She nodded slowly, her calm eyes studying him. “Be careful, Hawk.
If something has happened to Tiger, it could happen to you, too. Take Cheney.”
He shook his head. “No, Cheney stays here with you and Squirrel.
I’ll take Candle. She’ll know if there’s danger. We’ll be fine.” He hesitated, and then added, almost as an afterthought, “I’ll leave Sparrow, too. Just so you have another pair of hands.”
Without waiting for her response, he called out to Sparrow to stay with Owl, then summoned Panther, Bear, and Candle and went out the door, waiting only long enough to hear the locks click into place before climbing the stairs to the streets.
Once outside, he gathered his little company about him. “Okay, this is what we are going to do,” he said. He looked from face to face. “We’re going to find out why Tiger didn’t come to today’s meeting to get the pleneten for Persia. Maybe there’s a good reason, but maybe something has happened to him.
Panther knows where the Cats make their home, and that’s where we’re going.”
Eyes shifted quickly to Panther with the release of this bit of information, but no one said anything. Panther frowned slightly, but kept his eyes on Hawk and his mouth shut.
“So, Panther, you take the point, be in the lead,” Hawk advised, noting the glimmer of excitement that sparked to life in the other’s eyes.
“Bear and I walk the wings. Fixit and Chalk form the rear guard. Candle stays in the middle.
We keep to the center of the streets and we don’t break formation unless I say so. We don’t take any chances. We stick together.”
He paused. “Remember. We’re Ghosts, and we walk the ruins of our parents’ world. Eyes open.”
They set out for midtown, walking down the middle of First Avenue, prods held at the ready, eyes shifting from building to building, peering through the mix of shadows and light. The sun was still out, the day still bright and cheerful, the air still sharp with cold. The road was scattered with the same junk with which it had been scattered for as long as Hawk could remember. He scanned the familiar refuse—the hollowed-out vehicles, the broken pieces of pipe and railing, the splintered boards, and the bones and old clothing and trash.
To one side, up against a building, lay a solitary pink tennis shoe, its silver laces ragged, its bright fabric soiled by what might have been blood but was probably oil. Still bright and new looking, it stood out. He hadn’t seen it before and wondered where it had come from.
It was midafternoon by then and later still by the time they passed through the city and reached the north end. They were still a dozen blocks below the Space Needle, but the slender obelisk towered over them, visible through the framework of the abandoned buildings, stark and spectral and oddly sad. Panther took them close by the warehouse that contained the hidden stash of purification tablets, but turned them up into the maze of apartment buildings that filled the blocks above First Avenue before they reached it. The sun had passed well into the west and cast shadows of the buildings down the streets in broad dark stains. It was later than Hawk would have preferred, but there was nothing he could do about it other than to turn back, and he had no intention of doing that.
Finally, as they approached an intersection, but while they were still in the shelter of the buildings to either side, Panther brought them to a halt and pointed ahead.
“Around that corner to the right, second building in across the street, that’s their kitty-cat home,” he told Hawk. “Big old apartment building with lots of floors.”
Hawk nodded. He broke down the formation and put them in a line, Panther and himself in the lead, Bear in the rear, the others in the center.
They walked against the walls of the buildings on their right until they had reached the end of the last one before they would have to enter the intersection. Motioning for the others to stay where they were, Hawk peered carefully around the corner at the buildings across the street. The second one in was a huge old redbrick structure with its windows and entry boarded up.
There was no sign of life.
“How do they get in and out?” he asked Panther.
The other boy threw up his hands in exasperation. “What do you want from me? I found them; I didn’t go in for a visit.” He shook his head in disgust. “I saw a couple of them looking out from the windows, up on the higher floors, keeping watch. They thought no one would see them, I suppose. Frickin’
idiots.”
Hawk studied the building for a long time, thinking about what he should do but unable to come up with anything particularly good. He looked back at the others. “Wait here.”