Hawk made a circuitous approach to the compound, keeping to the concealment of the rubble and shadows. His destination was some hundred yards east of where he worked his way forward in a crouch, Cheney close beside him.
Nothing lived in this part of the city because the men on the walls kept watch day and night; if anything was seen, they were quick to send out a sanitation squad to destroy it. Twilight was the hardest time for the watchers to spot movement in the debris, even on the more open ground, which was the main reason Hawk had chosen this time of day for his meetings with Tessa. He met with her on the same day each week with no deviation. If either failed to show, the meeting was automatically rescheduled for the following night. The time and place were always the same—nightfall in the ruins of an old shelter that had once connected to an underground light rail system.
Hawk scanned his surroundings as he proceeded, searching through a mix of old bones, desiccated animals, and the occasional human corpse. He didn’t look closely at any of it; there wasn’t any reason to. Dead things were everywhere, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about them. He found the remains of street children almost every week, loners or outcasts or just plain unfortunates who had fallen victim to the things that hunted them. He no longer found the remains of adults; except for the Weatherman, those few still living outside the compounds had long since fled into the countryside, where your chances were marginally better if you possessed a few survival skills.
Hawk had lost two of his own family in the five years he had been living in the underground. The Croaks had gotten one, a little girl he’d named Mouse.
The older boy, Heron, had died in a fall. He could still see their faces, hear their voices, and remember what they had been like. He could still feel the heat of his rage at having failed them.
It took him a long time to reach the outbuilding, working his way s1owly and carefully through the ruins to keep out of sight of the compound guards, which sometimes required that he change directions away from the place he was trying to reach. Cheney stayed lose to him, aware of his caution. But Cheney knew enough about staying alive to avoid being seen in any case. Hawk was always amazed at how anything so big could move so quietly and invisibly.
When Cheney didn’t want to be seen or heard, you didn’t see or hear him. Even now, he would come up on Hawk unexpectedly, appearing from the shadows as if born of mist and darkness. If the boy hadn’t been so used to it, he would have jumped out of his skin.
When he reached the shelter leading to the rail system, he slipped down the darkened stairwell to the underground door and rapped three times, twice hard and once soft, then stepped back and waited. Almost immediately the locking device on the other side of the door released, the door opened, and Tessa burst through.
“Hawk!” She breathed his name like a prayer answered and threw her arms around him. “I almost gave up! Where were you?” She began kissing him on his face and mouth. “I was so sure that this time you weren’t coming!”
She was always like this, desperate to be with him, convinced he wouldn’t appear. She loved him so much that it frightened him, yet it made him feel empowered, too. She gave him a different kind of strength with her love, a strength born of knowing that you could change another person’s life just by being who you were. That he felt the same about her reinforced his certainty that by being together anything was possible. He had known it almost from the moment he had first seen her. He had felt it deep inside in a way he had never felt anything else.
He kissed her back now, as eager for her as she was for him.
When she broke away finally, she was laughing. “You’d think we’d never done this. You’d think we’d been waiting to do it all our lives.”
She was small and dark, her skin a light chocolate in color, her hair raven black and close-cropped in a silky helmet that glistened even in the darkness. Her eyes were large and wide with surprise, as if everything she was seeing was new and incredibly exciting. She exuded energy and life in a way that no one else could. She made him smile, but it was more than the way he felt about her. She had an enthusiasm that was infectious; she could make you feel good about life even in the bleakest of times and places.
“Look at you,” she whispered. “All ragged and dirty and mussed up, like Owl hasn’t made you take a bath in a month! Such a boy!” She grinned, and then whispered, “You look wonderful.”