“Fang’s gang,” Ratchet said from the floor. “Got it, bro.” The girls nodded in agreement.
“Okay, then. I guess we’re all straight on that,” Fang said.
“Straight on what?” Max said from behind him.
Fang’s heart almost stopped.
23
FANG SPUN AROUND and saw Max standing there, giving him the sardonic smile he knew so well.
“Straight on the fact that we need to work together as a team,” Fang managed to say. His heart contracted painfully inside his chest, then started beating again. “Where’d you come from?”
Max smirked and pointed at the sky, then wriggled a bit, adjusting her wings under her oversized windbreaker. “This was where we were supposed to meet, right?” She scanned the rest of Fang’s gang.
“Yeah,” Fang said, taking a deep breath. God help him, she even smelled familiar. “It’s been a long time.”
“Has it?” Max cocked her head and looked him up and down. “It feels like we just saw each other.”
Fang sighed. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea. He’d underestimated how he’d react to her. Way underestimated.
Max flipped her light brown hair over one shoulder, and Fang noticed that she’d dyed a big magenta streak in part of it. Other than that, she looked exactly the same.
Exactly the same as the Max he’d left barely more than a week ago, back in Colorado. He wondered what she was doing now, what she’d think about his joining forces with… her. The other her, that is. Max the Clone. Max II.
“Hi, I’m Kate,” Kate said, extending her hand.
Max II looked at the hand, then shook it, a smile lifting one side of her mouth. Max’s mouth. The mouth Fang had kissed so many times. Blood was rushing through his head, and he needed to clear it, to take control of this situation again. Worse, he had the feeling that this Max knew exactly what he was thinking, could read his mind, and was somehow laughing at him.
“And this is Star,” Kate said, pointing. “And that’s… Ratchet.”
“Yo.” Ratchet had gotten up off the floor, but his hands were buried in the pockets of his hoodie. “Cool hair. Is it dyed in blood or something? ’Cause that would be hard-core.”
Max II snickered, unphased by his comment.
“And what’s your name?” Star asked politely, but in the twenty-four hours Fang had known her, he’d learned to recognize the tone of warning beneath her politeness.
“Her name is—” Fang began, but Max II interrupted him.
“Maya. They call me Maya.” She shoved her hands into her pockets and sat down on one of the beds, daring him to contradict her.
Fang blinked. So she had changed her name. He couldn’t blame her.
“You okay, dude?” Rachet elbowed Fang in the ribs. “You’re looking a little green around the gills.”
Fang nodded his head, avoiding Maya’s eyes. “I’m fine. We just—go back a long time.”
Ratchet eyed the tips of Maya’s wings sticking out of her coat and gave a low whistle. “Say no more, man. I get you. You guys were all Swan Lake, doing the lovebird dance, and now it’s a little Emotions on Ice.” He looked at Kate. “I go for the Wonder Woman type myself.”
Kate’s smooth Asian face flushed bright red, and Star looked disgusted. “Maybe he could use another knee to the jugular,” she suggested.
Maya laughed. “Fun little group you got here.”
Fang forced a smile and nodded. This had been a huge mistake.
BOOK TWO
WHAT’S SO FUNNY ’BOUT PEACE, LOVE, AND WORLD DESTRUCTION?
24
“DO YOU SEE any guards?” I asked Dylan. Of course, I was still quietly freaking out about the second “coincidence,” but he didn’t need to know that…
“Not yet,” he said. “But they must be there. Are we thinking drop down onto the roof? Or land in the desert, then sneak up?”
“Roof,” I said, and he nodded. I hated it when he was agreeable.
Naturally, they weren’t going to let us just drop down onto the roof. My life could never be that easy. After all, this was a top-secret facility where new life-forms were being created. You think they’d let strangers plunk right down onto the roof?
No.
As soon as we were within three hundred feet, a door on the roof swung open, and figures all in black complete with ninja hoods, leaped out. They popped rifles up on their shoulders and took aim.
“Evasive maneuvers!” I yelled, but Dylan was already matching me zig for zag as we poured on the speed, blazing into the sky.
A bullet whistled past my ear. They were using long-distance sniper’s rifles.
“Watch it, Max!” Dylan grabbed my hand and yanked me to the left, just as another bullet streaked by, right where my head had been. I gaped at him, and he dropped my hand sheepishly. He shrugged. “I saw the guy aim.”
The people on the roof were little stick figures by now. Another hundred feet up and they’d disappear from my view.
“Freaking whitecoats!” I screamed, even though they’d been dressed in black. “So, what? You think if you can create life, you can destroy it too?”
Dylan looked down again, squinting. “Wait. They’re not whitecoats,” he said. “They’re not even grown-ups. They’re… I think they’re kids.”
“Oh, come on,” I protested. “They might have been a little short, but—”
“I could see them,” Dylan insisted, sounding agitated. “Inside their masks. They were kids, Max. I’m positive. And it gets worse. They didn’t, they didn’t have—eyes.”
“What?” I gasped. We’d reached a good cruising altitude, well out of range of fire. From this height, the land below looked like a crazy quilt stitched together.
“They didn’t have eyes,” he repeated, genuinely troubled.
“Great, give the blind kids guns,” I said, trying to lessen his horror. “I don’t even let Iggy have a gun. Usually.” I glanced over at Dylan, but he wasn’t smiling.
“But… they could still aim. They still knew we were there, somehow,” he said.
“They must have some sort of alternate sensing system. I wonder if they have no eyes on purpose, or if it was a mistake? I mean, Iggy is blind because they operated on him, trying to give him better night vision.”
Dylan looked appalled. “You’re kidding.”
“Don’t you get it?” I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “People like that—mad-scientist types—we aren’t human to them. We’re experiments. And those kids down there, kids who have been trained to kill, kids who have no eyes—they’re experiments too.”
“That’s all we’ll ever be, isn’t it?” Dylan shook his head sadly. “Lab rats. Just someone’s theory, someone’s pipe dream. And they’ve already replaced us with the next best thing.”
He looked so pitiful, so lost, that before I even knew what I was doing, I took his hand in mine. On purpose. It was warm and soft. Not battle hardened yet.
Then I said something that I’ve said very rarely in my life—even more rarely than “I love you.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
25
DYLAN GAVE MY hand a squeeze and smiled weakly. Out of nowhere, I had a vision of kissing those soft, perfect lips. Then Fang’s face flashed before my eyes. I fell into a sudden coughing fit and dropped Dylan’s hand like a dead fish.
“You okay?” Dylan asked, rubbing my back. When I glared at him, he, thankfully, had the decency to change the subject.
“It’s later than I thought,” he said. “I say we camp out in the desert tonight, spy on the school from a distance, and maybe find a way to sneak in tomorrow morning.”