I strode back to the flock.
"You okay?" Fang asked.
I nodded, then remembered I was mad at him.
I looked away and deliberately sat next to Nudge, against the other canyon wall.
"I just heard from the Voice," I said.
"What did it say?" Nudge asked, eating a rolled-up piece of bologna.
Angel and Total watched me intently, and Fang stopped typing.
"It said we haven't been seeing Erasers because they're all dead," I said bluntly.
Everyone's eyes widened to, um, about the size of dinner plates.
"What did it mean, they're all dead?" Nudge asked.
I shook my head. "I don't know. If it's not pulling my leg, then I would guess it meant...that all the Erasers are taking dirt naps." I thought about Ari, Jeb's son, who had been Eraserfied, and felt a tugging pain in my chest. Poor Ari. What a sucky life he'd been born into. And such a short one too.
"Who killed them?" Fang asked, getting to the point, as usual.
"The Voice said...all over the world, every branch of Itex and the Institute and the School-they were all terminating their recombinant-DNA experiments. And that we were almost the only ones left." It started to sink in, what that meant, and a cold shiver made me put my arms around my knees.
We were all silent for a minute, digesting this.
Then Total said, "Okay, if anyone asks, I can't talk, right?"
I rolled my eyes. "Oh yeah, that'll fool 'em."
"What are we gonna do now?" the Gasman asked. He looked very worried and came to sit closer to me. I reached out and fluffed up his mohawk, which had grown out.
"We have a mission," I began, ready to psych us all up for solving this puzzle. And possibly taking out a few whitecoats while we were at it.
"We need a home," said Fang, at almost the exact same time.
"What?" I asked, startled.
"We need to find a permanent home," Fang said seriously. "We can't last on the run much longer. I say screw the mission. Let them blow up the world. We can find a place to hide out where no one can find us, and we can just...live."
11
We all stared at Fang. That was the longest statement any of us had ever heard him utter.
"We can't forget the mission," I began, just as Angel said, "Yeah! We need a home!"
"A home!" said the Gasman, looking thrilled.
"A real home, better than our last one," Nudge agreed happily. "With no grown-ups, and no school or school uniforms."
"A home with a yard and lots of grass," said Total. "No more of this pebbles-and-dirt crap."
Why was I the only one who needed to know what was going on, who needed to understand what had happened to us and why? After everything we'd been through in the last few months, now they were ready to just throw it all away? I mean, Angel's kidnapping, going to New York, the subway tunnels, the beach, staying with Anne Walker, going to that school...
Oh. Well, okay. So they might be a little tired of the fear, pain, and mayhem, but still...
"Iggy?" I said, trying to keep the pleading out of my voice.
"Let's see," he said, holding out his hands as if they were a scale. "Hmm. On the one hand, we have constant, desperate, heart-pounding escapes, day after day, never knowing what's going to happen to us or whether we'll even be alive the next day..."
I frowned, seeing where he was going with this.
"On the other hand, a home: hidden, safe, sleeping in the same bed every night, relaxing, not having to fight for our lives at a moment's notice..."
"Okay, okay," I said. "You don't have to rub it in."
They watched me, waiting.
What was with Fang? Why was he undermining me like this? I used to feel so connected to him, like he was my absolute best friend in the world, someone who always had my back. Now I looked at him and felt as if I hardly knew him.
Reluctantly I shrugged one shoulder. "Whatever. A home, whatever."
The ecstatic cheering only made me feel worse.
12
"I'm not giving up the mission," I said, loud enough for Fang, several yards away, to hear me. We were only about eight thousand feet in the air, but it was really cold, probably below freezing. The wind in my eyes made them water constantly.
"I know."
"This is stupid," I said. Looking down, I saw the Pecos River winding like a thin, shiny snake through west Texas.
"Their hopes and dreams aren't stupid," Fang said, and I felt a flush warm my cheeks.
"That's not what I meant," I grumbled. "It's just-we were on a path. Now we're just leaving that path. One day I'm supposed to be saving the world, and the next I'm out looking for real estate. I don't get it. Plus, thanks to your little plan, we can't spit without being spotted and recognized. Where was my brain when I agreed to that one?"
Fang opened his mouth, but I interrupted. "Plus, now, thanks to you, we left the younger kids to be watched over by a blind guy and a talking dog. I must be insane! I mean, even more insane than usual. I'm going back."
I dipped one wing, ready to make a big wheeling turn, but Fang edged into my way, his face set.
"You promised," he said, making me scowl. "You said you'd give a quick recon, see if we could find a place."
I kept up the scowl, thankful that not once in my whole life had anyone felt compelled to tell me not to ruin my pretty face like that.
"Let them blow up the world, and global-warm it, and pollute it," Fang said. "You and me and the others will be holed up somewhere, safe. We'll come back out when they're all gone, done playing their games of world domination."
He had positively become a chatterbox lately.
"That's a great plan. Of course, by then we won't be able to go outside because we'll get fried by the lack of ozone layer," I said, getting worked up. "We'll be living in damp caves, eating at the bottom of the food chain because everything with any flavor will be full of mercury or radiation or something!"
I recognized Fang's face of exaggerated patience, which of course got on my last nerve.
"And there won't be any TV or cable because all the people will be dead!" I was on a roll now. "So our only entertainment will be Gazzy singing the constipation song! And there won't be amusement parks and museums and zoos and libraries and cute shoes! We'll be like cavemen, trying to weave clothes out of plant fibers. We'll have nothing! Nothing! All because you and the kids want to kick back in a La-Z-Boy during the most important time in history!"
I was practically frothing at the mouth.
Fang looked at me. "So maybe we should sign you up for a weaving class. Get a jump on all those plant fibers."
I stared at him, saw how he was trying to suppress his laughter at my vision of the apocalypse.
Something inside me snapped. My whole world had gotten turned on its head in the last twenty-four hours. Like, my old world had sucked so bad, and this world, amazingly, sucked worse.
"I hate you!" I screamed at Fang. Tucking my wings in, I aimed downward, diving toward the ground at more than two hundred miles an hour.
"No you dooonnn't!" Fang's voice spiraled away into nothingness, far above me.
Inside my head, almost drowned out by the roar of wind rushing by my ears, I heard the Voice make a tsking sound. You guys are crazy about each other, it said.
13
"Oh, yeah. No bedtime. It's a good thing," Gazzy sang, doing a little dance.
"Look, just because Max isn't here doesn't mean all the rules have gone out the window," Iggy said, facing him. "She left me in charge, and I'm gonna make sure to do everything she would-" He couldn't keep a straight face any longer and cracked up, bending over and clutching his stomach.
Nudge rolled her eyes, and she and Angel shared a smile. She picked up a small handful of pebbles and carefully started distributing them among other little piles.