“We’re not important, Fang,” the driver said soothingly, still looking starved with those hollow eyes. “We’re just part of the Plan. But everybody knows you.” He took several steps toward Fang. “You’ll be the first, after all.”
“Let me guess,” Fang said, his dark eyes narrowing. “The first to die.”
They charged him then, and relying on instinct rather than thinking, Fang snapped out his wings, his mind calculating rapidly. He’d do a quick up- and-away and jump behind them. He would knock their heads together, leave them sprawled on the asphalt, and beat it out of there.
But that’s not what happened at all.
Instead, with that careless wing snap, his injured wing bone ground against itself. Fang groaned in agony and involuntarily hunched over, scrunching his eyes shut as the pain vibrated through him.
And that’s all it took.
In the next second they were on him, wrenching his arms backward and digging their elbows into his neck. The driver was violently twisting his hurt wing behind him, and he saw black spots at the same time he felt his knees buckle.
Fang swore through clenched teeth as they started to drag him. He cursed these guys, cursed being alone, cursed the Voice for putting him in this position. This was a perfect storm of crap, all flying through the same fan, right at him.
The three of them worked together to pull Fang to the stone ledge beyond the safety barrier. He felt a singing panic in his veins as he neared the edge of the cliff. This was usually where he would show up to save someone, or someone would show up to save him.
But no one was coming—that was horribly clear. He was more alone than he’d ever been in his life.
The three of them heaved Fang up onto the ledge, kicking and swearing, realizing with growing horror exactly what would happen if he didn’t escape right now.
He gave another sudden jerk, surging against their grips with all of his strength, and… they let go.
Suddenly, he was free.
Free-falling, that is, hurled into empty space, toward the crashing waves of Lake Michigan, broken wing and all. Right off the edge of the cliff.
40
ANGEL SCREAMED FOR what felt like eons, until her own wordless howl hurt her head so much that she shut up. Her throat was raw, her eyes like sandpaper and still unseeing.
She’d had another horribly real nightmare—this time, Fang was the one who was dead. She’d seen him falling, falling…. Just like she’d seen Maya.
And now Maya was dead.
Angel winced, pressing fingers to her throbbing temples. She lived her own nightmare while she was awake, and she lived others’ nightmares when she slept. There was no escape. No escape, ever…
Fang.
Angel concentrated, but she couldn’t figure out the ending. She wanted to see, needed to see what happened next, even if it was as bad as she feared it was.
But she couldn’t.
In her vision, Fang was in a different place than last time. Instead of an empty red desert, the scene had been misty and chilly looking. Instead of the two girls from his gang, there had been three guys there, guys she didn’t recognize but instinctively hated. There had been a car. A sunshine-yellow convertible.
And there had been a cliff, dropping sharply and hopelessly down.
Angel felt tears prick her eyes as she relived the last part of the vision. What stuck with her most was the way they’d smiled, those three guys. They’d been beaming like lunatics as they hurled Fang over, leaning over the ledge to watch him fall.
Angel had waited impatiently for Fang to spread his wings and soar away—grinning triumphantly at the evil humans who’d thought they could hurt a bird kid by tossing him into the open air. Ha, ha, morons! Eat my wind!
But… he hadn’t.
Hadn’t smiled, hadn’t taunted them. Hadn’t spread his wings and soared away.
He’d just dropped, his body twisting and turning awkwardly in the air.
He’d looked broken.
Angel had screamed herself awake from the nightmare right before Fang hit the ground.
But maybe… A tiny part of her whispered, even as she tried to block it out.
Maybe it hadn’t been a nightmare after all. Maybe it had been a… vision.
No. No way. She squeezed her eyes shut. “It was a nightmare,” she said aloud. “It wasn’t real.”
Like now, she thought. Like the nightmare she was in the middle of living.
Right then a screeching, grating sound filled Angel’s ears, like fingernails on a chalkboard.
“Not real, not real,” she whispered, even as she shrank back into the shadows of her dog crate.
Moments later, the door to her crate swung open. She pulled herself against the back wall as tightly as she could, ready to come out kicking and punching and screaming.
She expected to feel human hands clenching her, but the sensation was cold, hard, and flat—terrifyingly mechanical. Two large metal paddles had reached in with an awful, gear-grinding sound. They practically filled the crate—there was no way to avoid them. Angel ducked high and low, but eventually the paddles closed in on her, clamping onto her body firmly, leaving her no room to writhe or wiggle free.
With more metallic grinding, the paddles began to retreat, dragging Angel out of the dog crate roughly. Then she found herself suspended in midair, held up by what must have been two warehouse cargo-moving forceps. She shouted and twisted this way and that as she moved through empty air. Then she was dumped unceremoniously on a hard surface. She felt the crisp sheets crinkle against her legs and almost wept with defeat.
An operating table.
Again.
She was too exhausted to struggle. What was the point? They would find a way to make her cooperate. She had no more tears left, so she lay dry-eyed as her arms and legs were clamped to the sides of the table.
“This is for your own good,” someone told her—a whitecoat whose voice she didn’t recognize. “We need to make sure there’s no way you can escape these tests.”
Angel’s heart clenched. More tests. What could they possibly do now? Hadn’t they already taken samples of skin, bone, blood, and feathers? How could they not know every square inch of her, down to the cellular level?
Another pair of cold metal forceps moved along her shoulder blades. They reached under her back, then forcibly unfurled her wings, pulling them out from beneath her. Her wings, too, were clamped to the operating table.
She tried to fight the nausea, but felt bile rising in her throat.
They’d never done this before. Never.
A whole new level of fear streaked through Angel’s body. She realized what was coming right before it actually happened.
Small snipping noises filtered into her brain, followed by a pinching sensation at her primary feathers.
“Done,” the whitecoat said. “Good little mutant.” He left the lab, his footsteps fading away as the door closed, leaving Angel clamped to the operating table. She remained silent the entire time, mute with shock and horror.
They’d clipped her wings.
41
EVERYTHING IS ABOUT to change, the Voice said. Prepare yourselves.
Every single member of the flock heard it.
Your task is to record what happens.
Nudge yelped and dropped the bottle of glue, leaving a glittery blue stain on her scrapbook.
“What—” she began, but was interrupted by the Voice.
Write, blog, take videos on a cell phone—it doesn’t matter. Just make sure you record everything, down to the last detail. Everything. You have to record it all—for the future.
A Voice in her head. Another huge clue that she was a freak. Nudge wanted to cry, wanted to scream at the Voice to leave her alone, to let her at least pretend to be kind of normal! Nudge clenched her jaw and determinedly went back to making her scrapbook of normal, wingless girls.
Nudge, this is about the future. In the future, you will be normal. In the future, you mi
ght even get sick of feeling average. But right now, the world needs you. The Voice sounded unusually gentle. This task is the most important thing you will ever do for humankind. So get up, grab your phone, and start keeping a log—for the future.
Nudge hesitated. This felt really urgent. She didn’t want any part of this. But she knew one thing: Max never went against the Voice. Nudge sighed, her shoulders slumping. There would be no normalcy today. “Okay,” Nudge said, defeated. “Okay.”
Don’t let Max out of your sight.
Iggy and the Gasman, in separate rooms, both sat up, listening. The Voice. They’d heard it only once or twice before. They were hearing it now. Like before, it seemed important, vital, that they do what it said.
You must protect Max at any cost—even your own lives, the Voice said. She must survive to lead. The calm is over. The storm is on the way, and the skies will break open with its force. Do you understand?
Not really, Gazzy thought, peering outside at the blameless blue sky. No menacing dark clouds, no swarms of locusts, no angry mobs. But he knew the Voice was right about one thing—he needed Max as a leader, and if her life was in danger, he was absolutely willing to protect her from weather or whitecoats or whatever else came along.
Gazzy stood up, ready to go find her, then hesitated. Don’t let Max out of your sight. Did the Voice really mean never ever let her out of his sight, no matter what? Surely Max would need bathroom breaks? What had the Voice said? Protect her with his own life! Well, of course, and that sounded like they would definitely need explosives before too long. But…
In the kitchen, Iggy was holding a mixer blade as cake batter dripped, unnoticed, onto his shirt. He had to protect Max? Even at the cost of his own life? He cocked his head, listening intently. He could hear nothing out of the ordinary—no vehicles or choppers on their way, no one shouting alarms. Total wasn’t even barking, not that he usually did. But for some reason the Voice needed his help. Right in the middle of this cake.
“Okay. She’ll survive without my help—she’s too stubborn to die,” Iggy muttered. “But I’ll protect her anyway.”
Good.
Harden your heart.
Why, hello there, Voice, I thought snidely. It’s nice to see you, too. How’s tricks?
There’s no time for jokes, Maximum. Time has run out. The end is here, Max. Now.
I stopped slashing wing holes in the back of a hoodie and frowned. The end? Like the apocalypse? No offense, but if I had a nickel for every time I’d heard that—
This is no time to be getting soft, to let your guard down, Max. You’re not as paranoid as you used to be. You’re not as strong.
Hey, I am just as paranoid as I ever was, I thought defensively. Our life here just happens to be on the calm and peaceful side of the spectrum. For once.
Listen very closely, Max. Your task, at the end, is to harden your heart.
Harden my heart? Like, further? Isn’t that what everyone has always complained about with me? Now it’s a good thing?
Lives will be lost. More than you can imagine. In order to survive, you must harden yourself against their suffering. Lose the softness. Become the fearless leader again.
I scowled at the implication that I’d ever been less than a “fearless leader,” but I had to admit, I was rattled—as much by the Voice, whose word I’d always taken as gospel, saying that the end was finally here as by the Voice, who had told me I had to save the world in the first place, telling me to put myself first. My mind recoiled at the confusion, and at the Voice’s hardness.
Its certainty.
I waited for the Voice to say something else, but it was silent—apparently my brain was only mine again. As messed up as that sounds.
Dread gnawing at my insides, I pondered my task: to harden my heart. Come what may.
42
EVERYTHING IS ABOUT to change. Dylan paused the video game he was playing. He looked around, but no one was near him. Prepare yourselves. Was this his… Voice? He knew Max, and possibly the other members of the flock, had heard it before, but this was totally new to him.
Um… what do you want? he thought. For a second, he was almost excited. It was like he was one of them—even more like Max—now that he had a Voice, too.
But his excitement quickly went cold.
You have a task ahead of you, Dylan. One that only you can perform. One that you must perform. Do you understand?
This sounded familiar. Dylan fought a wave of nausea as he remembered Dr. Williams describing the other task he had to perform—bringing Fang in for a life of torture. Now this weird Voice in his head was demanding something else of him that he supposedly couldn’t refuse….
What is it? Dylan thought with dread.
The answer wasn’t anything he would have predicted.
You must fully win Max’s heart. The survival of the world depends on it.
Dylan groaned and dropped his head into his hands. “Like I haven’t been trying!” he said aloud, exasperated. Is that all? Sure you don’t have any dragons I can slay instead?
A nice, solid, physical goal. That was what he needed. He was pretty confident about his physical abilities—flying skills, fighting technique, speed, strength.
But Max’s heart… Max was an enigma wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in a cipher. Or something. He’d been trying to win her over ever since he’d joined the flock. Every once in a while, it felt like he was making headway. Dylan’s face flushed as he remembered the few mind-blowing kisses they’d shared.
But then she would back off again, and he would be left wondering what he’d done wrong, and if he would ever, ever get it right.
Now the Voice, the not-to-be-ignored Voice, was saying he had to somehow step up his game and actually win Max’s heart. For the sake of the entire world. Dylan felt panicky. It wasn’t like winning Max’s heart was taking one for the team. It was the only thing he’d ever wanted.
But until now, he’d never been afraid of what would happen if he failed.
43
GOING ON A dream date is not exactly “hardening your heart,” Max, I thought to myself uneasily, remembering the Voice’s creepy warning. If being closed off were an Olympic sport, I’d have more gold medals than I could carry. But this whole heart-hardening gig simply was not happening.
Not now. Not tonight.
Because, despite my usual reaction to all things girly (eye roll, look of disgust, general feeling of nausea), tonight I was positively giddy and swooning. I couldn’t help it—I had seriously underestimated the effect a little romance can have on a girl.
Dream date.
Unlike the general population, my idea of a dream date would once have been simply defined as not eating roasted lizard or Dumpster scraps for dinner. But my first (second? Did the one at the movies count?) “date” with Dylan was certainly more than that.
Much, much more, in fact.
I stared up at the sight before me, jaw on the ground and eyes bugging. See, when Dylan came up to me after school and said “Follow me,” I thought, What the heck? I’ll just go ahead and follow the guy, let him show me whatever fascinating new discovery he’s made. I had expected him to demonstrate that he could fly backward or show me a cool rock formation he’d found—something like that.
Let me tell you: I was not expecting this.
“H-how did you…?” I stuttered. We were nestled within the branches of a huge fir tree, about thirty feet up. I felt the warmth of Dylan’s hand on my lower back, steadying me as I leaned backward and gaped up, still trying to take in all the amazing details of the house. My house.
“I’ve been building it ever since we got here,” Dylan said, smiling shyly at my speechless astonishment. “I went exploring the first day and found this tree, and I knew you liked tree houses….”
I grinned dopily at his perfect face, his soft, anxious eyes. I knew you liked tree houses. Dylan had taken the time to listen to what I liked, had been making notes about things that made me happy. The guy
had actually been paying attention.
And this… this was more than a tree house. It was like the Swiss Family Robinson tree house, Oregon edition. It had a floor, walls, windows, a roof. All of it was beautifully constructed out of branches and planks, and sort of camouflaged with leafy twigs and vines. From the ground, it would blend with the rest of the tree canopy. But from up here, on this branch, it was stunning. I saw a doorway covered with a green cloth curtain.
“Come on,” Dylan said, taking my hand.
Together we leaped the fifteen feet from the branch to the balcony that ran around three sides of the tree house. Dylan held open the door curtain and the warm glow of candlelight flowed out into the deepening dusk. That’s right—candlelight. The whole shebang.
I swallowed and stepped inside. When Dylan dropped the curtain, it shut out the rest of the world. Dylan and I were alone, out here in the mountain woods, a five-minute flight away from Newton and the rest of the flock.
Dylan looked at my face intently, as if trying to read my expression. I felt the flush creeping up my cheeks, my heart getting all loud and poundy. The combination of the violet dusk and the yellow candlelight made his features even more unbelievably gorgeous.
I turned away from him and walked around the space, running my fingers over the gleaming wood, seeing the notched joints, the clever design. It wasn’t huge inside—maybe eight feet by eight feet. But it was cozy, and plenty big enough. For what? I wondered.
“I stole the supplies from woodworking class,” Dylan said, answering my unasked question. “Do you like it?”
“I love it,” I murmured, with more ache in my voice than I’d intended. “It’s so th—”
I stopped and sniffed the air.
“So th…? So th what?”
“Do I smell… food?”
“You do indeed,” said Dylan. “Roast chicken, pasta, buttery garlic bread, and—”
“Chocolate cake?” I moaned. There was a short, square table in the middle of the room, set up with two pillows to sit on. To the left was a low shelf holding everything my hypersensitive-when-it-comes-to-sniffing-out-all-edible-things nose had caught, plus more.