They weren’t, of course, but Hawk didn’t argue. This was just Tiger’s way of marking his territory. “Ready to deal?”
Tiger was wearing his trademark orange-and-black-striped T-shirt beneath his slicker. All of the Cats wore some piece of clothing that was meant to suggest the kind of cat from which they had taken their names, although some of them were hard to decipher. One kid wore pants with vertical blue and red stripes. What was he supposed to be? Panther liked to make made fun of them for working so hard at being something they clearly weren’t. Real cats were small and sleek and stealthy. The Cats were a jumble of sizes and shapes and might as well be called Elephants or Camels. He was a better cat than they were, he was fond of saying. They didn’t even have a “Panther” in their tribe. Besides, they had only started calling themselves Cats and taking cat names after they found out about the Ghosts.
“Ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of copycats,” he would declare, sneering at the idea.
Hawk met Tiger alone in the center of the intersection while the others on both sides stayed where they were. Trades were rituals, marked by protocol and tradition. The leaders met first, alone, talked through the details of the trade, came to an arrangement, and settled on a time and place to make the trade if it wasn’t to be done that day. This time both sides had come prepared to trade immediately, having done so often enough before for each to know what the other needed. The Cats would bring their apples and plums and the Ghosts would bring a valuable store to offer in exchange.
“What have you got for us?” Tiger asked, anxious to get to the point of this meeting.
Hawk didn’t like being rushed. He brushed back his ragged, short-cropped black hair and looked back down toward the water and the Hammering Man, thinking again of the dead Lizard. “Depends. How much you got for us?”
“Two boxes. One of each. Ripe and ready to eat. Store them in a cool place and they’ll keep. You’ve done it before.” Tiger hunched his shoulders. “So?”
“Four flashlights and solar cells to power them. The cells have a shelf life of thirty years. These are dated less than twenty years back.” He smiled.
“Wasn’t easy finding them.”
“They still make them twenty years ago?” the other asked suspiciously.
Hawk shrugged. “It says what it says. They work. I tested them myself.”
Tiger looked around, maybe searching, maybe killing time. “I need something else.”
“Something else?” Hawk stiffened. “What are you talking about, man?
That’s a fair trade I’m giving you.”
Tiger looked uneasy. “I mean, something more. I need a couple of packs of pleneten.”
Hawk stared. Pleneten was a heavy-duty drug, effective mostly against plague viruses. No one outside the compounds could get their hands on it unless they happened to stumble on a hidden store. Even then, it usually wasn’t any good because it had to be kept cold or it would break down and lose its curative powers. Unrefrigerated, its shelf life was about ten days. He hadn’t seen any pleneten in all the time he had been a Ghost.
Except once, when Candle caught the red spot, and he’d had no choice but to ask Tessa.
“It’s for Persia,” Tiger said quietly, looking down at his feet.
“She has the splatters.”
Red spot. Like Candle. Persia was Tiger’s little sister. The only family he had left. He wouldn’t be asking otherwise. Hawk could sense the surfacing of the other’s desperation, radiating off him like steam leaking through metal plates, white-hot and barely contained. Hawk glanced back at the other Ghosts.
All expected an exchange to take place and would be disgruntled if it didn’t.
The fruit was a treat they had been looking forward to. Some of them would understand, some wouldn’t.
“Make the trade,” Hawk told the other. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Tiger shook his head. “No. I want the pleneten first.”
Hawk glared at him. “It will cost you a lot more if you don’t make the trade now. A lot more.”
“I don’t care. I want Persia well again.”
There was no reasoning with him. But Hawk would lose face if he gave in to what was essentially blackmail.
“Make the trade now,” he said, “and you can have the pleneten for nothing.”
Tiger stared at him. “You serious?”
Hawk nodded, wondering at the same time if he had lost his mind.
“You can get it? You give me your word on it?”
“You know you got my word and you know it’s good. Make the trade or you can forget the whole thing. Find someone else to get you your pleneten.”
Tiger studied him a moment longer, then nodded. “Deal.”