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Walter Reuther
Liên Kết Nhanh
Biên tập viên
Cập nhật: Maximum Ride 3 - Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
ePub
A4Part 2 - School’s In-Forever
M
y head was feeling as if had been used as a bowling ball, against solid marble pins.My heart pounded, my breaths were ragged and shallow, and every muscle I had ached. I didn’t know what was going on, but it was bad.
I opened my eyes.
The word bad was so grossly inadequate to describe the situation that it was like it was from another language-a language of naive idiots.
I was strapped to a metal hospital bed, wrists and ankles bound with thick Velcro.
And I wasn’t alone.
With effort, I raised my head, fighting off the swift wave of nausea that made me gag and swallow convulsively.
To my left, also strapped to a metal bed, the Gasman breathed unevenly, twitching in his sleep.
Next to him, Nudge was starting to move, moaning slightly.
Turning to the right, I saw Iggy. He was lying very still, eyes open, staring up at a ceiling he couldn’t see.
On his other side, Fang was straining silently against his Velcro restraints, his face pale and grimly determined. When he felt me looking at him, I saw relief soften his gaze for a split second.
“You okay?” I mouthed.
He gave a short, quick nod, then inclined his head to gesture to the others. I nodded wearily, summing up our situation with a universal “this is crap” expression. He tilted his head at a bed across from us. There was Total, looking dead except for the occasional muscle jerk, his small limbs bound like ours. He looked mangy, missing patches of fur around his mouth.
Moving my head carefully so I wouldn’t hurl, I examined our surroundings. We were in a plain white room, which was windowless. I thought I saw a door beyond Nudge’s bed, but I couldn’t be sure.
Iggy, Fang, me, Gazzy, Nudge, Total.
Angel wasn’t here.
I drew in a breath, readying myself to struggle against the straps, and it was then that it hit me: the smell. That chemical, antiseptic smell of alcohol, floor cleaner, plastic tubing. The smell that had filled my nose every day for the first ten years of my life.
Horrified, I stared at Fang. He gave me a questioning look.
Wishing desperately that I was wrong but with the terrified, sinking knowledge that I wasn’t, I mouthed the answer: “The School.”
Fang’s eyes flared in recognition, and that was the only confirmation that I needed of this nightmare.
We were back at the School.
The School-the awful, terrifying place we had spent the past four years trying to get over, get away from. At the School, we’d been experimented on, tested, retested, trained. Because of this place, I would never be able to deal with people in long white coats and could never major in chemistry. Because of this place, when I saw a dog crate at a PetSmart, I broke into cold chills.
“Max?” Gazzy’s voice sounded dusty and dry.
“Hey, sweetie,” I said as quietly as I could.
“Where are we? What’s going on?”
I didn’t want to tell him, but while I was trying to come up with a convincing lie, the reality broke into his brain, and he stared at me, appalled. I saw him silently say, “The School,” and I had no choice but to nod. His head flopped back against his bed, and I saw that his once fluffy blond hair was a dusty, matted gray.
“Hey!” Total said with weak indignation. “I demand a lawyer.” But his characteristic belligerence was betrayed by the sad pain in his voice.
“Do we have a Plan B? Or C? Even Z?” Iggy’s voice had no life in it, no energy, and I got the impression that he’d given up and was only going through the motions.
I cleared my throat and swallowed. “Yes, of course,” I said, scrabbling for any shred of authority I could muster. “There’s always a plan. First, we get out of these straps.”
I felt Nudge awaken and looked over at her. Her large brown eyes were solemn, her mouth stiffly trying not to quiver. A purplish bruise mottled her cheek, and I saw more on her arms. I’d always thought of her as a little kid, like Gazzy and Angel, but all of a sudden she seemed ten years older.
Because she knew, and it showed in her eyes.
She knew we were way, way up a creek, and that I had no plan, and that we had no hope.
Which pretty much summed it up.
I don’t know how much later-after my arms had gone numb but before my ankles started burning with pins and needles-the door opened.
A little gray-haired woman in a white coat walked in, carrying a tray. Somebody’s evil grandma.
A new scent filled the air.
I tried not to breathe it in, but it was unavoidable.
The woman walked right up to me, a smile on her pleasant face.
Get it together, Max. That was me talking. I hadn’t heard the Voice since the melee in the desert.
I tried to look as unconcerned as a fourteen-year-old bird kid strapped to a hospital bed in hell could look.
“This is a first,” I said coolly. “Torture by chocolate-chip cookie. Was this all your idea?”
The woman looked disconcerted but tried to smooth out her expression.
“We thought you might be hungry,” she said. “These are hot out of the oven.”
She waved the tray a bit, to make sure the incredible vanilla-tinged aroma of fresh-baked cookies reached all of us.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Because all you mad, evil scientists sit around whipping up batches of Pillsbury’s finest during your coffee breaks. I mean, this is pathetic.”
She looked surprised, and I felt anger warming my blood.
“I mean, points for the jail cell,” I went on, motioning at the room with my head. “Kudos for the Velcro straps. Those were good starts. But you’re sort of falling down with the chocolate-chip cookies. Like, did you skip school the day they taught hostage treatment?”
Pink patches flared on her cheeks, and she stepped back.
“Keep your lousy cookies,” I said, narrowing my eyes and letting a snarl enter my voice. “Whatever you sick freaks have planned for us, get on with it. ’Cause otherwise you’re just wasting our time.”
Now her face was stiff as a mask, and she started to head to the door.
This is a plan, I thought. When they came in to get us for whatever, that would be our chance. And we would seize it.
She was almost to the door when Total raised his head weakly. “Not so fast,” he croaked. “I’ll take a cookie. I’m not proud.”
Fang and I exchanged looks, and we rolled our eyes.
The woman looked startled when Total spoke and didn’t know what to make of his request. So she just hurried out the door, and when it slammed behind her, I felt it in my bones.
“Okay, the second they undo us, make sure all heck breaks loose,” I said when everyone was awake the next morning-at least I figured it was morning, since someone had turned the lights on again.
The flock nodded, but with none of the angry thirst for revenge they would need to escape.
“Look, we’ve had our backs against the wall before,” I reminded them. “These guys always screw up, always make a mistake. We’ve gotten the best of them every time, and it’ll be the same here.”
No reaction whatsoever.
“Come on, guys, buck up,” I coaxed. “Let’s see some insane rage put apples in those cheeks.”
Nudge smiled faintly, but the others seemed lost in their own worlds, tugging without purpose against their straps. Fang sent me an understanding look, and I felt so frustrated and stuck that I wanted to howl.
The door opened with a whoosh, and I quickly met everyone’s eyes: This was it!
It was Jeb. Followed by Anne Walker, whom we hadn’t seen since we ditched her Martha Stewart farmhouse in Virginia. And the unholy trio was completed by a golden-curled little girl: Angel, who was eating a chocolate-chip cookie and calmly watching me with her big blue eyes.
“Angel!” Gazzy’s voice broke as he understood that his sister had turned against us. “Angel, how could you?”
“Hello, Max,” said Anne Walker, not smiling, not looking at all adoptive mom-like.
I sighed heavily and stared at the ceiling. No crying. Not one tear.
Jeb came and stood right next to my bed, so close I could smell his aftershave. Its scent awoke a slew of childhood memories, the years between ten and twelve years old, when I’d felt the happiest I ever had.
“Hello, Max,” he said quietly, searching my face. “How do you feel?”
Which was a ten on the “imbecilic question” scale of one to ten.
“Why, I feel fine, Jeb,” I said brightly. “How about you?”
“Any nausea? Headache?”
“Yep. And it’s standing here talking to me.”
His fingers brushed the covers on top of my leg, and I tried not to shudder.
“Does it feel like you’ve been through a lot?” he asked.
I stared at him. “Yeah. Kind of. And sadly, I’m still going through it.”
Jeb turned and nodded at Anne Walker, and she made a noncommittal face back at him.
I started to pick up that something was happening here that I didn’t fully understand.
Good thing I’m used to that feeling.
“Max, I’ve got something to tell you that I know is going to be hard to believe,” Jeb said.
“You’re not evil? You’re not the worst lying, cheating, betraying jerk I’ve ever met?”
He smiled sadly. “The truth is, Max, that nothing is as it seems.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Is that what the aliens told you when you quit wearing your foil hat?”
Anne stepped forward. Jeb made a motion like, Let me do it, but she waved her hand at him. “The truth is, Max, that you’re at the School.”
“No freaking duh. And uh, wait-let me guess-I’m some kind of bird-kid hybrid. And you captured me. And, and, I’m strapped to a hospital bed. I bet I even have wings. Am I right?”
“No. You don’t understand,” she went on briskly. “You’re at the School, Max, because you never left it. Everything that you think you’ve experienced for the past five months has all been a dream.”
I gazed at Anne in admiration. “Gosh,” I said. “This is a totally new tack. I truly did not expect that.” Looking around at the flock, I asked, “Did anyone expect that?” They warily shook their heads no.
I nodded at Anne. “You’ve got me. Good one.”
“It’s true,” she said. “You know you’re an experimental form of recombinant DNA. You know that you’ve undergone testing during your limited life span. Part of the experiment has been to test your brains’ imaginative capabilities, as well as how accurately we can manipulate and even create your memories. There are various experimental drugs that we’ve been authorized to use, drugs that allow us to, in essence, give you life memories that you never truly experienced.”
Why was she doing this? Why go to so much trouble to spin this story?
“Does it really feel like you lived in Colorado with Jeb? That Angel was kidnapped? That you got her back? That you went to New York? That you killed Ari? That you lived with me in Virginia?” Her eyebrows rose.
Narrowing my eyes, I stayed silent. I was aware that the rest of the flock was paying intense attention to her every word.
“Max, we gave you those memories. We monitored your heart and lung rates while you imagined yourself in violent fights. We decided on New York, on Florida, on Arizona. Remember Dr. Martinez and Ella? Those constructs allowed us to test your psychological and physical responses to a warm, nurturing environment.”
My blood turned to icy slush in my veins. They knew about Ella and Dr. Martinez. How? Had they harmed them? Killed them?
I fought to keep my face impassive, to slow my panicked breathing. I couldn’t let them see that they were getting to me. This was the worst yet.
“What was the memory of living with you supposed to test?” I snapped. “How I would react to a two-faced control freak who didn’t have a maternal bone in her body?”
Two red splotches appeared on Anne’s cheeks. Score one for Max.
“You still don’t believe us, sweetheart,” said Jeb.
“Yeah. ’Cause I’m not a lunatic.” My voice sounded a little choked.
Jeb gently took my left wrist. Instinctively I tried to pull away from him, but I couldn’t. He carefully turned my hand inside the Velcro strap, so the underside of my arm was facing up.
“Look, Max,” he said very softly. “I’m telling you, none of it has been real. It was all a dream. You never left the School.”
Remember that puckered red scar on my arm, from when I tried to cut the chip out myself? And then the surgery, just a few days ago? It had left clean, straight little lines, maybe half an inch long.
Jeb pushed back my sleeve so I could see farther up my arm.
There were no scars there. Not anywhere. My arm was smooth and unmarked. I tried to wiggle my fingers. They moved. There was nothing wrong with my left hand.
Next to me, Gazzy sucked in an astonished breath.
I tried not to breathe at all, tried not to swallow, tried to conceal my shock. Then something occurred to me: We’d gotten Total in New York. “What about Total?” I demanded triumphantly. “Was he a dream too?”
Jeb looked at me gently. “Yes, sweetheart. He was a dream too. There is no Total the talking dog.”
He stepped aside so we could all see the bed across from us. It was empty. The sheets were smooth and taut and white. Total had never been there, had he?
Okay, color me way freaked. Either they were seriously messing with my mind or they were…even more seriously messing with my mind.
Very quickly, I ran through possible scenarios in my head:
1) They were lying (of course).
a) Lying about us all having been in the School this whole time.
b) Not lying about us all having been in the School this whole time.
2) This, even now, this second, was just another hallucination.
3) Everything up till now had in fact been drug-induced nightmares and dreams (an anorexically thin possibility).
4) Whether they were lying or no, whether this was a dream or no, I should just break loose, kick their sorry butts, and be done with it.
I lay back against my thin pillow. I glanced around at the flock. I had seen them age, seen them get taller, seen their hair grow. How could we have been tied up for years? Or had we been this big to begin with, been created this age?
I looked at Angel, wishing she would send me a reassuring thought. But nothing came from her at all. Oh, God.
I couldn’t think anymore. I was hungry and in pain and trying to keep a steel lid on my rising panic. I closed my eyes and tried to take some steady breaths.
“How do you get some chow in this joint?” I finally asked.
“We’ll get you something right now,” Jeb said.
“Like, a last meal,” said Angel in her little-girl voice.
My eyes opened.
“I’m sorry, Max,” said Anne Walker. “But as you’ve probably figured out, we’re shutting down all of our recombinant-DNA experiments. All of the lupine-human blends have been retired, and it’s time to retire you too.”
Which confirmed that we hadn’t seen any real Erasers lately. Gazzy had explained about the Flyboy robot things.
“Retire as in kill?” I asked flatly. “Is that how you live with yourselves? By using euphemisms for death and murder?” I pretended to quote a newscast: “In today’s news, seven people were ‘retired’ in a horrific accident on Highway Seventeen.” I changed voices. “Jimmy, don’t retire that bird with your shotgun.” Then, “Please, sir, don’t retire me! You can have my wallet!”
I gazed at Jeb and Anne, feeling cold rage turn my face into a mask. “How’s that working out for you? Able to look at yourselves in a mirror? Able to sleep at night?”
“We’ll get you something to eat,” Anne said, and she walked quickly out of the room.
“Max-,” Jeb began.
“Don’t you even talk to me!” I spat. “Take your little traitor with you and get out of our death chamber!”
Angel’s expression didn’t change as she looked from me to Jeb. Jeb took her hand and sighed, and they both left the room. I was shaking with emotion and in a last surge, strained against the Velcro straps with all my superhuman strength.
Nothing.
I flopped back against the bed, tears forming in my eyes, hating to have the flock see me like this. I wiggled my left fingers and looked for the scars. Nothing.
“So, that went well,” said Fang.
Okay, here’s a knotty little question: If you’re dreaming that you’re tied up by mad scientists in a secret experimental facility, and then you fall asleep and start dreaming, are you really dreaming?
Which one is the dream?
Which one counts?
How can you tell?
I’d been torturing myself with these pointless circular conundrums all day. Which raises another question: If I’m torturing my own brain by trying to figure stuff out, does that still count as Them torturing me? Because they caused the whole situation to happen?
At any rate, at some point I must have “fallen asleep,” because at some point, a hand shaking my shoulder made me streak back to “consciousness.”
As always, I leaped into wakefulness on full alert, automatically trying to assume a battle position. Pretty much impossible when you’re all strapped down.
I see perfectly in the dark, and it took only a split second to register the familiar hulking bad news leaning over my bed.
“Ari!” I whispered almost silently.
“Hi, Max,” Ari said, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t look that mental. I mean, every time I’d seen this poor screwup in the last couple months, he’d looked more and more as if he were standing on the edge of insanity with one foot on a banana peel.
But now he looked-well, not anything close to normal, but at least all the frothing at the mouth had stopped.
I waited for the first volley of venom.
But Ari had no snide remarks, no taunts, no threats. Instead he undid one of my arms, then pulled it down and strapped it to the arm of a wheelchair.
Hmm. Could I still fly if I was strapped into a wheelchair? I thought maybe I could. I guessed we would find out. In fact, if I could get some serious speed going on this thing, it might lend a significant boost to an exciting takeoff.
I sat down in the chair, and Ari strapped my ankle to the post by the front wheel. Just as I was tensing to make a break, he whispered, “They made this chair with lead bars. It weighs about a hundred an’ seventy-five pounds.”
Crap. Even though I was really tall for my age, I weighed barely a hundred pounds because of all the avian modifications to my bones and stuff. And the fact that I could almost never get enough food. So even though I was really, really strong, there was no way I could get a wheelchair that heavy off the ground.
I looked at Ari with loathing. “What now, big guy? You taking me to your leader?”
He didn’t rise to the bait. “Just thought I’d show you around a bit, that’s all, Max.”
“Gosh, a guided tour, from you? Now I know I’m dreaming,” I quipped. But then a thought occurred to me. “They told me all the Erasers had been retired. And if I wasn’t strapped down, I’d make air quotes around retired.”
Ari looked sad. “Yeah. I’m the last one. They…killed all the others.”
For some reason his quiet, sad confirmation of that terrible fact made my blood run cold. Despite what a walking chigger bite he was, there were still times when I could almost see the little kid he’d once been. They’d altered him when he was already three years old, and his results had been less than stellar, poor guy.
Oh, yeah, poor guy who tried to kill me a bunch of times. My eyes narrowed.
“The flock is supposed to be wiped out too,” I said. “Am I the first to go? Is that why you came to get me?”
He shook his head. “I just have permission to take you around. I know you guys are supposed to be retired, but I don’t know when.”
I got an idea. “Listen, Ari,” I said, trying for a cajoling tone. Since snarling or threatening comes much more naturally to me, I wasn’t sure how successful I was. “Maybe all of us should bust out of here together. I don’t know what Jeb’s told you, but you might be on the endangered list too.”
I was about to go on, but he interrupted me.
“I know I am,” he said, still very quietly. He pushed the wheelchair through the doorway, and we were in a long hall lit by fluorescent lights and tiled with the ever-popular linoleum squares. Suddenly he knelt down and pulled his shirt collar away from his neck.
I recoiled, but he said, “Look-I have an expiration date. We all do.”
Totally grossed out but morbidly curious, I leaned forward. On the back of Ari’s neck was a tattoolike line of numbers. It was a date. The year was this year, and I thought the month was this month, but I wasn’t sure. Funny how time drags when you’re being held captive.
I thought, Eew. Then, Poor Ari. Then, This might be another trick, another way for them to yank my chain.
“What do you mean, we all do?” I asked suspiciously.
His eyes, looking like the familiar kid-Ari eyes, met mine. “All of us experiments have built-in expiration dates. When someone’s time is pretty close, it shows up on the back of their neck. Mine showed up a couple days ago. So my time is soon.”
I looked at him, appalled. “So what happens on that date?”
He shrugged and stood to start wheeling me forward again. “I’ll die. They would have exterminated me with the others, but my time is really close anyway. So they cut me a break. Because, you know, I’m Jeb’s son.”
His voice cracked as he said that, and I stared straight ahead down the hall.
This was a new low, even for mad scientists.
I don’t know if you guys ever tour top-secret evil science labs, like for school field trips or something. But I got a tour that day, and if I had had to write a school paper about it, my title would have been, “Scarier and Far Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine (even if you have a totally twisted imagination).”
I mean, we’d grown up here. (I thought.) Plus, we’d seen some horrific stuff at the Institute in New York. (I thought.) So it’s not like devastating freaks of nature were new to me. But Ari brought me down halls and up and down in elevators, and we explored parts of the School I’d never seen, never knew existed. And let me tell you, the flock and I looked like Disneyland cast members compared with some of the things I saw.
They weren’t all recombinant life-forms. Some were “enhanced” but not combined with another species.
I saw a human baby who wasn’t even walking yet, sitting on the floor, chewing on a plastic frog while a whitecoat wrote a long, complicated, unintelligible mathematical problem on a wall-sized whiteboard.
Another whitecoat asked, “How long did this take Feynman to solve?”
The first whitecoat said, “Four months.”
The baby put down the frog and crawled over to the whiteboard. A whitecoat handed her a marker. The baby wrote a complicated, unintelligible answer on the whiteboard, something with a lot of Greek squiggles in it.
Then the baby sat back, looked at the whiteboard, and started to gum the end of the marker. The other whitecoat checked the answer. He looked up and nodded.
The first whitecoat said, “Good girl,” and gave the baby a cookie.
In another room I saw, like, Plexiglas boxes with some sort of grotesque tissue growing in them. Brainlike tissue floating in different-colored liquids. Wires were coming out of the boxes, connected to a computer. A whitecoat was typing commands into the computer, and the brain things were apparently carrying them out.
I looked at Ari. “Have brain, will travel.”
“I think they were seeing if people would still need bodies or something,” he said.
I saw a room full of the Eraser replacements, those Flyboy things. They were hung in rows on metal hooks, like raggedy coats in a closet.
Their glowy red eyes were closed, and I saw that each one had a wire plugged into its leg. Thin, hairy Eraser skin was stretched taut over their metal frames, and in some places it had torn, allowing a joint to poke through or a couple of gears and pulleys to show. The whole effect was pretty repulsive.
“They’re charging,” said Ari tonelessly.
I was starting to feel overwhelmed, even more overwhelmed than usual.
“They call this one Brain on a Stick,” Ari said, gesturing.
I saw a metallic spinal cord, connected to two metal legs, walking around. It walked smoothly, fluidly, like a person. At the top of the spinal cord was a Plexiglas box holding-no, not a hamster-a brainlike clump of tissue.
It walked past us, and I heard sounds coming from it, as if it were talking to itself.
In the next room we saw a little all-human kid, about two years old, who had weirdly bulked-up, developed muscles, like a tiny bodybuilder. He was bench-pressing more than two hundred pounds-weights much bigger than he was, probably eight times his body weight or more.
I couldn’t take any more of this. “So what happens now, Ari?”
“I’ll take you back,” said Ari.
We didn’t speak as he navigated the halls and levels of this village of nightmares. I wondered, if his expiration date was real, how it must feel for him to know that the end of his life was coming soon, minute by minute, second by second. The flock and I had faced death a thousand times, but it had always had an element of “maybe we can slide out of this.”
To have a date tattooed on your neck-it was like looking up and seeing a train’s headlights coming right at you, and your feet just can’t move off the track. I was going to check the backs of our necks as soon as I could.
“Max, I-” Ari stopped, pausing outside the door to the flock’s ward.
I waited.
“I wish-,” he said, his voice breaking.
I didn’t know what he’d been about to say, but I didn’t need to know. I patted his hand, perpetually morphed out into a heavy, hairy, Eraser-clawed mitt.
“We all wish, Ari.”
The next day they let us loose.
“Is it time for us to die?” Nudge asked. She sidled closer to me, and I put my arm around her.
“I don’t know, sweetie,” I told her. “But if it is, I’m taking a bunch of ’em with me.”
“Me too,” said Gazzy bravely. I gathered the Gasman to my other side.
Fang leaned against a wall, his eyes on me. We hadn’t had any time to talk privately since we’d gotten here, but I caught his gaze and tried to send him a look that had everything I was thinking in it. He was a big boy. He could handle the swear words.
The room’s door swung open, with its peculiar air rush. A tall, sandy-haired man strode in as if he were the king of the world. He was followed by Anne Walker and another whitecoat I hadn’t seen before.
“Dese are dey?” he asked, sounding like Ahnold in The Terminator.
Already he had me angry. “We be them,” I said snarkily, and his pale, watery blue eyes focused on me like lasers.
“Dis vould be de vun called Max?” he asked his assistant, as if I couldn’t hear.
“I not only would be Max, I am Max,” I said, interrupting the assistant’s answer. “In fact, I’ve always been Max and always will be.”
His eyes narrowed. Mine narrowed back at him.
“Yes, I can see vhy dey’ve been slated for extermination,” he said casually, as his assistant made notes on a clipboard.
“And I can see why you were voted ‘least popular’ in your class,” I said. “So I guess we’re even.”
He ignored me, but I saw a tiny muscle in his jaw twitch.
Next, his eyes lit on Nudge. “Dis vun can’t control her mouth or, obviously, her brain,” he said. “Something vent wrong vis her thought processes, clearly.”
I felt Nudge stiffen at my side. “Bite me,” she said.
That’s my girl.
“Und dis vun,” he went on, pointing at Gazzy. “His digestive system has disastrous flaws.” He shook his head. “Perhaps an enzyme imbalance.”
Anne Walker listened expressionlessly.
“Dis vun-vell, you can see it for yourself,” the man said, with a casual flick of his hand at Iggy. “Multiple defects. A complete failure.”
“Yes, Dr. ter Borcht,” murmured his assistant, writing furiously.
Fang and I instantly looked at each other. Ter Borcht had been mentioned in the files we’d stolen from the Institute.
Iggy, sensing ter Borcht was talking about him, scowled. “Takes one to know one,” he said.
“De tall, dark vun-dere’s nothing special about him at all,” ter Borcht said dismissively of Fang, who hadn’t moved since the doctor had come in.
“Well, he’s a snappy dresser,” I offered. One side of Fang’s mouth quirked.
“Und you,” ter Borcht said, turning back to me. “You haf a malfunctioning chip, you get debilitating headaches, and your leadership skills are sadly much less than ve had hoped for.”
“And yet I could still kick your doughy Eurotrash butt from here to next Tuesday. So that’s something.”
His eyelids flickered, and it seemed to me that he was controlling himself with difficulty.
Well, I get under people’s skins. It’s a gift I have, what can I say?
Ter Borcht looked at his assistant. “Let’s get on vis de questioning,” he said abruptly. Turning to me, he said, “Ve need to gather some final data. Den you vill be exterminated.”
“Ooh,” I said. “If I had boots on, I’d be quaking in them.” I tapped my bare toes against the floor.
I saw a quick flare of anger in his eyes.
“No, really,” I said, mucho sincerely. “Totally quaking, I promise. You’re really a very scary man.”
“First you,” he barked suddenly at Gazzy, and Gazzy couldn’t help jumping a tiny bit. I looked at him reassuringly and winked, and his narrow shoulders straightened.
“Vhat ozzer abilities do you haf?” ter Borcht snapped, while his assistant waited, pen in hand.
Gazzy thought. “I have X-ray vision,” he said. He peered at ter Borcht’s chest, then blinked and looked alarmed.
Ter Borcht was startled for a second, but then he frowned. “Don’t write dat down,” he told his assistant in irritation. The assistant froze in midsentence.
Glaring at the Gasman, ter Borcht said, “Your time is coming to an end, you pathetic failure of an experiment. Vhat you say now is how you vill be remembered.”
Gazzy’s blue eyes flashed. “Then you can remember me telling you to kiss my-”
“Enough!” ter Borcht said. He turned suddenly to Nudge. “You. Do you haf any qualities dat distinguish you in any way?”
Nudge chewed on a fingernail. “You mean, like, besides the wings?” She shook her shoulders gently, and her beautiful fawn-colored wings unfolded a bit.
His face flushed, and I felt like cheering. “Yes,” he said stiffly. “Besides de vings.”
“Hmm. Besides de vings.” Nudge tapped one finger against her chin. “Um…” Her face brightened. “I once ate nine Snickers bars in one sitting. Without barfing. That was a record!”
“Hardly a special talent,” ter Borcht said witheringly.
Nudge was offended. “Yeah? Let’s see you do it.”
“I vill now eat nine Snickers bars,” Gazzy said in a perfect, creepy imitation of ter Borcht’s voice, “visout bahfing.”
Ter Borcht wheeled on him as I smothered a giggle. It wasn’t funny when Gazzy did a pitch-perfect imitation of me, but it was hilarious when he did it to other people.
“Mimicry,” ter Borcht said to his assistant. “Write dat down.”
Walking over to Iggy, he poked him with his shoe. “Does anysing on you vork properly?”
Iggy rubbed his forehead with one hand. “Well, I have a highly developed sense of irony.”
Ter Borcht tsked. “You are a liability to your group. I assume you alvays hold on to someone’s shirt, yes? Following dem closely?”
“Only when I’m trying to steal their dessert,” Iggy said truthfully.
“Write that down,” I told the assistant. “He’s a notorious dessert stealer.”
Ter Borcht moved over to Fang and stood examining him as if he were a zoo exhibit. Fang looked back at him, and probably only I could see his tension, the fury roiling inside him.
“You don’t speak much, do you?” ter Borcht said, circling him slowly.
Fittingly, Fang said nothing.
“Vhy do you let a girl be de leader?” ter Borcht asked, a calculating look in his eye.
“She’s the tough one,” Fang said.
Dang right, I thought proudly.
“Is dere anysing special about you?” asked ter Borcht. “Anysing vorth saving?”
Fang pretended to think, gazing up at the ceiling. “Besides my fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica.”
Ter Borcht locked his gaze on me. “Vhy haf you trained dem to act stupid dis vay?”
They weren’t stupid. They were survivors.
“Why do you still let your mother dress you?” I countered snidely.
The assistant busily started writing that down but froze at a look from ter Borcht.
The scientist stepped closer to me, looking down menacingly. “I created you,” he said softly. “As de saying goes, I brought you into dis world, and I vill take you out of it.”
“I vill now destroy de Snickuhs bahrs!” Gazzy barked. Then the five of us were laughing-literally in the face of death.
“Oops,” I said once we were alone again. “Guess they forgot to program us with any respect for authority.”
“Those idiots,” Gazzy said, scuffing his foot against the floor.
We were feeling victorious, but it was still clear: We were captive, and right now they held all the tarot cards.
“I miss Total,” said Nudge.
I sighed. “If he ever existed.”
“We didn’t imagine the hawks…or the bats,” Nudge said.
“Yeah,” said Iggy. “We didn’t imagine those creepy subway tunnels in New York.”
“Or the headhunter, at that school,” said Gazzy.
“I know. I’m sure we didn’t,” I said, though actually I wasn’t, not a hundred percent, anyway.
Ari came and got me again that afternoon. This time I was actually allowed to walk. Wee-hah!
“I don’t trust him. Keep your eyes open,” Fang murmured as I was leaving.
“Ya think?” I whispered back.
“So what’s this all about, Ari?” I asked, as we passed some whitecoats who looked at us strangely. “How come we’re taking these little tours?”
Now that I wasn’t strapped to a lead wheelchair, I was memorizing every hall, every doorway, every window.
He looked uncomfortable and still subdued. For a wolverine, anyway. “I’m not sure,” he muttered. “They just said walk her around.”
“Ah,” I said. “So we can assume there’s something they want me to see. Besides the brain on a stick and the superbabies.”
Ari shrugged. “I don’t know. They don’t tell me anything.”
Just then we passed wide double doors, and one of them swung open as we went by. A whitecoat hurried from the room beyond, but not before I’d caught a glimpse inside.
On a large video screen that took up a whole wall, I saw a map of the world. My raptor vision took in a thousand details in a second, which I digested as Ari and I walked. Each country was outlined, and one city in each country was highlighted.
Above the map was a title card, THE BY-HALF PLAN. I’d heard of that somewhere before.
On an off chance that it would actually get me somewhere, I asked Ari, “So, what’s the By-Half Plan?”
Ari shrugged. “They’re planning to reduce the world’s population by half,” he explained morosely.
I almost stopped in my tracks but remembered to keep walking and to look disinterested. “Geez, by half? That’s what, three billion people? They’re ambitious little buggers.”
My mind was reeling at the idea of genocide on that level. It made Stalin and Hitler look like kindergarten teachers. Okay, really evil kindergarten teachers, but still.
Ari shrugged again, and I realized it was hard for him to get worked up about things when he was going to die any day now.
I thought about what else I had seen, and it suddenly hit me: I’d seen some of this stuff before, like in a movie, or a dream, or in…one of those skull-splitting infodumps I used to get. For a while I’d had intensely horrible headaches, where it felt like my brain was imploding inside my skull. Then tons of images, words, sounds, stuff would scroll through my consciousness. I realized that some of what I was seeing, saying, doing right now-I’d already seen it.
Think, think.
I was still concentrating when we turned a corner and I literally ran into someone. Two someones.
Jeb and Angel.
“Max! Sweetheart,” said Jeb. “I’m glad they’re letting you get some exercise.”
I stared at him. “So I’ll be in really good shape when they kill me?”
He winced and sort of cleared his throat.
“Hi, Max,” said Angel.
I just looked at her.
“You should really try one of these cookies,” she said, holding out a chocolate-chip chunk of treason.
“Thanks. I’ll make a note of it. You lying traitor.”
“Max-you know I had to do what was right,” she said. “You weren’t making the best decisions anymore.”
“Yeah, like the one when I decided to come rescue your skinny, ungrateful butt,” I said.
Her small shoulders sagged, and her face looked sad.
Be strong, Maximum, I told myself. You know what you gotta do.
“I have lots of special powers,” she said. “I deserve to be the leader. I deserve to be saved. I’m much, much more special than you or Fang.”
“You just keep telling yourself that,” I said coldly. “But don’t expect me to get on board.”
Her heart-shaped face turned mutinous. “I don’t need you to get on board, Max.” Her voice had an edge of steel in it. She’d learned that from me. What else had she learned? “This is all happening whether you’re on board or not. You’re going to be retired soon, anyway.” She took an angry bite of cookie.
“Maybe. But if I am, I’m going to come back and haunt you, every day for the rest of your hard, traitorous little life.”
Her eyes widened, and she actually took a step back.
“Okay, that’s enough, you two,” said Jeb, just the way he used to when some of us would mix it up back in the day.
“Whatever,” I said in my trademark bored tone. I stepped around them, avoiding any touch as if they were poison, and headed down the hall. My heart was pounding, and I felt an unwelcome flush heat my cheeks.
Ari caught up to me. We walked in silence for a while, then he said, as if offering a consolation prize, “They’re building an army, you know.”
Of course they are, I thought, feeling depressed. “How do you know?”
“I’ve seen them. There’s a whole hangar full of Flyboys, hanging up, charging. They have thousands, and they’re making more all the time. They’re growing Eraser skins in the lab.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
He frowned, looking confused. Then he shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve always seen you fight. Even though I know you can’t get out of this, it’s like I still want you to know what you’re up against.”
“Are you setting me up?” I asked bluntly. “Is this a trap? I mean, even more of a trap than it obviously already is?”
He shook his head. “No. It’s just…I know I’m never getting out of here. My time’s over. I guess part of me hopes you still have a chance.”
It made some sort of sad, pathetic sense.
“Oh, I’m getting out of here, I promise you.” And maybe, just maybe, I would take him with us.
Under the general heading “Torturing the Bird Kids, Part Deux,” you might find a whitecoat handing us a cardboard box that night.
We opened it carefully, expecting it to explode in our faces.
Inside, we found a slim wrapped package. It was a picture frame, book size but no thicker than a pencil. Of course Gazzy was the first one to press the red button on the side.
The frame bloomed into life, and there it was: that same picture Fang and I had found, once in a crack house in DC and once in Dr. Martinez’s house. I swallowed hard, thinking about her. Wondering if she was real. Hoping she was okay. Trying to figure out what her deal was.
The picture was of baby Gasman, with his telltale cowlick, being held by a woman who looked kind of tired and washed out. He was plump and happy, maybe a few months old.
Then the picture started moving, not like a movie but like the actual picture was just…moving. The image zoomed in and rotated, as if we were walking around the woman and focusing on Gazzy. Then the picture pulled back and swung around. We saw an ugly room, with cracked walls and dirty windows. Was that the squatter’s house we’d visited in Washington? Before it had become a bombed-out haven for thugs?
The camera focused on a wooden table, then on a slip of paper lying on the table. Again it enlarged and sharpened, enough so that we could read the paper.
It was a check. The name it was made out to was obliterated. The check was from Itex, for $10,000.
Gazzy coughed slightly, and I felt him trying to control himself.
His mother had sold him for $10,000 to the whitecoats at the School.
I didn’t know why only Gazzy’s life was in the picture frame, or why none of the rest of us got one. Those whitecoats sure liked to keep us guessing!
We all checked one another for expiration dates, but none of us had them. Yet. But you know, when you’ve faced imminent death as often as we have, it gets a little old, frankly. Our room had no windows, so we had zero reference for time passing. We fought off boredom by coming up with plans to escape, courses of action to take. I led the flock through all kinds of scenarios, how we could use each one to our advantage.
That’s what leaders do.
“Now, let’s say they come get us,” I started for the hundredth time.
“And, like, the halls are full of zebras,” Iggy muttered sarcastically.
“And suddenly tons of bubbles are everywhere,” said the Gasman.
“And then everyone starts eating beef jerky,” Nudge suggested.
“Yeah,” said Iggy, rubbing his hands together. “I’ll grab a zebra; Gaz, you fill all the bubbles with your trademark scent, so people are choking and gagging; and let’s throw beef jerky right into their eyes! Now, that’s a plan!”
They all collapsed into laughter, and even Fang grinned at me as I gazed sourly at the flock.
“I just want us to be prepared,” I said.
“Yeah-prepared to die,” said Iggy.
“We’re not going to die!” I snapped. “Not now, not anytime soon!”
“What about our expiration dates?” Gazzy asked. “They could show up any second. And what about stupid Angel, turning on us?”
There was a lot I wanted to say to him about that, but now wasn’t the time.
I opened my mouth to spout some reassuring lies, but the door opened.
We tensed, turning quickly to see a whitecoat coming at us, armed with a clipboard. He checked his notes and pushed his glasses up on his nose.
“Okay,” he said briskly. “I need the blind one and the one that can mimic voices.” He looked up expectantly as we stared at him.
“Are you on drugs?” I asked in disbelief.
“Me? No,” he said, looking confused. He tapped his pen against his clipboard. “We need to run some last tests.”
I crossed my arms over my chest as Fang and I instinctively moved between the whitecoat and the rest of the flock.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
The whitecoat looked surprised at my noncompliance-obviously he hadn’t read all of our case notes. “No, come along now,” he said, striving for authoritative and achieving only weenie.
“You’re kidding, right?” I asked. “Unless you’re packing a submachine gun, you’re flat out of luck, buddy.”
He frowned. “Look, how about they just come along peacefully, and there won’t be any trouble.”
“Uh…how about, no?”
“What kind of trouble?” Gazzy asked from behind me. “I mean, anything to break the boredom.”
The whitecoat tried to look stern. “Look, we’re trying to explore other options to your retirement,” he said. “You might be useful to us in other ways. Only people who are useful will survive the By-Half Plan. Actually, it’s really more like the One-in-a-Thousand Plan. Only people with useful skills will be necessary in the new order, the Re-Evolution. You should want to help us find out if you’re at all useful to us alive.”
“Because we’re probably not that useful dead,” Nudge said thoughtfully.
“No,” I agreed. “Well, maybe as doorstops.”
The whitecoat made an “eew” expression.
“Or like those things in a parking lot that show where the cars should stop,” suggested Iggy. He closed his eyes and went stiff, to demonstrate what it would look like.
“Also an option,” I conceded, while the whitecoat looked horrified.
“No,” he said, scrambling for composure. “But China is interested in using you as weapons.”
That was interesting. “Well, you tell China to bite us,” I said. “Now, skedaddle on out of here, before we turn you into a doorstop.”
“Come for testing,” he tried firmly one last time.
“Come back to reality,” I said, just as firmly.
He turned angrily and headed for the door. Gazzy looked at me, like, Should we rush him, push past him? I shook my head: Not now.
“You’ll pay for this,” the whitecoat said, flashing his ID card at the automatic lock.
“Boy, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that,” I mused.
See, when you’re an evil, endlessly funded insane scientist, you have both the means and the motive to, say, suddenly gas a whole room of hostage bird kids.
Causing said bird kids to pass out without even realizing it and then wake up in a metal cage in the middle of a field.
At night.
Some of you have probably jumped ahead and are already at the place where you realize this happened to us, and I’m not just rattling on hypothetically, so good on ya!
“Unhhh,” Gazzy moaned, starting to stir.
I forced myself to sit up. There were no lights. Even the moon and stars were blocked by thick, low-lying clouds.
“You are avake, yah?” said a voice in a horribly recognizable accent.
“Yah,” I muttered, rubbing my head. “And you are still a butthole, yah?”
“It’s time for you to be eliminated,” ter Borcht said, sounding gleeful. “You don’t cooperate vis de tests, you are useless to us.”
I helped Nudge sit up, rubbing her back as she cleared her throat.
“I don’t believe this,” Fang muttered, rolling his shoulders. He looked around at our cage. It was big enough to hold us, as long as we didn’t want to do anything frivolous, like stand up or move around.
“Believe it,” said ter Borcht, clapping his hands together. “Tonight ve implement our Re-Evolution Plan! Vhen ve are done, ve vill haf a world of less dan a billion people. Each country vill be under our control! Dere vill be no illnesses, no veakness. De new strong, smart population vill save dis planet und take us into de tventy-second century!”
“Yeah,” I said. “And if you look in the dictionary under ‘delusional megalomaniac,’ you’ll see your picture.”
“Nussing you say vill bozzer me,” ter Borcht said more calmly. “It is time to eliminate you. You haf failed all de tests. You are not useful.”
“No, but we’re dang cute,” I said, willing my brain to start churning out ideas. I scanned the sky and the field as best I could through the bars, but I saw nothing. Come on, come on, I thought.
“Max?” Nudge whispered. She edged closer to me and took my hand. I squeezed hers reassuringly, but I was thinking that maybe our time really was up. The five of us were hunched back-to-back inside the cage, all of us looking out.
Then a clumpy blob was coming toward us, growing larger. It took only a second for me to see that it was a group of people walking across the field. Probably here to get good seats for the fun. Some of them were wearing white coats, of course, but not all of them. My eyes picked out Jeb and Anne Walker.
“How can we break out of here?” Gazzy whispered so only the flock could hear.
“There’s a plan,” I murmured back. “There’s always a plan.” Well, it sounded good.
“Children,” said Jeb when he was close enough. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s have it be different. Let us out of the cage!”
He pressed his lips together, giving his head a tiny shake.
Next it was Anne’s turn. Inside the cage, we were practically vibrating with tension.
“Do you know what’s really sad?” she asked.
“That pin-striped pantsuit?” I guessed. “Those sensible shoes?”
“We gave you every chance,” Anne said.
“No, see, giving us every chance would be opening this cruel and inhuman cage and letting us out,” I said, ready to explode. “That would be every chance. This way, you’ve only given us some chances. You see the difference?”
“Enough!” ter Borcht barked. “Dis is pointless. Ve’re just vaiting for de executioners. Say your good-byes.”
“Good-bye,” said a sweet little-girl voice.
And then a shiny metal bar swung through the air and smacked ter Borcht’s head with a sickening, melonlike splat.
Well. It certainly got exciting as heck after that.
“Angel!” Nudge screamed, echoed closely by Gazzy. Fang and I threw ourselves against the cage bars, shaking them hard, searching for weak points.
Angel nimbly bobbed and weaved, her white wings beating as fast as my heart. She dive-bombed the group of scientists, who scattered, screaming for Flyboys to come to the rescue.
“I can’t break it!” Fang said, slamming his fists against the cage.
“But I can!” The gravelly voice from behind made us spin in time to see Ari do a full morph into a good ol’ old-fashioned Eraser. I’d forgotten how wolfish he could get, and his face, with its full snout packed with yellow, dripping teeth, was horrible up this close.
“Get back!” I shouted, pushing the flock away from him. Two ragged-clawed paws gripped the metal bars, and Ari lunged at us, fangs snapping.
I gasped as his teeth crunched down on the bars-and then, with grisly twisting-metal sounds, he started to chew through.
Outside, Angel hovered like a demonic hummingbird, swinging her bar, keeping everyone and everything away from us.
“She’s going to let Ari eat us!” Nudge cried. She braced herself against the cage and clenched her hands into fists. “But it won’t be easy for him!”
Time-out. Okay, now, tell the truth: When’s the last time you had to decide to make it hard for someone to eat you? That’s just the zany, roller-coaster life of a lab rat on the run.
It was time to spill. “Angel’s not a traitor,” I said. “She and I agreed that she would do this so she’d be on the inside and could get us out if anything happened. She’s been my spy.”
Time halted as four dumbstruck bird kids turned to gape at me.
“We came up with this plan in case the worst happened,” I said fast. “Which it did, of course. Angel’s not a traitor-never was.”
Smash! Time sped up again as Ari managed to gnaw through one of the bars. It was stomach churning to see-the ripped metal cut his mouth up something awful, and blood mingled with foul Eraser spit was flying everywhere.
Crack! Ooh-Angel had whacked another whitecoat. Like ter Borcht, this one dropped like a stone. In fact, ter Borcht hadn’t gotten up-he was rolling on the ground, moaning.
Riiip! Ari broke through another bar of the cage, and his unnaturally strong arms began to wrest the surrounding bars apart. His face was a repulsive bloody-meat picture as he snarled and grunted with the effort.
“I’ll take him out,” Fang whispered tensely in my ear. “Then you grab the others and get out of here.”
I quickly tapped everyone’s hands twice. They caught my eye and nodded, and we all braced for Fang’s move.
With a final, wrenching, earsplitting screech, Ari forced the bars apart, making an Eraser-sized hole in the cage wall.
“Ready.” Fang’s voice was deadly quiet in the screaming chaos around us.
We all tensed, ready to spring out as soon as Fang took Ari down-but instead of coming in after us, Ari backed away quickly.
“Come on!” he shouted. “Get out of there! We’ll hold these guys back!”
Wha?
“He’s on our side!” Angel yelled from above. “He’s with me! He’s getting you out! Ari! Release the secret weapon!”
Ari fumbled with his jacket, and a small coal-colored shadow popped out of it and began to race around, growling and snapping.
Was it-could it be?
“Move it or lose it!” Total shouted. “Let’s go, go, go!”
Fang shot through the hole in the cage, grabbed Total, and was up in the air before three seconds had passed. Amazingly, Ari stood off to the side and let him go.
I shoved Nudge through next, and she took a running leap, faltered for a moment, then stroked hard and rose into the air.
Still Ari stood back.
Watching him closely, I pushed Iggy out. “Four steps, up at ten o’clock,” I hissed. He nodded, then followed my instructions.
“Come on, Gasman, you’re last,” I said, and practically threw him out of the cage, wincing as the torn metal scratched him. A minor concern at this point.
Ari watched him go.
Angel was keeping the humans at bay, and it was my turn. Ari and I had a troubled history-okay, we usually wanted to kill each other, and one time I did kill him-but I couldn’t worry about it right now. I leaped from the cage, took a step on the ground, then snapped my wings out and was up in the air within one breath.
Oh, God, it felt so good to be up, flying, away from a world that held only pain and death for us.
“I’m so glad to see you guys,” said Total, sounding a little choked up. “I thought you were dead! I didn’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Glad to see you again too,” I said, surprising myself by actually meaning it.
Below us, Angel dropped the metal bar and zipped upward, streaming like a comet, her small face serene and beautiful. I blew her kisses through the air, my faithful partner in deception, and she beamed at me.
It was at that point that the executioners arrived and started shooting at us. I saw Jeb grab one of their arms, trying to mess up his aim, but the guy just clubbed him down with his gun, then kept firing.
We were already out of range. They would need a missile launcher to hit us now.
“Nyah, nyah, nyah,” I said quietly, looking down at them. I sucked in sweet lungfuls of night air, counted my flock, and took a moment to focus my direction, feeling where we were, which way was north, where we should go.
Then I saw Ari, still on the ground. The men with guns were running toward him.
“Ari!” I suddenly screamed without thinking. “Get out of there! Come up! Come with us!”
“What?!” Fang exclaimed. “Are you nuts? What the heck are you thinking?”
Ari probably couldn’t hear exactly what I said, but when he saw me waving my arms, he must have understood. He ran clumsily, a seven-year-old freak in a huge linebacker body, and forced himself into the air. A bullet grazed one of his unwieldy patched-on wings, but he kept flying awkwardly, rising upward slowly but steadily.
“Max, you are way out of line,” Fang said furiously. He tossed Total through the air at Gazzy, who gave a startled cry and grabbed the little dog. “There’s no way he’s coming with us!”
“He saved our lives,” I pointed out. “They’re going to kill him.”
“Good!” Fang said, a savage expression on his face. “He’s tried to kill us a hundred times!”
I’d actually never seen Fang like this.
“Max, Ari’s really mean,” Nudge said. “He’s tried to hurt you, and he’s tracked us-I don’t want him with us.”
“Me neither,” said the Gasman. “He’s one of them.”
“I think he’s changed,” I said, as Ari flew toward us.
“He helped get you guys out,” Angel reminded us. “And he found Total for me.”
Fang gave me an enraged, disgusted look and flew off before Ari got to us. Looking doubtful, Nudge and Gazzy went with him. Iggy heard their direction and followed.
Leaving me, Angel, and Ari behind.
“Thanks, Max,” Ari said when he was within earshot. “You won’t regret this, I promise. I’m going to keep you safe.”
I frowned at him, trying not to look at his ruined, gory face. “We all keep each other safe,” I said shortly, then swung into a steeply pitched right turn. I saw Gazzy and the others swooping over the School’s large parking lot. An entrance there led to additional, underground parking.
“Where’s Iggy?” I demanded.
The Gasman pointed downward, and I saw Iggy leaning over the open hood of a car.
“Oh, no,” I muttered, as Iggy slammed the hood shut, then pushed the car toward the sloping entrance to the underground parking.
“Oh no, oh no,” I continued as the car smoothly, silently rolled through the opening and disappeared. Iggy shot upward, looking happier than he had in weeks.
“And a-one, and a-two, and a-thr-,” he began.
Boom! A massive explosion blew part of the top off the parking garage. We quickly flew out of range as streaming chunks of glowing red asphalt, glass, and concrete rocketed through the night sky. Alarms went off. Outdoor emergency lights flashed on.
“Way to be!” the Gasman crowed, slapping high fives with Iggy.
“Yeah,” I said. “Way to be loud and obvious about where we are and what we’re doing.”
“High four!” Total said, holding up a paw. “That rocked!”
I felt Fang looking at me furiously, but I avoided his eyes. Ari hung back on the periphery.
I needed several moments to get a grip. Why had I asked Ari to come with us? Now everyone was mad at me. But it had seemed like the right thing to do. On the other hand, it required a perhaps ill-fated leap of faith on my part that he wouldn’t suddenly turn bad again. I’m not real good at leaps of faith.
Then again, Ari was going to die soon anyway.
I wheeled around and faced the flock, their forms dimly lit by the fireball below.
Boom! Another explosion, even bigger than the first, blew out another section of the garage. I looked at Iggy, and as if he could sense it, he shrugged.
“Big garage full of big cars with big gas tanks.”
Whatever. “Okay, guys, let’s head north,” I said briskly. No idea why, no idea where, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
Sometimes all you have is instinct, a gut feeling. It’s important to pay attention to them.
I almost groaned aloud. Look what the cat dragged in, I thought. Hello, Voice.
Hello, Maximum. I’m glad you’re okay.
No thanks to you, I thought as I leveled out and started flying directly north.
I’ve missed talking with you.
Well, I can’t say that I’ve missed you, I thought. But I sort of missed you too.
Now I’m back.
Yep.
And you know what else was back? I saw it when I waved for the others to follow me more closely.
The scars on my arm. From taking out my chip.
