Free 02 Seekers by Lynnie Purcell

but I didn’t back out. I crawled in the back and pretended to look comfortable around my coughing. Jackson and Margaret got in the front with Margaret at the wheel.
    Daniel wrinkled his nose at the smell and joined me in the back, not pretending he was happy with the smell. “Could you have picked a smellier piece of crap?” he asked Jackson.
    “I didn’t have to sign a title,” Jackson said. “Or pull on my contacts for an identity, which keeps us off the radar.”
    “You should have leaned on someone,” Daniel said.
    “Yeah, like someone with an air freshener,” I added.
    I turned in my seat and watched as Ellen and Sam faded out of view, Margaret driving slow
    down the narrow road of my dead-end street. Ellen waved once then turned and put her face in Sam’s shoulder to hide her tears from me. He held her tight, his eyes distant. I settled down into the seat, my arms crossed against the emotions in my chest, and tried not to think of the
    goodbyes. It had felt so simple…so easy. How was it that easy? I watched the flickering trees pass us in a blur of dark morning, and listened to the song Margaret had turned up to prevent Jackson and Daniel from bickering about the van. Jackson pulled out the morning paper and, after a cursory glance at the headlines, turned to the Sudoku. He started filling out numbers as if we weren’t all headed toward the unknown in a minivan.
    Daniel reached across the space and nudged my knee. “You okay?”
    “Yeah...”
    His face was skeptical, but he accepted my confirmation without argument. “Have you ever been to New Orleans?” he asked quietly.
    “Ellen and I stayed there for a week once, but she felt weird there, didn’t like it. We moved to Baton Rouge instead. That lasted for about six months….what?”
    He was staring at me thoughtfully. “Ellen always seems to know what places to avoid and when to move…” he said.
    I shrugged. “It’s called being flighty.”
    “Flighty has probably saved your life.”
    “Maybe. Why?”
    He turned toward me in the van, his long legs searching for a place to stretch out. “New Orleans has always been one of our cities. The fallen ones tend to congregate there for whatever reason, and that inevitably means more of us. Los Angeles is another big one – in America, at least.”
    “Oh. I wonder why.”
    “Because there are more people there,” Daniel said as if it were obvious. “Fallen ones have always been drawn to humanity.”
    “I think certain cities have magic,” I replied, shaking my head at his logic. I’d been through enough of them to know. “Savannah had magic. There was just something there that went
    beyond the people and the buildings. It was in the air, in the smells, in the way the night talked to you. New York is the same way.”
    “So, you’re saying that a place isn’t just made up of the people and buildings, or important simply because of the value we give them?”
    “I think that our conception of places, the conceived value we put to things, affects how we view a place, but I think places can be beautiful or important regardless of how any one person feels about them,” I said. “It’s sort of egocentric to say this place or that place is beautiful because people are there….what about all of nature? What about our lake? Does it stop having value when we leave?”
    “But the idea of value is an idea that only people can put into effect. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If no one beholds it, how can it retain value?” Daniel said.
    “You’re arguing that a place is limited by value, because of language or thought, right? That if no one is there to value it, it has no value?” I asked.
    “Doesn’t it take a person to think a flower sweet smelling or a forest pretty?” Daniel countered.
    “That’s assuming that people are the only ones that can appreciate life,” I said.
    “I just think that life is limited by thought,” Daniel said.
    “I think, therefore I