Iggy groaned. “Oh, no—years of Max influence are taking their toll. You sound just like her. You’re, like, a Maxlet. A Maxketeer. A . . . a . . .”
The Gasman frowned at Iggy and started writing. “Number one: Make firebombs—for our protection only. Number two: Blow up demonic Erasers when they return.” He held the paper up and reread it, then smiled. “Oh, yeah. Now we’re getting somewhere. This is for you, Angel!”
16
Angel knew she couldn’t go on like this much longer.
Her lungs had started burning bad an hour ago; she hadn’t been able to feel her leg muscles for longer than that. But every time she stopped running, a sadistic whitecoat—Reilly—zapped her with a stick thing. It jolted electricity into her, making her yelp and jump. She had four burn marks from it already, and they really, really hurt. What was worse was she could feel his eager anticipation—he wanted to hurt her.
Well, he could zap her a thousand million times, if he wanted. This was it—she couldn’t go on.
It was a relief to let go. Angel saw the whole world narrow down to a little fuzzy tube in front of her, and then even that went gray. She sort of felt herself falling, felt her feet tangle in the treadmill belt. The zap came, once, twice, three times, but it felt distant, more an unpleasant stinging than real pain. Then Angel was lost, lost in a dream, and Max was there. Max was stroking her sweaty hair and crying.
Angel knew it was a dream because Max never cried. Max was the strongest person she knew. Not that she had known that many people.
Ripping sounds and a new, searing pain on her skin pulled Angel back. She blinked into white lights. Hospital lights, prison lights. She smelled that awful smell and almost retched. Hands were pulling off all the electrodes taped to her skin, rip, rip, rip.
“Oh, my God, three and a half hours,” Reilly was murmuring. “And its heart rate only increased by seventeen percent. And then at the end—it was only in the last, like, twenty minutes that its peak oxygen levels broke.”
It! Angel thought and wanted to scream. I’m not an it!
“I can’t believe we’ve got a chance to study Subject Eleven. I’ve been wanting to dissect this recombinant for four years,” another low voice said. “Interesting intelligence levels—I can’t wait to get a brain sample.”
Angel felt their admiration, their crummy pleasure. They liked all the things wrong with her, all the ways she wasn’t normal. And all those stupid long words added up to one thing: Angel was an experiment. To the whitecoats, she was a piece of science equipment, like a test tube. She was an it.
Someone put a straw into her mouth. Water. She started swallowing quick—she was so thirsty, like she’d been eating sand. Then another whitecoat scooped her up. She was too tired to fight.
I have to think of how to get out of here, she reminded herself, but thoughts were really hard to string together right now.
Someone opened the door of her dog crate and flopped her inside. Angel lay where she fell—at least she was lying down. She just had to sleep for a while. Then she would try to escape.
Wearily, she blinked and saw the fish boy staring at her. The other boy was gone. Poor little guy had been gone this morning, hadn’t come back. Might not.
Not me, Angel thought. I’m gonna fight. Right . . . after . . . I . . . rest.
17
“Unhhh . . .”
This bed was horrible! What was wrong with my bed?
Irritated, I punched my pillow into a better shape, then started sneezing hysterically as clouds of dust sailed up my nose.
“Wah, ah, ah, choo!” I grabbed my nose in an attempt to keep some of my brains inside my head, but the sudden movement caused me to lose my balance, and with no warning I fell hard to the floor. Crash!
“Ouch! Son of a gu—” I scrambled to get up. My hands hit rough upholstery and the edge of a table. Okay, now I was lost. Prying open my bleary eyes, I peered around. “What the . . .”
Where was I? I looked around wildly. I was in a . . . cabin. A cabin! Ohhh. A cabin. Right, right.
It was oh-dark-thirty—not yet dawn.
I leaped to my feet, scanned the room, and saw nothing to be alarmed about. Except for the fact that obviously, Fang, Nudge, and I had just wasted precious hours sleeping!
Oh, my God. I hurried over to Nudge, who was sprawled across a recliner. “Nudge! Nudge! Wake up! Oh, man . . .”
I turned to Fang, to find him swinging his feet over the edge of a couch. He sneezed and shook his head.
“What time is it?” he asked calmly.
“Almost morning!” I said, terribly upset. “Of the next day!”
He was already moving toward the kitchen cupboards. He’d found an ancient, stained backpack in a closet, and now he methodically started to fill it with cans of tuna, sealed bags of crackers, zip-locked bags of trail mix.
“Wha’s happ’nin’?” Nudge asked, blinking groggily.
“We fell asleep!” I told her, grabbing her hands and pulling her upright. “Come on! We’ve gotta go!”
Dropping to all fours, I raked my shoes out from under the couch and blew dust bunnies off them. “Fang, you can’t carry all that,” I said. “It’ll weigh you down. Nothing’s heavier than cans.”
Fang shrugged and pulled the backpack on. Stubborn kind of fella. He moved soundlessly across the room and slipped through the window like a shadow.
Now I was jamming Nudge’s shoes onto her feet, rubbing her back, trying to wake her up. Nudge was always a reaaallly slow waker. Usually I appreciated the lack of word-spew, which would begin when she was fully functioning, but right now we needed to move, move, move!
I practically threw Nudge through the window, slithered out myself, then propped the screen back in place as best I could.
A quick run down a country road and we were off, stroking hard, pushing to get airborne.
Sorry, Angel. Sorry, sorry, sorry, my baby.
18
Okay. Despite the imminent sunrise, I felt better once we were flying above the treetops.
But still! How stupid was that? What kind of a loser was I, to let us fall asleep in the middle of a freaking rescue! I thought about Angel waiting for us, and my heart clenched. With a sense of dread, I banked and set us going about ten, twelve degrees southwest. Anxiety fueled my wings, and I had to remember to find good air currents, set my wings at an angle, and coast when I could.
“We had to rest,” Fang said, coming up beside me.
I shot him an upset glance. “For ten hours?”
“Today we’ve got another four hours to go, maybe a bit more,” he said. “We couldn’t have done it in one shot. It was late when we left. We’re going to have to stop again anyway, right before we get there, and refuel.”
There’s nothing more annoying than cold logic and reason when you’ve got a good fit going.
Fang was right, of course—sigh—and of course we’d have to stop again. We hadn’t even hit the California border yet. Far from it.
“We going to storm the place or what?” Fang asked an hour later.
“Yeah, Max, I was wondering what your plan was,” said Nudge, coming up alongside. “I mean, there’s only three of us, and a whole bunch of them. And the Erasers have guns. Could we, like, drive a truck through the gates? Or even into a building? Or maybe we could wait till nightfall, sneak in, and sneak out with Angel before anyone notices us.”
That crazy thought cheered her up. I kept silent—I didn’t have the heart to tell her we had about as much chance of that as we did of flying to the moon. But if worse came to worst, I had a secret Plan C. If it worked, everyone would escape and get free. Except me. But that was okay.
19
Despite my growing anxiety, it was glorious up here. Not many birds flew this high—some falcons, hawks, other raptors. Every once in a while some of them would come check us out, probably thinking, Man, those are some dang ugly birds.
This high up, the land below took on a checkerboard effect of Robin H
oodsy greens and browns. Cars looked like busy ants moving purposefully down their trails. Every once in a while I picked something small down below and focused on it. It was cool how some little tiny thing, like a swimming pool, a tractor, whatever, would ratchet into focus. At least those maniacs at the School hadn’t had time to “improve” my vision like they improved Iggy’s.
“Gosh, I wonder what Iggy and the Gasman are doing now?” Nudge babbled. “Maybe they got the TV working again. I hope they don’t feel too bad. It would have—I mean, I guess it’s kind of easier for them to be home. But I bet they’re not cleaning up or getting wood or doing any of their chores.”
I bet they’re cursing my name from dawn to dusk. But at least they’re safe. Absently, I chose a flickering shape below and focused on it, watching a small blob become people, take on features, clothing, individuality. It was a group of kids, maybe my age, maybe older. Who couldn’t be more unlike me.
Well, so what? I thought. They were just boring kids, stuck on the ground, doing homework. With bedtimes and a million grown-ups telling them what to do, how to do everything, all the time. Alarm clocks and school and afternoon jobs. Those poor saps. While we were free, free, free. Soaring through the air like rockets. Being cradled by breezes. Doing whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted.
Pretty good, huh? I almost convinced myself.
I glanced down again and refocused. Then I scowled. What had, at first glance, looked like just a bunch of boring, earthbound kids schlepping to school together now turned, upon closer examination, into what looked like several big kids surrounding a much smaller kid. Okay, maybe I’m paranoid, danger everywhere, but I could swear the bigger kids looked really threatening.
The bigger kids were boys. The smaller kid in the middle was a girl.
Coincidence? I think not.
Don’t even get me started about the whole Y chromosome thing. I live with three guys, remember? They’re three of the good ones, and they’re still obnoxious as all get-out.
I made one of my famous snap decisions, the kind that everyone remembers later for being either the stupidest dumb-butt thing they ever saw or else the miraculous saving of the day. I seemed to hear more about the first kind. That’s gratitude for you.
I turned to Fang and barely opened my mouth.
“No,” he said.
My eyes narrowed. I opened my mouth again.
“No.”
“Meet me at the northernmost point of Lake Mead,” I said.
“What? What are you talking about?” Nudge asked. “Are we stopping? I’m hungry again.”
“Max wants to go be Supergirl, defender of the weak,” Fang said, sounding irritated.
“Oh.” Nudge looked down, frowning at the ground as if it would all become clear soon.
I had started a wide circle that would take me back toward the girl below. I kept thinking, What if that girl was in trouble, like Angel, and no one stopped to help her?
“Oh! Max, remember when you got that little rabbit away from the fox, and we kept it in a carton in the kitchen, and then when it was well you let it go? That was cool.” Nudge paused. “Did you see another rabbit?”
“Kind of,” I said, my patience starting to wear thin. “It’ll take two seconds.”
I told Fang, “I’ll catch up with you guys before you’ve gone forty miles. Just keep on course, and if anything weird happens, I’ll meet you at Lake Mead.”
Fang stared ahead, the wind whipping through his hair. He hated this, I knew.
Well, you can’t please everybody all the time.
“Okay,” I said briskly. “See you in a few.”
20
The thing about Iggy was, well, sometimes he could figure stuff out like a real scientist. He was that supersmart, scary smart.
“Do we have any chlorine?” the Gasman asked Iggy. “It seems to be kind of explosive when mixed with other stuff.”
Iggy frowned. “Like what, your socks? No, we don’t have chlorine. No swimming pool. What color is this wire?”
The Gasman leaned over and examined the tangled pile of stereo guts spread out on the kitchen table. “It looks like a robot came in here and threw up,” he observed. “That wire’s yellow.”
“Okay. Keep track of the yellow wire. Very important. Do not confuse it with the red one.”
The Gasman consulted the schematics he had downloaded off the Internet. This morning Iggy had unfrozen the compressor fan inside the CPU, so the computer now worked without shutting down in hysteria every ten minutes. He had just fixed the computer, presto change-o.
“Okey dokey,” Gazzy muttered, flipping through pages. “Next step, we need some kind of timing device.”
Iggy thought for a moment. Then he smiled. Even his eyes seemed to smile.
“Well, that’s an evil grin,” Gasser said uneasily.
“Go get me Max’s alarm clock. The Mickey Mouse one.”
21
I landed a bit hard and had to run really fast to keep from doing a total face plant. I was somewhere in Arizona, trotting through scrubby brush behind a deserted warehouse. I pulled my wings in, feeling them fold, hot from exercise, into a tight accordion on either side of my spine. I tied my windbreaker around my neck. There. Perfectly normal looking.
When I rounded the corner of the warehouse, I saw that there were three guys, maybe fifteen, sixteen years old. The girl looked younger, maybe twelve or so.
“I told you not to tell anybody about my little situation with Ortiz,” one boy was yelling at her. “It was none of your business. I had to teach him a lesson.”
The girl bit her lip, looking angry and scared. “By beating him up? He looks like he got hit by a car. And he didn’t do anything to you,” she said, and I thought, You go, girl.
“He mouthed off to me. He exists. He breathes my air,” said the guy, and his jerk friends laughed meanly. God, what creeps. Armed creeps. One of them was holding a shotgun loosely in the crook of his arm. America, right to bear arms, yada, yada, yada. How old were these yahoos? Did their parents know they had guns?
It gets so tiring, this strong-picking-on-the-weak stuff. It was the story of my life—literally—and it seemed to be a big part of the outside world too. I was sick of it, sick of guys like these, stupid and bullying.
I stepped out from beside the building. The girl saw me, and her eyes flicked in surprise. It was enough. The guys wheeled to look behind them.
Just another stupid girl, they thought, relieved. Their eyes lingered a moment on my scratched face, my black eye, but they didn’t keep watching me. Mistake number one.
“So, Ella, what have you got to say for yourself?” the lead guy taunted. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t teach you a lesson too?”
“Three guys against one girl. That seems about even,” I said, striding up. It was hard to keep the fury off my face. My blood was singing with it.
“Shut up, chick,” one of the boys snapped. “You better get out of here if you know what’s good for you.”
“Can’t,” I said, walking to stand next to the girl named Ella. She looked at me in alarm. “Actually, I think kicking your stupid butts would be good for me.”
They laughed. Mistake number two.
Like the rest of the flock, I’m much stronger than even a grown man—genetic engineering at work. And all of us had been trained in self-defense by Jeb. I had skills. Until yesterday, I’d never had to use them. If I could just get Ella out of here . . .
“Grab Big Mouth,” said the head guy, and the other two moved to flank me.
Which made mistake number three. Bam, you’re out.
I moved fast, fast, fast. With no warning, I snapped a high kick right into the lead jerk’s chest. A blow that would have only knocked Fang’s breath away actually seemed to snap a rib on this guy. I heard the crack, and the guy choked, looking shocked, and fell backward.
The remaining guys rushed me at once. I whirled and grabbed the shotgun out of one’s hands. Holding its barrel, I swun
g it in a wide arc against the side of his head. Crack! Stunned, he staggered sideways as a bright red flow of blood streamed from his scalp.
I glanced over and saw Ella still standing there, looking afraid. I hoped not of me.
“Run!” I yelled at her. “Get out of here!” After a moment of hesitation, she turned and ran, leaving a little cloud of red dust behind her.
The third grabbed my arm, and I yanked it loose, then swung and punched him, aiming for his chin but hitting his nose. I winced—oops—feeling his nose break, and there was a slow-motion pause of about a second before it started gushing blood. Jeezum—humans were like eggshells.
The bullyboys were a mess. But still they staggered to their feet, rage and humiliation twisting their ugly faces. One of them picked up his gun and cocked it, favoring his right arm.
“You’re gonna be so sorry,” he promised, spitting blood out of his mouth and starting toward me.
“Bet I won’t,” I said. Then I turned tail and raced for the woods as fast as I could.
22
Of course, if I could have taken off, I’d have been a little speck in the sky by then. But I couldn’t let those yo-yos see my wings, and within seconds I was in the woods anyway.
I ran through the underbrush, smacking branches out of my way, glad I was wearing shoes. I had no idea where I was going.
Behind me I could hear a couple of the bozos yelling, swearing, threatening. I wanted to laugh but couldn’t spare the time. I was steadily increasing the distance between us.
Then I heard a loud bang! from the shotgun, and tree bark exploded around my head. That stupid gun.
Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking? Are you wondering if I noticed the similarities between this asinine situation and my dream? Well, yeah. I’m not an idiot. As to what it all meant, well, I’ll work on that later.