I sighed. "If he ever existed."
"We didn't imagine the hawks...or the bats," Nudge said.
"Yeah," said Iggy. "We didn't imagine those creepy subway tunnels in New York."
"Or the headhunter, at that school," said Gazzy.
"I know. I'm sure we didn't," I said, though actually I wasn't, not a hundred percent, anyway.
Ari came and got me again that afternoon. This time I was actually allowed to walk. Wee-hah!
"I don't trust him. Keep your eyes open," Fang murmured as I was leaving.
"Ya think?" I whispered back.
"So what's this all about, Ari?" I asked, as we passed some whitecoats who looked at us strangely. "How come we're taking these little tours?"
Now that I wasn't strapped to a lead wheelchair, I was memorizing every hall, every doorway, every window.
He looked uncomfortable and still subdued. For a wolverine, anyway. "I'm not sure," he muttered. "They just said walk her around."
"Ah," I said. "So we can assume there's something they want me to see. Besides the brain on a stick and the superbabies."
Ari shrugged. "I don't know. They don't tell me anything."
Just then we passed wide double doors, and one of them swung open as we went by. A whitecoat hurried from the room beyond, but not before I'd caught a glimpse inside.
On a large video screen that took up a whole wall, I saw a map of the world. My raptor vision took in a thousand details in a second, which I digested as Ari and I walked. Each country was outlined, and one city in each country was highlighted.
Above the map was a title card, THE BY-HALF PLAN. I'd heard of that somewhere before.
On an off chance that it would actually get me somewhere, I asked Ari, "So, what's the By-Half Plan?"
Ari shrugged. "They're planning to reduce the world's population by half," he explained morosely.
I almost stopped in my tracks but remembered to keep walking and to look disinterested. "Geez, by half? That's what, three billion people? They're ambitious little buggers."
My mind was reeling at the idea of genocide on that level. It made Stalin and Hitler look like kindergarten teachers. Okay, really evil kindergarten teachers, but still.
Ari shrugged again, and I realized it was hard for him to get worked up about things when he was going to die any day now.
I thought about what else I had seen, and it suddenly hit me: I'd seen some of this stuff before, like in a movie, or a dream, or in...one of those skull-splitting infodumps I used to get. For a while I'd had intensely horrible headaches, where it felt like my brain was imploding inside my skull. Then tons of images, words, sounds, stuff would scroll through my consciousness. I realized that some of what I was seeing, saying, doing right now-I'd already seen it.
Think, think.
I was still concentrating when we turned a corner and I literally ran into someone. Two someones.
Jeb and Angel.
49
"Max! Sweetheart," said Jeb. "I'm glad they're letting you get some exercise."
I stared at him. "So I'll be in really good shape when they kill me?"
He winced and sort of cleared his throat.
"Hi, Max," said Angel.
I just looked at her.
"You should really try one of these cookies," she said, holding out a chocolate-chip chunk of treason.
"Thanks. I'll make a note of it. You lying traitor."
"Max-you know I had to do what was right," she said. "You weren't making the best decisions anymore."
"Yeah, like the one when I decided to come rescue your skinny, ungrateful butt," I said.
Her small shoulders sagged, and her face looked sad.
Be strong, Maximum, I told myself. You know what you gotta do.
"I have lots of special powers," she said. "I deserve to be the leader. I deserve to be saved. I'm much, much more special than you or Fang."
"You just keep telling yourself that," I said coldly. "But don't expect me to get on board."
Her heart-shaped face turned mutinous. "I don't need you to get on board, Max." Her voice had an edge of steel in it. She'd learned that from me. What else had she learned? "This is all happening whether you're on board or not. You're going to be retired soon, anyway." She took an angry bite of cookie.
"Maybe. But if I am, I'm going to come back and haunt you, every day for the rest of your hard, traitorous little life."
Her eyes widened, and she actually took a step back.
"Okay, that's enough, you two," said Jeb, just the way he used to when some of us would mix it up back in the day.
"Whatever," I said in my trademark bored tone. I stepped around them, avoiding any touch as if they were poison, and headed down the hall. My heart was pounding, and I felt an unwelcome flush heat my cheeks.
Ari caught up to me. We walked in silence for a while, then he said, as if offering a consolation prize, "They're building an army, you know."
Of course they are, I thought, feeling depressed. "How do you know?"
"I've seen them. There's a whole hangar full of Flyboys, hanging up, charging. They have thousands, and they're making more all the time. They're growing Eraser skins in the lab."
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.
He frowned, looking confused. Then he shrugged. "I don't know. I've always seen you fight. Even though I know you can't get out of this, it's like I still want you to know what you're up against."
"Are you setting me up?" I asked bluntly. "Is this a trap? I mean, even more of a trap than it obviously already is?"
He shook his head. "No. It's just...I know I'm never getting out of here. My time's over. I guess part of me hopes you still have a chance."
It made some sort of sad, pathetic sense.
"Oh, I'm getting out of here, I promise you." And maybe, just maybe, I would take him with us.
50
Under the general heading "Torturing the Bird Kids, Part Deux," you might find a whitecoat handing us a cardboard box that night.
We opened it carefully, expecting it to explode in our faces.
Inside, we found a slim wrapped package. It was a picture frame, book size but no thicker than a pencil. Of course Gazzy was the first one to press the red button on the side.
The frame bloomed into life, and there it was: that same picture Fang and I had found, once in a crack house in DC and once in Dr. Martinez's house. I swallowed hard, thinking about her. Wondering if she was real. Hoping she was okay. Trying to figure out what her deal was.
The picture was of baby Gasman, with his telltale cowlick, being held by a woman who looked kind of tired and washed out. He was plump and happy, maybe a few months old.
Then the picture started moving, not like a movie but like the actual picture was just...moving. The image zoomed in and rotated, as if we were walking around the woman and focusing on Gazzy. Then the picture pulled back and swung around. We saw an ugly room, with cracked walls and dirty windows. Was that the squatter's house we'd visited in Washington? Before it had become a bombed-out haven for thugs?
The camera focused on a wooden table, then on a slip of paper lying on the table. Again it enlarged and sharpened, enough so that we could read the paper.
It was a check. The name it was made out to was obliterated. The check was from Itex, for $10,000.
Gazzy coughed slightly, and I felt him trying to control himself.
His mother had sold him for $10,000 to the whitecoats at the School.
51
I didn't know why only Gazzy's life was in the picture frame, or why none of the rest of us got one. Those whitecoats sure liked to keep us guessing!
We all checked one another for expiration dates, but none of us had them. Yet. But you know, when you've faced imminent death as often as we have, it gets a little old, frankly. Our room had no windows, so we had zero reference for time passing. We fought off boredom by coming up with plans to escape, courses of action to take. I led the flock through all kinds of scenarios, how we could use each one to our advantage.