The children were whistling, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why. Max seemed to be leading them and she was doing a good job so far.
I turned to Kit. “Why are they whistling?”
He shook his head. “No idea.”
Max screamed. “They’re coming! It’s Security! Hunters! Trust me on it. Run faster! Get away from here! Everybody run!”
I grabbed the closest child—Wendy—and I carried her down a narrow pathway that led deeper into the woods.
Kit took hold of Icarus, the little blind boy, who was frightened enough to go with him. Kit had his gun out, dark and scary, but also comforting.
“Wendy, look! ” Peter called out to his sister. “Look up! ” He was rooted to the ground, stunned by the sight of Max flying into the air.
No matter how many times I’ve watched her fly, I was always struck dumb by the miraculous, indelible sight. I knew how Peter felt, but this was no time for gawking.
I yelled, “Pe-ter! Come here! Right this minute! Move it!”
Still clutching Wendy, I plucked him up, too. They clung to me. They weren’t too heavy, but heavy enough.
I found temporary cover in the bushes. Gunfire crackled around us. A dark hole opened in the thick trunk of a nearby tree. I picked up the two small children again and stumbled and ran as fast as I could.
I looked back just in time to see Max drop out of a tree and land on one of the men doing the shooting. He was dressed in brown-and-green camouflage, like many hunters and survivalists in the area. Max fell on the man incredibly hard. From twelve to fifteen feet above, eighty pounds had the impact of a falling safe.
Bone cracked! I heard it. The writhing man screamed in extreme pain. I had no pity for him.
For a long moment, there was quiet again, but it was almost as scary as the noise and echoing gunshots. How many of them were chasing us? Where were they?
Then Kit dropped into a shooting crouch. A single shot burst from his semiautomatic. Another guard dropped, as if he were a felled tree. He held his shoulder.
I felt sick. I was a witness. All of us were.
The ground under my hiking boots suddenly bucked. It was a powerful explosion and it shivered every tree and shrub and the forest floor itself. We were almost knocked off our feet by the shock and concussion.
The air around us seemed to split open. The woods suddenly crackled with heat, then I smelled smoke and my heart sank.
Fire.
With a furious thundering, two deer streaked past us. Birds flew up in black clouds. The woods were suddenly alive with frightened animals, and even more frightened humans.
“The School!” Max screamed. “It’s back at the School.”
“That was a bomb,” Kit yelled to me. “They’re getting rid of the evidence. They’re burning the place down. Keep moving! Keep going! There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
We gathered up the children, kept them moving. We slid and fell and scraped our way down the hillside into a small valley. Then we climbed painfully up the side of a facing hill. Then down the opposite side. We ran until we couldn’t run anymore, and then we ran some more.
Five children, two adults—seven witnesses.
Chapter 86
WE FINALLY STOPPED to rest and took cover under a formation of primeval-looking boulders. We were exhausted, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and stunned to silence. Our recent small victory was only a brief respite. We had outrun a couple of Security geeks, but so what?
Five minutes passed—ten minutes—no one came up behind us. Not yet, anyway.
Kit had climbed a high, branched tree to do some quick surveillance. He shimmied up and down expertly, and I was impressed with his agility. He was full of surprises.
“I couldn’t see anyone following us,” he reported. “But that doesn’t mean much. They know we’ve got a long way down with the kids in tow.”
Max was at my side, urgently tapping my arm. “I should teach them to fly,” she said. “It will be easy for them, Frannie. I have to do it. They’ll be safer from the guards. I was.”
Night would be coming soon, and I was anxious and frightened for the children. I didn’t see how we could all safely make the trip down in darkness. Before today, I’d always thought of the woods as a personal refuge. No more.
“It’s getting dark pretty fast,” I said to Max. I didn’t want to scare her, but I hoped she would get my point.
“It’ll be okay for now,” she answered. “There’s a moon. Please trust me. I have instincts about these things. Also, we can see better in the dark than you can.”
I was so impressed with Max. It had only been a few days since she’d thrown herself screaming against our net. Now she had assumed responsibility for her small charges. I did trust her judgment, her instincts.
She felt it was time to push the little birds out of the nest. She was probably right about that. It would be a stunning thing to witness.
First flight!
Chapter 87
WE CLUSTERED TOGETHER on the shelflike summit of a rocky outcropping. The moon was brilliant overhead. It seemed ominous, like the chandelier at the opening of Phantom of the Opera. It was a beautiful night, though thoroughly spooky because of the dangerous circumstances we found ourselves in.
“This is how you do it,” Max told the others in a firm voice. “It starts in your head. You send your mind up and out of your body. Then just let your wings do the work. It’ll be great tonight. We’ll fly right by the moon, like in E.T. You guys remember that scene in the movie?”
“Cool!” Icarus yelled. “I’m E.T.! I’m the hero. I called it!”
The other kids rolled their eyes, but nobody argued with Icarus. I could see that the children were unusually generous and supportive of one another. They had team—or maybe it was flock—instincts.
I looked at the leaning tower of striated schist that stood about fifteen feet off the ground. It was just high enough for a practiced flyer to achieve lift, but it could also make for a pretty bad fall if the smaller children weren’t up to it. I held my breath a little. I trusted Max, though.
“Watch me!” she said to the other kids. “Do exactly what I do.”
First, she beat her wings in place. Then, when there was a good stiff breeze coming at us—she simply stepped off the high rock.
“Wow!” the other kids chorused. “Way to go, Max! Whoooo! That’s really great!”
For a moment, Max hovered effortlessly in the air. She turned her head down to make sure that all eyes were on her. They certainly were. Then she took off to another level.
She flew up toward the treetops, and it was just incredible. The hair on my neck stood on end. My legs were wobbly. But I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.
Using good sense, or instincts, she kept it real simple. No aerobatics and no showing off. She made one graceful circular loop and then came back down to the others.
“I can do that,” Peter bragged and thrust out chin and chest. “No problema. No big deal.”
“So can I, then,” Wendy said. “I’ve been waiting to fly all my life.”
“I fly in my dreams, all day and all night,” Icarus told us. They were so sweet and good with one another. How could anyone even think of harming them?
“Better let me go first,” Oz said, pushing past the smaller twins.
“No, me!” Peter insisted, holding his ground.
“Come here, Peter,” Max said, firmly. “I’m going to be right next to you the whole time, every second. Don’t mess around, you little messers! Come here!”
“Oohh! She’s mad, ” Peter said, and he crossed his eyes.
“On the count of three, we’ll jump together,” Max told them. “Any objections? Well, keep them to yourselves.”
I stood directly behind the children. Actually, I wanted to say, “Me next!” I wanted to fly, too. I was overwhelmed with a sense of the possible.
It was a full moon, and I could see so clearly. The children suddenly pushed o
ff from the rock, all five of them. Together.
“Look at that,” Kit whispered. “Uh-oh.” Kit gently squeezed my fingers.
I gasped. It was Peter! His first movements were understandably unsure. Then he simply plummeted! “Hey… helppp! ” he called out.
Max swooped beneath him.
She deftly grabbed his lower torso and the boy flapped his wings harder and harder. He was putting everything he had into it.
“Push the air down,” Max urged him. “Push that darned old air out of the way.” She was teaching him what to do. “Relax, Peter. Don’t tighten up. You were made for this!”
With that Peter leveled off. Max had given him just enough confidence. He seemed to float, then the boy rose steadily. The others were doing fine. The sky was a kind of plum-blue and was a magnificent background for the air show.
“My God, Frannie,” Kit said beside me. “No one has ever seen anything like this. Not even those fricking scientists.”
“Will you look at them go!”
There were no mishaps. The children flew as if they’d been doing it together for years. Max appeared to be giving them simple instruction: how to bank and how to create drag. They had whistled in the woods, and they whistled now.
“Chhee-rup. Chhee-rup. ”
At first I hadn’t gotten it. Now I understood that the whistling was a way for Icarus to see.
“Chhee-rup. ”
Together the children flew across a deep, scary ravine. They circled and formed a figure eight in the air. I couldn’t catch my breath as I watched them perform.
Max called out, “I’m right here, Ic.”
Icarus whistled, then he spoke. His voice echoed through the night air. “I feel you. I feel you moving in the air!”
And although it was a little too dark to clearly see his face, I could swear that Icarus was grinning his little fool head off.
Chapter 88
I CUPPED MY HANDS together and called out clearly and loudly to Max, “Time to come down. Okay, Max? Right now.”
To my relief, she waggled her wings and gave crisp orders for her tiny squadron to land. One after the other they did land, small feet smacking the dirt floor, accompanied by squeals of laughter and the purest delight that only children seem able to feel and display.
Actually, I felt guilty about giving them orders, knowing how discipline had always been instilled into them. But it had to be done. We still weren’t safe in these woods. Not even close. Men with guns would be coming soon, if they weren’t already nearby.
I hugged them all, and even Pip was delirious with happiness. But there was no time to savor the astonishing event.
The air was cooling down fast, as it does in the mountains at the end of the summer. Kit didn’t want to make a fire and he was right, unfortunately. It would be a lot safer without one. But a whole lot colder.
We found a reasonably protected place in the lee of a couple of large boulders. We pitched away loose stones and twigs and cleared a flat place for sleeping.
We gathered piles of leaves and loose wood to use for warmth during the night. The kids wrapped their wings around and were insulated.
“We’ll be in a better place tomorrow,” I told the children. “Maybe at my house.” And maybe not.
“You promise?” said Oz.
I wanted to promise him pancakes with syrup and all the milk he could drink. I wanted to promise him a real bed without bars and a happy-ever-after life. But I had no idea what the next twenty minutes would bring.
“Go to sleep,” I told them. I put my hand on Oz’s head. “Sweet dreams, okay?”
Oz gave me a cynical little smirk, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d made him a wish, not a promise. I stood over him as he joined the huddle of bird-kids. They were scratched and bruised and I didn’t have so much as a bandage. I didn’t even have a ragged blanket to throw over them.
I bit my lips to stop them from trembling when Max began the Lord’s Prayer. The others joined in and added names to the list of those God was to bless. I didn’t recognize any of the names—except for Mrs. Beattie’s—didn’t know whether they were animal or human, living or dead. There was so much history about the children I didn’t know yet.
Max said, “And God bless Frannie and Kit, our good friends. And God bless little Pip, too, our four-legged friend.”
Who had taught the children to pray in the midst of that depravity? Was it Mrs. Beattie’s influence? Was it instinct? I wondered if God was listening to the prayers? These special children needed Him, were under His protection. It was a knotty philosophical problem, and better left to theologians.
Once the others were sleeping, Max came and sat with Kit and me. Kit asked her for the fiftieth time about the School. Who, he wanted to know, were the people who worked there? Max still referred to the people as them. She was afraid about the School in general. She had been conditioned for years not to breathe a word.
Kit kept pushing her, coaxing her.
“They’ll put us to sleep,” she finally said. “They’re not fooling around.”
“How do you know that, Max?” I asked. I was hoping, praying, that she’d tell me a hokey bogeyman story; some Dr. Frankenstein version of “Wait till your daddy gets home.”
“They kill the skitters in jars.” She looked straight at me when she said it. Her face was a mask of total seriousness and truth. She turned pale. “And they have a kill jar for each of us.”
My breath caught hard. I knew about kill jars. They were containers filled with carbon monoxide. Kill jars were used to euthanatize lab mice after they’d served their purpose in research labs.
“But they wouldn’t put children like you to sleep,” I said to her.
“Yes, they sure would put children like me to sleep,” Max said. Her eyes were small and hard. “They always put the rejects to sleep.” Her voice was barely audible, as if she were talking to herself.
“Eve was put to sleep. And so was Adam… and, I think, so was my brother, Matthew.”
Chapter 89
I SAT BRACED UP against one of the boulders and tried to let some of the shell shock wear off. I don’t swear too much, but I was thinking holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. What a mind-boggling day. I realized that my heart hadn’t stopped pounding for the past several hours. I felt raw, used up, and incredibly tired. I knew I badly needed to sleep.
And yet I couldn’t get my eyes to shut. My eyelids weren’t functioning as they should. I was breaking down.
I was also heartsick and stunned by Max’s earlier pronouncement—children like her had regularly been put to death.
They always put the rejects to sleep, she’d said. They did it as standard operating procedure.
Adam was put to sleep. So was Eve.
But who were these children with the auspicious-sounding names? Why had they been killed? What caused them to be rejected?
Kit came and sat down beside me. He looked exhausted and worried and I couldn’t blame him. “I’ve got a confession to make,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I have to get this out in the open.”
I wasn’t expecting that. Not right now. “Confession about what?” I stared at him. My stomach had already dropped a couple of notches. I didn’t need any “confessions,” but there was no way he could take back his words.
“Will you stop reading my eyes?” he said.
“I’m not. Okay, I am. I’ll try not to. Talk. What is it that you have to say to me?”
He sat cross-legged, facing me. He considered, weighed, then finally spoke.
“A few weeks ago, a geneticist was killed in his bedroom in San Francisco. So was his live-in girlfriend. It was brutal and bloody. It was made to look like a burglary gone wrong. It wasn’t, though. This geneticist,” he went on, “had helped to discover a ‘promoter gene.’ The promoter gene was probably used at the School.”
I knew that promoter genes enable genetic material to be transferred from one organism to another. The promoter acts kind of like a key, opening
a DNA lock, but it’s not an all-purpose skeleton key. Different promoter genes are required for each type of genetic alteration.
“Who told you?” I asked. And why couldn’t you have told me a couple of days ago, Kit? What else are you holding back?
“This has to come out my way,” Kit said.
I sighed. “Okay, do it your way.”
“Hopefully, when I’m done, you’ll understand.”
“Hopefully, I will.”
“The geneticist, a man named James Kim, had confided to a friend of his at MIT that he and a select group of biologists were part of an underground lab network. They were doing illegal experiments, but highly profitable ones. He was working with a team whose hub was somewhere in the Boulder area. The leak of information cost him his life. And the life of the doctor at MIT.”
“Wait, Kit, are you saying you knew that human experiments were going on?” I asked. “Did you know that before we arrived at the School? Please tell me the whole truth.”
Kit shook his head. “No. I didn’t know anything for sure. I came out here to find the underground research team—if they existed as a team, if they were here. I didn’t know if I’d find them, or what I’d do if I did. I still don’t. And I had no idea beforehand about the horrors we discovered at the school. Or about Max. Who could have imagined that? Who would have dreamed?”
I sat up straight against the uncomfortable backrest of rock. Suddenly, I wasn’t as tired as I’d thought. “Kit, will you tell me exactly what’s going on? I feel like I’m going crazy. I know my life is in danger. I know these kids are in grave danger, too. Just tell me the truth. I deserve that, don’t I?”
“I’m trying to, Frannie. It’s not black and white, though. Some of it is unbelievably hard to get at.”
“Why? Because you were such a good liar at first?”
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