James Patterson - Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

"You still don't believe us, sweetheart," said Jeb.

"Yeah. 'Cause I'm not a lunatic." My voice sounded a little choked.

Jeb gently took my left wrist. Instinctively I tried to pull away from him, but I couldn't. He carefully turned my hand inside the Velcro strap, so the underside of my arm was facing up.

"Look, Max," he said very softly. "I'm telling you, none of it has been real. It was all a dream. You never left the School."

Remember that puckered red scar on my arm, from when I tried to cut the chip out myself? And then the surgery, just a few days ago? It had left clean, straight little lines, maybe half an inch long.

Jeb pushed back my sleeve so I could see farther up my arm.

There were no scars there. Not anywhere. My arm was smooth and unmarked. I tried to wiggle my fingers. They moved. There was nothing wrong with my left hand.

Next to me, Gazzy sucked in an astonished breath.

I tried not to breathe at all, tried not to swallow, tried to conceal my shock. Then something occurred to me: We'd gotten Total in New York. "What about Total?" I demanded triumphantly. "Was he a dream too?"

Jeb looked at me gently. "Yes, sweetheart. He was a dream too. There is no Total the talking dog."

He stepped aside so we could all see the bed across from us. It was empty. The sheets were smooth and taut and white. Total had never been there, had he?

Okay, color me way freaked. Either they were seriously messing with my mind or they were...even more seriously messing with my mind.

Very quickly, I ran through possible scenarios in my head:

1) They were lying (of course). a) Lying about us all having been in the School this whole time. b) Not lying about us all having been in the School this whole time.

2) This, even now, this second, was just another hallucination.

3) Everything up till now had in fact been drug-induced nightmares and dreams (an anorexically thin possibility).

4) Whether they were lying or no, whether this was a dream or no, I should just break loose, kick their sorry butts, and be done with it.

I lay back against my thin pillow. I glanced around at the flock. I had seen them age, seen them get taller, seen their hair grow. How could we have been tied up for years? Or had we been this big to begin with, been created this age?

I looked at Angel, wishing she would send me a reassuring thought. But nothing came from her at all. Oh, God.

I couldn't think anymore. I was hungry and in pain and trying to keep a steel lid on my rising panic. I closed my eyes and tried to take some steady breaths.

"How do you get some chow in this joint?" I finally asked.

"We'll get you something right now," Jeb said.

"Like, a last meal," said Angel in her little-girl voice.

My eyes opened.

"I'm sorry, Max," said Anne Walker. "But as you've probably figured out, we're shutting down all of our recombinant-DNA experiments. All of the lupine-human blends have been retired, and it's time to retire you too."

Which confirmed that we hadn't seen any real Erasers lately. Gazzy had explained about the Flyboy robot things.

"Retire as in kill?" I asked flatly. "Is that how you live with yourselves? By using euphemisms for death and murder?" I pretended to quote a newscast: "In today's news, seven people were 'retired' in a horrific accident on Highway Seventeen." I changed voices. "Jimmy, don't retire that bird with your shotgun." Then, "Please, sir, don't retire me! You can have my wallet!"

I gazed at Jeb and Anne, feeling cold rage turn my face into a mask. "How's that working out for you? Able to look at yourselves in a mirror? Able to sleep at night?"

"We'll get you something to eat," Anne said, and she walked quickly out of the room.

"Max-," Jeb began.

"Don't you even talk to me!" I spat. "Take your little traitor with you and get out of our death chamber!"

Angel's expression didn't change as she looked from me to Jeb. Jeb took her hand and sighed, and they both left the room. I was shaking with emotion and in a last surge, strained against the Velcro straps with all my superhuman strength.

Nothing.

I flopped back against the bed, tears forming in my eyes, hating to have the flock see me like this. I wiggled my left fingers and looked for the scars. Nothing.

"So, that went well," said Fang.

Okay, here's a knotty little question: If you're dreaming that you're tied up by mad scientists in a secret experimental facility, and then you fall asleep and start dreaming, are you really dreaming?

Which one is the dream?

Which one counts?

How can you tell?

I'd been torturing myself with these pointless circular conundrums all day. Which raises another question: If I'm torturing my own brain by trying to figure stuff out, does that still count as Them torturing me? Because they caused the whole situation to happen?

At any rate, at some point I must have "fallen asleep," because at some point, a hand shaking my shoulder made me streak back to "consciousness."

As always, I leaped into wakefulness on full alert, automatically trying to assume a battle position. Pretty much impossible when you're all strapped down.

I see perfectly in the dark, and it took only a split second to register the familiar hulking bad news leaning over my bed.

"Ari!" I whispered almost silently.

"Hi, Max," Ari said, and for the first time in a long time, he didn't look that mental. I mean, every time I'd seen this poor screwup in the last couple months, he'd looked more and more as if he were standing on the edge of insanity with one foot on a banana peel.

But now he looked-well, not anything close to normal, but at least all the frothing at the mouth had stopped.

I waited for the first volley of venom.

But Ari had no snide remarks, no taunts, no threats. Instead he undid one of my arms, then pulled it down and strapped it to the arm of a wheelchair.

Hmm. Could I still fly if I was strapped into a wheelchair? I thought maybe I could. I guessed we would find out. In fact, if I could get some serious speed going on this thing, it might lend a significant boost to an exciting takeoff.

I sat down in the chair, and Ari strapped my ankle to the post by the front wheel. Just as I was tensing to make a break, he whispered, "They made this chair with lead bars. It weighs about a hundred an' seventy-five pounds."

Crap. Even though I was really tall for my age, I weighed barely a hundred pounds because of all the avian modifications to my bones and stuff. And the fact that I could almost never get enough food. So even though I was really, really strong, there was no way I could get a wheelchair that heavy off the ground.

I looked at Ari with loathing. "What now, big guy? You taking me to your leader?"

He didn't rise to the bait. "Just thought I'd show you around a bit, that's all, Max."

"Gosh, a guided tour, from you? Now I know I'm dreaming," I quipped. But then a thought occurred to me. "They told me all the Erasers had been retired. And if I wasn't strapped down, I'd make air quotes around retired."

Ari looked sad. "Yeah. I'm the last one. They...killed all the others."

For some reason his quiet, sad confirmation of that terrible fact made my blood run cold. Despite what a walking chigger bite he was, there were still times when I could almost see the little kid he'd once been. They'd altered him when he was already three years old, and his results had been less than stellar, poor guy.

Oh, yeah, poor guy who tried to kill me a bunch of times. My eyes narrowed.

"The flock is supposed to be wiped out too," I said. "Am I the first to go? Is that why you came to get me?"