"So, breakfast," I said, trying to remember the drill. "Does the, uh, dog need to go out?"
"We already went out," said the littlest kid. Angel. She cocked her head to one side, looking at me, and I gave her a big smile. Little weirdo. I had no idea why Max stayed with these losers. She would do so much better on her own. Every one of them was a ball and chain, holding her down. She should have dumped them a long time ago. But that was one of her weaknesses: She needed an audience, a pep squad. Someone to hold her hand and tell her how fabulous she was.
Anyway. There was a tiny kitchenette in one corner of the room. I went over and put a frying pan on one of the hot plates. "Okay, how about some eggs?" I said, looking inside the minifridge.
"You're going to cook?"
I turned around to see Fang, the older, dark-haired boy, looking at me.
"Aren't you hungry?"
"Not that hungry," Gasman muttered.
I didn't get it. The other older boy, the fair one, stood up.
"I'll do it. Gaz, you pour juice. Nudge, get out the paper plates."
"But you're blind," I said. He couldn't cook. Or was this some kind of joke?
"You're kidding! I am?" the guy-Iggy-said sarcastically. He brushed past me and turned on the hot plate. "Who wants scrambled?"
"Me," said Nudge, raising her hand. She dug out some paper plates and put them on the dinky Formica table.
Huh. Maybe because I was the leader, I didn't do stuff like cook. Well, I had to look busy, in charge.
"Nudge? Come over here and I'll fix your hair." I rummaged in a backpack for a brush. "We could do, like, ponytails or something, get it out of your eyes."
Nudge-another dumb name-looked at me. "You want to fix my hair?"
"Yeah." God, what did Max do all day? She didn't cook, she didn't fix people's hair. Did she just sit on her butt barking orders all the time? "Oh, and hey-you-off the bed." I snapped my fingers at the dog, who just looked at me.
"Why can't he sit on the bed?" Angel asked.
"Because I said so," I said, starting to brush Nudge's hair.
There was silence, and I looked up to see the other four mutant kids looking at me. Well, not the blind one, though his face was turned toward me, which was creepy.
"What?" I asked.
124
The last thing I remembered was being kidnapped from the motel room. No, the very last thing I remembered was seeing that other Max in the room. What happened? Had she replaced me? Why?
At the moment, I didn't know if I was awake or asleep, alive or dead. I blinked again and again, but there was complete and utter blackness: no shadows, no blurry forms, no pinprick of light. All of us except Iggy can see extremely well in the dark, so not being able to see anything at all made my blood run cold.
Was I blind now, like Iggy? Had they experimented on my eyes?
Where was I? I remembered being bound and gagged. I remembered passing out. Now I was here, but where "here" was I had no clue.
Where was the flock? None of them had woken up when I'd been taken. Had they been drugged? Something worse? Were they okay? I tried to sit up, but it was as if I was suspended somehow-I couldn't put my feet down, couldn't push off anything. But I felt wetness. I could touch my face. My hair was wet. I reached out with my hands and felt nothing. There was water or something all around me, but it wasn't like ordinary water-I couldn't sink.
I swallowed and blinked again, feeling myself start to panic. Where was my flock? Where was I? What was going on? Was I dead? If I was dead, I was going to be incredibly pissed because there was no way I could deal with this limitless nothingness for an hour, much less eternity. No one had said death would be so intensely boring.
My heart was beating fast, my breaths were quick and shallow, my skin was tingling because blood was rushing to my muscles and main organs: fight or flight. Which reminded me. I stretched out my wings and couldn't feel a thing. Wildly I reached back with one hand. My heavy wing muscles, the thick ridges where they joined my shoulders, were there. I still had wings. I just couldn't feel them.
Was I anesthetized? Was I having an operation? I tried as hard as I could to move, thrashing around in the blackness, but again felt nothing.
Very bad news.
Where the heck was I?
Try to calm down. Calm down. Get it together. If you're dead, you're dead, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you're not dead, you need to get it together so you can escape, rescue the others, open a can of whup-ass on whoever put you here...
I was completely alone. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been completely alone. If I were in a hammock on a beach, sipping a drink with a little umbrella in it, and I knew the flock was safe and okay and everything was fine, I would be ecstatic. Being alone, off-duty, able to relax-it would be a dream come true.
Instead I was alone with darkness, with fear, with uncertainty. So where was I?
You might not want to know.
The Voice. I wasn't completely alone after all. The Voice was still with me.
"Do you know where I am?" I spoke out loud, my voice dropping away into dull nothingness.
Yes.
"So tell me!"
Are you sure you want to know?
"Oh no, I enjoy being in a state of complete ignorance!" I snapped. "This is why I don't want you around anymore! Now tell me, you jerk!"
You're in an isolation tank. A sensory-deprivation chamber. I don't know where, exactly.
"Oh, my God. You were right-I didn't want to know."
An isolation tank. Nothing but me, my totally screwed-up consciousness, and the Voice. Well, I could probably stand this for say, oh, ten minutes before I went stark-raving nuts.
Knowing the whitecoats, they probably planned to keep me in here a year or two, so they could take notes, see what happened to me.
I needed to die, right now.
125
But I'm Maximum Ride. So it wouldn't be that easy, would it?
Of course not. My life would never contain a convenient, pain-saving plan when it could stretch a problem out into an endless agony of uncertainty and torture.
I don't know how long I was in the tank. It could have been ten minutes. It felt like ten years. A lifetime. Maybe I slept. I know I hallucinated. Again and again I "woke up" to find myself back with the flock, back in our house in Colorado or in the subway tunnels of NYC or in the Twilight Inn. I saw Ella Martinez and her mom again, smiling and waving at me.
I think I cried for a while.
Basically every thought I'd ever had in my entire life, I had all over again, one after another in rapid-fire succession. Every memory, every color, every taste, every sensation of any kind replayed itself in my fevered brain, endless loops of thought and memory and dream and hope, over and over, until I couldn't tell what had been real and what had been wishful thinking and what had been a movie I'd seen or a book I'd read. I didn't know if I was really Max, or if I really had wings, or if I really had a family of bird kids like me. Nothing was real except being in this tank. And maybe not even that.
I sang for a while, I think. I talked. Finally my voice went. Weirdly, I was never hungry or thirsty. Nothing hurt; nothing felt good.
So when the tank was finally cracked open and light streamed in, it seemed like the worst, most painful thing that had ever happened to me.
126
I screamed, but the sound of my own voice was intensely loud, piercing my eardrums, so I shut up immediately. I squeezed my eyes shut against the blinding light and curled into a ball as much as I could. Big hands grabbed me and pulled me up, and just their touch, after so much nothingness, freaked out my senses.
They put me on a bed and covered me with a blanket. The feeling of anything touching me was torture. I huddled there trying not to move for a long, long time.
Finally I realized that I wasn't in so much pain anymore. I tried opening one eye a slit. It was too bright, but I didn't feel like my retina was searing.
"Ma
x?" The hushed whisper woke every nerve all over again, sending unbearably painful chills down my spine. I tensed, my eyes closed. I no longer knew how to run, how to flee, how to fight.
I wanted to be back in the tank, the blessed darkness and silence and nothingness.
"Max, how are you doing?"
Jim Dandy, I thought hysterically. Peachy. Never better.
"Max, do you need anything?"
That was such a ludicrous question that I felt myself smile.
"I need to ask you some questions," the voice whispered. "I need to know where the flock is heading. I need to know what happened in Virginia."
That got me. A couple of synapses actually connected in my brain. I pulled the blanket down just a little and opened my eyes a slit. "You know what happened in Virginia," I said. My voice was thin and rusty, made of nails. "You were there, Jeb."
"Only at the end, sweetheart," Jeb said, his voice very quiet. He was kneeling on the floor next to the cot I was on. "I don't know what happened before then, how everything fell apart. I don't know where the flock is headed now or what your plan is."
Now I felt maybe 10 percent like myself. "Jeb, I'm afraid you're going to have to learn to live with not knowing." I chuckled a tiny bit. It sounded like a cat choking.
"That's my Max," Jeb said affectionately. "Tough till the end. Even after everything, you're still in better shape than anyone else would be. But I have to tell you, you need to get on board with this saving-the-world project."
"I'll try to pencil it in," I croaked. Now I felt enough like myself to be irritated.
Jeb leaned closer to me. I opened my eyes and looked him straight in the face, that familiar face that had represented everything good in my life, at one time. And now represented everything bad.
"Max, please," he whispered. "Please just play along. They want to terminate you. They think you're a lost cause."
This was news.
"Who?"
"Itex. They're keeping you here while they try out their latest, greatest invention. They wanted you to lead with your head, not your heart, Max. I tried to teach you that, but maybe I failed. They're trying to take all of the heart out of you by keeping you here. But you care about things, and about people, Max. Like me. Please, don't make everything that's happened up till now meaningless. Don't give them cause to take you out, start over with someone else. Show them they're wrong about you. Show them you've got what it takes."
"I'll show them I've got what it takes to rip your spleen out through your nose," I said weakly.
"Batchelder!" I suddenly heard a deep voice from behind me. "You're not authorized to be in here."
Then my light was blocked again, the blanket was pulled off, and big hands picked me up and dropped me back into the horrible tank.
127
I led the five mutant freaks through the shadows toward Itex.
"In here." I held aside some bushes and motioned them through. It was dark, finally. I'd thought spending days watching a bunch of Erasers play Texas hold 'em was boring, but that didn't compare to today.
I didn't know how the original Max stood it. I'd lost count of how many times today I'd wanted to scream at them to shut up and get away from me. That Nudge never quit yapping, and Angel and Gasman had gotten into disputes like whether the sky was blue and what day this was. I hadn't found any chinks in Fang's armor, but it was just a matter of time. Angel frankly creeped me out-she was a loose cannon. Maybe she was kind of unstable. I would have to tell them that when I got back. Gasman seemed like a gullible idiot, and Iggy was dead weight, as far as I could tell. Except that he could cook, for some reason. Plus, they all talked to the dog like it was a person, asking it if it wanted this or that. I mean, it was a freaking dog.
But finally it was time. We'd gone on the tour of Itex today, and I'd made a big deal about noticing its weak points. Now we were "breaking in." I was trying to be careful, look like I was on guard.
I have to say, I was doing great. They didn't suspect a thing. All my training, the lessons, the practice-it was paying off. It was gratifying, how obvious it was that I was the new and improved version. In fact, it was weird how willing these freaks were to follow me around, do what I said. I'd told 'em we were going to break into Itex, and they were all on board. Even the dumb dog. When we were leaving the hotel, I'd tried to shut it inside the room, but Nudge had held the door open for it to trot out.
"The dog's coming on a raid?" I'd asked, my eyebrows raised.
"Of course he's coming," Nudge had said, looking surprised. "He always comes."
O-kaaay, I'd thought. I'm starting to put my finger on why you guys are slated for termination.
But whatever. They followed orders, anyway. I led them up a grassy hill, looking around-like someone was going to catch us, right? There was a huge HVAC box next to the main building, and we quickly unscrewed the cover. I jammed a stick in the enormous fan, and then we all hurried through. I yanked the stick out, the fan started spinning again, and we were in.
"That was a good idea," said Fang. Which was about five more words than he'd said all day.
I shrugged. I knew Max was totally full of herself, but that didn't mean I had to be. We started moving through the air vent system.
I was trying to remember to seem nervous, to look around, to act like I was considering which way to go. Sometimes I stopped everyone and put my finger to my lips, as if someone were coming. It was hysterical.
We got to the main branch of the HVAC system, and I pretended to hesitate before I led them all into the vent that went to the basement. Just a few more minutes, another couple hundred yards, and my job would be over.
And so would they.
128
Being back in the isolation tank after seeing Jeb was a huge relief-for about two milliseconds. Then I started thinking about what he had said. I remembered that I had a flock depending on me. I remembered that I was Invincible Max and that the whitecoats making me run through their maze were a bunch of losers.
Which left the question: how to get out of here?
I still couldn't sit up, couldn't feel anything. I was spacing out and hallucinating again-it was way hard to concentrate, to remember what I was doing instead of floating off into la-la land.
Think, Max.
Then I remembered I had a Voice in my head. Voice, you got any ideas?
What is it they want from you? the Voice said, shocking me. It had never, ever responded to a direct question before. At least that I could remember, right then.
Uh... what did they want from me? Just for me to be here. To be able to do things to me, make me jump through their hoops, be their lab rat.
What would happen if you took that away from them?
I thought. They would be very upset?
I smiled. But how could I take that away from them? I'd pretty much established that I couldn't break out of this sardine can.
Think about it.
Now that I really thought about it, realizing how limited my options truly were kind of freaked me out. Here was a situation where all my speed, my physical strength, my cunning-none of it would do me any good.
It was mind-blowing.
If I hadn't been so totally spaced, I would have panicked.
As it was, I felt oddly removed from the problem. Freaked, but removed at the same time. I was losing myself. Losing my mind.
Losing myself... losing me. They would be upset if they lost me. Because I wouldn't be around to jump through their hoops. But since I couldn't physically move, getting lost seemed pretty unworkable.
Except.
There was another way for them to lose me: if I died.
Which would sort of defeat my own purpose, as well as theirs. But-could I just make them think I was dead?
I bet there were monitors of some sort in here. When you put a rat in a maze, you hung around to observe the results. They'd probably been recording my crazed ranting and sobbing all along.
Now. How to be dead?
/> I lay back in the buoyant liquid. It supported me totally-I didn't have to try to keep my head up or anything. My breathing slowed, in and out, one, two, three, four. I relaxed every single muscle. Then I just... went inside myself. It was like I was a machine and I was slowly flicking switches off. I just willed all my systems to slow down more and more.
In the yawning silence, my heart beat slower, then slower. My eyes closed. Everything was still and silent. Maybe I would lie in this watery tomb forever.
There was no time, no thought, no motion.
I hoped I wasn't actually dead.
That would make finding our parents and saving the world really hard.
129
I see no need to go into a lot of boring detail, but we found our way to the Itex computer room. So far, the plan was working beautifully.
I shooed everyone away to the darkest corner of the room, and they actually listened to me. Then I turned one computer on, and it booted up silently. I had been told Nudge was good with computers, so I motioned her over.
"See what you can find out about Itex," I whispered. "Be quick-I don't know how much time we have."
We had exactly six minutes, forty-seven seconds, according to my watch.
"Okay," Nudge whispered back. She slid onto the stool and instantly went to the "List Programs" menu. From there she got to a C prompt, and then she typed in a bunch of gibberish.
I sighed to myself, waiting for her to get stuck, and then I'd have to take over. They'd taught me everything I needed to make sure I could get us where we had to go.
"Oh, here," Nudge whispered, and I watched in surprise as page after page of information, all labeled "Restricted Access Only" filled the screen. Hmm. Maybe this mutant was smarter than she looked. Maybe somehow, something had come out right, with her.
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