A slight scratching sound in the shadows made us all prick up our ears.
“Rats,” said Nudge nervously.
But it wasn’t rats. A tall figure appeared in the distance. We all went on alert, ready for a fight, since flight was out of the question.
A voice spoke.
“Max,” Jeb said.
And now my day of horror was complete.
90
“Well, well,” I said, using every bit of strength I had to make my voice sound chipper. “Fancy meeting you. Come here often? How’s the food?”
Jeb moved closer, till he stepped into the dim circle of light given off by the amber emergency fixture. He looked just the same—maybe more tired than usual. I guess torturing kids takes it out of you.
He gave me his trademark smile tinged with sadness. “Actually, no one knows I’m here.”
I made my eyes round. “Gosh, I sure won’t tell anyone!”
“So you met the Director?” he asked.
My facade crashed down, but I struggled to keep it together. “Yes. And what a picnic she turned out to be. Three billion women with ovaries on this planet, and I had to get the one voted ‘most likely to become a delusional psychopath’ as my mom.”
Jeb knelt down on the filthy stone floor, looking at me. I felt Angel wound tightly with tension next to me and wondered if she was picking up anything from Jeb. He hadn’t acknowledged the others, including Ari.
“You can still save the world, Max.”
A sudden wave of exhaustion almost sucked me under. I wanted to roll up into a fetal position and stay there for the rest of my life, which I hoped would be mercifully short. I had been working so hard for so long, going at 140 percent. I had pretty much hit rock bottom.
I closed my eyes wearily and leaned against the dank stone wall behind me. “How?” I said. “Through Re-Evolution? The By-Half Plan? No, thanks. I’m getting off the madcap train of mass destruction.”
Max, you have to trust me, said the Voice inside my head. You were created to save the world. You still can.
Give it a rest, Voice, I thought. I’m beat.
Max, said the Voice. Max.
Then it occurred to me that the Voice wasn’t actually inside my head.
Oh, God.
I opened my eyes.
Jeb was still kneeling in front of me. “You’ve come a long way, Max,” said the Voice, except that it was Jeb’s mouth moving, the sound coming from him. “You’re almost home. Everything will work out, but you have to do your best. And you have to trust me again.”
It was Jeb, speaking with the Voice, the Voice I’d been hearing inside my head for months.
Jeb was the Voice.
91
Fang paused a moment, his fingers over the keyboard in the Internet café. Next to him, Iggy and the Gasman were sucking down lattes like there was no tomorrow.
Which maybe there wasn’t.
“I feel like I could fly, like, to the space station!” the Gasman said enthusiastically.
Fang looked over at him. “No more caffeine for you, buddy.” He glanced around to make sure no one had heard the Gasman. But they were off in a corner of this run-down coffee shop, and there weren’t that many other people in here anyway.
Iggy drained his cup and wiped the foam mustache off his lip. “I liked it farther south,” he complained. “The sunshine, the beach bunnies. Up north here, this place has too much of the damp-mist thing going on.”
“It’s really pretty, though,” the Gasman said. “The mountains and the ocean. And the people look more real.” He glanced over at Fang. “Are kids still reading your blog?”
Fang nodded. “Tons.”
He scrolled down quickly, scanning the entries, and then he felt someone’s eyes on him. Instantly he looked up and tracked his gaze left to right, taking in the whole café. It was times like this he missed Max the most—because she would have felt it too, and they would have exchanged glances and known what to do in a moment, without speaking.
Now it was just him on this coast, and her and that cretin wherever they were.
Fang saw nothing, so he moved his eyes more slowly this time, right to left. There. That guy. He was headed this way.
Fang shut the laptop and tapped Iggy’s hand. The Gasman saw it and looked up, on alert. Eight years old and his fists were clenched, muscles tight, ready to fight.
When the guy was about fifteen feet away, still beelining for them, Fang frowned.
“We know this guy,” he murmured. “Who is he?”
Casually the Gasman turned and looked over his shoulder. “Uh...”
“His footsteps,” Iggy muttered. Fang couldn’t hear his footsteps. Iggy went on, face pinched with concentration. “Those footsteps...We heard them...in a subway tunnel.”
Fang’s eyes widened, and he sharpened his focus.
Of course.
Now the guy was six feet away, and he stopped. Fang had never seen him in daylight before, only in flickering reflections from oil-can fires in the train tunnels below New York City. He was the homeless computer nerd who carried a Mac everywhere he went, the guy who’d claimed that Max’s chip was screwing up his hard drive. When they’d asked him about her chip, he’d gone wiggy and run off. What was this guy doing here?
“You.” The guy frowned and pointed at them but pitched his voice so only they could hear him. “What are you doing here?”
“Take a seat,” Fang invited him, pushing one out with his foot.
The guy looked around suspiciously. “Where’s your girlfriend? The one with the chip inside her.”
“Not with us.”
He seemed to relax, fractionally, and edged warily into the seat, looking around. Fang smiled to himself. Finally, someone more paranoid than they were. It was refreshing.
“What are you doing here?” Fang asked, gesturing to the coffee shop. “Above ground. On the West Coast.”
The guy shrugged. “I get around. I see people here, there, all over. I just like to hang in New York mostly—it’s easier to blend.”
“Yeah,” Fang agreed.
Then the guy’s eyes fell on Fang’s closed laptop, and Fang saw him shift his alert level from yellow up to orange.
“Nice ’book,” he said.
“Thanks.” Fang waited.
“Don’t usually see one like that around.”
“Guess not.”
The guy seemed to make a decision, and he leaned forward across the table. “Where’d you get it? Or do I not want to know?”
Fang almost grinned. “You probably don’t want to know.”
The guy shook his head. “You people get into some serious stuff.”
“Yeah,” Fang acknowledged with a sigh. He looked up. “Would you know how to get a message through to every kid on the ’net, everywhere in the world?”
92
The guy looked at Fang. “Maybe. Probably. Guess it depends on the message.”
“Would you need to know the message?” Fang asked, seeing a big wrinkle looming. This guy was, after all, pretty much a nutcase. Who knew how he’d react to Fang’s message?
The guy thought about it, then said, “Yeah.”
“There goes that plan,” said Iggy, sucking down the last of his latte.
“Can I have a muffin?” the Gasman put in.
Fang pushed some money across the table. The Gasman took it and headed to the counter, keeping an eye out around him the whole way.
“What’s your name?” Fang asked.
There was a long pause while the guy considered.
“Man, this guy’s more paranoid than we are,” Iggy said. “It’s kind of refreshing.”
The guy looked at Iggy and seemed to notice for the first time that Iggy was blind. He turned back to Fang. “Mike. What’s yours?”
“Fang. He’s Iggy. The little one’s the Gasman. Don’t ask why.”
“Sit here long enough and you’ll find out,” Iggy muttered.
Mike’s eyes went wide, a
nd he tensed in his chair. Fang and Iggy tensed too, waiting.
“Is that your blog on the Web?” Mike asked in a whisper.
“Yeah.”
The Gasman returned and put a plate of muffins on the table. He immediately picked up on the vibe and stilled, looking quickly from boy to boy. Since no one was pulling out weapons, he sat down and took a muffin, pushing the rest toward the others.
“So you’re sayin’ you have...like, wings?” Mike kept his voice low.
“Not just like ’em,” said Iggy, talking with his mouth full. “We got ’em.” He realized Fang hadn’t answered the question and turned his head. “Oh. Was that a secret?”
“Not anymore,” Fang said dryly.
“You’re the bird kids everyone’s talkin’ about.”
Fang shrugged. “Can you help me or not?”
“I’ll help you if you’re them. Convince me.”
“I’ll need more room,” said Fang, looking around.
Mike took them upstairs, above the coffee shop, where he pulled out a set of keys and unlocked a door. Fang was on hyperalert and wished Angel were there to scan for any threats.
“In here.” Mike ushered them into a large room, obviously used for storage. Boxes of various supplies were stacked along one wall, but the middle of the room was empty. “This enough space?”
Fang nodded and shrugged off his jacket. He made note of where the windows were and gauged whether they were single or double paned, in case he had to jump through one any time soon.
Slowly, Fang unfolded his wings, stretching his muscles, enjoying the sensation of extending them after holding them tight against his back for hours. He shook them out, feeling the feathers align. The tips of his wings almost touched the walls on both sides of the room. He wished he could take off right now and fly for hours, wheeling through the open sky.
Mike’s mouth was slightly open. “Dude. That is so awesome.” He looked at Iggy and the Gasman. “You guys got ’em too? What about those chicks that were with you?”
“We all have them,” said Fang. “Now, howsabout sending that message?”
93
Mike’s fingers flew over the keyboard of Fang’s laptop. “I just gotta write a bit of code here,” he muttered. “Get you in through a bunch of different back doors. Lotsa people got firewalls up, stuff like that, but this should bypass most of ’em.”
He opened Fang’s main blog page and scanned it quickly. “Okay, I’ve gotta try to get access to them through their IP addresses, since you don’t have most of theire-mail addresses,” he said. “This
could be tricky, but I’ll give it a shot.”
“You are a criminal mastermind,” the Gasman said admiringly.
“I try,” Mike said.
“Wait,” said Fang, reading over his shoulder. “Switch over to my e-mail for a sec. I just saw a pop-up alert on the bottom of the screen.”
“Yeah, this one has three red flags for priority,” Mike said, pointing.
Fang’s heart sped up.
THIS IS FROM MAX. READ IT NOW!!!!
We’re in Germany. Town of Lendeheim. Big castle here, head of Itex. Lots of really bad stuff. Come as fast as you can. (Hi Fang! From Nudge. I miss you!) Do NOT blow this off. Come!!! We have days, maybe hours. I mean it, you better get your butt over here. Max.
Huh. Fang sat back and nodded at Mike to keep working.
So. Max wanted him back, eh? She didn’t say whether she still had Frankenbirdy with her. If she did, Fang didn’t want any part of it.
On the other wing, it had cost her a lot of pride to ask him to come. She’d never even taken his blog that seriously, and now she was using it to beg him to come back. Well, order him to come back. Which was as close to begging as Max would get.
What were they doing in Germany? How had they gotten to Europe? How did she expect him to get to Europe?
He looked at the date on the e-mail. Early this morning. And Germany was about ten hours or so ahead....
How would Max define “really bad stuff”? As opposed to just ordinary bad stuff? Stuff bad enough to make her swallow her pride and ask him to come help.
So they were talking pretty unimaginably bad.
“Okay, I got it,” said Mike, sitting back. He had a proud, satisfied smile on his face. “It’ll work a little like a virus, in that it’ll access other addresses through people’s e-mail programs, but it won’t cause any damage.” He frowned. “I think. Anyway, type your message and then hit this special Send box I created. Let’s see what happens.”
Fang swallowed. This was it. This was his chance to get kids to take this seriously, tell them what was going on. All over the planet, kids would read this message.
This was his chance to save the world.
He started writing.
94
To: undisclosed recipients
From: Fang
Subject: URGENT! We want our planet back!
Hey. If you get this message, we might have a chance. I mean the world might have a chance. Long story short: The grown-ups have taken a nice clean planet and trashed it for money. Not every grown-up. But a bunch of them, over and over, choose money and profits over clean air and water. It’s their way of telling us they don’t give a rat’s butt about us, the kids, who are going to inherit what’s left of the Earth.
A group of scientists want to take back the planet before it’s too late and stop the pollution. Good, right? Only problem is they think they need to get rid of half the world’s population to do it. So it’s like: Save the planet so the pollution doesn’t kill people, or...just kill people to start with, save everyone time. For you kids at home, that’s called “flawed logic.” I mean, call me crazy, but that seems like a really bad plan.
The other thing about these scientists is that they’ve tried to create a new kind of human who might survive better, like if there’s a nuclear winter or whatever. I won’t go into the details, but let me just say that this idea is as boneheaded and dangerous as their “kill half the people” plan.
What I’m saying is: It’s up to us. You and me. Me and my flock, you and your friends. The kids. We want—we deserve—to inherit a clean, unmessed-up planet, and still keep everyone who’s already living on it.
We can do it. But we have to join together. We have to take chances. Take risks. We have to get active and really do something, instead of just sitting at home playing Xbox. This isn’t a game. We can’t defeat the enemy by hitting them with our superlaser guns.
We want our planet back.
Kids matter. We’re important. Our future is important.
ARE YOU WITH ME?
95
The Gasman finished reading over Fang’s shoulder.
“I wish I had an Xbox,” he said. Fang rolled his eyes.
“Cool message, dude,” said Mike. “I feel like jumping up and starting a rally. Now what?”
“Now,” said Fang, starting to type another message, “we go to Germany.”
He ignored the way his heart thumped when he thought about seeing her—them—again. If she still had the cretin with her, he was going to be pissed. But cretin or no, splitting up the flock was wrong. If the world was coming to an end, they needed to be together.
To: Max
From: Fang
Subject: Yo
Yo, Max. We’re on our way. This better not be a joke. Fang.
He clicked the Send button.
96
You know that old saying “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”? Well, we were chained in a dungeon in Germany, my mother was a power-hungry, psychotic refrigerator, and my best friend and half my flock were MIA.
These were definitely lemons, so I thought about that saying.
And you know what? Whoever coined the phrase ought to have been smacked senseless. I mean, how lamebrained was that? “Life totally messing you up? Just turn that frown upside down!” What a moron!
“Max? You’re muttering again.” Nudge sounded tired.
> I looked at her. “Sorry.” I sighed and got to my feet. We were each now chained to the wall by one ankle. Our chains were about eight feet long, so we could walk around. See? My mom had a soft heart after all! Instead of being chained by both wrists, we were only chained by one ankle!
I mean, if I’d been looking for proof that she really did love me, this was it, right?
Total reached out and very gently closed his teeth around my ankle as I went past. “Muttering,” he said.
“Sorry.” I moved as far away as my chain allowed.
I was making the kids crazy with my barely suppressed rage and disappointment. And here’s the kicker: I had asked Fang for help. I had asked him to come back because I needed him. My stomach churned just thinking about it. That was me: Maximum Ride, Damsel in Distress.
I know this will surprise you, but I don’t damsel well. Distress, I can do. Damseling? Not so much.
“I don’t remember you muttering this much, before,” Ari said, crouching next to me.
“I was a little saner then,” I said.
“Oh.” He traced a finger through the grime on the floor. Suddenly I remembered him saying, “I can’t read.”
Knowing he was watching me, I slowly drew the letter A on the floor, making little trails through the dirt. Then I drew an R. And an I.
“That spells Ari,” I told him. I drew it again, slowly. A...R...I. “Now you do it.”
He started the A, then stopped. “What’s the point?” he asked, and I was stung because he was right. He didn’t have much time left. Did it really matter if he knew how to read?
“You should know how to write your name,” I said firmly, pushing his hand toward the floor again. “Come on. First A.”
Concentrating, Ari dragged one ragged claw through the dirt. He made a rickety, asymmetrical A.
“A drunk monkey could do better, but you’ll get there,” I said. “Do the R.”