Then she called over, “What’s your name?”
The little girl didn’t answer. She just kept staring. She was very tiny and so thin that it seemed she would disappear if she turned sideways. Her clothes were in tatters, her face smudged with dirt. She was such a ragged little thing that Owl decided on the spot that she would have to help her.
She took a chance then and wheeled herself over, taking her time, not rushing it, being careful not to do anything that would frighten the little girl. But the child just stood there and didn’t move.
Owl got to within ten feet and stopped. “Are you all right?”
“I’m hungry,” the little girl said.
Owl had no real food to offer. So she reached into one pocket, brought out a piece of rock candy, and held it out. The little girl looked at it, but stayed where she was.
“It’s all right,” Owl told her. “You can have it. It’s candy.”
The little girl’s gaze shifted, her eyes a startling blue that seemed exactly the right complement for her mop of thick red hair. Her skin tone was porcelain, so pale that it suggested she had never seen the sunlight.
It wasn’t all that unusual to encounter such children in these times, but even so this little girl didn’t look like anyone Owl had ever come across.
Owl leaned back in her wheelchair and put her hands in her lap. “I can’t walk, so I can’t bring it over to you. And I can’t throw it, because if I do it will shatter. So you have to come and get it. Will you do that for me?”
No response. The little girl just kept staring. Then, all at once, she changed her mind. She came right up to Owl, reached down and took the candy, unwrapped it and put it in her mouth. She sucked on it for a moment, and then smiled. It was the most dazzling smile Owl had ever seen. She smiled back, so charmed that she would have done anything for the girl.
“Can you tell me your name?” she asked again.
The little girl nodded. “Sarah.”
“Well, Sarah, what are you doing here all by yourself?”
The little girl shrugged.
“Where are your parents?”
The little girl shrugged again.
“Where is your home?”
“I don’t have a home.”
“No mommy and daddy?”
Sarah shook her head.
“No brothers and sisters?”
Another shake of her carrot-top.
“Are you all alone?”
The little girl hugged herself and bit her lip. “Mostly.”
Owl wasn’t sure what she meant by this, and neither was Hawk when the conversation was repeated to him later. He had reappeared with Tessa to find Owl in her wheelchair and Sarah sitting on the pavement in front of her, staring up in rapt attention as Owl finished another story of the children and their boy leader. By then, it was clear at a glance that the two had bonded in a way that couldn’t be undone and that the little girl had joined the family.
But within days of Sarah coming to live with them in their underground home the Ghosts began to realize that there was something very different about her. She dreamed all the time, waking frequently from nightmares that left her shaking and mute. They would ask her what was wrong, but she would never say. Sometimes she would refuse to go into places, especially places that were dark and close. She wouldn’t let them go in, either, throwing such a fit that it proved easier just to let her have her way.
Neither Owl nor Hawk could figure out what was going on, but they knew it was something important.
Then, one day, Owl was alone with Sarah in the center of Pioneer Square, sorting containers collected from a bin that Bear had dragged from several blocks away. Bear wasn’t far away, but he wasn’t in sight, either. Hawk and Sparrow were scouting new supply sources in midtown. Owl wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on around her, concentrating on the job at hand, and then all at once Sarah hissed as if she had been scalded, grabbed the back of Owl’s wheelchair, and pushed her swiftly into the interior of their building.
Owl barely had time to try to ask what was wrong when the little girl’s hand clamped across her mouth, and she was whispering, Croaks]
Seconds later they appeared. Three of the walking dead, slouching out of the darkness of an alleyway, casting baleful glances right and left as they passed through the square and continued down a side street. Had Sarah not gotten Owl out of sight, they would have been discovered. Owl braced the little girl by her shoulders. How had she known about the Croaks? Sarah shook her head, not wanting to say, but this time Owl persisted, telling her that it was all right, whatever it was, but that she had to know, it was important.
The little girl said it was the voices.
She said it was the voices inside her head, the ones that came to her both in dreams and in waking, warning her of danger. They were always there, always watching out for her.