I was still leaning over Dylan—the bullet hole was already healing, and he had some color back in his face—when someone cut in.
“Need a hand?” Fang asked. Dylan looked at the hand wearily, but took it, pulling himself up.
I raised an eyebrow at Fang.
He shrugged. “What? I’m trying to learn to be a team player.” Dylan actually smiled and, get this, fist-bumped my ex.
I nodded, a little dazed, and moved to the other side of the stage to herd out more of the confused former One Lighters.
It was actually kind of amazing to see two of the guys I cared most about in the world, different in so many ways, fighting together side by side. Fang covered Dylan’s weak side, and together they were doing some serious damage. We’ve come a long way, baby, I was musing, when suddenly a heavy weight hit me in the back.
Then two viselike hands clamped around my neck.
76
“YOU COULD HAVE ruled your own country!” Mark, the cowardly shooter, yelled into my ear. Lesson number one: megalomaniacs never give up when they should.
I tried to rise up on my hands and knees, but the guy was on my back and weighed a ton.
“Whoa!” I coughed, struggling to breathe. “What’d you get enhanced with—ham?”
“You could have been a princess in the New World! But now you’re going to die like a lowly, ordinary human.” He practically spat the last word, though he appeared to be human himself—a heavily Botoxed, steroid cocktail of a human, but a human nonetheless. This guy needed an intense course on overcoming self-hatred, stat.
“The thing about being a princess,” I managed to say, still struggling to get out from underneath him, “is that… you have to… kiss… a lot of… frogs!”
He was strong, and I clawed at his fingers with shockingly little effect. He clamped down harder on my windpipe, and I started to get really worried. I heard blood rushing in my ears, heard my heartbeat slowing. Not good.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.
“You are a black cloud over the One Light,” I heard the man say, as if from a distance. “You won’t destroy everything I’ve worked for and planned for all these years!”
Suddenly my head got yanked to one side, and the vise grip around my neck slackened a bit. I pried off his fingers with difficulty as I heard his voice, full of hatred and rage, shrieking, then a rush of air whooshed into my lungs so fast it was almost painful. I gasped like a fish, sucking in air with a wheeze, and then I heard my voice snarl, “That’s not how it’s going to end, dirtbag!”
I got up on all fours, wobbly, my head starting to clear.
But it hadn’t been my voice after all. It had been Maya’s. She had broken off a piece of a metal barricade and beaned ol’ Mark with it as hard as she could.
Of course, Mark, pumped up with who knows what, survived the blow. With an angry bellow, he got to his feet as I stumbled out of the way. Maya hauled back and smashed the metal pole into Mark again. There was an awful thwock.
“You know,” I choked out, “the bigger they are…” I lined myself up with Maya and grabbed the other end of the pole.
“The harder they fall!” Maya said, and the two of us rushed Mark using our combined strength to clobber him one more time. He staggered backward, looking surprised, and just as he started to look angry, he fell back off the stage, flailing through the air.
He landed ten feet below with a sickening crunch—I’m guessing his enhancements didn’t allow him to bounce back up like a ball. We call that a design flaw.
Maya and I looked at each other as I began to wrap my mind around the depressing realization that she had probably just saved my life.
“Max!” Dylan rushed over, and I blinked and looked around. The guards were all taken care of, what was left of my flock was still standing, and the rally had mostly dispersed.
It looked like another job well done. Now I just had to find Angel and Gazzy.
But as I took one last look at Mark’s body on the ground, I saw—were those?—wires sticking out below him. He wasn’t a bot, we knew that much, so were they connected to—
And that was when the City of Lights exploded with a thunderous boom!
77
THE NEXT FEW moments, surprisingly, proved that a lot of what Dr. Hans and the DGs had said was true: those of us with wings and wild-animal DNA were up above the blast in less than two seconds, leaving danger, rubble, and chaos behind. People left on the ground weren’t so lucky: those nearby were hurled into the air by the blast, and more were injured by flying debris. Trembling aftershocks also took a toll.
Through the dust and debris, I saw Fang’s gang, most of it, outside the plaza. I guessed that Ratchet had sensed what was about to happen, and they were strong enough and fast enough to get to safety quickly.
“Everyone okay?” I barked, and they nodded. Next to me, Maya did a quick head count. No Fang. Or Gazzy. Or Angel. My adrenaline surged.
“What happened?” I said, scanning the ground anxiously. “Gazzy’s never not been able to dismantle something!”
“I’m not sensing poison gas,” Dylan said, “not that that means anything. It might be odorless and tasteless.”
I circled quickly, going lower as the smoke settled. Where the open manhole had been, there was now a huge crater, maybe thirty feet across and thirty feet deep. My heart seized. Where was Gazzy? Angel? Fang?
Suddenly, I saw a smallish birdkid soaring upward, just as another gigantic explosion rocked the street. Shockwaves knocked me back several feet, and I inhaled a bunch of dust.
“Max!” Gazzy’s face was black, his eyes wide and scared.
“Gaz! Thank God you’re okay! Where’s Angel? And Fang?”
Gazzy started choking, forgetting to keep himself aloft, and I drifted down beside him as he landed on the broken granite pavers and rubble. He opened his mouth to speak, but coughed, then tears started running down his cheeks.
“Gazzy! What happened?” I said, but he shook his head, coughing,
Aftershocks rumbled below us again, and I made Gaz take to the air in case of another explosion. He could fly okay, but he looked miserable, and he kept gagging and spitting out dust.
Where was Angel? Where was Fang? I shot a panicked look at Dylan, and he understood immediately, diving down the hole to find them.
Could Angel and Fang really be gone? My brain whirled at the horrible possibility. Gazzy was still wheezing, unable to talk. There were times when I’d thought I’d lost Angel or Fang before. And when Fang left, I never thought I’d ever see him again. But that had felt more like… I wouldn’t see him, but he still existed. What about now? How would it feel if he—
I was swallowing shakily, terrified thoughts piercing my brain like shards of glass. Just as Dylan landed on the street, Fang shot up toward me, coming through the billowing clouds of dust and debris. His shirt was shredded, his face bruised and cut. Like Gazzy, he was covered with soot.
“Gaz! You made it out,” he gasped, when he got closer.
“Angel was right behind me,” Gazzy said. “Right behind me!” He looked around us, everywhere, as if expecting to see his sister making her way toward us.
I flew right up to Fang and clutched him, if only to convince myself that he was really alive.
That intense joy and relief ended in a nanosecond. I pulled back and grabbed his shoulders. “Where’s Angel?!”
“I—don’t—”
“How could you leave her?” I shrieked.