchen table, with her hands balled into fists in front of her, if she would ever get the old Nikki back, even just a bit.

He hadn’t been able to answer her. He’d eaten instead, and she had let him.

She hadn’t been able to finish her own question either. She had stopped at "The Nikki I..." and never gone back for the rest of it.

Well, here was her answer, out in the woods, telling a bird he had a helicopter and magic powers.

[A whole month...] she thought. [How very efficient...]

On sisters’ night in the penthouse, she had told Nora that she didn’t love this Nikki.

And she refused to give this Nikki a confession written for a different man.

The man she’d written it for was on Nora’s screen right now, holding a baby bird.

He had been through the end of the world twice, in two lives, and come out of it still climbing trees for birds.

And there was Nia.

She had told Nora that night, too, that Nia had stood next to him in that hell when Kara couldn’t, and that she was grateful for it, and she still was. Nia had never once been anything but decent to her.

Kara didn’t know what to do with any of it, so for now, she left it where it was.

Her eyes were wet, and she let them be wet. Her hand went up over her mouth, and under it she smiled so hard her face ached.

She was happier than she’d been since the world ended, and she was crying about it, which was very stupid, and she didn’t care one bit.

Nora picked the tablet back up, still laughing, and bumped her shoulder against Kara’s.

"Told you." Nora grinned at the screen. "Nikki is Nikki..."

Kara didn’t argue with her this time. Her temple, which throbbed every time Nora won anything, didn’t even twitch this time.

The argument that had been open between the two of them for weeks closed right there in the back of his truck without either of them saying another word about it.

"Does that thing talk?" Kara wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

"It has a speaker~" Nora looked enormously pleased with herself.

She dropped the drone down through the branches behind him, slowly, to the height of his head, close enough that he’d have heard it if he hadn’t been busy arguing with a bird.

Tikki heard it, though, and one ear swung round to it while the rest of him stayed on the bird.

Then his head turned, and he looked straight into the camera for a long second, right at Kara, before he turned back to the bird without a sound, having decided it wasn’t his problem.

Nora turned the tablet round, put her finger on the button for the speaker, and handed it over.

Kara pressed it, and her voice came out of the drone half laughing.

"Put it on a low branch, off the snow, and walk away. It’s learning to fly, and you’re scaring its mother. She’ll find it."

She let go of the button, then pressed it again, because she couldn’t help herself.

"And come home. You missed breakfast."

Nikki nearly fell over in the snow.

He jerked around on his knee, slipped, caught himself on one elbow with the bird held high in both hands to break the fall, and found the drone hanging in the air two meters from his face.

Tikki had both front paws over the edge of the pocket and his ears flat, glaring at it for nearly getting him squashed.

Even through the camera, Kara watched his ears go red, then his whole face. He opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, and nothing came out of it at all.

Then he did exactly what she’d told him.

He set the bird on the lowest branch of the pine, off the snow, stepped back from it, took his rifle off the trunk, and walked out of the clearing toward the farm without once looking at the drone, with Tikki twisted round backward in the pocket to keep his eyes on the bird.

He was ten steps away when the mother dropped onto the branch beside it and fed it.

Kara had been right, and for once she didn’t feel the need to say so.

She sat holding the tablet and watched the two birds a while longer, while Nora hummed beside her and very carefully didn’t look at her sister.

"So..." Nora kept her eyes on the screen with a massive shit-eating grin. "Got something to say?"

"Your church is unwatched." Kara handed her back the tablet.

Nora took it with a sniff, sent the drone up over the trees and back east toward the church, and went on humming.

Then Kara climbed out of the Ascender into the cold, squinting, with the sun sitting low and white over the east wall and the yard bright with snow, and went across to the house to make his sandwiches.

He’d missed breakfast, he’d be starving, and her hands needed a job.

She hadn’t made them once since the penthouse. The truth was that for a while now, she hadn’t been sure who she would be making them for.

She was sure now, and she was happy, too, and she was walking a good deal faster than she needed to.

The kitchen was empty, with June out on the porch with Walter and the dog, and for the next half hour it was Kara’s.

It was the biggest kitchen she had ever cooked in, with new log walls gone gold in the low sun, the window over the sink glowing white with the snow outside, the cast-iron woodstove ticking warm in the corner, and the long dining table right behind her.

The whole place still smelled of June’s pancakes from breakfast.

She found chicken in the fridge and bread in the pantry, and inside ten minutes she had the first two breasts in the pan, flattened thin under the heel of her hand, how he liked them. She caught herself humming while she did it, and she didn’t stop.

She’d done this every day for three years, cooking for the boy next door in exchange for a ride to class on the back of that ridiculous red bike of his, with both of them pretending it was a fair trade.

She had never minded it once. She would have done it for nothing, and she was fairly sure he’d always known that and given her the rides anyway.

She was leaning over the stove to check them, her chestnut hair falling forward over her shoulders, when she heard the mudroom door, then his boots on the floor, and then the boots stopped.

She looked back over her shoulder.

Nikki was standing in the kitchen doorway with snow on his shoulders and his rifle still on his back, and his face had gone white, all the way down to his lips.

He was staring at her, then at the stove, at the pan, at the dining table between them , then back at her, without moving.

Kara had never once in her life seen Nikki stand in a doorway and not come through it.

"Give me five minutes." Kara turned back to the pan. "I’m making your sandwiches."

"N-No, it’s fine..." It came out of him in a stammer, and Nikki didn’t stammer. "I’m not really hungry."

Kara turned round with the spatula in her hand and looked at him.

He had eaten three plates last night.

He had missed breakfast after a whole night out in the woods.

Since the Enhancers he ate more than any two people on this farm put together, and in three years of grilled chicken sandwiches, he had never once said no to one.

"My favorite~," he’d say, and "I know," she’d tell him, and that had been the whole of it for three years.

[It’s the bird...?] she thought. [Maybe he’s embarrassed about the bird? We did kind of just ruin his whole cold yandere persona...]

But when Nikki was embarrassed, he got loud. He’d stood up out of a pig trough at nineteen with a corn cob stuck to the side of his head, told Dean he meant to do that.

This was the opposite of loud.

A small crease came between her brows. She didn’t understand what she was looking at, and she didn’t like not understanding it.

Nikki crossed to the fridge without looking at her, pulled it open, took out a can of energy drink without checking which one, and shut the door again.

Tikki, who would have sold him for one grilled chicken sandwich, leaned out of the pocket toward the pan.

While Nikki walked out of the kitchen fast enough that the cat got carried off mid-lean, past the table and through the doorway and down the hall, without once looking back.