Max

  Delicate, caramel-colored tendrils. I'm really starting to worry myself.

  Anyway. We all got ready. We were wearing clean clothes. We went to school with various levels of enthusiasm.

  The school was long and low and spread out, painted in dusty pastels so it coordinated with the desert. It was not fenced in. There was a ton of open space around it, plenty of places to take off from, land, escape from.

  Jeb stood by the car, knowing better than to try to hug any of us good-bye. I was almost inside when he called my name.

  "Max."

  I went back over to him. "Please don't impart any pearls of wisdom. I just ate."

  He shook his head. "Just—beware of Mr. Chu. He makes Itex look like Sesame Street."

  Then, while I stared at him, he got in the car and drove away, headed for a plane to California. Which cheered me up but only a little.

  We were met at the door of the school by a woman holding a clipboard. "Hello," she said, smiling. Her smile reached her eyes, an important trait. "I'm Ms. Hamilton, Max. It's good to finally meet you. Your mom and I went to college together. Welcome to the Day and Night School. I hope you'll be happy here." She paused, only momentarily taken aback at the sight of Total, trotting along by Angel's side.

  Don't hold your breath, I thought. That's when it hit me: when had I last heard the Voice? I frowned, trying to remember. I couldn't. It was ages ago, or at least a week. A week can seem like a really long time in my life. Was I down to just one personality inside my head?

  "First we need to test your knowledge, so we'll know your strengths and weaknesses," Ms. Hamilton went on cheerfully. "Then we'll know what classes will be best for you."

  Nudge skipped along at Ms. Hamilton's side, glancing back to beam at me. I managed a slight grimace in return. We walked down a couple of hallways. There were exits at reassuring intervals. Through glass-paned doors, we saw large, sunny classrooms with small groups of kids in them. The kids looked happy to be here. Saps.

  Ms. Hamilton took us to an empty classroom. We sat down in chairs that were designed to accommodate the wingless. I shot pained looks at everyone who met my eye, letting them know that this was not my idea of a good time.

  I couldn't believe they had decided to do this. It was like—my plans for our lives weren't good enough anymore. They actually thought this situation would be better—which, I might add, included not being led by me.

  Now my stomach hurt, and I felt weighed down by a gray cloud.

  "First, we'll see how you do at math."

  I tried not to groan out loud. We're street-smart, not book-smart. How many people had tested us over the years?

  "Math, okay, bring it," said Total, hopping up on a chair. "Are we allowed to use calculators? Do you have some that are, you know, paw-ready?" He held up his right paw.

  Ms. Hamilton stopped and stared at Total. I snickered to myself. I had almost forgotten how much fun it could be to bait people. I sat up a little straighter.

  Then Ms. Hamilton smiled.

  At Total.

  "No, we don't have any paw-ready calculators," she said. "But you probably won't need one for these questions, anyway."

  Just like that, this grown-up had accepted the talking dog.

  Four hours later, Ms. Hamilton told us that our reading levels ranged between first grade and twelfth grade and that we had amazing vocabularies. (Angel was not the one who read on a first grade level, and Fang, Iggy, and I were not, sadly, the ones who read on a twelfth grade level.) We spelled about as well as four-year-olds do but had off-the-chart visual memories. We were majorly lame at math but could solve most problems anyway.

  "In short, you're very, very, very bright kids who haven't had much schooling," said Ms. Hamilton.

  I could have told her that before we'd wasted all this time. And she didn't even know about the other stuff we could do, like hack computers and jack cars and break into most buildings.

  "Angel, you're so far off the chart that we'll have to invent a special chart just for you." Ms. Hamilton laughed.

  "I thought you might," Angel said.

  I'd been here five hours, and so far I hadn't really wanted to take anyone apart. Weird.

  But that didn't mean I wanted to stay at the Day and Night School.

  Was I the only one?

  18

  SOUTH AMERICA," I said coaxingly. "It'll be warm. They have llamas. You like llamas."

  Nudge crossed her arms over her chest. "I want to stay here."

  We were in her room at a safe house that belonged to the school. It wasn't a bad setup. God knows we've had worse. But it was still part of a bigger confining situation, and my skin was crawling.

  "How long do you think it will take another suicide sniper to find us?" I asked.

  Nudge shrugged. "This place is out in the desert. And Ms. Hamilton told us about all the safety measures—the alarms, the lights, the radar. This is what we've been looking for."

  A year ago I would have ignored what Nudge was saying and just browbeaten her into getting up, throwing her stuff together, and bugging out.

  And it would have worked. But we'd been through a lot in the past year. There had been a couple of times when the flock had almost split up. The stuff I had done to make sure we'd survive when the others were little was not the same stuff that would work now. I needed a new way to bend them to my will.

  Only problem was, I didn't have any other way. And Nudge had found something she wanted even more—more than me, more than the flock, maybe even more than survival.

  She wanted to learn.

  "I'm tired of being scared, Max," she said, her large, coffee-colored eyes pleading.

  "We all are! And as soon as we finish our big mission, we'll be able to relax. I promise!"

  Note: I mentioned the Big Mission, the apocalypse, the end of the world, and so on. Basically, I'm supposed to "save the world." As in, save the entire freaking world. Jeb said everything that had happened to me, to us, was to toughen me up and teach me survival skills. In a way, everything seems like part of that plan, like it's connected. Like we have people trying to kill us partly because they think we're genetic mistakes, dangerous experiments that have gone wrong and so need to be eliminated—and partly because other people think that if I save the world, it'll cut way into their profit margins.

  I have to believe that if I keep trying to figure out the bigger picture, it'll all make sense. If it doesn't, I'll be ready for a loony bin. And as hard as all that was for me to accept, it had to be even harder for the younger kids.

  "I just want to fit in," Nudge said. She looked down at her tan feet, side by side on the new, clean carpet. "I want to be like other kids."

  I breathed in to the count of four. "Nudge, most of the other kids here seem like spineless, gullible weenies who wouldn't survive one day on their own," I said gently.

  "That's the point!" Nudge said. "They don't need to! They're not on their own—people take care of them."

  "I've always taken care of you and the others as best I could," I said, stung.

  Nudge's eyes softened. "But you're just a kid yourself." She brushed her fluffy hair behind one ear. "Max, I want to stay."

  Time to get firm.

  "We can't stay," I said briskly, standing up. "You know that. We have to go. This has been, well, not fun exactly but better than a punch in the gut. But it's over now, and we have to get back to reality, however much that might suck."

  "I'm staying."

  Had I heard her right? Nudge was always on my team. She was the agreeable one. Sure, she talked a whole lot and had a weird interest in clothes and fashion, but she was my… Nudge. Almost never in a bad mood. Never fought with the others.

  "What?" I said, my mind reeling.

  "I want to be normal. I want to be like other kids. I'm tired of being a freak and having to run all the time and never being able to settle down. I want a home. And I know how to get one."

  My chest felt tight, but I forced myself to say
, "How?"

  Nudge mumbled something, her hair covering her face as she looked down.

  "What?" I asked again.

  "If I don't have wings."

  This time I'd heard it, though it was barely a mumbled whisper.

  "Nudge, you come with wings," I said, not even understanding what she meant. "You're the winged version. There's no optional Nudge with no wings."

  She mumbled something again, which sounded bizarrely like, "Take them off." Then she was crying, and I sat back down and held her. Her tears got my shirt wet and her hair kept tickling my nose so I had to keep blowing little puffs of air to keep it away from my face. I was so horrified by what she'd said that it took a couple minutes to come up with something.

  "Nudge, getting your wings taken off won't make you not a bird kid," I said. I am not at my best in situations like this and mostly just wanted to smack someone and say, "Snap out of it!" So I was really stretching here. "Being in the flock is more than just about having wings. You're different from other people all the way down to your bones and your blood cells."

  She sobbed harder, and I backtracked quickly.

  "What I mean is, you're special, every bit of you. More special than any other kid in the whole world, including the ones you want to be like. You're beautiful, and powerful, and unique. Kids without wings don't have your strength, your smarts, your determination. Remember that guy in the junkyard when we were stealing those bits of cable? Whose idea was it to hit him with a two-by-four, huh? Yours!"

  Nudge sniffled.

  "Remember when Gazzy was really starting to imitate things, all the time, and he kept sneaking up on us and making a police-siren sound, and we'd always freak? Who was it who taped his mouth shut with duct tape while he slept? You."

  She nodded against my soggy shoulder.

  "And what about that time we tried to shoplift underwear from Walmart, and the store manager was chasing us? You ripped a fire extinguisher right off the wall and hurled it at his feet, didn't you? He went down like a lead balloon, and we got away."

  Nudge was silent. I was congratulating myself for averting disaster when she said quietly, "There's a difference between being special and being a total freak. I'm a total freak. And I'm staying here."

  19

  THEN SHE SAID that she is a total freak and that she's staying here. After everything I came up with, everything I could think of, she said she's staying here."

  My voice seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet night air, and I lowered it. Next to me, Fang leaned back against a huge boulder that was still warm from the day's sun. After my unsuccessful emo-weep-apalooza in Nudge's room, Fang and I had flown out into the desert, to a bare place where we could see anything coming from miles away.

  Fang frowned and rubbed his forehead. "She's confused," he said. "She's just a kid."

  "You know we have to go," I said. "What if she really won't come with us?"

  The moon lit the contours of his face. His eyes were the same color as the sky—just as deep, just as dark.

  "How can we force her?"

  He'd said "we," which made me feel better. But the hard truth was that we couldn't force Nudge. "Even if we made her come," I admitted, "she'd just hold it against us. She'd be mad."

  Fang nodded slowly. "You have to want to be with someone, or it doesn't work. You have to choose."

  I searched his face, wondering if we were still talking about Nudge. "Uh, yeah," I said awkwardly. I was just about to say something really important about Nudge, and it flew right out of my mind. "Um, and she…" I tried, but my voice trailed off as I got lost in the intensity of Fang's expression.

  He leaned closer. When had he gotten so much bigger than me? Four years ago he'd been a skinny beanpole! Now he was—

  "I choose you," he said very softly, "Max."

  Then his hard, rough hand tenderly cupped my chin, and suddenly his mouth was on mine, and every synapse in my brain shorted out.

  We had kissed a couple of times before, but this was different. This time, I squelched my immediate, overwhelming desire to run away screaming. I closed my eyes and put my arms around him despite my fear. Then somehow we slid sideways so we were lying in the cool sand. I was holding him fiercely, and he was kissing me fiercely, and it was… just so, so intensely good. There aren't any words to describe how good it was. Once I got past my usual, gut-wrenching terror, there was a long, sweet slide into mindlessness, when all I felt was Fang, and all I heard was his breathing, and all I could think was, "Oh, God, I want to do this all the time."

  Gradually our kisses became less hungry and more comforting. Our arms relaxed as we held each other in the cool desert air. Our breathing calmed, and my thoughts began to sort of connect to each other again in comprehensible chunks. I started my inevitable hysterical freak-out, but I tried to do it very quietly inside my head, because this had been so special, and I didn't want to ruin it. Like I usually did.

  I slanted my gaze up to him, and Fang was… smiling. He was lying on his back, holding me against him, and he was looking up at the night sky, with the katrillion stars that you see only when you're in the middle of nowhere. Then you see stars that you never even knew existed. He was smiling, and his face looked softer and less closed.

  I was instantly full of sharp, witty jibes, and it took every ounce of Maximum self-control not to say them. To just lie there and feel vulnerable, and think about everything that had just happened between us, and wonder how it had changed things, and wonder when I had started to love him so much, so painfully, and feel how terrified I was and how elated, and how every cell of my body felt so alive.

  It was pretty much the worst thing that could ever happen to a girl.

  I highly recommend it.

  When Fang asked if it was time to get back, I thought hazily, Back to what?

  This is my brain: O

  This is my brain after making out with Fang: o

  It's very sad.

  Then a couple neurons fired in unison, and I remembered. Oh, back to the entire rest of my family, including Nudge who wants to get her wings cut off.

  We hit the sky, and I flew powerfully, wincing only a little at the recently patched section. It was good, it was solid, but it needed a few more days.

  "Whoa," said Fang, and I saw it too. I checked the stars—it was about 2 a.m.

  Our newest safe house, alone in the desert, was ablaze with lights. Every window, every doorway.

  Never a good sign.

  20

  IN AN INSTANT, all my warm fuzzies were replaced by stomach-churning fear and guilt. I hadn't been there. Something had happened, and I'd been locking lips with Fang out in the desert. How stupid could I get? This was exactly why I shouldn't do stuff like that!

  We came down fast, hitting the ground hard in a running stop that kicked up dust. The front door flew open; Gazzy ran out.

  I grabbed his arms. "What happened?"

  "Max! Fang!" Gazzy yelled. He swallowed. "I thought you were gone! I thought they had gotten you!"

  "No, no, sweetie. Just a little nighttime spin," I said quickly. "What's going on? Why's everyone up?"

  Nudge and Iggy came out next—where was Angel? My heart seized just as she appeared, with Total behind her. Thank God.

  Suddenly it was quiet, the kind of quiet you have out in the desert in the middle of the night when everyone around you goes silent at the same time. Nudge, Iggy, Gazzy, Angel, and Total focused on me and Fang, their faces upset.

  I looked from one to the next. They were really freaked, but they weren't trying to escape anything. They weren't bloody. They hadn't been in battle in the past twenty minutes.

  "What. Is. Going. On?" I asked very deliberately, searching their eyes.

  "It's, uh…" Nudge began, then cleared her throat. She glanced at the others, then tried again, meeting my gaze bravely. "It's your mom, Max. Dr. Martinez. She's been kidnapped. She's gone."

  21

  I'M THE FLOCK LEADER. I'm fast, I'm tough, and I can
think on my feet or in flight. My hair-trigger responses have saved our hides more times than I can count. So my brain kicked in to high gear right away as I cut to the heart of the matter.

  "Huh?" I managed. I felt like I'd just taken a karate chop to the chest.

  "Phone call," Iggy said.

  "Ella called," Nudge clarified. "She's hysterical—your mom disappeared from the airport this afternoon while they were between flights. Dr. Martinez just went to the restroom and never came back. Right now Ella's at her aunt's house. I don't think Jeb knows. Ella was going to call him after she talked to us." She took a deep breath. For once I didn't mind her wordiness—the more info I had, the better.

  "Did they call the police or the FBI?" I asked, already calculating how long it would take me to fly to my half sister.

  "We don't know," Nudge said. Then we heard the phone ringing inside. I raced in and grabbed it.

  "Max?" It was Dr. John Abate, one of my mom's colleagues at the CSM. "Max, are you all okay?"

  "Yes," I said tensely. I motioned to the others to get inside and lock the door, turn off the lights. We could be the next targets. "What's going on?" I punched the button to put him on speakerphone.

  "A fax just came in to the CSM office," Dr. Abate said. "Usually no one would be here at this hour, but a couple of us were putting together a press report. Anyway—this fax came, and it says that Valencia has been kidnapped."

  "Yeah, Ella called." I was pacing, trying not to bite my nails. "Who was the fax from?"

  "We don't know," said Dr. Abate. "It looks like the origination number got cut off somehow during transmission. But it says that Valencia has been kidnapped and will be held until the CSM quits its efforts to put pressure on big businesses."

  My head whirled. I remembered Mr. Chu telling me that he'd come up with a way to convince me to quit working with the CSM. Maybe he'd just found it.