Back in the house, I put everything away—coat, boots, flashlight. I kenned Stella down to my shoulder and was heading upstairs when I all-at-once froze, halfway freaking out Stella, who lurched forward on my shoulder, flapped her wings for balance, and about poked out my eye with a feather.
There was Piper on the landing—rumpled nightie, ducky slippers, round glasses too big for her five-year-old face. Sitting there. Watching.
“What are you doing up?” I kept my voice quiet. Aunt Pen was a sound sleeper. Once the hearing aid came out she was gone: out for the night. Still, better not push it. Aunt Pen would fry a circuit if she saw Stella uncaged.
“Looking for you,” Piper said.
“Well, I’m here now. Get back to bed. We’ll both go back to bed.”
“Will you catch Luna?”
“Luna! Did you let her out?”
Piper shrugged.
I groaned. Inside, though—not out loud. I’d look pretty stupid getting on her case about Luna, with Stella sitting right there on my shoulder.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“In the basement.”
“The basement!” I remembered Aunt Pen and took it down a notch. “How did that happen?”
“I was looking for you. And I opened the basement door and she flew down.”
“Did you try to ken her back?”
Piper nodded. “She wouldn’t come!” Her voice spiked up: high-megahertz whine.
“Shh!” I put my arm around her. She leaned against me, buried her face in my shirt. “Hey. It’s okay.” It actually takes years to get kenning worked out with your bird—no matter how talented you are. It’s more complicated than you might think, and Piper’d had Luna for less than a year. Luna: as in Stellaluna, our favorite picture-book bat.
I might be able to summon Luna myself, but it’s not the done thing to ken another person’s bird. It’s just not polite.
A thought struck me. The basement.
I held Piper’s shoulders and pushed her away so I could see her face. “Why did you open the basement door? Did you hear something down there?”
“No.”
“Sort of a thumping sound?”
“No! I was just looking.”
Okay. I breathed. Okay. “Did you see where she went?”
“It was dark. And I couldn’t reach the switch.”
Don’t wanna.
I so wished I could leave this till morning. But no way would Piper go to sleep without Luna.
“You wait here,” I said.
I fumbled for the light switch just inside the basement door. Way down below, the ancient fixture clicked on—buzzing, flickering, and dim. I peered into the shadows. No sign of Luna. Ditzy bird. I started down the steps, breathing in eau de basement—metallic-smelling, sort of, mixed with chemicals and dust. Halfway to the bottom, Stella pushed off my shoulder and glided past the sputtery light, into the shadows.
“Hey,” I said.
I tried summoning her, but she slipped away. I could feel her faintly farther back, but she was dissing me.
Bad bird. Bad, bad bird.
I heard a scratching sound as Stella lit down someplace I couldn’t see, then a little greeting peep from Luna.
I hesitated on the bottom step and scanned the room. Hadn’t been down here in years. There was the furnace. The lawn furniture, stacked and covered, waiting for spring. The banks of floor-to-ceiling shelves with their neat plastic bins, all neatly labeled and color-coded, Aunt Pen style. HOLIDAY DECORATIONS. PAPER PRODUCTS. CLEANING SUPPLIES. LIGHT BULBS. STYROFOAM PACKING PEANUTS.
No Stella. No Luna. At least, not that I could see.
I moved past the first bank of shelves, then deeper back, past the next. PAINT. CARPET REMNANTS. EBAY. GOODWILL. There were a couple of plastic bins labeled DAMAGED FIGURINES—a tidy little graveyard for those bloodless birds of hers. Birds that didn’t shed feathers or strew seeds. Birds that didn’t poop.
The furnace snicked on, grumbled to life. A draft stirred the cobwebs at the tops of the shelves. I wished I’d put on my flip-flops. The concrete was seismic frigid, and bits of grit clung to the bottoms of my feet.
Ahead, at the far, dim end of the room, six or seven beat-up cardboard boxes sat in a heap on the floor. They looked so different from Aunt Pen’s pristine plastic bins, I knew what they must be.
The ones Dad had sent last week. The ones he’d found in that storage locker in Alaska. Full of Mom’s research stuff, he said.
We’d never even known about the locker until the overdue notice came. They were going to “dispose of the contents” unless someone paid, like pronto. So Dad went right back up to Anchorage, hoping to find some clues.
And there, at the top of the pile of boxes, were Stella and Luna. One each: cockatiel and canary. They seemed to be staring down into the narrow space between the boxes and the shelves. Ignoring me completely.
Could they smell Mom, maybe? Was that why they’d come down here?
I crept up behind Luna, pressed a finger against the backs of her twiggy legs. She lifted one foot and seemed about to fall for it—to step back onto my finger—but at the last second she tumbled to my nefarious plan and fluttered up to the top of the shelves.
“Twit,” I muttered.
The box, I saw, was marked up and tattered, having spent its previous life shipping ink cartridges from Taiwan. I strained to decipher the tiny postmark in the stuttering light. ANCHORAGE, AK.
I ran my fingers across Dad’s handwriting—the careful, rounded letters, the hopeful upward dips at the ends of words. Soon, he’d said when he’d called earlier this evening. He would come home soon.
When is soon? I’d asked. It was nearly two weeks already. But he couldn’t answer that. Had he found anything, any clues? Too soon to tell, he’d said.
I sighed, feeling the old familiar ache hollowing out my insides.
“Bryn?”
I turned around. Piper was leaning into the doorway at the top of the stairs.
“Bryn, did you find her?” She sounded a little wheezy.
“Yes. I’ll be there soon.” I heard the echo: Soon.
“With Luna?”
“Yes. In a minute. Go get your inhaler, would you?”
I looked where the birds were staring and saw that one of the boxes seemed to have tipped off the stack and landed on the floor on its side. The flaps had popped open; little clumps of wadded newspaper spilled out across the concrete, behind the other stacked boxes, beneath the lowest shelf.
A shiver brushed the back of my neck. Something had happened here. But what?
I synched with Stella and felt a weird, restless energy. Curiosity—on steroids. Something drawing her in.
I squatted beside the tipped box. It had been closed up with that brown paper sealing tape—not the stronger, plastic stuff you’re supposed to use for mailing. It looked as if the glue had come ungummed, and then the tape had torn.
It was mostly dirt samples in the boxes, Dad had said. Dirt with microbes in it. Bugs, Mom called them. She was always looking for promising new bugs. Bugs that would eat toxic waste. Dad had sent half the samples to Taj at the lab and half here, just to be safe.
I righted the box, set it on the floor beside the other ones. I raked through the crumpled paper inside. Nothing. I peered beneath the shelf, following the trail of newsprint.
Something there. Roundish. Hard to see way back there in the shadows.
A soccer ball? A volleyball?
From here, it looked kind of like leather, but it wouldn’t have to be. It could be that plastic synth leather. Pleather. It seemed to have sections, sort of, like crocodile skin or a tortoise shell. And it wasn’t quite round. More ovalish.
An egg? Some kind of mega-huge egg?
Ostrich?
Emu?
Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t dirt.
“What are you into, Mom?” I murmured.
Luna fluttered down again, beside Stella. Both of them still fixated on that egg. “Hate to break it to you, ladies,” I said, “but this is way out of your league.”
Maybe, when the egg had rolled out of the box, it had bumped the wooden post that held up the shelves. Ergo the mysterious thumps.
Maybe. But wouldn’t that happen just once?
“Bryn?” Piper again. “Are you coming?”
“Soon! Just wait there.”
I got down on my hands and knees, reached way back beneath the shelf. I touched the egg. It gave a little, like a rubber ball. I scooted forward, stretched full-out on the floor, and gently cupped my whole hand over it.
Weird. It was maybe a teensy bit warmer against my palm than it should have been. Not very warm, but it was chilly down here. You’d think the egg would be too.
And something else. It had a funny kind of vibe to it. So faint, I almost couldn’t tell if I was imagining it. But I didn’t think I was.
All at once, sprawled out there in the dark, with so many mysteries bumping around in my head . . . all at once, I knew one small thing for absolute certain.