When the Wind Blows - James Patterson [77]
An older boy, close to Max’s age, hung back. His hair was fine ash blond and it hung all around his face and down to his shoulders. His frame was lean, his bones fine and long.
It occurred to me that although these children had wings in common, their lineage was different. What could that mean? It meant something important, but I couldn’t figure out what.
I reached out to the boy, but he hissed when I touched his arm. Of course the boy was afraid of me. How could he trust anyone? How could any of the children trust us?
Only with assurances from Max did this little boy named Icarus allow me to approach him.
“I would never hurt you,” I told him.
“Heard that one before,” he said. “That’s how they all talk. Liars!”
Icarus pushed his blond hair away from his face, and I saw then that his irises were an opaque bluish-gray. I looked at Max and she told me what I already knew.
“Icarus is blind,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m kind of a mistake,” said the boy. “We all are.”
Chapter 81
KIT HAD LEFT Frannie and Max with the smaller children. There was so much that he needed to know about this place. He entered an executive office. Some kind of higher-up worked here. A bold sign in Helvetica type caught his eye: Assume nothing. Question everything.
“I’m already there,” he whispered under his breath.
Kit continued to be afraid for the children, and for Frannie. The fear was growing exponentially inside him. He felt that he’d been given responsibility for another family, to make sure they got through this safely. He took the responsibility seriously, and it scared him more than anything else could.
He surveyed the office. There were no photographs, no mementos on any of the table surfaces. Nothing personal was left out in plain sight.
Whose office was it? It had to be somebody important in the scheme of things. The room was about twenty feet square with a picture window opening out onto the lab. The floors were covered with plush, silver-gray carpet. The desk was old blond oak. There was a corkboard on the wall above it.
The papers on the corkboard mesmerized him. He stared at an amazing collection of pen-and-ink drawings of what looked to be theoretical improvements on human parts and organs. Whoever had done the drawings was a very good artist, he was thinking. He shuddered. A cold chill raced up his spine. Whoever did these line drawings—wants to be God.
He took down a manila envelope. Inside the packet were drawings of eyes of different shapes with cross-section illustrations, both lateral and transverse.
Da Vinci would have been proud of this artwork, Kit thought.
There was a complex sequence of drawings of a human leg. The leg was shown in various positions, some requiring a flexibility that seemed impossible to Kit. There was a tight line drawing of an arm, the fingers outstretched. Over the arm was a transparency upon which a new arm had been sketched.
A new arm? Abetter human arm? Is that what I’m looking at?
The new drawing showed longer muscles, and more streamlined digits. It certainly looked like an improvement on the current model. He hated to admit it, but it was actually quite thrilling.
It seemed as if some kind of extremely talented corporate body-part designer were sketching the new models for the coming season.
He was so immersed in studying the drawings that he almost missed the bunch of little keys hanging from a metal pushpin. They’d been right in front of him all the time. He grabbed them, and the corkboard almost came off the wall. The keys were labeled in small, meticulous print.
The first key was to the desk drawer. Kit pulled it so hard, it fell out of the desk, its contents spilling all over the floor.
He bent and rifled through the litter: paper clips and coins and stamps and pens—the usual universal desk debris. There was a Swiss Army knife amid the clutter. He pocketed it. It could come in handy.
The next key opened a long gray metal cabinet beside the corkboard. Inside the dark recess were quart bottles, tightly sealed from the look of them.