“I don’t know,” I said. “Sometime.” I gave him a tiny smile and then took a running jump off the balcony. I snapped my wings out, feeling them catch the air, and I rose swiftly into the night, headed home.
CHAPTER 17
My head was full of Pietro, Pietro, Pietro the whole way home. His kiss. The way he smelled. How he had helped me, protected me from his father. The other half of my mind was totally focused on that bath. Oh, god. It felt like only seconds until I realized I was over the McCallum Complex. I did a slow left, checked the yard out, then came down quickly behind the big garbage dumpster, like usual.
Pietro’s life was full of light. Full of rich fabrics and polished wood and warm-colored lamps creating pools of comfort. As I walked toward the doors to the common room, I tried not to feel achingly bitter about my life. And my parents. And my life. And the lab rats. And my life.
Clete was waiting for me and pushed through the doors eagerly to meet me. He opened his mouth to speak but then noticed I looked different. His up-and-down examination of me felt quite different from Pietro’s. That memory brought a flush to my cheeks.
“Where have you been?” Clete asked. “What’s all this?” His hands gestured to my clothes, my clean hair, the huge, throbbing stitched-up wound on my face.
I searched, wondering how to explain what had felt like a dead-dream. Pietro’s house, his hands, the Chungs’ cutting a C into my cheek, and the only hot bath I could ever remember taking. But Clete cut me off.
I was just about to say that I would tell him later when he waved his hands again and blurted, “It doesn’t matter. Listen, Hawk—everyone’s gone!”
I looked through the big glass windows. The common room seemed completely empty. Smiling tiredly, I said, “Did you guys come up with a new exit? Are they hiding?” I was in no mood for this, but they didn’t understand that. They wanted to play hide-and-seek for real, have me try to find them and test out their new spots. I’d either have to play along or disappoint them by being too wiped for one of the few games they could play.
“No!” Clete said as I opened the glass door. “I mean they’re gone! The soldiers took them!”
I stopped and looked up into his face. Usually he spoke slowly and dully, like the way he moved. When someone said something funny, it took him minutes to smile. Now there was fear and outrage in his voice.
“This better not be a joke,” I warned him. “I will NOT think this is funny.”
“It’s not a joke!” he said. “You know how we all bugged out this morning?”
Had that been only this morning? It felt like five years had passed since then. I took a pain pill out of the bottle in my pocket and popped it open, dry-swallowing it.
“Yeah?”
“The others must have waited a couple hours, then surfaced,” Clete said. “But I—I fell asleep there, under the floor. I only woke up when I heard Calypso screaming. Then I heard heavy footsteps and Moke fighting back and Rain trying to get away.”
He looked anxiously into my face as if I would already have a plan in place, because that was my job—knowing what to do. But I had nothing. I sat down heavily in one of the school chairs at a table and put my aching head in my hands. The numbing shot had worn off, and my cheek strained against the stitches every time I swallowed, or spoke.
“What should we do, Hawk?” Clete asked, all of his tension in his voice.
“Let me think for a minute, Clete,” I said. “What time did you hear them?”
Clete looked at his watch. “I guess… around two? I had missed lunch.”
“Okay. Let me think.” The soldiers probably hadn’t taken the lab rats off campus. At the other end of this huge complex were the Labs, where the doctors and scientists conducted their experiments on Opes, kids, and prisoners on death row. The lab rats were probably there. The question was—how could we get them back? And if we got them back, how could we keep them? They would never let us keep them. Which meant we all had to leave. Leave this place forever.
So I needed to come up with a plan to rescue the kids and escape to some new place far away in the city, where we wouldn’t be found. We couldn’t leave the city. Not unless we wanted to die in the desert.
And this plan had only one chance of working. If it failed, we were all dead.
CHAPTER 18
“This better work,” Clete muttered anxiously.
We were dressed in our usual coveralls, heading down the long corridor to the laundry rooms. As if nothing was wrong. As if I hadn’t lost most of my family in one day. As if rescuing them—if possible—would make me lose the only home I could remember. As if rescuing them meant I’d never see Pietro again.
Overhead, the dim lights flickered. My mind raced with adrenaline-fueled ideas—how to break the kids out, how to escape. If only they had wings! It would make all this so easy. And where could we live? Maybe way in the northeast corner of the City of the Dead? People didn’t ask a lot of questions there.
“Hawk?” Clete’s voice brought me back to the now. He was pointing at a sign that said, HALLWAY CLOSED DUE TO REPAIR. TAKE MAIN CORRIDOR INSTEAD.
An armed guard stood there, gesturing to an open door. “Stay in the exact middle of the prison corridor,” he warned us. “Go single file. And don’t let the shit they say bother you. There’s another guard at the end who will get you to the laundry.”
“Uh, okay,” I said, and motioned to Clete to go first. Just a little hiccup, I told myself. We weren’t going to come back through this hall anyway. From the laundry room, the Labs were across another big courtyard and down another long hall. Since I could fly, I could go anywhere. But I had to think of Clete. Maybe I could get him out, stash him somewhere, then get the others and go meet him? My head pounded with all the possibilities, and my cheek throbbed with pain, despite the pills. Despite my brain running on automatic, the rest of me was weak from loss of blood, the pain in my cheek hot and burning.
“Heyyyyy, baaaay-beeee!” Startled, I realized that we were walking through the main jail of the complex. We walked single file in the exact middle of the concrete floor—if we veered right or left, reaching hands could grab us.
“Hawk?” Clete muttered again.
“I know, Clete,” I murmured. “It’s okay. It’s almost over. You’re doing great.” For all his weird habits and hyper-brain abilities with computers, in some ways he was like a little kid.
We were almost through. Some prisoners were throwing things at us—chalk, toothbrushes (the rubber kind you put on one finger, because you can’t stab anybody with those). Basically anything they could part with, which meant anything they couldn’t turn into a weapon. They shouted things that made the back of Clete’s neck go bright red, but I didn’t have time to listen to them. I had to plan.
Okay, Hawk, I thought, let’s start thinking about the Labs.
The Labs were very bad. Being taken to the Labs meant your time was up. That keeping you alive wasn’t as important as McCallum finding out if you could live through a new biological weapon, or a new vaccine, or a new treatment for getting all the heavy metals out of your blood. I’ll save some time here and tell you the answer is no, to all. You do not live through it. If by some reason you sort of do and they bring you back to the Children’s Home, you won’t last long. You’ll be like a corn husk, like a walnut shell, with nothing inside. Then you’ll die, and whoever’s left calls the soldiers and they take you away again, this time to dump you over the city wall with the rest of the trash.
“Phoenix!”
Automatically I looked up, looked around. And realized with horror that it was the new prisoner talking. He was looking at me through the bars in his cell. I gave a fierce frown and prodded Clete between his shoulder blades so he would hurry up.
“Phoenix!” the prisoner said again. He pushed his face between the bars, staring at me. I ignored him.
“I knew it was too much to hope that you would still be waiting for us after all this time,” the prisoner said, speaking
loudly to make sure I heard. “But I still hoped. And then I saw you from the courtyard!”
My jaw was tight as I marched forward. A few more steps and I’d be past his cell.
“I’d recognize you anywhere,” the creep went on. “Because you look like me. Phoenix, I’m your father. Don’t you remember Dad-man? And Mom?”
My eyes flared and I turned slowly to look at him. “My name is Hawk, asshole! I don’t need your crap and your lie…” My voice trailed off as I realized that, actually, he did kind of look like me. Without the mohawk, the tattoos, and the piercings. And a man. But we had the same black hair, black eyes, thin nose, narrow mouth.
Suddenly my exhaustion and loss of blood made me sway, made the jail go fuzzy and gray for a moment. I grabbed Clete’s shirt and managed to keep my balance. He’d turned at the criminal’s words and now was looking back and forth between us.
“I don’t have parents,” I bit out. “You think I would be here if I had parents?”
The killer winced as if I had slapped him. “You do have parents!” he said, his voice hoarse. “Your mom and I named you Phoenix. We’ve been trying to get back to you for ten years. Your mom is… an amazing revolutionary. Her name is Max. Maximum Ride.”
I held on to Clete as the floor went out from under me, and then I fell, down, down into darkness.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 19
Max
I ran out of wall space to mark the days going by maybe a year ago? Three years? No idea. I’m not super tied into reality these days.
These days. The Powers That Be had been especially cruel, putting me on the top floor of Devil’s Hill. Its real name is McCallum Island Penitentiary. No one calls it that, and Devil’s Hill is a much more fitting name, anyway. But here on the top floor, my window—maybe twenty centimeters by forty, forty-five centimeters?—I’ve never gotten used to this metric crap. Anyway, the “window” that’s too small for any humanoid of any age to fit through, and yet has thick bars every four inches—damnit—ten centimeters—anyway, that window actually looks out on sky. I can see blue sky. I can see scary dark thunderclouds roiling toward me. I can see lightning flash, making my cell glow for a metric fraction of a second. I can hear birds, seabirds, calling hoarsely to each other, but I usually can’t see the suckers. And I sure can’t join them, fly freely among them, swerving and dipping and wafting along on a warm updraft, like I used to.
Sometimes I think that’s exactly why they put me here, in a cell with a window. Other prisoners would think this was the high life, would do just about anything to get a glimpse of the view I’ve got. Not me. For me, that window and slice of sky is pure torture. And torture is what McCallum’s good at, making me think about being free. Being able to fly. Like I used to.
Like I used to. That’s the phrase of the moment. Of the Year. Of the Years. Everything I’d once had, had once been, was like I used to. Thoughts started to creep coldly into my mind, the savage fingers gripping my memory and forcing me to see—Iggy. The Gasman. Angel. Nudge. And… Fang. And my baby. My baby Phoenix. Because Max + Fang = Phoenix.
I’d been there when she’d first walked, first spoken (her first word was Why?), and first flown. I couldn’t call it flying, actually. Just the memory of it made me laugh. Have you ever laughed at the thing that caused you the most pain of your life? That was me, remembering five-year-old Phoenix, running and jumping, letting her wings out. She’d been practicing constantly, working on her down-push so she’d have enough power to catch air in her feathers.
This time she was astonished as she rose three feet into the air, five feet, seven feet, still working her wings, already sharp and beautiful even at five years, their colors a glorious mix of Fang’s and mine.
“Get ready,” I murmured to Fang.
“On it,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
And at ten feet in the air, she crashed into the apple tree she was under. How could she have not noticed that she was standing in its shadow? She rose right up into it, breaking some small branches, getting scratched… and totally losing her focus and momentum. She made an anguished, silent face, then fell, a disappointed, feathery mass, into her father’s arms—where she promptly had a temper tantrum at not being allowed to immediately go back up.
“That was so goddamn cute,” Nudge had said.
That was as far as I got down memory lane before it turned into Memory Road to Hell, and the pain of losing them, losing all of them, just gutted me, left me kneeling on the ground, pounding the concrete until my fists bled. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!”
And that’s why I try not to remember. Anything. My “childhood.” My awkward teenage years, which were spent on the run from Erasers, crazed robots, mad teachers, anarchists—
Then the explosions. The chaos. The destruction that had forced us underground for years. Phoenix had been born underground, had spent her first few years living in tunnels, like a rabbit or a mole. When we surfaced, when she felt actual sunshine on her toddler face, reacting with pure shock to the outside world, my heart had burst. She had pointed at the sun and said, “What’s that?”
No kid should live in a world where they don’t know what the sun is, I’d told myself. And I’d promised I was going to make up for the hell of her first years with nothing but paradise to follow.
But paradise couldn’t last forever. Here my memories began to shred and fragment, overlaid with the constant, head-splitting noise of McCallum, day and night. He promised, cajoled, reprimanded, raged. None of it meant anything. I saw others shrink beneath his weapon of the Voxvoce, which made grown men and women cry and fall to the ground. Sometimes they just screamed, hands over their ears, trying to escape the lances and blades of vicious noise, their own sanity winking in and out, like my memories.
My mind grew cloudy and my memories faded like woodsmoke as soon as I tried to capture them. I didn’t know what had happened or why me and my flock were suddenly on the run again after years of peace. I’d tried to remember so many times, until tears ran down my face, and headaches raged along with my temper.
I’d been interrogated. That was just a Sunday walk in the park for me—I could be interrogated all day long, and in the end, the questioners would be ready to tear their hair out, more frustrated than I was by a long shot. I’d be fine. Bloodied, sore, but fine. That is, as long as I knew that Phoenix was safe with her dad or one of my flock. No one else. Ever.
Then… I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. I can’t even imagine what kind of scenario would have made me leave my baby, my firstborn. The world must have been about to end.
I’d been wounded—a wing, my arm, my ribs broken on my left side. I couldn’t fly. Could barely run. A rib had punctured my side and it was running blood till I was dizzy. I’d been holding Phoenix… her small feet getting soaked with my blood.
Fang had found an ally—someone we knew and trusted. She would take care of Phoenix and hide her till we could come get her. And so, with Rose less than a hundred feet away, with me screaming and sobbing and bleeding, Fang had put me on his back and flown away from our child. I’d watched her grow smaller, her tiny, confused face following our ascension, drops of her mother’s blood falling down like rain.
Then… what? We’d been shot out of the sky? We’d lost the rest of the Flock? We’d been separated?
All I know was that I had woken up in this cell on Devil’s Hill. McCallum ranted at me day and night from a vidscreen right outside my cell. The days had passed. And passed. And passed. Till I had run out of room on my walls to mark them. That had been a year ago? Three years? Once I tried counting my marks, to try to get a grasp on how long I’ve been here, but the number got pretty high, pretty fast, and I’m not ashamed to admit that maybe I lost count on purpose.
I’m not super tied into reality these days.
Call it a coping mechanism.
CHAPTER 20
“Wake up!”
The bucketful of cold disinfectant splashed
over me. At the last second I remembered not to open my eyes because I surely didn’t want that stinging crap rolling into them… if that was all they were throwing at me.
“Get up!” The wooden handle of a mop cracked across my back even as I rolled out of bed, pinching my wings and making me spout things I might regret.
“I’m up, you dick!” I shouted, swiping my wet hair out of my face. The disinfectant was yellow-green and smelled exactly how you’d think prison disinfectant smelled: nasty, with a side of nauseating. The only plus side of it was that I didn’t have lice… usually.
Why was this inmate/janitor in my cell? Because these cells don’t have doors. Long ago, McCallum decided that the fewer prisoners he had to feed, clothe, and house—however horribly, for any of those things—the better. Fewer inmates means—and stay with me here—lower costs, which means higher profits.
His answer was not to educate the inmates or give them therapy so they’d get out sooner and be less likely to come back. Noooooo. That would be too kind. McCallum is not kind. He is a shithead of the highest order. Which I guess is a contradiction in terms, but I’m gonna go with it.
Anyway, his answer was to take all the doors off the cells. We were free to wander anytime, anywhere we wanted. Escaping was impossible—it was pretty rare that anyone even tried. The last person who’d tried actually made it into the sea. Obviously trying to swim the twenty miles to the mainland. Finally he turned back, made it onto the mossy, seaweed-covered rocks of Devil’s Hill. The warden wouldn’t let him back in. He clung to the wet, slimy rocks, begging to come back to the prison he’d hated. Soon he was shaking and red-eyed from the cold, constant saltwater washing over him, drying on his skin, dehydrating him with every wave. They gave him no food, no fresh water, no mercy. His begging turned to shouting turned to shrieking turned to screaming and sobbing. His fingertips got worn away by clinging to the wet rocks. Salt crusted around his eyes, his mouth. I’d wished I could help him, but there was just no way. At last one of the big waves washed over the rocks, and when we looked again, he was gone.
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