O YOU WANT to know what’s the closest thing to feeling the most powerful you can feel? Flying alone at night. Risky. Nothing but you and the wind. Soaring way above everything, slicing through the air like a sword. Up and up until you feel like you could grab a star and hold it to your chest like a burning, spiky thing…

Oh, the poetry of a bird kid. Remind me to collect it all into one emotional, mushy volume someday, under some fake, poetic-sounding name, like Gabrielle Charbonnet de la Something-Schmancy. (I’m not kidding. I saw that name on a backpack in France. Poor kid.)

I wheeled through the sky, racing as fast as I could, my wings moving like pistons, up and down, strong and sleek. When I felt an updraft of warmer air, I coasted, breathing in the night’s thin coolness, dipping a wing to turn in huge, smooth circles as big as football fields.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Everyone was back at the house, asleep, I hoped. I’d sneak in before anyone woke up and saw I was gone and freaked out and thought I’d been kidnapped or something. But right now I needed some time. Some space. Some breathing room.

Once again, the fate of the flock was in my hands, and once again, I seemed to be the only one seeing or thinking clearly enough to know that there really wasn’t even a choice here. School wasnever actually a real choice.

Why didn’t the rest of the flock ever see that?

We’re the flock. We’re the last, most successful, still-living recombinant life-form that the Dr. Frankenstein wannabes at the School had created. That pretty much cemented us to one road in life, one fate: to run—forever.

Why did the rest of the flock keep pretending that we had choices? It was a waste of time. Worse, it was always up to me to be the bad guy, the one who shot down everyone’s hopes and dreams. You think I liked being the heavy? I didn’t.

Breathe in, breathe out.

And Fang. He usually supported me. Which I appreciated. But lately he’d been lobbying for us to find a deserted island somewhere and just kick back, eat coconuts, and chill, without anyone knowing where we were.

Sometimes that sounded really good.

But how long could that last? Sooner or later, Nudge was going to want new shoes, or Gazzy would run out of comic books, or Angel would decide she wanted to rule the world, and then where would we be?

Right. We’d be back to me telling everyone no.

And Fang. I didn’t know what he was doing, kissing me and then flirting with Dr. Stupendous and then

making hot, dark eyes at me.

It was enough to make a girl nuts ormore nuts—

Pssshh!

It took several seconds for the pain neurons to fire all the way from my right wing to my befuddled brain. And since I was conditioned to try not to scream out in surprise or pain—it’s a survival thing—I was still staring stupidly at the weirdly big hole even as I started to spiral awkwardly down to earth,way too fast.

I’d been shot. I was plummeting to the ground. And I couldn’t stop.