I sighed. “Of course you count, Nudge. Let’s just go back to the island, all right? Like we said.”
“There’re no boys left is what you meant,” she continued bitterly, cocking her head. “No Dylan. No Fang. No more cute guys to obsess over you.”
I pressed my lips together and stared at her. “What?”
But Nudge was on a roll. “Poor, poor Max,” she said, finding some ancient cans of tuna and an old jar of hearts of palm. Who eats that? “How are you going to survive with no one to fight over your attention?”
“Nudge,” I said, getting up, “you know I’ve never been the princess. Always been the dragon-slayer. Look at me: If I wanted guys falling all over me, don’t you think I would wash up once in a while?”
Nudge frowned but followed me through the cottage as I gathered our meager belongings, layering clothes and tucking a rusty hammer and an old water bottle into my tattered pack. It wouldn’t last much longer.
“It’s just always about you,” Nudge said, but with less heat.
That stopped me in my tracks. I turned and took both her shoulders, looking up into the face that might never regain its startling, budding beauty. “Sweetie,” I said softly. “It’s always about us, the flock. It’s always, always, always about the flock. I don’t know how to do it any other way.”
Nudge gave a shuddering breath, then nodded and rested her untorn cheek on my shoulder. We hugged for a long time, until a neglected Total weaseled his way between our legs, pushing like a little bulldozer until we made room for him.
With a watery smile, I patted his head and nodded at Nudge.
“Pack up,” I said. “It’s time to go.”
We would survive. We always had. We just had less to lose now.
25
THE JOURNEY BACK to our island seemed to take twice as long as we remembered. Ever wonder why birds fly in a V? Because each bird deflects a little of the wind for the birds behind it. It’s all about teamwork, folks. Of course, with just Nudge and Total, my team was really more of a trio.
Despite Total’s protests about the fabulousness of his wings, he’s still a little guy and flying long distance is hard for him. Nudge and I took turns letting him piggyback. By the time we saw the outline of familiar cliffs in the distance, I was more exhausted than I’d ever been, and the only thought in my head was The flock is over. The flock is over. The flock is over.
“Just a little farther,” I said, as much to convince myself as Nudge and Total.
But our island was still a desolate disaster. Black smoke hung thick over everything, and by half a mile out, Nudge sounded like she was coughing glass, and tears streamed down my face as tiny flecks of burning material flew into my eyes.
The air was so toxic that flying inland just wasn’t possible. Instead, we flew along the outer edge of the island, heading upwind for the far north side, away from the volcano, where the smoke wasn’t quite so thick.
“I’m so tired,” Nudge complained, moving her wings in slow arcs to conserve energy. “Max, what are we gonna do?”
“We’ll find a place to land,” I assured her, though it was hard to keep the doubt out of my voice.
My flock of three hovered in silence for a few moments, contemplating the ash cloud and the sea of lava that now coated everything.
“Max… I’m not questioning your judgment, but our former home doesn’t exactly look livable at the moment.” Total gave my neck a brief lick, as if to soften his words.
Total had always been a little high-maintenance, but I had to admit he had a point. Food alone was already starting to feel urgent, and anything that had survived the initial explosion and tsunami was now almost certainly overcooked barbecue.
We were in dire straits indeed.
“Wait—there’s something moving down there.” I pointed. “Look.”
As we dipped lower, I saw that it wasn’t just something alive. It was someone. Human.
“Hey!” I screamed at the boy. “Hey!”
If you know me, you know I’m normally a big believer in Stranger Danger. My friends wouldn’t exactly describe me as a people person, since I generally loathe most of the people I come in contact with. (To be fair, a lot of them have tried to kill me.)
But the population of the world had been sliced drastically, I’d just lost most of my family, and I really just wanted a little sympathetic company, okay?
So I kept shouting and waving like a maniac, barely noticing when one of the figures moved away from the others and bent down to position something on the shore.
And when I saw the spark, my first thought was about how these people could be useful to us, since they had a lighter.
But then there was a whizzing sound in the air, and the small spark suddenly got very large as it rocketed up at us. Suddenly, it all clicked into place for me.
“Bank!” I yelled, yanking Nudge’s arm right as the firework exploded with a pop of dazzling red.
26
“OOF,” I SAID as my body bounced and then sank against the woven rope net held taut by dozens of hands.
They saved us! was my first thought.
They shot us! was my second.
Remembering the rocket, I wiggled my fingers, making sure I hadn’t lost any digits. Other than a ringing in my ears that was going to lead to a whopping migraine, I was in one piece.
I peered at my attackers through the rope. Some of them had webbed toes, and others had legs that were fused together to the knees, so that they sort of hopped.
Mutants.
They turned their heads as someone approached, and I saw that all of them had little slits behind their ears, opening and closing as they sucked in air. Gills. Just like ours.
“Release them,” a male voice ordered, and they all let go at once.
Nudge, Total, and I tumbled into one another on the ground. “Hey, easy!” I said, and looked up at the mutants’ apparent leader. “And you are…?”
“Rizal.” He was short and muscular with brown, deeply tanned skin and hair that hung down into his eyes. From the way the other kids were looking at him, he was clearly in charge.
“So, Rizal.” I shook the netting free from my shoulders and stood up, matching his even gaze. “Do you mind telling me why you shot a rocket at us and trapped us in nets?”
“That was a defense mechanism Jonny Diamond has been working on for months.” Rizal nodded to a skinny kid with glasses. “He calls it the Jeweled Star.”
“I don’t care what it’s called,” I said. “Why did you shoot us out of the sky?”
“It was a warning. To stay away from our island.”
Say what?
My eyes narrowed. “Um, I’m pretty sure this is our island,” I said, suddenly feeling very territorial about this unlivable piece of volcanic rock.
“Hang on.” Nudge cut in. “I know some of these kids. Hey, Angela!” She waved. “And Barry!” The fish kids didn’t wave back, but Nudge didn’t seem to mind. “We all swam together at the waterfall the first day Nino Pierpont brought us here! Remember? We thought everyone else had died! Where have you been the last three months?”
“So you were part of the original people?” I asked. “I guess we all belong here, then.”
“Not anymore,” Rizal said. “We’re an exclusive community now.”
The two kids flanking him leveled the sharp-arrowed ends of their spearguns at us, and others used the nets to bind our hands.
What did I tell you? You can’t trust anyone.
27
I STARED AT the bare feet with their webbed toes approaching us. I was already cranky from the night we’d spent tied up in an oversized lobster cage—just ask me how much I love cages—and the new day wasn’t looking much better.
Now that I’d lost my freedom, I was starting to see how shortsighted my argument for taking things slow really was. I wanted to know who was behind this, and I wanted to know now.
“Who’s in charge?” I shouted at the fish kids as they passed
by. “What happened the day the sky caught fire? Are the caves still accessible?”
None of the fish kids would so much as look at us, though, and every one of them was heavily armed this time, with spearguns strapped over their shoulders and knives hugging their ankles and thighs.
“The full battalion, eh?” I observed dryly. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were afraid of us.”
“Overgrown guppies,” Total growled through his teeth. They’d wrapped seaweed around his snout to make a makeshift muzzle, but if there’s anyone you can’t shut up, it’s Total.
Then Rizal himself stood in front of us and pulled a large hunting knife from his belt. He tested the blade with his thumb, and I scowled.
“It’s a little cowardly to kill somebody when they’re tied up, don’t you think?”
Silently, Rizal released the door of the cage and then cut through the rope that bound our wrists. I rubbed my raw skin, not taking my eyes from the knife. If Rizal made a move, I wasn’t going down without a fight.
“Our weapons are for hunting,” he said evenly, and dumped a basket of fish at our feet. “And no one gives us orders. We rule ourselves.”
I hadn’t understood how starved I’d been until then, and Nudge, Total, and I all lunged for the basket. When I held a silvery body in shaking hands, I told myself it was just like sushi. Like a sushi kit. The sushi was just still inside, that’s all. As the mutant kids looked on with expressionless faces, I hungrily tore into the fish’s side, ignoring scales and fine bones and just chomping away. I ate it like an ear of corn, turning it around, nibbling off every bit of flesh, and then throwing the head and tail into a pile. Then I grabbed another one.
By the end of our messy feast, we all had shining scales flecking our hair and skin, bloody mouths, and unnamable gore lodged so deeply under our nails that it would probably never come out. I felt a thousand percent better.
After Total let out a delicate burp, Rizal finally spoke. “We’ve decided you can stay in our community,” he said. He walked back and forth in front of us with his spear slung over his shoulder. “Once we are there, you will not swim in the open water. You will not be permitted to hunt. You will not leave the caves.”
I looked up from my pile of fish bones. So the caves are intact.
“I am an excellent paddler!” Total protested. “And the girls both have gills.…”
Rizal dismissed the suggestion. “If you don’t follow the rules, you’ll be killed.”
“Wow, love the hospitality.” I wiped the blood from my lips and accepted that my hair would smell like fish guts for the rest of my life. “You rule yourselves, but you kill any dissenters. Is that what happened to everyone else?”
“We didn’t murder the other mutants. When the sea first flooded the caves, there was no way out. The bird kids, the bug kids—everyone drowned all around us.”
“What about the humans?” I asked, trying to temper my hope. Maybe Angel couldn’t sense anyone’s thoughts on this part of the island after the first few days, including the fish kids and my mom. There was a chance.…
Rizal snorted. “Pierpont barricaded himself in the food vault because it was watertight. It was almost a month before the sea receded enough for us to pry open the door.”
“He left everyone else to starve?” Nudge gasped.
Rizal nodded in disgust. “We found him curled on the floor. Ironically, he escaped drowning but died of thirst. Every can of soup and fruit had been sucked dry.”
“And the others?” Total asked quietly. “Do you know their fates?”
“The girl, you mean? And the veterinarian?”
My half sister, Ella. My mom.
Rizal flicked the dark hair out of his eyes absently, as if nothing at all was riding on his next words. “Same as all the rest,” he said, shrugging. “The water came in. We swam. They drowned.”
“Oh,” I said in a flat voice, and gripped the rock floor for support as I felt my blood draining.
Deep down, I’d known that was the likeliest scenario, but I understood now why Iggy hadn’t wanted to stay on the island: Not really knowing was so much better than knowing.
Because you could never get that hope back.
28
“DON’T BE AFRAID of Rizal,” the kid called Jonny Diamond said. “He can be harsh, but he’s just trying to keep us safe.”
Everyone was getting ready to go to the caves, but I’d remained rooted to the rock long after the feast, thinking about my family. I thought about how Ella’s face lit up when she looked at Iggy, and how she never even got to go to a school dance with him. About how, even though my mom was supersmart and at the top of her field, she was always trying to do mom things for me, like cooking great meals and getting me my own bed with fancy sheets and snuggling me, even when I resisted, because she knew I secretly craved that contact. I remembered how they’d both opened their home to me the very first day we’d met—never mind that I was a stranger, a mutant, and being shot at by stupid teenage boys.
Yet, though I managed to look out for the rest of my flock, I hadn’t kept my human family safe when it mattered. And now, though I could still hear Ella’s laugh and remember what my mom smelled like (antiseptic, vanilla shampoo, and cinnamon gum), I couldn’t quite picture their faces.
Anyway, I’d been meditating on that cheery subject for hours, so I must’ve looked pretty desolate by the time Jonny came in.
But scared? Of Rizal? Doubtful.
“Who says I’m afraid of anything?” I asked, sitting up straighter.
Jonny chuckled and scooped up the pile of fish bones, tossing them back into the sea. “Well, you should be scared about the state of the world. If you’ve survived out there for this long, I figured you’d know that by now.”
I eyed the belching volcano in the distance and the swirls of hardened lava just a few feet away. My expression softened.
“Yeah, this whole apocalypse thing is pretty surreal, huh? Did my mom… Did Dr. Martinez know what happened? What caused it?”
Jonny grabbed the rope netting, then sat down next to me on the rock ledge. “I thought she said something about Russia’s betrayal…” My eyebrows shot up at the mention of the very place Angel had gone to, but Jonny shook his head uncertainly. “That day was really crazy, though. Pierpont had all this high-tech equipment, but all it told us was that a few small objects had exploded on contact with the earth’s atmosphere.”
Meteors. That’s what Dylan said, too. But they couldn’t have been small. They must have been huge, and more than just a few of them, judging by the mess we saw.
“We were all in the caves by then, though, so we couldn’t see what was happening outside.”
“The sky caught fire,” I said, remembering how there’d been a huge black hole ringed in flames.
“But here’s the thing: The hits were only reported in the Pacific.”
“So?”
“So the local tsunamis would’ve been caused by the impact, but what about the other reports we heard?” Jonny seemed to catch himself. He focused on the net in his lap, knotting it expertly. “Sorry, you don’t want to get me started on all my theories.…”
“Hey, I asked, didn’t I?” I took a length of rope and mimicked his hand movements. “I’m a big fan of conspiracy theories.”
They line up with my real-world experience: that pretty much everyone I meet is out to get me.
Jonny’s eyes became animated. “Okay. So, the meteor fragments were in the Pacific,” he repeated. “But that first day, we got news blips from all over the world about other sudden disasters—too many global events for coincidence.” He gestured with his speargun on the rock as if marking spots on a map. “I’m talking rumors of nukes being deployed in Africa, several heads of state murdered, a lockdown in the US, a major epidemic in East Asia… There’s a lot we don’t know, but I’m positive it was all orchestrated by people with a lot of money and power. They wanted to destroy the world, and might not be too happy to fin
d out a bunch of mutant kids survived. I’ve been telling Rizal we need to make more weapons.” He stabbed the spear into the sand and looked up as if scanning for trouble from the sky. “We have to be prepared to fight.”
I guessed his theories were more right than wrong. What else did he know? “Right before she died, my mom warned us about a biological weapon called the H8E virus,” I told him. “Did you hear about any connection to the Apocalypticas? Or the Doomsday Group? Or H-men? Or the Remedy?”
If anyone knows her genocidal terrorist flash cards by heart, it’s me. I certainly have enough experience with them at this point.
“The epidemic started right before the meteor, and together they must have wiped out most of the people in the world. We haven’t heard any updates since that very first day, before the tsunami hit and the caves flooded. Which reminds me—we should be heading out in just a few minutes. Let’s get you suited up.” He stood up and started lugging over the ancient oxygen tank he’d brought in. “Since all the equipment stopped working, we’ve been totally cut off from the rest of the world.” He shrugged. “Rizal says it’s better this way—that we have everything we need in the caves, and we shouldn’t go looking for trouble.”
Sounds familiar.
“What do you think?” I asked.
Jonny opened his mouth, but hesitated. “I think trouble’s rarely in hiding,” he answered finally. “And if someone planned something on this scale?” His eyes widened, magnified by his glasses. “Then none of us is safe.”
29
“I DON’T NEED that,” I said, waving away the oxygen tank Jonny had set in front of me.
He continued sorting tubes. “There should be a bit left in the cylinder. The Aquatics don’t really need them, but we keep a couple of spares for emergencies.”
“I can breathe underwater,” I insisted. “Same as you.”
Jonny sat back and looked at me. “For how long?”
“Well, a long time,” I said. “And at great depth.” I nudged the cylinder with my foot. “So I don’t need that. Trust me.”
Maximum Ride Forever Page 7
