James Patterson - Max

“Max, you there?” Dr. Abate asked.

“Yes.” One-word answers seemed all I was capable of.

“Listen – I’ve got to go talk to the FBI. They’ll probably want to talk to you too. You were among the last people to see her. I want you guys to sit tight for a couple hours, okay?”

“Hm,” I said, unwilling to promise that.

“Hole up there, protect yourselves, but stay put,” he said again. “Let me get some answers before you go charging off.”

“I do not ‘go charging off!’ ” I said, offended.

“Yes, you do,” John said, exactly when everyone else in the flock said it.

“Your middle name is ‘Charging Off,’ ” Total muttered, fortunately out of kicking range.

“Okay, gotta go,” said John. “We’re going to try to figure out if we can tell where the boat was by what we can see in the picture. I’ll call you as soon as I can. Stay by the phone.”

“Okay.” I hung up, just as Fang turned toward me from the window.

“In other news,” he said, “the house is surrounded. It looks like those things from Mexico City.”

SITTING TIGHT? Holing up? Waiting for answers?

Those are all things I’m not good at .

Planning a massive attack against mechanical geeky-like things when I was already furious and itching to kill something?

Piece o’ cake.

I took a break from my plotting, clenching and unclenching my hands, to find five pairs of eyes locked on to mine. Iggy’s gaze was locked to a point about two inches above my eyebrows. He’s good, but he’s not perfect.

“What?” I said.

“Dr. Abate said to sit tight,” Nudge said.

“Dr. Abate didn’t know about the combat robots sent to kill us,” I pointed out.

“They haven’t attacked yet,” Iggy said.

“Oh, gosh, I guess they won’t, then,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I just rolled my eyes, Ig. Anyway, how many of them are there?”

“Looks like, about… eighty.” Fang calculated the odds in his head. He nodded once: we could do it.

I began to come up with an attack plan.

“Maximum Ride.”

My eyebrows raised. The voice from outside had been loud, mechanical, and had mispronounced my name. Max-HIH-mum Ride. What a doofus.

Gazzy had been kneeling at a window, curtain raised just enough for him to see. “These guys have… it looks like Uzis attached to their arms. Uzis. The automatic ones.”

He glanced at me, willing me to understand that it wouldn’t be hand-to-wing combat. Eighty-plus submachine guns spewing countless rounds of bird-kid-piercing bullets would be significantly less fun than the rip-roarin’, head-breakin’, ankle-bustin’ jamboree I’d pictured.

“Hm,” I said.

“Max-HIH-mum Ride,” the voice intoned again.

I let out a deep breath. “Everyone, get upstairs to the hall, where there aren’t any windows. Stay down, but be ready to do an up-and-away if you hear a bunch of breaking glass.” I looked at Fang. Our hot-and-heavy make-out session in the desert seemed like a lifetime ago. Two lifetimes. “Should I answer him?” I asked, only half joking.

“I think you should look at him,” Fang said, and something in his voice made me frown.

As the flock scuttled upstairs, I sank to my knees and crawled to a window. Despite Gazzy’s repeated pleas that we get a pair of night-vision goggles, we do see excellently in the dark. So it wasn’t hard for me to focus on the leader in front, the one calling my name.

What I saw was like ice water being poured down my back.

I looked at Fang, who was crouched in the living room’s darkness, waiting.

“But he’s… dead,” I said, my voice hollow. “I mean, dead again .”

Fang’s face was grim. “They just made it look like that to freak you out.”

I nodded slowly. “They succeeded.”

The head robot-soldier had been enhanced, its outer covering made to look more human. Made to look exactly like Ari, my half brother, who I’d killed once, saw killed once, and had buried not that long ago.

MY FIRST THOUGHT was Jeb . He’d created the first Ari – maybe he’d had enough DNA left to create another one. Then I thought about how distraught Jeb had seemed at Ari’s funeral.

I took another look.

There were slight differences. The curve of his eyebrows, the wave of his hair. Maybe it wasn’t really Ari’s genes. Just a similar thing made to freak me out, like Fang said.

“So where are these guys from?” Fang asked quietly, crouching next to me on the floor. “They were in Mexico City. Now they’re here. What do they want?”

“They want me – us – to quit working for the CSM,” I said. “Remember when I came back with my new, ventilated wing? They did it – they took me to a guy called Mr. Chu. Short, I think he’s Chinese, major bee up his butt. Mr. Chu told me he’d find a way to make me stop working for the CSM. He said he represented a bunch of super-powerful businessmen.”

“And your response was…”

“Unsatisfactory, I guess.” I peeped through the window again: The things had moved closer. They were about twenty yards from the house. The leader was still out front, and I sensed he was about to mispronounce my name again.

“And you didn’t tell anyone because…” Fang had that too-patient tone in his voice that let me know that he knew that I knew that he knew that I’d screwed up.

“I wanted to do some research,” I said too defensively, which let him know that I knew that he knew that I may have conceivably perhaps not chosen the best possible route in this particular instance. “Later I mentioned it to the Jebster, and he went pale like someone had sucked all the blood out of his head.” Okay, I guess that’s a gross image. But still. “And then he convincingly said, ‘Gee, no, haven’t heard of him.’ As if I’d had my brain removed and I might believe that.”

Fang said nothing, which meant that he was thinking. He says nothing and thinks more than anyone I know.

“Max-HIH-mum Ride,” said the Ari wannabe.

“How hard would it be to program him to say my name correctly?” I fumed.

“You must not leave the area,” said the voice.

I peeked out through the curtain again. The Ari-thing was closer, standing directly in the moonlight. I peered at him, and something about him made my blood run cold – and it wasn’t just his Ari-ness.

“Fang,” I whispered. “Look at him. He might not be a robot.”

Fang rose slightly and took a look. “Hm.” There was a whole unspoken paragraph there. You had to read between the lines.

I looked out again. The combat-bots were huddled together, forming an almost perfect circle that I assumed went around the whole house. Their knees were bent, their Uzi-arms raised and braced. Primed and ready for action.

But it was the main guy who stuck out. Despite his jerky movements and mechanical voice, he seemed oddly – human.

“Ew,” I whispered, struck by a thought. “You know how Itex stretched skin stuff over their ’bots to make ’em look like Erasers, or just more humanoid? This guy – it’s like they took a person and then built a robot inside of him. Going from the inside out instead of the outside in. You know? Gross.” My nose wrinkled as I pondered this.

Fang looked at me silently for a few seconds. “Is it hard, being you?”

“Yes, it is, actually,” I said snidely. “For the record. But are you saying that that’s impossible? That no one could possibly be twisted enough to take a person and then grow a cyborg inside it? Gosh, that couldn’t happen, not in today’s world!” I made my eyes big. “That’s almost as unbelievable as a bunch of scientists grafting avian DNA into human embryos! It’s the stuff of science fiction! It couldn’t possibly ever happen!”