Maximum Ride Forever (25 page)

ANGEL LOOKED AT Dylan, her head tilted to one side. She frowned, but he met her gaze evenly.

“It’ll just take a minute,” Dylan said.

“Sure,” I said, standing up. I gave Angel a “we’ll finish talking later” look and she nodded solemnly at me. Dylan and I set off, and I couldn’t help smiling when I saw Iggy demonstrating a homemade wrist rocket to Margaret A.

Dylan saw her, too, and gave me a rueful smile.

“So where are we going?” I asked.

“Remedy’s lair.”

My head whipped around and I stared at him. “What? What for?”

“I need to show you something,” Dylan said again, and I felt the slightest twinge of fear. Now that I was paying
attention, he seemed kind of different. I’d hardly seen him for the past week—sometimes in the evening around a fire, he’d show up, looking exhausted. Almost haunted.

Again and again, Dylan had proven his loyalty to me and the flock, but the whole world had spun out of control and I couldn’t help wondering if being one of the Horsemen had changed him forever in ways I couldn’t imagine.

Or maybe I could imagine them. Maybe that was what the hint of fear was about.

“I am not going down that billion steps again,” I said lightly. “My legs are still aching from that.”

Dylan gave me an almost sad, distant smile and shook his head.

All around us, kids were working to build us a better future. I took comfort in the fact that there seemed to be people everywhere—no place felt deserted or lonely. Still, when Dylan led me inside Himmel and through the tunnels, I felt myself going on guard. And when he stopped in front of Jeb’s old lab, I hesitated and looked up at him.

“What are we doing here, Dylan?” I asked softly.

Again that slightly sad smile. “I have… a present for you. I think.”

Okay, that sounded ominous. I took a breath and felt my muscles tense. I really didn’t want to go back into that place. Looking up into Dylan’s crystalline aqua eyes, I searched them to read his intent. But I couldn’t.

He pushed open the door to the lab and gestured to me to go in. The last kids we’d seen had been a couple of minutes
ago—out of screaming range. Pressing my lips together, I stepped in, praying that someone had gotten rid of Jeb’s body.

The lab had been cleaned up. Everything broken was gone, everything left was neatly arranged and labeled. I looked around in surprise.

“Who did this?” I asked.

“I did,” Dylan said. “I’ve been working in here.”

My eyebrows knitted together. “Doing what?”

“In a way, continuing my father’s work.”

I stared at him, unconsciously moving away and glancing around for possible weapons. “Dylan, come on,” I said, keeping my tone even. “What are you talking about?”

“This.” Dylan turned and went through a door on the other side of the lab. I instantly sprang over and grabbed a scalpel, though what I would do with it, I had no idea… Dylan was much stronger than me now. Hiding the scalpel behind my back, I waited, and in just a minute Dylan came back—pushing a hospital bed.

Someone was lying on that bed, covered by a sheet.

I saw just a bit of black hair spilling out from beneath the white cloth and almost screamed. My breath came shallowly as I stared at the bed, and then at Dylan.

“What… what in the world have you been doing?” My voice was high and squeaky. “Wh-who… who is that?”

“You know who it is,” Dylan said softly, and pulled back the sheet. “It’s Fang.”

And… that was when my pregnant self fainted like a schoolgirl, right onto the floor.

OR I WOULD have hit the floor, if Dylan hadn’t had enhanced reflexes and superhuman strength. My eyes fluttered open just seconds later to see him looking down at me in concern.

He was holding me in his arms as if I weighed nothing, and now he gently lowered my feet to the floor. I grabbed hold of a lab table to steady myself and felt anger rising in me.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” I practically spat. “You know how I feel about clones. Your so-called dad was nuttier than a fruitcake, and you know it! Why would you do this? Why would you make a fake Fang?”

Dylan held up his hands, then pushed them through
his dark blond hair in frustration, seeming to hold his head for a second. His jaw twitched and his teeth clamped together. Suddenly I realized I had dropped the scalpel when I fainted. Dylan must have seen it, must have known I’d picked it up as a weapon.

“Max,” he said tightly. “Everything I’ve ever done has been for you. It’s not like I’m a hero—we both know I was programmed to want to… be with you, above anyone else.” His eyes met mine. “You know how I feel, and how I would feel about you no matter what, whether I was programmed to love you or not.”

My cheeks heated and I swallowed, not knowing what to say.
Why is he telling me this?

“I love you,” he said steadily. “I always have, and I always will. You know that.”

I looked away, not wanting him to humble himself this way.

“And I know you love Fang,” he went on more softly. “You always have, and you always will.”

Now I felt really bad.

“I—” I started, but he held up his hand to stop me.

“It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just how it is,” he said, and I felt a hormonal tear come to my eyes. “Once I hoped—I hoped maybe Fang was your first love, and I… I would be your last.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, feeling an ache in my throat that might never go away.

“It’s not your fault,” he said again, gently. “This hasn’t turned out the way I hoped, but then, what has? The world hasn’t turned out the way we hoped, either, right?”

I nodded, praying I wouldn’t start blubbering.

Dylan swallowed again and glanced at the hospital bed. “I pretended to kill the flock, so they would be safe. I had less control over what happened to Fang. The Horsemen were there—Jeb and the doctor were trying out a new upgrade—and there was only so much I could do. You saw how Fang dragged them all over the cliff with him. You saw how one of them… took off Fang’s wing.” The last words ended in a whisper.

I nodded and wiped away a single tear, feeling like the most ancient fifteen-year-old in the world. What was left of it.

“I… waited until everyone was gone, and then… I flew down into the canyon.”

My eyes widened. No. I knew Fang was dead. Angel knew Fang was dead—she had felt it.

Dylan shrugged. “The doctor had labs all over the place. I found Fang at the bottom of the canyon, just as he was about to die. In fact, he might have actually been dead. At any rate, by the time I got him to one of the doctor’s labs, he
was
dead.”

My eyes narrowed. “Okay. And the point is…”

“The doctor had done all kinds of experiments. You can guess,” said Dylan, looking disturbed by the memories.
“But he had the means to put beings into stasis, to hold them until he was ready for them, or whatever.”

I refused to have hope, refused to even think about it. “For God’s sake, Dylan. What are we doing here? Just—tell me.”

Dylan gestured to the bed. “That’s Fang. And… I can make him live.”

“WHAT…” WORDS FAILED me. That happened very rarely.

“Actually, it’s up to you,” Dylan said. “This is Fang, and he’s in stasis. His body healed itself, mostly, but his wing… well, it was gone. I’ve given him a new wing. It’s artificial but looks and feels just like the real thing. He’ll be able to fly.”

My head was spinning, and actually, the room was, too, a little bit. Abruptly I sat down on a lab stool, gripping the nearby table even harder. I just couldn’t take it in.

“What are you saying?” My words were barely audible.

“Experiments and artificial… parts. I know you hate it, hated everything that Jeb and the doctor did,” Dylan said. “And here I am, doing the same thing. But—I did it for you. Because I love you. I did it because this was Fang, and you
love him. So I’m giving you a choice: Do you want me to complete the process? Or would it be better to let him go, the way he should have? Would you still want him, with an artificial wing?”

My eyes felt as big as moons as I stared at Dylan. “Is he a cyborg?” My mouth moved but hardly any sound came out.

“No. It’s like a person having an artificial leg,” Dylan said.

“He would be alive? And—and normal?”

Dylan nodded slowly. “Flesh and blood and brooding silences, the whole lot.”

“I would want him,” I said. “I would want him, wings or no wings, arms or no arms, eyes or no eyes…”

For a long moment, Dylan looked steadily at me.

“Dylan—I’m going to have Fang’s baby.” That was hard—it was like a light went out in Dylan’s eyes. I felt terrible, seeing that this was the final blow, the thing Dylan would never be able to pretend away.

“Congratulations,” he said quietly, his voice cracking. Then he coughed and nodded. “Okay, let’s do this.”

It was like being in a sci-fi movie, watching Dylan wheel in equipment, flip big switches, instruments jumping. He put diodes all over Fang’s still form. I was horrified by my decision, but I knew that even if Fang were a zombie, I would want him, and I would take care of him and protect him for the rest of my life.

Finally Dylan double-checked everything and nodded
again. He came to me, and on his face were a calm acceptance and a sweet honesty that I would remember for the rest of my life.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know. I love you, too, but not—”

“I know. It’s okay. I just—want you to forgive me.”

“For what?”

Dylan didn’t answer, just took my face in his hands, so gently, and kissed my forehead. “Good-bye, my love.”

“Good-bye? What do you mean—”

And before I could move, Dylan grabbed a knot of wires in one hand and flicked the last switch. The lights in the room blinked on and off, there was a horrible buzzing, crackling sound, and I saw Dylan’s body spasming as thousands of volts of electricity surged through him.…

And into Fang.

On the hospital bed, Fang’s body arced once, then fell back. In the flickering lights I saw one of his hands twitch, his fingers curl. Dylan slumped to the floor, his eyes wide and still, his face slack except for the slightest smile on his lips. He was dead. He had killed himself so that Fang would live. He had killed himself for me.

I began to scream, and was still screaming a minute later when Kate and Holden burst into the room.

I’LL BET WHEN you cracked open my first book, you didn’t know you’d signed up for New World History 101, huh?

Or Her-story, if we’re getting technical.

It’s hard to document exactly how it happened—hard to do it right—but there needs to be a record, so we don’t end up here again, repeating the same mistakes. So someone can see the warning signs, and take a stand.

So you can save the world, if it ever needs saving again. And I’m betting it will.

Right now, all I can do is tell my own truth.

Fang was really alive.

Kate found an envelope addressed to me, from Dylan. It said: “I knew you would choose him, and I accept that. If I
can’t live with you, then please believe I’m happy to die for you, my love. Forever yours, Dylan.”

I cried for like three days over that, over Dylan’s unbelievable sacrifice—for me.

Fang was confused at first, having lost months of his life, and had to train his body to work again after being in stasis for so long. But, being Fang, he was soon himself again, and even got used to his new wing faster than I’d expected. It wasn’t long before we were taking one of the last outside flights we could take, before the nuclear winter really hit and we’d have to go underground.

And Dylan was really dead. It took years for me to make peace with that, to not feel guilty, to know he had chosen to do that, and that I hadn’t killed him. But it wasn’t easy. And… I missed him. I missed his smile, his dependability, his sweetness and honesty. I would always miss him. There would always be a Dylan-shaped hole in my heart. But I was thankful every single freaking day that I didn’t have a Fang-shaped hole in my heart. ’Cause I wasn’t sure I’d survive that.

Anyway, it was on that last flight that I gave Fang the big news.

“A what?” he said, staring at me.

“A baby,” I repeated.

He forgot to fly and started dropping out of the sky. I just waited for him, and he soon joined me again.

“Like, a
baby
?”

“I believe that’s what they’re called, yes,” I said primly.

“Are you sure?” he asked, and I rolled my eyes.

“It’s kicking me,” I said. “From the
inside
.”

As you know, Fang is fairly expressionless. But the look on his face when he finally got that he was going to be a dad was… pure exhilaration. The most joy I’d ever seen on anyone. It filled me with a warm glow that kept me going, long after we had to move underground.

But living like a termite (ugh, don’t remind me) was harder than I’d imagined it could be. It felt like being buried alive. Some of the illusion technology kept functioning and projected city streets or starry skies, but every time I tried to fly, I crashed into the low ceilings.

When you’re a claustrophobic bird kid, an underground compound really is the definition of hell. No matter what blissed-out German word you choose to name it.

Our only window to the outside world was a tiny camera that poked aboveground. We watched the screen for months as rain started to fall, and then snow. Then the temperature dropped and the ice came, and all we saw out of the lens were thick, blue-white crystals.

“Trust me,” Angel said. “Not yet.”

Not yet.

So we lived like moles, navigating tunnels in near darkness, turning pale in artificially lit rooms. Once I ended up in Dylan’s former room by mistake. Several kids had moved in there; it was big enough, and none of its belongings reminded me of Dylan. But still, I saw his face silhouetted against the silk wallpaper, imagined him sleeping on
the round waterbed that now held two smaller mutants. My heart ached for him, and all he had wanted, and all he had done for me. It probably always would, and that seems fitting, somehow.

We all dreamed of the sun and breathing fresh air.

It wasn’t all bad, though. In the room I shared with Fang, I swore through a much-too-long childbirth and may have punched Fang and ripped a pillow in half, but I ended up with a wrinkled, utterly perfect nugget of joy as a souvenir.

A baby girl. With wings.

I wish I could have taken a picture of Fang holding his daughter, just to capture that expression of wonder and terror on his face. And while she learned to wail and projectile vomit and say “No” to everything I asked (
karma
), we made some pretty amazing progress in other ways.

Star used her talent for making annoying high-pitched sounds to shock the rest of the Doomsday prisoners back to their senses.

Our little seedlings grew into a thriving plant nursery, which meant never having to eat a freezer-burned Salisbury steak again. And, okay, it also meant avoiding extinction as a species.

The Morrissey brothers, Matthew and Lucas, had worked on developing the original vaccine for the H8E virus, and were able to replicate it in the lab using splices of Fang’s DNA. Jeb was right—Fang really would have a huge impact on generations to come. Because though the
virus was endemic in most of the world, now everyone, mutant or man, would be protected when we returned to the surface.

And one day, after almost four years, we did exactly that.

A sliver of sun peeked through the camera lens, and the ash was finally starting to clear. And when, after days of staring at a clear blue sky, Angel finally nodded
yes
, there was no better feeling than leaving behind our earthworm existence to emerge, blinking, into the light, and become birds again.

Even if the world wasn’t exactly as we’d left it.

Though the sun was shining again, the Russian wilderness was still completely encased in ice. The trees in the surrounding forest looked more like stooped snow people, and the cold was bone-breaking. We could not survive there.

For months more, we all made plans. Everyone who could fly had the best chance of getting far enough south. Others carefully gathered provisions so they could attempt overland journeys—we still had hopes that more people had survived.

Finally the day came when the original six of our flock, plus Fang’s and my daughter, and Total, of course, and fifteen other bird kids left the home that had kept us alive through the devastation that people came to call Earth 2.

As we flew south, we found that ash and ice had buried cities and hidden landmarks. It was hard to tell where we
were, but we knew the blue-white shimmer stretched over a whole lot of the planet.

Until it gave way to just ash.

The sky was clear, but the earth’s surface was now gray. And when we flew near the impact site of the biggest crater, the drifting ash had formed dunelike waves that were a hundred, sometimes two hundred feet high.

I don’t know how to even explain how massive this meteor was.

It left a crater so wide that we could barely see across it. When we stood at its edge, we were looking into a hole that went down for almost a mile.

It was the literal expression of “awesome”—every one of us was struck speechless with shock, wonder, and reverence at the extreme power of nature.

Finally, Total managed to articulate what all of us were feeling.

“How is it remotely possible that we survived this?” he asked, and we all chuckled, breaking the tension.

“The human spirit,” Angel said with a good-natured shrug. “Turns out it’s actually pretty tough to kill.”

“And the canine spirit,” Total said quickly, and we all agreed.

“Mama, what are we going to do now?” my daughter asked, ever curious.

I squeezed her hand and smiled.

“We’re going to begin again.”

We’re living in the Southern Hemisphere now, somewhere
in what used to be Peru. The rain forest shriveled up along with everything else, so I’ll have to wait awhile to build another tree house, but plants are starting to grow back, bit by bit. I come out to this hillside every afternoon and sit cross-legged among the Incan ruins, where the boulders are still standing, even after the end of the world. I take my feather pen—an old memento—and I write with ink made from ash and stone.

I try to record the past.

Right now, I exhale and lean back against a five-hundred-year-old stone wall, relishing the feel of the sun on my face again. I study this page, and the many pages before it, and wonder if someone will read these words in another five hundred years.

I trace the silky black feather pen across my skin, down my cheek, and close my eyes, remembering.