“Max, is there anything we can do to help?” Ella’s mom’s eyes were filled with a deep emotion that unnerved me.
Saving the world didn’t feel like something I could delegate.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said politely.
Behind me, Fang stood waiting, hating being in the open in their yard. He’d been weird all morning, and I wasn’t sure if it was about my wonky hand, what I’d said by accident, or what. Anyway, I knew he was itching to be off, and part of me was too.
Part of me wasn’t.
There were hugs, of course. These people couldn’t spit without having to hug someone. It felt unbalanced, being able to hug back with only my right arm—that is, my left arm could move up, but it was pretty dead below the elbow. Awkward.
I saw Dr. Martinez step toward Fang, her arms out, but a glance at his face made her stop, then smile warmly and hold her hand out for shaking. He took it, to my relief.
“I’m so glad I met you,” she said to him, looking as if she were visibly restraining herself from hugging him. He stood stiffly, not saying anything.
“Take care of Max.”
He nodded, and his mouth quirked on one side. He knew the idea that anyone needed to take care of me would get my knickers in a twist. I scowled. We would discuss this, for sure.
“Later,” he said to Ella and Dr. Martinez in that gushy, hyperemotional, overdramatic way he had.
Then he ran across the yard, leaping into the air and unfurling his wings right before he hit the woods. I heard them gasp at the sight of his fourteen-foot wings lofting him effortlessly into the sky, so dark they looked almost purple in the sunlight.
I smiled one last time at Ella and her mother, feeling really sad, but not as sad as I had last time, despite my ruined arm. Now I felt like, I found them again; I can always come back.
And I really thought I might, when all of this was over. If it was ever over.
33
Flying again felt as wonderful and life-giving as flying again always did. Fang and I didn’t speak for maybe forty minutes, streaking back toward where we’d left the flock. I was filled with apprehension and started to think through the almost-certainly-impossible idea of us all getting cell phones so we could keep in touch during times like this.
Finally it couldn’t be avoided any longer.
“So what’s with you?” I asked brusquely.
As if he’d been waiting, Fang rose and held his speed so he was almost right on top of me. While flying, it was the easiest way to hand something to someone else.
I held up my right hand, and he reached down, pressing a small white square of paper into my hand.
I looked at it as he shifted slightly so we were side-by-side again.
It was a photo, and I recognized it.
It was the picture of the baby Gasman that Fang and I had found in a deserted crack house, like, a million years ago. I’d left it in my pack, hidden back with the others in the canyon. “Why’d you bring this?” I asked Fang.
“I didn’t.” His voice was calm as always, but I saw rigid tension in his frame. “I found it.”
“What?” That didn’t make sense. “Found it where?”
“Between two books in Dr. Martinez’s home office,” he said, looking at me, registering my shock. “Between a book about recombinant-DNA theory...and one on birds.”
34
Well. If sudden knowledge had a physical force, my head would have exploded right there, and chunks of my brain would have splattered some unsuspecting schmuck in a grocery store parking lot down below.
Let’s just say I was stunned, and it takes a fair amount to stun me, I promise you.
My jaw dropped open as I stared at Fang’s grim face, and only the certainty that I would start eating bugs any second made me shut it again.
I’m not the leader for nothing. I mean, I’m the oldest, but I’m the leader because I’m smart, strong, fast, and determined. I’m willing to be the leader. I’m the decision maker. And now, with typical leaderly incisiveness, I put two and six together and came up with one single question that would get right to the crucial heart of the matter.
“Whaaat?”
“I found the picture in Dr. Martinez’s home office,” Fang began again, but I waved at him to be quiet.
“You searched her office?” I had never thought to do that. Not the first time, not this time.
His face was impassive. “I needed a paper clip.”
“She had books on combining DNA?”
“And birds.”
“She’s a vet.”
“Fine, she’s a vet. But avian anatomy, plus recombinant-DNA theory, plus the picture of the Gasman...”
“Oh, God, I can’t think,” I muttered, putting my hand to my head.
Everything’s part of the big picture, Max, the Voice helpfully supplied. All you have to do is put the pieces together.
Fortune cookie crap like that didn’t do a thing for me. I mean, I could have gotten that anywhere, without having a freaking Voice in my head.
“Oh, really?” I snarled. “I just have to put the pieces together? Excellent! Thanks for the great tip! Wish you’d told me earlier, you—”
I realized I was talking out loud and shut up.
I didn’t know what to think. And Fang was the only one I could admit that to. Any of the other kids, and I would’ve made something up to cover the truth.
I shook my head. “I don’t know what the deal is. I know she’s helped me, not once but twice.”
Fang didn’t say anything, in that annoying way of his.
We were practically to the canyon where we’d left the flock. I searched the area but didn’t see any telltale sign of smoke from their fire. Which meant they were being smart for once, lying low, they were...
Fang and I dropped down into the canyon, but we already knew. We knew from two hundred feet up. I didn’t need to touch the burned-out ashes or look around for clues, though I did, of course.
It was all horribly, sickeningly clear: The flock hadn’t been here in a couple of days. The scraped canyon floor showed they’d been taken by force.
While I’d been happily stuffing my face with homemade chocolate-chip cookies, my friends had been getting captured, with all that that implied.
I dropped my head into my hand, holding up my left arm uselessly.
“Crap.”
Massive understatement.
35
When Nudge finally opened her eyes, the truck was moving. She couldn’t remember the last several hours, so she figured she’d been asleep.
Squirming around, she saw Gazzy and Iggy lying with their eyes closed, maybe sleeping. Even Total seemed worn out, lying on his side, not even panting.
Angel was gone. Max and Fang had no idea where they were or what had happened. Iggy seemed to have given up.
The Gasman hadn’t said it, but Nudge knew he was more scared than he’d admit. Dried tear tracks streaked his dirty cheeks, making him look younger and more helpless than she’d ever seen him.
By moving slightly, Nudge could see five Flyboys sitting near the front of the truck, their backs against the truck walls. From here they looked almost like regular Erasers, but there was something slightly different about them. Basically, they were metallic robots with a thin Eraser skin over their frames. Their fur wasn’t as thick. And they never morphed into looking semihuman—they stayed in wolf form all the time.
Nudge closed her eyes again, weary and aching all over, too tired to think. They needed a plan. Everything just seemed so overwhelming and scary.
The truck shuddered to a halt, the screech of the brakes hurting Nudge’s ears. Then the ride grew very choppy, as if they had veered off the road and were rolling on dirt now. Ow, ow, ow, Nudge thought, biting her lip to keep from crying out. Gazzy and Iggy groggily opened their eyes, and Total stirred.
“I hope this is a potty break,” he muttered.
There was shouting outside. The three bird kids struggled to s
it up, their hands still duct-taped behind them.
The two back doors of the truck were thrown open with heavy, brain-rattling bangs. Sunlight flooding in made them blink and turn their heads away. The Flyboys in the truck with them strode to the opening.
There was more shouting, raised voices from the front of the truck. Nudge saw nothing outside except a long, empty dirt road with low brush lining it. No buildings, no electricity wires. No one around to help them. Nowhere to run to. Their wings had been bound flat against their backs.
“What’s happening?” Iggy’s whisper was barely audible, but a Flyboy kicked him.
“Shut up!” it growled, sounding like a recorded phone message.
Nudge heard many feet walking quickly toward the back of the truck. She braced for whatever was going to happen next.
Which no one ever could have predicted in a million years.
An overwhelming clump of Flyboys surrounded the back of the truck, furry faces frozen into identical sneers. Nudge swallowed, pretending to be braver than she was.
The crowd shifted restlessly, and Nudge saw that it was parting to let someone through. Max? Her heart jumped at the possibility. Even Max trussed up, in bad shape, thrown into the truck with them, would be fabulous, such a welcome—
It was Jeb!
Nudge felt a twinge around her heart as she looked at the face that had formed so much of her childhood. Jeb had rescued them. Then he’d died—or they’d thought he was dead. Then he had shown up again, clearly one of Them. Nudge knew that Max hated him now. So Nudge hated him too.
Her eyes narrowed.
From behind Jeb an Eraser, a real Eraser, stepped out to stand next to him. It was Ari! Ari, who had also been dead and then not really. Ari was the only real Eraser they’d seen in days and days.
Nudge put a bored expression on her face like she’d seen Max and Fang do a thousand times. Yeah, yeah, Jeb and Ari, she thought. Show me something new.
Someone else stepped out from behind Ari.
Nudge’s eyes widened, and her breath seized in her throat. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Instead her lips silently formed one word: Angel.
Nudge searched Angel’s blue eyes, but they seemed like a total stranger’s. Nudge had never seen her like this.
“Angel!” Gazzy’s face looked happy but at the same time concerned.
“Angel?” Nudge finally spoke, fear trickling like ice water down her neck.
“Time to die,” Angel said in her sweet little-girl voice.
36
“This is too easy,” Fang muttered, frowning at the ground two thousand feet below us.
“I was thinking the same thing. They did everything except leave gigundo yellow arrows saying This way, folks!”
We’d flown in a mammoth circle and had picked up tire tracks within an hour. It looked like a big truck, lots of wheels, and it had left desert sand on the highway for almost half a mile. We couldn’t think of any other reason a truck would have been hidden off-road and then driven out. Unless it belonged to, like, cactus poachers. Sand collectors. A movie crew.
This being the middle of Freaking Nowhere, USA, there was only the one road for miles and miles. So, one road with clear tire marks headed in one direction. Gee, obvious much?
“And we’re falling for this because of our sudden, unexpected regression into unbelievable stupidity?” I said.
Fang nodded grimly. “We’re falling for it because we’ve got no other choice.”
“Oh, yeah. That.”
Three hours of fast flight later, we saw them: an eighteen-wheeled semi parked off the road in perhaps the most desolate, unpopulated spot in all of Arizona. You could not call 911 from here. You could not run for help. You could send off a flare every half hour for days and not be seen by anyone.
“Looks like the place,” I said, sighing. “And look at that crowd down there. I thought all the Erasers were exterminated.”
“So the Voice lied to you?”
“No,” I said slowly, as we coasted on a current. “It’s never actually lied to me. So if those things aren’t Erasers, then they’re the Erasers’ replacements. Oh, joy.”
“Yep.” Fang shook his head, so not into this. “Five bucks says they’re worse than the originals. And they probably have guns.”
“No doubt.”
“And of course they’re expecting us.”
“We did everything but RSVP.”
“I hate this.” Fang deliberately looked everywhere but at my useless left hand.
“That would be because you’ve still got a tenuous grasp of sanity.”
I circled wide, trying to gear myself up for an impossible fight: We would be outnumbered a couple hundred to two, by something worse than Erasers. I had no idea if the rest of the flock would be able to help.
It was pretty much a suicide mission.
Again.
“There is one bright side to this,” said Fang.
“Yeah? What’s that?” The new and improved Erasers would mutilate us before they killed us?
He grinned at me so unexpectedly I forgot to flap for a second and dropped several feet. “You looove me,” he crooned smugly. Holding his arms out wide, he added, “You love me this much.”
My shriek of appalled rage could probably be heard in California, or maybe Hawaii. Certainly by the unknown army down below. I didn’t care. I folded my wings against my sides and aimed downward to get away from Fang as fast as possible. Now that he had filled me with a blind, teeming bloodlust, I was ready to take out a couple thousand Eraser replacements, no matter what they were.
Which, I admitted to myself, may have been his point.
Amazingly, we were able to thump to quick-running landings on the roof of the semi without getting punched full of little unaerodynamic bullet holes.
Heads swiveled to look at us, Erasery heads, but there was something different about them. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.
“Iggy?” I yelled.
“Max!” I heard his strangled cry from the rear of the truck and trotted over.
“You guys ok—,” I began, then I saw Jeb, Ari, and Angel standing on the ground. “Angel!” I cried. “Are you okay? I’m gonna take these guys apa—”
The look in Angel’s polar-ice eyes stopped me.
“I told you I should be the leader, Max,” she said with a chilling flatness. “Now it’s your time to die. The last life-forms from the labs are being exterminated, and you will be too.” She turned to Jeb. “Right?”
Jeb nodded solemnly, and then my world went blank in the wink of an eye.
PART 2
SCHOOL’S
IN —
FOREVER
37
My head was feeling as if had been used as a bowling ball, against solid marble pins.
My heart pounded, my breaths were ragged and shallow, and every muscle I had ached. I didn’t know what was going on, but it was bad.
I opened my eyes.
The word bad was so grossly inadequate to describe the situation that it was like it was from another language—a language of naive idiots.
I was strapped to a metal hospital bed, wrists and ankles bound with thick Velcro.
And I wasn’t alone.
With effort, I raised my head, fighting off the swift wave of nausea that made me gag and swallow convulsively.
To my left, also strapped to a metal bed, the Gasman breathed unevenly, twitching in his sleep.
Next to him, Nudge was starting to move, moaning slightly.
Turning to the right, I saw Iggy. He was lying very still, eyes open, staring up at a ceiling he couldn’t see.
On his other side, Fang was straining silently against his Velcro restraints, his face pale and grimly determined. When he felt me looking at him, I saw relief soften his gaze for a split second.
“You okay?” I mouthed.
He gave a short, quick nod, then inclined his head to gesture to the others. I nodded wearily
, summing up our situation with a universal “this is crap” expression. He tilted his head at a bed across from us. There was Total, looking dead except for the occasional muscle jerk, his small limbs bound like ours. He looked mangy, missing patches of fur around his mouth.
Moving my head carefully so I wouldn’t hurl, I examined our surroundings. We were in a plain white room, which was windowless. I thought I saw a door beyond Nudge’s bed, but I couldn’t be sure.
Iggy, Fang, me, Gazzy, Nudge, Total.
Angel wasn’t here.
I drew in a breath, readying myself to struggle against the straps, and it was then that it hit me: the smell. That chemical, antiseptic smell of alcohol, floor cleaner, plastic tubing. The smell that had filled my nose every day for the first ten years of my life.
Horrified, I stared at Fang. He gave me a questioning look.
Wishing desperately that I was wrong but with the terrified, sinking knowledge that I wasn’t, I mouthed the answer: “The School.”
Fang’s eyes flared in recognition, and that was the only confirmation that I needed of this nightmare.
We were back at the School.
38
The School—the awful, terrifying place we had spent the past four years trying to get over, get away from. At the School, we’d been experimented on, tested, retested, trained. Because of this place, I would never be able to deal with people in long white coats and could never major in chemistry. Because of this place, when I saw a dog crate at a PetSmart, I broke into cold chills.
“Max?” Gazzy’s voice sounded dusty and dry.
“Hey, sweetie,” I said as quietly as I could.
“Where are we? What’s going on?”
I didn’t want to tell him, but while I was trying to come up with a convincing lie, the reality broke into his brain, and he stared at me, appalled. I saw him silently say, “The School,” and I had no choice but to nod. His head flopped back against his bed, and I saw that his once fluffy blond hair was a dusty, matted gray.
“Hey!” Total said with weak indignation. “I demand a lawyer.” But his characteristic belligerence was betrayed by the sad pain in his voice.
Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports Page 6
