James Patterson - Maximum Ride - The Angel Experiment

Two hours later, Lake Mead came into view, along with the cliff top covered with the huge hawks who had rescued us. The six of us, together again, landed gratefully on the scraped-out ledge.

Angel collapsed onto the cool, dust-covered floor of the cave. I sank down next to her, stroking her hair.

“I thought I would never see you again,” she said, and a single tear rolled down her face. “They did all kinds of stuff to me, Max. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.”

“I would never quit trying to get you back,” I told her, feeling like my heart was going to overflow. “There’s no way I would ever let them keep you. They would have to kill me first.”

“They almost did,” she said, her voice breaking. I gathered her to me and held her for a long time.

“This is how it should be forever,” Iggy said. “All of us together.”

I looked up to where Fang was leaning against a wall, facing the canyon. He felt my gaze and turned. I held out my left fist. Almost smiling, he came and stacked his left fist on top of it. One by one, the others joined us, and I disentangled my right hand from Angel’s hair and tapped the backs of theirs.

“I’m just… so thankful,” I said. Nudge looked at me with faint surprise. Okay, so I’m not the most mushy person ever. I mean, I love my family and I try to be nice to them, but I don’t go around telling them how much I love them all the time.

Maybe I should fix that.

“I mean,” I said, feeling really self-conscious, “this made me realize how much we all need one another. I need all of you. I love you all. But five of us, or three of us, or two of us isn’t us. Us is all six.”

Fang was examining his sneakers with great interest. Iggy was nervously tapping long white fingers against his leg. But my little guys got what I was saying.

Nudge threw her arms around my neck. “I love you too, Max! I love all of us too.”

“Yeah, me too,” said the Gasman. “I don’t care if we have our house, or a cliff ledge, or a cardboard box. Home is wherever we all are, together.” I hugged him, and he nestled against me, looking happy.

Later on, we all slept, and awoke in the night to heavy rain, a miracle in the desert. We scrambled up to the ledge and let the rain pour down on us, washing off blood, dirt, and memories. Even raindrops hitting my nose hurt, but I held my arms open to the sky and felt clean and cold and shivery.

I shivered, and Fang briskly rubbed my shoulders. I looked at him, his eyes as dark as the desert sky. “Jeb knows our house,” I said very softly.

Fang nodded. “Can’t ever go back. Guess we need a new home.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth slightly, inhaling the chill, rain-washed air. I opened my eyes. “East,” I said, feeling the Tightness of it. “We’ll go east.”

Blue, blue sky, above the clouds. The air is colder, but the sun is warmer up this high. The air is thin and light, like champagne. You ought to try it sometime.

I felt happy. The six of us were homeless, aimless, on the run-and might be for the rest of our lives, however long or short they might be. But…

Yesterday we’d escaped the hounds of hell at the School, after all. We’d had the pleasure of seeing our friends the hawks do some slice ‘n’ dice on the white-coats and the Erasers.

We had Angel back.

I glanced over at her-she was still a mess. It would take her a while to heal after what they had done to her. Every time I thought about it, chains of anger tightened around me, till I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Sensing me looking at her, she turned and smiled. One whole side of her face was green and yellow-a healing bruise.

“God!” Nudge said, speeding up a bit to catch my slipstream. “It’s just so, so… you know?” She swooped down gracefully, then rose again and pulled alongside.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, grinning at her.

“I mean, the air, and we’re up so high, and no one’s after us, and we’re all together, and we hit IHOP for breakfast.” She looked over at me, her brown eyes bright and untroubled. “I mean, God, we’re just up here, and it’s so cool, and down below kids are stuck in school or, like, cleaning their rooms. I used to hate cleaning my room.”

Back when she had a room. I sighed. Don’t think about it.

Then, in the next second, I choked. I think I made some kind of sound, then a blinding, stunning pain exploded behind my eyes.

“ Max ?” Nudge screamed.

I couldn’t think, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do a thing. My wings folded like paper, and I started to drop like a hailstone.

Something was incredibly wrong.

Already.

Tears streamed from my eyes, and my hands clutched my head to keep the pain from splitting my skull wide open. The only semicoherent thought I had was Please let me go splat soon, so this freaking pain will stopstopSTOP.

Then Fang’s arms, ropy and hard, scooped me up, and I felt myself rising again. My wings were mushed between us, but nothing mattered except that my brain had been replaced by a bursting nova of raw agony. I had just enough consciousness to be embarrassed at hearing myself moan pitifully.

Death would have been so great just then.

I don’t know how long Fang carried me. Slowly, slowly, the pain leached away. I could almost open my eyes a slit. I could swallow. Cautiously, wincing, I let go of my head, half expecting huge shards of skull to come away in my hands.

I blinked up at Fang, his dark eyes looking down at me. He was still flying and carrying me.

“Man, you weigh a freaking ton,” he told me. “What’ve you been eating, rocks?”

“Why, is your head missing some?” I croaked. His mouth almost quirked in a smile, and that’s when I knew how upset he’d been.

“Max, are you okay?” Nudge’s face was scared, making her look really young.

“Uh-huh,” I managed. I just had a stroke or something.

“Find a place to land,” I told Fang. “Please.”

An hour or so later, I thought that I had recovered- but from what? We were making camp for the night.

“Yo, watch it!” I said. “Clear more of that brush away- we don’t want the whole forest to burn down.”

“Guess you’re feeling like your old self,” Fang murmured, kicking some dead branches away from where Iggy Was lighting a fire.

I shot him a look, then helped Nudge and Angel surround the pile of kindling with big stones. Why was the blind guy playing with matches, you ask? Because he’s good at it. Anything to do with fire, igniting things, exploding things, things with fuses, wicks, accelerants… Iggy’s your man. It’s one of those good/bad things.

Twenty minutes later, we were exploring the limits of what could be cooked on sticks over an open fire.

“This isn’t half bad,” the Gasman said, eating a curled piece of roasted bologna off his stick.

“Don’t do bananas,” Nudge warned glumly, shaking some warm mush off into the bushes.

“S’mores,” I cooed, mashing a graham cracker on top of the chocolate-and-marshmallow sandwich I had balanced on my knee. I took a bite, and pure pleasure overwhelmed my mouth.

“This is nice,” the Gasman said happily. “It’s like summer camp.”

“Yeah, Camp Bummer,” said Fang. “For wayward mutants.”

I nudged his leg with my sneaker. “It’s better than that. This is cool.”

Fang gave me an “if you say so” look, and turned his bacon over the fire.