Simple Talents

Chapter Nineteen

Theonda lead the way, a speck of gold in the sky, shimmering a mere kilometre ahead, circling at a turn before moving onto the new direction, making Rannolia's job infinitely easier. Theonda was glad to act as guide in the clouds so the rest of the girls could sleep. She would have driven if she could have, but she was afraid of even trying. It only takes one accident to ruin something like that for you.

Theonda was proud of her job as navigator, it was something she was always good at, but could never really put into practice considering her confinement at the schools. Being so open and flying so high was freeing. The world open below her, just her, was like a beautiful secret, like a painting you made that you loved, but would never show to anyone. It was just for you.

But, of course, when they reached the nest, that would stop. Fellow bird-people feared discovery, to the point of refusing outside contact to even the closest of the close. They migrated constantly between nests, hiding them well enough that only the insiders could ever catch where they really were. A dozen or so years ago, back before Theonda's memory began, her parents had both been a part of the secret nest circle, known as the Tobu Hito Wa or "Those who fly" in Japanese. Many of the early members of this nest had been Japanese, although most of the bird people had come from islands near Japan or even Europe. Theonda's ancestry was a mix of those original European and Japanese, giving her beautiful, wide brown eyes, but golden feathers and hair.

Her mother and father would tell her stories about the original Tobu Hito Wa, and of all their hiding places in North America, down to the very last detail, in case anything ever happened to them. Nothing had as far as Theonda knew, but they had removed themselves from the Tobu Hito Wa long ago, and were now in one of the most prominent Northern Nest colonies. She doubted that they were safe considering the nests' strong ties to the schools. They would have been safer with the Tobu Hito Wa, but after the labs' raid of 1999, they had doubted the protection of the nest, and fled, hoping for a more stable home.

Theonda had remembered her mother crying in the forest, flowers placed under a large pine. Engraved on the trunk had been Symphony Lee, 1996-1999, "I hope that wherever you may be, that your sky is blue, and your grass is green" Love always, Mommy, Daddy, and Tonda. Her mother had then given her the terrible news, that Theonda had not always been an only child. Tonda had been Symphony's name for her because he couldn't say it properly with his speech impediment. He was playing out in a grove with some other children and two of the elders when they were raiding the camp. The elders were killed on sight along with Symphony when he tried to fly home. Two other children were killed in the grove, nine were captured. The raid killed one other, and captured fifteen more talents. Her mother had seen Symphony die, and had been quick to warn others, but still had to be pulled away by her own mother in the end, the only way she would go without her boy. Unlike the other bodies that were carried away for tests, Symphony had fallen in the deep brush. Only a loving mother and father could find him there days later.

Theonda didn't know what to expect from the Tobu Hito Wa, but from what she had heard, their exclusivity was legendary, their secrecy more so, and their protective and loving nature to their own even more so. Theonda simply hoped that she would count. It was kind of a long shot that they would even be there, the information being over a decade old; but from what she knew, many of their nests had been destroyed, and that the one they were heading to was one of their best-guarded and favourites.

She was pulled from her thoughts when she saw it; a circle of four logs in a clearing with a large fire-pit in the center, with a small sapling resting in the middle. Something noticeable, but not too noticeable. It was only something that stood out to those in search of it. Looking all around her for obvious spying eyes, she dove from the sky, only leveling and gliding to a landing when she hit the tree-line, hoping for minimal shock by any accidental onlookers; hopefully from a distance she only looked like a big bird of prey.