“He’s not going to want anyone to see his failures,” Fang fact, he’s going to make sure no one does. He’ll have to get rid of them.”
I nodded, feeling sick inside.
“Are you thinking we need to stop him?” Fang asked. “I’m thinking we need to start with some research.”
25
DR. SCARY HAD about 300,000 Google hits. We started wading. The high point was stumbling on a photo of him from grad school, which actually made me laugh out loud. Back in the old days, the doc had a lot of hair. And it was perfectly feathered. Wow. You think you know someone …
But it all went downhill from there.
On around page thirty of our search results, we clicked on a link that looked like gobbledygook — but when the screen cleared and refreshed, it almost made my heart stop. At the top of the page appeared the logotype for the Institute of Higher Living. The rest of the screen was blank except for three boxes for a user name and two passwords.
I hadn’t heard anything about the Institute in a long time. We’d busted into one of their facilities and released some mutants once. That’s where we picked up Total.
Fang and I exchanged glances. We knew we had to find a way to break in.
“Nudge?” I called, and she came over. Nudge had a preternatural gift for computer hacking and was the only one of us who truly knew her way around this high-octane government computer we’d nabbed a while back.
I couldn’t even process the flurry of mouse clicks, screen flashes, dialog boxes going open and shut, and letternumber series that Nudge keyed in to the machine as she tried to hack in. It took her about ten minutes to get access — a long time by her measure — and it took Fang and me twenty more minutes of exploring to find a list of lab reports that sounded like maybe, just maybe, they had the fingerprints of Dr. Hackjob-Wackjob:
Morbid Effects of Autoantibodies on Rodents
Autoimmune Toxicity in Systemic Viral Experimentation on Chimpanzees
Abnormal Cell Differentiation from Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Experimentation
Cancerous Effects of Viral Reprogramming of iPSCs in Human Adults
Defective Apoptotic Processes and Cell Proliferation in iPSC Experimentation on Human Children
Most of those words I didn’t know, aside from the red flags of cancerous and abnormal — but human children was all I needed to feel like throwing up. I almost didn’t want to go further. But I drew a breath and forced myself to start reading the first document.
Fang and I stared at the screen.
“Is it just me or does this feel like it’s written in Latin?” Fang said five minutes later. We were both so freaked by the scientific mumbo jumbo that we hadn’t even clicked to the next page view.
“Latin would be easier to understand than this,” I grumbled. “But hold on — see those references in parentheses to ‘figure one’ and ‘figure two’ and ‘figure three’? It means there are pictures somewhere associated with this paper.”
“Well, you know what they say … ,” Fang began.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” I finished. “Let me just skim through the rest of this stuff real quick and see if anything catches my eye.”
I have to give myself credit for that one. Most grownups wouldn’t have even bothered to try to wade through that crap, but I managed to pick up on two key points.
First: Autoantibodies set your immune system against you and attack the body’s own organs like they’re the bad guys. Second: Abnormal cell growth, too much cell growth, badly “programmed” cell growth = party invitation to cancer. Great.
I started clicking through the pages of the PDF faster now, to get to the pictures. And then, when I did, I wondered why I’d been so eager to see them.
Our grisly tour of Dr. Hans Gunther-Hagen’s Gallery of Mistakes took at least two hours.
We saw people with purple eyelids and grotesquely bulging eyes the size of baseballs, people with glands in their necks so swollen it looked as if there were an alien creature growing inside them. Others had muscles so inflamed their bodies ballooned and twisted into shapes I didn’t think possible. The skin disorders were maybe the worst for me to look at. Rashing and cracking and bleeding and virtual disintegration so wildly extreme that I had to stand up and walk away from the computer at one point.
This was only what was happening on the surface of these victims. I’d read enough to understand the bottom line: toxic disaster. Chronic pain, even agony, not to mention the psychological effects of dealing with it.
“There’s more. The regeneration stuff,” Fang said, and I nodded. It was a horror show, but I had to go deeper, and deeper still. Page after page, image after image, document after document.
I can’t even write down the details of what I saw on the screen that day. It would bring back too many nightmarish visions of festering wounds, partial and deformed limbs, and horrific tumors of all shapes and sizes.
“I just knew it,” I said in a low voice. “I knew he would stop at nothing to accelerate his research on humans.”
What we would call mistakes, Dr. G called progress.
26
IT WAS HOURS later when Iggy jolted us out of Dr. Hans’s Fun House.
“What’ve you guys been doing all this time? Online poker? You sure are … into it.”
“Playing a video game,” Fang answered, hiding the document on the computer desktop. Even though the other kids had seen a lot of freaky stuff in their lives, it was still our instinct to protect them from anything that might overload their quota of nightmares.
“You’re lying through your fangs,” Iggy accused.
Fang tried to play innocent — but “innocent Fang” is an oxymoron, so it didn’t work.
“That reminds me,” Angel called over to us from the couch. “I have a video for you, Max!”
She skipped to her bedroom and brought out a backpack that she turned upside down. Out dropped a clogged travel-size hairbrush, an iPod Shuffle, and a CD in a linty transparent sleeve.
“I found it in my bag a few days after we got back from Africa. It has your name on it, but I don’t know how it got there — I swear.”
I didn’t have a good feeling about this, but curiosity got the better of me and I popped the CD into the computer right away. I’d drill Angel later about why she “forgot” to give it to me until now.
When I clicked “play,” my not-good feeling got much, much less good.
My favorite finger-chopping foe smiled at me from the screen.
“Hello, Max,” Dr. Gunther-Hagen began. I braced myself, as Fang stood behind me with his comforting hands on my shoulders.
You ran out a bit quickly today, and I was so excited to be demonstrating my work that I never had the opportunity to give you some of the more important reasons why I know you would find it very rewarding to work with me.
As I’m certain was apparent from what you saw and learned of my limb-regeneration project, I am the world’s leading expert on stem cell research, bar none. Growing an organ in a dish and implanting it is rather an elementary process for me and my team compared to limb regeneration. In fact, I’ve been successfully implanting organs grown from subjects’ own tissue for a number of years. Were you to join forces with me, doors would open up for you and your flock.
He paused dramatically.
“For example, wouldn’t one of your boys love” — he reached to his side and slid a cloudy jar into view of the camera — “a brand-new pair of these?”
He picked up the container so the camera could focus on it.
Floating inside was a human eyeball.
27
THE NEXT MORNING I SET the kids to working on independent studies, and I did more computer research about genetic-recombination theory and stem cell science. I knew they had incredible potential to help humankind. But what became clear to me was that the doctor was experimenting way too fast on humans. All my research had done was upset me.
So now I was emerging from
a long shower that was supposed to be therapeutic. I started dragging a comb through my brown hair, getting caught in snarls. Really and truly stuck. I got lost in the ritual of trying to untangle the tangles — contemplating Dr. Hans and Iggy and the possibility of new, healthy eyes for one of the people I loved most in the world — as the moisture on the mirror slowly began to dissipate.
That’s when I spotted an Eraser in the mirror, looking out at me through the fog.
Reactions were faster than thought, and I whirled, one fist raised to strike … an empty wall. A fast look showed that unless the Eraser was paper thin and stuck to my back, there was no one in here but me.
I sat on the edge of the tub, heart pounding.
This had happened once before, ages ago. I’d looked in the mirror and seen an Eraser version of Max looking back at me. But Erasers didn’t even exist anymore — they’d all been “retired.” I peeped up over the edge of the mirror. The steam had cleared, and I saw my human face, my brown eyes.
What was happening to me?
28
SWEARING UNDER MY BREATH, I searched the bathroom, opening cupboards, feeling under the sink. I examined every inch of every wall and ran my fingers around the window frame. If there was a camera hidden in there, I didn’t find it.
A tap on the door made me jump like a deer.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
I unlocked the door and let Fang in. Grinning, he shut the door behind him. Then he saw my face. “What’s wrong?” He glanced around. “You have that ghost look again.”
I let out a breath. “Nothing.”
“Then why is a comb stuck in your hair?”
Crap. I slowly pulled it out, trying to get through the worst of the tangles.
From down the hall, I heard raised voices and a crash, and I tensed.
“The kids are taking a little break,” Fang said.
“But everything’s okay out there?” I tried to sound casual.
He shrugged. “I think they’re getting cabin fever.” He stepped forward and put his hands around my waist. “But enough about them,” he said, and his voice sent chills — good ones — down my spine.
I wanted to forget about everything and escape into Fang’s kiss. Don’t think, just feel.
“Where’s Max?” I heard Gazzy say out in the hall, and Iggy responded.
“Wherever Fang is, of course.” They laughed.
I pulled away from Fang. Even this was being ruined.
“They’re okay,” said Fang, bending his head again.
A second later I nearly jumped out of my skin, though. “Oh, Fang, you’re so haaandsooome,” I heard. It sounded like me — standing right next to me.
That was Gazzy, doing one of his absolutely perfect impersonations. He also had a gift for throwing his voice.
“Max! Let me take you away from all this! My darling!” If I hadn’t been holding Fang — and also hadn’t known that he would never say something that corny — I would have sworn it was him. Cackling laughter.
Fang and I leaned our foreheads against each other.
“Whoa — watch it!” There was a loud crash, and I practically pushed Fang into the wall. Yanking the door open, I strode down the hall.
“What’s going on out here?” I demanded, hands on hips.
“Nothing,” Gazzy said, smirking. “What’s going on in there?” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, and my face burned. Then I saw it: a pile of broken dishes and leftover food all over the floor.
“Who did this?”
“It was me,” Gazzy said in Nudge’s voice.
“Hey!” she said. “They were wrestling.” “You’re supposed to be studying,” I snapped.
“Oh, while you get to make kissy-face with Fang in the bathroom?” Iggy sneered. “I don’t think so.”
I was so mortified I was speechless for a second. Then I stamped my foot and said, “Get back to your books!” Which was, of course, a huge mistake.
29
THEY JUST STARED at me for a moment, then Iggy’s face contorted into anger. He yanked off his iPod earphones and threw the whole thing across the room. “I can’t take it anymore!”
“Hey!” I said sharply. “Those are expensive!”
“I can’t help it!” he shouted. “I’ve been listening to how the Roman Empire fell, and all I can say is, it didn’t fall nearly fast enough!”
“You’re, like, totally sucking the fun out of the first kind-of vacation we’ve had in ages and ages!” Gazzy whined, his arms crossed.
Even Nudge, my peacemaker, chimed in. “I listened to an hour of French history this morning, and I thought my head was going to explode,” she said. “It’s just, army this, invader that, conquering whatever. We have to learn, and I love learning things, but there has to be a better way. Like at a school!”
I was shocked — Nudge had always been my most loyal supporter.
Well, I wasn’t going to stand for this. I was the flock leader! I was going to restructure our lesson plans, I was going to start issuing demerits or other teachery things, I was going to …
I was going to stop being such a hard nose.
I had an idea, and I like to think it actually came from my own brain and not from the Voice or from Angel. And it’s so sad that I even need to clarify that.
“You know,” I said slowly, “I’m going to be fifteen tomorrow.”
Blank stares. I guess I hadn’t made the smoothest segue in the world.
“What?” Iggy asked.
“I’m going to turn fifteen tomorrow,” I said, warming to the idea. “It’s high time. I can’t remember when I turned fourteen. We’ve got to start writing this stuff down. Anyway, tomorrow I’m going to be fifteen. So we need a party.”
“If you get to be fifteen, then I get to be fifteen!” Iggy sounded indignant.
I looked at Fang. “Wanna be fifteen?”
His smile melted me. “Yeah.”
“I want to be twelve!” Nudge cried.
“I’m nine! I’m nine!” said Gazzy, jumping up and down.
“I’m already seven, but I didn’t have a party,” said Angel.
“Then it’s decided,” I said in my leaderly way. “We’re all turning a year older tomorrow, and we’re going to have a big party.”
My flock cheered and started dancing around the room. I sighed happily.
Sometimes being a good leader is knowing when to … back off.
30
“ME AND MY BIG MOUTH,” I muttered, looking around my room. “Sure, let’s have a party; let’s all get a year older! Excellent idea, Max. But what are you gonna do for presents?”
The six of us had never had much, and we’d been on the run, on the road, for so long that we’d been forcibly pared down to having, like, nothing. But I wanted to do this right —’cause what’s a birthday party without presents?
I had about twenty hours. I was going to have to improvise. Opening my bedroom window, I climbed onto the sill and looked out over the canyon. I was stopped by a sudden thought.
I knew what I really wanted to get Iggy for his birthday.
And I knew where to get it.
But … I just couldn’t pay that price. I couldn’t.
I leaned forward and let myself drop into the air, enjoying the thrill of free-falling before snapping my wings out and rising.
Let’s see the doctor touch the sky!
“Do you think she’d like a bomb of her own?” Gazzy asked Iggy.
Iggy thought. “I kind of don’t think so. She usually just relies on us to do all that.”
“Well, what can I give her?” Gazzy ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “Bombs are the only thing I know how to make!”
“Well, here’s an idea,” said Iggy, and leaned over to whisper into Gazzy’s ear.
A smile slowly widened on Gazzy’s face. He rubbed his hands together. “Brillllliant.”
Nudge sang softly to herself as she worked. It had been totally worth it, lu
gging everything back from Europe and New York. Look at how handy these things were now! Her backpack had been stuffed, and she’d hidden 80 percent of everything she’d bought, sure that Max would make her dump it as being not worth lugging around, a liability in case of a fight, etc., etc., etc. Now it was all paying off.
Two presents down, three to go. She smiled as she reached for the hot-glue gun.
* * *
Angel straightened, listening. Overhead she heard the cries of a hawk, and she shaded her eyes to watch it wheel through the sky. She loved flying with hawks. They’d all learned a lot from them. You’d think that flying would be as natural as walking, and it was, in a way, but it was also a skill that could be improved.
Other than the hawks, she was alone in the canyon. She had most of what she needed, but a couple more things would be perfect. Her sharp eyes darted here and there, searching in the shadows, checking out every shape, every outline.
Oh, there! Perfect! It was amazing that vultures hadn’t picked the bones clean.
It was just what she needed for the presents she was making.
Fang saw the shine of familiar brown hair way down the street and stepped back quickly into the shadow of a storefront. What was she doing here, more than a hundred miles from home? He smiled: no doubt the same thing he was doing.
So far he was in good shape: He’d gotten a really scary thriller novel on CD for Iggy. It was totally inappropriate for kids, and he knew Ig would love it. For Nudge he’d bought a dozen different fashion magazines, all about hair and clothes and makeup. He could already imagine her squealing with joy, then disappearing for several days to curl up somewhere and pore over every page.
For Gazzy? A history of explosives and how they’d been used in warfare for thousands of years. It was like giving candy to a diabetic, but it was perfect.