The boy said nothing for a long time, sitting back, looking at nothing.
“She told the judges that she was carrying my child,” he said finally. He looked up again, meeting Logan’s gaze. “I don’t know if it’s true or not.” He shook his head slowly. “Doesn’t matter, I suppose. None of it matters. Even if I am who you say, even if the bones are my mother’s, it doesn’t change what’s going to happen to me or to Tessa.”
“Or to the Ghosts?” Logan asked. “They seem to believe in you. The boy and his children. They mentioned that right away when I told them I was looking for the gypsy morph and what the morph was expected to do. They say you are a family. What happens to them?”
“I don’t think I can do anything for them.” Hawk’s words were laced with bitterness. “I can’t save them or Tessa or anyone. I can’t even save myself from this.”
He looked at the floor again. “Or my child, if there is one.”
Logan gave him a minute, and then said, “Take the bones. Hold them. Let’s see if they give you any answers.”
“No,” Hawk repeated. Then his eyes lifted and met Logan’s. They stared at each other for a long time. “All right,” the boy said finally. “Give them to me.”
Logan leaned forward and dumped the bones gently into the boy’s palm. Hawk looked at them, a glimmer of whiteness against the dirt-streaked flesh of his hand. Then slowly he closed his fingers over them.
Logan waited expectantly.
“Nothing,” Hawk said finally. “It’s all a . . .”
Then his eyes snapped wide, his mouth fell open in shock, and his slender body went rigid, his muscles cording, straining against what was happening to him. Logan started to intervene, then checked himself. Better to let this play out. The boy was shaking now, his body jerking in whiplash fashion. He was trying to say something, but the words came out as small whimpers. He clasped the fist that held the finger bones to his breast, hunched over as if to find a way to absorb the bones into his body, and began to rock forward and back.
“Hawk?” Logan whispered to him.
A white light bloomed from the center of the boy’s body, a small blossom at first, and then a bright cloud that all but enveloped him. Logan backed away despite himself, edging toward the darkness, not understanding why, but feeling that his presence was invasive and perhaps even dangerous. He watched the light steady and then begin to pulse in a rhythm that matched the rocking of the boy.
Hawk continued to make indecipherable sounds, lost to everything about him, gone completely into whatever catharsis the bones had generated.
The rocking and the pulsing continued for a long time, and then died away in an instant, leaving the boy hunched over like a fetus, pressed down against his hand and the bones and the floor with the wash of the electric torch casting his shadow in a tight, dark stain across the concrete.
“Hawk?” Logan tried again.
The boy’s head lifted slowly and his face came into view, his features stricken and his skin damp with his own tears. The green eyes were filled with a mix of wonder and recognition, of understanding that only moments earlier had been lacking. He stared at nothing, and then at Logan without seeing him. He was looking somewhere else, somewhere only he could see.
His throat worked. “Mother,” he whispered.
*
OWL WAS SUPERVISING preparations for moving, organizing and dispatching the others on tasks designed to gather together their stores and belongings. She had decided that morning, when Hawk failed to return and Logan Tom set out to find him, that whatever else happened the Ghosts were leaving. She no longer trusted Pioneer Square, no longer felt safe, no longer believed they belonged in this part of the city. She had half decided this before, after their terrible battle with the centipede, but now she was determined. They would move to higher ground, farther back from the waterfront, up in the hills behind the city where they were out of the underground tunnels and sewers and away from the tall buildings. There might be less concrete and steel to protect them inside the residences and low-rises, but there might be fewer monsters, as well.
Besides, she thought, they were at the start of the journey Hawk’s vision had foreseen. The boy and his children were about to set out, just as she had told them in her stories. There was no reason to think about staying any longer.