Then the eyes of the world winked shut.
85
GET UP, A fuzzy voice shrieked. Get up get up get up. It sounded water-soaked, low and slow. Was it my Voice, or Angel’s, or someone else’s entirely? I didn’t even know if it was real.
The ringing in my head grew, turning into a sound like the hiss of rushing water, an echo bouncing around like a rubber ball inside my head. Wind whipped around me and the hiss grew to a wail. My brain throbbed.
I covered my ears and felt wetness. The metallic smell of blood burned in my nostrils. I pried open my eyes, and that’s when the hurricane-strength needles of rain started to hit my face.
I turned to look for help and felt my stomach lurch as a strong arm yanked me back, keeping me from plummeting over the edge of the cliff. “Get up!” Fang yelled in my face, finally piercing through my confusion and dragging me to my feet.
I looked across the cliffs for the other kids, but saw only a wall of water out in the sea. Not just a wall—a massive wall, miles long and taller than a skyscraper. Surrounding us. The monstrous wave grew more massive by the second, almost blotting out the smoking sky as it surged toward the precarious crag we clung to.
A mega-tsunami.
I instinctively tried to flap, but a searing pain shot through my mangled, bleeding wing. Panic froze my heart. This was it.
There would be no more.
I felt a sob of self-pity building in my chest, but Fang held my face in his hands and looked at me urgently, his eyes locked on mine.
“I love you, Max,” Fang said, and those words, the ones I’d been waiting to hear forever, towered above all the chaos, making everything else fall away. Whole universes were built and destroyed by those words. There were tears in his eyes. “God, Max, I love you so much.”
I know, I thought. I’ve always known.
Then Fang’s stormy eyes grew blacker than I’d ever seen them as they looked past me, at our fate. I turned to see the wave swelling toward us, seconds away, the white foam of its mouth howling higher and higher. But I wasn’t surprised, or scared, or even angry. I accepted it like a friendly wind, come to fly me home.
It’s okay, I thought. And it was.
Fang kissed my eyelids, my cheeks, and then my lips one more time, whisper soft. Then he clutched my head to his chest and we took one last deep breath, wrapping ourselves in each other’s arms for eternity as the warm water crashed over the cliff and swallowed us whole.
I love you, too, Fang.
Epilogue
MAX’S
LAST
WORDS
NOW, DON’T GET all weepy on me, dear reader. No chin-quivering or nose-sniveling, either. These pages do not need to be all soggy with your mucus.
There’s nothing to moan and groan about, anyway. The truth is, I am the luckiest girl in the world.
Don’t give me that I-can-see-right-through-you-Max- and-not-just-because-you’re-freaking-dead look. I’m serious.
Think about it. When the end comes, will you be buried in the arms of the one you love? Of the one who knew you your whole life, who loved you your whole life? The one person who could really and truly love you like you needed to be loved?
I hope so.
Because I was, and I wouldn’t change any of it—not for anything.
Not even the world.
Okay, I can see that you’re upset. I know you must be wondering, just like I’m wondering right now: Was I really supposed to save the world, or was it all just a big lie?
In other words, did I fail? (Gosh, it sounds so ugly when you put it like that.)
Or was my life just a metaphor for what we’re all supposed to do with our lives—that each of us is supposed to believe that we can, that we must save the world? That the world will be saved only if we each take that kind of responsibility?
Because if this life has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t leave anything up to fate or chance, or for someone else to clean up. Because in the end, “special” people are still just people. Because, PS, those so-called special people can’t actually save us.
We all have to save ourselves.
Or maybe this was a lesson in carpe ever-loving diem—seize the day, kiddos, and hold tight to your loved ones, the only part of life that really matters, and live each moment to the fullest, because you never know when an explosive ball of gas is going to light up the sky and blow you into oblivion.
But no, really.
Was it all just a big shrug of meaninglessness that will now plunge you into a pit of existential emptiness and melancholy?
I hope not. At least, don’t blame me for it. What, carrying the weight of the whole world wasn’t enough? I have to look out for your happiness, too?
Jokes aside, I really do hope that my life meant something in the end—that it meant all of those things. I don’t know what’s next—what any of us can expect—but I do know that I’m ready to see what’s out there for me. In fact, I think I hear Fang calling my name now. He sounds so far away….
You guys? I don’t want to, like, freak you out at this point in our journey, but I think I’m starting to see that famous light at the end of the tunnel that you always hear about. This is where we part ways, I’m afraid.
Before I go, even if you’ve rolled your eyes at every bit of cheesy advice I pulled out of my butt when the flock needed some pep in their patooties these last few years, know that I mean this last little nugget from the bottom of my not-really-so-cynical little freak heart:
Save your world. Love it, protect it, and respect it, and don’t let haters represent it.
Don’t leave the saving to anyone else, ever, because, exhibit A—why, hello there!—it’s way too much for one person. And if you want to skip out on the responsibility train, my whole life—and death—will have been in vain.
It’s yours. It’s all yours for the taking!
You’re not going to waste it now, are you?
Epilogue the Last
THE
BEGINNING
One
WHEN I OPEN my eyes, everything is dim blue wonder. Playful shapes of light dance across my vision, diving, and dipping, then merging into shadow. I thought heaven would be brighter.
I’m spinning, and I watch in bug-eyed wonder as my hand moves in front of my face in slow motion, my fingers leaving streaks like sparkler trails in the dark as my eyes try to adjust to their movement.
I can feel the air as I push and poke, think I can taste the sound of what blue feels like—a whale’s warbling echo.
Or is that singing?
Of course my angels sound like strangled whales.
It’s wonderful feeling weightless, free. Almost like flying, but without even having to move—floating toward an easy, carefree eternity of being rocked like a baby, free of all burdens and responsibility. I actually sigh with relief.
Wait a minute. I just sighed. I’m… breathing?
Underwater?
I’m alive?
“Max,” I hear a voice call from above. What a magical sound that is.
Hmm? I think. Voice, is that you pestering me again? Do not disturb. Busy floating. Call if you want to talk rainbows.
A disembodied hand grasps mine and pulls me upward.
Are you there, God? It’s me, Max.
“Max!” The voice is clearer, immediate.
The water cradles me closer. Am I moving at all? Is this real?
My eyes trace slowly, lazily up the hand that’s entwined with mine, the squared fingers tan and vaguely familiar. And strong. Like the arm and shoulder the hand is connected to. The face finally registers just as we break the surface.
As does shock.
Thrashing, I stupidly suck in a huge breath through my nose, instead of using the gills I developed long ago. The harsh air rips through my lungs, and I double over, coughing and choking out water.
“I told you I would come back for you,” Dylan whispers, rubbing my back.
Two
FANG, DYLAN, ANGEL, and I sit perched on a large, exposed ridge of rock that rises high out of the water. We’re alive. A little soggy and a lot banged up, maybe, but still living, breathing.
Survivors.
Hawks soar above us, diving through the narrow crevices, their long brown feathers mirroring my own. As the sun warms my face, I long to join them.
I peer out over the vast strangeness of the landscape, a charred wasteland: the island, now broken up into hundreds of smaller islands, with narrow inlets snaking in and out of them; the spindly remaining trees, branchless, barkless, standing straight up like frightened soldiers with an army of dead brothers at their feet; the hardening ash, swirling into surreal silver spirals, hot air belching out of cracks in the crust to form thermal pools; and an unfathomable high-tech city of luxury, sealed in caves that are now buried below the turquoise water.
It’s been only a few hours since the Split—when the gash in the sky severed this new world from the old one—but we swam and limped and swerved into our new existence feeling changed.
But we haven’t changed, really; the rest of the world has. And somehow, this new world makes sense in a way that the old one never did.
Fang’s tying a singed but sturdy branch to my wing with a scrap of his T-shirt, creating a splint. My wing, though still painful, is already healing before my eyes. Because it was made to. We are not fragile creatures, after all.
And that is why we’re still here.
Dylan is watching Fang’s movements—deft, efficient—but there’s no threat there. Something has shifted.
In all of us.
“I read about something like this happening in Russia,” Dylan says, answering the question we’re all asking in our heads: What, exactly, was that thing that split our world in two? “The Tunguska event, I think it was, in the early twentieth century. A meteor exploded near the earth’s surface and wiped out miles and miles of forest.”
I can’t help but notice how confident he sounds, how he doesn’t look down when he talks, how he’s no longer embarrassed about his interest in science, his love of books. He’s just eager to share the knowledge that will help the group survive. He knows, as we all do, that we can use any help we can get.
“This seems a lot bigger than that one, though,” he says. “I wonder if anything like this is happening elsewhere—like a ripple effect or something. Just look at the sky. I’ve definitely never read about anything like that.”
The sky has taken on this bizarre, Technicolor hue that warps and shimmers like some psychedelic black-light poster—totally surreal. Yet… it feels familiar, somehow. Like I’ve been dreaming about it every night of my life, but I’ve just forgotten my dreams each day on waking to the life in which I have been trapped.
I keep thinking how amazing this place is going to be to explore by air.
Dylan stands up. “We should probably start combing the perimeter for possible other entrances to the caves. The main line I took everybody through is now underwater.”
“I’ll check out the tree-house village,” Fang says. “See if there’s anything left, start the rebuilding.” He gives my hand a tight squeeze, but that desperation, that urgency between us is gone. No insecurities. Max and Fang. Fang and Max. No longer a question. We just are.
Angel and I sit together on the edge, watching the guys soar through the air. We don’t need to talk, because everything is understood. The weirdness that had come between us is gone, and since resurfacing I haven’t heard a word from my Voice, trying to tell me what to do. There’s no leader now, no power. We’re all working—quickly, efficiently—together.
It’s well documented that I’ve never been very good at school or any of the other junk normal kids are supposed to slog through. That’s because I’m not normal, and never have been. None of us are. But in this postapocalyptic world, on this tiny, wrecked island, I have a feeling we’re going to excel.
“Dylan’s right that this thing’s big,” Angel says after a few minutes. “I’m tapping into Dr. Martinez’s thoughts, and they’re monitoring satellite connections all over the world from inside the caves. This wasn’t the only event. It’s triggered a ripple effect. There’s been major volcanic and tectonic activity. Whole countries may be covered in water, ash, or flame. It’s unclear at this point.”
The two of us are silent for a long moment, letting that sink in—that the whole world and probably most of the people we know in it are done for.
“I’m so glad that it wasn’t me, that it wasn’t us,” Angel says, her eyes brimming with tears. “Isn’t that selfish?”
I shake my head. “It’s not selfish. We’re here. We’re alive. I’m not going to apologize for surviving.” That might sound harsh, but through the grief and the devastation, I can’t help feeling hope, too. If you could choose between life and death, wouldn’t you leap toward living with everything you had?
No one wanted life as we knew it to end. But we were made for this. Surviving, I mean. And the truth is, we weren’t that great at fitting in to life as we knew it, anyway. In fact, life as we knew it kind of sucked. Stuck in cages, trackers implanted beneath our skin, all that power they shoveled between us, turning us into sideshow freaks.
That’s all over now. The whitecoats only know how to live in a world where they can have cushy homes and order factory-farmed, premade food. This is definitely not their world.
It’s ours.
“I know what you mean,” Angel says, reading my thoughts. Her blue eyes have a faraway look, and even without the ash in her feathers, she looks older, more mature. Like she grew a century in an hour. Like she grew into that Voice of hers. “It’s almost like we were meant for this world, and not that other one. Like it’s finally our time.”
It’s a dark thought, but one I can’t turn away from. This is an environment that requires a little something extra from its inhabitants. Half of it is underwater. And we have gills. The other half is made of unreachable cliffs and towering trees. And we have wings. This place is primal, and it’s raw.
I was made for this.
And if I’m going to start this new life being who I am truly meant to be, there is something I know I have to do.
I look beyond Angel’s windblown curls and see that Fang has returned and is looking at me.
I walk over to him, our gazes fully locked. And when I reach him, I don’t hesitate to say what I know is the most important truth of my life. The only truth.
“I love you, Fang,” I whisper.
He smiles and takes my hand.
We stand together on the precipice, opening our wings to their full span and watching the long feathery shadows reach out over the land below.
In a way, maybe I did die in that wet grave, because it’s like I was completely reborn when I came up from that water. The air feels different to me now. I’m breathing it differently now. Like my body is a whole new machine.
It is my time.
The time of Maximum Ride.
I have some really bad secrets to share with someone, and it might as well be you—a stranger, a reader of books, but most of all, a person who can’t hurt me. So here goes nothing, or maybe everything. I’m not sure if I can even tell the difference anymore.
The night my parents died—after they’d been carried out in slick black body bags through the service elevator—my brother Matthew shouted at the top of his powerful lungs, “My parents were vile, but they didn’t deserve to be taken out with the trash!”
He was right about the last part—and, as things turned out, the first part as well.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Please forgive me…. I do that a lot.
I’d been asleep downstairs, directly under my parents’ bedroom, when it happened. So I never heard a thing—no frantic thumping, no terrified shouting, no fracas at all. I woke up to the scream of sirens speeding up Central Park West, maybe one of the most common sounds in New York City.
But that night it was different.
> The sirens stopped right downstairs. That was what caused me to wake up with a hundred-miles-an-hour heartbeat. Was the building on fire? Did some old neighbor have a stroke?
I threw off my double layer of blankets, went to my window, and looked down to the street, nine dizzying floors below. I saw three police cruisers and what could have been an unmarked police car parked on Seventy-second Street, right at the front gates of our apartment building, the exclusive and infamous Dakota.
A moment later our intercom buzzed, a jarring blat-blat that punched right through my flesh and bones.
Why was the doorman paging us? This was crazy.
My bedroom was the one closest to the front door, so I bolted through the living room, hooked a right at the sharks in the aquarium coffee table, and passed between Robert and his nonstop TV.
When I reached the foyer, I stabbed at the intercom button to stop the irritating blare before it woke up the whole house.
I spoke in a loud whisper to the doorman through the speaker: “Sal? What’s happening?”
“Miss Tandy? Two policemen are on the way up to your apartment right now. I couldn’t stop them. They got a nine-one-one call. It’s an emergency. That’s what they said.”
“There’s been a mistake, Sal. Everyone is asleep here. It’s after midnight. How could you let them up?”
Before Sal could answer, the doorbell rang, and then fists pounded the door. A harsh masculine voice called out, “This is the police.”
I made sure the chain was in place and then opened the door—but just a crack.
I peered out through the opening and saw two men in the hallway. The older one was as big as a bear but kind of soft-looking and spongy. The younger one was wiry and had a sharp, expressionless face, something like a hatchet blade, or… no, a hatchet blade is exactly right.
The younger one flashed his badge and said, “Sergeant Capricorn Caputo and Detective Ryan Hayes, NYPD. Please open the door.”