“I’m Dylan,” Dylan said when she paused by his bed, looking confused.
“He’s the latest, um, acquisition,” I explained weakly. Even with his messed-up skin, he still looked like he’d been designed by Gods R us. Except right now it was Trolls R us. But, like, a troll who would totally be a pinup in all the troll teen magazines.
“Hi, Dylan,” my mom said. “I’m Valencia Martinez, Max’s mom.”
Dylan’s puffy eyes widened. “You have a mother?” he asked me. “Wow. I had no idea. Do you have a father too, then?”
Bad, bad question. My mom quickly changed the subject. “You know, I read about a case where someone poisoned a spy with a radioactive element,” she said. “The pictures I saw kind of looked like this.”
“Oh, holy crap,” I said, putting my hand to my mouth.
“It’s not radiation poisoning,” said a voice.
“Jeb!” My mom went over and closed the door behind him.
“How do you know?” I demanded of Jeb. “Did you have something to do with this?”
“No,” said Jeb. He was wearing a hospital gown, open in the back, and I hoped he was enjoying the breeze. An IV dripped into his arm, and he had wheeled its little stand in with him. He looked pale and weak — after all, he had taken a bullet for us. Maybe I should be a tad less accusatory.
“No,” he repeated. “And I hope I’m wrong, but I think it’s an … accelerator of some kind. A genetic accelerator.”
“What the heck is that?” Gazzy asked.
Jeb paused. “Well … it’s something that would react with your genes. Basically introducing new mutations and speeding up mutations you already have. I think all of us got dosed, except maybe Max and Fang, because they were gone. But it’s having an effect only on you, whose DNA has already been modified.”
There was an appalled silence. I’d been gone for, like, two days, and in that time, everything had completely careened out of control.
“But what if it helps us become even better?” Angel said, ever the creepy optimist. Her normally beautiful face looked like a personal-size pizza with eyes. “We could be like superheroes!”
“Yeah, so far that’s working out well for you,” I said, gesturing to everyone’s ruined skin. “Do you have any idea who would —” I stopped as the obvious answer came to me. “Dr. Seersucker.”
Angel sat up. “Dr. Gunther-Hagen is really brilliant, Max.”
“You want to be accelerated? Fine. But you have no idea what’s going to happen to you next. We already know that your good doctor’s self-healing genetics can have some pretty scary side effects.”
Angel frowned, and Dylan looked concerned. I’d forgotten he had been gifted with Dr. Gunther-Hagen’s magic spit.
My mom turned to Jeb, who was leaning against a wall, looking gray. “Is there any way to know what will happen to them? How toxic is it? Is it deadly? Is there any way to get it out of their systems?”
“Um, not really, I’m not sure, I don’t think so, and I doubt it,” said Jeb, trying to answer all her questions. “My guess is that this initial bad reaction might be the shock of having it introduced to their systems. I’m hoping that once it’s absorbed, these side effects will go away.”
“This was someone conducting an experiment,” Fang said slowly. Frowning, he turned to Jeb. “Someone who’d want to be there to see the results.”
Jeb held up a hand. “Don’t even go there, Fang. The accelerant would have had to be in a shared source — say, in the air or water at the house. I would have been affected too.”
“But it wouldn’t affect you because you’re normal,” Fang objected. “You said so yourself.”
“That’s just a theory,” Jeb said. “This was not my doing.” My mom interjected. “Let’s focus on the important thing here. Is there a way to undo this?”
Jeb shook his head. “If I’m right, it would have been designed to start binding to their DNA immediately, inserting its enzymes and amino acids directly into their chromosomes.”
I sank down onto a hard plastic chair. “Oh, my God.”
“This could give us cancer!” Nudge said, blinking back tears.
“Or turn us into, like, pterodactyls or something,” said Gazzy. “It wouldn’t take much.” He looked stoic.
Jeb sighed. “We should contact Gunther-Hagen to see if he admits to any of this — or even if he won’t admit it, maybe he’ll give us clues as to what it is.”
The idea of contacting the doc for help was totally crazy to me. Excuse me, but hadn’t Jeb just been shot by one of the man’s employees?
“I would vote to get out of here, get to a safe house, and see what happens over the next twenty-four hours,” I suggested.
“I’ll call a contact at the CSM,” said my mom, reaching for her phone. “He’ll be able to help us find a place.”
But I had only one real desire right then: to go back to Colorado and drink the water. If my flock was going through this, I needed to go through it too.
PART
FOUR
THE TOTALLY, COMPLETELY UNTHINKABLE
67
TOTAL WAS GLAD TO SEE us all again. His own horrible skin lesions were somewhat disguised by his black fur, but he was definitely suffering the same effects.
“I feel like crap!” he said, once we were settled at the new safe house. “At first I thought I’d gotten some bad shrimp dip, but this is way beyond that.”
“How’s Akila?” I asked. “She seem okay?”
“Yes, thank God.” His small black eyes glittered. “Which reminds me. I’ve got some big news —”
“Max? Come look at this sunset,” said Dylan. I’d been avoiding him ever since we got here, even though I’d felt his eyes on me whenever we were in the same room. Nudge had told me he was a great singer and could totally be a star, on top of being a great fighter who got along swimmingly with the rest of the flock.
Without meaning to, I glanced across the room at Fang, who’d been talking to Gazzy and Iggy. His gaze was lasered in on me.
“Oh, I’m sure it’s great,” I said to Dylan lamely. The picture window showed the low mountains off in the distance, and we could see a bit of the ocean if we leaned way to the left on the balcony.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” said Dylan, a wistful smile on his slightly less troll-like face. “But I’d understand if you want to keep your distance from” — he pointed at himself — “this mess.”
“Can’t you, like, put some magic spit on it and make it all better?” I asked, only half joking.
“Tried it already.” He chuckled. “I guess even the doc’s magic doesn’t work on bad teenage complexions. I’m doomed.”
The irony of Dylan complaining about his usually perfect skin was not lost on me. I laughed, then smothered it, not willing to be sucked into his charm.
The rest of the flock was starting to seem better too, as Jeb had predicted. They had more energy, and their skin looked less awful. If Jeb was right, their systems were absorbing the reactant, binding it to their genes, and soon it would be normal, a part of them. Greeaaaat. I kept waiting for antlers to pop out of their heads or for them to start understanding Akila when she barked. I mean, what the heck was going to happen to them?
The next day the skin lesions were virtually gone. But we hardly even noticed because, lo and behold, something else was gone too.
Angel.
Do you want to join me in the next word? Okay, everyone all together now:
Again.
It wasn’t like the other times, when we had to mobilize our forces and piece together clues and leap out into the air on a rescue mission.
This time, we only had to read the note.
Dear Flock and Max and Dr. Martinez and Jeb and Dylan,
You guys are wrong about Dr. Hans. He wants to help us, and for us to be the best we can be. You don’t trust him because you don’t trust anybody. But I want to be more powerful. I want to know what he’s working on. I’ve gone t
o work with him. Please don’t follow me. Things will only get messy if you do.
Love,
Angel
P.S. I just want to remind you that Fang’s time is about up. Him being there puts the rest of the flock in danger. I’m sorry, Fang.
68
“CAN’T WE PUT a boot on her, like a little car?” Gazzy asked, rubbing his hair in frustration so that it stood straight up.
“Yeah, maybe we should start locking her in at night,” I said wryly.
“Could she have been … kidnapped?” my mom asked.
We all quickly looked around. There was no sign of disturbance; everything was still locked. And the note was in Angel’s handwriting.
“No, I think she decided to go,” I said. “As much as I wish that weren’t true.”
“What does she mean about Fang’s time being up?” Jeb asked.
“She said that in Africa,” said Nudge. “She said Fang was gonna die.”
“Die?” My mom’s eyes widened.
“She was just trying to get attention,” said Fang. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
I suddenly had a thought, one of those awful thoughts that you hate right away and yet you can’t ever unthink it. I felt my heart start to pound as I stood up.
“Fang? Let me see the back of your neck.”
Those of us who graduated from (or, I should say, escaped from) the School have expiration dates, like milk. We first noticed them on some Erasers, after they had … expired. Dates, like little tattoos, showed up on the backs of their necks. They seem to become visible about a week, maybe less, before the built-in expiration gene kicks in. Do we have long, full lives ahead of us, or are we living on borrowed time? No clue. It makes retirement planning, like, impossible.
Fang stood up. In the past year he’d gotten taller than I was, so I had to stand on tiptoe a bit to see his neck. I didn’t want to look — didn’t want to know. I couldn’t even let myself think of what it would mean if I saw a date there.
But I’m not a coward. So I brushed his black silky hair off the smooth skin of his neck — the same neck I had kissed not long ago. I could smell his clean Fang smell, the one he inexplicably had even when he was noticeably filthy and covered in gore.
And I looked.
And saw … just smooth, plain, tan Fang skin. I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
“No date,” I quickly told the others, and they visibly relaxed.
“Do I have a date?” Dylan’s quiet voice almost made me jump — I’d forgotten that he was there.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You were made by different people, I think.”
uncertainty played across his once-again-gorgeous face. I took pity on him. “I could … look. I guess.”
He came to stand close to me, and turned his back. His streaky blond hair wasn’t as long as Fang’s, but I still had to push it out of the way. And tug down a tiny bit on the neck of his maroon T-shirt. I hadn’t been this close to Dylan before, and I realized that he smelled good in a completely different way. Clean. Spicy.
Then I realized what I was thinking, and my cheeks burned. I took a fast look at his neck and snatched my hands away. “No date. Not that that means anything.”
“At least you don’t have one,” said my mom. “We know what having one means; we don’t know what not having one means.”
Still, Angel’s note had reignited the fears I’d tried to bury. What if all of the attacks in recent days had been meant for Fang? The Eraser attack, the Cirque shooter, the Furioso incident — what if all of these had been designed to get Fang? I remembered how Dylan had chopped the woman’s gun out of her hand at the restaurant.
He just might have saved Fang’s life.
69
“WHERE DOES DR. GOD hang out?” I asked. “Where exactly has Angel gone? How did she know where to find him?”
Nudge headed to our computer. “On it.”
“I’ll go with you,” Fang told me, already starting to load his pockets with knives, throwing stars, Snickers bars.
“No,” I said, trying to sound calm. “I’ll go by myself.”
He straightened up, and let me tell you, it was all I could do not to crumble and beg him to come with me. Any fight was possible with Fang as my backup. Any trip was more fun. But what if this was all designed to get him? I just didn’t know. I couldn’t take that chance. The thought of anything happening to Fang … it was much worse than thinking of anything happening to me.
Fang, typically, didn’t start pelting me with questions. Instead he looked at me, cocked his head slightly, and thought things through.
“You think you’ll have more chance of success without me?” he asked mildly.
“No,” I answered honestly. “Of course not. But I’m willing to risk me. I’m not willing to risk you.”
He opened his mouth to start arguing, but I held up my hand. “Fang, we don’t know what this whole ‘Fang’s time is up’ thing is about. But if it turns out that Angel’s doing this as part of that, then I don’t want to make it easy for them. You know?”
I turned to Jeb. After the shooting incident, I felt I had to trust him more. “Are you going to be staying here for a while?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“You can’t go by yourself, Max,” said Dylan.
I blinked. I mean, I don’t take direction from people I love, so direction from people I’ve practically just met? Not likely.
“Um, I found an address in Malibu, weirdly enough,” said Nudge.
“Malibu?” I frowned. “That’s practically next door.”
“Max, what if something happens to you?” Dylan asked.
I ignored him and turned back to Jeb. “If Fang is in any way harmed while I’m gone — if he gets a hangnail — you won’t see another morning. Are we clear on that?”
Fang crossed his arms over his chest. “This is ridiculous. I’ve never needed a babysitter.”
“Not a babysitter — just backup,” I told him. “Iggy, Nudge, and Gazzy are also on duty here. But I don’t think I’ll be gone long.”
I moved to leave, and Dylan actually grabbed my shoulders. I was so surprised that I forgot to karate-chop his elbows and break his arms.
“I don’t want anything to happen to you,” he said urgently.
“What you want does not matter here,” I said slowly and carefully. I hoped Dylan was sensitive enough to read between the lines, to the subtext of: Let go of me or I’ll kill you.
He let go of me. Fang was looking at him with narrowed eyes. I didn’t have time for this.
“Okay, later,” I said, and strode off to save the day, once again. I hoped.
70
DR. HANS GUNTHER-HAGEN left his computer console and headed out to the terrace overlooking the ocean.
“Max is on the way,” he said. “I thought it would take longer for her to find this house.”
“Nah,” said Angel, dunking a strawberry into her nonalcoholic strawberry daiquiri. “They’re totally on top of the research, especially with that government computer.”
“Government computer?”
“Yeah. From the CIA or the NSA or something,” Angel said. She lay back on her patio lounger and adjusted her sunglasses. Her pure white wings were spread out to the sides, about nine feet across. The sunlight warmed the feathers, soaking in to heat the porous, light bones. It felt fantastic.
“She should be here quite soon,” said Dr. Hans. He shaded his eyes and searched the sky, as if even now he’d be able to see her tiny silhouette against the blue.
“Yeah,” said Angel, setting down her drink and closing her eyes. “I told you.”
She listened to the doctor walk away, hearing every nuance of his steps. She smiled to herself but made sure to keep it off her face. This was why Max liked being the leader, she thought. It was amazing to figure out a plan and then have it work, just watch it all start to fall into place. It was like playing chess, but with real people. And the endgame w
as about to start.
71
MALIBU WAS BUILT on cliffs next to the Pacific Ocean. There was a narrow strip of dark tan sand, then a thin row of houses, then the Pacific Coast Highway, then cliffs dotted with more houses. I have one word, people: earthquake. I mean, hello, San Andreas Fault? Those houses would be toast crumbs if the big one hit.
Dr. Gunther-Hagen’s house was overlooking the beach — I recognized it from the satellite photos Nudge had found. I held my breath and dropped down onto his terrace, hoping everyone around had their eyes glued to the hypnotic waves and the even more hypnotic all-girl beach volleyball competition taking place down on the sand.
The first thing I saw — well, after a quick sweep to check out security teams, cameras, razor wire, etc. — was Angel, lounging on a … lounger.
“Hi, Max,” she said, pushing her shades up onto her curls.
“I hope you’re wearing sunscreen,” I said. “You’re gonna have hella wrinkles by the time you’re ten.”
“Want some daiquiri?” she offered, pointing at a blender. “Is it traitor flavored?” I asked.
Angel sighed and sat up as the sliding glass doors opened. Dr. Hans Gunther-Hagen came out, dressed in a crisp white linen suit. He smiled and held out his hands to me.
“Maximum!” he said. “I’m so glad you’ve come to join us.”
“Whoa, let’s get one thing straight, Hansie,” I said, keeping a healthy distance from him. “I came here for answers. I’m not joining nobody.”
“That’s a double negative, Max,” Angel noted. If I was the one who had taught her grammar, I now regretted it.
“Max, please, sit down,” said Dr. G-H. He gestured to a patio chair. I crossed my arms over my chest and looked at him.
“What are you using Angel for?” I asked. “And what’s Fang got to do with it?”
“Max,” said Angel, “there isn’t much time left for the world as we know it. If we want to survive, we have to join Dr. Hans and work with him.”