“Yeah?”
“The others must have waited a couple hours, then surfaced,” Clete said. “But I—I fell asleep there, under the floor. I only woke up when I heard Calypso screaming. Then I heard heavy footsteps and Moke fighting back and Rain trying to get away.”
He looked anxiously into my face as if I would already have a plan in place, because that was my job—knowing what to do. But I had nothing. I sat down heavily in one of the school chairs at a table and put my aching head in my hands. The numbing shot had worn off, and my cheek strained against the stitches every time I swallowed, or spoke.
“What should we do, Hawk?” Clete asked, all of his tension in his voice.
“Let me think for a minute, Clete,” I said. “What time did you hear them?”
Clete looked at his watch. “I guess… around two? I had missed lunch.”
“Okay. Let me think.” The soldiers probably hadn’t taken the lab rats off campus. At the other end of this huge complex were the Labs, where the doctors and scientists conducted their experiments on Opes, kids, and prisoners on death row. The lab rats were probably there. The question was—how could we get them back? And if we got them back, how could we keep them? They would never let us keep them. Which meant we all had to leave. Leave this place forever.
So I needed to come up with a plan to rescue the kids and escape to some new place far away in the city, where we wouldn’t be found. We couldn’t leave the city. Not unless we wanted to die in the desert.
And this plan had only one chance of working. If it failed, we were all dead.
CHAPTER 18
“This better work,” Clete muttered anxiously.
We were dressed in our usual coveralls, heading down the long corridor to the laundry rooms. As if nothing was wrong. As if I hadn’t lost most of my family in one day. As if rescuing them—if possible—would make me lose the only home I could remember. As if rescuing them meant I’d never see Pietro again.
Overhead, the dim lights flickered. My mind raced with adrenaline-fueled ideas—how to break the kids out, how to escape. If only they had wings! It would make all this so easy. And where could we live? Maybe way in the northeast corner of the City of the Dead? People didn’t ask a lot of questions there.
“Hawk?” Clete’s voice brought me back to the now. He was pointing at a sign that said, HALLWAY CLOSED DUE TO REPAIR. TAKE MAIN CORRIDOR INSTEAD.
An armed guard stood there, gesturing to an open door. “Stay in the exact middle of the prison corridor,” he warned us. “Go single file. And don’t let the shit they say bother you. There’s another guard at the end who will get you to the laundry.”
“Uh, okay,” I said, and motioned to Clete to go first. Just a little hiccup, I told myself. We weren’t going to come back through this hall anyway. From the laundry room, the Labs were across another big courtyard and down another long hall. Since I could fly, I could go anywhere. But I had to think of Clete. Maybe I could get him out, stash him somewhere, then get the others and go meet him? My head pounded with all the possibilities, and my cheek throbbed with pain, despite the pills. Despite my brain running on automatic, the rest of me was weak from loss of blood, the pain in my cheek hot and burning.
“Heyyyyy, baaaay-beeee!” Startled, I realized that we were walking through the main jail of the complex. We walked single file in the exact middle of the concrete floor—if we veered right or left, reaching hands could grab us.
“Hawk?” Clete muttered again.
“I know, Clete,” I murmured. “It’s okay. It’s almost over. You’re doing great.” For all his weird habits and hyper-brain abilities with computers, in some ways he was like a little kid.
We were almost through. Some prisoners were throwing things at us—chalk, toothbrushes (the rubber kind you put on one finger, because you can’t stab anybody with those). Basically anything they could part with, which meant anything they couldn’t turn into a weapon. They shouted things that made the back of Clete’s neck go bright red, but I didn’t have time to listen to them. I had to plan.
Okay, Hawk, I thought, let’s start thinking about the Labs.
The Labs were very bad. Being taken to the Labs meant your time was up. That keeping you alive wasn’t as important as McCallum finding out if you could live through a new biological weapon, or a new vaccine, or a new treatment for getting all the heavy metals out of your blood. I’ll save some time here and tell you the answer is no, to all. You do not live through it. If by some reason you sort of do and they bring you back to the Children’s Home, you won’t last long. You’ll be like a corn husk, like a walnut shell, with nothing inside. Then you’ll die, and whoever’s left calls the soldiers and they take you away again, this time to dump you over the city wall with the rest of the trash.
“Phoenix!”
Automatically I looked up, looked around. And realized with horror that it was the new prisoner talking. He was looking at me through the bars in his cell. I gave a fierce frown and prodded Clete between his shoulder blades so he would hurry up.
“Phoenix!” the prisoner said again. He pushed his face between the bars, staring at me. I ignored him.
“I knew it was too much to hope that you would still be waiting for us after all this time,” the prisoner said, speaking loudly to make sure I heard. “But I still hoped. And then I saw you from the courtyard!”
My jaw was tight as I marched forward. A few more steps and I’d be past his cell.
“I’d recognize you anywhere,” the creep went on. “Because you look like me. Phoenix, I’m your father. Don’t you remember Dad-man? And Mom?”
My eyes flared and I turned slowly to look at him. “My name is Hawk, asshole! I don’t need your crap and your lie…” My voice trailed off as I realized that, actually, he did kind of look like me. Without the mohawk, the tattoos, and the piercings. And a man. But we had the same black hair, black eyes, thin nose, narrow mouth.
Suddenly my exhaustion and loss of blood made me sway, made the jail go fuzzy and gray for a moment. I grabbed Clete’s shirt and managed to keep my balance. He’d turned at the criminal’s words and now was looking back and forth between us.
“I don’t have parents,” I bit out. “You think I would be here if I had parents?”
The killer winced as if I had slapped him. “You do have parents!” he said, his voice hoarse. “Your mom and I named you Phoenix. We’ve been trying to get back to you for ten years. Your mom is… an amazing revolutionary. Her name is Max. Maximum Ride.”
I held on to Clete as the floor went out from under me, and then I fell, down, down into darkness.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 19
Max
I ran out of wall space to mark the days going by maybe a year ago? Three years? No idea. I’m not super tied into reality these days.
These days. The Powers That Be had been especially cruel, putting me on the top floor of Devil’s Hill. Its real name is McCallum Island Penitentiary. No one calls it that, and Devil’s Hill is a much more fitting name, anyway. But here on the top floor, my window—maybe twenty centimeters by forty, forty-five centimeters?—I’ve never gotten used to this metric crap. Anyway, the “window” that’s too small for any humanoid of any age to fit through, and yet has thick bars every four inches—damnit—ten centimeters—anyway, that window actually looks out on sky. I can see blue sky. I can see scary dark thunderclouds roiling toward me. I can see lightning flash, making my cell glow for a metric fraction of a second. I can hear birds, seabirds, calling hoarsely to each other, but I usually can’t see the suckers. And I sure can’t join them, fly freely among them, swerving and dipping and wafting along on a warm updraft, like I used to.