“I want us to learn more,” I said. Plus, I needed a big project to focus on. “I’ve been thinking about this since Africa. We know some stuff — how to hack computers, break locks, et cetera. But I’ve realized there’s a lot we don’t know. And here we are, living peacefully in our new house, tons of time to spare, hours to fill up — so we should be putting that time to good use!”
“What do we need to learn?” asked Iggy.
“Oh, I don’t know… . Like, why was Chad in such a mess? Why were the locals suspicious of Americans?” I paced up and down our living room. “And where did the Romans go, and how did they get replaced by Italians? I mean, the Greeks are still around!” I went on enthusiastically. “There’s so much to learn. It’s never bothered me till now — we always knew enough to get along. But now I’m thinking, How can we fight evil scientists without understanding science? How can we save the world if we hardly know anything about it?”
“We don’t have to know about something to save it,” Iggy argued. He had one foot on a window ledge, ready to jump out. “I mean, we know evil scientists really well, but we don’t want to save them.”
“Okay, that example doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “But, like, these CSM missions we’ve been on — we’ve relied on other people to tell us what we need to know. Mostly, we’ve been able to trust them. But what if they weren’t trustworthy? What if we knew enough to judge for ourselves? We could stay totally independent!”
Fang stroked his chin the way he did when he was thinking. Nudge was staring at me, and now she threw a couch pillow at my head. Only my lightning reflexes kept me from getting a face full of corduroy-covered foam.
“We’ve had so many chances to go to school!” she wailed. “But noooooo! You always hated school! You didn’t want us to learn stupid boring school stuff!”
“I still don’t like school,” I said. “But we can learn by ourselves. We can do field trips. Experiments. There are online courses. We have the computer.” I pointed to our super-duper contraband computer, lifted from the government some while back.
“I say no.” Iggy folded his arms and looked defiantly at a spot by my left ear.
“I say no too.” Gazzy folded his arms, imitating Iggy. Angel looked thoughtful but didn’t say anything.
“We need to do this, guys,” I said. “We’ll get bored if we just sit around all the time.”
“I’m happy to sit around all the time,” said Gazzy. “I
don’t mind being bored.”
“Anyone who does not feel the need to deepen his or her font of knowledge is welcome to be on bathroom and kitchen duty for a month,” I said. “Are there any questions?” Eyes met mine with various expressions of anger, resentment, uncertainty, yada yada yada.
There were no questions.
21
DYLAN WAS STARING into my eyes. Hard. He was leaning toward me.
“Dylan, no — stop.”
His hands were on my shoulders, pulling me closer. “Max, stay,” he said. “I know it’s hard for you to understand. Or accept. But we were made to be together. You need me.”
I edged away but couldn’t disconnect from his eyes. “I already have everything — and everyone — I need,” I told him. I tried to sound sure of myself. It was clear that Dylan wasn’t fooled by anything.
“No,” Dylan murmured, almost sadly, as if he wanted to break the news to me gently. “You do need me, Max. I can help you more than anyone.”
“Yeah?” I asked, my voice a squeak. It felt impossible not to drown in the deep blue of his eyes. His strong hands slipped from my shoulders and curled around my back. I’d never felt anyone close to me like this except Fang. It was uncomfortable — but there were also shivers going down my spine.
“You need me because I … I can see things no one else can,” he confessed. “I can see people from across the world, across an ocean. I can see what’s going to happen. I can protect you.”
“You don’t know me, Dylan,” I said, steeling my voice but still totally under the control of his gaze. “I’ve never needed to be protected.”
It was as though he didn’t even hear me. He stroked his hands along the tops of my wings, smoothing the feathers softly. “I can see that you and I will be together,” he said, no hint of a smile on his unearthly good-looking face. “Forever.”
22
“NO,” I SAID, APPALLED. “No — that can’t be true. I’m not ready!”
“I don’t care if you’re ready or not.” Gazzy’s voice, irritated, crept into my consciousness. “Don’t forget this was your idea.”
My eyes blinked open fast, and I almost leaped into a sitting position. I stared at Gazzy, confused, afraid to look around and see Dylan lounging somewhere, a knowing smile on his face,
Oh, jeez. I’d fallen asleep on the couch. Good lord, my subconscious was doing another number on me. I frowned. At least I hoped it was my subconscious.
“Coming,” I groaned, getting up off the couch. We were on day three of our homeschooling program, and so far it felt like I was stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits of higher education. So today we were going to try to get out and “spread our wings,” so to speak. On a field trip.
Forty-five minutes later we were reducing altitude, getting ready to land in a park in the closest big city to our house. (I can’t reveal more about the locale for privacy reasons, you understand.)
“Why can’t we go to the NASCAR track?” Gazzy whined. “I think there’s a lot more that we could learn there.”
Fang nodded. “Gotta agree with Gazzy on that one. Physics. Geometry. Marketing, Advertising. Sociology.”
“You’re just lucky I’m not sending you guys to the zoo. You’ll take the art museum and love it.”
“I just don’t get what bird kids need to know about art,” Iggy said grumpily. Okay, so Iggy had a good reason to be complaining, what with not being able to see art and all.
“Well, I don’t either, to tell you the truth. That’s the whole point. There’s a reason that people flock to look at a bunch of useless things sitting in a building. We’re going to find out what it is.”
We landed in a grassy clearing away from the walking paths, then sauntered over to the nearby art institute. “Aren’t you afraid someone might find us here?” Nudge asked, looking warily at the school buses pulling up to the parking lot.
“I think an art museum is the last place in the world you’d look to find a bird kid.”
The reason? We’d never been to one. Didn’t seem like the place to head for survival. Now that I was actually in one, I saw that I’d been way off base.
Clean bathrooms. Cafeteria. Dozens of deserted corners, galleries, hallways, and back stairs where you could hide for hours, maybe even days. Outdoor courtyards for flying exercise. Huge mega-galleries with two-story-high ceilings that would be great for indoor flying. In an emergency, weapons would be available in the hall of medieval armor. The educational center had computers and books, and the gift shop had cool stuff for the younger kids — puzzles, games, arts and crafts …
Fang interrupted my reverie. “So what’s the plan?”
“Stay in pairs,” I directed. “Nudge and Angel, Gazzy and Iggy —”
“And Fang and Max,” Iggy finished in a mocking singsongy voice.
I ignored him. “Meet back here at the ticket desk in an hour and a half. And come with answers to these questions.” I pulled out a piece of paper I’d jotted notes on earlier in the day. “Okay. Each of you should tell us something you learned about history, about yourself, and about one or more of us.”
The flock looked at me blankly.
“We only have an hour and a half to practically discover, like, the meaning of life?” Fang asked.
“Why not? We’ve had to do harder stuff to survive,” I pointed out. “And besides — you never know. Someday we might have only a few seconds to figure out the meaning of life.”
23
FOR SOMEONE WHO WAS way more interested in NASCA
R less than an hour ago, Fang sure seemed to be getting into the art museum. I mean way into.
“Were you, like, Indiana Jones or something in a former life?” I quipped as Fang dragged me through the fifth or sixth hall of ancient artifacts.
“Maybe,” Fang said in a faraway voice as he gazed at a birdlike ritual mask made by the — I squinted at the placard — Senufo tribe. We’d been through the Egyptian, Greek/Etruscan, Roman, pre-Columbian, and Native American collections, and now we were into African art.
“Aren’t you sick of broken pots and hatchets yet?” I asked him.
“What’s your hurry?” Fang turned and looked me in the eye. “Or d’you think that if you can’t save the world with it, it’s not worth your time?”
“Look, I have to find answers to my own questions or I lose leader credibility. And I haven’t found them here. I’m thinking maybe a da Vinci would be useful. He was pretty smart, from what I’ve heard.”
“Don’t think so much, Max. This is supposed to be about feeling stuff, not finding answers, right?”
Did I hear him correctly? Fang talking about feeling
stuff?
Maybe there was something special about this place.
I knew Nudge and Angel had started off in the historicgarments gallery, and I figured they’d never leave a room full of eighteenth-century court dresses and Victorian ball gowns. So I was kind of surprised when we crossed paths near the Impressionist room.
“Predictable,” Fang whispered. “Pretty pastel-colored paintings of landscapes, flowers, and ballerinas.”
Those two were so completely zoned into the pictures that we tiptoed right by them. They didn’t even notice. What was it that Angel was so hypnotized by? I casually glanced at the placard to get the artist’s name. Mary Cassatt. I saw picture after picture by this painter of beautiful mothers with beautiful children. All soft, warm, comforting.
And I saw a tiny, tiny tear roll down Angel’s cheek.
* * *
Of all places to run into Gazzy and Iggy: the gallery where the canvases were big and the colors were wild, angry, free, and — well, explosive. The security person informed me it was called the “abstract expressionism” space.
“What are you guys doing here?” I asked. “Thought you’d be in the armory.”
“Well, it’s the easiest place for me to describe what I’m seeing to Iggy,” Gazzy explained.
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Fang said, pointing to a painting made up of random splatters and lines. “Seems like the hardest place to be describing stuff. ’Cause there are no … actual … pictures here.”
“I can detect color fields, remember?” Iggy reminded us. “And then Gazzy just makes up the rest. What he thinks the picture represents.”
“Yeah, like that one over there?” The Gasman gestured to a composition that looped and splashed around two yellow circles. “It says Untitled #5, but I call it Happy Breakfast: Take two gigundous sunny-side up eggs, stomp on the yolks, then dance around a little bit with an open bottle of ketchup in one hand and a can of motor oil in the other.” Iggy nodded like it made complete sense.
It was sweet of Gazzy to interpret, but God, did I wish Iggy could see with his own two eyes.
“Okay, everyone, time to report,” I announced.
I still didn’t have answers to my own questions, but one of the good things about being the leader is you can sometimes get away with not doing your own assignments. “Who wants to go first?”
Nudge, the eternal good sport, volunteered. “In the garment gallery we learned about corsets. ugh! Max, did you know that they could squeeze people to death?” Hmm, I should’ve restricted undergarments from the assignment. “I also learned that Angel can’t stand to look at any pictures with bad stuff in them, like devils or people or animals getting killed. Including dragons,” she went on. “And, um, about myself, I learned I like the photography the best. Imagination is great and all, but I like real people more.”
“A-plus, Nudge. Extra credit for that surprising insight on Angel.” Angel gave me a look like I was being mean. She was probably right. “Gazzy?”
“In the armory I learned the earliest gunpowder formula — coal, salt, pepper, and sulfur — and it was first written down in the year 1044.” I was pretty sure Gazzy already knew every formula for every explosive in history, but oh well. “And I decided that Iggy sees a lot less than he lets on. Also, I learned that I have a good imagination.”
“Sure you do, Gazzy, but didn’t we all know that?” I pointed out.
“If you did, you never told me,” he said poutily. Note to self: Must do better at encouraging flock.
“Fang? What say you, wise man?”
“Well, did you guys know the Rosetta Stone is, like, way more than a computer program? It’s actually this kind of awesome hieroglyphics-decoder-type rock. And about the flock, I discovered that in some parts of the world, if us bird kids had appeared hundreds of years ago, they literally would have thought we were gods. That’s pretty cool. And about me? I realized … I’d really like to travel the world. See different cultures, live in a tribe. I’m thinking Papua New Guinea or somewhere.”
“Yeah?” I raised an eyebrow. “Well, have fun with that. I think the flock’s seen enough of the globe lately.”
Fang flashed me a look of irritation. “Didn’t think I was getting graded, Max. Remind me to keep my mouth shut next time. I’ll risk the F.”
Okay, that was pretty much three strikes in a row for me. “I’m sorry, guys — I guess I’m just jealous that you all discovered this great stuff and I … didn’t.”
“Whatever, Teach,” Iggy said, a little disgusted. “In case you’re even remotely interested in hearing what I have to say, I learned something about myself.”
“Of course I want to know, Iggy,” I said hastily. “What is it?”
“I learned I want to see.”
We were all quiet.
Iggy had never said that. We totally took for granted that his superior extrasensory skills seemed to give him pretty much the same abilities and quality of life the rest of us had — if not better.
“I’m sorry, Iggy” was my best response. “I wish I could help you.”
“Max? You didn’t ask me,” Angel spoke up. Another wounded flock member.
“I was just getting to you, Ange. Did you discover anything?”
“Yeah. I found out that the African art collection here is on loan from the H. Gunther-Hagen Foundation. I didn’t know the doctor liked art, did you?”
My day was now officially ruined.
24
AFTER OUR ART INSTITUTE DIVERSION, I decided to go back to normal lesson plans to avoid the element of surprise — i.e., not knowing answers to my own questions. Control and I, after all, were likethis.
But even normal lessons turned out to be a problem. Case in point: everything mathlike besides plain math (+, −, ×, %) was a huge recipe for trouble. Nudge was reduced to tears by the natural–unnatural number conundrum, and tensions were high again.
“Look, I know this has been really hard,” I said, “but we don’t just quit because something is hard.”
Nudge frowned. “Yes, we do. We do all the time!”
Fang brushed his hand across his mouth and looked down at the table, obviously trying to hide a smile.
“Well, okay, maybe sometimes we do,” I admitted. “But I’m not backing down from this. We’re going to be educated if it kills us!” I looked at them seriously. “Because if we’re not educated, I’m dang sure that will kill us.”
“Max?” Angel turned her innocent blue eyes on me. “Here’s something to learn, but it’s funner to read.” She pulled out a book and handed it to me. Alarms went off in my head when I saw the cover: The Way to Survive, by Dr. Hans Gunther-Hagen.
“Where’d you get this?” I took the book from her and started flipping through it.
“Dr. Hans gave it to me in Africa. It’s really interesting,”
sai
d Angel.
“Okay,” I said, narrowing my eyes at her. When was she hanging out with Dr. G-H in Africa? “Class dismissed.”
For the rest of the afternoon, I curled up in our deck hammock and blocked out the sound of the TV coming from inside while I read Dr. Scary’s book.
Fang came and sat in the other end of the hammock, so our feet were touching. I thought about the last time we’d managed to really be alone — not counting the night I’d thought he was an Eraser, ’cause that had sucked — and my cheeks flushed. I wished we were twenty years old. I wished we were safe and didn’t ever have to worry about people like Dr. G. I wished we could do whatever we wanted.
“Whatcha doing?”
“This is what Angel is reading. I’m wondering if the not-so-good doctor got to her in Africa.”
“Compelling read?”
“Just kind of horrible,” I said quietly. “At first it seems like he’s talking about how to save the earth, and how mankind has messed everything up, and how we should fix it. But if you keep going, he says that the only way for humankind to survive is if it radically changes — becomes more than human. He calls it skipping an evolutionary grade. Basically he wants everyone to ‘evolve,’ and he’s trying to come up with the technology to jump-start it. If he had his way, no one would be one hundred percent human anymore. Everyone would be hybrids, or have their genes tinkered with, to make them superhuman.”
“We like being more than human,” Fang pointed out. “But we’re only more than human because we’re rare,” I
said. “What are we if everyone is like us, or evolved in different ways? What if we become the ones who aren’t special enough?”
“Hm,” Fang murmured. “So where does the doctor go with his plan?”
I frowned. “He asks for help. From scientists, from volunteers. From people who want to be on the cutting edge of a new world. But meanwhile he’s out there injecting people with God knows what — or maybe worse. And not every one of his experiments can be a success. Some of them have to be mistakes. Failures. What happens to those people?”