Max walked for a very long time, all the while wondering where Jace was. What had happened to the phone? Why hadn't she explained where she had gone in the note? There was but the concise instruction that had proved completely useless. And now there she was, walking along the highway. Hitchhiking.
A truck was slowing down. Max grinned in triumph as it halted beside her. The man driving it looked down at her and then went to keep driving.
"Hey-" began Max, but he pulled away. "HEY!" she yelled, and started running. Maxie could run very, very quickly for someone her age, faster than most of the adults she knew. Well, all of them. Except for Jace.
The man looked at her in shock as she sprinted easily next to the truck, thumping on the window with her fist. He pulled over. "What do you want?" he asked her uneasily.
"A ride. As far toward Seattle as you can take me. I'll even pay you."
"Seattle? No deal, little girl. I don't give rides to runaways."
"I'm not running away from someone, I'm running to someone. My aunt in Seattle. She's the only person who will take care of me."
Or at least Max hoped that her Aunt Max would want to take care of her.
"Sorry, little girl. I'm going to Los Angeles, but I can't take you. I'll get arrested for abduction."
"But I need to find my aunt! She's the only family I have!"
"You find someone who cares," the driver sneered, and the truck pulled away.
All the way to Los Angeles for free! No way was Max missing out on this opportunity. She glared after the truck for a moment and then started running after it. Max built up speed, careful not to run into anywhere she could be seen in the rear view mirror.
And all in a second, Maxie took a running jump. It was a slightly ungainly, clumsy jump but it got her into the flatbed of the truck with the minimum amount of noise. She hugged her knees as the truck took her further away from her home and deeper into the unknown.
The lights of the stars and of the passing traffic blurred together as Max gave into fear and fatigue. She slept.
The next thing Max knew was that it was morning and quite a few people were standing around, looking at her in shock, including the crabby driver and a few other drivers. She was woken quite abruptly by someone smacking her over the head with the back of their hand.
"That creepy little kid wanted a ride last night!" the driver was raging. "I said no!"
"How the hell did she manage to get into the back, then?" someone whispered.
"Are you all right, dear?" a woman asked in concern.
"Out you come!" Two men grabbed her arms and dragged out out of the back of the truck. With incredible strength, Max yanked her arms out of their grasp and backed away.
She appeared to be in a parking lot. Max had excellent eyesight and could see a gate quite clearly, all the way at the other end of the lot.
Max grinned embarrassedly.
"Thanks for the ride!" she yelled, and ran. Everyone else seemed to be moving in slow motion but Maxie was moving faster than she'd ever moved in her life. In seconds she was at the gate.
She rattled it and gave a yowl of annoyance, letting out some of her energy. She had boundless energy when she needed it. Max scaled the high fence and leaped over the other side, inspecting her surroundings.
Max appeared to be standing by a road with a lot of cars going past. On the other side she could see some run-down homes and buildings.
She checked her watch. It was eight-thirty exactly.
Maxie was across the road in seconds. She briefly considered calling the crisis number, but she wasn't really in crisis.
She changed her clothes in a public bathroom. Max didn'y have any toothpaste, so the best she could do was to wash her mouth out with water. Some women with cigarettes watched her curiously as she shouldered her bag and left.
So this was Los Angeles. Lila had been here once, to visit an aunt- much like Max was doing, although she had a very long way to go until she reached Seattle.
She found a bench and sat there, smiling. Feeling very pleased with herself, Maxie ate one of her sandwiches and inspected her map.
Max decided to go along the coast. No more hitchhiking- too risky. Word would travel, people would begin to recognise her. She could walk along the highway and take buses at night.
"I'm going to get outta Los Angeles, on to San Francisco. Through Portland and then to Seattle."
Four hours of walking later, Max thought she'd made it sound far too easy. She seemed to be getting nowhere. It was noon. She was hot, far too hot and hungry, but she didn't dare eat another sandwich. All the American money Jace had had was in hundred-dollar denominations. How would she explain the fact that she had so much money?
Nights and days blurred into each other like the lights on the highway. Max spent her lonely nights sitting in almost empty buses or hitchhiking. One guy had started talking in a very creepy way. When she'd asked him to stop the car he hadn't listened, so Maxie had followed her first instinct and made a fist. She hit him hard in the side of the head, so hard he went sideways even with his seatbelt buckled and smacked the other side of his head on the window.
The car skidded across a wet road. Stunned, he'd managed to hit the brakes. Max had grabbed her backpack, opened the door and fled through night streets in terror. Mothers always talked about getting abducted by bad men and getting in car accidents, so it was awful to have to experience both these things in a matter of minutes.
Max sat finally, sniffling through a mild cold, in a seat a few rows behind the driver of the bus. An hour or two and they'd reach Seattle. She hadn't slept in three days, just ran or walked or shivered in doorways. Rain pounded against the windows. Finally, she was nearly there.
"So," called the driver, a woman. "What's your name?"
She was pretty old. Max guessed about late forties. Max gave herself a little hug. "Max. My name is Max."
"You meeting someone at the bus station, Max?"
"I'm going to walk to my aunt's workplace and wait for her there."
"It's pretty late. Maybe you should call your aunt and have her meet you at the bus station."
"I've never met my aunt before. I want to make a good impression and not wake her up in the night."
"Travelling alone, eh? Where from?"
"Nearby Hermosallo."
"I could get you a place to spend the night with some nice people who could give you a cab fare to your Aunt's house."
"That's kind, ma'am, but I don't want to impose." Jace told her daughter at a young age to address women as 'ma'am' unless they told her otherwise. "That's what I was taught," she'd told told her little girl.
"It's no trouble. I'm supposed to look out for children using the bus lines alone."
Max decided to play along. "Yeah, I guess," she said, skating warily around the question.
She took her mother's picture out of her pocket. Max missed her mother terribly, wanted nothing more than to be at home instead of travelling to visit an aunt she'd never met before. "I'm OK, Mama," she whispered to the picture. She whispered it so softly all she herself could make out was the movement of her lips and a noise that sounded like a sigh.
The bus pulled into the Seattle bus station, nearby the very place where Jace had boarded the bus to Mexico ten years ago, although there was no way for Maxie to know that. She showed her sector pass and papers to the man behind the desk after twenty minutes standing in line and was just about to leave when she felt someone grab her shoulder.
Max yelped and whipped around, ready to throw one of her killer punches but saw it was only the bus driver and relaxed. Sort of.
"What do you want?" she demanded, tense.
"Hey, don't hurt me!" kidded the driver. "Remember? I'm going to call some nice people who'll give you a bed for the night."
The driver steered Max over to a payphone and told her told wait while she called. Unhappily, Max kicked at the gravel. She wasn't dumb. Max Morales knew what this meant- social workers. A children's home.
She hung around a few minutes and then crept away, out of the bus station and into Seattle.
It was worse than Los Angeles. At least she'd arrived in LA in high spirits and the daytime, but now she stood in a dark street. It looked like it was going to start raining again any minute. Who'd want to live in a place like this?
Max took a deep breath and went to find somewhere to hide for the rest of the night. Nobody would be answering their phone that late. The only thing to do right then- the only thing Maxie wanted to do- was sleep.
The first place she saw with a lot of light was a bar a while away. She'd changed one of her bills for ten-dollar denominations, so she went inside, grateful for dry and warmth and company.
Granted, it wasn't much company. There were a table of women laughing loudly and smoking cigarettes in the corner, a few men up at the bar nearly passed out, some teenagers playing pool and some shifty-looking younger teenagers skulking in the water.
"You're up late," remarked a loud sort of woman wearing too much makeup as she came to get another pitcher for her friends.
"So are you," shot back Max. She didn't need this. She was hungry, cold, lonely and nervous.
The woman sniffed in contempt, paid for the pitcher and went back to the table.
"Anything for you, kid?" said the bartender in a gravelly voice.
"Got anything with chocolate in it?" asked Max, half-interested.
He snickered and Max felt stupid. "Nope."
"Fine, get me a Coke or something please, sir."
"Or something?" he repeated.
"Surprise me," she said in clipped tones, and he went to get her drink.
She sat there for hours. The women left, some more teenagers entered. One tried to talk to her, make fun of her, "Where's your mommy, kid?"
This had annoyed Max greatly. "Don't. Mess. With. Me."
The sun rose over Seattle. Max had left the bar and walked for twenty minutes until she found a working, unoccupied payphone. She lifted one of the grubby phonebooks off the floor effortlessly and looked up Bicycle Couriers.
The first name she had found was Reliable Runs By Day. She dialled it.
"Hello?" a woman on the other end of the line had said boredly.
"My name is Max, may I please speak to Max?"
"Look, kid, just piss off, OK? I hate prank phone calls!" the woman seethed, hanging up abruptly.
It took five calls before she found a messanger service with an employee named Max.
"OK, hang on, I'll get 'em," said the man on the other end of the line. "Hey Norton, got a kid on the line who wants to talk to you!"
Norton?
"Norton Maxwood, who's this?" a man had answered.
"Norton? The guy on the phone said your name was Max," asked Maxie in confusion.
"Oh, that's my nickname. You know, Max. Maxwood. Did you want to talk to me?"
"You're not the Max I need," said Max glumly. She hung up.
Three calls later, to a place called Jam Pony, she talked with a man named Mr Ronald.
"Jam Pony, Ride With Pride, Mr Ronald speaking."
"Um, hi. Do you have an employee named Max working at Jam Pony?"
"Which Max?" Max's heart leaped.
"Max Morales."
"Sorry, there's nobody called Max Morales working here."
"Max Morales the First?" she asked desperately.
Mr Ronald sighed. "Want to tell me a little more about this Max Morales of yours?"
"Uh, well, she has a big sister named Jace Morales who lives in Mexico. She's my aunt. I'm named after her."
There was the sound of papers being shuffled. "Closest I can give you is a Max Guevara who used to work here."
"Did she have a sister named Jace?"
"She had no family. No parents, brothers or sisters or relatives of any kind."
"I guess I've got the wrong number, then. The Max I'm looking for had an older sister named Jace."
There was a pause.
"Sir?"
"Yes?"
"Could I have her number anyhow? This is the first Max I've found who could be the one I need to contact."
"I'm sorry, little girl, but I don't give out employee or former employee phone numbers over the phone."
"Please? I- I've come all the way from Mexico to stay with my aunt, but I don't know where she lives or her number or anything. Can't you ask someone? There's gotta be someone there who knows my Aunt Max's address. Please, sir!"
A different voice, a woman's voice seemed to float out of nowhere on the other end of the phone. "Normal, you gotta kid beggin' you for something? Sad world when Seattle's kids gotta turn to Normal Ronald for their problems."
"Thank you, Cindy, for your insight, now I have a hot run to 458 Daley Avenue with your name on it. Bip, bip, bip, back to work, people!"
Frustrated, Max hung up the phone. She pulled a pen out of her pocket and scribbled down Jam Pony's address on her arm.
It took a lot of directions from complete strangers and a lot of patience on Max's part, but she found herself looking shyly into Jam Pony during the peak of the morning runs for the employees.
She shuffled inside feeling terribly awkward and looked around. There were a lot of tough, trendy adults hanging around and talking around graffitiied lockers. Max made her way over to the front desk, where a few of the riders were having an argument with the man behind the desk- this must be the guy she'd spoken to on the phone.
Max had an idea. She tugged on a tattooed woman's sleeve and said, faking a lisp. "'Thcuse me, ma'am, but there's a man thmoking in the men'th room."
She laughed loudly as if this was something fantastic. "Hey Normal!" she yelled, eyes dancing. "Kid over here says some guy's smokin' in the men's!"
"What? If it's Herbal again-" He darted toward the nearest door, presumably the men's room.
Maxie wasted no time. She darted behind the dounter and opened a file cabinet marked PAST EMPLOYEES.
"Mabbie- Martin- Maya... hang on, that's too far." She flipped back a few files until she found one with MAX GUEVARA written neatly on a bright tag.
Max yanked out the file and flipped through the papers, scanning them and committing the relevant information to memory. Maxie had a very good memory.
Max never questioned her abilities. She knew she wasn't exactly normal- she did extremely well in school, ran faster, jumped higher and breathed less than most human beings. Except her mother. So she had decided long ago it was simply something about her mother's family that allowed them to be so, as her mother always put it, exceptional. She wondered whether Max the First was exceptional too.
"Hey, there's nobody in the men's room!" yelled Mr Ronald. Max froze. "Who the firetruck's idea of a joke is this?"
"That's my cue," said Max with a brief smile. She ran for it.
Using a ten from her pocket, she bought herself a burger in a greasy little shop and thought about her aunt. Would she be kind? Would she want to help her?
Max felt very lonely all of a sudden as she finished her burger. It started to rain as she left the burger joint and headed toward the part of town where this Max Guevara lived.
She began to suspect that someone was following her about two streets from her aunt's address. Maxie looked behind her.
Nope. Just two girls about her age in raincoats, running home and shrieking with laughter. They rounded the corner and disappeared.
Dark clouds rolled across the sky and rain poured. Max was soaked to the skin and shivered uncontrollably, snuffling. A Jam Pony rider chose that exact moment to ride past, spraying her with icy, dirty water.
She sneezed and hitched up her backpack. "Guess I deserve it for g-g-going through their records..." she stuttered.
The street was deserted.
All in a second, two men darted out from the nearest alley. She screamed as one grabbed her around the neck and dragged her backwards. The other hit her so hard in the side of the head she felt like she'd been hit over the head with a brick.
"Hey, kid. You had a lot of money at the burger place, huh? Let's see how much you've really got," snarled one.
"Scream and the only way you're ever gonna see your mommy again is in a body bag," hissed the other.
Max pulled out of their grasp, ducking under their arms. She held up her fists in as menacing a way as she could manage. Max had plenty of power in her fists and feet, but no real training or discipline. Maybe, if she kept bluffing...?
They laughed and went for her again. Blindly, head throbbing, she jumped high into the air and hung one-handed from a windowsill.
They started throwing bits of gravel and pieces of trash at her. The gravel glanced off her arms and ankles, biting at her freezing skin.
"Leave me alone!" she wailed in a voice that was unnaturally high. "Leave me alone and I'l give you all the money I've got!"
Incredibly, Max managed to delve into her pocket and find some ten and hundred-dollar bills. She tossed them down. They whirled in the wind, weighed down by the rain and came to a rest in the muddy water swirling around the muggers' feet
"Anything else?"
"I-I-"
One hurled a tin can at her. It bounced off her eyebrow, cutting her. Using the one hand, she managed to take her backpack off, switching hands halfway through. Maxie brought her knees up, rested the back pack on them and searched for more money, anything to make those freaks go away.
The backpack fell and one of the muggers took it. "Hey... give that back to me!" shrieked Max.
The muggers ran off with it. After a few seconds Max let herself fall. Her money, papers, clothes, map and her only photo of Jace had been in that bag.
She began to walk, practically dragging herself through the streets. She had no idea how long she'd been walking but somehow she found herself where she'd wanted to be for what seemed like thousands of years. Her aunt's doorstep.
She braced herself against the doorframe with one hand and rang the doorbell with the other. After a few minutes, the door creaked open.
A woman in her late twenties stood there. She was pretty, very pretty but she didn't look anything like Jace. They couldn't have been sisters.
Max was too tired and in pain to have her brain process this.
"Hello," said the woman, giving her a peculiar look.
"Are- are you Max? Max Guevara? The Max Guevara who used to work at Jam Pony?" asked Maxie, her breath coming sharply.
"Yes." Max Guevara said this in exactly the short, no-nonsense, don't-ask-any-more-questions way that her mother did.
"Do you have a big sister named Jace?"
The woman in the doorway put her hands on her hips. "Who wants to know?" she asked suspiciously.
Little Max didn't know how she was meant to say, "I'm your long-lost niece." She just gazed at the woman.
Max Guevara was starting to look concerned. "Are you bleeding?" she asked suddenly, stepping toward Maxie.
The whole hallway seemed to start spinning around Maxie, slowly at first and then faster and faster. Everything was growing dark and blurry at the corners.
Max's aunt was reaching out to inspect the cut above Maxie's eyebrow. Little Max suddenly ducked. Her aunt looked surprised. "Hey, what are you-"
Max took a deep breath and managed to blurt out what her mother had always said to say. "M-My name is Max Morales. I'm Jace's daughter and I'm in trouble. I came here from Mexico because my mother went missing. You're the only family I have."
Everything seemed to fall apart and go black as Max Morales' knees buckled under her and she fainted.
* * *
DISCLAIMER: 'Dark Angel' belongs to Fox and James Cameron. Not me. So don't sue.
NOTE: I apologise for any geographical errors I might have made in this chapter. I don't live anywhere near the US and I got all my geographical information from a map of the United States that I found on Google Image Search.
A truck was slowing down. Max grinned in triumph as it halted beside her. The man driving it looked down at her and then went to keep driving.
"Hey-" began Max, but he pulled away. "HEY!" she yelled, and started running. Maxie could run very, very quickly for someone her age, faster than most of the adults she knew. Well, all of them. Except for Jace.
The man looked at her in shock as she sprinted easily next to the truck, thumping on the window with her fist. He pulled over. "What do you want?" he asked her uneasily.
"A ride. As far toward Seattle as you can take me. I'll even pay you."
"Seattle? No deal, little girl. I don't give rides to runaways."
"I'm not running away from someone, I'm running to someone. My aunt in Seattle. She's the only person who will take care of me."
Or at least Max hoped that her Aunt Max would want to take care of her.
"Sorry, little girl. I'm going to Los Angeles, but I can't take you. I'll get arrested for abduction."
"But I need to find my aunt! She's the only family I have!"
"You find someone who cares," the driver sneered, and the truck pulled away.
All the way to Los Angeles for free! No way was Max missing out on this opportunity. She glared after the truck for a moment and then started running after it. Max built up speed, careful not to run into anywhere she could be seen in the rear view mirror.
And all in a second, Maxie took a running jump. It was a slightly ungainly, clumsy jump but it got her into the flatbed of the truck with the minimum amount of noise. She hugged her knees as the truck took her further away from her home and deeper into the unknown.
The lights of the stars and of the passing traffic blurred together as Max gave into fear and fatigue. She slept.
The next thing Max knew was that it was morning and quite a few people were standing around, looking at her in shock, including the crabby driver and a few other drivers. She was woken quite abruptly by someone smacking her over the head with the back of their hand.
"That creepy little kid wanted a ride last night!" the driver was raging. "I said no!"
"How the hell did she manage to get into the back, then?" someone whispered.
"Are you all right, dear?" a woman asked in concern.
"Out you come!" Two men grabbed her arms and dragged out out of the back of the truck. With incredible strength, Max yanked her arms out of their grasp and backed away.
She appeared to be in a parking lot. Max had excellent eyesight and could see a gate quite clearly, all the way at the other end of the lot.
Max grinned embarrassedly.
"Thanks for the ride!" she yelled, and ran. Everyone else seemed to be moving in slow motion but Maxie was moving faster than she'd ever moved in her life. In seconds she was at the gate.
She rattled it and gave a yowl of annoyance, letting out some of her energy. She had boundless energy when she needed it. Max scaled the high fence and leaped over the other side, inspecting her surroundings.
Max appeared to be standing by a road with a lot of cars going past. On the other side she could see some run-down homes and buildings.
She checked her watch. It was eight-thirty exactly.
Maxie was across the road in seconds. She briefly considered calling the crisis number, but she wasn't really in crisis.
She changed her clothes in a public bathroom. Max didn'y have any toothpaste, so the best she could do was to wash her mouth out with water. Some women with cigarettes watched her curiously as she shouldered her bag and left.
So this was Los Angeles. Lila had been here once, to visit an aunt- much like Max was doing, although she had a very long way to go until she reached Seattle.
She found a bench and sat there, smiling. Feeling very pleased with herself, Maxie ate one of her sandwiches and inspected her map.
Max decided to go along the coast. No more hitchhiking- too risky. Word would travel, people would begin to recognise her. She could walk along the highway and take buses at night.
"I'm going to get outta Los Angeles, on to San Francisco. Through Portland and then to Seattle."
Four hours of walking later, Max thought she'd made it sound far too easy. She seemed to be getting nowhere. It was noon. She was hot, far too hot and hungry, but she didn't dare eat another sandwich. All the American money Jace had had was in hundred-dollar denominations. How would she explain the fact that she had so much money?
Nights and days blurred into each other like the lights on the highway. Max spent her lonely nights sitting in almost empty buses or hitchhiking. One guy had started talking in a very creepy way. When she'd asked him to stop the car he hadn't listened, so Maxie had followed her first instinct and made a fist. She hit him hard in the side of the head, so hard he went sideways even with his seatbelt buckled and smacked the other side of his head on the window.
The car skidded across a wet road. Stunned, he'd managed to hit the brakes. Max had grabbed her backpack, opened the door and fled through night streets in terror. Mothers always talked about getting abducted by bad men and getting in car accidents, so it was awful to have to experience both these things in a matter of minutes.
Max sat finally, sniffling through a mild cold, in a seat a few rows behind the driver of the bus. An hour or two and they'd reach Seattle. She hadn't slept in three days, just ran or walked or shivered in doorways. Rain pounded against the windows. Finally, she was nearly there.
"So," called the driver, a woman. "What's your name?"
She was pretty old. Max guessed about late forties. Max gave herself a little hug. "Max. My name is Max."
"You meeting someone at the bus station, Max?"
"I'm going to walk to my aunt's workplace and wait for her there."
"It's pretty late. Maybe you should call your aunt and have her meet you at the bus station."
"I've never met my aunt before. I want to make a good impression and not wake her up in the night."
"Travelling alone, eh? Where from?"
"Nearby Hermosallo."
"I could get you a place to spend the night with some nice people who could give you a cab fare to your Aunt's house."
"That's kind, ma'am, but I don't want to impose." Jace told her daughter at a young age to address women as 'ma'am' unless they told her otherwise. "That's what I was taught," she'd told told her little girl.
"It's no trouble. I'm supposed to look out for children using the bus lines alone."
Max decided to play along. "Yeah, I guess," she said, skating warily around the question.
She took her mother's picture out of her pocket. Max missed her mother terribly, wanted nothing more than to be at home instead of travelling to visit an aunt she'd never met before. "I'm OK, Mama," she whispered to the picture. She whispered it so softly all she herself could make out was the movement of her lips and a noise that sounded like a sigh.
The bus pulled into the Seattle bus station, nearby the very place where Jace had boarded the bus to Mexico ten years ago, although there was no way for Maxie to know that. She showed her sector pass and papers to the man behind the desk after twenty minutes standing in line and was just about to leave when she felt someone grab her shoulder.
Max yelped and whipped around, ready to throw one of her killer punches but saw it was only the bus driver and relaxed. Sort of.
"What do you want?" she demanded, tense.
"Hey, don't hurt me!" kidded the driver. "Remember? I'm going to call some nice people who'll give you a bed for the night."
The driver steered Max over to a payphone and told her told wait while she called. Unhappily, Max kicked at the gravel. She wasn't dumb. Max Morales knew what this meant- social workers. A children's home.
She hung around a few minutes and then crept away, out of the bus station and into Seattle.
It was worse than Los Angeles. At least she'd arrived in LA in high spirits and the daytime, but now she stood in a dark street. It looked like it was going to start raining again any minute. Who'd want to live in a place like this?
Max took a deep breath and went to find somewhere to hide for the rest of the night. Nobody would be answering their phone that late. The only thing to do right then- the only thing Maxie wanted to do- was sleep.
The first place she saw with a lot of light was a bar a while away. She'd changed one of her bills for ten-dollar denominations, so she went inside, grateful for dry and warmth and company.
Granted, it wasn't much company. There were a table of women laughing loudly and smoking cigarettes in the corner, a few men up at the bar nearly passed out, some teenagers playing pool and some shifty-looking younger teenagers skulking in the water.
"You're up late," remarked a loud sort of woman wearing too much makeup as she came to get another pitcher for her friends.
"So are you," shot back Max. She didn't need this. She was hungry, cold, lonely and nervous.
The woman sniffed in contempt, paid for the pitcher and went back to the table.
"Anything for you, kid?" said the bartender in a gravelly voice.
"Got anything with chocolate in it?" asked Max, half-interested.
He snickered and Max felt stupid. "Nope."
"Fine, get me a Coke or something please, sir."
"Or something?" he repeated.
"Surprise me," she said in clipped tones, and he went to get her drink.
She sat there for hours. The women left, some more teenagers entered. One tried to talk to her, make fun of her, "Where's your mommy, kid?"
This had annoyed Max greatly. "Don't. Mess. With. Me."
The sun rose over Seattle. Max had left the bar and walked for twenty minutes until she found a working, unoccupied payphone. She lifted one of the grubby phonebooks off the floor effortlessly and looked up Bicycle Couriers.
The first name she had found was Reliable Runs By Day. She dialled it.
"Hello?" a woman on the other end of the line had said boredly.
"My name is Max, may I please speak to Max?"
"Look, kid, just piss off, OK? I hate prank phone calls!" the woman seethed, hanging up abruptly.
It took five calls before she found a messanger service with an employee named Max.
"OK, hang on, I'll get 'em," said the man on the other end of the line. "Hey Norton, got a kid on the line who wants to talk to you!"
Norton?
"Norton Maxwood, who's this?" a man had answered.
"Norton? The guy on the phone said your name was Max," asked Maxie in confusion.
"Oh, that's my nickname. You know, Max. Maxwood. Did you want to talk to me?"
"You're not the Max I need," said Max glumly. She hung up.
Three calls later, to a place called Jam Pony, she talked with a man named Mr Ronald.
"Jam Pony, Ride With Pride, Mr Ronald speaking."
"Um, hi. Do you have an employee named Max working at Jam Pony?"
"Which Max?" Max's heart leaped.
"Max Morales."
"Sorry, there's nobody called Max Morales working here."
"Max Morales the First?" she asked desperately.
Mr Ronald sighed. "Want to tell me a little more about this Max Morales of yours?"
"Uh, well, she has a big sister named Jace Morales who lives in Mexico. She's my aunt. I'm named after her."
There was the sound of papers being shuffled. "Closest I can give you is a Max Guevara who used to work here."
"Did she have a sister named Jace?"
"She had no family. No parents, brothers or sisters or relatives of any kind."
"I guess I've got the wrong number, then. The Max I'm looking for had an older sister named Jace."
There was a pause.
"Sir?"
"Yes?"
"Could I have her number anyhow? This is the first Max I've found who could be the one I need to contact."
"I'm sorry, little girl, but I don't give out employee or former employee phone numbers over the phone."
"Please? I- I've come all the way from Mexico to stay with my aunt, but I don't know where she lives or her number or anything. Can't you ask someone? There's gotta be someone there who knows my Aunt Max's address. Please, sir!"
A different voice, a woman's voice seemed to float out of nowhere on the other end of the phone. "Normal, you gotta kid beggin' you for something? Sad world when Seattle's kids gotta turn to Normal Ronald for their problems."
"Thank you, Cindy, for your insight, now I have a hot run to 458 Daley Avenue with your name on it. Bip, bip, bip, back to work, people!"
Frustrated, Max hung up the phone. She pulled a pen out of her pocket and scribbled down Jam Pony's address on her arm.
It took a lot of directions from complete strangers and a lot of patience on Max's part, but she found herself looking shyly into Jam Pony during the peak of the morning runs for the employees.
She shuffled inside feeling terribly awkward and looked around. There were a lot of tough, trendy adults hanging around and talking around graffitiied lockers. Max made her way over to the front desk, where a few of the riders were having an argument with the man behind the desk- this must be the guy she'd spoken to on the phone.
Max had an idea. She tugged on a tattooed woman's sleeve and said, faking a lisp. "'Thcuse me, ma'am, but there's a man thmoking in the men'th room."
She laughed loudly as if this was something fantastic. "Hey Normal!" she yelled, eyes dancing. "Kid over here says some guy's smokin' in the men's!"
"What? If it's Herbal again-" He darted toward the nearest door, presumably the men's room.
Maxie wasted no time. She darted behind the dounter and opened a file cabinet marked PAST EMPLOYEES.
"Mabbie- Martin- Maya... hang on, that's too far." She flipped back a few files until she found one with MAX GUEVARA written neatly on a bright tag.
Max yanked out the file and flipped through the papers, scanning them and committing the relevant information to memory. Maxie had a very good memory.
Max never questioned her abilities. She knew she wasn't exactly normal- she did extremely well in school, ran faster, jumped higher and breathed less than most human beings. Except her mother. So she had decided long ago it was simply something about her mother's family that allowed them to be so, as her mother always put it, exceptional. She wondered whether Max the First was exceptional too.
"Hey, there's nobody in the men's room!" yelled Mr Ronald. Max froze. "Who the firetruck's idea of a joke is this?"
"That's my cue," said Max with a brief smile. She ran for it.
Using a ten from her pocket, she bought herself a burger in a greasy little shop and thought about her aunt. Would she be kind? Would she want to help her?
Max felt very lonely all of a sudden as she finished her burger. It started to rain as she left the burger joint and headed toward the part of town where this Max Guevara lived.
She began to suspect that someone was following her about two streets from her aunt's address. Maxie looked behind her.
Nope. Just two girls about her age in raincoats, running home and shrieking with laughter. They rounded the corner and disappeared.
Dark clouds rolled across the sky and rain poured. Max was soaked to the skin and shivered uncontrollably, snuffling. A Jam Pony rider chose that exact moment to ride past, spraying her with icy, dirty water.
She sneezed and hitched up her backpack. "Guess I deserve it for g-g-going through their records..." she stuttered.
The street was deserted.
All in a second, two men darted out from the nearest alley. She screamed as one grabbed her around the neck and dragged her backwards. The other hit her so hard in the side of the head she felt like she'd been hit over the head with a brick.
"Hey, kid. You had a lot of money at the burger place, huh? Let's see how much you've really got," snarled one.
"Scream and the only way you're ever gonna see your mommy again is in a body bag," hissed the other.
Max pulled out of their grasp, ducking under their arms. She held up her fists in as menacing a way as she could manage. Max had plenty of power in her fists and feet, but no real training or discipline. Maybe, if she kept bluffing...?
They laughed and went for her again. Blindly, head throbbing, she jumped high into the air and hung one-handed from a windowsill.
They started throwing bits of gravel and pieces of trash at her. The gravel glanced off her arms and ankles, biting at her freezing skin.
"Leave me alone!" she wailed in a voice that was unnaturally high. "Leave me alone and I'l give you all the money I've got!"
Incredibly, Max managed to delve into her pocket and find some ten and hundred-dollar bills. She tossed them down. They whirled in the wind, weighed down by the rain and came to a rest in the muddy water swirling around the muggers' feet
"Anything else?"
"I-I-"
One hurled a tin can at her. It bounced off her eyebrow, cutting her. Using the one hand, she managed to take her backpack off, switching hands halfway through. Maxie brought her knees up, rested the back pack on them and searched for more money, anything to make those freaks go away.
The backpack fell and one of the muggers took it. "Hey... give that back to me!" shrieked Max.
The muggers ran off with it. After a few seconds Max let herself fall. Her money, papers, clothes, map and her only photo of Jace had been in that bag.
She began to walk, practically dragging herself through the streets. She had no idea how long she'd been walking but somehow she found herself where she'd wanted to be for what seemed like thousands of years. Her aunt's doorstep.
She braced herself against the doorframe with one hand and rang the doorbell with the other. After a few minutes, the door creaked open.
A woman in her late twenties stood there. She was pretty, very pretty but she didn't look anything like Jace. They couldn't have been sisters.
Max was too tired and in pain to have her brain process this.
"Hello," said the woman, giving her a peculiar look.
"Are- are you Max? Max Guevara? The Max Guevara who used to work at Jam Pony?" asked Maxie, her breath coming sharply.
"Yes." Max Guevara said this in exactly the short, no-nonsense, don't-ask-any-more-questions way that her mother did.
"Do you have a big sister named Jace?"
The woman in the doorway put her hands on her hips. "Who wants to know?" she asked suspiciously.
Little Max didn't know how she was meant to say, "I'm your long-lost niece." She just gazed at the woman.
Max Guevara was starting to look concerned. "Are you bleeding?" she asked suddenly, stepping toward Maxie.
The whole hallway seemed to start spinning around Maxie, slowly at first and then faster and faster. Everything was growing dark and blurry at the corners.
Max's aunt was reaching out to inspect the cut above Maxie's eyebrow. Little Max suddenly ducked. Her aunt looked surprised. "Hey, what are you-"
Max took a deep breath and managed to blurt out what her mother had always said to say. "M-My name is Max Morales. I'm Jace's daughter and I'm in trouble. I came here from Mexico because my mother went missing. You're the only family I have."
Everything seemed to fall apart and go black as Max Morales' knees buckled under her and she fainted.
* * *
DISCLAIMER: 'Dark Angel' belongs to Fox and James Cameron. Not me. So don't sue.
NOTE: I apologise for any geographical errors I might have made in this chapter. I don't live anywhere near the US and I got all my geographical information from a map of the United States that I found on Google Image Search.
