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enemies of the city-state. These men had
killed bad bloods and been killed by bad bloods—and Cal was among
them. Even worse, he was their leader.
    “That man,” Cal continued slowly, “That man
is the one I lost my arm for.” He inhaled and exhaled a shaky
breath, and as he met my eyes, his forehead wrinkled as if he were
forcing the words out. “He’s also the reason I killed the bad
blood, the one who reminded me of you.”
    I nearly dropped the photo. “I don’t
understand.”
    “He can help us with the election,” he
explained. “You can help him.”
    Before I could ask for clarification, the
phone clicked, and a groggy voice split through the silence. “Who
is this?”
    Cal never looked away from me. “It’s me.”
    A loud exhale came from the other end.
“Cal.”
    I glanced back down at the photo, scanning
the man next to Cal again, but nothing sparked my memory. I racked
my brain, trying to figure out what Cal was thinking, but the age
difference was throwing me off. Cal couldn’t have been older than
twenty in the photo—and if I remembered correctly, he was only
eighteen—and that meant the boy next to him was just as old as Cal
was now. I didn’t know many older folks. Only Cal and Old Man
Gregory. But something about the boy etched out my thoughts as I
slowly added wrinkles and receded his hairline.
    “Cal,” the man repeated, and his voice aided
my photo-editing mind. “I can’t believe it. I—”
    “I didn’t call to catch up,” Cal said. “I
called to help.”
    “Ah.” The sound lingered. “You can’t help me,
old friend. I’ll find a way—”
    “I already have a way,” Cal interrupted as I
recognized the uncanny facial features. They had been a mystery due
to the smile. He almost never smiled now. A modern politician
rarely did. “I think I can solve this rumor about your daughter,
Alec.”

 
     

    The morning
light spewed into my bedroom, and it lit up the large, white
T-shirt Melody wore as pajamas. She stood on her tiptoes behind a
seated Timmy, and he cringed as she tugged his white hair up. With
tiny fingers, she threaded his thin mop into tiny braids, and I
watched the youngest member of my flock in sleepy silence. How long
they had been awake, I didn’t know, but now that I was awake, I
couldn’t take my eyes off the two children. Melody was only four,
ditched on the streets one year ago until I found the toddler
walking around in an invisible panic. Timmy was only nine—and a
human at that, ditched by his parents because his sisters were bad
bloods. Niki had saved him. At least she had saved someone. But I
wondered how the Northern Flock’s stories compared to ours.
    Did they have any humans in their flock? Who
saved who? Why were they abandoned on Vendona’s streets? How old
was Blake?
    The little blond boy couldn’t have been older
than five, and the images I had seen through his mind lingered in
my memory like they were my own. Daniel went fishing with Adam.
Maggie—the redhead—watched them from the lake. I even knew where
the lake was. In return, I wondered how much Blake had learned
about me by reading my mind and how much he understood from the
images he saw. I wondered if he’d tell Daniel. I wondered if Daniel
wondered about my flock as much as I wondered about his, and now
that I had met an entirely new flock, I wondered even more about my
own—how our stories compared, how our lives interlocked, how our
situation was similar. The Northern Flock had the same amount of
members, after all, and their ages even ranged around the same
numbers.
    It seemed too strange to be a
coincidence—almost as if Daniel and Robert had the same plans when
they formed the Northern and Southern Flocks—but I couldn’t draw
any conclusions by comparing. When I did, Blake became Melody.
Timmy became one of the dozen kids I’d met, the ones I couldn’t
remember the names of, despite the fact that he was a human and
they were bad bloods. Catelyn and I could’ve