His eyes, looking like the familiar kid-Ari eyes, met mine. "All of us experiments have built-in expiration dates. When someone's time is pretty close, it shows up on the back of their neck. Mine showed up a couple days ago. So my time is soon."
I looked at him, appalled. "So what happens on that date?"
He shrugged and stood to start wheeling me forward again. "I'll die. They would have exterminated me with the others, but my time is really close anyway. So they cut me a break. Because, you know, I'm Jeb's son."
His voice cracked as he said that, and I stared straight ahead down the hall.
This was a new low, even for mad scientists.
45
I don't know if you guys ever tour top-secret evil science labs, like for school field trips or something. But I got a tour that day, and if I had had to write a school paper about it, my title would have been, "Scarier and Far Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine (even if you have a totally twisted imagination)."
I mean, we'd grown up here. (I thought.) Plus, we'd seen some horrific stuff at the Institute in New York. (I thought.) So it's not like devastating freaks of nature were new to me. But Ari brought me down halls and up and down in elevators, and we explored parts of the School I'd never seen, never knew existed. And let me tell you, the flock and I looked like Disneyland cast members compared with some of the things I saw.
They weren't all recombinant life-forms. Some were "enhanced" but not combined with another species.
I saw a human baby who wasn't even walking yet, sitting on the floor, chewing on a plastic frog while a whitecoat wrote a long, complicated, unintelligible mathematical problem on a wall-sized whiteboard.
Another whitecoat asked, "How long did this take Feynman to solve?"
The first whitecoat said, "Four months."
The baby put down the frog and crawled over to the whiteboard. A whitecoat handed her a marker. The baby wrote a complicated, unintelligible answer on the whiteboard, something with a lot of Greek squiggles in it.
Then the baby sat back, looked at the whiteboard, and started to gum the end of the marker. The other whitecoat checked the answer. He looked up and nodded.
The first whitecoat said, "Good girl," and gave the baby a cookie.
In another room I saw, like, Plexiglas boxes with some sort of grotesque tissue growing in them. Brainlike tissue floating in different-colored liquids. Wires were coming out of the boxes, connected to a computer. A whitecoat was typing commands into the computer, and the brain things were apparently carrying them out.
I looked at Ari. "Have brain, will travel."
"I think they were seeing if people would still need bodies or something," he said.
I saw a room full of the Eraser replacements, those Flyboy things. They were hung in rows on metal hooks, like raggedy coats in a closet.
Their glowy red eyes were closed, and I saw that each one had a wire plugged into its leg. Thin, hairy Eraser skin was stretched taut over their metal frames, and in some places it had torn, allowing a joint to poke through or a couple of gears and pulleys to show. The whole effect was pretty repulsive.
"They're charging," said Ari tonelessly.
I was starting to feel overwhelmed, even more overwhelmed than usual.
"They call this one Brain on a Stick," Ari said, gesturing.
I saw a metallic spinal cord, connected to two metal legs, walking around. It walked smoothly, fluidly, like a person. At the top of the spinal cord was a Plexiglas box holding-no, not a hamster-a brainlike clump of tissue.
It walked past us, and I heard sounds coming from it, as if it were talking to itself.
In the next room we saw a little all-human kid, about two years old, who had weirdly bulked-up, developed muscles, like a tiny bodybuilder. He was bench-pressing more than two hundred pounds-weights much bigger than he was, probably eight times his body weight or more.
I couldn't take any more of this. "So what happens now, Ari?"
"I'll take you back," said Ari.
We didn't speak as he navigated the halls and levels of this village of nightmares. I wondered, if his expiration date was real, how it must feel for him to know that the end of his life was coming soon, minute by minute, second by second. The flock and I had faced death a thousand times, but it had always had an element of "maybe we can slide out of this."
To have a date tattooed on your neck-it was like looking up and seeing a train's headlights coming right at you, and your feet just can't move off the track. I was going to check the backs of our necks as soon as I could.
"Max, I-" Ari stopped, pausing outside the door to the flock's ward.
I waited.
"I wish-," he said, his voice breaking.
I didn't know what he'd been about to say, but I didn't need to know. I patted his hand, perpetually morphed out into a heavy, hairy, Eraser-clawed mitt.
"We all wish, Ari."
46
The next day they let us loose.
"Is it time for us to die?" Nudge asked. She sidled closer to me, and I put my arm around her.
"I don't know, sweetie," I told her. "But if it is, I'm taking a bunch of 'em with me."
"Me too," said Gazzy bravely. I gathered the Gasman to my other side.
Fang leaned against a wall, his eyes on me. We hadn't had any time to talk privately since we'd gotten here, but I caught his gaze and tried to send him a look that had everything I was thinking in it. He was a big boy. He could handle the swear words.
The room's door swung open, with its peculiar air rush. A tall, sandy-haired man strode in as if he were the king of the world. He was followed by Anne Walker and another whitecoat I hadn't seen before.
"Dese are dey?" he asked, sounding like Ahnold in The Terminator.
Already he had me angry. "We be them," I said snarkily, and his pale, watery blue eyes focused on me like lasers.
"Dis vould be de vun called Max?" he asked his assistant, as if I couldn't hear.
"I not only would be Max, I am Max," I said, interrupting the assistant's answer. "In fact, I've always been Max and always will be."
His eyes narrowed. Mine narrowed back at him.
"Yes, I can see vhy dey've been slated for extermination," he said casually, as his assistant made notes on a clipboard.
"And I can see why you were voted 'least popular' in your class," I said. "So I guess we're even."
He ignored me, but I saw a tiny muscle in his jaw twitch.
Next, his eyes lit on Nudge. "Dis vun can't control her mouth or, obviously, her brain," he said. "Something vent wrong vis her thought processes, clearly."
I felt Nudge stiffen at my side. "Bite me," she said.
That's my girl.
"Und dis vun," he went on, pointing at Gazzy. "His digestive system has disastrous flaws." He shook his head. "Perhaps an enzyme imbalance."
Anne Walker listened expressionlessly.
"Dis vun-vell, you can see it for yourself," the man said, with a casual flick of his hand at Iggy. "Multiple defects. A complete failure."
"Yes, Dr. ter Borcht," murmured his assistant, writing furiously.
Fang and I instantly looked at each other. Ter Borcht had been mentioned in the files we'd stolen from the Institute.
Iggy, sensing ter Borcht was talking about him, scowled. "Takes one to know one," he said.
"De tall, dark vun-dere's nothing special about him at all," ter Borcht said dismissively of Fang, who hadn't moved since the doctor had come in.
"Well, he's a snappy dresser," I offered. One side of Fang's mouth quirked.
"Und you," ter Borcht said, turning back to me. "You haf a malfunctioning chip, you get debilitating headaches, and your leadership skills are sadly much less than ve had hoped for."
"And yet I could still kick your doughy Eurotrash butt from here to next Tuesday. So that's something."
His eyelids flickered, and it seemed to me that he was controlling himself with difficulty.