Angel nodded next to her. Even Total, sitting on the sand by Angel's feet, seemed to bob his head in agreement.
My mouth opened, but nothing came out. I was stunned-they'd never disobeyed a direct order.
I wanted to start shrieking at them, but it was already too late: Two paramedics were running across the sand, holding a body board. The flashing lights of the ambulance made intermittent rosy stripes across all our faces.
"Goveryou," I said tightly, using a secret language that went back to when we were kept in a lab. It was used in cases of extreme emergency when we didn't want anyone to understand us. "Allay. Todo ustedes. Egway."
"No," said the Gasman, his lower lip starting to tremble. "Neckerchu."
"What's happened here?" One of the paramedics dropped down next to Fang, already taking out his stethoscope.
"Accident," I said, still glaring at Gazzy, Nudge, and Angel.
Reluctantly I removed my hands from the soaked pad. Fang's face was white and still.
"Accident?" repeated the paramedic, staring at the injury. "With what, a rabid bear?"
"Kind of," I said tensely. The other paramedic shone a small flashlight into Fang's eyes, and I realized Fang was truly unconscious. My sense of fear and danger escalated: Not only were we about to enter a hospital, which would freak us all out, but it might end up being for nothing.
Because Fang could die anyway.
10
The ambulance felt like a jail cell on wheels.
The antiseptic smell inside made my stomach knot with nightmare memories of the School. In the back of the ambulance, I held Fang's cold hand, which now had a saline drip taped into it. I couldn't say anything to the flock, not in front of the EMT, and I was too upset, scared, and mad to come up with anything coherent anyway.
Is Fang okay? I silently asked my Voice. Not that the Voice had ever once answered a direct freaking question. It didn't break the pattern now.
"Uh-oh-he's fibrillating," one paramedic said urgently.
He pointed to the portable EKG machine, which was going thump-thump-thump very fast. "Get the paddles."
"No!" I said loudly, startling everyone. The paramedic held the shock paddles, looking surprised. "That's always how his heart is. It always beats really fast. That's normal for him."
I don't know if the paramedic would have used the paddles anyway, but just then we roared into the hospital emergency bay and all was chaos.
Orderlies ran out with a gurney, the EMT guys started rattling off Fang's stats to a nurse. And then Fang was wheeled out of sight, down a hall and through some doors.
I started to follow, but a nurse stopped me.
"Let the doctors see him first," she said, flipping a page on her clipboard. "You can give me some information. Now, what's his name? Is he your boyfriend?"
"His name is... Nick," I lied nervously. "Nick, um, Ride. He's my brother."
The nurse looked at me, my blond hair and fair skin, and I could tell she was mentally comparing me with Fang-who had black hair, dark eyes, olive skin.
"He's all of our brother's," said Nudge ungrammatically.
The nurse looked at Nudge, who was black, and at the rest of us, none of whom really matched, except Angel and Gazzy, the only true siblings among us.
"We were adopted," I said. "Our parents are... missionaries." Excellent! I mentally patted myself on the back. Brilliant! Missionaries! "They're away on a... short mission. I'm in charge."
A doctor in green jammies hurried up to us. "Miss?" he said, looking at me, glancing at all of us. "Could you come with me, right now?"
"Think he noticed the wings yet?" I heard Iggy barely murmur.
I tapped Iggy twice on the back of his hand. It meant, You're in charge till I get back. He nodded, and I followed the doctor down the hall, feeling like I was on death row.
11
Walking quickly, the doctor looked at me in that zoo-exhibit way I've become familiar with. My heart sank.
All of my worst fears were coming true. I could already see the mesh of a big dog crate closing in around me. Those freaking Erasers! I hated them! They always showed up, and when they did, they destroyed everything.
You have to respect your enemy, Max, said the Voice. Never, ever underestimate them. The second you do, they'll squash you. Be smart about them. Respect their abilities, even if they don't respect yours.
I swallowed hard. Whatever.
We pushed through heavy double doors and were in a small, tiled, very scary room. Fang was on a gurney.
He had a tube going down his throat and more tubes attached to his arms. I pressed my hand to my mouth. I'm not squeamish, but cracked, painful memories of the experiments done on us at the School were seeping into my brain, and I wished that my Voice would keep talking, say something really annoying to distract me.
Another doctor and a nurse were standing by Fang. They had cut his shirt and jacket off. The horrible jagged claw wounds in his side were still bleeding.
Now that he had me here, the doctor didn't seem to know what to say.
"Will-will he be okay?" I asked, feeling as if I were choking. Life without Fang was unimaginable.
"We don't know," said one of the doctors, looking very concerned.
The woman doctor gestured to Fang. "How well do you know him?"
"He's my brother."
"Are you-like him?" she asked.
"Yes." I set my jaw and kept my eyes on Fang. I felt my muscles tighten, a new, unwelcome flood of adrenaline icing its way through my veins. Okay, first I would slam this little trolley against the nurse's legs...
"So you can help us," the first doctor said, sounding relieved. "'Cause we're not recognizing this stuff. What about his heartbeat?"
I looked at the EKG. The blips were fast and erratic.
"It should be smoother," I said. "And faster." I snapped my fingers a bunch of times to demonstrate.
"Can I...?" the doctor asked, motioning his stethoscope toward me. I nodded warily.
He listened to my heart, a look of total amazement on his face.
Then he moved his stethoscope over my stomach, in several places. "Why can I hear air moving down here?" he asked.
"We have air sacs," I explained quietly, feeling as if my throat were closing. My hands tightened into fists by my sides. "We have lungs, but we also have smaller air sacs. And-our stomachs are different. Our bones. Our blood." Gee, pretty much everything.
"And you have... wings?" the second doctor asked in a low voice. I nodded.
"You're a human-avian hybrid," the first doctor said.
"That's one name for it," I said tightly. As opposed to, say, mutant freak. "I prefer Avian American."
I glanced at the nurse, who looked scared and like she'd rather be anywhere but here. I so related.
The female doctor became all business. "We're giving him saline, to counter the shock, but he needs blood."
"You can't give him hu-regular blood," I said. All the scientific knowledge I'd gleaned over the years from reports and experiments started coming to the surface. "Our red blood cells have nuclei." Like birds'.
The doctor nodded. "Get ready to give him a donation," she instructed me briskly.
12
Twenty minutes later, I was two pints lighter and dizzy as a dodo bird from it. I shouldn't have given that much blood, but Fang needed even more, and it was the best I could do. Now he was in surgery.
I made my way down the hall to the waiting room, which was crowded-but not with bird kids.
Quickly I walked the perimeter, in case they were under chairs or something. No flock.
My head swiveled as I checked one hall and then another. I was already weak and kind of nauseated, and the fear of losing my flock made me feel like hurling was seconds away.
"They're down here." A short, dark-haired nurse was speaking to me. I locked my gaze on her.
She handed me a small plastic bottle of apple juice and a muffin. "Eat this," she told me. "It'll help with the dizziness. Your... siblings are in room seven." She pointed down the hall.