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small pile of too-large clothes.
Hopping free, he made liberal use of his new razor sharp
beak and claws. At this stage, it was nice not to have to deal with
the jacket. His new body was insulated enough. Once Adrian
reached the edge of the roof, he spread his wings and leaped
simultaneously. For a moment he felt gravity seizing old. Then
like a swimmer out of the gate, Adrian angled his wings and
stroked out against the air around him. His new lighter body
soured out onto the wind currents over Kentucky Street and
he took the first thermal into a lofty turn that would lead him
toward the Mall.
Propelled by smooth, even strokes, Adrian took a moment
to appreciate the pleasure of flying. It was far from effortless.
With each stroke of his wings, his relatively colossal chest
muscles pumped and flexed and he could feel his tendons and
ligaments strain from the tips of his primaries to the end of his
tail. It a bit more exhausting than jogging, but not as bad as a
dead run. He had mentally compared it to swimming a moment
before, but a bird weighs more in the air than a man in water.
He was always acutely aware of gravity, waiting till he failed to
catch the next updraft. Still, no matter how much he did it, and
no matter the danger, looking down on the earth never became
old.
Flying had been much easier to learn than slithering or
swimming fish-style, once he got up the nerve for the first jump,
anyway. In fact, the only thing easier than flying or swimming
had to be walking quadruped, since it had only taken him one
panic-filled instant to get the rhythm of that, fifteen years ago.
He tried not to think back to that time, it never helped.
Pumping the air savagely, he still found himself replaying the
front page captions. Famous American biologist vanishes along
with wife and son in disaster at national park. Adrian added his
own footnote to the memory as he curved around the J. Edgar
Hoover Building. Freak teenaged boy escapes and lives off the

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