“Akila!” Total was off in a flash to be reunited with his furry lady love.
Wow. They really have thought of everything, I thought.
Laughing, Angel, Fang, and I followed my mom farther down the path.
“This is you, Max.” My mom nodded up at a mammoth banyan tree.
My new home was almost impossible to see if you didn’t know it was there—the perfect hideout. At the top of the towering trunk, a canopy of leaves reached for the sun.
“It’s beautiful,” I said in awe.
“It suits you,” Fang said from behind me, his breath making the hairs on my neck stand up.
I looked at the brittle, gnarled roots snaking all the way up and around the trunk, creating a hard, protective layer for the tree’s core. Maybe Fang wasn’t so far off.
“How do we get in?” I asked.
My mom turned and smiled at me. “You fly.”
75
I COULD FLY in here, I thought breathlessly. Inside my own house.
The tree was completely hollow. The ceiling was made of thick protective glass, but it was all the way up top, near the banyan’s broad, glossy leaves. Strips of sunlight filtered through the canopy, reminding me of old, dusty churches with swallows darting among the rafters.
Angel stayed with me to explore the place after Mom had taken Fang somewhere—who knows where; maybe a floating tree-house hospital in paradise?—to remove the bandages from his quickly healing wounds. As we explored, all kinds of cool little details caught our eyes. The furniture looked like the tree itself had just grown naturally into rough, chairlike shapes, and tunnels from the main room led to elaborate balconies with comfy hammocks. It all looked kind of haphazard, but at the same time beautifully, thoughtfully designed.
Someone knows me very well, I thought.
I pressed a button on one wall and a metal ladder spiraled silently down to the jungle floor below. Mechanical. Fancy.
I soared upward, the wood circling around me in a blur, and found the latch to a door in the glass ceiling that lead to the roof. There was a small balcony high above the jungle’s canopy where I could see everything: the towering cliffs on the other side of the island, the sea lapping against the sandy coast… and, of course, it was an ideal spot for spying on my wayward flock.
The perfect perch. Angel and I sat there together for a moment.
I was dreaming of long days of swimming, cliff-diving, soaring above the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, so I was surprised to suddenly catch sight of Angel’s distant, unsettling look.
“What, honey?” I said gently.
She looked up at me urgently. “I want to stay here forever,” she said, gripping my hand tightly. “Max, I never want to leave.”
“You won’t have to, sweetie,” I promised her. I peered at the banyan’s sturdy silhouette and beamed. “None of us will ever have to leave again.”
I felt so much relief as I said it, knowing it was true. But Angel was still staring at me, like she didn’t want to let me out of her newly recovered sight. Her eyes were huge in her little face, and she seemed pretty spooked.
“Angel?” I said uneasily. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, but it came out as a stressed little squeak. “It’s just… nothing.”
I put my arm around her. “I know you’ve been through a lot lately, but that’s all over now. You can trust my mom. We’re thousands of miles from anyone who would hurt you, and totally off the radar. It’s safe here. Really.”
Angel let out her tense breath and smiled. “Thanks, Max.” She walked over to the doorway. “I’ll be at my tree house if you want to find me.”
As I gave Angel a quick good-bye hug, I noticed that a thick branch connected my home to another tree house. I shimmied across it, wondering which member of the flock’s butt I’d have to kick in the mornings, weighing the pros and cons of waking up to Nudge’s sugary pop music versus being downwind of Gazzy’s infamous morning emissions.
Instead, the bold, black letters staring back at me from the wooden plaque on the door caused a helpless little squeak to come out of my mouth: DYLAN.
Does. Not. Compute.
That name on the door was like a hard fist to my stomach, and I felt all the stuff I’d been so good at swallowing come back up: Anger that he’d almost killed Fang in front of all of us. Hurt and confusion over his complete freak-out. Shame for all the stupid, fluttery feelings I’d felt when he looked at me with those ocean eyes of his. Clearly he was not my perfect other half. Everything came spewing out like some sort of emotional vomit.
Romantic, huh?
And because the universe just loves to screw with my emotions, I felt a hand on my shoulder right then, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Was he…?
“Don’t worry, Max,” my mom said, striding past me.
I exhaled. The ladder—I’d left it down.
With one hard wrench, she pried the nameplate off the door and tossed it out of the tree like yesterday’s garbage. “That sign will be replaced.” Mom sighed.
“Uhhh,” I groaned, totally incapable of any other response. I clenched my jaw and concentrated on pushing every stupid thought of Dylan back down again.
“Fang! Up here! Come see your house,” Mom called from the balcony. She looked back at me with… what? Pity? “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, giving my arm a squeeze. “He wasn’t… expected.”
76
“THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE you need to know,” my mom said when we all met up again, and Fang’s eyes flicked to mine.
Was it all too good to be true?
“What?” I asked uneasily.
“Let me show you,” she said, and then she called the rest of the flock to join her.
After a short, brisk hike through the jungle, during which my anxiety steadily grew, the flock finally emerged to face the spectacular cliffs we’d seen from our houses. My heart leaped. I couldn’t wait to dive over the edge and weave through all those crazy crevices, the wind surging through my feathers.
But before I could take off, my mom put two fingers to her mouth and let out a crisp, high-pitched whistle. A signal. The flock looked around, confused. The place seemed abandoned.
Then slowly, tentatively, people started emerging from the surrounding trees and from fractures in the rocks. I remembered what Angel had said about my mom earlier, that she was a traitor, and had a moment of panic. Hostiles?
I immediately took a defensive stance and the flock followed suit, ready to attack, but then I realized something.
“There aren’t any adults,” I said, relaxing. “It’s all kids.”
Their expressions were serene, welcoming, and as they came closer I saw scales, tails, metal arms.
“They’re mutants!” Gazzy squeezed Iggy’s arm.
“Yes,” my mother answered. “All enhanced kids. Just like you.”
As if to punctuate her words, a girl who looked about eight years old unfurled a pair of speckled black and gray wings, laughing to her friends. They all soared upward ten, twenty, thirty feet.
“Just like us,” Nudge whispered, echoing my mom.
Even Fang was grinning. It was impossible not to. After so many years of being experimented on, of doing what everyone else wanted us to do, of running, running, running, we were finally in a place where we belonged.
“Max,” Mom said, and I followed her gaze to the jungle behind us.
There, with a ginormous grin on her face, was my half sister.