"Do you know where I am?" I spoke out loud, my voice dropping away into dull nothingness.
Yes.
"So tell me!"
Are you sure you want to know?
"Oh no, I enjoy being in a state of complete ignorance!" I snapped. "This is why I don't want you around anymore! Now tell me, you jerk!"
You're in an isolation tank. A sensory-deprivation chamber. I don't know where, exactly.
"Oh, my God. You were right-I didn't want to know."
An isolation tank. Nothing but me, my totally screwed-up consciousness, and the Voice. Well, I could probably stand this for say, oh, ten minutes before I went stark-raving nuts.
Knowing the whitecoats, they probably planned to keep me in here a year or two, so they could take notes, see what happened to me.
I needed to die, right now.
125
But I'm Maximum Ride. So it wouldn't be that easy, would it?
Of course not. My life would never contain a convenient, pain-saving plan when it could stretch a problem out into an endless agony of uncertainty and torture.
I don't know how long I was in the tank. It could have been ten minutes. It felt like ten years. A lifetime. Maybe I slept. I know I hallucinated. Again and again I "woke up" to find myself back with the flock, back in our house in Colorado or in the subway tunnels of NYC or in the Twilight Inn. I saw Ella Martinez and her mom again, smiling and waving at me.
I think I cried for a while.
Basically every thought I'd ever had in my entire life, I had all over again, one after another in rapid-fire succession. Every memory, every color, every taste, every sensation of any kind replayed itself in my fevered brain, endless loops of thought and memory and dream and hope, over and over, until I couldn't tell what had been real and what had been wishful thinking and what had been a movie I'd seen or a book I'd read. I didn't know if I was really Max, or if I really had wings, or if I really had a family of bird kids like me. Nothing was real except being in this tank. And maybe not even that.
I sang for a while, I think. I talked. Finally my voice went. Weirdly, I was never hungry or thirsty. Nothing hurt; nothing felt good.
So when the tank was finally cracked open and light streamed in, it seemed like the worst, most painful thing that had ever happened to me.
126
I screamed, but the sound of my own voice was intensely loud, piercing my eardrums, so I shut up immediately. I squeezed my eyes shut against the blinding light and curled into a ball as much as I could. Big hands grabbed me and pulled me up, and just their touch, after so much nothingness, freaked out my senses.
They put me on a bed and covered me with a blanket. The feeling of anything touching me was torture. I huddled there trying not to move for a long, long time.
Finally I realized that I wasn't in so much pain anymore. I tried opening one eye a slit. It was too bright, but I didn't feel like my retina was searing.
"Max?" The hushed whisper woke every nerve all over again, sending unbearably painful chills down my spine. I tensed, my eyes closed. I no longer knew how to run, how to flee, how to fight.
I wanted to be back in the tank, the blessed darkness and silence and nothingness.
"Max, how are you doing?"
Jim Dandy, I thought hysterically. Peachy. Never better.
"Max, do you need anything?"
That was such a ludicrous question that I felt myself smile.
"I need to ask you some questions," the voice whispered. "I need to know where the flock is heading. I need to know what happened in Virginia."
That got me. A couple of synapses actually connected in my brain. I pulled the blanket down just a little and opened my eyes a slit. "You know what happened in Virginia," I said. My voice was thin and rusty, made of nails. "You were there, Jeb."
"Only at the end, sweetheart," Jeb said, his voice very quiet. He was kneeling on the floor next to the cot I was on. "I don't know what happened before then, how everything fell apart. I don't know where the flock is headed now or what your plan is."
Now I felt maybe 10 percent like myself. "Jeb, I'm afraid you're going to have to learn to live with not knowing." I chuckled a tiny bit. It sounded like a cat choking.
"That's my Max," Jeb said affectionately. "Tough till the end. Even after everything, you're still in better shape than anyone else would be. But I have to tell you, you need to get on board with this saving-the-world project."
"I'll try to pencil it in," I croaked. Now I felt enough like myself to be irritated.
Jeb leaned closer to me. I opened my eyes and looked him straight in the face, that familiar face that had represented everything good in my life, at one time. And now represented everything bad.
"Max, please," he whispered. "Please just play along. They want to terminate you. They think you're a lost cause."
This was news.
"Who?"
"Itex. They're keeping you here while they try out their latest, greatest invention. They wanted you to lead with your head, not your heart, Max. I tried to teach you that, but maybe I failed. They're trying to take all of the heart out of you by keeping you here. But you care about things, and about people, Max. Like me. Please, don't make everything that's happened up till now meaningless. Don't give them cause to take you out, start over with someone else. Show them they're wrong about you. Show them you've got what it takes."
"I'll show them I've got what it takes to rip your spleen out through your nose," I said weakly.
"Batchelder!" I suddenly heard a deep voice from behind me. "You're not authorized to be in here."
Then my light was blocked again, the blanket was pulled off, and big hands picked me up and dropped me back into the horrible tank.
127
I led the five mutant freaks through the shadows toward Itex.
"In here." I held aside some bushes and motioned them through. It was dark, finally. I'd thought spending days watching a bunch of Erasers play Texas hold 'em was boring, but that didn't compare to today.
I didn't know how the original Max stood it. I'd lost count of how many times today I'd wanted to scream at them to shut up and get away from me. That Nudge never quit yapping, and Angel and Gasman had gotten into disputes like whether the sky was blue and what day this was. I hadn't found any chinks in Fang's armor, but it was just a matter of time. Angel frankly creeped me out-she was a loose cannon. Maybe she was kind of unstable. I would have to tell them that when I got back. Gasman seemed like a gullible idiot, and Iggy was dead weight, as far as I could tell. Except that he could cook, for some reason. Plus, they all talked to the dog like it was a person, asking it if it wanted this or that. I mean, it was a freaking dog.
But finally it was time. We'd gone on the tour of Itex today, and I'd made a big deal about noticing its weak points. Now we were "breaking in." I was trying to be careful, look like I was on guard.
I have to say, I was doing great. They didn't suspect a thing. All my training, the lessons, the practice-it was paying off. It was gratifying, how obvious it was that I was the new and improved version. In fact, it was weird how willing these freaks were to follow me around, do what I said. I'd told 'em we were going to break into Itex, and they were all on board. Even the dumb dog. When we were leaving the hotel, I'd tried to shut it inside the room, but Nudge had held the door open for it to trot out.
"The dog's coming on a raid?" I'd asked, my eyebrows raised.
"Of course he's coming," Nudge had said, looking surprised. "He always comes."
O-kaaay, I'd thought. I'm starting to put my finger on why you guys are slated for termination.
But whatever. They followed orders, anyway. I led them up a grassy hill, looking around-like someone was going to catch us, right? There was a huge HVAC box next to the main building, and we quickly unscrewed the cover. I jammed a stick in the enormous fan, and then we all hurried through. I yanked the stick out, the fan started spinning again, and we were in.