Crap.
57
FIRST THINGS FIRST, I thought.
“Angel, instead of holding on to the rope, tie it around your chest, under your arms. We’ll pull you out.”
“But my —”
“I know, punkin,” I said determinedly. “We’ll just have to try.”
Fang and I together were strong enough to pull so hard that we’d break Angel’s ankle. She wouldn’t be able to hold on through that. Hence the tying. But at least she would be free. I still had no idea how to get Akila home.
“Okay, I’m ready,” came Angel’s small voice.
Fang and I nodded to each other, then slowly, firmly pulled on the rope. There was hardly any give. I heard Angel make a little wail of pain, but we kept pulling as it became harder and harder. Suddenly Angel cried out, and the rope was much easier to pull.
“Angel?”
“My foot’s out,” she said miserably.
We had her up top in a few seconds, and then we were both hugging her.
Angel looked up at me, her face shockingly white. “We won’t make it back,” she said. “Not in this storm.”
“She’s right,” Fang said. “We need to dig a hole and hunker down, wait it out.”
It took me only a second to agree. Carefully we stepped away from the crevasse and began looking for shelter. There was a rocky outcropping about ten yards away, and slowly, painfully, we dragged ourselves there, holding tightly to Angel and Akila.
Angel and the dogs crouched down while Fang and I dug out a cave as fast as we could. Since our hands were frozen and we couldn’t feel them, this took longer than we hoped. Finally it was big enough to hold all of us — barely. We grabbed Angel, Total, and Akila, and pulled them into our makeshift shelter. Fang and I kept our backs to the wind, and within a minute, the storm had blown enough snow to seal us in. It was amazing how the wall deadened the sound outside. The lack of wind howling in my ears was deafening.
I took off my sunglasses and checked us all out. Angel was still pale and shaking with cold. Fang was trying hard not to shiver, but he was obviously grimly miserable. Total was struggling to his feet. Akila was standing uncertainly, pressed against the back wall of the shelter. Her thick fur was full of ice, and I quickly rubbed my gloved hands over her, brushing the ice to the ground.
“How’s your ankle, Angel?” I asked.
“It hurts. It might not be actually broken, though. Don’t know. It hurts.” She was wiped, hardly able to speak.
“Okay, everyone, rub your arms and slap your hands against your chest,” I ordered, fighting the urge to just lie down and go to sleep. It was quiet in here, cozy almost, and maybe I was imagining it, but I felt warmer. “Get that blood going!” I reached over and rubbed Total’s fur. “How you doin’?”
“I’d give a lot for one of those thermal pools about now,” he said, his voice thin and crackly.
“You and me both,” I said with feeling. I glanced at Fang. “Too bad Brigid isn’t here. I bet she’d know what to do.” I probably only sounded about 70 percent bitter.
Fang met my gaze evenly. “I’m sure she’ll come find our frozen bodies.”
“We’re not gonna freeze!” Angel said anxiously. “Are we?”
Instantly I regretted baiting Fang, but what do you know, even a little bit of anger warms you right up. “No, sweetie, we have this shelter. We’ll be okay,” I said. “We’ll just wait out the storm, and as soon as it’s over, we’ll all get back to the station.”
I wondered if the others had got caught in the storm. I sure hoped not. I was totally not up for rescuing anyone else.
58
HERE’S A TIP: If you’re ever stuck in an ice cave in the middle of a storm with two bird kids, a talking dog, and another dog, do yourself a favor: Bring a book. ’Cause once it seems as though you might not die any second, it suddenly becomes intensely boring. And if Total hummed another song from My Fair Lady, I was gonna throw him back out into the blizzard.
“I’m cold,” said Angel, then caught herself, sitting up straight. “Not that cold.”
That was my brave little soldier. Tough as nails.
“And my ankle’s so cold it doesn’t hurt much,” she said with a little smile.
We had to get her back to the station, have someone look at her ankle. We all heal supernaturally fast, but if her ankle was broken and it healed wrong, they’d have to rebreak it.
The storm was still howling outside, as far as we could tell. I was starting to feel sleepy again — one of the early warning signs of hypothermia. This space was too small for us to move around to keep warm, and despite the fact that we were packed in like sardines, we didn’t seem to be warming one another up. It was slowly growing darker and darker as the storm made our snow wall thicker.
I tried thinking angry thoughts to get my blood warm, but after just a few minutes it seemed like too much trouble.
“This is the end,” Total said.
“What?” I said. “No, it’s not. This is not the end.” I wanted to say a bunch more, but it seemed so hard to speak. “It’s not the end till I say it’s the end.” My tongue felt thick, my mouth dry. Brigid had told us not to eat snow for water, but I was dying to.
“This is one thing you can’t control, Max,” said Fang. Angel was leaning sleepily against him, and he was stroking her hair.
Well, I just didn’t accept that.
“It’s been an honor serving with you,” Total intoned mournfully. I started to break in, but he held up a paw. “No, no, don’t stop me. Certain things must be said. I always swore I’d face death with dignity and honor.”
“No, you didn’t!” I exclaimed. “You always said you’d fight it tooth and nail! You said you’d go out kicking and screaming!”
Total frowned at me, then went on as if I hadn’t spoken.
“Life, like that first burst of color at dawn, is fleeting,” he said. “Ah, sweet life! What a short, strange trip it’s been! I’ve done, been, so much more than a typical dog.” He looked fondly at Akila. “Just like you, my beauty, my queen. You’ve served a nobler purpose.”
I found I had enough energy to roll my eyes.
“And now it’s come to this.” Total gestured to our tiny, ever-darker cave. “I had such dreams, such hopes! There’s a whole world out there. . . .” He shook his head. “I always wanted to be an astronaut. Now I’ll never even get to try my wings.” In the dim light, I saw his tiny baby wings flutter slightly, and for some reason, I got a lump in my throat.
I blamed it on the hypothermia and near death.
“How many fine wines I haven’t tried.” Total sighed. “How many sights I haven’t seen. The Pyramids in Egypt. The Great Wall of China. The bonny, bonny White Cliffs of Dover. Gone, all gone, lost to me forever!”
“Please tell me the end is soon,” Fang muttered.
Suddenly I had a thought: air. We were sealed into this place. Had we used up all the oxygen? Was that why we were so dopey? I twisted around and punched my fist through the snow wall as hard as I could. My hand was so numb it was like I was using a stick. A gust of fresh, icy air blew in, and we all inhaled and blinked.
“Is the storm over?” Angel mumbled.
“No,” came a deep, odd voice from outside.
My eyes flew open wide, and so did Fang’s. Normally my body would have been instantly flooded with adrenaline and I’d have been in full-on fight mode, but this time I could barely react, barely raise my arm.
“The storm is just beginning.” The deep voice laughed, and then the wall crashed down on us.
59
THEY WERE GHOSTS, ice ghosts, my brain thought sluggishly.
Except ghosts couldn’t drag us out into the freezing air. Despite being half dead from hypothermia, Fang and I still had enough strength to immediately throw ourselves into the air, each of us holding one of Angel’s hands.
“Agh!” I cried, feeling a fine wire net smash against my face. The net whipped us down against the icy gro
und hard enough to make me lose my breath.
“Max!” Angel cried.
Pushing myself up on my numb hands, I searched frantically for a way out, at the same time trying to identify our attackers. The storm had lessened a bit, so I could see at least a couple feet in front of me. I blinked up through the mesh and saw that our captors were some kind of jazzed-up robots, kind of like short Flyboys with no wings. Only they hadn’t bothered making them look even halfway human.
We just couldn’t get a break.
Fury warmed my blood, and I tried to leap up, snarling, but the net only closed tighter around us, knocking me to the ground again.
I heard laughter, and spun my head this way and that to identify its source. The wind still howled in my ears, making it hard to tell where the laughter had come from.
One of the things was bigger than the others, who were only four feet tall or so.
“Do not hurt them,” he said in the deep, gravelly voice we’d first heard. “Remember, we must save them.”
“News flash,” I spat, trying to rise up again. “Your saving us is practically killing us! Let us up!”
He laughed again, but his face didn’t change expression, which was way creepy. I squinted, trying to get a better view. “Oh, jeez,” I muttered in disgust. Clearly they had gotten this guy from Frank-n-steins R Us. First off, he was enormous — maybe seven feet tall. And huge, broad and heavy. One arm was like an I beam: way too long, out of proportion with the rest of his body. I could barely make out metal spikes that seemed embedded in his flesh. Gross. He gave an impression of being chunked together from different alien species, and somehow it seemed even worse than Ari’s awful wings, sewn into his back.
“Not saving you from this storm, mutant,” he said. “Saving you for your later fate, we are.”
His voice was weirdly inflected and metallic, like an automated answering machine.
“Oh, good. Yoda captured us,” Fang whispered.
Something hauled the net up with us in it, and we dangled a foot off the ground. Fang was hyped, also trying hard to get out. Angel still looked shocky and frozen, confused and scared. Total was struggling to right himself, and Akila couldn’t get on her feet, but she was growling.
“I am Gozen,” said the bigger thing. “I do not want you to freeze to death. I want to watch you die later.”
“You need to get yourself a new hobby,” I snarled.
“It’s always something,” Total muttered, still trying to get upright.
“Killing things is not a hobby,” Gozen said, sounding as though he would have smiled if he could. “It is my life. It is what I was created to do. I am able to kill things in many, many different ways.”
Gross, I thought. Someone had programmed him to feel pleasure about killing. I could hear it in his voice.
“We’re able to kill things in many different ways too,” I said, putting as much steel into my voice as I could, in case he was programmed to pick up on stuff like that. “We like breaking things, for instance.” I shifted my glance to one of the robot soldiers, deciding that if we all suddenly swung toward it, we could move the net enough for me to try to kick its head off.
“That is something we share,” said Gozen. His clawlike hand shot out before I could blink, and he grabbed Angel’s arm through the net. “Like this.”
We all heard the horrible, unmistakable sound of Angel’s bone snapping, accompanied by her barely suppressed shriek of pain. My heart leaped into my throat, and I chopped down on Gozen’s hand as best I could. My hand bounced off his grip, and the rebound almost dislocated my shoulder. Way to go, Max. Chop down on solid metal.
Gozen released Angel, and I immediately grabbed her, drawing her to me and holding her against my chest, feeling her trying to stifle her cries. We were still swinging above the ground, and the mesh wasn’t stopping the freezing winds from tearing at our faces, our jackets.
“Move them,” Gozen directed.
Whatever was holding us started moving slowly across the ice. I felt as if I’d been cold forever, had been surrounded by screaming wind my whole life. Inside the swinging mesh, I looked at Fang’s eyes, the only dark things visible in the endless, swirling whiteness.
Wait, he seemed to say. Wait, and when we see a chance, we’ll take it.
Part Three
MOON OVER MIAMI — OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT
60
HOLDING US OFF the ground inside a tightly woven metal net was about as effective as locking us in dog crates. Not infallible, but pretty dang close. Sure, we could move the net by shifting our weight around, but we were too far away from anything to hit.
After a while we stopped shivering and got sleepy again — welcome back, hypothermia! Just as I was groggily debating the merits of freezing to death before anyone could do something awful to us versus actually living, the thing carrying us began to roll up a snow-covered ramp. My eyes were burning, and my lashes were frozen with chunks of ice, but I blinked and squinted. We were going into . . . a building? A large, round, white building?
Inside I saw that it was a really big jet, designed to move troops or cars or something. So we were going somewhere.
“Max?” That voice . . .
The net released us, hard, onto the floor. Angel gasped slightly, but fortunately she was so out of it by now that the new pain barely registered.
In an instant I staggered to my feet, willing myself back to full consciousness. The ramp closed, and my eyes couldn’t see well in the dim light. I’d lost my sunglasses in the skirmish and was now practically snow-blind.
“Max!”
My heart sank, and I peered into the half-light. “Gazzy?”
61
HALF AN HOUR LATER, we were thawed, reunited with the rest of the flock, able to see, and becoming very, very p.o.’d about being captives again. Yeah, pretty much business as usual for us.
“Where are we going?” Iggy asked. “Any clues?”
“No,” I said. This rear area of the plane, intended for cargo, had not been graced with windows, since boxes usually don’t give a crap about where they’re going. We were lucky it was slightly heated.
“Who was the big thug?” Nudge wrapped her arms around her knees, resting her head on them. They’d been grabbed one by one, back at the station. Some of the scientists had tried to fight and had a bunch of serious injuries to show for it. I felt sorry for them, but if you lie down with dogs . . . (No, Total, don’t get offended. The flock were the “dogs” in that metaphor. See, they hung out with — You know what? To heck with it.)
“Don’t know,” I said. Adrenaline had been keeping me alert when we first got here, but now it was gone, leaving me wallowing in the wallow of the deeply bummed. “He’s a big Frankenberry jerk, though.”
“Those things are so weird,” said Gazzy.
“You’re not kidding,” I agreed.
All the short soldiers that had captured us, plus a bunch more, were here in the cargo area with us. When the ramp had locked into place, the big guy had given a command. The soldiers had lined up against the wall, three rows deep, and then just stood there. I couldn’t tell if they were powered down or what.
Then Gazzy had tried to touch one and got a nasty electric shock that knocked him backward about a foot and a half.
Several of the soldiers around that one had seemed to power up then, shifting their positions and aiming their sensors at us. A couple of them had inched forward, and we all froze.
“Back away very slowly, Gazzy,” I said quietly. “To the wall, and sit down, very, very slowly.”
Still rubbing his shocked hand, Gazzy began to back up, then he jumped when a laser beam shot out and burned a hole right through the toe of his boot.
“Yow!” he said, hopping on the other foot.
“Did it get you?” I asked anxiously, keeping my eyes on the soldiers.
“No — just burned a hole through my boot. Missed my toes.”
“Okay, everyone, let’s just stay still,” I
ordered. “No sudden moves. These things are clearly hair-trigger, and I don’t want any holes burned through more important stuff, like our heads.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were all ready to be diagnosed with ADD, and the sitting-still thing was not working for us. Gradually we found out that we could move, as long as we didn’t do anything suddenly and didn’t go near the soldiers.
“Fine, they can have me if they want, but why drag Akila into this?” Total said for the nineteenth time. “She didn’t do anything!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying for the nineteenth time not to choke him to death. “On the other hand, if they’d left her, she might be dead by now.”
“Hmph!” Total said. Akila, I was glad to see, was looking relatively undamaged — though haughty, as if all this being captured was okay for ordinary mutants, but not for a purebred Malamute whose mother had once won the Iditarod dog sled race.
But I was relieved she seemed all right. I might feel murderous toward any number of enemies, but I always had a soft spot in my heart for animals. Especially non–genetically engineered ones.
I inched over to sit next to Fang, and had to look around, startled, for a couple moments before I saw him, almost invisible against the dark wall. I wondered if he was missing Dr. Amazing, then felt bad for still being jealous of her. Nudge had told me how hard Brigid and the others had fought against the GoBots.
I was glad Angel was finally sleeping, her head in Fang’s lap. We’d made her a lame sling out of a scarf, but I hoped someone would set her arm soon. Someone like my mom.
The metal door at the front of the cargo area opened, and the big thug came back in. His footsteps made him sound like he weighed about three hundred pounds, and now I could gauge his height at almost seven feet.
I allowed myself a quick fantasy of making him swallow one of Gazzy’s bombs, then forced myself to full-alert mode, looking for a way out of this mess. As soon as we’d been locked in, we’d tried unsuccessfully to open the back ramp — everything would have been sucked out of the plane if we’d opened it, which was fine for us, since we could fly. The minibots would all have gone crunch on the ground, of course, but hey, you win some, you lose some.