It was my call. Because I was the leader.
I’m great at thinking on my feet and making snap decisions, but this—this was a big life-or-death choice. I felt stuck. And every second counted.
Dylan touched my back gently, as if to tell me that he knew it was hard, but he’d understand whichever way I went. At least, I hope that’s what he meant.
“I think Gazzy should stay,” Angel said, looking up at me. “And I’ll stay with him, to help. I’m not as good as Iggy, but I can do whatever he tells me to.”
“No, not you too,” I said.
“I’ll stay,” said Fang. “With three of us, we’ll make it work.” He turned to Gazzy. “Get going. Be fast but careful.”
“Fang is right,” said Dylan.
I realized I couldn’t fix this situation. I couldn’t make the perfect decision that would save everyone. I had to trust their instincts. And I had to do what I could.
“We need to go warn everyone in the plaza,” I said, trying to kick my brain into gear. “We need to get as many people out of there as possible.”
I didn’t say it, but we were all thinking the words just in case.
Angel nodded. “Yes. You guys get going!” She looked at me one last time. “It’ll be okay, Max. I’ll be with you always, no matter what. And Max—I believe in you. Forever.”
73
DYLAN AND I raced down the tunnel as fast as we could. I was overjoyed to see the shaft of light coming from the open manhole.
“How do we fly up through that?” Dylan asked as we skidded to a halt.
I grabbed a ladder rung set into the cement wall. “We climb!”
Once we were out, the normalcy of the street scene made what we’d encountered below seem even more surreal. Without worrying who might see us, we launched ourselves into the air and rocketed back to the stage in the middle of the Place de la Concorde.
Iggy and Nudge—no Maya in sight—were still flying, performing for the audience. Onstage, I saw an older teenage girl, talking into a headset, walking around, smiling.
“You want to be saved, don’t you?” she said.
“Yes!” the crowd roared.
“You want to be safe in the arms of the Earth Mother when the apocalypse comes, don’t you?”
“Yes!!”
“And you, your children, and your children’s children will be safe, will be saved forever, because of the choices you make today,” said the girl, turning serious. Then she smiled and walked to the other side. “And what’s the way to the future?”
“The One Light!” the crowd roared. They were practically hysterical with excitement, and I wondered if they’d been given some type of drug. I couldn’t tell. All I saw were beaming faces, fists raised in the air, people waving signs, “Kill the Humans” T-shirts.
T minus five and a half minutes. Let’s get this show on the road.
I aimed down at the stage, and the girl caught sight of me. “Look, everyone!” she shouted into the microphone. “That’s the future of the human race! Enhanced is where it’s at! That’s the promise of the One Light!”
The crowd cheered and applauded for my enhanced self.
I continued flying at full speed, and the girl’s expression went from delight to confusion to concern in a matter of seconds as I streaked toward her. I buzzed her close enough to mess up her hair, then grabbed the cordless mic out of her hand.
“Everyone! There are bombs under this plaza!” I shouted with no preamble. “You have minutes, maybe seconds to save yourselves! Everyone get out of here as fast as possible! There are bombs and poison gas under the plaza!”
I glanced at the girl. Where I’d expected to see outrage, anger, excuses thrown out at the audience to keep them there, there was… nothing. Just smiling, serene, calm. She’d known about the impending disaster awaiting the crowd, awaiting her, and she’d just accepted it.
Her tranquil smile tore at my heart like long, icy fingers. It was terrifying.
Scanning the faces of the crowd was even worse. I’d banked on screaming people swarming the exits like frightened cattle, knocking down the metal barricades. Or at the very least, some vague murmurs of alarm. Instead, they were nodding at me like puppets on strings, smiles painted into place.
The icy feeling within me was growing. They wanted to die. Every last one of them.
“This is a trap!” I bellowed at them, frantic. “There are bombs under this plaza! Bombs and poison gas! Don’t you get it? Get out of here! Scram! Save yourselves!”
“Save the planet! Kill the humans!” they chanted. “Support the future of enhanced society!”
Dylan swooped beside me and grabbed the microphone. “How are you going to get enhanced if you’re all blown up into little pieces?” he yelled.
They actually cheered.
Every ounce of energy seemed to leak out of me, and I felt like giving up right then. If everyone wanted to go up in one big firework, who was I to snuff out the spark? But then I glanced over and saw the determined look on Dylan’s face as Nudge and Iggy dropped onstage for backup, and I remembered who I was and what I was here for.
These freaks might have thought they were saving the world, but that was my job, and they were going to play by my rules. Which didn’t involve any of that “Kill the Humans” crap.
Fight time!
74
THEN A SORT of riot broke out, but it wasn’t the outraged, we-don’t-want-to-die kind we’d hoped for. A bunch of the One Lighters jumped onstage and made a beeline for us, mumbling about “merging with the promise of enhancement.”
Truly horrific.
Nudge and Iggy were going all Fight Club on some of the DG guards, who were heavily muscled, as if they’d already received enhancements. But it wasn’t those dudes that were giving them trouble. My flock were pros. A roundhouse kick here, a karate chop there, and the guards were toast. It really was just like riding a bicycle.
No, it was the kids—the culties—who were the real problem. Picture Michael Jackson in that “Thriller” video, surrounded by flesh-craving zombies closing in. That was us, but our dead-eyed suicidal zombies all had angelic grins pasted on their faces as they pawed at our wings. It was like they wanted to claim us. Ick.
The mob was a living, breathing sponge, hundreds of kids deep. And after spending my developmental years in a cage… Claustrophobia? I has it. They were clutching at us, pulling on our feathers, touching our arms and our faces. How do you fight a swarm of sickos who want to die and don’t mind taking you with them?
And all this while the countdown to D-day continued.
I was panicking, really panicking, for the first time in… at least a few days. And as I glanced around, the overwhelmed faces of Dylan, Iggy, and Nudge were not the least bit reassuring.
Right on cue, Maya showed up, gang in tow. They were able to rip through the crowd, in part because at first the culties didn’t seem to understand that the gang was enhanced as well.
Kate grabbed armfuls of Doomsday kids, four or five at a time, and hurled them out the exits. When she’d cleared a pathway through the crowd for us, she picked up two huge, lumbering guards and swung them upside down by their feet, one in each hand, while Nudge boxed their noses, dodging the rush of blood. With space cleared, we could use our wings again and attack from above.
Meanwhile, Ratchet seemed to sense every attacker coming his way, and, on top of that, seemed to be kicking it at some old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat. He had teamed up with Iggy, who was a natural spinning, whirling dealer of pain as he punched, kicked, and chopped his way through an onslaught of guards. They both looked pretty happy.
And Star, the blond girl, had hit on the biggest jackpot of all, sort of by accident. She was using her hummingbird speed to flit in circles around the guards, who looked so dizzy and confused that it was almost kind of pathetic.
But the key thing was that when she was zipping around, she was making this high-pitched noise—a supersped-up “Aiiyah!”—that seemed to c
rack the Doomsday code of brainwashing. The kids were covering their ears, but that sound, and some common sense, was getting through. Star had done for these kids in ten seconds what it had taken Angel hours of mind-coaxing to accomplish: They were… snapping out of it. And running for the exits.
Huh. Wish we’d figured that out sooner!
With the mob no longer singing Killmas carols, maybe we could wrap up this little party and make sure Gazzy and Angel were safe. Though with Fang there, of course they were. He wouldn’t have left them—
Right then, Ratchet signaled to us, and Dylan spied something I couldn’t quite see off to the side of the stage. His face twisted with rage as he pushed me out of the way.
“Look—” he started to say, then suddenly his voice cut out, and I saw him spin like a top. Blood started flowing to the ground, spurting like drops of rain.
75
“DYLAN!” I SCREAMED. I knelt down beside him, feeling pukey and fuzzy and like the wind had been knocked out of me. He was holding his arm (sigh of relief) tight, grimacing. Blood leaked out through his fingers.
“It’s fine,” Dylan said tersely. “Bullet went right through—bone seems okay.”
I didn’t even have a second to give him my best I’m-really-glad-you-didn’t-just-die-because-I-kind-of-like-you-more-than-I-thought look though, because—
“Max, watch out!” Dylan shouted and shoved me. Stage right, an older man with wild hair and plastic-like skin was firing a gun at us.
“Mark, no!” shouted Beth, the Queen of the Cult. Big of her.
The guy pushed the girl aside and aimed, and I dodged a bullet that came close enough to nick my feathers. I tried to drag Dylan out of the way, but the guy was still popping off as many shots as he could.
“Max, go! Don’t protect me!” Dylan yelled. “Go!”
Then, Holden, the little Fang gang kid, came out of nowhere with an apparent death wish. He raced directly toward the maniac with the gun shrieking something that sounded like “I am Starfishhh!”
Holden looked like Swiss cheese for a second as Mark used up the last of his ammo, but the holes on the kid’s arms closed up in seconds flat. This little daredevil had some serious chops, and by now most of the flock and the gang were closing in. The gunman, looking more than a little freaked out, ran offstage like a five-year-old girl.
I was still leaning over Dylan—the bullet hole was already healing, and he had some color back in his face—when someone cut in.
“Need a hand?” Fang asked. Dylan looked at the hand wearily, but took it, pulling himself up.
I raised an eyebrow at Fang.
He shrugged. “What? I’m trying to learn to be a team player.” Dylan actually smiled and, get this, fist-bumped my ex.
I nodded, a little dazed, and moved to the other side of the stage to herd out more of the confused former One Lighters.
It was actually kind of amazing to see two of the guys I cared most about in the world, different in so many ways, fighting together side by side. Fang covered Dylan’s weak side, and together they were doing some serious damage. We’ve come a long way, baby, I was musing, when suddenly a heavy weight hit me in the back.
Then two viselike hands clamped around my neck.
76
“YOU COULD HAVE ruled your own country!” Mark, the cowardly shooter, yelled into my ear. Lesson number one: megalomaniacs never give up when they should.
I tried to rise up on my hands and knees, but the guy was on my back and weighed a ton.
“Whoa!” I coughed, struggling to breathe. “What’d you get enhanced with—ham?”
“You could have been a princess in the New World! But now you’re going to die like a lowly, ordinary human.” He practically spat the last word, though he appeared to be human himself—a heavily Botoxed, steroid cocktail of a human, but a human nonetheless. This guy needed an intense course on overcoming self-hatred, stat.
“The thing about being a princess,” I managed to say, still struggling to get out from underneath him, “is that… you have to… kiss… a lot of… frogs!”
He was strong, and I clawed at his fingers with shockingly little effect. He clamped down harder on my windpipe, and I started to get really worried. I heard blood rushing in my ears, heard my heartbeat slowing. Not good.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.
“You are a black cloud over the One Light,” I heard the man say, as if from a distance. “You won’t destroy everything I’ve worked for and planned for all these years!”
Suddenly my head got yanked to one side, and the vise grip around my neck slackened a bit. I pried off his fingers with difficulty as I heard his voice, full of hatred and rage, shrieking, then a rush of air whooshed into my lungs so fast it was almost painful. I gasped like a fish, sucking in air with a wheeze, and then I heard my voice snarl, “That’s not how it’s going to end, dirtbag!”
I got up on all fours, wobbly, my head starting to clear.
But it hadn’t been my voice after all. It had been Maya’s. She had broken off a piece of a metal barricade and beaned ol’ Mark with it as hard as she could.
Of course, Mark, pumped up with who knows what, survived the blow. With an angry bellow, he got to his feet as I stumbled out of the way. Maya hauled back and smashed the metal pole into Mark again. There was an awful thwock.
“You know,” I choked out, “the bigger they are…” I lined myself up with Maya and grabbed the other end of the pole.
“The harder they fall!” Maya said, and the two of us rushed Mark using our combined strength to clobber him one more time. He staggered backward, looking surprised, and just as he started to look angry, he fell back off the stage, flailing through the air.
He landed ten feet below with a sickening crunch—I’m guessing his enhancements didn’t allow him to bounce back up like a ball. We call that a design flaw.
Maya and I looked at each other as I began to wrap my mind around the depressing realization that she had probably just saved my life.
“Max!” Dylan rushed over, and I blinked and looked around. The guards were all taken care of, what was left of my flock was still standing, and the rally had mostly dispersed.
It looked like another job well done. Now I just had to find Angel and Gazzy.
But as I took one last look at Mark’s body on the ground, I saw—were those?—wires sticking out below him. He wasn’t a bot, we knew that much, so were they connected to—
And that was when the City of Lights exploded with a thunderous boom!
77
THE NEXT FEW moments, surprisingly, proved that a lot of what Dr. Hans and the DGs had said was true: those of us with wings and wild-animal DNA were up above the blast in less than two seconds, leaving danger, rubble, and chaos behind. People left on the ground weren’t so lucky: those nearby were hurled into the air by the blast, and more were injured by flying debris. Trembling aftershocks also took a toll.
Through the dust and debris, I saw Fang’s gang, most of it, outside the plaza. I guessed that Ratchet had sensed what was about to happen, and they were strong enough and fast enough to get to safety quickly.
“Everyone okay?” I barked, and they nodded. Next to me, Maya did a quick head count. No Fang. Or Gazzy. Or Angel. My adrenaline surged.
“What happened?” I said, scanning the ground anxiously. “Gazzy’s never not been able to dismantle something!”
“I’m not sensing poison gas,” Dylan said, “not that that means anything. It might be odorless and tasteless.”
I circled quickly, going lower as the smoke settled. Where the open manhole had been, there was now a huge crater, maybe thirty feet across and thirty feet deep. My heart seized. Where was Gazzy? Angel? Fang?
Suddenly, I saw a smallish birdkid soaring upward, just as another gigantic explosion rocked the street. Shockwaves knocked me back several feet, and I inhaled a bunch of dust.
“Max!” Gazzy’s face was black, his eyes wide and scared.
&nbs
p; “Gaz! Thank God you’re okay! Where’s Angel? And Fang?”
Gazzy started choking, forgetting to keep himself aloft, and I drifted down beside him as he landed on the broken granite pavers and rubble. He opened his mouth to speak, but coughed, then tears started running down his cheeks.
“Gazzy! What happened?” I said, but he shook his head, coughing,
Aftershocks rumbled below us again, and I made Gaz take to the air in case of another explosion. He could fly okay, but he looked miserable, and he kept gagging and spitting out dust.
Where was Angel? Where was Fang? I shot a panicked look at Dylan, and he understood immediately, diving down the hole to find them.
Could Angel and Fang really be gone? My brain whirled at the horrible possibility. Gazzy was still wheezing, unable to talk. There were times when I’d thought I’d lost Angel or Fang before. And when Fang left, I never thought I’d ever see him again. But that had felt more like… I wouldn’t see him, but he still existed. What about now? How would it feel if he—
I was swallowing shakily, terrified thoughts piercing my brain like shards of glass. Just as Dylan landed on the street, Fang shot up toward me, coming through the billowing clouds of dust and debris. His shirt was shredded, his face bruised and cut. Like Gazzy, he was covered with soot.
“Gaz! You made it out,” he gasped, when he got closer.
“Angel was right behind me,” Gazzy said. “Right behind me!” He looked around us, everywhere, as if expecting to see his sister making her way toward us.
I flew right up to Fang and clutched him, if only to convince myself that he was really alive.
That intense joy and relief ended in a nanosecond. I pulled back and grabbed his shoulders. “Where’s Angel?!”
“I—don’t—”
“How could you leave her?” I shrieked.
“Max, I—Gaz was almost done and I thought—Angel said—”
I looked into Fang’s face. His dark eyes, usually bottomless, were full of emotion. His face was ashen. My eyes widened and my hands dropped from his shoulders. I let my wings take me backward, away from him, as a silent, searing scream started to rise in my chest. He didn’t say anything out loud, but he told me just the same: he didn’t know where Angel was, and he was afraid that something awful had happened to her.
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