James Patterson - Two Schools Out - Forever

"Oh, here," Nudge whispered, and I watched in surprise as page after page of information, all labeled "Restricted Access Only" filled the screen. Hmm. Maybe this mutant was smarter than she looked. Maybe somehow, something had come out right, with her.

"Okay, start reading," I said, looking over her shoulder.

Time was running out for the freaks.

I, Maximum Ride, was dead, and nobody seemed to have noticed.

Maybe I really was dead. I was starting to not really care one way or another.

Finally, finally my captors figured out that instead of an interesting, captive lab rat, they now had a much less interactive dead body on their hands.

Deep in my trance, I had only a split second to brace myself as they ripped open the top of the tank, letting in retina-searing, blinding light. Staying limp was the hardest thing I had ever done.

Voices said, "What happened? Who was monitoring her? They're gonna have our butts!"

Once again hands grabbed me and hauled me out of there. Once again it was the most horrible, painful thing I could imagine. But this time I forced my eyes open, put my feet down, and roared.

My knees buckled under me, but I flung my wings out, shaking as much moisture as possible off them. I had a brief glimpse of astonished, then angry faces, and, with another raspy, croaky roar, not nearly as intimidating as I'd hoped, I leaped up shakily.

I saw a blurred image of a window and ran at it, hardly able to keep on my rubbery legs. When I was close, I threw myself at the glass as hands grabbed at my wet clothes and wings.

Please don't let this glass have chicken wire embedded in it, I remembered to pray at the last second. I guess it didn't, because I crashed right through it, which made every cell in my body feel as if it had been crushed by a truck. Screaming in pain, I felt damp air hit my cheeks and then I started to fall.

I tried to move my wings, tried to remember that familiar feeling of catching wind beneath them: light, beautiful sails of muscle and feather and bone. But I felt only numbness, a deadened sensation, as if I'd been dipped in novocaine.

Work, dang it, work! I thought, and had an image of myself crumpling into a broken heap on the ground, maybe five stories below.

It was dark out: less painful for my eyes. I opened them to see the ground rushing up at me way too fast. Once again I flung my wings out, desperate for them to catch me, to snatch me back up into the air.

And they did-just as my bare feet banged against the grass. Then I was lurching unsteadily upward, trying to remember how to fly, how to move my muscles, how to unhinge my shoulder blades to give me more freedom. I lifted up past the broken window, which had several angry faces crowded in it.

One face wasn't angry. Jeb's. He held his hand out the window, giving me a thumbs-up.

"See you soon, sweetheart!" he called.

I soared upward, the wind blowing my wet hair back.

What was with him?

"Geez, there's so much stuff here," Gasman whispered, reading over Nudge's shoulder.

Yeah-huh, no kidding, I thought. I hadn't expected nearly this amount of info on Itex. I wondered if they'd had any idea that this kid would be so successful at hacking in.

Nudge was scrolling through pages fast. I kept an eye on my watch, ready to hurry everyone on to part two of tonight's little charade.

"I wonder," Nudge said, suddenly stopping her typing and sitting very still. "I wonder if Jeb has been here. I feel something." Cripes, I thought. This is getting creepy.

"Why would Jeb have been here?" I snapped. "He has nothing to do with Itex."

"Max, I can feel his vibe. He was here. Maybe there is something on him, on us, in the Itex files." Her fingers started flying.

"What are you doing?" I whispered. "No ad-libbing-stick to the program."

Irritated, I quickly checked out the others. Gasman and Iggy were beneath a counter, and Gasman was looking up at something. Fang was standing guard by the door.

Angel and her unwanted flea-magnet were sitting very still, close to Fang. Angel's eyes were closed, I noticed with irritation. Nice time to take a nap. Just then her eyes popped open and she looked straight at me. I gave her a reassuring smile and turned back to Nudge.

"Oh, gosh," Nudge whispered as the screen suddenly filled again. "Look, look!"

Frowning, I watched as pages of documents tiled before us. On the top was a photograph of a baby. It was wearing a white hospital bracelet that said, "I'm a Girl! My name is Monique." The Monique part was handwritten.

"That's me, me as a baby," Nudge said excitedly.

I had no idea why she thought this, but whatever. She started scrolling through the pages and hit a huge patch of, like, blueprints or mechanical drawings, schematics, design plans. I looked closer and frowned. These were plans of how to recombine the baby's DNA, graft avian DNA into her stem cells.

"Max, Max, look at this," Nudge whispered, pointing. There, at the bottom of a long medical form, was the signature of Jeb Batchelder. "Oh, my gosh. Max-can you believe this? Fang?"

Fang came over silently and read over her shoulder. His eyes narrowed. I didn't understand-how could Jeb Batchelder be here in Itex's files? We were supposed to be finding out stuff about how evil Itex was-not about the scientists at the School.

Nudge clicked on a link, and a small media-player window popped up. It was labeled "Parents, two days post."

A fuzzy video clip of a black couple started playing. The woman was crying, and the man had a pained, frozen expression on his face, as if he'd just seen a horrible accident. The woman was saying, "My baby! Who would take my baby? Her name was Monique! If anyone knows where my baby is, please, please bring her back. She's my world!" The woman broke down sobbing and couldn't go on.

This wasn't the stuff we were supposed to be seeing. We were supposed to be looking at file after file about how Itex was polluting the planet, destroying natural resources, using child labor, and so on. Despite myself, I was intrigued by what Nudge was finding.

"That doesn't make sense," I said, after the video played. "We saw the medical consent form a few screens back."

Nudge sniffled and clicked back to the form. At the bottom were signatures of Monique's parents, authorizing someone named Roland ter Borcht to "treat" their baby.

But, now that we looked at them, the parent signatures looked exactly like Jeb Batchelder's.

I didn't know what to think. None of this agreed with what they had told me. What was real? Crying silently, Nudge continued to scroll through the file. Another photograph of the woman filled the screen. She looked older and incredibly sad. Stamped across the photo in red ink was the word "Terminated."

Suddenly Iggy pulled his head out from under the counter. He was holding some wires in one hand. "Someone's coming," he said.

Freedom is still freedom, even if you're soaked, practically nuts, and having trouble getting your muscles to cooperate.

First stop: the Twilight Inn. I checked it out carefully, but it seemed clear. The Echo was still in the parking lot. No one was in the room, however, though all of our stuff was still there. Was the flock out looking for me?

I wolfed down some food, then packed all of our stuff as fast as I could. I grabbed everything and took off, running twenty feet in the parking lot and leaping into the air, wings wide and gathering wind.

I kept up a constant surveillance, watching for flying Erasers, but saw nothing. The backpacks weighed me down too much-I needed to ditch them and have my hands free.

I hid our stuff at the top of a pine tree. Next stop: back to where I'd just busted out from. The more I felt like myself, the more myself felt like a murderous, enraged maniac. I tore through the night sky, rage rolling off me like steam. My whole life, the whitecoats had done countless heinous, inhuman, unforgivable things to me, to all of us. They had kidnapped Angel. But now they'd really crossed the line.