Close by, one of the female whitecoats was struggling to her feet. I darted toward her, then jumped into the air, my right leg already swinging out in a huge roundhouse kick. I hit her in the chest, wham! She sank to her knees, unable to breathe, a stunned look on her face.
“Think of this as an occupational hazard, you witch!” I snarled, then spun to check on the rest of the flock.
Fang was venting his hostility on Ari, who crouched defensively on the ground, his arms wrapped around his head. Fang smashed him sideways with a kick, then punched the side of Ari’s head. For good measure, Fang hoisted a crate and crashed it down on the wicked Eraser. Now it looked as though Ari had been caught in a cage.
I shot into the air, feeling exhilarated as fierce hawks rushed past me. I counted four whitecoats, Ari, and three other Erasers on the ground, two Erasers still standing. One of them pulled out a gun, but promptly had his wrist muscles slashed by an unforgiving beak. Ooh. That had to hurt.
“Fang!” I bellowed. “Iggy! Gazzy! Let’s go! Go, go, go!”
Almost reluctantly, they pulled high into the air. Iggy moved through the hawks. By some unspoken message, he communicated that our battle was over. Those beautiful birds swerved gracefully and rocketed upward, making my ears ring with their wild calls.
“One, two, three, four, five,” I counted, rounding up my own flock and urging them higher. “Fang! Get Angel!” Angel had managed to stay airborne all this time, but she was sagging and losing altitude. Immediately, the Gasman flew to one side, Fang to the other, and they held her as they rose.
More whitecoats and Erasers streamed out of the building, but we were too high and moving too fast for them to hurt us. So long, cretins, I thought. School is out—forever.
“Max!”
That voice tugged my gaze downward.
Jeb stood there. He must have gotten caught in the hawk attack, because his white coat was torn, his shoulder red with blood. “Maximum!” he yelled again. The expression on his face wasn’t anger—it was something that I didn’t recognize.
“Max! Please! This was all a test! Don’t you get it? You were safe here! This was only a test! You have to trust me—I’m the only one you can trust! Please! Come back—let me explain!”
I looked at him, the man who had saved my life four years ago, taught me practically everything I knew, comforted me when I cried, cheered me on when I fought, held my hair back when I was heaving my Wheaties, the closest thing I ever had to a dad.
“I don’t think so,” I said tiredly. Then I pushed down hard and let my wings carry me far away, up to where my family was waiting.
66
Two hours later, Lake Mead came into view, along with the cliff top covered with the huge hawks who had rescued us. The six of us, together again, landed gratefully on the scraped-out ledge.
Angel collapsed onto the cool, dust-covered floor of the cave. I sank down next to her, stroking her hair.
“I thought I would never see you again,” she said, and a single tear rolled down her face. “They did all kinds of stuff to me, Max. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.”
“I would never quit trying to get you back,” I told her, feeling like my heart was going to overflow. “There’s no way I would ever let them keep you. They would have to kill me first.”
“They almost did,” she said, her voice breaking. I gathered her to me and held her for a long time.
“This is how it should be forever,” Iggy said. “All of us together.”
I looked up to where Fang was leaning against a wall, facing the canyon. He felt my gaze and turned. I held out my left fist. Almost smiling, he came and stacked his left fist on top of it. One by one, the others joined us, and I disentangled my right hand from Angel’s hair and tapped the backs of theirs.
“I’m just . . . so thankful,” I said. Nudge looked at me with faint surprise. Okay, so I’m not the most mushy person ever. I mean, I love my family and I try to be nice to them, but I don’t go around telling them how much I love them all the time.
Maybe I should fix that.
“I mean,” I said, feeling really self-conscious, “this made me realize how much we all need one another. I need all of you. I love you all. But five of us, or three of us, or two of us isn’t us. Us is all six.”
Fang was examining his sneakers with great interest. Iggy was nervously tapping long white fingers against his leg. But my little guys got what I was saying.
Nudge threw her arms around my neck. “I love you too, Max! I love all of us too.”
“Yeah, me too,” said the Gasman. “I don’t care if we have our house, or a cliff ledge, or a cardboard box. Home is wherever we all are, together.” I hugged him, and he nestled against me, looking happy.
Later on, we all slept, and awoke in the night to heavy rain, a miracle in the desert. We scrambled up to the ledge and let the rain pour down on us, washing off blood, dirt, and memories. Even raindrops hitting my nose hurt, but I held my arms open to the sky and felt clean and cold and shivery.
I shivered, and Fang briskly rubbed my shoulders. I looked at him, his eyes as dark as the desert sky. “Jeb knows our house,” I said very softly.
Fang nodded. “Can’t ever go back. Guess we need a new home.”
“Yes,” I said, thinking. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth slightly, inhaling the chill, rain-washed air. I opened my eyes. “East,” I said, feeling the rightness of it. “We’ll go east.”
PART 4
NEW YAWK, NEW YAWK
67
Blue, blue sky, above the clouds. The air is colder, but the sun is warmer up this high. The air is thin and light, like champagne. You ought to try it sometime.
I felt happy. The six of us were homeless, aimless, on the run—and might be for the rest of our lives, however long or short they might be. But . . .
Yesterday we’d escaped the hounds of hell at the School, after all. We’d had the pleasure of seeing our friends the hawks do some slice ’n’ dice on the whitecoats and the Erasers.
We had Angel back.
I glanced over at her—she was still a mess. It would take her a while to heal after what they had done to her. Every time I thought about it, chains of anger tightened around me, till I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Sensing me looking at her, she turned and smiled. One whole side of her face was green and yellow—a healing bruise.
“God!” Nudge said, speeding up a bit to catch my slipstream. “It’s just so, so . . . you know?” She swooped down gracefully, then rose again and pulled alongside.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, grinning at her.
“I mean, the air, and we’re up so high, and no one’s after us, and we’re all together, and we hit IHOP for breakfast.” She looked over at me, her brown eyes bright and untroubled. “I mean, God, we’re just up here, and it’s so cool, and down below kids are stuck in school or, like, cleaning their rooms. I used to hate cleaning my room.”
Back when she had a room. I sighed. Don’t think about it.
Then, in the next second, I choked. I think I made some kind of sound, then a blinding, stunning pain exploded behind my eyes.
“Max?” Nudge screamed.
I couldn’t think, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do a thing. My wings folded like paper, and I started to drop like a hailstone.
Something was incredibly wrong.
Already.
68
Tears streamed from my eyes, and my hands clutched my head to keep the pain from splitting my skull wide open. The only semicoherent thought I had was Please let me go splat soon, so this freaking pain will stopstopSTOP.
Then Fang’s arms, ropy and hard, scooped me up, and I felt myself rising again. My wings were mushed between us, but nothing mattered except that my brain had been replaced by a bursting nova of raw agony. I had just enough consciousness to be embarrassed at hearing myself moan pitifully.
Death would have been so great just then.
I don’t know how long Fang carried me. Slowly, slowl
y, the pain leached away. I could almost open my eyes a slit. I could swallow. Cautiously, wincing, I let go of my head, half expecting huge shards of skull to come away in my hands.
I blinked up at Fang, his dark eyes looking down at me. He was still flying and carrying me.
“Man, you weigh a freaking ton,” he told me. “What’ve you been eating, rocks?”
“Why, is your head missing some?” I croaked. His mouth almost quirked in a smile, and that’s when I knew how upset he’d been.
“Max, are you okay?” Nudge’s face was scared, making her look really young.
“Uh-huh,” I managed. I just had a stroke or something.
“Find a place to land,” I told Fang. “Please.”
69
An hour or so later, I thought that I had recovered—but from what? We were making camp for the night.
“Yo, watch it!” I said. “Clear more of that brush away—we don’t want the whole forest to burn down.”
“Guess you’re feeling like your old self,” Fang murmured, kicking some dead branches away from where Iggy was lighting a fire.
I shot him a look, then helped Nudge and Angel surround the pile of kindling with big stones. Why was the blind guy playing with matches, you ask? Because he’s good at it. Anything to do with fire, igniting things, exploding things, things with fuses, wicks, accelerants . . . Iggy’s your man. It’s one of those good/ bad things.
Twenty minutes later, we were exploring the limits of what could be cooked on sticks over an open fire.
“This isn’t half bad,” the Gasman said, eating a curled piece of roasted bologna off his stick.
“Don’t do bananas,” Nudge warned glumly, shaking some warm mush off into the bushes.
“S’mores,” I cooed, mashing a graham cracker on top of the chocolate-and-marshmallow sandwich I had balanced on my knee. I took a bite, and pure pleasure overwhelmed my mouth.
“This is nice,” the Gasman said happily. “It’s like summer camp.”
“Yeah, Camp Bummer,” said Fang. “For wayward mutants.”
I nudged his leg with my sneaker. “It’s better than that. This is cool.”
Fang gave me an “if you say so” look, and turned his bacon over the fire.
I stretched out with my head against my balled-up sweatshirt. Time to relax. I had no idea what that pain had been, but I was fine now, so I wasn’t going to worry about it.
What a lie. My knees were practically knocking together. The thing is, the “scientists” back at the School had been playing with risky stuff, combining human and nonhuman DNA. Basically, the spliced genes started to unravel after a while, and the organisms tended to, well, self-destruct. The flock and I had seen it happen a million times: The rabbit-dog combo had been such bad news. Same with the sheep-macaque monkey splice. The mouse-cat experiment had produced a huge, hostile mouse with great balance and an inability to digest either grain or meat. So it starved to death.
Even the Erasers, as successful as they were, had a huge downside: life span. They went from embryo to infant in five weeks, and from infant to young adult in about four years. They fell apart and died at around six years, give or take. But they were being improved all the time.
How about us? How long would we last? Well, as far as I knew, we were the oldest recombinant beings the School had ever produced.
And we could devolve and expire at any time.
And maybe it had started happening to me today.
“Max, wake up,” said Angel, tapping my knee.
“I’m awake.” I pulled myself up, and Angel crawled over and climbed into my lap. I put my arms around her and stroked her tangled blond curls away from her face. “What’s up, Angel?”
Her large blue eyes looked solemnly into mine. “I’ve got a secret. From when I was at the School. It’s about us. Where we came from?”
70
“What do you mean, sweetie?” I asked softly. What fresh hell is this?
Angel twisted the hem of her shirt in her fingers, not looking at me. I clamped down on any thoughts I had, so Angel couldn’t pick up on my alarm.
“I heard stuff,” she said, almost whispering.
I gathered her closer. When the Erasers had taken her, it felt like someone had chopped my arm off. Getting her back had made me whole again.
“Stuff people said or stuff people thought?” I asked.
“Stuff people thought,” she said. I noticed how tired she looked. Maybe this should wait till tomorrow.
“No, I want to tell you now,” she said, obviously reading my thoughts. “I mean, it’s just stuff I sort of heard. I didn’t understand all of it—chunks were missing. And it was from a couple different people.”
“From Jeb?” I asked, my throat tight.
Angel’s eyes met mine. “No. I didn’t get anything from him at all. Nothing. It was like he was dead.”
Angel went on. “They kept doing tests, you know, and they were all thinking about me, about the flock, like, wondering where you were and if you would try to come get me.”
“Which we did,” I said proudly.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Anyway, I found out that another place has information about us—like where we came from.”
My brain snapped awake. “Whaat?” I said. “Like our life span? Or where they got our DNA?” Did I even want to know our life span? I wasn’t sure.
Angel nodded.
“Well, spill it!” Iggy, who must have been awake and listening to us, demanded in that sensitive way of his. I shot him a look—which was useless, of course. And now everyone was awake.
“They have files on us,” Angel said. “Like, the main files. They’re in New York. At a place called the Institute.”
“The Institute?” I asked. “In New York City or upstate New York?”
“I don’t know,” Angel said. “I think it was called the Institute. The Living Institute or something.”
Fang was looking at me, still and intent. I knew he had already decided to go check it out, and I nodded briefly.
“There’s more,” Angel said. Her small voice wavered, and she pressed her face into my shoulder.
“You know how we always talk about our parents but didn’t really know if we were made in test tubes?” Angel said. I nodded.
“I saw my name in Jeb’s old files,” Nudge insisted. “I really did.”
“I know, Nudge,” I said. “Listen to Angel for a minute.”
“Nudge is right,” Angel blurted. “We did have parents—real parents. We weren’t made in test tubes. We were born, like real babies. We were born from human mothers.”
71
I think if a twig had snapped right then, we all would have leaped ten feet into the air.
“You’ve sat on this since yesterday?” Iggy sounded outraged. “What’s the matter with you? Just because you’re the youngest doesn’t mean you have to be the dumbest.”
“Look,” I said, taking a breath, “let’s all calm down and let Angel talk.” I brushed her curls out of her face. “Can you tell us everything you heard?”
“I only got bits and pieces,” she said uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, everybody. I’ve just felt yucky . . . and it all makes me really, really sad too. I don’t wanna cry again. Awhh, I’m crying again.”
“It’s okay, Angel,” Fang said in his low, quiet voice. “We understand. You’re safe now, here with us.”
Nudge looked as if she was about to explode, and I sent her a glance that said, Okay, just hang on. The Gasman edged closer to me and took hold of my belt loop for comfort. I put one arm around him and held on to Angel with the other.
“It sounded like,” Angel began slowly, “we came from different places, different hospitals. But they got us after we were born. We weren’t test-tube babies.”
“How did they get us?” Fang asked. “And how did they get the bird genes into us?”
“I didn’t really understand,” said Angel. “It sounded like—like they got the genes into us before
we were born somehow.” She rubbed her forehead. “With a test? An amino . . . ammo . . .”
“Amniocentesis?” I asked, cold outrage creeping down my spine.
“Yeah,” said Angel. “That’s it. And somehow they got the bird genes into us with it.”
“It’s okay, just keep going,” I said. I could explain it to them later.
“So we got born, and the doctors gave us to the School,” Angel went on. “I heard—I heard that they told Nudge’s mom and dad that she had died. But she hadn’t.”
Nudge made a gulping sound, her large brown eyes full of tears. “I did have a mom and dad,” she whispered. “I did!”
“And Iggy’s mom—”
I saw Iggy tense, his acute hearing focused on Angel’s small voice.
“Died,” Angel said, and took in a shuddering breath. “She died when he was born.”
The look of stunned grief on Iggy’s expressive face was awful to see. I didn’t know what to do, what to say. I just wanted to take away everyone’s pain.
“What about us?” the Gasman asked. “How could they get both of us, two years apart?”
Angel wiped her eyes. “Our parents gave us to the School themselves,” she said, and started crying again, her thin shoulders shaking.
The Gasman’s mouth dropped open, his eyes as round as wheels. “What?”
“They wanted to help the School,” Angel said, gasping out the words through her sobs. “They let them put bird genes in us. And gave us away for money.”
My heart was breaking. The Gasman tried so hard to be brave, but he was just a little kid. He leaned against me, burying his face in my shirt, and burst into tears.
“Did you hear anything about me? Or Max?” Fang was stripping the bark off a stick. His tone was casual, but his shoulders were tight, his face stiff.
“Your mom thought you died, like Nudge,” Angel said. “She was a teenager. They don’t know who your dad was. But they told your mom you died.”