“Go back up the stairs yourself!” Panther snapped, and wheeled away.
As the others watched in disbelief, he started toward the back of the room and the deep shadows, ignoring the looks directed after him, oblivious to Candle’s hiss of warning. Hawk started to follow, then stopped as he realized he could not turn Panther around without risking a confrontation that would likely do more harm than good. Not knowing what else to do, he swung the thin beam of his torch after the retreating figure to help light his way.
Panther reached the piles of crates and moved through them, neither hesitating nor hurrying.
Then, abruptly, he disappeared from view.
Hawk held his breath and waited. He glanced left quickly. Within the black hole of the collapsed wall, everything was still. But the shadows of the room seemed to coalesce into something huge.
In the next instant Panther reemerged from between the crates, carrying a box of the precious tablets, his prod cradled loosely in the crook of his arms.
He crossed the room to where the others waited, went past them without stopping, and started up the stairs.
“Come along, children,” he sneered.
No one argued. They went up from the basement with hurried glances over their shoulders, crossed to the front wall of the building where Fixit was waiting, and climbed back through the broken window. Outside, they stood uneasily in the street and stared at one another.
“What happened?” Fixit asked in bewilderment, looking from one face to the next.
“Good thing you got me along to do the tough stuff,” Panther declared, giving Hawk a meaningful glance. “Got to have someone who ain’t afraid of the dark. Got to have someone to face down the bogeyman when he crawls out of his hole.”
Hawk didn’t reply, even though he wanted to tell Panther that he’d better not disobey him like that again, ever. Instead, he motioned them into the wing formation and they set off for home, moving back toward the center of the city.
Candle walked next to him and stared straight ahead, her young face tight and hard and her thin body rigid. Hawk left her alone. She knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that they had gotten away with something back there, even if Panther didn’t believe it. He was thinking that they had been lucky. He was thinking of the dead Lizard and the nest of Croaks and the possibility that there was something new and dangerous in the city.
But he was also thinking of her vision of the previous night—that something was coming for them, something that was going to kill them—thinking that maybe the world beyond their underground home was closing in on them in a way none of them had anticipated.
Thinking that maybe they had better be ready for it when it did.
Chapter THIRTEEN
HAWK WAS STILL brooding over the incident in the warehouse basement when he arrived back at Pioneer Square. It was already growing dark, and he could not afford to be late for his meeting with Tessa, so he set out again almost at once. Owl caught the look on his face as he passed through the kitchen and grabbed a slice of the bread she had baked, but said nothing. The others were preoccupied and didn’t notice. Except for Candle, who shared an understanding of what they had brushed up against in the darkness and somehow managed to avoid.
But Candle didn’t say anything, either.
She would later, he thought as went out the door, Cheney padding silently after him. She would tell Owl everything. Owl was her mother, and she was her mother’s little girl.
Theirs was a special relationship, made strong by the circumstances that had brought them together. Owl had been gone from the Safeco compound and living with Hawk and the first of the Ghosts, Bear and Fixit and Sparrow, for almost two years when she found Candle. Confined to her wheelchair and for the most part to the underground, there was no good reason for Owl to ever find anyone.
But against all odds, she had found Candle.
She had been outside that day, carried up by Hawk and Bear for a visit to the compound and Tessa, in the days before Tessa and Hawk had been caught together and Tessa had been forbidden by her parents to go out alone. They had arranged to meet just north of the compound at the edge of Pioneer Square in one of the buildings fronting Occidental Park. Tessa had been waiting when they arrived. The four had visited, then Bear had gone off in search of writing materials for Sparrow, who had been left behind with Cheney, and Owl had wheeled her chair out into the square to give Hawk and Tessa some time alone.
She was sitting in a pale wash of sunlight with her back to the building and her eyes lifted to watch tiny strips of blue sky come and go like phantom ribbons through breaks in the clouds when the little girl appeared. One moment she wasn’t there and the next she was, standing in front of the building across the way and staring at Owl. Owl was so surprised that for a moment she just stared back.