“Max, I—Gaz was almost done and I thought—Angel said—”
I looked into Fang’s face. His dark eyes, usually bottomless, were full of emotion. His face was ashen. My eyes widened and my hands dropped from his shoulders. I let my wings take me backward, away from him, as a silent, searing scream started to rise in my chest. He didn’t say anything out loud, but he told me just the same: he didn’t know where Angel was, and he was afraid that something awful had happened to her.
My breath caught in my throat, and my blood turned to ice. Had she been trapped by the second explosion? It didn’t seem possible. I remembered her small, earnest face, saying, “I can deal with pretty dangerous.”
“Angel, where are you?” Gazzy yelled, turning in circles, bobbing up and down in the sky, then suddenly he crumbled, his face dissolving into tears. My munitions and weapons expert really was just a nine-year-old kid, and he’d just lost his little sister.
And I’d lost my baby.
78
“IT’S BEEN FIVE HOURS, Max.” Dylan’s quiet voice was like sandpaper.
“I refuse to believe that she didn’t escape,” I said stubbornly, and tried to help superstrong Kate shift some more twisted wreckage from the blast site.
Dylan and I had even crawled through the rubble near the manhole and tried to get back into the sewer system. But the tunnel had completely collapsed, and Gazzy said that while he’d managed to defuse most of the network of bombs, he obviously hadn’t gotten to every one, plus the poison gas was still down there.
He’d given me that information through sobs, as I held him, his head on my shoulder.
Angel’s last words to me kept replaying in my mind: It’ll be okay, Max. I’ll be with you always, no matter what. And Max—I believe in you. Forever. What had she meant by that? Had she had some premonition that she might not come back? Had she made the ultimate sacrifice? She’d talked of all my sacrifices. I was haunted by the idea that she might have chosen to make one of her own.
Next to me, Kate sat down. Star held out a bottle of tepid water, and Kate drank it. She looked exhausted. I sighed and bent down to move another chunk of cobblestone.
The police had closed down the entire area, evacuating the buildings that were still standing, clearing the Place de la Concorde. We’d hovered above the Louvre, waiting for them to leave, after Fang had made sure that his gang was okay. They’d been great, helping to rescue at least twenty people trapped under the rubble, helping to get hurt children to nearby hospitals. Now they sat on a curb, looking wiped, like Nudge, Gazzy, and Iggy. Only Fang, Dylan, and I were still on our feet. Just barely.
An aerial search had turned up nothing, but after two hours we’d found one of Angel’s pink sneakers, two blocks away. It had been ripped apart, its sole dangling. A section of it was stained with blood.
That’s when I had finally broken down.
“I tried to get to all of them,” Gazzy sobbed. “I thought I had. There must have been like a remote setoff that I didn’t know about. I don’t know what happened.” I remembered the wires sticking out of Mark and shuddered.
Would Gazzy ever forgive himself? I was the one who had decided to let him try. If I had insisted he leave there, made all of the flock get out of there and let the DGers…
We’d all be safe, but thousands of people might be dead, Paris would be even more ruined than it was now, and I’d still never be able to forgive myself.
This was the hard stuff, the leader stuff, the save-the-world stuff that I just couldn’t stand having to deal with. At a certain level, there are no best choices, no right decisions. Only choices that are less bad, decisions that are less wrong.
It was dark now. It was hard to accept that we’d found all we were going to find. We’d all been crying, off and on, for hours, except for Fang and Dylan. Somehow they had remained strong as they worked side by side with me, shifting the biggest boulders and the heaviest pipes.
Now I stood looking at the crater, wondering how the DGers could have done such a thing. How could that guy Mark have lived with himself? It was all too much. I wanted to go home, but I wasn’t even sure where home was at that point. I didn’t even know what had become of my mom or Jeb. Or Ella. Had they been part of this in some way? I wasn’t certain about anything anymore.
I hung my head, and I felt someone, Fang, gather me gently to him. My cheek rested on his shoulder, and my silent tears soaked his torn shirt. He felt warm and strong and heartbreakingly familiar. And at that moment, not a single thing in my life was certain, strong, or whole. Nothing.
Least of all Fang.
79
THE WEIRD, WEIRD thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you’re faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.
Within hours of Angel’s disappearance, while my heart was still raw and bleeding and in denial, Paris was already starting to recover. Cleanup teams swarmed the Place de la Concorde; officials tested radiation levels. Fang had given them information about what still lurked in the crushed tunnels beneath the city, and they’d deployed military experts and bomb squads to finish the job that Gazzy had done so amazingly well, for a nine-year-old.
We’d combed all the hospitals and trauma units, pushing aside curtains, bursting into rooms, praying we’d see Angel’s filthy, wounded face—alive. But we didn’t.
As a beautiful sunset painted the area with blood-red hues, people began to pull themselves together. I wanted to grab strangers and yell, “Don’t you understand what’s happened?” But I knew it was pointless. It was only my pain searching for an outlet.
Finally, Fang came and found me, where I had collapsed in exhaustion, near the blast site. I looked up through dry and mournful eyes. “If we haven’t found her body yet, then she’s still alive,” I said.
He sat down, took my hand in his. Slowly, he shook his head. He looked like he’d aged about ten years in the past twenty-four hours. His face was drawn and gaunt. His hair and clothes were still caked with grit and blood. He shook his head again, slowly.
“No, Max,” he said. “Probably not.”
I wanted to scream, “It’s your fault! You’re the one who left her!” But it wasn’t his fault. Because I had left all three of them.
“We’re… taking off,” Fang said.
I knew my face was splotchy and tear stained; my clothes were filthy and covered with soot and blood and dust; my hair was matted with ash and grit.
“What?” I asked dully.
Nudge had been sleeping against my shoulder, and now she roused and blinked groggily.
Fang gestured toward his gang waiting several feet away. They looked whipped and dirty, and they had new, sad, firsthand knowledge about some of the awful things that can happen in the world. Strangely, seeing them warmed my heart a little. They were starting to look like they belonged with us.
“We’re going to take off,” Fang repeated. “The cops got some of the DG organizers, but not whoever or whatever was supposed to be the One Light. Gazzy filled me in on what he and—on what he’d learned at their headquarters. So we’re going after that. It doesn’t sound like Mark was the kingpin—he was only a servant of the One Light.”
“Huh,” I said, unable to offer more of a reaction.
“We have to kill the plant at the roots,” Fang said, “or it’ll just grow back.”
His face was lined and grim, his voice flat. He’d always loved Angel so much. Like we all had.