“Max!” The voice is clearer, immediate.
The water cradles me closer. Am I moving at all? Is this real?
My eyes trace slowly, lazily up the hand that’s entwined with mine, the squared fingers tan and vaguely familiar. And strong. Like the arm and shoulder the hand is connected to. The face finally registers just as we break the surface.
As does shock.
Thrashing, I stupidly suck in a huge breath through my nose, instead of using the gills I developed long ago. The harsh air rips through my lungs, and I double over, coughing and choking out water.
“I told you I would come back for you,” Dylan whispers, rubbing my back.
Two
FANG, DYLAN, ANGEL, and I sit perched on a large, exposed ridge of rock that rises high out of the water. We’re alive. A little soggy and a lot banged up, maybe, but still living, breathing.
Survivors.
Hawks soar above us, diving through the narrow crevices, their long brown feathers mirroring my own. As the sun warms my face, I long to join them.
I peer out over the vast strangeness of the landscape, a charred wasteland: the island, now broken up into hundreds of smaller islands, with narrow inlets snaking in and out of them; the spindly remaining trees, branchless, barkless, standing straight up like frightened soldiers with an army of dead brothers at their feet; the hardening ash, swirling into surreal silver spirals, hot air belching out of cracks in the crust to form thermal pools; and an unfathomable high-tech city of luxury, sealed in caves that are now buried below the turquoise water.
It’s been only a few hours since the Split—when the gash in the sky severed this new world from the old one—but we swam and limped and swerved into our new existence feeling changed.
But we haven’t changed, really; the rest of the world has. And somehow, this new world makes sense in a way that the old one never did.
Fang’s tying a singed but sturdy branch to my wing with a scrap of his T-shirt, creating a splint. My wing, though still painful, is already healing before my eyes. Because it was made to. We are not fragile creatures, after all.
And that is why we’re still here.
Dylan is watching Fang’s movements—deft, efficient—but there’s no threat there. Something has shifted.
In all of us.
“I read about something like this happening in Russia,” Dylan says, answering the question we’re all asking in our heads: What, exactly, was that thing that split our world in two? “The Tunguska event, I think it was, in the early twentieth century. A meteor exploded near the earth’s surface and wiped out miles and miles of forest.”
I can’t help but notice how confident he sounds, how he doesn’t look down when he talks, how he’s no longer embarrassed about his interest in science, his love of books. He’s just eager to share the knowledge that will help the group survive. He knows, as we all do, that we can use any help we can get.
“This seems a lot bigger than that one, though,” he says. “I wonder if anything like this is happening elsewhere—like a ripple effect or something. Just look at the sky. I’ve definitely never read about anything like that.”
The sky has taken on this bizarre, Technicolor hue that warps and shimmers like some psychedelic black-light poster—totally surreal. Yet… it feels familiar, somehow. Like I’ve been dreaming about it every night of my life, but I’ve just forgotten my dreams each day on waking to the life in which I have been trapped.
I keep thinking how amazing this place is going to be to explore by air.
Dylan stands up. “We should probably start combing the perimeter for possible other entrances to the caves. The main line I took everybody through is now underwater.”
“I’ll check out the tree-house village,” Fang says. “See if there’s anything left, start the rebuilding.” He gives my hand a tight squeeze, but that desperation, that urgency between us is gone. No insecurities. Max and Fang. Fang and Max. No longer a question. We just are.
Angel and I sit together on the edge, watching the guys soar through the air. We don’t need to talk, because everything is understood. The weirdness that had come between us is gone, and since resurfacing I haven’t heard a word from my Voice, trying to tell me what to do. There’s no leader now, no power. We’re all working—quickly, efficiently—together.
It’s well documented that I’ve never been very good at school or any of the other junk normal kids are supposed to slog through. That’s because I’m not normal, and never have been. None of us are. But in this postapocalyptic world, on this tiny, wrecked island, I have a feeling we’re going to excel.
“Dylan’s right that this thing’s big,” Angel says after a few minutes. “I’m tapping into Dr. Martinez’s thoughts, and they’re monitoring satellite connections all over the world from inside the caves. This wasn’t the only event. It’s triggered a ripple effect. There’s been major volcanic and tectonic activity. Whole countries may be covered in water, ash, or flame. It’s unclear at this point.”
The two of us are silent for a long moment, letting that sink in—that the whole world and probably most of the people we know in it are done for.
“I’m so glad that it wasn’t me, that it wasn’t us,” Angel says, her eyes brimming with tears. “Isn’t that selfish?”
I shake my head. “It’s not selfish. We’re here. We’re alive. I’m not going to apologize for surviving.” That might sound harsh, but through the grief and the devastation, I can’t help feeling hope, too. If you could choose between life and death, wouldn’t you leap toward living with everything you had?
No one wanted life as we knew it to end. But we were made for this. Surviving, I mean. And the truth is, we weren’t that great at fitting in to life as we knew it, anyway. In fact, life as we knew it kind of sucked. Stuck in cages, trackers implanted beneath our skin, all that power they shoveled between us, turning us into sideshow freaks.
That’s all over now. The whitecoats only know how to live in a world where they can have cushy homes and order factory-farmed, premade food. This is definitely not their world.
It’s ours.
“I know what you mean,” Angel says, reading my thoughts. Her blue eyes have a faraway look, and even without the ash in her feathers, she looks older, more mature. Like she grew a century in an hour. Like she grew into that Voice of hers. “It’s almost like we were meant for this world, and not that other one. Like it’s finally our time.”
It’s a dark thought, but one I can’t turn away from. This is an environment that requires a little something extra from its inhabitants. Half of it is underwater. And we have gills. The other half is made of unreachable cliffs and towering trees. And we have wings. This place is primal, and it’s raw.
I was made for this.
And if I’m going to start this new life being who I am truly meant to be, there is something I know I have to do.
I look beyond Angel’s windblown curls and see that Fang has returned and is looking at me.
I walk over to him, our gazes fully locked. And when I reach him, I don’t hesitate to say what I know is the most important truth of my life. The only truth.
“I love you, Fang,” I whisper.
He smiles and takes my hand.
We stand together on the precipice, opening our wings to their full span and watching the long feathery shadows reach out over the land below.
In a way, maybe I did die in that wet grave, because it’s like I was completely reborn when I came up from that water. The air feels different to me now. I’m breathing it differently now. Like my body is a whole new machine.