“Why is it colder now?” I called to Gazzy, who was the closest to me.
“The higher you go, the colder it is,” he called back. “We’ve been so high that the air is actually thinner, with less oxygen. That’s a trip.”
I was gonna take his word on that. Breathing in deeply, I felt cool air filling my lungs, filling everything inside me with, like, life or something. I felt clean and fresh, I wasn’t hungry, I had water anytime I wanted it. This was the most wonderful, fantastic, unbelievable feel—
“Can I make a suggestion?” Gazzy said. He’d pulled closer to me while I’d been glorying in how fabulous it all was.
“Yeah?” I said without enthusiasm.
“Okay, you see how you’re flying, and like everything except your wings is kind of hanging down? Like your body?”
“Yeah?”
“Okay, see how we’re flying, how we push our heads forward and arch our backs and hold our legs parallel with our wings?”
I looked. Yes, indeed, so they were.
“So?” I said, ready to defend my personal flying choices.
“So our way is more streamlined,” Gazzy said. “We’re blocking less air, making less resistance.”
“Okay,” I said.
He sighed. “It’s easier,” he said gently. “It takes less energy. You don’t get as tired as fast.”
Ohhhhh. Hesitantly I tried it, arching my back, using my leg muscles to hold them parallel to my wings.
Oh, my sun, it made so much difference! I was practically gliding along, not having to move my wings nearly as hard or as fast!
“I’m like a bullet!” I said happily.
“Yep,” Gazzy agreed. “Once you get in the habit, you won’t have to think about it. You wanna see something else?”
“Yeah!” I said. I’d been flying my whole life, and now someone was teaching me how.
“Angle yourself to the left of me, about two meters past my feet,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, doing as he instructed.
“Now you’re in my slipstream,” he said. “Do you feel the air coming off me? It’s like a little air current. If you put yourself into it, basically I’m doing some of the work of you flying. Feel it?”
“I think so,” I said, trying to angle myself better. I could feel the airstream, but it was hard to stay in it.
“If you’ll notice,” he went on, “the rest of us do that naturally. We all take turns being the one in front, because that’s harder. The rest of us angle ourselves out in a vee-shape, to take advantage of the slipstream.”
“Oh, my sun, I think I’m in it!” I said excitedly. I hardly had to use my wings at all, when I was in it. I kept falling out or going above it, but now I actually knew it existed.
Oh, this was amazing! I breathed in, working on being a bullet in Gazzy’s slipstream. This was awesome.
Which is why I was so not ready five minutes later when I felt myself completely. Run. Out. Of. Steam.
With no warning my wings lost every ounce of energy. They seemed to weigh fifty kilos apiece. It was harder to breathe. My throat was closing. I had tunnel vision, then couldn’t see anything. I tried to yell for Gazzy, for anybody, but all I could get out was one last gasp.
And then the sky went black, and I was dropping like a rock toward the endless ocean.
CHAPTER 65
I blinked and drew in breath. I was still falling. I tried to stop myself with my wings, but at this speed they almost snapped off. I cried out in pain and folded them in. Now I was falling faster.
I yelled but my voice was snatched away by the wind and I couldn’t even hear it myself. I’d never flown so high. Now I was gonna hit the ocean and it’d be like a plum hitting concrete. Still—I was glad I got to do all this before I died.
An entire minute had passed. The longest minute of my life, and I’m including listening to Clete’s endless plans to bring the city down. The rushing air made it hard to look up, and when I tried I couldn’t see the Flock. We all have amazing eyesight, but I doubted they could pick me out against the ocean from nine kilometers up.
Almost a whole other minute passed. I managed to turn so I was falling face first. Below me I saw waves, blue-green ripples. Something jumped out of the water! Several somethings! Really big, smooth, shiny, jumping in arcs. Some kind of fish. I bet Nudge knew what they were.
In the City of the Dead they farmed fish in huge tanks. These were wild fish. I hoped I didn’t kill too many when I disintegrated against the water.
The ocean smelled salty. If I reached out, I could almost touch it. I guessed I had about three seconds left. I closed my eyes.
Something like a freight train hit me sideways. It took several seconds to realize I wasn’t wet. I wasn’t wet? I wasn’t dead?? Opening my eyes, I looked up to see that Fang was carrying me in his arms. He’d come down and snatched me up at the last second before death. He’d seen me, caught me, and now was surging upward with powerful wing strokes. Before, because I was the only flier I knew, I’d prided myself on flying almost as good as Ridley. Now I knew that Fang and the Flock did fly as good as Ridley.
I hoped Ridley was okay and knew to wait for me. Or maybe she knew to get the hell out of there, which would be good, too.
“I need you to climb on my back,” Fang said, looking down at me. “I can carry you much longer on my back.”
It was hard to look tough when he’d just saved my life, but I tried anyway. “I don’t need you to carry me.”
“Yeah?”
Before I could answer with a hard Yeah, Fang dropped me. Just let go of me and let me fall.
Because I wasn’t ready, I was in the same position as before, where I couldn’t whip my wings out because the high speed of falling would probably snap the bones. I watched him become smaller very rapidly above me. He was grinning.
I gave him the finger and crossed my arms over my chest. When I dared to look up again, he was laughing.
Then he dive-bombed, the way I’d seen Ridley go after a rat. He came down amazingly fast and scooped me up.
“I need you to get on my back,” he began again.
So I did, because this flight was too far for me and he couldn’t carry me forever in his arms. But I didn’t have to be pleasant about it.
CHAPTER 66
Max
One has so much time to reflect, doesn’t one, when one is hanging upside down in a net? Especially when one has a puffed-up blowhard yapping at one incessantly. Every so often, McCallum would demand some answer to some stupid question. I was usually off in a daydr—daymare—and he had to repeat it several times.
After the second time, he had a guard use a taser on me (tied to a long pole—it was ridiculous). I had to point out that being tasered made speaking physically impossible for a while, and also tended to build up ill will. Was that what he wanted?
Then it was back to the yapping. Two and a half meters below me, the doctor looked sulky, the prison warden seemed about to have a heart attack, and the prisoners, who had stayed up the whole freaking night to watch this circus, had mostly fallen asleep in place.
I kept thinking about that amazing glitch in the news feed, and where the camera had been. Who had made that happen? Why? Had it helped anything, anywhere? Had it hurt? McCallum had definitely seemed upset by it, that was for sure. If they could get a camera that close to me, could they get like, a grilled cheese sandwich within reach?
All valid questions. If I ever met these people, I was definitely bringing up the question of the grilled cheese sandwich.
“Maximum…” The voice was silky, cajoling, and it slithered into my ear. “It’s pointless to keep fighting. You’re the last of your kind, and you should want us to pursue any means to make more of you.”
I kept my face blank, but inside it was like a cold hand had seized my heart and squeezed. What did he mean, last of my kind? The rest of the Flock was out there somewhere, fighting for freedom! Weren’t they? Did McCallum know something? Or was he jus
t saying it to upset me?
All these years, the only thing that had kept me going was the sure knowledge that Fang had gone back to get Phoenix, and that they and the Flock were living somewhere, probably looking for me and plotting to liberate the planet, one stupid regime at a time.
I wriggled to get more comfortable, making the net sway. As soon as they got tired of this, I was going to chew my way out and go back up to the welded bars of the prison’s all-encompassing cage. I’d already managed to quietly fray some of the rope. McCallum couldn’t be right. I knew my family was still out there, maybe still looking for me.
“You’d hate to die, knowing that you could have created more of your kind but chose not to? Are you ready to let humanity down like that?” McCallum sounded totally reasonable.
“Humanity,” I said, “of which you are a part, can kiss my ass!”
“Maximum,” McCallum said, “don’t make this decision in such a heated moment. We’ll let you hang there for a while, give you time to think. When you get tired of hanging upside down in a net, just yell. We’ll be ready to talk.”
The screen went blank, then a cartoon came on about some kids exploring in the woods. They find something important and didn’t tell the nearest adult. No! They schlepped all the way to a government office and told that person. I don’t even know what they found because my net had been swinging the wrong way round at the time.
McCallum was wrong—I did want to create more of my kind… but not by giving them my wings. I had, in fact, already created one. Where was Phoenix now? My heart ached from the lack of holding her. She’d been so amazing, even at five. Determined, headstrong. I hoped she hadn’t given Rose Simmons any problems. You just had to know how to deal with her. She could be stubborn, grumpy. But not for long. I remembered cuddling her after a bath when she was all clean and sweet-smelling. I missed her so much I thought I would go crazy sometimes. And where was Fang, my love? Oh, god, did any of this have any point at all? Was I just delaying the inevitable?
My net swung around again.
Maybe I was. Maybe I was being stubborn and stupid and making the wrong decisions. It wouldn’t be the first time, and god knows it surely wouldn’t be the last.
Because I was going to bust out of this joint if it was the last thing I did.
One simply had to figure out how.
CHAPTER 67
Hawk
Turns out, riding over an ocean with someone else doing all the work wasn’t so bad. Except for the part where they played “Drop the Phoenix.” Other than that, it was great.
“Uh-oh…“ Iggy said.
I clung tighter to his neck. “No! Nooooo! No more Drop the Phoenix!”
“I think I might have to…” Iggy said.
“Noooo!” I shouted. “Goddamnit! This isn’t fun!”
“Might have to… drop the Phoenix!” Iggy yelled, and did a fast spin so he was flying upside down and I was trying not to plunge to my death.
Nudge and Gazzy laughed gaily because apparently it didn’t bug them to see a teenager hanging on to save a life she’d already almost lost.
“Goddamnit!” I shouted again, trying to kick Iggy. “My name is Hawk!” I managed to land a good one right on his butt.
“Yow!” he said, and quickly pried my fingers loose.
My howls of outrage were lost to the wind as I fell. I didn’t even try anymore. Just kept my wings tucked in, my arms crossed angrily over my chest, and a sour expression on my face. Then I waited.
Sooner or later, maybe in about three kilometers, someone would come fetch me.
This time it was Fang. He came down like an arrow, swooped me up, then almost flung me onto his back. I quickly grabbed on.
“Do not,” I said icily, “play that game again, you sick bastard.”
I felt Fang chuckle beneath me, though I couldn’t hear it.
“It’s weird,” he said with fake innocence as we soared upward. “How you manage to fall every time, and your name isn’t even Phoenix! That’s bizarre, don’t you think?”
He asked me that every time. My first three responses, none of them polite, had earned me a quick return to “Drop the Phoenix.”
I tried for something neutral. “Maybe… maybe you guys have me confused with someone?”
He turned his head so I’d be sure to hear him the first time. “I think we’re all pretty sure that you’re both fantastic and obnoxious, an almost guaranteed outcome of Max plus Fang.”
I started to say something about where the obnoxiousness had come from but pressed my lips together. No more Drop the Phoenix.
“Do you know for sure where we’re going?” I asked instead.
“Yes.”
“Do you know for sure Max is there?”
“Eighty percent sure,” Fang said.
“What happens if this is the twenty percent?”
“Then we keep looking. It took almost nine years to find you. I came to get you while the others kept looking for Max. I figured out the best way to you was through the prison. And right when I got myself arrested in that hellhole of a city, Gazzy found Max.”
The air rushed through my mohawk and made my longer hair stream out behind me. My eyes watered from the chilly wind but I didn’t dare let go to wipe them, or my nose, for fear of triggering a Drop the Phoenix. A thousand other questions filled my head, but I didn’t know where to start. He said—they all said—that he was my dad. And I knew I looked like him. Somewhat. Okay, a lot. Did that mean I got to ask him anything? He was still scary sometimes. I’d seen him get angry, and I didn’t want to get him angry at me. At least, any more than I had to.
Gazzy, Nudge, and Iggy had been helping to fill in the blanks. But just a little. As if there was some stuff they didn’t want to tell me. Some things it hurt too much to remember or talk about. I was like, you’re talking to someone who grew up on the streets of the City of the Dead. I bet you can’t shock me.
Except they could shock me, and they did. They shocked me every time they were kind or acted like they cared about me. Or when they wanted me to be with them on purpose. Sometimes just by looking at me. Nudge could make me practically cry by the way she looked at me.
I mean, was this going to be my life from now—
“Uh-oh,” Fang muttered and nodded at Gazzy.
“No! No more freaking goddamn Drop the Phoenix!” I bellowed. “If you drop me, I’ll take a bunch of your hair out with me, I swear by the sun!”
“No,” Fang murmured, reaching way back to pat my shoulder. “Look. Up ahead.”
There it was, shining in the middle of this freaking huge ocean. It looked like an enormous rock, but there was a metal cagelike thing covering the whole place. Right now, three helicopters were hovering over it. Soon we were close enough to hear megaphones.
I glanced at the others. They looked grim.
“Looks like we found Max,” Nudge said with a tight smile.
CHAPTER 68
“What is that place?” I asked Fang.
The Flock had quickly risen upward and was now circling about four kilometers above the rock, the helicopters, the noise.
“Here, switch to Nudge for a minute,” Fang said, angling over her. Something in his voice made me do it without question, jumping off of him and landing on Nudge’s back, perfectly between her wings, aligning my body with hers. Weird that I already trusted these people enough to try something like that.
“But what is that place?” I asked again.
“It’s one of the highest-security prisons in the world,” Gazzy said, his voice unusually solemn.
“Why… is Max in prison?” I remembered why Fang had been imprisoned—for killing a bunch of kids. I almost didn’t want to know about Max.
“A job went wrong,” Nudge said simply. “Max was caught. This was only a few months after she and Fang left you with our friend. She’s been missing for ten years.” Her voice sounded thick with tears, and I saw her quickly swipe one hand over her eyes.
“
What makes you so sure she’s down there?”
Gazzy answered, finding a current and gliding in a big circle. “One, this is the last Class D prison left for us to check. If this doesn’t pan out, we’ll move on to all the Class C prisons—like any of those could hold her. Two, the metal cage on top. Putting a cover on high walls, on a rock two hundred kilometers from anything in the middle of cold, shark-infested water, seems a bit like overkill. Makes you wonder what they’ve got in there.”
“Just a bit,” Fang said, peering downward.
“Three,” Iggy said, now continuing, “experience has shown us that if we suddenly find a bunch of police, or military, or mercenaries all having a hysterical meltdown over something, then that something is Max.”
“Uh… how many times has this happened?” I asked.
Gazzy tossed me a small, heavy brown paper bag. “Here, hold this.”
I caught it one-handed.
“Okay, can you fly now?” Nudge asked.
I moved my shoulders, flexing my wings to test for strength.
“Yeah, pretty sure I can pull my own weight,” I said. Holding Gazzy’s paper bag close to me, I let go of Nudge and shot my wings out fast. Instantly the wind caught them, shooting me backward about thirty meters before I found my rhythm and flew to catch up. The hours of rest, and some food, had been as good as eight hours of sleep. I felt recharged and ready for anything.
Gazzy tossed more bags to the others. I was working to stay in Iggy’s slipstream, paying attention to how my body was positioned, like I’d been taught. “What are these?” I asked, shaking my paper bag. Please be more food, I begged silently.
“Bombs,” Gazzy replied, not looking over. “Don’t shake it, don’t squeeze it.”
Iggy giggled beside me. “If Gazzy hands you something, it’s pretty much always a bomb. What, were you hoping for lunch or something?” He chuckled again.
“No,” I said, putting as much snideness in my voice as I could. “I meant, what kind of bomb. Obviously. Jeez.” I held it somewhat away from myself—the “Don’t shake it, don’t squeeze it” directive kind of freaking me out.
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