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“Why, Cren?” I ask him gently. “What are you so against us going to The Hive?”
He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. “Can you not speak that name in this building? It is my home. My sanctuary.” When he opens his eyes to look at me they’re tired and sad. “They have taken so much already. I do not care for them to ruin this as well.”
“Of course, yeah,” I agree, not understanding entirely. But I understand enough. I understand having a home and defending it at all costs. I understand having it taken. Invaded.
“We don’t want to go to them,” Ryan tells Crenshaw. His eyes are still watching the old man closely. His weapon is still in place on his hand. “We were hoping you could advise us on how to gather people together. To get more help. We could try to rally the gangs, but they don’t play well together. Not in a fight.”
Crenshaw nods sagely. “Each would wonder what was in it for them.”
“Exactly. There’d be so much fighting with each other, we’d never get around to fighting the Colonies. It’s why we wanted to go to the largest of the gangs, because they’re already united, but,” Ryan glances at me quickly, his face unreadable, “we’re pretty sure we wouldn’t want to pay their price.”
“Indeed you would not,” he agrees softly. He looks at Ryan with eerily sharp eyes. Eyes that remind me of Trent. That feel too lucid to be my Gandalf the Gray. “Never take her to them. Never let them see her. Women in The H—“ He sighs forcefully. “It’s no place for women. Especially women like her.”
I frown, a
“What do you mean, ‘women like her’?” I demand.
“You lost someone to them,” Ryan says sadly.
Crenshaw nods.
“To who?” I ask. “To The—to them?”
They ignore me again. I’ve gone full Casper.
Crenshaw nods. “She was her age. Just as bright. Just as beautiful.” He grins faintly. “Just as rough around the edges.”
Ryan smiles. “It’s part of the beauty.”
“The greatest part.”
“I’m sorry about your daughter.” Ryan says, obviously gleaning more from this conversation than I am. What daughter?
“Don’t be sorry for me. Just do a better job protecting her than I did.”
“I swear it.”
“Good lad.”
“What the hell?” I mutter, looking back and forth between them.
They wouldn’t hear me with Ouija board.
Crenshaw rises from the table slowly. It’s as though his outburst has drained him of everything he had. He’s hunched slightly, his movements labored. I have to remind myself that as spry, lively and crazy as he seems, he is an old man. He’s got a lot of life under his belt and it’s not just bones that get tired.
He goes to a wooden box about the size of a toolbox sitting at the foot of his bed. After digging around silently, he pulls out a large piece of worn, white paper. I’m waiting anxiously to see what this is. It could be anything. A spell book. A nude drawing of Tom Hanks. A cheat sheet to the 2009 SATs. Or something far more disturbing like a nude drawing of himself or a detailed chart monitoring his bowel movements. One never knows.
What he actually does lay out on the table both startles and amazes me.
It’s a map of Neverland. A hand-drawn, near perfection, detailed map of the Seattle area. Not as it was, because who cares? This is a map of what the city is today. Instead of zip codes, the city is broken up by gang territories. The stadiums are labeled as what they really are – Colonies. I eagerly search the outer edges to the south, looking to see if Cren knows exactly where the third Colony lies, but there’s nothing. Just a drawing of the shoreline with a topless mermaid out in the water, waving at me.
“Whoa,” Ryan breathes, stowing his spike hand under the table and leaning forward over the map.
Crenshaw smiles at him happily, his mood shifting dramatically. He’s proud and pleased to see Ryan so into his work. Excitement is written all over both of their faces.
“It is incomplete,” Crenshaw warns. He spreads it flat with gentle, soothing hands. “I shouldn’t be showing it to you, Helios. Other gangs, other tribes, would be angry to know I’d shown you where their hideouts lie. But I have faith in you. I trust in your trueness.”
“Thank you, Master Crenshaw,” Ryan says with a small smile. He looks so happy. Flattered by the old guy’s admiration and I realize I’m not the only one who grew up without a dad. Who feels that missing piece of me.
“I believe I have the names of each of the tribes correct, but of course I’m unsure as to what the true names of the Colonies are.”
“C-92,” I deadpan, pulling my eyes away from Ryan’s smile. I wipe my sweating palms on my pants before pointing to the football stadium. Next I point to the baseball stadium right next door. “G-11. The one in the southeast is somewhere along the water but I don’t know where. The people I talked to didn’t either. It’s G-35.”
They stare at me in shock. I don’t know if they’re surprised I remembered the names or that I know them at all. I have a brief, paranoid and horrifying thought that they’ll think I’m a spy. That I didn’t ‘escape’ the Colony at all but that I was released to… what? Be socially awkward with a hot guy and help an old lunatic finish his map quest?
“Where were you held?” Ryan asks.
He’s looking at me, I can feel it. I keep my eyes trained on the table.
“The MOHAI,” I reply curtly.
“The what?”
I point to the spot on Cren’s map. The small area tucked in the harbor that felt a million miles away from here but now looks so close. Too close. And too small to house so many people. Too small to house a person like Vin.
“It was here. In the old museum building. I can’t remember what MOHAI stands for, but it was Colony A-36.”
Crenshaw quickly whips out a charcoal pencil from his box of goodies and begins filling in the information I’ve given him.
“Why did they name them like that?” Ryan asks, watching Crenshaw’s simple, slanting handwriting scrawl over the pages. I expected something more somehow. Old English flourishes or Latin. Maybe Aramaic. These chicken scratches a
“Everything about them is a lie,” Crenshaw mutters.
“It’s to confuse people.” I point vaguely to the MOHAI. “The people in the building where I was held are pulled from all of the other Colonies. It’s what I told you about breaking up families. Every one of those people has someone in another Colony somewhere. Someone they care about. They all have something to lose.”
Ryan nods. “Makes sense. It’s a good way to control people. But why did these people get pulled away from their families to go here? Is it a new Colony? I’ve never heard of one up that way.”
“It can’t be new. It’s too well developed. And a girl I talked to said it had been occupied before but there was a problem in the building. They abandoned it for a while.”
“Who was this girl?”
I shrug, sitting back with my arms crossed over my chest. “Just some chick angry at being there.”
“Another friend?” Ryan asks, gri
I shake my head. “I punched her in the face.”
“Typical.”
“And the ear. I almost knelt on her throat. Nearly smothered her with a pillow.”
“Now do you see why I have a hard time believing you made friends in there?”
“This young woman,” Crenshaw says suddenly, frowning at his map, “did she know if there were others? Other Colonies?”
“No, just the ones you have marked now.”
He looks up at me, his face drawn. He’s disappointed. “It is a shame you could not gain us more valuable information while you were there.”
“It is. It’s a shame I didn’t do more sleuthing while I was there,” I say, my temper rising. “I should have gone all Sherlock up in that joint, but I was too busy trying not to lose my mind from all of the bright lights and bodies everywhere. Next time, I promise, I’ll do better.”