Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
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Cập nhật: Maximum Ride 3 - Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
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A4Part 4 - I Didn’t Just Hear What I Thought I Heard, Did I?
F
rankly, it takes a lot to surprise me. I’m pretty unsurprisable. But I admit, that was pretty much the last thing I expected to hear. “Hoo, delusional much?” I said, proud that my voice was rock solid. Almost.The Director walked to her big desk and set down several CD-ROMs.
“I know it’s hard to believe, but look closely at me, Max. I’m an older version of you.”
I stared at her blond hair, her dark brown eyes. I remembered that Nudge had said she reminded her of someone.
“Yeah?” I said. “Let’s see your wings.”
She gave me a smile. “I don’t have any avian DNA. But you-you were the most brilliant success we ever had.”
I was still reeling from shock, so I went on “smart retort” autopilot. “Then why do you and ter Borcht keep trying to kill us?”
“You’re an older generation, Max,” she explained. “You have no proven life span. There’s no room for mistakes in the new world.”
I was floored. “Here’s a tip: Your protective maternal instinct sucks.”
“I’m your mother, Max, but I’m also a scientist. Believe me, watching you grow up from afar, devising this entire game, this series of tests-there were times that I didn’t think I could go through it.”
“Funny, I felt the same way. For completely different reasons. But you had a choice,” I pointed out, becoming more and more incredulous.
“I’m making the ultimate sacrifice to create a new world. I gave my only child to the cause.”
“That’s not the ultimate sacrifice!” I said, outraged. “Giving yourself would be the ultimate! Giving me up is like the second-to-ultimate! See the difference?”
She smiled somewhat sadly. “You’re so smart, Max. I’m so proud of you.”
“Which makes one of us,” I said. “I mean, God! It’s parents’ career day at school. I stand up and say, ‘My mother is an evil scientist who’s planning a holocaust that will eliminate half the people on Earth.’ How could I ever live that down?!”
She turned away and sat at her desk. “I blame Jeb for letting you be such a smart aleck.”
I stared at her. “I blame you for altering my DNA! I mean, I have wings, lady! What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that the world’s population is destroying itself,” she said in a steely tone I recognized. (I have one just like it.) “I was thinking that someone had to stand up and take drastic action before this entire planet is incapable of supporting human life. Yes, you’re my daughter, but you’re still just part of the big picture, part of the equation. I was thinking I’d do anything to make sure the human race survives. Even if it seems awful in the short term. In future history books, I’ll be heralded as the savior of humanity.”
Perfect. I finally, after fourteen years, meet my mother, and she’s a raving lunatic. This day just could not get better.
I swallowed. “You give good megalomania,” I said.
The Director motioned to the Flyboys hovering around the edges of the room. “Take them to the place that I prepared,” she said. “You know what to do once you get there.”
“I don’t want to make you feel even worse, Max,” said Total. “But I can’t stand your mother.”
I looked at him. In the English/mad-scientist dictionary, you can translate “place I prepared” as “dank, ominous dungeon.” Literally a freaking dungeon! Cinderella’s castle had come complete with a real dungeon. And the “you know what to do” part translated to “chain them all to the walls like medieval prisoners.”
“Well,” I said, “at least with my parents, I don’t have to look hard for something to rebel against.”
Anyway, we seemed to be the only occupants in the dungeon, though it stretched on, out of sight. Loudspeakers were hung on the walls, and they were playing the Director’s brainwashing messages, which in itself was enough to drive anyone starkers.
Like, if the whole “chained to a wall in a dungeon” thing wasn’t enough to send you around the bend.
All of us were flying creatures, except for Total, and sort of halfway Ari. So chaining us to the wall, underground, was one of the worst things you could do.
My mother had done this to us.
I shook my head, unutterably depressed. “I mean, why couldn’t she have been a nice hooker, or a crack addict, like Fang’s mom?”
“Speaking of Fang,” said Nudge, “maybe he’s on his way here right now.”
A gleam of hope flared and was just as quickly extinguished. “Yeah, if our message got through. If he’s gotten over Ari, which I doubt. If they can somehow get to Europe, like, right away.”
“Max?” said Angel. “You’re kind of making things worse.”
I was. I was being a jerk. Later, when I was alone, I would lie down and sob my guts out from the raw, acid disappointment about my mother. Right now I had to stop taking it out on everyone.
“You’re right,” I said, my throat feeling tight. “I’m sorry. Actually, I do think that our e-mail got through, because Nudge is brilliant at that stuff. And he’s Fang. They’re on their way. I know it.”
Silence.
“You lie really well, Max,” Nudge said approvingly.
I laughed. “I’ve had a lot of practice. But seriously, I do bet they’re on their way.”
“How could they cross the ocean?” Ari asked, not meanly, just wondering.
“Maybe they got tickets on a plane, like us,” said Angel.
“Or maybe they stowed away on a plane,” suggested Nudge.
“Or maybe they, like, flew up into the sky, waited for a jet to pass by, then dropped down onto it and held on,” I said dramatically, and we all laughed. I imitated Fang hanging on to a jet, mouth open from the wind drag.
Their chuckles seemed to make the walls recede a bit and the darkness not quite so dark.
The loudspeakers were most annoying when they were in English because we couldn’t help listening. The Director-or Crazy Old Mom, as I liked to think of her-was again spouting something about the future of flawlessness.
“She is a seriously negative woman,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Max,” said Nudge. “I know she wasn’t what you were hoping for.”
“Yeah.” I smiled wryly. “‘Delusional mass murderer’ wasn’t really on my list.”
Again I wanted to wail with disappointment, but I swallowed it down. I had finally found my mother, and she was my worst nightmare. This was really just too bitter to bear. On top of that, Nudge was trying to comfort me. It was my job to comfort her. Usually the only person who comforted me was Fang. Who had deserted me.
A slight scratching sound in the shadows made us all prick up our ears.
“Rats,” said Nudge nervously.
But it wasn’t rats. A tall figure appeared in the distance. We all went on alert, ready for a fight, since flight was out of the question.
A voice spoke.
“Max,” Jeb said.
And now my day of horror was complete.
“Well, well,” I said, using every bit of strength I had to make my voice sound chipper. “Fancy meeting you. Come here often? How’s the food?”
Jeb moved closer, till he stepped into the dim circle of light given off by the amber emergency fixture. He looked just the same-maybe more tired than usual. I guess torturing kids takes it out of you.
He gave me his trademark smile tinged with sadness. “Actually, no one knows I’m here.”
I made my eyes round. “Gosh, I sure won’t tell anyone!”
“So you met the Director?” he asked.
My facade crashed down, but I struggled to keep it together. “Yes. And what a picnic she turned out to be. Three billion women with ovaries on this planet, and I had to get the one voted ‘most likely to become a delusional psychopath’ as my mom.”
Jeb knelt down on the filthy stone floor, looking at me. I felt Angel wound tightly with tension next to me and wondered if she was picking up anything from Jeb. He hadn’t acknowledged the others, including Ari.
“You can still save the world, Max.”
A sudden wave of exhaustion almost sucked me under. I wanted to roll up into a fetal position and stay there for the rest of my life, which I hoped would be mercifully short. I had been working so hard for so long, going at 140 percent. I had pretty much hit rock bottom.
I closed my eyes wearily and leaned against the dank stone wall behind me. “How?” I said. “Through Re-Evolution? The By-Half Plan? No, thanks. I’m getting off the madcap train of mass destruction.”
Max, you have to trust me, said the Voice inside my head. You were created to save the world. You still can.
Give it a rest, Voice, I thought. I’m beat.
Max, said the Voice. Max.
Then it occurred to me that the Voice wasn’t actually inside my head.
Oh, God.
I opened my eyes.
Jeb was still kneeling in front of me. “You’ve come a long way, Max,” said the Voice, except that it was Jeb’s mouth moving, the sound coming from him. “You’re almost home. Everything will work out, but you have to do your best. And you have to trust me again.”
It was Jeb, speaking with the Voice, the Voice I’d been hearing inside my head for months.
Jeb was the Voice.
Fang paused a moment, his fingers over the keyboard in the Internet café. Next to him, Iggy and the Gasman were sucking down lattes like there was no tomorrow.
Which maybe there wasn’t.
“I feel like I could fly, like, to the space station!” the Gasman said enthusiastically.
Fang looked over at him. “No more caffeine for you, buddy.” He glanced around to make sure no one had heard the Gasman. But they were off in a corner of this run-down coffee shop, and there weren’t that many other people in here anyway.
Iggy drained his cup and wiped the foam mustache off his lip. “I liked it farther south,” he complained. “The sunshine, the beach bunnies. Up north here, this place has too much of the damp-mist thing going on.”
“It’s really pretty, though,” the Gasman said. “The mountains and the ocean. And the people look more real.” He glanced over at Fang. “Are kids still reading your blog?”
Fang nodded. “Tons.”
He scrolled down quickly, scanning the entries, and then he felt someone’s eyes on him. Instantly he looked up and tracked his gaze left to right, taking in the whole café. It was times like this he missed Max the most-because she would have felt it too, and they would have exchanged glances and known what to do in a moment, without speaking.
Now it was just him on this coast, and her and that cretin wherever they were.
Fang saw nothing, so he moved his eyes more slowly this time, right to left. There. That guy. He was headed this way.
Fang shut the laptop and tapped Iggy’s hand. The Gasman saw it and looked up, on alert. Eight years old and his fists were clenched, muscles tight, ready to fight.
When the guy was about fifteen feet away, still beelining for them, Fang frowned.
“We know this guy,” he murmured. “Who is he?”
Casually the Gasman turned and looked over his shoulder. “Uh…”
“His footsteps,” Iggy muttered. Fang couldn’t hear his footsteps. Iggy went on, face pinched with concentration. “Those footsteps…We heard them…in a subway tunnel.”
Fang’s eyes widened, and he sharpened his focus.
Of course.
Now the guy was six feet away, and he stopped. Fang had never seen him in daylight before, only in flickering reflections from oil-can fires in the train tunnels below New York City. He was the homeless computer nerd who carried a Mac everywhere he went, the guy who’d claimed that Max’s chip was screwing up his hard drive. When they’d asked him about her chip, he’d gone wiggy and run off. What was this guy doing here?
“You.” The guy frowned and pointed at them but pitched his voice so only they could hear him. “What are you doing here?”
“Take a seat,” Fang invited him, pushing one out with his foot.
The guy looked around suspiciously. “Where’s your girlfriend? The one with the chip inside her.”
“Not with us.”
He seemed to relax, fractionally, and edged warily into the seat, looking around. Fang smiled to himself. Finally, someone more paranoid than they were. It was refreshing.
“What are you doing here?” Fang asked, gesturing to the coffee shop. “Above ground. On the West Coast.”
The guy shrugged. “I get around. I see people here, there, all over. I just like to hang in New York mostly-it’s easier to blend.”
“Yeah,” Fang agreed.
Then the guy’s eyes fell on Fang’s closed laptop, and Fang saw him shift his alert level from yellow up to orange.
“Nice ’book,” he said.
“Thanks.” Fang waited.
“Don’t usually see one like that around.”
“Guess not.”
The guy seemed to make a decision, and he leaned forward across the table. “Where’d you get it? Or do I not want to know?”
Fang almost grinned. “You probably don’t want to know.”
The guy shook his head. “You people get into some serious stuff.”
“Yeah,” Fang acknowledged with a sigh. He looked up. “Would you know how to get a message through to every kid on the ’net, everywhere in the world?”
The guy looked at Fang. “Maybe. Probably. Guess it depends on the message.”
“Would you need to know the message?” Fang asked, seeing a big wrinkle looming. This guy was, after all, pretty much a nutcase. Who knew how he’d react to Fang’s message?
The guy thought about it, then said, “Yeah.”
“There goes that plan,” said Iggy, sucking down the last of his latte.
“Can I have a muffin?” the Gasman put in.
Fang pushed some money across the table. The Gasman took it and headed to the counter, keeping an eye out around him the whole way.
“What’s your name?” Fang asked.
There was a long pause while the guy considered.
“Man, this guy’s more paranoid than we are,” Iggy said. “It’s kind of refreshing.”
The guy looked at Iggy and seemed to notice for the first time that Iggy was blind. He turned back to Fang. “Mike. What’s yours?”
“Fang. He’s Iggy. The little one’s the Gasman. Don’t ask why.”
“Sit here long enough and you’ll find out,” Iggy muttered.
Mike’s eyes went wide, and he tensed in his chair. Fang and Iggy tensed too, waiting.
“Is that your blog on the Web?” Mike asked in a whisper.
“Yeah.”
The Gasman returned and put a plate of muffins on the table. He immediately picked up on the vibe and stilled, looking quickly from boy to boy. Since no one was pulling out weapons, he sat down and took a muffin, pushing the rest toward the others.
“So you’re sayin’ you have…like, wings?” Mike kept his voice low.
“Not just like ’em,” said Iggy, talking with his mouth full. “We got ’em.” He realized Fang hadn’t answered the question and turned his head. “Oh. Was that a secret?”
“Not anymore,” Fang said dryly.
“You’re the bird kids everyone’s talkin’ about.”
Fang shrugged. “Can you help me or not?”
“I’ll help you if you’re them. Convince me.”
“I’ll need more room,” said Fang, looking around.
Mike took them upstairs, above the coffee shop, where he pulled out a set of keys and unlocked a door. Fang was on hyperalert and wished Angel were there to scan for any threats.
“In here.” Mike ushered them into a large room, obviously used for storage. Boxes of various supplies were stacked along one wall, but the middle of the room was empty. “This enough space?”
Fang nodded and shrugged off his jacket. He made note of where the windows were and gauged whether they were single or double paned, in case he had to jump through one any time soon.
Slowly, Fang unfolded his wings, stretching his muscles, enjoying the sensation of extending them after holding them tight against his back for hours. He shook them out, feeling the feathers align. The tips of his wings almost touched the walls on both sides of the room. He wished he could take off right now and fly for hours, wheeling through the open sky.
Mike’s mouth was slightly open. “Dude. That is so awesome.” He looked at Iggy and the Gasman. “You guys got ’em too? What about those chicks that were with you?”
“We all have them,” said Fang. “Now, howsabout sending that message?”
Mike’s fingers flew over the keyboard of Fang’s laptop. “I just gotta write a bit of code here,” he muttered. “Get you in through a bunch of different back doors. Lotsa people got firewalls up, stuff like that, but this should bypass most of ’em.”
He opened Fang’s main blog page and scanned it quickly. “Okay, I’ve gotta try to get access to them through their IP addresses, since you don’t have most of theire-mail addresses,” he said. “This
could be tricky, but I’ll give it a shot.”
“You are a criminal mastermind,” the Gasman said admiringly.
“I try,” Mike said.
“Wait,” said Fang, reading over his shoulder. “Switch over to my e-mail for a sec. I just saw a pop-up alert on the bottom of the screen.”
“Yeah, this one has three red flags for priority,” Mike said, pointing.
Fang’s heart sped up.
THIS IS FROM MAX. READ IT NOW!!!!
We’re in Germany. Town of Lendeheim. Big castle here, head of Itex. Lots of really bad stuff. Come as fast as you can. (Hi Fang! From Nudge. I miss you!) Do NOT blow this off. Come!!! We have days, maybe hours. I mean it, you better get your butt over here. Max.
Huh. Fang sat back and nodded at Mike to keep working.
So. Max wanted him back, eh? She didn’t say whether she still had Frankenbirdy with her. If she did, Fang didn’t want any part of it.
On the other wing, it had cost her a lot of pride to ask him to come. She’d never even taken his blog that seriously, and now she was using it to beg him to come back. Well, order him to come back. Which was as close to begging as Max would get.
What were they doing in Germany? How had they gotten to Europe? How did she expect him to get to Europe?
He looked at the date on the e-mail. Early this morning. And Germany was about ten hours or so ahead….
How would Max define “really bad stuff”? As opposed to just ordinary bad stuff? Stuff bad enough to make her swallow her pride and ask him to come help.
So they were talking pretty unimaginably bad.
“Okay, I got it,” said Mike, sitting back. He had a proud, satisfied smile on his face. “It’ll work a little like a virus, in that it’ll access other addresses through people’s e-mail programs, but it won’t cause any damage.” He frowned. “I think. Anyway, type your message and then hit this special Send box I created. Let’s see what happens.”
Fang swallowed. This was it. This was his chance to get kids to take this seriously, tell them what was going on. All over the planet, kids would read this message.
This was his chance to save the world.
He started writing.
To: undisclosed recipients
From: Fang
Subject: URGENT! We want our planet back!
Hey. If you get this message, we might have a chance. I mean the world might have a chance. Long story short: The grown-ups have taken a nice clean planet and trashed it for money. Not every grown-up. But a bunch of them, over and over, choose money and profits over clean air and water. It’s their way of telling us they don’t give a rat’s butt about us, the kids, who are going to inherit what’s left of the Earth.
A group of scientists want to take back the planet before it’s too late and stop the pollution. Good, right? Only problem is they think they need to get rid of half the world’s population to do it. So it’s like: Save the planet so the pollution doesn’t kill people, or…just kill people to start with, save everyone time. For you kids at home, that’s called “flawed logic.” I mean, call me crazy, but that seems like a really bad plan.
The other thing about these scientists is that they’ve tried to create a new kind of human who might survive better, like if there’s a nuclear winter or whatever. I won’t go into the details, but let me just say that this idea is as boneheaded and dangerous as their “kill half the people” plan.
What I’m saying is: It’s up to us. You and me. Me and my flock, you and your friends. The kids. We want-we deserve-to inherit a clean, unmessed-up planet, and still keep everyone who’s already living on it.
We can do it. But we have to join together. We have to take chances. Take risks. We have to get active and really do something, instead of just sitting at home playing Xbox. This isn’t a game. We can’t defeat the enemy by hitting them with our superlaser guns.
We want our planet back.
Kids matter. We’re important. Our future is important.
ARE YOU WITH ME?
The Gasman finished reading over Fang’s shoulder.
“I wish I had an Xbox,” he said. Fang rolled his eyes.
“Cool message, dude,” said Mike. “I feel like jumping up and starting a rally. Now what?”
“Now,” said Fang, starting to type another message, “we go to Germany.”
He ignored the way his heart thumped when he thought about seeing her-them-again. If she still had the cretin with her, he was going to be pissed. But cretin or no, splitting up the flock was wrong. If the world was coming to an end, they needed to be together.
To: Max
From: Fang
Subject: Yo
Yo, Max. We’re on our way. This better not be a joke. Fang.
He clicked the Send button.
You know that old saying “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”? Well, we were chained in a dungeon in Germany, my mother was a power-hungry, psychotic refrigerator, and my best friend and half my flock were MIA.
These were definitely lemons, so I thought about that saying.
And you know what? Whoever coined the phrase ought to have been smacked senseless. I mean, how lamebrained was that? “Life totally messing you up? Just turn that frown upside down!” What a moron!
“Max? You’re muttering again.” Nudge sounded tired.
I looked at her. “Sorry.” I sighed and got to my feet. We were each now chained to the wall by one ankle. Our chains were about eight feet long, so we could walk around. See? My mom had a soft heart after all! Instead of being chained by both wrists, we were only chained by one ankle!
I mean, if I’d been looking for proof that she really did love me, this was it, right?
Total reached out and very gently closed his teeth around my ankle as I went past. “Muttering,” he said.
“Sorry.” I moved as far away as my chain allowed.
I was making the kids crazy with my barely suppressed rage and disappointment. And here’s the kicker: I had asked Fang for help. I had asked him to come back because I needed him. My stomach churned just thinking about it. That was me: Maximum Ride, Damsel in Distress.
I know this will surprise you, but I don’t damsel well. Distress, I can do. Damseling? Not so much.
“I don’t remember you muttering this much, before,” Ari said, crouching next to me.
“I was a little saner then,” I said.
“Oh.” He traced a finger through the grime on the floor. Suddenly I remembered him saying, “I can’t read.”
Knowing he was watching me, I slowly drew the letter A on the floor, making little trails through the dirt. Then I drew an R. And an I.
“That spells Ari,” I told him. I drew it again, slowly. A…R…I. “Now you do it.”
He started the A, then stopped. “What’s the point?” he asked, and I was stung because he was right. He didn’t have much time left. Did it really matter if he knew how to read?
“You should know how to write your name,” I said firmly, pushing his hand toward the floor again. “Come on. First A.”
Concentrating, Ari dragged one ragged claw through the dirt. He made a rickety, asymmetrical A.
“A drunk monkey could do better, but you’ll get there,” I said. “Do the R.”
He started on the R, first drawing it backward. I didn’t know if this was normal for his age or whether his brain had been affected by all the experiments done on him. I rubbed it out and showed him how to do it correctly.
Jeb had taught me and Fang to read. I’d taught Gazzy and Nudge and Angel. We were a little shaky with spelling and grammar sometimes, but all of us could forge signatures like a pro. He hadn’t taught his own son.
“How come you’re doing this?” Ari’s hesitant question caught me off guard.
“Uh-to make up for almost killing you in New York?”
Ari didn’t look at me. “You did kill me,” he said. “They brought me back. Fused some of the bones in my neck.” He ran a meaty paw over his neck as if it still pained him.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times those words have passed my lips. And three of them had been in the last five minutes. “You were trying to kill me first.”
He nodded. “I hated you,” he said calmly. “Dad gave you everything, he really loved you. I was his son, and I didn’t mean anything to him. You were so strong and perfect and beautiful. I just hated you. Wanted you dead. And he used that. He used me as part of your testing.”
I was rattled. Ari seemed so matter-of-fact. “He was proud of you,” I said, dredging up memories of a long time ago, before Jeb had stolen me and the rest of the flock out of the lab. “He liked you following him around in the lab.”
“You never even noticed me,” Ari said, slowly tracing the I in his name.
“I did,” I said, thinking back. “You were a cute little boy. I used to be so jealous of you because you were his son. You belonged to him in a way that I didn’t belong to anyone. I wanted to be perfect so Jeb would love me.”
Even as I said the words, I was just realizing them myself. Ari looked up at me, surprised. I rocked back on my heels, facing these painful truths. It was like Dr. Phil had apparated right into our dungeon.
“I knew I was a freak,” I said softly. “I had wings. I lived in a dog crate. But you were a regular little boy. You were Jeb’s real son. I kept thinking, If I’m strong enough, if I do everything he tells me, if I’m the best at everything, then maybe Jeb will love me too.” I looked down at my new boots, already dull with dirt. “I was so, so happy when he stole us from the lab.” My throat got tight, remembering. “I didn’t think it could last. I was afraid. But I was happy that I was going to die away from the lab. Not in a dog crate. And then it went on. No one found us. Jeb took care of us, taught us stuff, how to survive. It was almost like a normal life, like normal kids. And you know, Ari,” I said, “I was so happy to be gone, so happy to have Jeb, that I didn’t even think about the little boy he’d left behind. I guess I just thought you were with your mom or something.”
Ari nodded, and after a moment he swallowed and cleared his throat. “I don’t have a mom.”
“It’s not what it’s cracked up to be,” I said, and he smiled.
“I understand now,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault. You were just a kid, like me. It wasn’t either of our faults.”
I pressed my lips together hard, determined not to make poignant tear streaks down my no doubt filthy face.
“I saw a Shakespeare movie on TV once,” I said. “The guy said something like, ‘Anyone who fights with me today is my brother.’ So-if you fight with me today…”
He smiled again and nodded, understanding. Then we hugged, of course, because the Hallmark moment wouldn’t be complete without it.
Not long after the Hallmark commercial, several Flyboys appeared in the dungeon and moved us-to somewhere even worse.
“This is great,” I said, radiating sincerity. “I love what you’ve done with the place. Really.”
The thing about sarcasm is that it’s lost on robots, like Flyboys, for example. But I could always hope that they had voice-activated recorders on them and that later they’d be playing my snide message back to Crazy Old Mom.
The Flyboys turned, rotors humming, and stalked away. No sense of humor.
Nudge, Angel, Total, Ari, and I surveyed our change of scenery.
“Let’s see,” I said. “High stone walls, lifeless span of grit, mutants marching around…I don’t know-I’m thinking it says ‘prison yard.’ How about you guys?”
“Prison yard sums it up,” Total agreed, then trotted off to pee on the wall.
“Prison yard is too good for this,” said Nudge. “Like, cheerless, joy-sucking plain of despair would be more like it.”
I looked at her in admiration. “Nice! You’ve been reading the dictionary again, haven’t you?”
Nudge blushed happily.
“Look! There I go,” Angel said, pointing. Twenty yards away, her clone rambled about with the others, looking more like Angel than Angel did. About two hundred beings were in what used to be the castle stable area, I guessed. No one was talking. Mostly they were shuffling in a large, clockwise circle, getting their “exercise.” They seemed so much like a mindless school of fish, or perhaps a flock of sheep, that I wanted to run through them, shouting, to see if they’d scatter.
“Do you see me?” Nudge asked, peering through the crowd.
“I still can’t believe I don’t have a clone,” Total huffed, trotting back.
“You’re unduplicatable,” I said.
“I doubt it,” he said. “I mean, maybe it wouldn’t talk, maybe it would just go arf, but still. Like, what, they couldn’t bother?”
“Arf?” I said.
“Oh, there I am!” said Nudge, up on her tiptoes. “I see the other me has hair issues too.”
“Why would they make clones of us?” I wondered out loud.
“You.” The metallic voice had no inflection. We spun to see a Flyboy behind us.
“Yes, C-Threepio?” I said politely.
“Walk.” The Flyboy pointed at the throng, then took a step toward us.
Well, you don’t have to threaten me twice. We quickly headed into the crowd and started pacing along with the rest of them.
I was keeping my eye out for Max II, who, last time I’d had a close encounter with her, had been trying to kill me and had narrowly escaped being killed by me. In case she wasn’t a ‘let bygones be bygones’ kind of gal, I was braced for the worst.
“So is this what prisons will be like after Re-Evolution?” Angel asked, holding my hand. “With the collars and everything?” She rubbed the one around her neck, its green LED blinking every two seconds.
“I guess so,” I said, resisting the urge to tug at my own collar. “I guess they have these things rigged up to shock us if we try to escape. They probably have tracers in them too.” Which was why we hadn’t done an up-and-away as soon as we got out here.
“How come they’ll still have prisons, after half of everyone is dead?” Nudge asked. “I thought people would quit fighting for stuff. I thought the future people would be perfect. If they’re perfect, they won’t go around committing crimes, will they?”
“There,” I said. “Decades of psycho logic picked apart in three seconds by an eleven-year-old. Take that, modern science!”
And speaking of modern science, I was about to be confronted by one of its marvels. Or disasters. All depends on your point of view.
“Max.”
I turned quickly at the too-familiar voice. And there I was, pretty as heck, brown eyes, a few freckles, fashion challenged, and a bad attitude. Max II.
“Gosh,” I said. “It’s like looking in a mirror.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Except I’ve had a bath recently.”
“Touché. So, me, how’s tricks?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Selling Girl Scout cookies,” I said. “Want some? The Samoas are terrific.”
Max II started walking next to us, and we kept pace with the crowd, moving in a big oval around the barren yard. I stayed on guard, in case she suddenly attacked me.
“Baa,” Nudge bleated. “Baaa.”
I laughed, and Max II looked at me. “How can you laugh?” She gestured angrily at the walls, the guard towers, the armed Flyboys that stood around like remote-controlled puppets.
“Well, she baaed like a sheep,” I said. “It was pretty funny.” I patted Nudge’s head. “Especially with her lamby hair. Maybe I should call her Lamby from now on.”
Nudge grinned, and Max II got angrier. “Don’t you realize what’s going on? Where we are?”
“Uh, a honking big castle of evil in Germany?” I offered. “I’ve narrowed it down that far.”
Max II glanced around, as if making sure we weren’t overheard. Since we were shoulder to shoulder with a couple hundred other people, it was kind of a wasted gesture.
“This is the last stopping place,” she said under her breath, not looking at me. “Look around. We’re all rejects. They were trying to build an army out of us, but then they got the Flyboys to work. Now we’re obsolete. And every day, a bunch of us disappear.”
I studied her. “I’m sorry-did I miss something? Last time I saw you, you were trying to kill me. Are we friends now? Did I miss the memo? Now you’re clueing me in on the sitch?”
“If you’re against them, then we’re on the same side,” Max II said firmly.
She could have totally been lying, of course. In fact, it was safest to assume that she was. But her words were all too likely to be the truth.
“How long have you been here?” I asked her.
She looked away. “Since Florida. They…were really mad that I let you beat me.”
“You didn’t let me do squat,” I said.
Sighing, she gave a brief nod. “I was supposed to win. I was supposed to finish you off. They never counted on you winning. And then you didn’t kill me. It was awful.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, feeling fresh anger ignite. “I’ll try not to humiliate you by letting you live next time.”
Max II looked at me sadly, and it really was creepy; so much like looking in a mirror that I felt my face try to assume the same expression, so we’d match.
“There won’t be a next time,” she said. “I’m telling you, this is the last stop. They brought us here to kill us.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” Max II said, agitated. “We’re all slated to die. Every day, more of us disappear. When I first came here, this yard was so full, we had to take shifts. There were thousands of us. Now this is all that’s left.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“With this many of us, I guess we have until…maybe tomorrow,” she said, looking around, mentally calculating.
Okay, this was not sounding good. I thought we’d have a couple days to regroup, find a way out of this. If Max II wasn’t lying, then I needed to step up our time frame in a big way. If Max II was lying, I still had no reason to want to hang around.
We continued to shuffle in big circles, and now both Nudge and Total were baaing occasionally. I was deep in thought, trying to come up with one of my typically brilliant plans, when a mutant bumped into me for a split second, then moved away.
It left something in my hand.
A piece of paper.
Very, very surreptitiously, I unfolded it and glanced down. It was a note, and it said: Fang on his way with flock. Says it better not be a joke.
Inside me, a hard knot of tension that I hadn’t even known I had seemed to unravel. Oh, God. Fang was coming. I would have been more suspicious, but the “it had better not be a joke” thing could only have come from him.
Fang was on the way. With Iggy and Gazzy. We would all be together again.
“Max? What’s wrong?” Nudge looked at me with concern. “You’re crying.”
I touched my cheek to find that I was crying, tears streaking down my face. I wiped them away on my sleeve and snuffled. I was too happy to speak for a moment.
“Fang’s coming to help us,” I said under my breath, looking straight ahead. “He’s on his way.”
We all exercised in the Yard of Despair for another half hour. My mind was spinning-knowing Fang was on his way had given me a jolt of adrenaline. I wondered when he had left. I wondered if I would be able to bear it if Fang’s message was all another “test,” if it wasn’t real.
On the other hand, sometimes a happy delusion is better than grim reality.
In the meantime, I took baby steps behind the mutant in front of me, holding Angel’s hand, feeling Total’s little side brushing against my leg from time to time.
And I started watching and listening more intently. I’d thought the mutants were silent, but now I began to pick up on things they were saying so softly that the words almost got lost in the dry shuffling noise of their boots against the grit.
I tapped Nudge’s hand and nodded my head at the crowd. Angel looked up at me, feeling my intention, and started paying attention also.
Like a prison, the mutants were murmuring, as softly as the wind. Unfair. Lied to us. So many of us gone. Don’t want to disappear. Don’t want to be retired. What to do? There are so many of them. Too many of them. This is a prison. A prison of death. Unfair. I did nothing wrong. Except exist.
I moved slowly through the crowd, listening to the murmurs, the messages. Angel was picking up on their thoughts. I saw her blue eyes become troubled with her new knowledge.
By the time a strident electronic buzzer told us to go back inside, I had formed a semiclear picture of the group’s emotions. They didn’t want this to happen to them-what had happened to their fellow inmates. They wished they could change things. Some of them were really angry and wanted to fight, but they didn’t know how. I guessed their fighting instincts had been engineered out of them. Mostly, they were confused and disorganized.
Which is where a-ahem-leader would come in.
My plans were starting to percolate as I marched with the others back into the fantasy world of mad scientists, and that plus the knowledge that Fang was on his way made me almost cheerful.
Until three Flyboys stepped in front of me, Angel, Nudge, Ari, and Total, pointing guns at us.
I groaned. “What now?”
“You come with us,” they intoned, as if one.
“Why?” I asked belligerently.
“Becuss I want to talk to you,” said our old pal ter Borcht, stepping out from behind them. “Vun last time.”
We were prodded through long, winding stone corridors in the bowels of the castle, occasionally tripping on the uneven stone floor. I felt as though I’d been chilly for days and rubbed Angel’s and Nudge’s arms to help them keep warm in the dank chill.
“I hate this guy,” Ari muttered, keeping his head down.
“There’s a club,” I told him. “The Haters of ter Borcht Club. Have you gotten your badge yet?”
Finally we were pushed into a-come on, you can guess-yes: a white, sterile-looking lablike room filled with tables holding schmancy, no doubt expensive science equipment that I longed to start whacking with a baseball bat.
Once we were in, the doors slammed shut behind us, and several Flyboys stood in front of them, guns ready.
“The meeting of the Haters of ter Borcht Club will now come to order,” I murmured. Nudge swallowed a snort, and Angel projected a grin into my head. Can you do anything with him? I sent her in a directed thought.
No, came her regretful reply. I get stuff from him-awful, scary, disgusting stuff, but I can’t seem to send anything in.
Which messed up Plan A.
“So!” said ter Borcht, coming toward us. “I vass verry disappointed dat you are not dead by now!”
“Vee feel de same vay about you!” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.
His eyes narrowed. Really, sometimes I impress even me.
“But I don’t tink I vill haf to vait dat much longer,” he said. “Maybe by dinner, yah? In de meantime, some people vant to talk to you.”
“This oughtta be good,” I whispered.
“Five bucks says they’re scientists,” Total whispered back.
“No kidding.”
The doors swung open behind us, and a team of five people walked in. They were Chinese? I wasn’t sure.
“Tsk,” said Total. “Last season’s white lab coats. So tacky.”
“How can you tell?” I asked, not bothering to lower my voice.
“This year’s has smaller pockets and wider lapels. Their coats are so…I don’t know. Revenge of the Nerds?”
The five Asian whitecoats looked confused, and ter Borcht practically had steam coming out his ears.
“Enuff!” he snapped, clapping his hands together hard. “Dey vill ask you qvestions. You vill answer. Are ve clear?”
“Clear as pea soup!” I said.
If ter Borcht could have hit me, he would have. I guess he didn’t want to do it in front of the Clean Team.
Instead, purple in the face, he stalked behind his desk and sat down, angrily shuffling papers. The Clean Team came closer, looking at us curiously, as if we were a zoo exhibit. Gee, I haven’t felt like that before.
We stayed quiet, but inside I was getting more and more tense. I could take all five of these yahoos out by myself, I thought. And ter Borcht too, as a bonus. Not to mention the Flyboy guards, guns and all. What stopped me? My collar. For all I knew, all he had to do was press a button, and I would drop to the ground, electrocuted.
The Asian scientists talked softly among themselves. I remembered hearing that some country had wanted to buy us, to use as weapons somehow. I know, I know, it sounds totally loony, a child wouldn’t believe it, but you have no idea how incredibly stupid the war guys can be.
Slowly the whitecoats walked around me, Nudge, and Angel, seeming to marvel at how incredibly lifelike we were. Total they ignored completely. When they looked at Ari, they couldn’t disguise their dismay. I’d gotten so used to his appearance that it didn’t register on me anymore. Ari didn’t look human, didn’t look like an Eraser. He just looked like a mistake.
His face flushed as he caught their expressions, and I felt really sorry for him. He’d gone from being a cute three-year-old kid to being a hulking patchwork monster within four short years. He knew what he looked like, knew he was dying, and he didn’t understand why any of it had happened.
“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” I told the whitecoats, and they almost jumped when I spoke, staring at me with new curiosity.
“Ah, hallo,” one guy said in heavily accented English. “We will ask you some questions, okay?”
I rolled my eyes, and they murmured excitedly among themselves.
“You have a name, yes?” he said, pen ready over his clipboard.
“Yes,” I said. “My name is seven-five-nine-nine-three-nine-ex-dash-one. Junior.” I heard ter Borcht hiss over at his desk, but he stayed out of it.
The whitecoat looked at me in confusion, then turned to Nudge. “What is your name?”
Nudge thought. “Jessica,” she decided. “Jessica Miranda Alicia Tangerine Butterfly.” She looked pleased with her name, and smiled at me.
The whitecoats murmured among themselves again, and I heard one of them whisper, “Butterfly?”
They turned to Angel. “We will call you Little One,” the leader said, obviously deciding to dispense with the whole confusing name thing.
“Okay,” Angel said agreeably. “I’ll call you Guy in a White Lab Coat.” He frowned.
“That can be his Indian name,” I suggested.
One of the other ones spoke up. “Tell us about your sense of direction. How does it work?” They all looked at me expectantly.
“Well, it’s like I have a GPS inside me,” I told them. “One of the talking ones. I tell it where I want to go, and it tells me, Go twenty miles, turn left, take Exit Ninety-four, and so on. It can be pretty bossy, frankly.”
Their eyes widened. “Really?” said one.
“No, you idiot,” I said in disgust. “I don’t know how it works. I just know it has an unfailing ability to point me in the opposite direction of a bunch of boneheads.”
Now they looked a little irritated. I gave them another, say, five minutes before they cracked and this interview came to an exciting end.
“How high can you fly?” one asked abruptly.
“I’m not sure. Let me check my tummy altimeter.” I looked down and pulled up my sweatshirt a couple inches. “That’s funny. It was here this morning….”
“As high as a plane?” Guy in a White Lab Coat snapped.
“Higher,” said Nudge. They whirled on her.
“Higher than a plane?” one asked eagerly.
Nudge nodded confidently. “Yep. We can go so high that we can’t even hear the rubber band making the little propeller go around-thwip, thwip, thwip.” She made a circling motion with one finger. She frowned. “You meant a toy plane, right?”
Ter Borcht exploded to his feet. “Enuff! You vill get novere vis dese failures!”
“Now, now, Borchy,” I said. “These nice people came all this way to talk to us. They know we can fly really high. They know we can always find our way, even in the dark. They know we can go faster than, like, a hundred miles an hour. I’m sure they want to know more about us.” Let’s just dangle a carrot and see what they do, I thought. It would be my little science experiment.
The five whitecoats were busy scribbling down these tidbits. Ter Borcht, looking furious, sat down heavily.
“You know, Borchy,” I said in a loud whisper, “you might want to lay off the fried foods.” I patted my stomach, then pointed to his much, much bigger one. I winked at him and then faced the questioners seriously. “I guess you guys also know that we need lots of fuel to keep going. Every two hours. Stuff like milkshakes, doughnuts, chicken nuggets, steak, french fries, uh…”
“Hamburgers,” said Angel. “And carrot cake and pastrami and, um, French bread and-”
“Waffles,” said Nudge. “And baked potatoes with cheese and bacon. And more bacon by itself. And peanut butter sandwiches and Snickers bars and root beer an’-”
“Hoagies,” said Ari in his rusty voice. They looked at him, startled, as if they hadn’t figured him capable of speech.
Then the five whitecoats huddled and talked excitedly among themselves while I wiggled my eyebrows at my flock and got hopeful about a major snack headed our way.
“You don’t need to eat,” ter Borcht said more calmly. “You are dying soon anyvay.”
The head whitecoat went over to him and talked, and ter Borcht started looking angry again. I heard him say, “No! It’s too late.”
“Why can’t you get into their heads?” I whispered very softly to Angel. “Make ’em see ants everywhere or something.”
“I don’t know,” Angel said, disappointed. “I just feel…shut out. It’s like I start to get in and then I get pushed out again.”
“Now I’m really hungry,” Nudge whispered.
“Me too,” said Ari.
“Me three,” whispered Total. “I’m ready to eat one of them.”
The rest of us made “eew” faces, but then the door to the lab opened, and everyone turned to look.
It was Mom. And frankly, she didn’t look that happy to see me.
Mom-Marian Janssen-greeted the Chinese scientists warmly, so I figured they were offering her a big chunk of change to buy us as weapons.
“Are you finding out the information you need?” she asked. Ter Borcht snorted loudly over at his desk, and she cast him a glance.
“Are they cooperating?” Marian asked the room in general.
“What do you think?” I asked, just as Guy in a White Lab Coat said, “No.”
Marian took out a PDA. “I told you I had much of this information, but I understood that you wanted to interview them yourselves. Now, what do you need to know?”
“How fast can they fly?” asked one.
Marian clicked her PDA. “Max, here,” she said, gesturing to me, “has exceeded two hundred miles an hour, straight on, and upward of two hundred sixty miles an hour in a steep dive.”
The scientists looked impressed. I started to feel an icy chill creep down my back.
“How high can they fly?” another one asked.
“Max has been documented at altitudes of approximately thirty-one thousand feet for short periods of time. Her oxygen consumption increased appropriately but created no hardship. Her normal cruising altitude is usually between fifteen thousand and twenty-two thousand feet.”
Again the scientists looked impressed and made notes. One entered things into a calculator, then whispered results to the others.
I felt Nudge’s and Angel’s eyes on me, but I had a sinking feeling inside and didn’t want to look at them. I was betting that Spy Mom had gotten all this information from my chip, the one I’d had Dr. Martinez take out.
The head guy looked at me speculatively. “How much weight can they carry?”
“We believe they can carry up to four-fifths of their own body weight for periods of up to an hour,” said Marian. “And one-half of their body weight almost indefinitely.”
Like our backpacks, for example.
“How much body fat do they have?” asked one of them. “Do they swim well?”
I decided to keep my mouth shut about Angel’s ability to breathe under water.
“We believe they have normal swimming abilities but with greatly increased endurance,” said Marian, cool as a polar bear’s nose. “Their body fat is extremely low. Max is five-eight but weighs barely a hundred pounds. Of that weight, extremely little is fat or bone. Mostly she’s made of muscle.”
She’s made of muscle. Like I was a kit that had been put together.
Okay, I get it. Shut up.
“But they can swim? They don’t sink?” asked one.
Marian shook her head. “Their bones are extremely light and porous, filled with tiny air pockets. In addition to their lungs, they have peripheral air sacs along each side. They don’t sink.”
“Okay, this is stupid,” I said in a bored tone. “There’s no point in discussing this-except that it shows how clearly you need to get a life-because there’s no way we’re going to be weapons for anyone.”
“That’s right,” said Nudge. “I’m not carrying bombs or assassinating anyone!”
That’s right. We have standards, missy!
“You’ll do what we tell you,” said Marian chillingly. “I’m sure we can find some way to motivate you.”
Instantly I thought that if they were hurting one of the others, I would do just about anything to stop it.
Again, information better kept to myself.
“I have to tell you, we don’t work cheap,” I told the Chinese scientists. “We’ll need serious bling, big-screen TVs, vacations in Hawaii, and the best cheeseburgers that money can buy. For starters.”
They nodded eagerly, thrilled at my giving in, which, frankly, was pathetic. I mean, don’t they have cynics in China? Clearly these guys were not the brightest crayons in the box.
“Okay, enough!” the Director snapped. Turning to the scientists, she said, “We can get you any other information you need. In the meantime, we’re going to work on a serious attitude adjustment.”
“Basically, I have two speeds,” I told them. “Hostile or smart-aleck. Your choice.”
Ignoring me, Mom ushered the whitecoats out the door.
“That wasn’t clever,” she said, turning back to me. “Your survival depends on your extreme cooperation.”
“Dere iss no survival!” ter Borcht said angrily, standing up. “Dey are dead!”
She ignored him too.
“You were designed to be very smart, Max,” she told me. “We electrically stimulated your synaptic nerve endings while your brain was developing.”
“And yet I still can’t program my TiVo,” I said.
I thought I heard Total stifle a snort, but I didn’t look down.
“It’s time to start using your smarts,” the Director went on tightly. “Dr. ter Borcht is not the only one who wants you dead. Working for the Chinese is your one opportunity to continue living.”
I stared at her in amazement. “How do you even live with yourself?” I said, genuinely dumbfounded. “You’re willing to sell children to a foreign government so they can use us as weapons, possibly against other Americans. I don’t get it. Were you hiding behind a door on morals and ethics day? Then you have the gall to call yourself my mother? You couldn’t mother someone if they shot five gallons of estrogen into your veins! What about their mothers?” I waved at the flock. “Please tell me their mothers aren’t half as lame as you!”
“Their mothers were nobodies,” Marian said. “Donor eggs. Lab workers, techs, anyone we found. That was the point-that we could create a superrace out of anything. Out of trash,” she said meanly.
I heard blood rushing through the veins in my head. “Well, you’re right there,” I said. “Because we are a superrace. And I did come from trash.”
The Director clapped her hands, and the Flyboys at the door snapped to attention. I felt Ari and the others straighten up, go on higher alert, waiting to see how badly this situation would devolve. Which it was guaranteed to do.
“You’re a child, Max,” she said, obviously trying to control her anger. “Which makes it unsurprising that you can’t see the big picture. You’re still putting yourself at the center of the universe. It’s time you found out you’re just a small speck in the big scheme of things.”
“Which means what?” I demanded. “That I’m nothing? That I’m not a person? That you can do anything you want to me and it’s okay? You’re so full of it! But you’re wrong. I know that I do matter. I am important. And you’re a pathetic, cold, pointless wastoid who’s going to grow old alone and die, then roast in hell forever.”
I have to say, that sounded dang good, considering I don’t even know if I believe in hell. I do believe in hateful rhymes-with-witches, though, and I had one standing right here who was glaring sparks at me.
“This is what I mean,” she said. “Your childish insults don’t affect me. Your useless anger doesn’t affect me. You’ll end up doing what I say or you will die. It’s that simple.”
“That’s one of the many, many differences between you and me,” I snarled. “I have enough smarts to know that it’s never that simple. And I can make this more complicated than you could possibly imagine.” I put real menace into my voice, leaning forward threateningly and clenching my fists. Her eyes flickered.
“See, you don’t know squat about me, Mom,” I went on icily. “You have no idea what I’m capable of. Just because you made me doesn’t mean you know what I can do, what I’ve done. And here’s a news flash: My chip is gone. So you can take your spyware and shove it.”
Her glance quickly shot to my wrist.
I dropped my voice and stared into her eyes. I could tell she was trying hard not to look away. I was so furious I could have cheerfully ripped her head off. “But you’re going to find out, Mom,” I said very softly. “And it’s going to give you nightmares for the rest of your wasted life.”
Oh, my God, I was so badass. It was all I could do to not give a mwa ha ha ha!
The Director clenched her teeth and visibly controlled some shallow breaths. Finally she spoke. “You’re wasting your time, Max,” she said. “You can’t hurt me.”
I grinned evilly, and she flinched for a split second, then made her face expressionless.
“Yes, Mom,” I whispered. “I really can.”
I’m sure some of you get sent to your rooms sometimes by your parents. All I have to say is, the next time it happens and you’re lying there all mad thinking about how hard your life is, just picture me standing next to you, ready to smack you upside the head. When I get sent to my room, it’s in a freaking dungeon! With rats!
Plus, how many of your parents chain you to the wall? I’m betting not that many. Okay, maybe some. I don’t know how regular families work. But probably not many, am I right?
“Yeah, you showed her,” Total muttered, licking his paw where his shackle was chafing it.
I made a face at him. “God, my mom’s such a witch.”
“We’ve been in worse places, in worse situations,” Nudge said.
“For all we know a PetSmart truck is pulling up outside, unloading dog crates,” I said gloomily, unwilling to be comforted.
The speakers wired to the walls crackled to life, and I groaned as more multi-culti propaganda began to assault our ears.
I inched over toward Nudge and Angel. My chain let me sit between them, and I unfolded my wings and shook them out. Then I carefully wrapped my wings around Nudge and Angel, encasing them in a warm, feathery cocoon big enough to hold all of us. Total couldn’t be left out, so he dragged his chain over and crawled beneath my wings too.
I looked over at Ari. He was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, so he wasn’t part of the feathery fun fest.
It was quiet and dim here; the stones were cold under my jeans, and I could feel a chill starting to seep into my skin. Another hour or two and we would be miserable with cold. How long would it take Fang to get here? How could he even get here?
Total pricked his ears and raised his head slightly. Looking into the shadows, I saw a tall shape moving toward us. In an instant I had recognized the gait, the height, the body language. Jeb. He was like really spicy Mexican food-kept coming back on ya.
I didn’t have the energy for more sparring.
When he was close enough, I said, “Please tell me that icebox was kidding about being my mother.”
He knelt in front of us, and I gathered the younger ones more closely under my wings.
“The Director is a brilliant woman with a global vision,” Jeb said.
“Yeah, a deranged global vision,” I said sourly.
“She’s a remarkable, gifted scientist.”
“Why can’t she use her powers for good instead of evil? Like, cure cancer or something. And no, killing everyone who has cancer does not count as a cure.”
“Dr. Janssen is an ambitious, talented political strategist,” Jeb said. “She could very well end up running the world. One day she might be the most powerful person on Earth. As her daughter, you would be in a position of unimaginable advantage.”
“Except that I would have changed my name and dyed my hair and would be living incognito somewhere to avoid the embarrassment of having a ruthless, power-crazy Dr. Frankenstein for a mother,” I pointed out.
“Even if she were the most powerful person in the world, and being her daughter would give you almost unlimited power too?” Jeb asked.
I made a face. “If I had that much power, the first thing I would do is slam her into jail.”
Jeb just looked at me. “What else would you do?”
“Put her in jail,” I repeated. “Plus all the others who lent a hand to this hateful Goldfinger plan of world domination. Plus, I would say that all wars would be fought only on foot with nothing more than swords. No guns, no missiles, no bombs. Only swords.” I looked up, warming to the idea of World Emperor Max. “And I would seize all the offshore hidden bank accounts of companies and people who had contributed to ruining the environment. With that money, I would make sure that health care and education were available to everyone for free.”
I felt Nudge and Angel smile against my shoulders, and I sat up straighter. “Plus, housing and food for everyone. Companies that polluted would be shut down and banished. People in the government who ignored the environment and started wars would be booted out of office and made to work in the fields. And-”
Jeb held up his hand and stopped me. “You just passed another test, Max.”
“Excellent,” I said, irritated all over again. “Then get us out of this stinking dungeon.”
“What test did she pass?” Nudge asked, raising her head a little.
Jeb turned to her. “She’s incorruptible.”
Bully for me. “At least by power,” I said. “You haven’t tried Snickers bars or cute shoes.”
Jeb smiled at me. It still hurt my heart when he did that.
“You don’t want the Director to be your mother no matter what kind of power you would get from it.”
“I don’t want the Director to be my mother because she’s an insane witch,” I said.
His smile widened, and I barely suppressed an urge to punch him.
“The Director isn’t your mother.”
Had I heard right? Was he just snowing me? I felt Nudge and Angel stiffen, and Ari clumsily sat up and rubbed his eyes. He blinked at seeing Jeb but didn’t say anything.
“What do you mean?” I said suspiciously. “Is this one of your chain yanks? I mean, for God’s sake, make up your mind!”
“The Director, Marian Janssen, engineered your design and development,” Jeb explained. “She oversaw the whole project. To her, that must feel like motherhood.”
“Oh, my God, and here I thought she couldn’t get any more pathetic.” Relief was flooding through me that such a horrible, crazy person truly had not passed on her DNA to me.
“She didn’t donate an egg?” I needed to be sure.
Jeb shook his head. “She shares no genetic material with you.”
I dropped my head. “I’m really, really glad,” I muttered. Of course, it left me with my same old “mystery guest” for a mother, but I swear, anyone would have been better than that freak show. I couldn’t believe Jeb had just waltzed in here and told me. He, more than anyone else, should have known how huge it was, finding out who my mother was. Or wasn’t.
I looked up at him. “Well? Any other bombs you want to drop before you leave? Any more fake directions you want to steer me in?”
Jeb hesitated. “Do you remember in New York, when you killed Ari, and I yelled that you had killed your brother?”
I looked over warily and saw Ari tense, staring at Jeb.
“Yeah. Lucky for you he’s hard to kill.”
Ari shot me a brief smile.
“He is your brother, Max,” said Jeb. “At least, your half brother.”
I couldn’t breathe. What did…what…
“I’m your father, Max,” said Jeb simply.
Everything faded away except Jeb’s face.
I couldn’t even hear the propaganda blaring from the speakers anymore. I felt the damp heat of Nudge’s hand tighten in mine, felt my feathers brushing the cold stone floor, but all I could do was stare at Jeb while his words rattled senselessly inside my brain.
My eyes flicked back to Ari. He didn’t look upset-just stunned.
“What are you talking about?” I said, unwilling to have the rug pulled out from under me, which, face it, seems to be these guys’ main source of yuks.
“I’m your father, Max,” Jeb repeated. “I wasn’t married to your mother, but we decided together to create you.”
I couldn’t even look at him. For years and years I had wished that he was my dad. In my mind, without telling anyone, I’d pretended he was. It was what I’d wanted more than anything in the world. Then he’d disappeared and I’d grieved for him with a broken heart.
Then he’d turned up again-surprise!-evil. Which had broken my heart even worse than the first time.
Now Jeb was saying that he really was my dad. That my wishes had come true. Except I no longer trusted him, no longer admired him, no longer loved him.
“Hmm,” I said.
He reached out and patted my knee briefly. “I know it’s an awful lot to take in, especially given the past six months. All I can say is that one day I hope to be able to explain it all to you, Max. You deserve that, and so much more. But know that I’m your father. And I know this sounds impossible, but I’m asking you to trust me as your dad.”
“That really can’t happen at this point,” I said slowly.
He nodded. “I understand. But I’m asking you to try.”
“Hmm.”
“Half brother?” Ari asked.
Jeb turned to him. “Yes. You had different mothers. Your mother was my wife, who died shortly after you were born.”
Ari was absorbing this when I asked, “But I was born before Ari. Who was my mother?”
“Your mother and I had no personal relationship,” said Jeb slowly. “But we agreed on what to do; we agreed that we wanted to be part of your beginning, part of your heritage. It was a monumental, stunning idea, that we-”
“I don’t want to hear this!” I cried, folding in my wings. I was ready to kill him, drawing out this moment like torture. “I don’t care about all the ‘beautiful science,’ la la la! You tell me who my mother is before I yank your eyes out!”
Jeb looked at me, unperturbed. “She’s a good woman, and you remind me of her.”
I stood up, trembling with rage and tension. “You…better…tell…me.”
My hands were clenched into fists. Angel and Nudge stood up too, behind me. Total was growling low in his throat. For such a small dog, he could sound like a rottweiler when he wanted to.
“Your mother is Dr. Martinez. Valencia Martinez. You met her in Arizona.”
I almost fell over backward. For a second I thought I was going to faint-I got tunnel vision and my skin felt icy. There was no sound in the empty, echoing dungeon.
A dozen images flashed through my mind: her smiling face, her warm brown eyes, the smell of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. Her and Ella watching me, hands shading their eyes, as I took off. Eating meals together. She was the most real momlike mom I’d ever imagined.
“Dr. Martinez…is my…mother?” I whispered hoarsely.
He nodded seriously. “She was an incredibly important research scientist, specializing in avian genetics. But once you were a viable embryo, she was locked out of the process. Not by me, I might add. She went back to Arizona, brokenhearted. But she donated the egg that became you.”
I frowned, my mind racing, looking for loopholes. I had to make absolutely sure, because if I got my hopes up and then was wrong, I didn’t think I’d ever recover. “Dr. Martinez is Hispanic,” I said. “I don’t look anything like her.”
“You have her eyes,” said Jeb.
Well, I did have brown eyes.
“And I was blond as a little boy, like you are. So was Ari, if you remember.”
I glanced at Ari, who was now, you know, wolf colored. He had been blond.
I focused my laser gaze on Jeb and made my voice as hard as an ice pick. “If this is an elaborate test, something else I’m supposed to pass somehow, you will never see the light of day again.”
Jeb’s mouth quirked on one side. “This, I’m happy to say, is not a test. Out of everything I’ve ever told you, it is the most true. Valencia Martinez is your mother. And I’m your father.”
I looked at him, still furious about everything that had happened since he’d disappeared on us more than two years ago. I wanted to hurt him one-tenth as much as he’d hurt me and the rest of the flock.
“I don’t have a father,” I said coldly, and was both rewarded by and guilty about the flare of pain I saw in his eyes. I looked away and, still trembling with emotion, turned and went as far as my chain would let me.
When Jeb spoke, he used the Voice, the one I’d gotten so used to hearing inside my head, the one I hadn’t heard since he’d told me it was him.
“Max-you’re still here to save the world. That’s what you were born for, that’s the point of everything, all of this. No one else can do it. I believe that with all my heart. This isn’t a test, and I’m not snowing you. You have to do this. Nothing in the history of mankind has ever been more important. Nothing. Ever. Ever.”
There was silence for a few moments. It was all too much for me to take in-like getting the most amazing, fabulous, unbelievable Christmas presents ever, and yet having them cause you an incredible amount of rage and pain.
“What about our parents?” Angel asked. “Me and the Gasman. Nudge, Fang. Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” Jeb said, standing up. “Some of them were never identified by name-only number. And we’ve lost track of others. Their roles were over so quickly.”
“What about that information we found,” Nudge asked, “where we saw some names and addresses and stuff?”
Jeb shook his head. “I don’t know what you found, but I’d guess you misinterpreted it, or maybe it was planted by the Director. I’ve been finding out about many things she’s done that I didn’t know about.”
Oh, I’m so sure, I thought.
Looking over at Nudge and Angel, I saw their faces fall, the light of hope fading in their eyes. I put my arms around them, and Total wedged himself among our feet.
“I’m sorry, guys,” I said, holding them close. “But parents are totally overrated. We’re all the family we need. Right?”
“We’ve just…spent so much time trying to find out,” Nudge said softly.
Angel nodded. “I want to know, for sure.”
“Someday we’ll know the whole truth,” I said. “But for right now, I’m just glad I have you guys. You’re my family.”
They gave me sad smiles and nodded.
I looked over my shoulder at Jeb. “You can go now. Unless you have any more heartbreaking news you’d like to deliver.”
He looked regretful, and I automatically tensed up.
“You’re supposed to come see the rally,” he said. “And then there’s a final test.”
He sounded weird and didn’t meet my eyes. I’m sure all of you will join me in leaping to the conclusion that something bad was about to happen.
And you would be right.
You are reading Fang’s Blog. Welcome!
Date: Already Too Late!
You are visitor number: Our stat thing quit working. Got overloaded. But you’re way up there, believe me.
Let’s Stick Together, People!
Okay, folks, we’re on the East Coast somewhere between Miami and Eastport, Maine. Don’t want to be more specific than that. We’re on our way to rejoin Max. Don’t have time to rehash all the details, but let’s just say that I’ve decided a flock ought to stick together while they can.
We’ve gotten more mail than we can handle, so thanks to everyone who’s supporting us. I can only reply to a few people, so I’ll do that here, and then we have to split.
To Advon777 in Utah: I don’t know where you got a missile launcher, and I don’t want to know. But even though it might come in handy, it still seems like a really bad idea for you to be messing with it. Maybe you should just put it back where you got it.
To Felicite StarLight in Milan, Italy: Thanks for the offer, but I really don’t have time for a girlfriend right now. I found your ideas…creative, but this is not a good time.
To JamesL in Ontario: Thanks, man. I appreciate your support. We need all the help we can get, but waiting till you get out of second grade is fine.
To PDM1223: Excellent! That’s exactly what I’m talking about! Tell people what’s going on, spread the message, organize protests and stuff. Picket the gargantuan pharmco companies like Itex. I hacked into their files and found that the companies Stellah Corp, Dywestra, Mofongo Research, DelaneyMinkerPrince, and a bunch of others are all Itex under different names in different countries. Stellah Corp is in England, not far from you. See the whole list under Appendix F, for Fatheads. Everyone, read this guy’s mail! He totally has a handle on what I mean, what needs to happen.
To everyone in the Seattle area: There’s a protest organized for Saturday. Check the schedule that BigBoyBlue has made (thanks, BBB!), attached as Appendix G, for the time and place. Folks in other cities, check the schedule. There’s a tidal wave of stuff going on. Thanks to everyone who’s making this happen! We’re gonna save the world! We’re the last hope!
-Fang
Fang typed the last words, then sat back and rubbed his eyes. It was two in the morning.
He, Iggy, and the Gasman were set up to sneak onto a freight plane at 6:10 a.m. The two other boys were asleep, curled up on sacks of seed corn in the corner of this cavernous hangar. Fang had offered to take the whole watch. He had to get caught up with his blog, and also, they seemed much more wiped than he was. They’d flown across the whole United States, with stops only for quick rests and meals on the run.
He shut down the computer, wanting to save the battery. He felt safer without its soft blue glow, with the middle-of-the-night blackness settling around him.
It was hard to believe what he was reading on the blog, the swelling underground movement that kids were organizing all around the world. Even in places like Kazakhstan and Taiwan, kids were getting mad, getting determined. Fang had heard from kids who seemed willing to die for what they believed in. He hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.
He leaned back against a sack of corn, listening to the others’ breathing. It was torture to wait until six like this, and then the whole flight across the ocean, and then look for Max somewhere in Germany. He’d give anything to be able to snap his fingers and be there. Unfortunately, that was one skill the mad scientists had forgotten to program in.
In the meantime, he was totally stoked about his blog, the one that Max hadn’t taken seriously. He really thought these kids could make a difference. More important, they thought so too.
He put his hands behind his neck and stretched, then permitted himself a small grin. Max had always teased that the flock had voted Fang “Most Likely to Become a Cult Leader.”
Well, maybe he had. And maybe that was the only thing that could save everybody.
“Is this a pep rally?” Total asked in a low voice as we slogged our way up countless stone steps. “With cheerleaders? I love cheerleaders.”
“I don’t think it’s a pep rally,” I said under my breath. “Somehow I don’t think the Mad Whitecoat team is squaring off against the Fightin’ Freedom Lovers.”
“What kind of final test?” Nudge asked, sounding apprehensive.
I sighed. “Something asinine, probably life threatening, and guaranteed to make me angry every time I remember it for the rest of my life.”
Angel looked up at me, worried. “Do you think Fang will get here soon?”
I nodded. “I’m sure he’s on his way.”
But he probably wouldn’t make it in time to spare me this idiocy. Instinctively I began taking deep breaths, super-oxygenating my blood. My knuckles were scarred from the last little skirmish I’d had with the flying can openers, and I cracked them loudly, already bracing myself to feel pain and to ignore it.
The rally was taking place out in the wimpy winter sunlight of the prison yard. The sky and air felt as gray as the lifeless dirt beneath our boots. I thought about Dr. Martinez and how she might actually be my mom. Outside of the flock, she and Ella-Ella was my half sister!-were my favorite people in the world. I wished I could take several hours to just enjoy thinking about it. Now I might die before I ever saw them again.
The remaining ranks of mutants and wannabes were lined up neatly in the yard. There were fewer of them than before, and I remembered what Max II had said about how they disappeared every day.
Was this going to be another fight with Max II? Did they really want me to kill her this time? I prayed no one was sick enough to make me fight Ari again, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
“Wait here,” commanded a Flyboy in a metallic voice.
Sure, I thought, because telling me what to do always works so well.
Several Flyboys surrounded us, pointing guns. The guns seemed to be welded to their arms, part of them. An improvement over the last ones-now they couldn’t drop their weapons or have them taken away. Those guys just kept innovating! That’s progress, people!
“Welcome, everyone,” said my ex-mom, walking out onto a platform. Her image immediately popped up on half a dozen movie theater-sized screens positioned all around the yard.
She opened her arms in greeting, and then I noticed the viewing stands full of people over to one side. Everything about them said “government wanks,” and I figured they were here to be impressed, flattered, and bribed, not necessarily in that order.
“Welcome, honored representatives of…” Then she launched into a geographical who’s who of countries all around the world. Pretty much every country I’d heard of, and a bunch I hadn’t, seemed to be thinking about jumping on the Insane Apocalypse bandwagon.
“And now, prepare yourselves to view many of our most stunning achievements,” said the Director, pressing a button that opened an eight-foot metal-clad door.
Great, I thought. My day’s about to get worse.
Which, come to think of it, was the first of their stunning achievements, actually.
“Okay, they got me,” Total whispered. “I am one stunned little dog.”
Angel, Nudge, and I nodded silently, our eyes wide at what was happening in front of us.
I won’t describe the scariest things we saw that morning, ’cause it would depress the heck out of you. Let’s just say that if these scientists had been using their brilliance for good instead of evil, cars would run off water vapor and leave fresh compost behind them; no one would be hungry; no one would be ill; all buildings would be earthquake-, bomb-, and flood-proof; and the world’s entire economy would have collapsed and been replaced by one based on the value of chocolate.
However, since they were evil, basically we saw stuff that would fuel the world’s nightmares for the next five hundred years.
“Max, if you survive your final test, can you steal one of those magic outfits for me?” Angel asked, leaning against me.
“I’ll try to get one for each of us,” I replied, and then I realized what she’d said. “Hey! ‘If’?”
She looked at me seriously, and I hoped she hadn’t developed a way to predict the future. “We’re way outnumbered, and I don’t think they’re gonna fight fair.”
I held her hand tightly. “They never do. But I will survive, and I will steal you one of those magic suits.”
She smiled.
“Here you see our patented process for growing replacement limbs,” said the Director. A man walked out, reached over, and detached his arm from the shoulder. He showed that it was made of flesh and bone, and was attached to him by an electronic interface that looked suspiciously like an iPod data port.
“Way gross,” said Nudge, and we all nodded.
“We made the replica arm out of biogenetic matrix,” the Director explained.
“Is that from Duncan Hines?” I whispered.
“It functions exactly like the limb he lost-and even better,” the Director went on. “We laced titanium cells into the bone material, strengthening its stress resistance by four hundred percent.”
“And guaranteeing him hassles at airport security stations all over the world,” I murmured.
“Next we have one of our most successful human hybrids,” said Dr. Janssen.
A woman walked out, totally normal looking. Did she have wings? Was she an Eraser?
“Mara here had Panthera pardus genetic material grafted into her human DNA. It’s given her some unique qualities.”
“What’s that?” Angel whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Something feline,” said Ari.
He was right. Up on the platform, the woman opened her mouth to reveal humongous razor-sharp fangs, which looked even more lethal than the typical Eraser’s. Then she crouched down, sprang up as if made of rubber, and landed fifteen feet above the platform, clinging to a tall light stand.
Everyone who hadn’t gasped when they saw her fangs quit trying to be suave and went ahead and gasped.
The Director smiled and motioned her down. “As usual, the leopard genes were expressed in some unexpected ways.”
Meaning they still didn’t know what the heck they were doing.
Mara turned around. The Director unzipped her jumpsuit at the back, and an excited murmur raced through the crowd. Ol’ Mara had leopard spots trailing down her spine.
“Guess she can’t change that,” I said, and Total snickered.
“And Mara is just the beginning,” said the Director.
Growing up in the lab at the School, where we were surrounded by dog crates filled with mix ’n’ match genetic experiments, we’d seen pretty much any combination of two living things that you could imagine, and probably a thousand that you couldn’t. Virtually all of them had been unsuccessful, or “nonviable,” as the whitecoats said. A tiny percentage made it past the embryo stage, and a few struggled along for a year or two before their horrific deficits caught up with them. As far as I knew, we, the flock, had been by far the most successful hybrid. Us and the Erasers. Even the Erasers only lived about six years or so. We were ancient compared with them.
Today we were seeing some successful hybrids, like Mara. After SpotGirl, the Director trotted out two people who could control the color of their skin just by thinking about it.
“Can they turn blue?” Nudge asked, fascinated. “Or purple?”
“Who knows?” I said, and then my stomach twisted as the people onstage literally turned camouflage right in front of us. I thought about what the military people of various countries could do with that and felt ill.
We saw people who could increase their height by about four inches, just by controlling their muscles and skeletal structures with their minds.
“Combine that with the skin-changing types, and you’ve got a recipe for a bank robber deluxe,” I said. “They’d never be recognized.”
We saw people with hard, scaly, bulletproof skin, or GatorGuys, as we called them. We saw a woman who could scream at pitches too high for any of us to hear but had Total writhing in pain on the ground, biting his lip to keep from shrieking swear words. Her voice could break glass, which isn’t totally unusual, but it could also shatter metal, which seemed new and different-and completely horrifying.
“Think of what a successful nag she would be,” I said to Ari, and he tried to smile but couldn’t. His skin seemed to have a grayish cast, and he’d been unusually quiet for several hours. I wondered if he was near his end.
“These things all look like soldiers,” said Nudge. “Like they’d be good in a war, you know?”
“They look all warry because they were built to be an army,” I told her.
“Well, that would do it,” she said.
“Don’t these people ever think about anything else?” Total muttered in disgust. “There’s more to life than world domination, you know.”
“Max? What’s that?” Angel asked, pointing.
I looked. Up on the stage the Director seemed to have a remote control in her hand. Then I saw a small swarm of glittery copper-colored things circling around her. Were they bugs? Had they started engineering bugs? Oh, great. Just what the world needed.
The Director motioned to someone. He opened a large plastic box, and hundreds of beautiful butterflies flew out. It was a weird jolt of color in this gray landscape. Well, besides the camo people, that is.
The glittery things weren’t bugs.
They were nano-bullets, with their own internal guidance systems.
Within seconds they had locked on to the butterflies, and moments after that, all that was left were bits of shimmery wings, floating to the ground.
Nudge, Angel, Ari, Total, and I stared at one another in horror.
“What do they have against butterflies?” Nudge demanded, outraged.
“I think the butterflies were just an example,” I said. “I think the point is that those things are tiny and deadly and can find the proverbial needle in the biogenetically modified haystack.”
Total shook his head, then lay down and covered his eyes with his paws. “It’s all too much,” he moaned. “I’m too sensitive for this.”
“And now, we have saved the best for last,” the Director boomed over the loudspeakers. “I give you…Generation Omega!”
A boy came out. He looked about my age but was maybe a couple inches shorter than I was, and heavier by about forty pounds. He had pale brown hair and silvery blue eyes, and was wearing one of the magic suits, which could change color and form at a verbal command.
“Oh, they gave him the cute gene,” said Nudge, and Angel giggled.
The Director beamed at the boy. He looked out at the crowd without expression.
“Omega here is our pinnacle achievement,” said the Director, “the result of more than six decades of research. He is an unqualified success and far surpasses any hybrid made before.”
“Ouch,” said Total.
“In Omega lie our hopes and dreams for the utopia of the future,” the Director gushed. “He is the key to the hyperevolved human of tomorrow. He’s immune to virtually every disease known and has superacute reflexes and greatly increased strength. He tests off the charts of every intelligence scale devised. In addition, he has superior memory retention and reaction time. He’s truly a superman.”
“Plus, he cooks like a dream and makes darling floral arrangements in his spare time,” I muttered.
“And he’s here to demonstrate just how tough he is, how supremely suited he is to forge a new human existence in our brand-new world.”
“Brand-new but full of dead people and empty buildings,” I said.
“To begin, Omega will vanquish an obsolete but somewhat successful human-avian hybrid,” said the Director. “And that will be a symbol for how everything will go from here on.”
I stiffened and stared at her.
The Director looked back at me.
“Right, Max?” she said.
Have I mentioned how much I can’t stand despotic psychopaths? Why, yes, Max, you have. Like, a couple hundred times.
Well, it’s for reasons like this.
“Maximum Ride and Omega will fight to the death,” said the Director merrily, as if announcing the next croquet competition.
“Max?” Nudge whispered, appalled.
Ari grabbed my arm and stepped halfway in front of me, to protect me. I smiled at him and shook my head slightly, and he stepped back with an angry frown.
“That guy wants to kill you, Max,” said Angel, sounding scared. “His whole life, he’s been trained to kill you.”
Of course. Because God forbid he should have any kind of normal existence, watching TV, eating Twinkies, and so on.
Like a school of washed-out-gray fish, the mutants all turned to stare at me. They parted, as if Moses were waving his staff over them, and then Omega did a high double somersault off the stage, landing perfectly on the gray grit with a barely heard crunch.
“Angel, if you can, this would be a good time to mess with his mind,” I murmured.
“On it,” she said, but she didn’t sound hopeful.
My heart had kicked into high gear, my fists were clenched, and adrenaline was whipping like white lightning through my veins.
From the end of the mutant corridor, Omega started coming at me, doing one handspring after another, leaping forward onto his hands, flipping over, then landing lightly, a human circle. He could move incredibly fast, and within seconds his booted feet landed crisply right in front of me.
Omega snapped upright, and for a second, those silvery eyes looked coldly into mine.
Before he knew what was happening, I had cocked my arm back and slammed my fist into his left eye as hard as I could.
I can move pretty fast too, when I want.
He staggered back but used the energy from my punch to fuel a spinning snap kick that would have caught me right in the neck if I weren’t a great fighter and the fastest bird kid around.
Instead, I was ready, and I grabbed the heel of his boot and whipped it to the left, yanking him off balance so that he landed hard on his back in the dirt. Hoo-yah.
In a split second he sprang up again. I blocked his hard elbow jab to my head, but his other hand knifed into my side, right over my kidney. The pain was immediate and stunning; it hurt so much that I wanted to sink to my knees and throw up.
But I hadn’t been raised that way.
It’s just pain, I told myself. Pain is merely a message, and you can ignore the message.
So I stayed on my feet, sucked in a breath, and smacked my open palm against his ear with all my force. His face crumpled, and his mouth opened in a brief, silent scream. I hoped I’d ruptured his eardrum. But all too quickly, his face straightened out and he lunged at me again, elbowing me in the ribs and then chopping the back of my neck with the edge of his hand.
Pain is merely a message. Right now I was holding all calls.
I managed to spin and kick him hard in the side, then followed with a snap kick right into his spine. If he’d been an ordinary human, it would have broken his back. But Omega just staggered, instantly righted himself, and came roaring back full force.
Usually I try not to kill people, ’cause I’m just a softie that way. Even Ari-I only killed him by accident. But I decided that since my ex-mom had said this was a fight to the death, in a way I kind of had permission to kill this weiner. And yes, I’m worried about the state of my soul and karma and blah blah blah, but right now I wanted to live, to come out of this battle alive. So I would deal with my karma later. And if I came back as a roach in the next life, well, at least I’d survive the nuclear holocaust.
I did a spinning kick where I literally looked like a propeller, both feet off the ground, scissoring at Omega with my powerful legs. One kick caught him hard in his back, and he lurched forward. As he tried to block the next one and grab my boot, I slammed right into the back of his perfect little head and knocked him to the ground.
In seconds I had sprung onto his back, grabbed one arm behind him, and yanked hard, up and to the left.
His arm popped out of its socket with a stomach-churning
thunk sound.
“Maybe you should change your name to Theta,” I hissed into his ear as he gasped, facedown in the dirt. “Or Epsilon.”
Okay, now, the shoulder dislocation, I have to tell you, stopped most people cold.
“My…name…is…Omega,” he ground out.
Then he jerked upward, throwing me off as his shoulder joint popped loudly back into place. He grimaced, then came after me again, murder in his bloodshot, silvery eyes.
You are reading Fang’s Blog. Welcome!
Date: Already Too Late!
You are visitor number: Thing is still broken.
Watch Out, Guys, Here We Come
It’s about five a.m. We should be sneaking on board the cargo plane soon. I’ve let the others sleep as much as they can-and of course now I’m so wiped I can’t think straight. I’ll try to grab some zzz’s on the plane. Once it’s up in the air, we’re golden. We’re probably the only people in the world who don’t worry about plane crashes. If something happens to this plane and we start going down, I’ll be like, later!
I hope Max is okay. Any of you guys-if you’re around Lendeheim, Germany, go to the castle there and raise heck, okay?
-Fang
A slight sound made Fang quit typing. He listened. It wasn’t dawn yet-through the hangar windows he could see the glow of the amber safety lights outside. Maybe the loading guys had shown up early.
And maybe Fang had been born yesterday and was a gullible numskull.
Silently he closed his laptop and stashed it in his backpack. Then he slid over to the others and touched their legs. They woke instantly, with no sound, the way they’d been trained.
The Gasman looked at Fang. Fang put a finger to his lips, and the Gasman nodded.
Fang reached over and tapped the back of Iggy’s hand twice.
Iggy sat up carefully and nodded also.
Then their world imploded: The enormous metal doors at the hangar entrance opened with earsplitting creaks; the glass door by the hangar office shattered inward; and two high windows on the other side broke as Flyboys began crawling through like angry, angry wasps.
“Get outside!” Fang ordered the boys. “Iggy, open doors right in front, twelve o’clock!”
The trick to having obedient, unquestioning children was to have death be the other option, Fang thought as he raced toward the oncoming Flyboys.
There were dozens of them, some running in, weapons ready; some airborne, swooping down like big butt-ugly insects. They opened fire: Bullets began ricocheting off the metal hangar walls, off the pallet movers and Bobcats.
Fang flew straight through the crowd of Flyboys. Several of them landed blows on him, making him suck in his breath, but he stayed aloft and made it outside. Instantly a bullet grazed his shoulder. Hissing, he glanced down, saw it was just a surface wound, and raced upward. There! He saw the Gasman and Iggy also outside. Excellent. Now, if they could all meet up and somehow lose these suckers…somehow?
Fang darted here and there, keeping his wings in close, the way the hawks had. He banked and maneuvered tightly, able to move much faster and more nimbly than the Flyboys.
He could still hear shots from inside the hangar, and he had a moment to think, They might not want to be shooting so close to that plane’s gas tank, then boom! As in-BOOM! The metal roof of the hangar blew upward, and a massive fireball boiled out. Jagged chunks of metal flew everywhere, and Fang saw the Gasman take a hot shard across his face. The Gasman gasped and put one hand to his cheek but still managed to punch both of his feet into a Flyboy’s chest, knocking it sideways.
The Flyboys weren’t great at flying sideways, and before that one could right itself, it crashed to the ground.
Bits of other exploded Flyboys rained around them. Fang swooped down, grabbed a fallen weapon, then rocketed back into the air. He tried to fire the gun, took a second to find the safety, then let rip a hail of bullets at a line of maybe ten Flyboys. It effectively mowed them down, and Fang seriously questioned Max’s “no guns” rule.
“You will die today,” several Flyboys promised in their weird metallic voices. “We are here to kill you and the others. Max and the rest of your flock are already dead. Now it is your turn.”
Fang felt a cold jolt, then dismissed it. Max wasn’t dead. He would know, somehow. He would have felt it. The world still felt the same to him; therefore, Max was still in it.
“We are here to kill you,” the Flyboys intoned all together.
“Then you’re out of luck,” Fang snarled, and opened fire again. Another ten Flyboys dropped, hitting the ground with somewhat sickening crunching and splatting sounds.
“You will not die easily,” yet another Flyboy droned.
“You got that right.” Fang had never seen so many Flyboys before-there must have been three hundred? More? The Gasman and Iggy were still holding their own-the Flyboys seemed to be trying to capture them instead of kill them outright. Because what would be the fun of that? Fang thought.
“First we will dismember you,” said a Flyboy. “We will post the pictures on your blog. To show what happens when you resist. Then we will make you recant everything you have said on your blog.”
Fang grinned, continuing to bob and weave up and down by fifteen-foot drops. “After you dismember me? Did you fail basic human biology?”
“We will torture you,” the Flyboys pressed on.
“I don’t think so,” said Fang, and mowed them down. God! The whole firing-a-weapon thing was amazing! It just worked so incredibly well! It was so efficient! What did Max have against guns, anyway?
“We will show the world how you take back everything you said.” A new, unmowed-down crop of Flyboys continued the same old song.
“Here’s a tip,” Fang advised them. “If you show me being tortured and then taking everything back, people might catch on. They might actually guess that I didn’t do it voluntarily.”
“We will torture you,” the Flyboys insisted.
“Okay, bored now,” Fang said, and pulled the trigger. Only to have nothing happen. Maybe the gun was empty. In an instant he’d swooped and tried to pluck another gun from a crumpled Flyboy body. That gun was attached to its Flyboy, though, so Fang ended up being yanked to the ground. He dropped it, ran a bit to get away from ground-based Flyboys, then finally found an unattached gun.
Spinning, he fired, catching all the Flyboys directly behind him. Then he changed angles and shot up into the sky, watching with satisfaction as several Flyboys started flying lopsidedly, smoke streaming off them.
“Hey!” shouted the Gasman from above. “Watch that thing!” Fang looked up to see the Gasman pointing to two holes in his jeans-Fang had shot right through his pants, but amazingly hadn’t hit him.
“My bad!” Fang yelled. The drawback with guns, besides the fact that you might hit members of your own flock, was that they didn’t take out hundreds of bad guys all at once. He needed something more massive. If Iggy or the Gasman had had any bombs, they would have used them by now. It was up to Fang.
He leaped into the chilly air again, shooting more carefully at Flyboys. When he was about five hundred feet up, he saw a broad expanse of gray with a rim of fire at its far edge.
The ocean. With the sun breaking at the horizon.
“It is your time to die,” droned a full squadron of Flyboys, following him.
“I am one of many!” Fang shouted, heading east, away from the hangar. “I am one of many! You have no idea!”
I was braced and ready to launch into my next move against Omega when I heard the Director’s voice boom, “Wait!”
I wasn’t about to start listening to her now, and I sprang forward, fingers stiff to shatter his trachea-
But the metal collar around my neck zapped me with a nerve-shattering dose of electricity, and I dropped to the ground like a chunk of cement.
A while back, I’d been hit with a bunch of skull-exploding headaches that had left me weak and nauseated; this was a lot like that. When my scrambled brain finally cleared and my synapses began firing again, I was on my back with my worried miniflock p
eering down at me.
I shot to my feet as fast as I could, a little off balance, to see Omega standing to one side, ramrod straight like a soldier, not looking at me.
I shot Nudge a questioning glance, and she shrugged.
“You have anticipated my commands,” said the Director, sounding unthrilled.
I didn’t start it, lady, I was going to say, but then I remembered that, technically, I had, so I kept my mouth shut.
“The first part of the battle will be a test of speed,” said the Director.
The crowd of lemmings parted in anticipation of a race.
“Begin where you are,” intoned the Director. “Run to the opposite castle wall and back, four times. May the better man win.”
I gritted my teeth. The Director was a sexist pig on top of all her other faults.
The wall was about six hundred yards away. There and back, four times.
Someone scraped a line in the dirt with his boot, and Omega and I stood on it. What else could I do? I was shook up and barfy from the electric shock. I didn’t think being a conscientious objector would go over well at this point.
Omega seemed unruffled, cool, and not like he’d just popped his shoulder back into place.
“You can’t win,” he said calmly, not looking at me. “No human can run faster than I can.”
“Bite me,” I replied, and leaned over to get a good start. “Also, watch my dust!”
“Go!” the Director cried, and we were off.
Well. I must say, Omega was a speedy little sucker, I’ll give him that. He hit the opposite wall several seconds ahead of me, and I was dang fast, and taller than he was. By our third lap, he had about a quarter length on me. Neither one of us was breathing that hard-he was Superboy, and I was designed to be able to breathe in very thin air, way up high.
But he had no emotion-he wasn’t angry, didn’t seem determined to win at all costs, didn’t seem invested in beating me.
Which made three more differences between us.
Finally we were on the last lap. He had almost a three-quarter-length lead on me. The crowd was silent-no one dared cheer. The only sounds were our breathing and the pounding of our boots on the ground.
When Omega was about thirty yards away from whipping my butt, I suddenly dove forward, pulled out my wings, and went airborne. I thought I heard the crowd gasp.
Keeping very low to avoid the electrified net at the top of the castle walls, which Max II had warned us about, I streaked toward the finish, my wings working smoothly. I tilted as I passed Superboy, so I wouldn’t whap the back of his head with a wing-tempting though it was.
Then I shot across the finish line, ten feet ahead of him, and ran to a somewhat clumsy halt, trying not to careen into the gray sea of spectators.
I stood up, breathing hard, and punched my fist in the air. “Max, one!”
“Cheating disqualifies you!” The Director said, looking mad.
“I didn’t cheat! Did you say ‘no flying’? Did anyone say ‘no flying’? No.”
“It was a race on the ground!”
“Again, said who? Just because Wonderlad is stuck to the ground doesn’t mean I have to be. I’ve evolved past being stuck to the ground.”
Now the Director looked really mad. The sea of indistinct faces murmured; feet shifted on the ground. I folded my wings in, aware of dozens of eyes watching me.
“You are disqualified,” the Director said shortly. “Omega is the winner.”
“Whatever,” I said, pushing down my disgust. I shot Omega a sideways glance. “Does she tie your shoes for you too?”
His perfect eyebrows drew together, but he didn’t speak.
Nudge and Angel took my hands and stood close, and Ari came up behind me, as if to protect my back. I felt very comforted by their being there. I would have felt even better if I had seen Fang standing with me, ready to back me up.
“Next will be a contest of strength,” said the Director. “Omega’s muscles are approximately four hundred percent stronger and denser than a regular boy’s. Bring out the weights!”
I am weirdly, wickedly strong, and not just for a girl, not just for my age. I’m stronger than just about any grown-up, man or woman. We all are. But I didn’t have the bulk that Superboy did, and in general I was designed to be smart and fast, and to fly well. Not to be able to compete in a tractor pull.
It really was a tractor pull, in a way. Heavy weights were loaded onto a wooden platform. We were each given a thick chain. The idea was literally to pull the platform across the dirt. We were even until about five hundred pounds, then Superboy started to edge past me. I could barely budge six hundred and fifty pounds-he pulled it three feet.
They piled on more weight-eight hundred pounds. I couldn’t believe I was going to lose a strength contest to a boy. There was no way.
I gritted my teeth, cracked my knuckles, and put the chain over my already bruised shoulder. Omega and I looked at each other, side by side. When the Director blew sharply on her whistle, I put my head down, planted my feet in the dirt, and pulled with all my might. Sweat broke out on my forehead. It felt as though the chain were wearing a furrow in my shoulder. Breath hissed through my clenched teeth.
I made the platform tremble a little, moved it maybe a quarter of an inch.
Omega hauled it almost a foot.
When he was pronounced the winner, he looked at me with those weird, expressionless eyes. I didn’t think he was a robot, like the Flyboys, but I did wonder if his emotions had been designed out of him. Of course, with a guy, how could I tell? Ha ha!
Anyway.
You might not know this about me, but I hate losing. I’m not a good sport, I’m not gracious in defeat, and I hated Omega for making me lose. I was gonna get him. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know when, but I knew I would.
“The next contest will be intelligence.” The Director looked smug.
I almost groaned. Of course I’m really sharp, really bright. But I’d had almost no schooling. What I knew I’d learned either from television or from Jeb. I knew a lot about how to fight, how to survive. I knew a bit about some places, like Egypt and Mongolia, from National Geographic. But I didn’t have much book learning at all. The couple of months I’d spent at that hellhole of a school in Virginia had shown me that compared with most kids my age, I was a village idiot. Just in terms of book learning. Not about stuff that mattered.
“First question,” said the Director. The crowd turned to watch me and Omega in our duel of wits. “The castle walls are eighteen feet high, seven feet thick, and one thousand, twenty-seven feet long. One cubic yard of stone and mortar weighs one thousand, one hundred twenty pounds, or exactly half a ton. How many tons of stone and mortar are contained within the walls?”
Omega looked off into the distance, obviously starting to calculate.
“You are kidding me,” I said. “Why would I ever need to know that?”
“Like, if you had to make repairs?” Nudge guessed.
“Couldn’t I just hire a wall repair company?” I asked.
“It’s a simple calculation,” said the Director, still smug.
“Yeah? Let’s see you do it.”
Her cheeks flushed, but she stood tall. “Are you conceding?”
“I’m not conceding anything,” I said. “I’m just saying it’s completely pointless. How about I just pick a lock instead? Me and Omega. Let’s see who can do it faster.”
“Two thousand, three hundred ninety-six point three three tons,” said Omega.
“Okay, smartyboots, how about if you’re flying at eighteen thousand feet at, say, a hundred and forty miles an hour,” I said. “You’re facing a southwest wind of about seven knots. How long would it take you to fly from Philadelphia to Billings, Montana?”
Omega frowned as he started to work the math.
“Are you saying you know how to make that calculation?” the Director asked.
“I’m saying I’m smart enough to know that I’ll get there when I get there!” I almost shouted. “The questions themselves are dumb: They don’t have anything to do with being able to survive.”
“In the new world they do, Max,” said the Director. “Maybe not in your world. But your world is over.”
I was having a really bad day. These tests were a waste of time. I was expecting to get jolted with a lightning bolt of electricity at any moment. I was losing to a boy. Still remaining in this contest was a fight to the death.
And Fang still wasn’t here.
I knew he hadn’t had enough time to get here. There was a reasonable hope that he could be here within the next six hours or so. But he wasn’t here now, and I was reaching my breaking point.
I looked at Nudge and Angel. Nudge seemed very tense, and her fingers were curling at her sides. Angel had that scary intent expression she got right before she convinced a stranger to do something. All of a sudden, I remembered that Dr. Martinez was my real mom. Probably. I’d been lied to so many times that it was hard for me to accept anything as fact. But she might have been my real mom.
I wanted to see her. And my sister, Ella.
I needed to get out of here.
Next to Angel, one of the mutants frowned, looking confused. She blinked. I saw Angel stare at her, concentrating. Uh-oh. Then the mutant leaned to the one next to her and whispered something so softly I couldn’t hear it.
Angel looked pleased, and my stomach knotted up.
“What’s going on, sweetie?” I whispered through clenched teeth.
“Things are going to get exciting,” Angel said with satisfaction.
“Define ‘exciting,’” I said cautiously.
Angel thought. “Everyone freaking out?” she offered.
“Uh…in a good way?”
“In an exciting way,” she said, watching the crowd.
“Now we come to the definitive battle,” the Director said into the loudspeaker.
Right then, all heck broke loose. The best way to describe it would be to say that suddenly everyone drank crazy juice and went haywire. Mutants spontaneously began fighting with one another. Some of them had clearly been trained to be soldiers, but there was quite a bit of catfight face-slapping and shoving going on too.
“People!” the Director yelled into her loudspeaker. “People! What is going on?”
“They don’t want to be here anymore,” Angel said, watching them.
“We don’t want to be here anymore!” the crowd yelled.
“They’re tired of being treated like numbers and experiments,” Angel explained.
“We’re not numbers!” I heard angry voices cry. “We’re not experiments!”
“Hmm,” I said, scanning the area, looking for ways to escape.
“They feel like pawns,” Angel went on.
“We’re not just pawns!” the mutants yelled.
“They’re people too, even if they were just cloned and created,” Angel said, stepping closer to me and taking my hand.
“We’re people too!” voices shouted. “We’re people too!”
“O-kaaay,” I said, and quickly gathered Nudge, Angel, Ari, and Total. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll make our way to the wall and go along it till we see a way to break out.” They nodded and we began to move through the crowd, dodging flying fists and angry shoving.
“Robots!” yelled the Director, and everywhere, the robots stood at attention and armed their weapons. “Get this crowd under control!”
Yeah, because it wasn’t bad enough, with everyone fighting. Now we had to get the bloodthirsty robots involved. And they had guns.
We continued to push through the crowd, trying to reach a castle wall. I saw Flyboys starting to wade into the crowd of angry, fighting people.
“Why are they fighting each other?” Nudge asked, close to my shoulder. “They should all gang up on the Flyboys.”
Angel looked around. “Oh. Yeah.”
She stood still for a minute, her brow furrowed with mighty concentration. Then, one by one, all around us, mutants slowed down in their fight, looked around, then turned to attack the Flyboys.
I grabbed Angel’s hand and started to push through the crowd again, keeping low. “You are a scary, scary child, you know that?” I asked her.
She smiled.
I almost walked right into a thick line of Flyboys. Looking up, I saw solemn Eraser faces with glowing red robot eyes.
“You must stop,” intoned one.
“I disagree.” In an instant I launched myself at it, trying to knock it off balance. It was the second-to-last model, and I knocked its weapon out of its hands.
But not fast enough to avoid another Flyboy clocking me in the head with the butt of its gun. I staggered as a starburst of pain exploded behind my ear. A second later, warm blood started running down into my collar.
My flock sprang into action. Nudge jumped high in the air, whipping out her wings to hover below the electrified net but above the fray. Total chomped down hard on a Flyboy’s ankle, and I could hear his fangs hit the metal below the thin layer of skin.
“The base of their spines!” I heard a voice call from behind.
I spun to see Jeb wading through the crowd toward us, dodging punches and kicks. “Hit the Flyboys at the base of their spines,” he said. “It’s a design flaw.”
I had zero reason to trust him, despite all his yapping about being my dad, blah blah blah. Still, I had nothing to lose. Wheeling, I escaped my Flyboy and whipped around in back of another one. As hard as I could, I aimed a flying sideways kick with both feet right at its tailbone area.
Crack! Its legs crumpled, and it snapped forward from the hips, unable to move. A couple seconds later, the red glow in its eyes faded.
Huh. Whadaya know.
Then it was like a flashback to when I was eleven years old, fighting side by side with Jeb. He was the one who’d taught us to fight so well, to win at any cost. It was Jeb who’d taught us to never play fair, never telegraph our punches, always use any means to win a battle. Now, with him taking out Flyboys right next to me, it was just like those training days, like I was a little kid again, pretending he was my dad.
“Block it!” Jeb yelled, yanking me off memory lane. Instinctively I threw my arm up in time to block a Flyboy’s overhand punch.
“Nudge! Angel! Attack the base of their spines!” I shouted. “Snap them!”
The fight began to turn in our favor then. As long as we could get behind a Flyboy, we could take it out about 80 percent of the time, which was all we needed.
Some of the mutants, however, didn’t seem to have gotten Angel’s latest memo and were still fighting one another, and us too.
Behind me, Ari was using his enormous strength to literally toss smaller mutants over his head into the mosh pit of death that made up the castle courtyard. He saw me snap a Flyboy’s back, and he spun to do the same. The Flyboy managed to catch Ari with a hard punch under his jaw, and I saw his head jerk upward.
Roaring with fury, Ari righted himself and lunged at his attacker…only to sink to his knees slowly, a puzzled look on his face.
“Cover me!” I shouted at Nudge, Angel, and Total, and sprang to Ari’s side.
I grabbed him under one arm and tried to help him stand. I couldn’t get him up.
“Max?” he said, sounding confused.
“You hurt? You get shot? Where?” I demanded.
He looked down at his shirt and jacket. There were no spreading rosettes of blood. He shook his head. “I just…”
He glanced up at me, and there he was-seven-year-old Ari, the little kid who used to follow me around. I saw him there clearly in those eyes.
“I just…Oh, Max,” Ari said, and then he slumped against me, eyes still open, weight so heavy on me that I fell to my knees next to him. I stared at his face, shook his shoulder.
“Ari!” I said. “Ari! Come on, snap out of it! Please, Ari?”
All around us, the battle thrashed on, but Ari was silent.
“Ari?” Horrified, I pressed two fingers against his neck, feeling for a pulse.
Ari’s time had come. He had expired.
Right here, right now, in my arms.
Oh, God. I felt as if my breath, my spirit, had been knocked out of me. For several seconds I just stared numbly at Ari’s ruined face, his unseeing eyes. My throat was gripped tight with emotion, and I brushed my fingers over his eyelids, closing them.
This poor, poor kid. I hoped wherever he was, he was no longer in pain, no longer ugly, no longer unloved and unwanted. Hot tears sprang to my eyes, and I wanted to sob.
Swallowing hard a bunch of times, I looked up and saw that everyone around me was still engaged in a life-or-death battle. They had no time to help me, no time to acknowledge Ari’s death. A whistling noise next to my ear made me realize that I was still under attack myself-a Flyboy had just swung its weapon at me, trying to crush my skull.
Feeling helpless and furious, I gently lay Ari down in the dirt. “I’ll come get you,” I promised in a whisper. Then, enraged, I leaped up, grabbing the first Flyboy in my way. I twisted its neck as hard as I could. The Flyboy fell, and I moved on, smashing another in the back, dropping it like a sack of rotten groceries. Roaring with fury, I ripped the weapon from a downed Flyboy and swung it around my head, cracking it against three more robots, knocking them off balance, slowing them down so that Jeb and Nudge could take them out from behind.
Ari was dead, and for what? Why had this happened to him? Why had his life been seven years of pain and confusion and loneliness?
“Ari!” Jeb had finally seen his son. He rushed to Ari’s side and knelt next to him. Looking stunned, he gathered Ari’s hulking form and held him to his chest. “I’m so sorry.” I saw his mouth shape the words, though I couldn’t hear them. “I’m so sorry.” He bent over Ari’s form, mindless of his vulnerable position.
Then he looked up and caught my eye. His eyes were shiny with tears, which shocked me. He pitched his voice so I could hear him. “Omega can’t track things fast with his eyes.”
I waited for more, but that was it. I turned and whaled back into the fight, trying to accomplish the universal goal of every warrior everywhere: Get the other guy. Do not let him get you.
So big whoop: Omega couldn’t track things well. Thanks, Jeb! Any other tidbits of wisdom for me? Like “Omega has an off switch”?
Who knew where the heck Omega was, anyway? For all I knew he was up on the stage, getting a manicure.
Swinging my weapon like a baseball bat, I felt the satisfying but bone-jolting thwack! as it slammed into a Flyboy’s shoulder. It turned, and I swung at the base of its spine. Crack! Another Flyboy shortened to the height of a coffee table.
“She says we must fight.”
The quiet words spoken near my nonbloody ear made me wheel to face…Omega. He looked spick-and-span, as if he’d managed to sit this one out.
“You don’t have to do everything she tells you,” I said, still lunging and fending off Flyboys. The gun flew out of my hand.
Omega spoke to the Flyboys around us: “Stop. She is mine.”
Which made me even madder, if possible. “I’m…not…anyone’s!”
The fact that the Flyboys listened to him and moved on to other targets made me see red, and it wasn’t just the blood running into my eyes. Though of course that didn’t help.
“We must fight,” said Omega.
I was so tired of all the puppet masters pulling our strings.
“You can decide not to,” I told him firmly.
He frowned. “I don’t know how…to not.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” I muttered, then swung back and walloped him in the side of his head as hard as I could.
Ow ow ow! Something in my hand went crunch, as if I’d broken a small bone. Oh, my God, it hurt! I sucked in my breath and tried not to scream. Like a boy!
Omega staggered but caught himself and immediately spun into a snap kick at my knee. I dodged it and wheeled into a spinning side kick, which connected solidly with the top of Omega’s leg. Tucking my hurt hand against my body, I focused on kicks, aiming high at his head, bobbing and weaving to avoid his blows. He managed to block almost everything I threw at him, his silvery eyes following my movements calmly and precisely.
He can’t track things fast.
What did that mean?
As an experiment, I took my hurt hand and waved it quickly in front of his face, as if I were about to hit him from a bunch of different directions. Sure enough, his eyes couldn’t follow it, and he paused, as if to concentrate on it.
So I punched him with my other fist, a really hard blow right at his nose.
Apparently his perfect schnoz was not 400 percent stronger than the average nose, because it broke. Omega blinked and stepped back, looking startled, then blood started gushing from his nose. He touched it, alarmed.
“Head wounds always bleed a lot,” I told him.
Then I whipped my hand all around him, up and down, side to side, and again he tried hard to track it, as if he couldn’t help himself.
I jumped and landed a scissors kick against his neck, and he went down on his knees, coughing. Once more with the hand waving. It was like hypnotizing a cat. Then I clasped my hands together, wincing from the pain in my broken one, and gave Omega a powerful two-handed punch that sent him facedown into the dirt. Of course, hitting him with my injured hand hurt so much I almost shrieked and passed out right next to him.
But I held tough. Just barely. But enough.
I looked down at Omega, the superboy, the pinnacle of Itex’s achievement. I’d bested him because he couldn’t track things well with his eyes. I’d won because Jeb had told me about it. I looked up at the Director. She was staring at me with the pure, cold hatred of someone who’s been defeated by something she thought was inferior.
Well, that’s the breaks.
Omega was out cold but not dead. We were supposed to fight to the finish. If he’d gotten me on the ground, he would have killed me, poor sap. He didn’t know any better.
But I did. I could have given him a quick sideways kick at the base of his neck, which would have snapped his spine. Instead I walked away, heading back to where my half brother’s body lay.
Who’s the better man now, you idiot? I thought at the Director.
The electric net topping the castle walls could keep stuff in but not out, interestingly. I was pushing through the crowd, tossing off a quick punch or kick here and there, trying to get to Ari, when suddenly a large rock flew over the castle wall. It hit a mutant on the head, and she sat down abruptly.
I looked up. An actual arrow, flaming like in the movies, was flying overhead. It streaked right through the net and buried itself in the back of a Flyboy, who promptly caught fire. What else?
When humans catch fire, they run around screaming, or possibly remember to stop, drop, and roll. When a Flyboy catches fire, it just stands there looking stupid until it turns into a tall, flaming statue. Apparently, once a Flyboy is really aflame, its joints and pulleys quit working and it can’t move. Useful info I tucked away for future use.
More rocks began flying overhead.
Getting Ari would have to wait. I had the living ones to take care of now.
“Angel!” I shouted. “Nudge! Total! Stand next to the wall!” I hadn’t noticed Total in a while, and I was glad to see him bound out of the crowd toward me. He was limping, holding one paw up, but leaped into my arms and licked my face.
“Bleah. Blood,” he said, and quit licking. Bleah right back atcha, I thought.
“Who’s throwing the rocks?” Nudge asked, as we pressed against the wall.
“I don’t know,” I started to say, just as Angel said, “Kids.”
“What do you mean ‘kids’?” I asked. More rocks flew overhead, and several more flaming arrows.
“I think it’s kids out there,” Angel said. “It feels like kids.”
I watched as another large rock hit a Flyboy in the knees. The robot buckled, and then two mutants fell on it, punching it and pulling its hair.
“Kids or, like, cavemen?”
“Kids,” said Angel.
“Save the flock! Kill the Flyboys! Destroy Itex!”
My eyebrows lifted as the growing roar outside became more distinct. Slowly, the noise in the courtyard stilled, and the roar outside grew louder. More and more rocks, some as big as melons, and flaming arrows streaked over the walls.
“Save the flock! Kill the Flyboys! Destroy Itex!”
I looked at Nudge and Angel. “Wonder if they’re blog readers?”
“Chase them away!” the Director’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker. Her angry face appeared eight feet tall on the screens around the courtyard. Some of the screens were now broken, and all had dirt and blood splashed on them. They had probably cost a lot too.
“Chase them away!” the Director shouted again. “They are vermin! They are here to destroy you! Chase them away!”
As always, the Flyboys jumped to do her bidding without question. There were maybe sixty left, and as one they shot out their wings and took to the air.
“Uh,” said Nudge, watching.
Yes. Oops. No one had turned off the electric net. Sixty Flyboys rose quickly upward, and sixty Flyboys instantly shorted out when they hit the net. They fell to the ground in perfect unison.
“That was poor planning on her part,” Total observed, and I nodded.
Bam! Bam! Bam! I heard the squeal of an engine outside, and then bone-rattling thumps against the tall gates. The people outside were trying to drive a vehicle through, trying to break down the gates.
Westfield, England
The regional director of this School looked over the tops of his glasses. “Holloway? What’s that noise outside?”
His assistant moved to a window. A look of alarm passed over his face. “It seems to be some kind of demonstration, sir,” he said.
“Demonstration? What the devil do you mean?” The regional director moved to the window. What he saw made his mouth open in astonishment. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people were protesting outside the School’s gates. They were…they looked almost like children. But that didn’t make sense.
“Is this some antinuclear demonstration?” he asked Holloway. “Do they have signs? Perhaps we should call security.”
Holloway listened at the window. The roars outside became more distinct. “Save the flock! Destroy Itex! Save the world! Destroy Itex!”
The two men stared at each other. “How could they possibly know we’re an arm of Itex?” the regional director asked.
Crash! A softball-sized rock flew through their window, showering them with glass shards.
Now they could hear the chanting clearly:
“We want…what’s ours!
“You belong…behind bars!
“Itex is an evil giant!
“Us kids ain’t buyin’ it!”
The regional director looked at Holloway, who had several scratches from flying glass. “Call security.”
Martinslijn, Netherlands
Edda Engels looked up from her lab bench and listened. Odd sounds were coming in the window. She went to investigate, only to dodge a heavy glass bottle, tipped with a burning rag. Wha? Was that a Molotov cocktail?
Boom! It exploded just as Edda dove beneath her desk. What was going on? Outside, it sounded like hundreds, maybe more, were surrounding her lab. What were they saying?
“You’ve ruined our water and our air!
“You’re evil and you just don’t care!
“Fang is right: the time has come
“For us kids to claim our home!”
Who was Fang? Edda wondered. And more important, how could she get out of here? The fire was spreading.
Woetens, Australia
“What’s all that dust, then?” The chief operating officer of the Australian branch of DelaneyMinker peered out the window. Miles and miles of desert stretched away as far as she could see. On the horizon, a wide, low dust storm was coming at them.
“Hand me those binoculars, would you, Sam?” she asked her assistant.
Sam handed her the binoculars.
“Is it…School Day?” asked the COO. “Are we expecting field trips?”
Sam looked at her. “We don’t get field trips here. It’s a top-secret facility. Why?”
“Well, it looks like…children! On motorscooters, apparently. And some of those four-wheel thingies.”
“ATVs?” asked Sam. He took the binoculars and looked.
A line of small vehicles stretched for at least a mile. It did look like children. Was this some sort of nature club? He squinted and adjusted the focus slightly. They were carrying signs. He could almost make one out…
DELANEYMINKER = POLLUTING STINKER
And another one:
THE PLANET IS OURS! GET OUT!
“You may want to go into lockdown,” said Sam, sounding far calmer than he felt.
“Iggy!” Fang yelled. “Gasman! Follow me!” Wheeling through the sky, Fang worked his wings powerfully, racing across the gray ocean toward the horizon.
Risking a backward glance, he saw that Iggy and the Gasman were behind him and closing fast.
“Dive-bomb,” Fang said. “On my count.”
The Gasman looked down, frowned, then drew in a deep breath and nodded.
“Oh, God,” said Iggy. “Talk about cold…”
“We are here to destroy you,” said the Flyboys, sounding like an angry swarm of mechanized bees.
“One!” Fang called, heading away from shore as fast as he could. He hoped there was a steep drop-off along this part of the coast. “Two!”
“You will recant!” the Flyboys droned. “You will recant!”
“Three!” said Fang, and tucked his wings in tight against his body. He aimed himself downward, right at the water. From this high, going this fast, hitting the water was going to feel like hitting concrete. But it couldn’t be helped.
He heard the Gasman’s and Iggy’s jackets flapping as they accelerated downward.
“This is going to be bad!” Iggy called.
“Yep,” Fang agreed, his voice snatched away by the streaming wind.
“There is no escape!” droned the Flyboys, who were, of course, following them fast.
Yeah? thought Fang. This is true.
Smash!
Hitting the cold ocean was in fact a whole lot like hitting concrete, Fang decided, but he was so streamlined that he shot straight down like an arrow, spearing the water. It felt as if God had punched his face, but he was still alive and conscious.
He heard the impact of the Gasman and Iggy hitting the water but could barely see anything when he opened his eyes.
As the boys started to make their way up to the surface, their ears popping, they saw and felt hundreds and hundreds of Flyboys smashing into the water.
It turned out they could not swim.
It also turned out that water was not a good environment for their systems to function properly in. The electrical charges of the Flyboys shorting out actually made Fang’s skin tingle, and he motioned to the Gasman to get away, now! The Gasman grabbed Iggy, and they swam hard after Fang.
They bobbed to the surface about eighty feet away from where a showstopping lights-and-sparks display was taking place. The Flyboys couldn’t help themselves, even as they saw dozens of their colleagues exploding and shorting out in the water.
Some of them tried to backpedal, but their wings weren’t designed that way-and the Flyboys behind them just hit them and dragged them all down anyway.
“Awesome!” shouted the Gasman, punching his fist in the air. “Oh, Iggy, man, if you could only see this!”
“I hear it,” said Iggy happily. “I feel it. There’s nothing like the smell of the shorted closed-circuit system of an electric Frankenstein.”
“So, guys,” said Fang, treading water. “Good plan?”
“Excellent plan, dude,” said the Gasman, and Iggy held up his hand for a high five.
Fang slapped it, then they swam toward shore.
With a gigantic splintering, grinding noise, the enormous castle gates burst inward. What was left of the mutants hurried out of the way.
A giant yellow Humvee careened in through the gates, its front end considerably smashed.
The driver’s door popped open, and a teenage girl leaned out. “I just got my license!” she said excitedly in a heavy German accent.
Then hundreds of kids started pouring through the broken gates, only to stop and stare at the courtyard, littered with bodies and busted Flyboys.
Onstage, the Director was white-faced. Her order had effectively finished off the last of this batch of Flyboys. Maybe she had more stashed inside. At any rate, she turned and started hurrying toward the metal door that led back into the castle.
I tumbled Total into Angel’s arms and grabbed Nudge’s hand. “Come on!”
The two of us took off into the air-the Flyboys had shorted out the electric grid as well as themselves.
“Help me get her!” I told Nudge.
Just as the Director reached the metal door and was grabbing hold of the lever, Nudge and I dropped down on either side of her.
“Not so fast, Mom,” I snarled.
Nudge and I each grabbed the Director under an arm and took to the air.
She was no lightweight, but together we took her high, way over the castle. She was screaming in terror, looking down, kicking her feet, losing both of her sensible shoes.
“Put me down this instant!” she shouted.
I looked at her. “Or what? You’ll send me to my dungeon?”
She stared at me with contempt.
“Oh, did you see?” I said. “I defeated Superboy. But who knows? Maybe someday you can turn him into a real boy.”
“Omega was far superior to you,” the Director spat.
“And yet here I am, dragging your stupid butt across the sky, and there he is, doing a face-plant in the dirt,” I pointed out. “If by ‘superior,’ you mean totally inadequate in every way, then, yes, Omega is far superior.”
“What do you want?” the Director snapped. “Where are you taking me?”
“Mostly just up,” I said. “I do want some answers, though,”
“I’ll tell you nothing!”
I looked at her seriously, her stiff blond hair streaming out in back of her. “In that case, I’m going to drop you from way, way up here, and watch you go two dimensional. We call it ‘flock splatter art.’”
A look of genuine fear entered her cold eyes, which cheered me a little.
“What do you want to know?” she asked cautiously, trying not to look down.
“Who’s my real mom? And no, designing me doesn’t make you a mom.” I knew what Jeb had told me; I wanted confirmation.
“I. Don’t. Know.”
“Oops!” I let go of her, and she shrieked as she and Nudge started plummeting.
“I’ll tell you!” she screamed, looking up at me.
I swooped down and grabbed her again. “Now, you were saying…?”
White-faced, she swallowed and took some deep breaths. “A researcher. She studied birds. She offered to donate an egg. It isn’t important who she was.”
My heart leaped. “Her name?”
“I don’t remember. Wait!” she said, as my fingers loosened. “Something Hispanic. Hernandez? Martinez? Something like that.”
I could hardly breathe, and it wasn’t because we were at five thousand feet. Dr. Martinez really was my mother. I hugged the knowledge to me like a life jacket.
“You’re not the only successful hybrid, you know,” the Director said.
“Well, there’s darling Omega,” I admitted. “And Spot, the cat girl.”
“And me,” the Director said.
I whistled. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. You’re half…vulture? Hyena? Some kind of marine bottom-feeder?”
“Galapagos tortoise,” she said. “I’m one hundred and seven years old.”
“Huh. And you don’t look a day over a hundred and five,” I said.
She glared at me.
I looked down and saw that the castle was surrounded by German polizei cars. Today was over. Today had been saved. Maybe even the world?
“Bye,” I told her, and let go.
Nudge couldn’t hold her, and the Director spun downward, screaming in terror and surprise.
That isn’t you, Max, said the Voice.
The Voice! I hadn’t heard it in a while.
Why’s that, Jeb? I asked inside my head. Because you didn’t design me that way?
No, said the Voice. Because that’s not who you are as a person. No one designed it. It’s all you. You’re just not a killer. You’ve shown that again and again. And it makes me prouder than anything else about you.
I sighed. Yes, it’s true, I am pretty wonderful, I thought to the Voice. But deep down, where I hoped the Voice couldn’t hear me, I did feel a little proud, a little heart-warmed.
Talk about manipulation.
“Okay, let’s go get her,” I told Nudge, and we swooped down and caught the Director with a good two hundred feet to spare.
After it was all over but the shouting, my only desire was to streak toward home. But of course I was outvoted, three to one. Even when I claimed that each of their votes counted for only half a vote, they still outvoted me.
Within hours we were at their chosen destination,
“Let me see the screen,” Angel asked, leaning closer.
Yes, we were at a cyber café in France. Why France? The food! The cute shoes! The fact that Total could go into restaurants and grocery stores!
“Now I can’t see,” Total complained. He leaned forward on his paws on the table.
“Coffee!” said Nudge happily, slurping from her mug. “Looove it!”
“Please tell me that’s decaf,” I said.
The screen dinged, and there was Fang’s face. And Gazzy. And Iggy, all crowding around their computer back in the States.
Fang! It felt like years since I’d seen him, talked to him. In the past three days, every memory I’d ever had of him had played through my brain. In the dungeon, it was thinking about him that had kept me going. Then getting that note from the mutant in Lendeheim, saying he was coming-it had been one of the best moments of my life.
“Where the heck were you?” I demanded. “I thought you were on your way!”
“Little Flyboy complication,” he said, his voice sounding funny through the computer. “Did you know they can’t swim? They sink like rocks. They don’t like water at all.”
His solemn face, his eyes as familiar to me as my own, seemed to make my world straighten out again. I laughed, and everything in me felt whole and complete. I knew the flock would stay together now, no matter what.
“You guys stay put,” I said. “We’ll come to you.”
“You got it,” he said, and my heart melted.
“Bring me something from France!” Gazzy cried in the background.
“Okay,” I promised him.
“Me too!” Iggy put in. “Like, a French girl!”
I groaned. Can we say ‘sexist pig’ one more time?
But he was my sexist pig, and I would see them all soon. I couldn’t wait.
