“Clete,” I said, “you are a stone-cold genius.”
And he was, but that didn’t mean we were out of danger. The guns might not shoot bullets anymore, but they were still weapons. Army soldiers were using their rifles like baseball bats, slamming them into people’s heads, their shoulders, their sides. Again, people began crumpling, or screaming and running away.
There was no place to run. Everyone was pushing against everyone else. I saw an Ope fall, holding up her arms. Panicking people, afraid for their lives, ran over her. One single person stopped and tried to rescue her, some guy in a hoodie. He grabbed her arms, hauled her up over his shoulders. She was unconscious, maybe dead. But he fought the crowd to get out of the square. I gasped when his hoodie got pushed back—it was Pietro! What was he doing here? Why was he trying not to be recognized?
Then I realized—the tanks and soldiers on the far side of the park were Paters.
Max grabbed the mic again. “Who’s responsible for this slaughter? The Six! The Six have too much power! The Six must be stopped!”
Angel tugged on Max’s shirt, and the two of them ran off the back of the stage. A moment later, I saw them shoot into the sky like rockets.
“Stop the Six!” someone shouted below, and others took up the chant. “Stop the Six! Stop the Six!”
Next to me, Clete happily joined in. “Stop the Six!” he yelled.
“Shh!” I snapped and elbowed him.
Too late. Someone below looked up. Ridley screamed. A soldier took a long knife from her boot, her eyes intent on us.
“No!” I shouted, snapping a wing out to shield Clete.
Thunk! The blade went through my wing cleanly, pinning me to Clete’s back.
“Oh!” he said, looking at me in surprise. Then his eyelids fluttered and he fell backward off the statue, taking me with him.
CHAPTER 91
We landed hard, my wing ripping with the impact. Clete was on the ground, but I’d landed facedown on a small stone edge around the statue. A fast, freaked-out self-check told me I’d broken at least two ribs—a feeling I knew well enough. Quickly I spit dirt out of my mouth and sat up, feeling the grinding pain in my chest, the searing pain in my wing.
The soldier who’d thrown the knife was staring at me, looking from my face to my wing and back again. Moving fast, I grabbed the knife, swallowing a scream as it left my wing, and hummed it at the soldier, burying it deep in her chest above her ribs. She blinked a couple times, then sat down as if wondering why she suddenly couldn’t breathe and felt like shit.
“Clete!” I leaned over him, pulled him to face me. “Clete!”
His innocent face was calm, his eyes unseeing. I shook him. “Clete! Goddamnit! Clete! Come on!” I knew why he wasn’t answering, knew the only reason why Clete could be this calm, even amid a panicked crowd. But I just couldn’t let the truth into my brain. “Clete! Come on, let’s go!”
The riot continued around me—people tripping over us. I heard the whining rumble of the tanks, the shouts and screams of pain and fear, and still I sat there next to my friend. My brother. Looking up dully, I saw that I was right in the path of a tank’s tracks. I had to move, fast.
Stifling a sob, I pushed Clete next to the statue so he wouldn’t get run over. Then I saw it: a manhole cover, right beneath the Chung tank. I dove for it just as the tank’s caterpillar tracks began moving. My heart pounded like never before as I pried the cover up with my fingernails. The treads were almost on me, but I threw myself into the hole feet-first, hitting some rungs before landing some twelve feet below. My ribs took another blow and I cried out, the pain squeezing around my chest like an iron band. I looked up as the tank’s treads crushed half the manhole cover into place, flattening it like tin foil.
Weeping, I crawled deeper into the darkness, the truth surrounding me like a cold wind.
Clete was dead.
CHAPTER 92
I gave myself three minutes to get my shit together, broken ribs, dead friend and all. If I gave myself more than that, I’d panic. And I couldn’t afford to do that, down here in the dark. I was shaking, panting, felt dizzy and sick. In the darkness I could hardly see my wing, but I knew it had a big rip in it, my feathers were stained dark with blood. My heart was practically banging against my ribs; whenever I moved, my broken ribs ground together and it was impossible to not gasp with pain.
I had only one thought: Clete was dead! I’d known him practically my whole life, had slept near him every night I could remember.
Shit! Wiping snot from my nose, I whispered every swear word I knew. Then I stood shakily. I had to find the Flock. Taking off my loose jacket, I folded my wing in tight, then tied the jacket around it and my broken ribs. Could I even fly? I wasn’t sure.
Above me I still heard screams, pounding boots, metal hitting metal, metal hitting bone. I heard the shouts, even louder than the screams: “Stop the Six! Stop the Six!”
Okay. I was beneath Industry Park. I needed to get somewhere clear where I could try to take off. Clete’s body was still up there. I couldn’t do anything about that. Keeping close to one curved wall, I headed north.
As I moved through the city’s tunnels, I tried to think my way through this. Where had Max and Angel gone? Where was the rest of the Flock? They were probably all carrying bombs, right? I wasn’t sure—they hadn’t included me in a lot of the rally planning. Did they not trust me? I remembered Max’s words about how I was a rookie who would get them all killed, and I winced. She hadn’t been wrong. I hadn’t known what to do or how to protect Clete, and now he was dead, gone forever.
Was I supposed to meet everyone back at Tetra?
“Stop the Six! Stop the Six!” the crowd was still chanting, despite the soldiers coming at them. There had been tens of thousands of people there. None of the Six’s armies could beat that many people, especially if they didn’t have guns. So the mob might actually be able to do something. But what? The soldiers above were only lackeys. The real power behind the Six was safely ensconced somewhere, no doubt.
The only way to stop the Six was to—storm their palaces? Actually, only three of the Six—Chungs, Diazes, and Paters—had shown up with muscle today. They were the ones to focus on. I thought of Pietro, disguised, hanging out in the crowd, helping that Ope, even though he could’ve been killed trying. I thought of Giacomo, telling Pietro not to have anything to do with me.
Well. I knew whose palace I wanted to see stormed.
CHAPTER 93
Max
“Did you see her?” I asked Iggy. We were flying south, away from the rally. Rally! Try riot! Those armies had been told to go in and slaughter hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people. People whose only crime was wanting clean air, clean water.
“You’re asking the wrong freak, obviously,” Iggy said dryly, and I rolled my eyes because duh, I knew that. Of course Iggy didn’t see anything.
“Yeah, sorry.” I dropped back to Angel and Nudge. “Did you guys see her?”
“No,” Nudge said, looking concerned. “One minute she was on the statue, the next, she was gone. They both were.”
“So maybe she took off, flew off somewhere,” I said. I scanned the skies around us, but tamped down on the rising panic, refusing to let myself worry. Phoenix had made it clear that she didn’t need any advice from me, so, whatevs. It hadn’t been my idea to have her up on that statue of the huge nimrod.
“Hm,” said Angel, obviously listening in on my thoughts.
“You guys ready?” Gazzy came closer and opened his vest to reveal more small bombs than I’d known about.
“Did you see where Phoenix went?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “But she’s tough, I’m telling you. Wherever she is, she’s kicking ass and taking names.”
“Yeah,” I said, my panic only subsiding a little. “What’s first on our shit list?”
Nudge pulled a literal list out of her pocket and tried to read it. Since we were at twelve thousand feet, going fas
t, it was like trying to read toilet paper. She squinted, held the paper tight. “The dope factory,” she announced at last.
“Let’s hit it,” I said, and pushed down hard with my wings.
Three minutes later we were over a god-awful ugly building, our eyes burning from coming down through the green-gray sludge they called “clouds.” I felt like I was wearing a scuba suit filled with sand, and it wasn’t only the air quality making me feel that way. The unbearably itchy and irritated feeling went below my skin, and since I knew myself horribly well, I knew it was because I was upset that I didn’t know where Phoenix was.
We were expecting bullets to come at us, but it would be okayish; at this altitude, there was too much wind for regular machine-gun bullets to be super accurate. Still, they could now see us, so we could kiss our stealth plan good-bye.
“Okay,” said Gazzy. “Remember to pull their strings at the last minute!”
I had already dropped mine. “Strings? What strings?”
“It’s a new design,” Gazzy called over to me. “An added safety feature! Ya gotta pull their strings or they don’t go off. Cool, huh?”
“Oh, damnit, Gaz!” I said, already dropping out of formation.
“Max, don’t!” Angel’s voice was already fading high above me.
I could see my bomb—just a second ago it had landed on the roof of one of the dope factory’s buildings. I could see it because it was neon pink. Gaz was trying to make them more festive.
Of course, this close, the guards’ aim would be much better—but they weren’t shooting. I landed for a split second, grabbed my bomb, and bounced back up to take flight. I saw the guards’ furious faces, saw them yelling and throwing their guns down on the ground. Of course! I laughed—Phoenix’s friend was supposedly able to dismantle guns. I hadn’t believed it, but it looked like he’d come through.
Now I could see the simple cotton string Gazzy had rigged up. I pulled it, the bomb vibrated slightly in my hands, and I dropped that sucker.
Whoosh! Something fast and hot hit one of my wings, spinning me sideways. Had the bomb gone off too early? I was falling fast, losing altitude and gasping for air. Keeping my head together, I forced myself to straighten in midair and beat my wings—which hurt like hell—something was really wrong with my right wing. I looked sideways—it wasn’t broken—I could move it. But it was burned, and where it was burned, a line of feathers fifteen centimeters wide had been scraped away.
“They’re shooting flares!” Iggy yelled.
“Are you okay?” Angel asked, coming closer to me.
“No,” I said, gritting my teeth and motioning to my wing, now spinning a rivulet of blood into the air.
“Oh, shit,” she said, and deftly pulled a bomb string with her teeth while she did another one in her hands. She hummed them both downward, one, two, and we watched as large chunks of the factory exploded and went up in flames, the hot gust of air buoying us higher. Trying to ignore the burning, searing pain of my wing, I looked behind us and saw a dark figure shooting toward us.
Oh, thank god—Fang.
Then I saw the look on his face.
CHAPTER 94
“What happened, baby?” Fang asked, flying directly over me, matching wing stroke for wing stroke.
“They’re shooting flares. And rockets,” I said tightly. My wing hurt so freaking bad. Using it was definitely making it worse. “Where’s Phoenix?” I craned my neck to look at him, and the dark expression on his face made my stomach knot.
“Next is the so-called Hospice House!” Nudge shouted and motioned where we needed to go. She took point and the rest of us vee’d out in back of her. Gaz was throwing bombs to us—Fang deftly caught his and dropped one into my hands.
“Do. You. Know. Where—” I started.
“I found Clete, the kid she was with, who stopped the guns,” Fang said.
“What did he say? Was Phoenix still with him?”
Fang was silent for several seconds, and I wanted to swing my left wing up and fwap him in the face. “He’s dead.”
I just blinked.
“He was lying at the base of that stupid statue, dead,” Fang went on. “His computer was smashed into atoms.”
“And… Phoe—” I began.
“She wasn’t there,” Fang interrupted me. “But there were feathers covered in blood, and more blood in a trail to the street.”
“Then what?” I asked faintly as my own blood seemed to leave my head in a rush. I shook my head and tried to clear away the fog taking me over.
“Then nothing,” Fang said. “I didn’t see her body—we don’t know she’s dead. But she’s injured, for damn sure. I don’t know if she was taken captive… or what.”
Every single stroke of my wing felt like it was being hit with a blowtorch, over and over. Plus, it was now weaker than my other wing. Which meant I had to force it even harder to go up, go down.
We were flying right below the noxious city clouds and could easily see hordes of people swarming up the main avenues, looking like honeybees. They split off into different directions and I assumed they were heading for the Sixes’ home bases. We had whipped them up into a frenzy, and now they were going to try to overthrow their corrupt overlords.
Even though guns weren’t working, the soldiers had shown that rifles could still maim and kill, and now they were shooting flares and rockets. Lines of broken and bloodied bodies showed where the crowds had been. Even with my raptor vision, I couldn’t pick out a body with a black mohawk, piercings, tattoos, and army boots.
That was good, right?
Fang’s strong hands reached down to rub my shoulders, pushing aside my hair. “She’s okay,” he said. “I know that it’d take more than an army with tanks to stop her. She’s strong.”
“She’s untrained,” I said. “She’s naive. She doesn’t have the exper—”
“She’s kept herself and her friends alive for ten years,” Fang said.
I didn’t say anything but yanked the string out of my lime-green bomb and hurled it down onto the hospice with every bit of anger and fear I had. It took out a quarter of the top two floors, shattering windows, flinging bricks and mortar into a sunless courtyard.
“That’s my girl,” Fang said, dropping his own bomb.
“What do we blow up next?” I asked.
CHAPTER 95
Hawk
I’d been walking for almost an hour, just to get way north, to where the Paters had their estate. I’d tried jogging and running, but it’d made my wing start bleeding again. My jacket was soaked, and I was definitely leaving an easy trail behind me. I’d also had to wade in icy water up to my chest, then stoop and walk almost bent double for almost a kilometer, my ribs pressing against my lungs and nearly stopping my air flow.
So now I was walking as quietly as I could. The worn leather soles of my boots were surprisingly silent, even over trash, tile, and wet cement. Every so often when I crossed beneath a manhole close to the surface I would stand and listen, careful not to let the dots of sunlight fall on me. I still heard angry hordes. I still heard the rumble of tanks and thousands upon thousands of feet as they tromped north. There was a huge contingent headed for the Paters’. I’d never seen anything like this, where all kinds of people from the City of the Dead joined together with one goal. Max had done this. Max and Angel. “It’s what we do,” Max had said.
Could the City of the Dead even actually be liberated from McCallum and the Six? I didn’t know. I only knew that after today, things would never be the same. I would never be the same. And Clete would still be dead.
Hot tears ran down my cheeks, no doubt leaving trails through the dirt and blood. I should be getting to the Paters’ soon. I had a choice of five manhole covers or sewer grates that I could climb out of—I picked the one hidden by bushes in the Paters’ private kitchen garden. From there I could hop the fence out into the street and join in with the crowd.
I found the spot and looked up. It looked a lot smaller
than it had when I was a little kid. Pietro and I’d climbed in and out of it all the time, pretending to be spies or soldiers or whatever. Now it looked really, really narrow. Yeah. I hadn’t climbed through it in about six years. Ever since Giacomo had pointed a knife at me and said if I ever brought my freak self around again, he’d kill me. I’m paraphrasing. The next time I’d seen Pietro, not on purpose, just a coincidence, he’d been riding in the back of his dad’s car. He’d had a black eye and an ugly bruise on his cheek. I’d straightened from where I’d been pawing through trash, and our eyes met. Carefully he turned his head away from me, as if he couldn’t tell me apart from the trash.
I’d hated the Paters ever since.
Gosh, fun times.
I hoisted myself up the rusted ladder, rung by rung, trying not to make a sound when I jarred my ribs or scraped my wing against the narrow wall. Finally, I was at ground level. I waited and listened. Heard not a sound. No, I could hear the mob in the far distance, like the buzz of angry wasps. Shouts, but no gunfire. Because of Clete.
Very carefully I edged the oblong metal cover up, centimeter by centimeter. Still quiet here in the kitchen garden. Neither the cooks nor maids were out here clipping fresh herbs for their rabbit stew or whatever.
Now I was hungry. Great.
The cover was up, I lifted it and moved it sideways. Then I put my hands on the edges and pulled myself up, biting my lip when my wing and ribs got smushed against one side. I was in the garden, behind a thick tea shrub. An excellent spot. I pulled my feet up and silently replaced the cover. I would hang here till I heard the crowd get to the gates.
“You called it, Ernie,” a rough voice said above me. I leaped up but was instantly shoved down by a huge guard in Pater colors. “I was sure she’d go for the east-side street one, but you said kitchen garden, and you was right!”
Oh, goddamnit.
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