Maximum Ride Forever

67

“Nooo!” I woke up gasping, and the word came out strangled as I inhaled.

I couldn’t get enough air and I was having heart palpitations like I’d just run a marathon.

I thought I might throw up.

I couldn’t remember the details of the nightmare, but I knew I’d been falling. It wasn’t one of those falling-off-the-couch dreams, either — I had been falling for miles.

I’d been having that kind of dream a lot lately, but this time, I couldn’t shake the sense that something was very, very wrong. Blinking, I reoriented myself — me, check. Harry, check. Woods probably somewhere around the Washington-Canada border, check. Sanity? Maybe a bit iffy.

Maximum Ride is next.

I held my breath, certain I heard the rustle of branches or shoes shuffling through the fallen pine needles not too far away.

“Did you hear something?” I whispered, and elbowed Harry next to me, but his only response was making twittering noises in his sleep.

So much for his evolved reflexes.

I listened again, trying not to breathe, but the only thing I heard was the hoot of an owl somewhere in the distance. Okay, maybe I was being paranoid. The adrenaline had kicked my senses into overdrive. I just needed to calm down and try to get back to sleep.

But it had gotten so cold. It felt rooted deep in my body, and I was shivering too much to relax. Since Harry was asleep anyway, I scooched closer to him, trying to get warm. His wings folded forward to encircle me, and for a moment I almost convinced myself that they were Fang’s wings, guarding me from whatever might come.

My breath started to slow...

Suddenly my face hit the dirt as Harry yanked his wing out from under my cheek. When I scrambled to my knees, he was already hovering in the air, alert. The kid had my back after all, and I would have smiled in appreciation if I hadn’t been so concerned with what had set him off: a figure materializing out of the trees.

A guy.

With wings.

Seeing the outline of feathers, Harry relaxed a little, but the sight made my pulse race faster.

I thought of the way my gut had been telling me to come this way all along.

The way I’d been so sick with worry I’d barely been able to eat.

I knew I would find him.

But...

“Dylan?”

“Hey, Max,” he answered, as if he’d just run to the store and was back now. I’d thought he was dead all this time.

“Max Mum?” Harry asked uncertainly.

Dylan looked past Harry to where I was still sitting on the ground, but all I could do was blink back at him dumbly. After my silence lasted a beat too long, Dylan asked, “Aren’t you happy to see me?”

“Yeah. I just. I thought,” I said haltingly, still out of sorts. “For a second you looked like... Fang.”

Dylan’s entire posture stiffened, but his face seemed to crumple, his gaze falling to the ground.

Nice one, jerkface. Real sensitive.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted, starting to recover from the shock. “I mean yes, of course!” I scrambled to my feet and ran to him. “I am really happy to see you, Dylan.”

Now I was a grinning idiot, so freaking relieved that he was safe. When he folded me into a hug, I loved the way he squeezed me a little too tight, held on a little too long. I sighed against him, but I was confused by the way my heart was leaping like a frog on speed when just a minute ago I’d wanted so desperately to see Fang.

I had to pull back.

“Everybody thought you were dead!” I said. I was gripping the sides of his arms, and his muscles were bigger than I remembered, more solid. His hair was changed, too — cropped close to his skull — and his eyes, which had always been so clear and bright, looked strangely cloudy.

“Why do you look so different?” I asked, my gaze traveling down from his black coat to his heavy combat boots. “And why are you dressed like you’re in a biker gang? You even have gloves — so much more prepared for this weather than me.”

Rather than answer me, Dylan turned behind him, and a smaller figure stepped forward.

“Oh, my God! Angel!” My heart lit as it always did when I saw her. I rushed to her, saying, “I was on my way to join you! I can’t believe you’re here, too!”

But Angel wasn’t smiling, and the expression on her face stopped me in my tracks. Something wasn’t right.

“What’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?” I frowned.

Angel pressed her lips together, like she was trying to hold something in tight. “Max...”

That cold feeling returned, flooding my whole body, and my voice rose shrilly.

“What’s wrong?”

68

Then Angel ran to me, crashing into me, almost bowling me over.

“Oh, Max!” she cried. She wrapped her arms around my waist and buried her face in my shirt as her too-thin body shook against me.

I rubbed her back, smoothed her hair. I was so relieved to be holding her like this, so grateful to have my littlest girl back with me that I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t want to ruin that one happiness.

But I had to know.

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” My voice was flat, certain. “The rest of the flock is dead. Fang, Nudge, Iggy, Total...”

Angel pulled back from me, her eyes red.

“No.” She wiped her nose with her palm and shook her head. “Nudge is okay. Iggy. They’re not all—”

“I saw on the blog. They said Gazzy...” My voice cracked and I swallowed. “I guess if you screw around with explosives for long enough, that’s what happens.”

“It’s not true,” Dylan said, stepping forward. “The deaths were faked. The kids are fine.”

“You don’t have to lie to me,” I said bitterly. “I can handle it.”

But Dylan had always been one of the most honest people I’d known — he was often a little too truthful about his feelings — and I saw he was serious now.

“I faked their deaths,” he clarified.

“You wha—” I stared at him incredulously. I thought about the misery I’d felt reading those words, the wrenching uncertainty of the past few days. I narrowed my eyes, and my voice was razor sharp. “Why would you do that?”

Dylan sighed and shook his head. “I had to convince the Remedy I’d killed them, so he wouldn’t send the other Horsemen.”

I looked at him sidelong, confused at first. And then I understood, and my eyes flew open.

“The other Horsemen?” I repeated. I stepped closer to him, already balling my fists. “You’re one of the Horsemen?”

“Not exactly...”

Dylan built a fire, and over the next hour, he explained what had happened when he’d left us — how he’d been trying to find the water jugs by the lake and had gotten disoriented.

“I guess it was the toxic gases from the volcano. I just kept stumbling around, retracing my steps. My shoe got stuck between rocks, and when I yanked my foot free, the shoe was completely charred. I knew I had to get out of there, but by then the smoke was so thick I could barely see, and my ears were still fuzzy from the blast. So when I heard someone shout my name, I thought it was one of you.”

The knot in my stomach tightened.

“When I turned,” Dylan went on, “a metal pipe smashed into my face. I fell forward onto my knees, and then someone stabbed my neck with a syringe.”

“Who was it?” I prodded.

Dylan shook his head. “Never got a look. Next thing I know, I’m in an underground lab surrounded by cages.”

Harry’s eyes widened—“cage” was a word he understood.

“What did they do to you?” I asked.

“I found out later they call it upgrading.” Dylan shut his eyes for a second, his jaw tightening. “When it was over, I did feel different — stronger.” Unconsciously he flexed his fingers, and I remembered how he’d felt so much more muscular.

He looked at me. “But the complete reprogramming didn’t take. I was still me, but I was supposed to be somebody else. The only clue I had to go on was a note in my hand.”

He took a piece of folded paper from his pocket and held it out to me. “ ‘One True Way,’ ” I read. “Sounds like some Doomsday nonsense.”

Dylan nodded. “I thought the same thing, but when I walked out of the lab, I saw that the streets all had names like that — Right Path, Just Causeway. One True Way was an address, not a slogan.”

“How did you just walk out of the lab?” I asked.

“I don’t know — one day the door was open. I went through it, expecting to be captured at any second, but I just kept going. Then it was up a bunch of stairs, and I was on a street.”

“Where? What city?” I pressed.

Dylan shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t recognize it. And when I got to the address on True Way, Dr. Gunther-Hagen was waiting for me.”

“Wait, Hans is alive?” I perked up. The last we’d seen of the German geneticist was in the fiery blaze of a plane crash over a year ago. We’d all assumed he was dead.

Dylan glanced at Angel, and she gave a slight nod. He turned back to me and rested his hands on my shoulders. His face was serious.

“Max, Dr. Gunther-Hagen is the Remedy.”

69

“What?!” I was on my feet, my mouth hanging open.

“I wasn’t sure what to make of him at first,” Dylan continued. “I tried to keep quiet, feel him out. But after a lecture on how the only solution to the ecological crisis was completely eliminating human impact, he asked me to kill the rest of the flock.”

“You have to be kidding me. Häagen-Dazs? Last I heard, he wanted me to start reproducing! Now we have to be eliminated?”

Dylan and Angel both nodded somberly. The three of us shared the unspoken knowledge that Dylan had been designed to be my mate, my perfect partner.

“Well, nothing should surprise me, at this point,” I said. “And yet I’m surprised.” Needing a minute, I stalked around the woods, trying to figure this out. Dylan was one of the Horsemen. Angel had arranged to have him pretend to kill the rest of the flock — convincingly, I might add. Now Dr. G-H had turned out not only to be alive, but to be the biggest honcho in all of honchodom.

I thought back to what Dr. Hans had said about Fang’s special DNA. How ambitious the doctor had been. How he had millions in grant money at his disposal.

Dr. Gunther-Hagen might have been a philanthropist, an environmentalist, and a brilliant scientist. But he was also a rich, manipulative extremist with a God complex — never a good combo.

I’d never liked him.

“He’s the force I’ve seen building for so long,” Angel said when I got back. “He is plague, and war, and famine, and death.”

“What you mean is, he’s a total asshat,” I said bluntly. “And we could’ve stopped him sooner.”

Then I got angry. Nail-spittingly angry. I was furious at everything Dr. G-H had done, and I wanted someone to pay. Right now.

“So, let me get this straight,” I said to Dylan. “This mass murderer was right in front of you, asking you to join his murder team and kill your friends, and instead of taking him out right then, you accepted the mission? And you just left him there?”

Dylan looked at me like I’d slapped him, and color rushed to his cheeks as if I really had.

“If I had killed the Remedy then, I would have been dead myself a second later. He has guards everywhere. But by pretending to follow his orders, I’ve been able to save the flock, gather information, and help Angel in her plan. Is that not good enough for you?”

“Why didn’t you come get me?” I pressed. “I could’ve helped you.”

“You were halfway around the world!”

“So was everyone else!” I yelled.

As Harry crouched on the other side of the fire, his head jerked back and forth between Dylan and me.

“I told you, the doctor was sending reinforcements, the other Horsemen!” Dylan threw up his hands in exasperation. “I had to get to everyone first and convince him you were all dead. Or you really would be!”

“But you—” I started again, but realized I was running out of objections.

It was possible Dylan had actually done a really good, selfless thing.

Maybe you should stop berating him, Angel’s voice said inside my head as she cocked an eyebrow. I glared at her, knowing she was right.

When I looked back at Dylan, into those aqua eyes that I’d missed so much, the fight drained right out of me.

“You did it all on your own?” I asked more calmly. “You risked your life to save the rest of the flock?”

“You guys are my family.” Dylan shrugged, humble as ever. “It’s what any of you would’ve done.”

My heart melted right then, and I nodded.

Yeah, it is. Time to eat crow. So to speak.

“C’mere, Boy Wonder.” I yanked Dylan toward me for the tightest hug, squeezing those pumped-up biceps until he understood how thankful I was — for what he’d done, and that he was still alive.

That he really was part of our family.

“So everyone’s safe, then?” I said, once the hugfest was over. “Where’s the flock? Are they close? I can’t wait to have us all back together again.”

Dylan winced and looked at Angel.

“What is it?” I asked.

Something was very wrong.

70

“Almost everyone’s safe.” Angel spoke carefully.

I frowned. “Is someone hurt? What happened? Is it Nudge? Total?”

“It’s Fang,” Dylan said softly, not looking at me.

“Yeah? What about him?”

“He’s... dead, Max.”

You’d think those words would’ve laid me out, but they didn’t.

Because they simply didn’t make sense. I had once thought Angel was dead. It had been bad. I had feared that Dylan was dead, since we’d left the island. I had worried about each person in my flock, worried until it ate away at my insides and destroyed my sleep. But I’d never, ever imagined that Fang would actually ever be dead.

Ever.

Not until I was dead, too.

“I don’t understand,” I said stiffly. “There must be some mistake.”

Tell me it was a mistake. Tell me the reports of Fang’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Tell me.

“I knew it was gonna happen.” Angel’s voice sounded like it was underwater. “I’ve known it forever, and now it’s real.”

Real. Dead. Fang, my Fang, was no longer in this world. The world was still turning somehow, but without Fang.

My body seemed to understand the words before my head did. Just like this morning, I couldn’t get enough oxygen, and my heart and lungs were working double-triple-overtime. This time, my heart was physically breaking.

“Why do you think that?” My voice was remote.

Dylan hesitated. “It was the Horsemen — upgraded Erasers.”

“No. Take it back,” I choked out.

Make this feeling stop.

“Take what—” Dylan started to ask, but I grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and slammed him against a tree, pressing my forearm tight against his throat.

“Max!” Angel gasped.

“Take it back!” I repeated in a shrill, maniacal voice I didn’t recognize.

Dylan looked back at me helplessly, his beautiful eyes full of anguish.

“Say he’s not dead!” I roared, and shook Dylan harder.

Stop it, Max! Angel said. She had weaseled her way inside my head, and I felt my fists unclenching despite what I was telling them to do. Let. Him. Go.

My arms fell to my sides, Dylan fell to the ground, and then I dropped to my knees, crying so hard I couldn’t breathe.

71

I sat alone in the dark, leaning against the trunk of a tree, pressing my face into my knees. My eyes were bleary from exhaustion and tears, but I wouldn’t lie down. I couldn’t go to sleep.

Thirty feet away, Angel, Dylan, and Harry still sat around the glowing coals, talking quietly. Well, not Harry. They’d left me alone after I had broken down. I’d cried so hard I’d thrown up, retching into the pine needles, and then I’d cried some more.

I felt their helplessness, their shared pain, but they had no idea. No one had ever possibly felt this bad before. Not like this. When Harry had tried to pat my shoulder, I had punched him. My squalling grief had shut Angel out of my head completely. Finally I’d crawled off into the darkness, stopping only when I ran into a tree. My exhausted brain didn’t know what else to do, so I had curled up in front of the tree.

They hadn’t come after me. They were probably afraid I was going to freak out again, get violent. Or that I’d make that horrible, wrenching sound of pain again, sobs that shook not just my body, but the earth, the trees, the sky. They were afraid that next time, I wouldn’t stop.

I was all cried out, though.

And as I slowly came back to my senses, I saw how stupid it was to cry over something that was so obviously not true.

This was Fang we were talking about. The Fang who had once fought five Erasers at once and had come out with only a bloody nose. Fang had healed from a bullet wound in two days. He could slip invisibly between shadows and fly with the speed of a fighter jet and was one step ahead in a fight, always. He had almost died once, when Dr. Gunther-Hagen had almost completely drained his blood and replaced it with chemicals, but with a shot of adrenaline, Fang was back up in no time. He had survived a fiery apocalypse and pulled me from the grip of a tsunami.

The kid had invincible DNA, for crying out loud. He couldn’t just die.

And if he wasn’t dead, which he wasn’t, that meant I needed to find him.

I looked over at the group gathered around the fire. It looked so warm over there, so cozy. For a second, I ached to be with the family I had missed for so long.

I couldn’t see their faces from here, and their words were only murmurs. If I got closer, I’d have to look into their sad eyes, and I’d want to scratch them out. If I heard the lies spilling from their mouths, I’d want to plug them with a fist.

They were right to leave me alone. They were right to be afraid.

I didn’t think I would ever forgive them for a lie like this.

Not true not true not true, I shouted inside my head like a mantra, trying to drown out their voices.

72

Angel walked toward me, and I sat up a bit.

“I’m so sorry, Max.”

“I’m okay,” I said, without looking up.

“Harry’s pretty cool, huh?” she said after a minute. “His thoughts are so funny. All jumbled and excited. Like a little kid’s.”

“Mmm.”

You just can’t stay out of anyone’s head, can you?

If Angel heard my thought, she didn’t respond. She just stood silent, a silhouette backlit by the fire, watching me. Her gaze was gentle, but I knew those icy blue eyes could turn cold and ruthless. I remembered that she and her cherubic face had betrayed me again and again. I reminded myself that Angel would do anything to get what she wanted — even put a voice inside my head to challenge my decisions.

She was lying this time, too. She had to be.

“Do you have something to say?” I asked finally, looking up.

Just tell me what all this is about. Tell me the truth.

Angel sighed. “I don’t have all the answers, Max. I just know we have to get to Russia. I think everything has been building to this. We really need to leave soon, to go meet up with the other kids.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah?” Angel’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “That’s great! Me and Dylan had a pretty rough day flying through a blizzard, though. We should get a few hours of sleep first.” She laid her hand on my back. “You could use some rest, too, Max. We can head out in the morning.”

I stood up and began to pack. “Take Harry along with you guys, okay? He needs to be with other bird kids, and there’s something I need to do alone.”

Angel glared at me, her mouth twisting into an angry knot. “I thought you’d learned your lesson, Max. I thought that was why you came after us. But you’re just going to walk away from your flock? Again?”

When I didn’t answer, she batted the bedding out of my hands.

“So when it’s finally time to do what you’re meant to do, you’re running from your destiny? I have news for you, Max: You don’t have a choice.”

Annnd, after approximately one hour of sweetness, Angel the Tyrant was back.

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be such a drama queen. I’ll catch up with the flock. There’s just a place I need to stop by first.”

“The only place we need to go is Russia. All of us.”

I didn’t respond. She knew I was headed to Alaska.

“There’s no point.” Angel trailed me to my small pile of clothes. “I told you, he’s dead.”

“Stop it. Stop saying that.” I wrenched my hand away from her and closed my eyes, blocking out the words.

It’s a lie it’s a lie it’s a—

“It’s true. I don’t know how to make you believe it.”

I clamped my teeth together and started tossing dried food in a bag.

That’s why I’m going to Alaska. To see for myself.

“There’s nothing to see, Max. Fang faced his fate.” She paused and then said more loudly, “He wasn’t a coward.”

I glared daggers at her smug little face.

“Did you see him die?” I challenged. “You weren’t there, were you?”

“I told you, I’ve seen Fang die a thousand times!” Angel’s shout was half sob. “It doesn’t matter if I was there, because I can’t get the nightmare out of my head.”

“If you weren’t there, then you don’t know.” I turned away from her, scooping up the sleep sack from where it had fallen. “Not for sure.”

“I was there.”

Dylan was still crouched by the cooling embers. His face was in profile as he leaned forward, hands clasped over his knees, and his voice was so soft I wasn’t sure I’d heard right at first.

“What?” I managed to squeak, and he turned his head.

“I said I was there. I saw it.”

73

I had to go, had to leave now.

“Max...” Dylan said, walking over.

It took everything in me not to run. I grabbed a handful of clothes and busied myself with layering for the cold flight ahead.

“Max, look at me. Please.”

I pulled my sweatshirt over my head slowly, losing myself in the fabric. When Dylan tugged it down, I started to turn away, but he held my shoulders firm, forcing me to face him.

“I was there.” He sighed heavily. “To warn him. To fake his death like I did with the others. But I guess the Remedy didn’t think I could handle Fang, and he sent reinforcements.”

“And you didn’t help him?” My voice sounded small, weak. I blinked hard, but my sore eyes burned with salt. “You didn’t save him?”

“I tried!” Dylan pressed his palm against the trunk of a tree and shook his head. “There were too many of them, and I lost consciousness...”

“You blacked out?” I focused on that last scrap of hope — the final possibility that could mean it was all a big mistake. “So you didn’t see him die, either.”

It’s a lie a lie a lie.

“I saw the Horsemen tear into him.”

That’s when it all started to feel real again, and the tears began to leak everywhere.

“Max Mum!” Harry’s feathers were all puffed up again, and he was glaring at Dylan.

“I’m fine, Harry.” I was blubbering, but I held my hand up to tell him to stay where he was.

Dylan lowered his voice and knelt down next to me. “I know this is hard for you,” he said gently. “I know you still don’t trust Angel, and as for me...” My heart clenched and I looked up just as he glanced away. “Well, I have no idea what you think of me anymore.

“But you know I wouldn’t lie to you.” His gaze was steady, and he took both of my hands in his. “Fang’s not coming back, Max. Not ever. I even sent the video to the Remedy as proof. It was the first time I reported a death that wasn’t a lie.”

My whole body stiffened.

“What do you mean, the video?” I asked, and Dylan winced. “Tell me.”

“They put a tech chip in my arm to communicate,” he explained reluctantly, and pulled up his sleeve to reveal a small screen. “I was recording to sell the doctor on what I thought would be a faked death, like all the others, but then...”

“Play it for me.”

Dylan’s eyebrows shot up. “What? Max, no. Trust me, you don’t want to see that.” When I didn’t look away, Dylan started to pace. “Look, maybe I don’t want to see it again, either, okay? When I woke up and saw him lying there, all...”

Dylan took a deep breath and raked his fingers through his hair as if trying to pull the image out. He looked back at me with an expression of utter horror, but I tugged at his arm desperately.

“I’ll never believe it,” I pleaded. “I’ll never let it go. I just need to know, Dylan. To move on.”

Dylan pressed his lips together in disapproval, shaking his head. He pushed a button on his wrist.

The picture was grainy and chaotic, and dark forms swooped in and out of the frame, massive Erasers who kept landing hard hits. I heard Dylan’s voice pleading, and then Fang’s voice, and then Dylan’s moan, just as a set of ugly wolf jaws seemed to come right at the screen, blurring the video for a second.

“This is where I blacked out,” Dylan said.

But the camera kept rolling. Now that Dylan wasn’t jerking all around, it was actually a lot clearer than before.

At first you only saw fat, white snowflakes, with the mountainous skyline stretching far into the background. I watched those snowflakes for several long seconds, feeling anything but calm as the quiet rang in my ears.

Then, a voice offscreen. A man’s voice was calling up to Fang, taunting him. A voice I recognized.

“What the hell was Jeb doing there?” I jumped to my feet, shouting at Dylan.

But before he answered, we saw action on the video screen. Fang crashed into the image with three giant Erasers snarling on his back. Fang was more beat-up than I’d ever seen him. His lips and eyes were so swollen and bloodied that his face was almost unrecognizable, and the huge wolves were still going to town, biting into his flesh and pummeling his skull one after the other.

“Why isn’t he fighting back?” I demanded, watching as Fang raked his nails along the ground, trying to crawl free.

“He was,” Dylan answered. “But they’re not just Erasers. They’re Horsemen.”

My hands covered my mouth and half my face so that just my eyes were peeking out. I watched as a steel-toed boot connected with Fang’s torso, and I felt my own body shudder as I heard his ribs crack. I didn’t know how much more I could take of this, when, mercifully, they tumbled out of view.

Jeb was on the edge of the screen, though. We heard the grunts of the fighters, and he was crouched next to them like a patient referee waiting to call the match. Then, even though I couldn’t see what happened, I heard Fang scream in agony.

The sound made my eyes fill with tears and my blood run cold. I was shaking all over.

But Fang and the Horsemen rolled into view again, and I exhaled with relief. This time, Fang had his arms locked around the three hulking bodies, grabbing fistfuls of fur and straining necks — whatever he could grasp. He seemed so confident, I thought he’d gotten some advantage, channeled a new power.

But then he started to roll.

“What is he doing?” I whimpered. “Oh, God, what is he doing?”

Despite his obviously weakened state, Fang’s will was unstoppable. He dragged the frantic Horsemen toward the edge... and then they were offscreen again.

Afterward, I held my breath as I waited for Fang to stumble back in front of the camera, listening desperately for the sound of his ragged breathing.

There were only snowflakes, though — and silence.

The silence seemed to go on forever.

Dylan started to turn off the video, but then I spotted Jeb, awkwardly dragging something toward the edge.

“Wait!” I squeezed Dylan’s arm. “What is that?”

It was black and oddly shaped, textured and smooth at once.

“Stop it,” I said abruptly. I felt bile rising in my throat as I remembered the screams. “That’s enough.”

It was way more than enough.

It was Fang’s bloody, mangled wing.

“He took the rest of them out with him,” Dylan said reverently. “The best assassins the Remedy had. He was brave, Max. To the very end. I thought you might want this,” he added. “To remember.”

Dylan held out a feather, about a foot long, beautifully black and shiny.

If you’ve ever loved someone like I did, if they made you crazy and happy and exasperated and elated and if you wanted to hold them and shake them and sometimes kick them and if, after all that, they were like part of your family and part of your soul...

Imagine seeing that feather. Imagine what that felt like.

It made it real.

It wasn’t just a punch to the gut; it was a rip, too — like someone had torn all the hope and love, plus all the muscle and bone, right out of my body. I had nothing left to stand on.

I’d fallen to my knees before I’d even felt them buckle, and the nausea finally overcame everything else.

“I’m sorry, Max!” Dylan cried miserably as I retched again and again into the dirt. “I’m so sorry.”

74

I awoke feeling cold again. But this time, the cold felt heavy in my gut, and it didn’t go away.

Angel led us. Harry and Dylan formed the V, and I hung back, riding the slipstream and letting them carry me for thousands of miles. We flew up along the west coast of Canada and over Alaska, and I didn’t look down once. Didn’t want to see the flattened cities and charred forests. Didn’t want to see the landscape as bleak as my mind.

I don’t deal with death well, you might have noticed. I don’t really deal at all — I go on autopilot. The flight to Russia felt like one long hallucination, and I didn’t eat, or talk, or cry.

It seemed like I barely breathed.

I do know that as we flew over Alaska, we were pelted with a blizzard so fierce it almost knocked Harry from the air. The cold made Dylan’s teeth chatter and Angel’s breath come in gasps, but I hardly felt any of it.

My thoughts were as blank as the snow.

Numb.

The Bering Strait was less than a hundred miles across, but the slate-colored water looked like an endless dark hole, trying to suck me down.

Once, I stopped flying completely, letting my body hang limp for a second too long. I folded my wings in and started to drop, imagining myself plunging into the freezing water, having it hit me like concrete at that speed. A fast death.

But then I saw angry clouds in the distance and jerked back up. I was sure I’d glimpsed Fang’s stormy eyes, and thought I saw his face just beyond the horizon. The wind whispered to me: Not yet. Not yet.

“Cut it out, Angel,” I mumbled. “Get out of my head.”

She didn’t look back, though. It was Fang’s voice, gravelly and insistent, that urged me on, reminding me why I was still here, and what I needed to do.

So I kept moving forward, mile by mile, and the cold feeling inside me started to heat up into rage and harden into resolve: I would get to the Remedy, whatever it took.

And I’d kill him myself.

I’d expected the Remedy’s den of death to be as wrecked as the rest of the world, but when the water became land again, the gray, barren coast of Russia turned to lush, green forests. Mountains were untouched by ash, and rivers still flowed blue. After all the devastation I’d seen, it should’ve given me hope.

But I was in no state to embrace such a positive emotion, so naturally, it just fueled my fury. He didn’t deserve this. I didn’t deserve it.

Not yet.

We were flying over a forest of tightly packed trees when I noticed Dylan scanning the ground. I broke formation and flew up next to him.

“Where is he?” I didn’t have to clarify who I meant.

“Underground. A place called Himmel.” Dylan pronounced the last word with an accent.

“Himmel?”

“Heaven,” Dylan explained. “It’s German.”

My mouth tightened into a hard line and I wondered what the German word for hell was. I was going to show Dr. Gunther-Hagen that everything has an opposite.

“Okay, let’s go,” I said grimly.

“Wait, Max.” Angel reached for my arm. “We have to join the others at the camp first.” She smiled faintly. “It’s just another few miles.”

Reluctantly I nodded, figuring “the others” were the rest of the flock, but when a clearing opened up in the woods, I saw rows and rows of makeshift tents made out of everything imaginable, from plastic tarps to blankets to flowered bedsheets. Between them, thousands of people went about their business. After seeing hardly anyone for so long, it really was a sight to behold.

“Where did they all come from?” I asked in awe, and Angel shrugged.

“All over.”

I had seriously underestimated her. And for once, that was a good thing.

“Look.” She pointed. “There’s the rest of the flock.”

I hadn’t let myself believe I’d see them again. Not fully. I’d already lost something so huge, having hope seemed like being a sucker asking to get burned.

But the sight of their faces cut through my shield, and I was shaking so hard I could barely steer myself to a landing. I hadn’t lost it all. Nudge, Iggy, Gazzy. Even Total — they were all here, waiting for me.

Alive.

75

The first poor soul in my path of suffocating love was Nudge, and I tackled her, knocking her to the grass.

“Agh!” she said as I almost crushed her with the force of my embrace. Strangers stared at the bird girl acting like a lunatic attacker, but I didn’t care as long as I never had to let my little sister go again. Finally, I pulled her to her feet.

“Oh, Nudgelet,” I said with a shaky breath, “I’m so glad you’re okay.” Nudge’s eyes glistened.

“I missed you, too, Max.” The bite on her cheek had healed into a gnarly scar, but her brilliant smile made you hardly notice it.

“Don’t I get a hello?” Iggy asked from behind me.

“C’mere.” I yanked him into a fierce bear hug, squeezing tightly until he started coughing. Then I held him at arm’s length, looking him over.

“You scared the crap out of me!” I shouted, jabbing him in the chest.

“Whoa, take it easy!” Iggy put his hands up defensively.

“I thought you were dead!” I shoved him. “Do you have any idea what that does to a person? Do you?”

“It’s not my fault! Dylan spread the rumor!” Iggy protested, but now he was laughing as he blocked my jabs. “Besides,” he said, flashing a wry grin, “how much more do you love me now that I’m not dead?”

I rolled my eyes and mussed his shaggy blond hair in exasperation, but the truth? A lot more. Or at least I was a lot more appreciative of my weird, lovely little flock than I ever had been.

I hugged Gazzy and Total, too, my face muscles constantly quivering between sobs and smiles. It was definitely an emotional reunion, to say the least.

“How did they say I died?” Gazzy asked eagerly.

“You got blown up.”

“Cooool.” His eyes lit with morbid delight, and when I pursed my lips, unamused, he cackled like a maniac. “And also totally bogus you would believe that, Max. Do you have any idea how much I know about combustible materials and the rate of conflagration?”

“No, I don’t,” I said, trying not to imagine all the times Gazzy’s experiments had come close to blowing us all up in our sleep. “And for that I’m incredibly grateful.”

“Well, jokes aside, I’m incredibly grateful to be alive,” Iggy said. He clapped Dylan on the back and pulled him in for a hug. “Seriously, man, I don’t know how you pulled that off, but thank you.”

“It wasn’t a big deal.” Dylan blushed.

“Not a big deal?” Nudge echoed in disbelief. “I almost died of shock! I could’ve done without waking up to Total slobbering on my face, but you saved all of our lives, Dylan!”

Dylan smiled, but his eyes flicked to mine and Angel’s and his smile faded.

He didn’t save all our lives. He didn’t save Fang.

“An act of heroism to rival any of the classic demigods,” Total was gushing. “Achilles...”

Suddenly my chest hurt and my throat ached. “Okay,” I said, and coughed. “So what’s the deal with the kids at the camp? Why are we here?”

76

“I told you. We’re here to fight a war,” Angel said. She looked out across the crowded field. “And that’s why we brought an army.”

I watched Angel’s face, trying to figure out what was different about her. She seemed removed from the group, somehow. Apart.

“Gasman and I just got here a couple of days ago,” Iggy said. “But Nudge has been chatting everyone up for the last week, pulling together their stories.”

“We’re pretty sure the Remedy detonated nuclear warheads on every continent,” Nudge reported. “Maybe close to a hundred.”

“That’s insane,” I said in horror.

“No, what’s insane is that there’re over four thousand left, stockpiled here in Russia,” Gazzy said. “And this wackjob has full access.”

I thought of the flattened cities I’d seen. The caved-in homes, mangled bodies, burned flesh. Then I imagined one man, alone in a room, pushing a button to make that happen.

Then pushing it again. And again.

A hundred times.

“It’s time to end this,” I said through gritted teeth. “Now.”

“Supplies are low anyway,” Iggy agreed.

I glanced at the dense forest around us, at the still-green leaves and undeveloped land. There had to be a ton of wild game nearby.

“We know how to hunt,” I reminded him. “And Harry here is stellar. Harry—”

“Harry!” He’d been hanging off to the side, but now he crowed his name on cue, and Nudge’s face lit up.

Gotta be the dimples. Every time.

“We can definitely use him,” Iggy said. “But a lot of these other mutants are city kids, and they have no idea how to feed themselves.”

“They’re not all mutants, either,” Gazzy said. “Like the girls we brought from the silo — they’re human, but they’re super hard-core.” He beamed. I raised a suggestive eyebrow, and Gazzy snickered, always the lady-killer. “There’s also a lot of lab escapees, like the bug boys over there.”

I followed his gaze to where a bunch of small, athletic kids were kicking around a ball of newspaper tied with rope in place of a soccer ball. They almost didn’t look like mutants at all, except for the hard brown shell that started on their upper arms and went down their backs. There was a paler kid with them who seemed familiar.

“Is that...”

“Holden from Fang’s gang?” Iggy said. “Yeah, that’s the Starfish. They actually have contests over who has the weirder epidermis.” He chuckled. “Kate and Ratchet are here, too, somewhere.”

“Kate?” I jerked my head around to stare at Angel. “The traitor?”

“I found her and Ratchet in San Francisco, in an abandoned mall,” Angel explained. “They were emaciated, living off whatever hadn’t rotted in the food court. Almost everyone else within a thousand miles had died of the H8E virus, but since they were immune, they’d set up a clinic and were transfusing their own blood to save other kids.”

Well, what little martyrs.

“But she still betrayed Fang,” I repeated, emphasizing each word with my open palm. “She and Star sold him out to Jeb.”

It had meant the death of my clone, Maya, and the dissolution of Fang’s gang.

“Trust me, Kate regrets that,” Angel said. “That’s why she’s here — to fix what she did. And we’re going to need her strength against the Remedy’s forces.”

Dylan nodded in agreement, and I remembered what he’d told me about the Horsemen, how they were almost superhuman. Kate might have lightning reflexes and be able to punch with the force of a wrecking ball, but she could never “fix” what she’d done.

“Speaking of Fang’s gang,” Total said curiously, twitching his furry ears. “Where is our dark, brooding brother?”

“Yeah, I thought Fang was coming with you guys,” Iggy said. “Dylan told us—”

“Fang is dead,” Angel answered bluntly.

The words were still like knives, slicing up my heart.

“Yeah, right.” Gazzy started to laugh but then saw the looks on our faces, and his expression morphed into horror. “What do you mean, he’s dead?”

“He was killed by Horsemen,” Dylan said, clenching his fist. “I tried to stop it, but there were just too many of them.”

The words tore through the flock like a hurricane. It hurt to see them realize that nothing would ever be the same.

Nudge’s face crumpled and she buried her face in Dylan’s shoulder as her body shook with sobs. Total flopped on the ground, wailing. Tears ran down Gazzy’s cheeks and he sat abruptly, ripping at blades of grass. Angel rubbed his back, trying to comfort her big brother.

Iggy walked off to the side and blindly stared into the woods, his body incredibly still, his face a mask I couldn’t read. Just like after Ella.

Only I stood alone, my eyes dry. I wouldn’t revisit that grief — not yet. At that point I felt only pure, distilled anger, a seemingly bottomless well of fury.

At Angel, for saying it would happen. At Dylan, for making it true. At myself, for letting him go.

And at Fang, most of all, for leaving. For dying.

How could I ever, ever forgive him for that?

So when Total suggested we say some words for Fang, when Gazzy said we would fight the battle in his name, and when Nudge wanted to hold a candlelit vigil, I bit down hard on my tongue to keep from screaming.

I didn’t want to tell stories or share memories. I didn’t know if I could even say his name.

With the taste of blood in my mouth, I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned away.

“Max?” Nudge called after me, a quaver in her voice.

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” I said as I walked away from my family. I trudged deeper into the camp, ducking under clotheslines and trying to lose myself in the sea of strangers.

“I just can’t.”

77

The next day, the camp buzzed with nervous energy as everyone prepared for battle.

Iggy and Gazzy had rigged up a catapult out of fallen trees, and Holden was shouting directions about angle placement and velocity. All around me, kids were trying to psych each other up, banging their weapons together like they’d seen in movies, even though no one knew what we were up against.

Most of us didn’t, anyway.

Angel was the one who’d gathered us here, and of course she was nowhere in sight. And Dylan was the one person who’d actually seen the underground layout, and so far, he’d told us nothing.

We were here. It was time. What were we waiting for?

Restless, I wandered through the muddy rows of the camp, veering right to avoid a damp-eyed prayer circle Nudge was leading, complete with candles. I ground my teeth.

“Not into that praying crap, either, huh?”

Startled, I turned to see Ratchet lying on a tarp, doing sit-ups.

“We’re gonna win or we’re gonna lose. Personally, I think we’re gonna lose. But either way, praying to some yahoo isn’t going to change anything.”

“Where’s Kate?” I asked.

“Over with the baby general.” Ratchet nodded past me without breaking rhythm.

About a hundred yards away, near the edge of the woods, Angel was talking to Kate and Dylan.

“If they wanna whisper secrets,” Ratchet said, taking a breath, “maybe they shouldn’t be so loud about it.”

I could barely see their expressions from here, let alone hear their voices, but with his extraordinary senses, not much got past Ratchet.

“What secrets?”

Ratchet did several more sit-ups, his trademark aviator glasses reflecting back at me with each one. Finally, he stopped and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

“Maybe you should go find out for yourself.”

When I approached, Angel seemed completely different than I’d ever seen her. Her voice was still the same, soft and young, but her tone was one of unmistakable authority. Sitting on a stump with her legs tucked under her, she looked like a child empress, consulting with her trusted advisors.

Which apparently didn’t include me.

As I approached, they stopped talking abruptly. Dylan coughed and shifted uneasily, and Kate flashed me a wide fake smile.

“Getting chummy in the cool kids’ club?” I asked.

“Hmm?” Angel said distractedly. “What is it, Max?”

“Sorry to break up this little party, but is someone going to explain what the heck is going on? Shouldn’t we be casing the entrances? Or at least organizing the giant mass of people you convinced to meet here?”

“Dylan and Kate have been working out a strategy of attack,” Angel said, standing. “And I was about to make an address on the field that should answer some of your questions.”

“All I need,” I said coldly, “is a face to smash my fist against.”

78

All eyes were on Angel now. Yet, hovering a hundred feet above the field, facing her makeshift army, she felt about as powerful as a sparrow.

Her wings ached from constant traveling. Like all bird kids, she was naturally skinny, but her weight had dropped dangerously from the stress. And after so many sleepless nights, she was almost delirious. Everything had been building to this, though — this was the most important moment in her life. Angel gathered her strength.

“Thank you for coming,” she began.

But her small, quivery voice was swallowed up by wind, and the kids below frowned uncertainly, fidgeted, whispered to one another. They stared up at the pale little girl who had led them here, her white wings keeping her aloft. They waited.

Angel took a deep breath to steady herself and smelled the ash drifting in on the wind. It was now or never.

We have kids here from all over the world, she continued. This time, her lips moved, but she didn’t shout. She wanted them to hear every word, really hear her, so she spoke inside their minds.

Some of you came because you were starving. Some because you were homeless. Some because you wanted to fight...

Angel glanced at the silo girls standing near Gazzy, ammunition draped across their chests.

... And others came because you were afraid.

She nodded at Lucas and Matthew Morrissey.

But I know all of you want to understand what happened. You want to know the truth.

She saw Max’s face twitch, her eyes narrow. Angel nodded.

Let me show you.

Angel stilled her body until her feathers were barely moving. She relaxed her breathing and closed her eyes. She let the connection open up.

Her brain flooded with thoughts from thousands of other minds — worries, doubts, judgments, memories — all blurring together until the din was like a swarm of locusts buzzing inside her skull, furious and deafening.

Then she took her own vision, her own terrible knowledge, and she pushed it into that space. She made them see.

Angel showed them the round, perfect globe as only astronauts had seen it, blue and naked and seeming to glow.

She showed them the enormous asteroid and its fiery tail, roaring through the darkness, pulled like a magnet. Closer, closer.

The smaller pieces breaking off as it entered the earth’s atmosphere, scattering throughout the Pacific.

The many shooting stars that got brighter and brighter until it felt like your eyelids were peeled back, unable to shut out their light.

The moment the biggest chunk hit on the western coast of Morocco, there was too much to see at once, too much to know. The images flashed faster and faster, like a flipbook of drawings:

The main meteor, almost a mile wide, smashing against the earth, creating a new, gigantic crater where Morocco had once been.

The ring of fire that circled the massive crater, burning for months.

The jolt after the impact that rippled though the water within moments, churning into tsunamis.

Angel showed them the blinding flash that North Africans saw just before their bones vaporized in the heat. The mile-high tidal wave of water arcing over New York and most of the East Coast of the United States, Venezuela, and Spain just before it sucked everything back to sea. She showed them forests from Eastern Europe to the western US that burst into flame all at once as hot ash pelted down. And the shudder of shock waves racing underfoot around the globe, toppling cities, causing a domino effect of volcanoes to erupt with devastating results.

Angel showed them everything she could, and when she was done, she opened her eyes with a gasp, severing the connection.

Angel saw Nudge right below her, tears spilling down her cheeks. Many others were weeping, too. Just as Angel had.

Angel didn’t show them what had happened days and weeks after — the death and famine, the raids. They already knew all about that. There was just one more thing they didn’t know.

The Remedy did this, she told them. This, and much more. He dropped bombs, unleashed a virus. He tried to wipe all traces of humans off the earth.

The field of people was silent. They looked up at her with damp, desperate eyes, asking her what to do.

We have to fight, she answered.

Angel winced as a bolt of pain shot through her temples and a vision flashed behind her eyes — a split-second glimpse of this same field, littered with the wounded and the dead. She knew she was leading many of these kids to their deaths, but she had no choice.

The world doesn’t have very many people left, but it has us. You’ve survived. But is just surviving enough?

“No!” a few eager kids shouted, but others still looked uncertain.

The Remedy drops bombs and builds superhuman androids to do his dirty work, but he’s never gone to battle, Angel said, her words gaining force. The Remedy stole our planet, murdered our families, and destroyed our homes, but he’s never seen our faces. Are you going to let him walk away?

“NO!” the crowd roared in unison.

Angel fluttered down until she was just a few feet off the ground. She wanted to see the dirt on their faces. She wanted to be able to meet their eyes. All she had was these kids, and all they had was her, and whatever they’d grabbed from the rubble. Her fighters were armed with barbecue forks, baseball bats, broken crutches, lengths of rusted rebar, pitchforks, tree limbs, junior archery sets... their bravery humbled her.

“The Remedy thinks he has won,” she said aloud, her voice strident and clear. “But he can’t see the future. I can. And I swear, if you follow me, we will see him fall.”

Right there, Kate fell to her knees in the dirt, her dark hair hanging as she bowed her head. Beside her, Ratchet knelt as well. One by one the others followed, until over a thousand kids were kneeling before Angel, ready to serve.

79

All I’d wanted was to fight the Remedy. But as the troops were finally moving out, I was pushing backward against the tide of bodies, searching for blonde hair and white feathers.

I needed to talk to her first.

“Angel!” I yelled, elbowing my way through. “Ange!” I grabbed her hand and turned her around to face me. “What was that?” I demanded. I could still see the imprint of the explosion behind my eyelids, a sudden camera flash. I felt the heat, as real as if it were flaying my own skin. “Tell me what that was.”

In the middle of all this chaos, with people bumping past us and shouting directions, Angel had the stillness of a monk.

“You know what it was, Max. The day the sky caught fire — it was Armageddon.”

“But that doesn’t tell me anything!” I said, more frustrated than ever. Everyone was acting like Angel had given all the answers, but all I had were more questions. “How do you know it was the Remedy? And what about the bombs, and the Horsemen?” I was shaking her now. “How do you know what you saw is even real?”

“Because I know!” Angel shouted, wrenching free of my grasp. “Because I saw it, just like I saw Fang’s death — before it happened!” She looked up at me with watery blue eyes, and in that moment, I finally saw Angel for what she really was.

Not just a psychic or a mind reader. A prophet.

She was also a seven-year-old who’d been carrying around the most terrible secret in the world, all by herself. I noticed the ragged cuts around her fingernails where she’d torn the skin away, the dark circles around her eyes, and realized how much I had failed her.

“Oh, honey,” I said. When I put my hands lightly on the outsides of her arms, she tensed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because,” she said, her small bow lips quivering, “you never wanted to listen.”

“Of course I—” An image of Fang’s face flashed in my mind, and I winced.

Fair enough.

“I’m listening now,” I said gently.

We walked to the edge of the clearing, away from the rest of the kids, and Angel sat back down on the stump and pulled her knees up to her chest.

“The visions started after they altered my eyes at the school.”

My chest tightened, remembering that awful time after Paris. We’d all believed Angel was dead for weeks before finding her in one of Jeb’s corrupt labs.

“At first I thought I was blind, like Iggy. But then I realized I could actually see more — stuff that hadn’t happened yet. I kept seeing these flashes, and it was so scary, Max,” she said, resting her chin on her knees to look up at me. “I could never see the whole picture, and I didn’t know if it would be this year or in five years or a hundred years.”

“Did anyone else know about all this? The meteor and bombs and apocalypse?” I asked, still trying to figure out where the Remedy fit into all this.

“The scientists did, and the world leaders,” Angel said. “I didn’t find that out until the day it hit, when I heard Dr. Martinez’s thoughts.”

“But my mom was worried about the H8E virus,” I said. I remembered her telling Fang and me about the plague the Apocalypticas had developed, how we should all be safe from it, on the island. “She didn’t mention the meteor.”

“That’s because the Russians had planned to blast it apart with nuclear weapons. ‘They were going to nuke it’—that’s what Dr. Martinez kept thinking the day the sky caught fire. ‘I thought Russia was going to nuke it.’ ”

“But somehow Dr. G-H got control of the nukes first?”

Angel nodded.

“He just... let it... hit us,” she said, looking up at me in bewilderment, and I’m sure my face was a mirror of shocked, sickened horror. Angel started to weep, and I hugged her close to me. “I swear I didn’t know about the Remedy, Max.” She cried harder, her tears soaking my neck. “I just knew we had to get to Russia.”

“I know, sweetie,” I whispered, smoothing her hair. “I’m so sorry I didn’t listen.”

“I’m sorry, too,” she hiccupped. “And I wasn’t trying to hurt Fang by showing him his fall. I just didn’t know what else to do.”

I couldn’t think of Fang without feeling the cold grip of nausea in my gut, and I stiffened. Angel felt the shift and pulled away from me, wiping her face.

“We should go. I said I would lead those kids.”

My little prophet.

“You really were great up there earlier, Angel. A true leader.”

“I know,” Angel said matter-of-factly, and I laughed. “What?” She smiled. “I told you I know stuff. You taught me a lot, though, Max.”

“Oh yeah?” I cocked an eyebrow. “Like what?”

“Like how you never stop fighting for the right ending. Even after the apocalypse.”

That’s my girl. I snapped open my wings, and Angel did the same.

“Let’s show Dr. God what hell feels like.”

80

Once again, Angel hovered above her army. The icy wind cut through her thin clothes and whipped against her cheeks, but Angel faced it unblinkingly. This time, she was officially their leader, the general leading them to war.

And, for some of them, to death.

We will win, though, Angel told herself, though her visions had never shown her the final outcome. We have to.

As they shivered in haphazard lines awaiting Angel’s command, she studied the layout of the battlefield below. Years of living with Max on the run had taught her to look for vulnerabilities, and she saw that geography was in their favor, at least. The main entrance to the underground city known as Himmel was in a clearing, so they had unobstructed access, and though Dylan had warned her about vents in the surrounding ground, the surrounding woods provided a natural barrier against escape. From her vantage point in the sky, Angel saw beyond the trees as well — to endless miles of flat Siberian wilderness.

The Remedy might have an advanced security system, but he was still underground. There was nowhere for him to run.

“Prepare the catapult!” she yelled down to Gazzy and Iggy. She watched as they started to load the homemade smoke bombs.

Himmel’s entrance didn’t look like much from above. From the ground it appeared like the mouth of a cave, but the outcropping was hidden by the wiry grasses that covered the rest of the countryside. From up here, apart from a small mound in the earth, you’d barely know it was there.

“FIRE!” Angel commanded.

Gazzy launched the grenades one after the other, but apart from the sound of the egg-like objects singing toward Himmel’s narrow mouth, the field was silent. The air felt full of static, it was so pregnant with anticipation.

Then, as the bombs started to release their gases, Angel heard a barrage of new thoughts, all at once.

Not the thoughts of her own army, but of the army below — the one she hadn’t been sure was there.

They were there, all right, and Angel realized with alarm that there were more than she’d ever anticipated. There were many thousands of fighters in the Remedy’s army. More than they could ever take on.

“HOLD!” Angel shouted a little hysterically at her ranks. But the events had already been set in motion, and thick clouds of smoke began billowing out of the hole. The angry, panicked thoughts of the Remedy’s army buzzed louder, louder. “Hold...”

The survivors and the mutants on the field twitched uncomfortably in response to Angel’s reaction. They didn’t hear the deafening thoughts, couldn’t fathom how many soldiers there were; they saw only an empty field.

Her friends had no clue what was about to happen.

They waited, watching the smoke-filled hole.

They tensed, readying themselves for what was to come.

“CHARGE!” Angel screamed the moment she saw the outline of bodies through the smoke.

As her fighters surged forward, the Remedy’s troops started to emerge, but the entrance to Himmel was so narrow it formed a bottleneck. Only a few of the Remedy’s soldiers could get out at a time, she realized.

There was still a chance they could hold them off!

The billowing smoke blocked her view, but right before the armies clashed into each other, Angel saw her troops hesitate, just for a moment.

What are you doing? She sent the question telepathically to Kate, their strongest fighter, who was on the front lines. What’s wrong?

“They’re kids, Angel,” Kate answered her. “Just little kids.”

Angel’s heart broke, but the rest of her shook with fury. They’d been mentally, if not physically, prepared for the Remedy’s superhuman Horsemen or his armed Russian guards. Using children to fight his war was way more despicable.

They were fighting, though. They were Doomsday soldiers, brainwashed to hate humans and mutants alike. Angel watched more and more of them pushing past her soldiers, weapons held in fierce grips, eyes lusting for blood. If her survivors didn’t push back, they’d all be killed.

Luckily, the flock, at least, had dealt with these kids before. Nudge let out a terrifying battle cry and launched herself forward in a roundoff backflip, her feet catching two machete-wielding warriors midair. The rest of the troops followed, battling the Remedy’s child army in hand-to-hand combat.

Angel worked on breaking into the minds of the Doomsday fighters, but she knew from past experience that the cult mind was extremely difficult to crack into — the One Light had an incredibly powerful hold on them.

Still, she burrowed into their minds, hammering at the boundaries of their psyches, her head throbbing as she worked to free them before too many had to die. In a trancelike state herself, Angel was concentrating so hard on battling back the warped thoughts that she almost didn’t hear Dylan’s desperate cry.

“THE VENTS!” he was screaming at full volume now. “ANGEL, THE VENTS!”

As dozens of Horsemen burst up through unseen vents in the field, Angel shook in despair. These Horsemen were elite models, robots whose actions were completely controlled by the Remedy, so she couldn’t read their thoughts.

But she knew their power.

“Ratchet! Kate! Dylan!” she summoned them telepathically, her voice tinged with real fear for the first time. “Get to Max!”

Even if they didn’t win this battle, even if she couldn’t save these kids, Angel knew, as she’d always known, that Max was their only chance at saving the world.

81

The ground under me shook violently. Like everyone else on the front lines, I couldn’t see anything through the smoke, but it sounded like the world was breaking open.

Our whole army was bunched in a tight cluster in the center of the field. It was obvious we were in an extremely vulnerable position, but we had to hold back the ranks upon ranks of Doomsday psychos who kept pushing out of the entryway.

Right now, I was in a hair-pulling battle with a surprisingly vicious pigtailed eight-year-old and standing on an older boy’s windpipe as I tried to pry his fingers off his homemade scythe. I thought that was more important than worrying about an earthquake... until I realized it wasn’t an earthquake.

It was another army, shooting up out of holes in the ground all around us.

An army of M-Geeks.

At least that’s what I thought they were. They sure looked like the flying robots that had annoyed us since the days of Mr. Chu — right down to the weapons grafted onto their arms in place of hands.

RAT-A-TAT-TAT! came the sound of machine-gun fire.

The field became a tangle of chaos and panic. I knew how to fight these villains, though. I’d done it before.

Leaving behind the Doomsday kids I’d pinned, I shot into the air. I flew erratically, hearing the pop of bullets and trying to find a clear view of one of the robots.

“Watch it!” Ratchet smashed into my side, knocking me off balance.

“Hey!” I scowled. “You watch it!”

“You were about to fly into the path of a bullet,” Ratchet explained testily. Only someone with crazy heightened senses like his could’ve seen that. “You’re welcome.”

Looking down, I saw that most of our army was scattering for cover, but Holden and the bug boys were running full speed toward the M-Geeks. Bullets ricocheted off the armored mutants, and though Holden should’ve been full of holes, his elastic cells regenerated at such a high frequency that they barely slowed him down.

Closer to me, Gazzy teetered on the shoulders of another M-Geek, determinedly slamming a big rock on its head. But the head didn’t split like an orange as before — they’d evolved. Instead, the gloved hand reached for Gazzy, grabbed him by his messy blond hair, and slammed him forward onto the ground, where Harry was already mewling in pain. The robot pointed his gun arm, execution style, at my wounded friends.

I got ready to dive.

Time for a reunion, Geeky.

But before I could drop, Dylan shot past me. He reached the M-Geek first, tearing him off Gazzy and smashing the armored face until the metal actually dented.

I started to look for another M-Geek, but I saw we had bigger problems to worry about.

Beyond the bodies fighting on the field around me, I saw something else charging out of the forest. My mouth hung slack.

It was a parade of enemies past come back to haunt me. Some had the snarling, wolfish snouts of Erasers. Some were cyborg Flyboys. Others looked like something entirely new: droids made of metal or giants whose hands could easily snap bodies in half.

I spotted a huge man with a slick bald head and cruel eyes — a carbon copy of the giant I’d met in Africa, who’d told me his buddies would be back to rip me apart. I narrowed my eyes.

This one’s mine.

Dropping fast, I snap-kicked the backs of his knees, and when the big oaf buckled, I jumped up and jammed my fingers into his eyes, following with a quick uppercut to the chin.

Now I’d made him mad.

Roaring with pain and anger, he lunged toward me. Suddenly a powerful kick exploded against his left side — right to the kidney — and the giant collapsed in agony.

Kate.

“What are you doing?” I groaned, clenching my fists.

“Helping,” Kate grunted as she heaved the whimpering giant up onto her shoulders. The giant had to outweigh Kate by about three hundred pounds, but she lifted him over her head as if he were a toy. She spun around and hurled him across the field, where he crashed against a tree and slid to the ground.

“I don’t need help,” I insisted.

This was a battle. A battle in which, with the Horsemen and the Doomsday kids together, we were vastly outnumbered. Kids were injured all around us, putting their lives on the line, and I should be pulling my weight, fighting alongside them. I wanted to fight, more than anything.

But no one would freaking let me!

I felt a dull blade trying to hack into the back of my thigh and whipped around just as I felt it scratch my skin. It was a Doomsday kid with fierce eyes, and I grinned. At last!

I drew my arm back for a sucker punch, but right then there was a head-shattering noise that made my ears feel like they were bleeding and my brain feel like it was liquidating. I gritted my teeth, working through the pain of the audio assault, but I noticed the Doomsday kids weren’t faring so well. Not just the kid in front of me, but all across the field, they were blinking in confusion, and their weapons clattered to the ground.

The sound was breaking their hypnosis.

A tornado-like blur whirled across the field. When it finally stopped spinning, the sound cut out, and Star, the last member of Fang’s gang, stood there smirking. “I remembered I had some unfinished business,” she explained with a shrug.

With the Doomsdayers no longer a threat, I realized we might just have a chance at winning this thing. I looked around, quickly taking stock. The Horsemen had been unfazed by Star’s brain-melting noise. Our kids were ganging up on them now, but even against ten of our soldiers, the new mutants were fierce, clearly made to be killing machines.

My heart beat faster as I scanned the muddied mess for my flock.

There were Nudge and Total, getting their revenge against a Cryena with the help of the silo girls.

Iggy, Ratchet, and Star were using their collective supersenses to make a metal mutant shake all over, until sparks shot out of its fingertips.

I inhaled the distinctive stink of greasy canine fur. An Eraser on steroids was making a beeline for me, and I took to the air and assumed an offensive stance. My muscles quivered with readiness, waiting for the ballet of an aerial fight stacked way against me.

That didn’t happen, though, because Dylan slammed into the Eraser first, again, getting between us and snapping its jaw with a well-aimed kick.

“You can’t take on everyone!” I yelled angrily as Boy Wonder finished off Teen Wolf. “I have dibs on that Eraser over there,” I said, pointing. “OKAY?!”

“Max, wait!” Dylan grabbed for my arm. “You can’t fight right now — don’t be stupid.”

My eyes almost bugged out of my head. If there was ever a time that I was going to actually rip someone’s head off, it was then. I was many things, but I was not stupid.

“Wh-what I mean is,” Dylan stuttered, seeing the rage in my eyes, “now that the Doomsday kids are down, the entrance is clear.” He pointed, and I saw it was true. “I think our soldiers can handle the rest of the Horsemen... So do you want to meet the Remedy, or not?”

I didn’t hesitate. “Now you’re talking.”

82

Not that finding the Remedy was so easy. Underground, I followed Dylan through the dank tunnels filled with stale air, and I was pretty sure we were going in circles.

“It didn’t look like this before,” Dylan explained. “It was a huge city, with skyscrapers and neon lights.”

“Uh-huh. And what is this, the subway station?” In every direction, all I saw were damp, sloped walls lit by faint tracking lights.

“I mean they were three-D projections,” Dylan said irritably. “And my eyesight isn’t so great after Gazzy’s explosion in the silo, okay? Here. I think this is the door to the lab.”

“I got this,” I assured him. “You take the mansion.”

Dylan didn’t want to split up, but we needed to cover as much ground as possible. There was no way I was letting the Remedy slip through my fingers.

Still, as my footsteps echoed down the hall, I started to feel uneasy. The air was getting colder with every step, but even if it had been a hundred degrees down there, the place would’ve given me chills.

I didn’t know if there would be a bunch more newly created Horsemen to attack me or a blast of gas to knock me out, but everything about this place felt wrong.

When I pulled open the single door at the end of the hallway, I understood why.

It was an exact replica of the lab I’d grown up in. The same large dog crates lining the walls. The same gurneys covered with crinkly paper sheets. The test tubes and scalpels. The same acrid, chemical smell of disinfectant.

A whitecoat was there, his back to me, and my stomach clenched as I flashed back to the years spent being poked and dissected on a table like this, sweating with fever as various drugs worked their way through my system, vomiting from exhaustion as they put us through test after test.

My breath was coming in shallow little bursts, and I was trying very hard not to completely give in to a panic attack as I crept forward.

“Hello, Max,” the whitecoat said, and I stopped in my tracks, the hair rising on the back of my neck as the last piece of this little nostalgic puzzle snapped into place. The man turned around, and when he pulled the blue mask down from his face, he was smiling.

“Jeb,” I said, shaking my head in disgust. “I wondered how you fit into all of this. I should’ve known it had to do with your passion for cloning your pathetic little wolfboy son, ad infinitum.”

Jeb looked pained, and he took off his surgical glasses and massaged his eyelids. “Max, when Ari died, I was devastated. I just wanted to bring him back, the way he was.”

“A murderous sociopath with staggering daddy issues?”

Jeb leaned against the counter and crossed his arms, sighing heavily in that way parents do when they want to apologize without apologizing and instead skirt responsibility entirely.

“The point is, we’re past that now. Through a number of groundbreaking experiments, Dr. Gunther-Hagen helped me see my error — that it was the humanity of the mutants that was holding us back. The essential flaw that, if eliminated, would allow for a controlled population of indestructible guardians.”

Well, if that wasn’t a euphemism, I didn’t know what was.

“I hate to break it to you, but your murder-bots up there can die, just like everybody else.”

“They’re still a little buggy — Dylan in particular didn’t take well to the change — but with renewed supplies of DNA immortalis, we get closer every time. Closer to perfect.”

What?

I glanced around at the trays of test tubes. They were full of clear liquid, with what looked like cotton balls floating in them.

DNA immortalis — where have I heard that before?

Then I remembered an image I’d wanted to forget forever, of a body at the bottom of a cliff. Alarm bells started screaming inside my head.

“You made the Horsemen by splicing Fang’s genes?” I gaped at Jeb in horror as he shifted uncomfortably.

They killed Fang by using his own strength against him.

“Well, I don’t see any of your Horsemen now. You’re all alone in here.”

“I know it’s difficult to understand,” Jeb said quickly.

“Yes, it is,” I said as I walked toward Jeb. He flinched back against the counter, sending a tray of shiny medical instruments clattering to the floor. “Help me understand, Jeb.”

“It was never just work for me, Max,” he pleaded. “It was personal. I always wanted you kids to thrive, and thanks to Fang, now you truly can.”

“That won’t be happening.” I grabbed Jeb by the throat. He sputtered, clawing at my hands, but I was a hybrid and he wasn’t, and I was much stronger than he was. I squeezed tighter around his neck, concentrating on my fury. “I don’t want a Horseman bot with Fang’s DNA. I want Fang. And you killed him!”

Jeb’s face reddened, his eyes losing focus. His blood vessels darkened into purple webs, and I knew I couldn’t do it.

I hated Jeb more than anyone else. But I had loved him once, too, before all the betrayal. He had been like my father once upon a time, and he had saved me from a lab like this one and given me a home. Me and the flock. He’d taught me how to survive and made me feel important, and smart, and loved. For a while.

“There’s something wrong with you,” I said, releasing my grip. Deep sobs were welling up in me, but I was too well trained as a fighter to give in to them. “There’s something seriously wrong with you.”

Jeb took a gasping inhale, then hunched over, wracked with violent coughs as he tried to suck in air. For a second, I almost felt bad for him.

Just for a second, though.

The next moment, I felt a white-hot jolt in my side. My teeth ground down hard and every muscle in my body clenched as an electric force pulsed waves of pain through my body.

“Certain safety precautions are required when dealing with large mammals in a lab setting,” Jeb explained.

When he withdrew the Taser, I crumpled to the floor.

My legs dangled as Jeb gathered me into his arms. I wasn’t paralyzed — I still had a bit of feeling in my arms — but I couldn’t get enough control of my floppy limbs to bash his head in.

“You’re out of date, Max,” Jeb said, strapping me onto a gurney. My right hand twitched with a bit more purpose this time, my knuckles curling into a claw, but Jeb batted it away with ease as he tapped for a vein.

“Time for an upgrade.” He sat on the stool, flicked his fingers against the syringe, and leaned close, ready to drive it home.

No! my mind shrieked. Stop!

“Some of us do just fine the way we are,” a prep school voice laced with steel said from the doorway.

83

I remember the events that followed as if they were in slow motion, but I know it all must’ve happened in an instant:

Jeb looked to his left, and I tried to move my fingers again.

My arm snapped forward like it was spring-loaded.

I plunged the syringe, which I now somehow held, into Jeb’s thigh.

The room sounded like a storm of clanging metal as Star spun forward and smashed into my gurney, but Jeb’s bewildered eyes never left mine.

Right up to the point when Kate snapped his neck.

My head still lolled to the side, but my eyes flicked between the two girls from Fang’s gang, and the man who had been my dad, sprawled lifeless on the floor.

Did that really just happen?

“Angel said you needed help,” Kate said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She seemed as shocked as I was that Jeb was dead.

I nodded. Angel had heard my thoughts. I had needed help. He would have turned me into a monster.

But as I stared into Jeb’s stunned face, twisted awkwardly toward me, I didn’t feel relief.

I was horrified by his crimes, but I still felt an awful loss and disappointment. I know it sounds stupid, after so many years and betrayal after betrayal, but I’d still, somehow, kept hoping he’d go back to being the old Jeb one day. Now he didn’t have any more chances to prove himself or to change for the better. In the end, he had died an evil man.

And that was devastating.

My body started to shake — from the release of panic or tears, I wasn’t sure — and Kate, who had such power inside her she could break a man’s bones with one hand, began to undo my straps with the utmost gentleness.

“I should have done something sooner,” Star said.

I shifted slightly on the paper-covered bed to look at her.

“When I first found out what that maniac was doing, I should’ve stood up to him,” Star went on.

“You were scared,” Kate said. She propped me up with sturdy arms. “We all were.”

Star started to pick her way through the shards of glass, sharp tools, and overturned carts her tornado had created in the lab, but stopped right before the door.

“Fang didn’t deserve that,” she whispered, not looking at me.

No, he didn’t, and I hadn’t forgiven Star for what she’d done.

But Fang would have. He would have been proud of her for coming now, and she should know that.

“Hero,” I mumbled, pointing at her. It was the best I could manage with drool still leaking from my mouth.

Star laughed harshly, and she finally faced me, her eyes glistening. “Yeah, well, we’re all just trying to save the world, right? Isn’t that what you flock kids keep yammering about? Let’s finish this, already.”

84

Let’s finish it, I repeated as I stumbled down the hallway a few minutes later. Kate and Star had stayed to guard the lab, but I didn’t need them now. Though my body was still weak from the Taser, as my systems rebooted, the surge of adrenaline made me feel almost high. It was time to meet the Remedy.

But when I turned into the tunnel, something grabbed my arm and I almost jumped out of my skin.

“One Light,” a boy with large bloodshot eyes and open sores on his face gasped at me. I felt a stab of pity for him, though he was clawing at me murderously while choking on his own coughs.

The H8E virus, I thought, wrenching myself away from his grasp. I wondered how many of the other Doomsday kids on the battlefield were infected. My mom had said bird kids and mutants were immune, but if the Remedy was now poisoning his own, it couldn’t be a good sign.

As I ran from the sick boy, I realized how vulnerable I was here, alone, limping through an underground, closed space that we knew contained nuclear weapons. I crept more carefully, sticking to what I thought was the main passage, but I had no map, and all these dark, damp passageways looked exactly the same.

I thought I heard a squeak behind me — maybe a Horseman, or another infected kid — but when I listened, I only heard my heart thundering in my ears.

“Max!” Dylan whispered directly behind me in the dark, and I almost screamed bloody murder. “Shh!” he said, clamping a hand over my mouth.

Naturally, I bit his hand.

“Are you serious?” I demanded. “Who does that to a person?” Then I noticed he was alone. “Where’s Gunther-Hagen?” I demanded. “You said you knew exactly where his lair was.”

“It’s been evacuated. I tore the place apart, but the guards—” He eyed my puffy eyes and wobbly legs and stopped mid-sentence. “What happened to you?”

That question was completely overwhelming.

Well, Jeb was creating a master race using Fang’s DNA, I got Tased and nearly Horsemanized, the Deceitful Duo showed up to save the day, and now it feels wrong to hate them, even though I still do. Kind of.

“Jeb is dead,” I said, drastically simplifying things, and Dylan looked shocked. “What were you saying about guards?”

Dylan shook his head, then said, “The Remedy’s Russian guards...”

He turned, and the RAT-A-TAT-TAT of machine-gun fire exploded inside the tunnel.

“They followed me!” Dylan yelled, dragging me down a side passageway.

I followed him down winding tunnel after winding tunnel, deeper and deeper into the maze. We passed more sick kids and the smell of death grew stronger, but the echo of military boots thundered after us.

Then Dylan stopped abruptly in front of a black door that looked exactly like all the other black doors. He traced his hand along the front of it.

“What are you doing?” I said, a little hysterically. I heard the thick-tongued shouts of the guards just behind us, and I flat-out refused to die before I found the Remedy.

There was a beep as the door “read” Dylan, and then the door swung open. “Come on!” he said, yanking me inside just as we started to see the flash-fire of bullets ricocheting off the walls. “We’ll be safe in here.”

“Where are we going?” I asked, but he had already punched a button on the wall, and I realized we were in a rickety elevator.

“Somewhere safe. Just promise not to judge me, okay?”

I gave him a quizzical look, but he just shook his head and sighed.

When the elevator stopped, we stepped into some kind of alternate universe. There were pink silk pillows, mirrored walls, colorful tapestries, and enough perfume to make my lungs seize.

The place was the stuff of my nightmares, basically.

And in the center of an overstuffed chair big enough for two, a gorgeous girl put down her computer and stood up. She was tall and slim and, unlike me, had bathed within the last month and didn’t have blood and gore all over her. I suddenly felt like a horrible, bedraggled rat that was barely human, much less female.

“You came back.” The girl’s large, heavily lashed eyes filled with joy and she came over to Dylan, closer and closer until, to my shock, she curled against him, nuzzling his neck. “Oh, baby, you really came back.”

My eyebrows rose into my hairline as I looked at Dylan over the top of her head.

Consider yourself judged.

85

I hadn’t known Dylan could get uncomfortable. I’d seen tons of girls throw themselves at him, and he’d always charmingly bantered with them while deflecting their advances. Right now, he was frozen in place, looking like he’d rather go back to the battlefield and resume being bludgeoned by Horsemen.

“Can you hang on just a minute?” he asked Princess Doe Eyes, prying her off him. He pulled me to the side.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he hissed. “I didn’t want her, but Dr. Gunther-Hagen made her as a new match for me.” He dropped his eyes. “To replace you.”

I glanced back at the girl, noting her lack of battle scars, her smooth, soft, clean — everything, the whole cozy room, which even contained a bed.

“Gosh,” I said dryly. “She’s awesome. Can I get back to killing the Remedy now? You know, the crusher of hopes, murderer of billions, destroyer of the world?”

“But we’re safe here,” Dylan sputtered. “And I’m not, I mean, she’s not—”

“Baby, I was so worried about you,” the girl crooned, and flipped silken hair over a slim shoulder. Then her beautiful eyes seemed to notice me for the first time. “Is this a... friend, sweetie?”

“Yes,” he said, taking her hands in his. She blinked up at him with so much naked adoration, I thought I might vomit.

“I’m going,” I announced, and walked back to the elevator. Right now, certain death seemed preferable. I jabbed the elevator button.

“Listen, I know this is hard to understand right now,” Dylan told Stepford Girl quickly. “You think we’re supposed to be together, because that’s what you’ve been told. But we’re not.”

This poor girl had been created with one purpose, and Dylan had to tell her it wasn’t going to work out. He was being so gentle with her, though, so kind. The way I’d never been with him.

Don’t turn around, I thought guiltily. Just keep staring at this elevator door.

“But we were made to be together,” she insisted sweetly. “I’ve done everything you wanted, tried to become everything you wanted. I know you like to read, so I’ve been reading. Since you wanted me to have a name, I took it from this book.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the cover. It was The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

Margaret A. ImMargaretA. The commenter with “inside info” on Fang’s blog.

“You’re ImMargaretA?” I asked, turning to gape at her.

Her eyes widened and darted to Dylan nervously, and then she smiled at both of us, blinking like she had no freaking idea what I was talking about.

“You posted on the blog,” I said testily. “You described the deaths of my flock. Remember?”

Margaret’s face flushed. “The doctor let me follow all Horseman’s adventures,” she chirped happily, but I saw the anger behind her eyes when she looked at me — like I was spilling a secret we shared. “So I would know when he would come back to me.”

When she looked back at Dylan, she turned on the charm, but now I saw something else beneath her adoration: fear.

She still thought he was a real Horseman, I realized. And she was terrified.

On the blog, she wasn’t trying to spread false information; she’d only repeated what she had been told was true. She’d really been trying to warn us about the Remedy. About Dylan.

And I’d just sold her out.

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “Just take us to the doctor.”

But she wasn’t having it.

“The doctor is busy,” Margaret A. answered, glaring at me, and then turned back to Dylan with a coy smile. “You must be tired, baby,” she cooed. “Come sit down.”

“I can’t be with you,” Dylan blurted, seeming oblivious to her act. “I love... someone else.”

My chest tightened, but Margaret had finally had enough.

“You can’t be with me?” she snapped, her sugary voice hardening into something more real — something strong. “Well, guess what? Maybe I never wanted to end up with a contract killer, pieced together part by part, my identity wiped clean. But if I have to be a living doll to avoid getting gassed with H8E or blown to pieces in a nuclear blast, I can play along. Okay?”

She fixed Dylan with in icy stare, but her eyes were filling with tears.

“Margaret, listen to me,” I said in a low whisper. “You don’t have to pretend anymore. We’re going to get you out of here.”

“There’s no way out,” she said miserably. “He just keeps moving farther down.”

“Down where?” I pressed.

Margaret A. glanced at the mirror, and I met her eyes. Crocodile tears started to roll down her sculpted cheeks, and she broke my gaze. But then, in the mirror, I saw what she’d really been looking at — an imperfection, some kind of seam.

A door.

86

Dylan pushed through the mirrored door to find a winding metal staircase that reached down what looked like several hundred feet into darkness. It was so narrow, there was no question that only one of us could fit at a time.

Max protested, of course, but Dylan insisted on going first. Even aside from Angel’s warnings about protecting Max, Gunther-Hagen was Dylan’s maker, and he needed to face him alone.

“Don’t fall off,” Margaret warned him.

That warning seemed obvious, but the staircase was so narrow it hugged Dylan’s hips, and as he descended into what felt like the center of the earth, it shuddered and creaked under his weight, threatening to pitch him into the abyss beneath him. He thought he could hear creatures in water splashing somewhere far below, hissing and snapping their jaws.

But when he finally reached the bottom, the staircase ended on solid ground — a street. Dylan blinked up at a door, confused. It looked exactly like the door to the mansion where he’d first found the doctor. The streets were holographic projections, Dylan knew, but the reproduction was incredible.

The odd sense of déjà vu continued as his boots echoed across the marbled tile and he approached the grand ballroom and saw Dr. Gunther-Hagen sitting in his office chair, just as he’d left him. Alone.

However, this time, hundreds of screens lined the walls — world maps, weather reports, graphs of ash trajectory, and recordings from his Horsemen.

“A10103,” the doctor said, swiveling to greet him.

“Actually, it’s just Dylan.” He removed his worn leather gloves and tossed them to the floor between them.

“How disappointing,” the doctor said, but he was grinning with satisfaction, and it made Dylan’s skin crawl.

“I am not the monster you think I am, Dylan. I only wanted to make you stronger,” he said earnestly. “Look around. You can have the life you want. You don’t even realize you’re fighting against your own kind.”

Dylan laughed aloud, and the harsh sound echoed up into the frescoes. He saw nothing of himself reflected in this egomaniacal man who had created him. Once, this had been the person Dylan knew best. But he’d become more and more unrecognizable, and now Dylan felt that he had nothing in common with him.

Absolutely nothing.

“You failed,” Dylan announced, leaning menacingly over the doctor. “Jeb is dead, and so are the other Horsemen.” Dylan tapped the screen on his wrist, and the bloody battle replayed on-screen. “You did make me stronger. Stronger than all of them — I’m the only one left.”

“Not only you.” Dr. Gunther-Hagen lifted the sleeve of his white coat, revealing a screen on his wrist that matched Dylan’s. “I injected myself with the serum, of course.” The doctor’s eyes glittered. “My creations shouldn’t be the only ones with a chance at eternal life. You and I are left together, son. Something tells me you didn’t completely overcome your programming, hmm?” He pursed his lips.

Had he? Dylan dropped his eyes. This was what the doctor had done to him — made him question, made him doubt. Dylan had struggled with his origin from the beginning, trying to determine how much was really him and how much was... everything else. He hadn’t become a mindless killer, but apart from that, did he really have any control at all?

Dylan heard footsteps echoing through the entryway and looked at his maker.

“No.” Dylan shook his head sadly. “I just did what you first programmed me to do: I couldn’t stop loving Maximum Ride.”

“You thought you’d won, didn’t you?” Max looked at the doctor from the doorway, her eyes like skewers.

“Oh, I have won, child.” Gunther-Hagen sank back in his office chair, unperturbed. “I was just telling Dylan about our coming eternal life.”

“He injected himself with Fang’s DNA,” Dylan explained.

“Is that so?” Max shook her head sadly at the doctor, but she was smiling. “Jeb told me the serum wasn’t quite there yet. You might’ve been trying to live forever, but I’m afraid forever’s going to stop a little shorter than you’d planned.

“And, bummer for you, there’s been a change in power, so things are probably going to get a little rough from here on out. There’s no way you’re getting out of here, Häagen-Dazs. We have you completely surrounded.”

“The last of the world’s righteous survivors, all in one place?” For the first time, Dylan noticed that the doctor was tapping his fingertips carefully against the screen at his wrist. “How convenient.”

Dylan! Max! There’s a bomb! Angel’s voice rang through his head.

“Where is it?” Max growled, her body rigid with caution, her face muscles twitching in fury.

Dr. Gunther-Hagen opened his pristine white lab coat and started to unbutton his expensive collared shirt, fixing them with his icy, amused gaze.

But when the shirt fell open, there was a mass of wires and steel canisters where his chest should have been. The doctor wasn’t rigged to the bomb.

He was the bomb.

“Jeb was kind enough to hook me up to the last reactor...” The doctor swirled slowly around in his office chair, his voice trailing off. “It’s a pity you’ve killed him — how will you disable it now?”

“I guess we’ll just have to kill you,” Max snapped.

“Oh, I hope so,” Gunther-Hagen said, still smiling. “If I die, the bomb engages, and your little army goes down with me.”

87

I thought of what Angel had said before the battle. The Remedy thinks he’s won. But he can’t see the future. I can.

We will see him fall.

There was nowhere for him to fall, though. We were already at the bottom of the earth.

“We have to get him out of here,” I told Dylan as quietly as I could. “I’ll fly him as high as I can, and you start getting people underground.”

“Max, no, let me do it. He wouldn’t blow me up.”

But I was the one who was supposed to save the world. Angel had said that all along. Everything I’d survived so far had been building to this moment. It was the last chance I was going to get.

“He’s mine,” I said, and my tone left no room for argument. “Let’s go, Hansy.”

Dr. G-H gave a philosophical shrug and got up, as if he was indulging my silly whim. Pushing him toward the door, I grabbed the collar of his white coat, balling the fabric in my fist. As I started to drag him up the eleventy million steps of the medieval staircase, Gunther-Hagen kept that supercilious grin plastered to his face.

“I guess there’s a way out after all,” he said smugly.

He didn’t set off the bomb while we climbed, nor when we went out Margaret’s door and through the dark passageways. Out on the bloodstained battlefield, the Remedy stood still when I hooked my arms around him and took off, my wings carrying us high over where Gazzy and Iggy were leading the other kids in rounding up the prisoners.

“I’ve so missed the great outdoors,” the doctor said. He closed his eyes, seeming to blissfully savor the wind on his face, despite the air, which was becoming more and more ash laden.

Now that I had him in my hands, I didn’t want him to enjoy a single second of his life. He was brilliant and could have helped humanity so much. But he’d thought the only solution was to wipe people off the earth.

“No,” I said, shaking him. “You don’t get to close your eyes, Häagen-Dazs. Look at all those people down there.” I pointed to the kids below, the ones who were helping the wounded, the ones who were carrying their dead comrades off the field. “You killed their families, their friends. You destroyed their homes, but they’re survivors. They’re free, because you failed. Look!”

Gunther-Hagen craned his neck to look at me. “You want me to stay and watch their expressions as the reactor detonates, is that it? I agree, it would be most entertaining to watch.”

I ground my teeth together and shot upward, flying high into the atmosphere and east over the ocean, until I was sure the kids would be safe.

“Now I’m the one who’ll be making threats.” I hooked one arm beneath his neck and gave a little yank. He coughed, his hands reaching for my arm. “So you’d better start talking.”

“Ask me anything you’d like, Maximum,” Gunther-Hagen said, evidently enjoying this. “I know once you hear my reasoning...”

“Don’t count on it. Now, how did you plan it?” I demanded. “And who helped you?”

If any of those scumbags were still alive, we’d deal with them as well.

Dr. Gunther-Hagen pressed his lips together into an ironic smile. “The fates aligned, you might say. I barely had to plan at all... Dr. Martinez did most of the work for me.”

I blinked hard at that. “I was with my mom the day of the explosion,” I snapped. “She was trying to protect everyone she could.”

“Oh, her work with me started much earlier than that. You’ll remember her involvement in Angel’s modification, I’m sure.”

My gaze faltered.

“Jeb knew about Angel’s gift, but it was Dr. Martinez who founded the Psychic Initiative,” Dr. G-H continued. “She said Angel was just a child — a powerful child who didn’t know how to manage her power. That capable, responsible adults needed to take over, so we could learn about the risks of the future.” His voice had a dark edge to it. Though I was the one gripping his throat, it felt like he was moving toward checkmate. “All I had to do was fund it.”

“My mom was just trying to save the planet!” I said defensively.

“Oh, I assure you, Maximum, so am I. We just had different ideas about how to go about it. Dr. Martinez wanted to alert the world powers about the asteroid and blow it out of the sky with nuclear missiles. But I persuaded her that we should handle things more privately.” The corners of his eyes wrinkled with amusement. “So as to prevent panic.”

“So instead you unleashed a deadly plague to kill ninety-nine percent of the world, let the asteroid destroy even more people, then nuked all the cities for good measure,” I said.

I remembered the pictures we’d scrolled through on the computer. The images of people sobbing, people praying, people running even when they had nowhere to go.

I didn’t know how he could live with himself. But then, he wouldn’t have to much longer.

88

The icy wind whipped through my tangled hair and tugged at my aching arms, and I almost dropped the psychopath to his death right then. But I wasn’t done yet.

Find. Truth.

Dr. Gunther-Hagen was shaking his head. “The virus wasn’t my work, I’m afraid. The Apocalypticas left us that little gift, and they leaked it all on their own.”

So my mom was right about that.

“I don’t think they imagined such initial success. A hundred dead in a couple of days, millions within a week, and by the end of the month, a quarter of the world.” The doctor spoke breathlessly, his eyes lighting up. “It was extraordinarily impressive.”

“Impressive?” My mouth gaped. “Is that what you call murdering billions of people?”

I loosened my grip on his neck, and the doctor slipped down a few inches. His face blanched a light shade of green, but when he answered me, his tone was still measured.

“Let me remind you, child, I did the honorable thing: I developed a vaccine.”

“You can buy a lot with a vaccine when the population is in the grips of a global pandemic.” I narrowed my eyes. “Like... a bunch of nuclear bombs, for example.”

“Actually, those were a gift. My staff had the technology to accurately target the asteroid, after all. With your mother’s political connections, the Russians were easily persuaded to hand over the stockpile if it finally meant some good PR for them.”

He betrayed her — along with the rest of the world.

“Why develop the vaccine, then?” I pressed. “What was it worth?”

“I do love an eager pupil.” The doctor smirked. “It bought me a name.”

“A name?” I repeated.

“When the virus was released and so much of the population was infected, you can imagine how much media attention the discovery of a vaccine received.”

Yeah, I could. I pictured his face covering the newspapers, his smile flashing out of televisions. They probably called him a freaking hero. The thought made me so furious I couldn’t speak. I glared at him, daring him to continue.

“After the asteroid hit, suddenly everyone wanted another quick remedy. They looked to me again, of course. Who else could they trust more?”

“So you’re saying you were able to push the world into a dictatorial state through branding?” I said in disbelief.

“A remedy gave them permission to look away,” he explained. “It assured them that someone was capable of eliminating their problems. And I have.”

“How can you call yourself a doctor?” I asked in disgust. “Didn’t you, like, take some kind of oath saying, ‘I will not unleash death and destruction on my patients and all of modern society’?”

“The earth is my primary patient,” the doctor reasoned calmly. “And the ecosystem will recover much better with fewer people to compromise it.”

“Right, because radioactive debris is super healthy for the planet!” I sneered. “Wait, you didn’t really think this little confession was gonna save you, did you?” I loosened my grip a bit more.

He flinched, instinctively grasping at air, and I smiled faintly as I pulled him back. Gunther-Hagen’s eyes hardened, and his fingers locked around my wrists. “You still don’t understand. I don’t need to be saved. Humans aren’t supposed to be saved. My work will live on. My legacy—”

I cut him off. “Your legacy is dead. Jeb is dead. He’ll never make another Horseman.”

“Dylan is my legacy,” the doctor countered. “A truly evolved specimen, despite some remaining glitches. He and the female mate I created for him will help repopulate the earth with a genetically ideal species. You were never worthy of him.”

The thing was... that last part was completely true.

My expression must have faltered, because the doctor smiled. “You’re really very ordinary, you know, Maximum Ride,” he said sympathetically. “Weak. And soon, you and your kind will die out, just like your boyfriend did.”

He tapped the screen on his wrist. I couldn’t see the image, but I could hear that it was the video Dylan had shown me. Even above the howling wind, I heard Fang’s screams.

Too. Far.

“Nothing’s dying out, you disgusting supremacist,” I snapped. My arms quivered with rage as I held him in front of me. I felt the heat rushing to my cheeks as I said the words:

“I’m pregnant.”

89

The confession hung in the air between us, and I instantly wished I could snatch it back. I hadn’t told anyone — until that moment, I hadn’t fully admitted it to myself. But I couldn’t hide from it now. Saying it aloud made it real.

More than that — from the doctor’s expression, I knew it had power.

“It can’t be,” the doctor whispered, his face twisting in horror. “Fang is dead.”

I remembered when the doctor had kidnapped Fang. He’d told Dylan that Fang had to die because his invincible DNA posed too high a risk. I’d wondered why they didn’t kill him that day, and realized the doctor was too power-hungry to destroy the key to immortality.

Wordlessly, I switched my grip to one hand and unzipped my hoodie with the other. The wind whipped open the fabric, and Gunther-Hagen’s gaze traveled down to where the T-shirt underneath pulled taut against my stomach, revealing the smallest hint of a curve.

“It’s over,” he murmured.

“Oh, it’s just beginning,” I said.

And that’s when he pressed the screen on his arm again. “Reactor, engage,” he commanded.

I inhaled sharply, wincing as I waited for the explosion in the distance, praying that Dylan had managed to save as many kids as he could.

But there was no explosion, no far-off mushroom cloud that spelled death and destruction.

There was no beeping, either, or suggestion of a countdown, and I saw from Dr. G-H’s fury that it hadn’t worked. There was something wrong with the signal.

I didn’t know what had happened any more than Gunther-Hagen did, but I thought of Nudge’s hacking abilities, and Angel’s mind-reading, and Gazzy’s bomb knowledge, and I knew my flock had probably just saved my life for the thousandth time.

“What’s the matter, Hans? Is your final plan not working? I guess it doesn’t matter if you die now, after all.” My tone was biting, but my brain was flooded with such a surge of relief I felt like I was about to pass out.

I guess that’s why I was so unprepared for what happened next.

The old man lunged forward, gouging at my stomach with a silver pen. “That child is the virus that will plague the whole world!” Gunther-Hagen shrieked. “And I am the Remedy!”

“You’ve killed enough people already,” I snarled at him. “You don’t get to kill Fang’s child.”

Then, with all my strength, I flung him away from me, into the empty sky.

For a fraction of a second, he hung in the air, his white coat billowing around him, his eyes snapped open in surprise, his mouth frozen in a perfect O.

Then he fell.

I fluttered my wings, watching as the Remedy, the supreme terrorist of the world, plunged to the ground. I thought of Fang, how he must have grabbed at the air in the same panicked way.

Just before the body hit, I crossed my arms over my stomach and turned away.

90

Everything seems starker in the daylight, doesn’t it? It’s easier to see all that you’ve lost, and all that you’ve gambled, and how hard it’s going to be to get back to where you started.

We never did have a victory celebration. After all the bombs and burned homes, no one was very excited about fireworks. And with blood still staining the field around us, no one could really imagine partying.

Not here, anyway. Not now.

Instead, for the past week, crews had worked on burying the dead and cleaning up the tent city. Others questioned captives and explored Himmel’s labyrinth of tunnels.

I had started hauling food up from the vast storage supplies of Himmel. I needed to do something with my hands — organize supplies and make plans for shelter, or plant some of the seedlings we’d found in the giant greenhouse. I needed to focus on the future.

But everything is so stark in the daylight.

I felt the faintest, mostly healed scratches on my stomach chafing against my shirt. Now that I’d said a certain two words aloud, the future was feeling like a pretty scary place.

I patted my belly button, feeling the swell that was growing a tiny bit bigger every day. I pressed my knuckles against the small curve, kneading in, but it always rebounded.

I really hoped this wasn’t going to be a great big egg to lay. How could I possibly sit still on it for nine months?

“What are you doing?” Angel asked from behind me.

I dropped my hand from my stomach and tried to clear my thoughts.

“Sorting supplies for distribution.” I tossed one of the frozen meals to her. “Dr. G-H sure loved him some TV dinners.”

“You have to put them back.” Angel was already messing with the piles I’d made. “Right now. The plants, too.” She nodded at the bean plants sprouting in the plastic containers. “They won’t survive out here in the cold, and we have to eat what we can in the forest before it’s gone.”

“What do you mean, ‘gone’? The woods are full of wild game. We’ll have lots of time to build shelters and get set up out here before winter.”

“Try nuclear winter.” Angel squinted at the hazy sky. “Do you see how thick the dust is getting? The asteroid and all the bombs sent tons of stuff into the air, and that cloud is coming our way. It’ll totally block out the sun.”

She looked at the thousands of makeshift tents strewn around us. “Tomorrow we’ll get organized, try to contact any other survivors. We’ll probably have to go underground in less than a month.”

“You want to live in the Remedy’s city?” My body recoiled instinctively at the thought of those claustrophobic tunnels, and I shook my head. “I can deal with the cold.”

“Not cold like this,” the little prophet insisted. She pinched the top of a bright green bean sprout. “They’ll grow fine in artificial light.”

Could I, though? I thought of the small life taking shape inside me, never seeing the sun, and I started to shake.

Just focus on stacking supplies, I thought, gripping the packaged food so tightly I was crushing the boxes.

You don’t have to hide it from me, Angel’s voice said in my mind. I already know.

My eyes flew to hers.

Angel smiled. “Why do you think I made Dylan and Kate stay glued to your side during the battle?” she said with a smirk.

I was confused about so many things — including whether I wanted to strangle Angel or hug her.

“I’m not ready to be a mom,” I whispered. “I don’t know what to do.”

I’d fought super-mutants and defeated dictators, but this was so far out of the realm of things I could handle, I was asking a seven-year-old for parenting advice.

“Yeah, you do.” Angel smiled, bumping my shoulder. “You mothered us, didn’t you?”

I remembered the flock’s food fights at breakfast. My utter hatred of school. The way Nudge had to remind me to brush my teeth.

Not really.

Angel giggled and snuggled against me. I smoothed her pale curls away from her forehead like I had since our days in dog crates.

“I never got to tell Fang,” I said after a minute, my voice flat with defeat.

That was partly why I had been tracking him so desperately. I’d needed his help to find the Remedy, but I’d also had something urgent to tell him.

“Excuse me, ladies.”

I looked up to see Dylan standing in front of us — I’d been so wrapped up in talking to Angel that I hadn’t even noticed him coming.

“Hey,” I said, my face burning. I pictured the day that Dylan found out about the baby and just wanted to curl up.

“Max, can you come with me?” he asked. “I need to show you something.”

91

Angel looked at Dylan, her head tilted to one side. She frowned, but he met her gaze evenly.

“It’ll just take a minute,” Dylan said.

“Sure,” I said, standing up. I gave Angel a “we’ll finish talking later” look and she nodded solemnly at me. Dylan and I set off, and I couldn’t help smiling when I saw Iggy demonstrating a homemade wrist rocket to Margaret A.

Dylan saw her, too, and gave me a rueful smile.

“So where are we going?” I asked.

“Remedy’s lair.”

My head whipped around and I stared at him. “What? What for?”

“I need to show you something,” Dylan said again, and I felt the slightest twinge of fear. Now that I was paying attention, he seemed kind of different. I’d hardly seen him for the past week — sometimes in the evening around a fire, he’d show up, looking exhausted. Almost haunted.

Again and again, Dylan had proven his loyalty to me and the flock, but the whole world had spun out of control and I couldn’t help wondering if being one of the Horsemen had changed him forever in ways I couldn’t imagine.

Or maybe I could imagine them. Maybe that was what the hint of fear was about.

“I am not going down that billion steps again,” I said lightly. “My legs are still aching from that.”

Dylan gave me an almost sad, distant smile and shook his head.

All around us, kids were working to build us a better future. I took comfort in the fact that there seemed to be people everywhere — no place felt deserted or lonely. Still, when Dylan led me inside Himmel and through the tunnels, I felt myself going on guard. And when he stopped in front of Jeb’s old lab, I hesitated and looked up at him.

“What are we doing here, Dylan?” I asked softly.

Again that slightly sad smile. “I have... a present for you. I think.”

Okay, that sounded ominous. I took a breath and felt my muscles tense. I really didn’t want to go back into that place. Looking up into Dylan’s crystalline aqua eyes, I searched them to read his intent. But I couldn’t.

He pushed open the door to the lab and gestured to me to go in. The last kids we’d seen had been a couple of minutes ago — out of screaming range. Pressing my lips together, I stepped in, praying that someone had gotten rid of Jeb’s body.

The lab had been cleaned up. Everything broken was gone, everything left was neatly arranged and labeled. I looked around in surprise.

“Who did this?” I asked.

“I did,” Dylan said. “I’ve been working in here.”

My eyebrows knitted together. “Doing what?”

“In a way, continuing my father’s work.”

I stared at him, unconsciously moving away and glancing around for possible weapons. “Dylan, come on,” I said, keeping my tone even. “What are you talking about?”

“This.” Dylan turned and went through a door on the other side of the lab. I instantly sprang over and grabbed a scalpel, though what I would do with it, I had no idea... Dylan was much stronger than me now. Hiding the scalpel behind my back, I waited, and in just a minute Dylan came back — pushing a hospital bed.

Someone was lying on that bed, covered by a sheet.

I saw just a bit of black hair spilling out from beneath the white cloth and almost screamed. My breath came shallowly as I stared at the bed, and then at Dylan.

“What... what in the world have you been doing?” My voice was high and squeaky. “Wh-who... who is that?”

“You know who it is,” Dylan said softly, and pulled back the sheet. “It’s Fang.”

And... that was when my pregnant self fainted like a schoolgirl, right onto the floor.

92

Or i would have hit the floor, if Dylan hadn’t had enhanced reflexes and superhuman strength. My eyes fluttered open just seconds later to see him looking down at me in concern.

He was holding me in his arms as if I weighed nothing, and now he gently lowered my feet to the floor. I grabbed hold of a lab table to steady myself and felt anger rising in me.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” I practically spat. “You know how I feel about clones. Your so-called dad was nuttier than a fruitcake, and you know it! Why would you do this? Why would you make a fake Fang?”

Dylan held up his hands, then pushed them through his dark blond hair in frustration, seeming to hold his head for a second. His jaw twitched and his teeth clamped together. Suddenly I realized I had dropped the scalpel when I fainted. Dylan must have seen it, must have known I’d picked it up as a weapon.

“Max,” he said tightly. “Everything I’ve ever done has been for you. It’s not like I’m a hero — we both know I was programmed to want to... be with you, above anyone else.” His eyes met mine. “You know how I feel, and how I would feel about you no matter what, whether I was programmed to love you or not.”

My cheeks heated and I swallowed, not knowing what to say. Why is he telling me this?

“I love you,” he said steadily. “I always have, and I always will. You know that.”

I looked away, not wanting him to humble himself this way.

“And I know you love Fang,” he went on more softly. “You always have, and you always will.”

Now I felt really bad.

“I—” I started, but he held up his hand to stop me.

“It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just how it is,” he said, and I felt a hormonal tear come to my eyes. “Once I hoped — I hoped maybe Fang was your first love, and I... I would be your last.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, feeling an ache in my throat that might never go away.

“It’s not your fault,” he said again, gently. “This hasn’t turned out the way I hoped, but then, what has? The world hasn’t turned out the way we hoped, either, right?”

I nodded, praying I wouldn’t start blubbering.

Dylan swallowed again and glanced at the hospital bed. “I pretended to kill the flock, so they would be safe. I had less control over what happened to Fang. The Horsemen were there — Jeb and the doctor were trying out a new upgrade — and there was only so much I could do. You saw how Fang dragged them all over the cliff with him. You saw how one of them... took off Fang’s wing.” The last words ended in a whisper.

I nodded and wiped away a single tear, feeling like the most ancient fifteen-year-old in the world. What was left of it.

“I... waited until everyone was gone, and then... I flew down into the canyon.”

My eyes widened. No. I knew Fang was dead. Angel knew Fang was dead — she had felt it.

Dylan shrugged. “The doctor had labs all over the place. I found Fang at the bottom of the canyon, just as he was about to die. In fact, he might have actually been dead. At any rate, by the time I got him to one of the doctor’s labs, he was dead.”

My eyes narrowed. “Okay. And the point is...”

“The doctor had done all kinds of experiments. You can guess,” said Dylan, looking disturbed by the memories. “But he had the means to put beings into stasis, to hold them until he was ready for them, or whatever.”

I refused to have hope, refused to even think about it. “For God’s sake, Dylan. What are we doing here? Just — tell me.”

Dylan gestured to the bed. “That’s Fang. And... I can make him live.”

93

“What...” words failed me. That happened very rarely.

“Actually, it’s up to you,” Dylan said. “This is Fang, and he’s in stasis. His body healed itself, mostly, but his wing... well, it was gone. I’ve given him a new wing. It’s artificial but looks and feels just like the real thing. He’ll be able to fly.”

My head was spinning, and actually, the room was, too, a little bit. Abruptly I sat down on a lab stool, gripping the nearby table even harder. I just couldn’t take it in.

“What are you saying?” My words were barely audible.

“Experiments and artificial... parts. I know you hate it, hated everything that Jeb and the doctor did,” Dylan said. “And here I am, doing the same thing. But — I did it for you. Because I love you. I did it because this was Fang, and you love him. So I’m giving you a choice: Do you want me to complete the process? Or would it be better to let him go, the way he should have? Would you still want him, with an artificial wing?”

My eyes felt as big as moons as I stared at Dylan. “Is he a cyborg?” My mouth moved but hardly any sound came out.

“No. It’s like a person having an artificial leg,” Dylan said.

“He would be alive? And — and normal?”

Dylan nodded slowly. “Flesh and blood and brooding silences, the whole lot.”

“I would want him,” I said. “I would want him, wings or no wings, arms or no arms, eyes or no eyes...”

For a long moment, Dylan looked steadily at me.

“Dylan — I’m going to have Fang’s baby.” That was hard — it was like a light went out in Dylan’s eyes. I felt terrible, seeing that this was the final blow, the thing Dylan would never be able to pretend away.

“Congratulations,” he said quietly, his voice cracking. Then he coughed and nodded. “Okay, let’s do this.”

It was like being in a sci-fi movie, watching Dylan wheel in equipment, flip big switches, instruments jumping. He put diodes all over Fang’s still form. I was horrified by my decision, but I knew that even if Fang were a zombie, I would want him, and I would take care of him and protect him for the rest of my life.

Finally Dylan double-checked everything and nodded again. He came to me, and on his face were a calm acceptance and a sweet honesty that I would remember for the rest of my life.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know. I love you, too, but not—”

“I know. It’s okay. I just — want you to forgive me.”

“For what?”

Dylan didn’t answer, just took my face in his hands, so gently, and kissed my forehead. “Good-bye, my love.”

“Good-bye? What do you mean—”

And before I could move, Dylan grabbed a knot of wires in one hand and flicked the last switch. The lights in the room blinked on and off, there was a horrible buzzing, crackling sound, and I saw Dylan’s body spasming as thousands of volts of electricity surged through him...

And into Fang.

On the hospital bed, Fang’s body arced once, then fell back. In the flickering lights I saw one of his hands twitch, his fingers curl. Dylan slumped to the floor, his eyes wide and still, his face slack except for the slightest smile on his lips. He was dead. He had killed himself so that Fang would live. He had killed himself for me.

I began to scream, and was still screaming a minute later when Kate and Holden burst into the room.