Prologue
I couldn't stand it anymore, dry heat making me sticky with sweat. Cole was going to get it now. I felt Jacob next to me, landing, his wing brushing against mine. His black wings were burning hot, and, brushing against my snowy white wing, practically burned me. I pulled away involuntarily. The down sides of being a half bird test-tube baby.
But someone had to get rid of Cole, right?
"We going in?" Jake asked. Well, duh, I thought. I turned to look at Jake and his dark brown eyes were wandering, eating up everything around us. Memorizing exits, noticing landmarks, making a general map in his head of anything and everything within as far as the eye can see. And when you have raptor vision, that's pretty far.
I wanted to get back in the sky. Flying over the desert is the best way to experience it-you don't feel the heat up there. But no, we had to be on land. Leave it to Cole to settle down in Arizona. Bleh.
"Yes, we're going in," I finally replied. "The question is how do we get in?" We looked north and south, scanning the wall. The building was about ten feet high and fifty feet wide, and from what we could see, solid. And how they kept it so white in this place I would never know. "They better pay the guys who dust this thing a fortune," Jake said, reading my mind. Leave it to him to read my mind.
"Well, let's go," I said, jumping and spreading my wings out to fly over the building.
And of course, some infrared beam caught me and an alarm sounded.
Great.
I looked around and red lights came out of the corners of the roof. The place still looked like a white box, until finally a robot rose up through the ceiling, a mess of silver and blue and what practically looked like stickers from a toy robot. It didn't look real at all.
Until it started shooting at us.
Dodging the bullets, flying straight up in a zigzag, this little mission was looking more and more difficult. But I knew our only chance of getting in was through the same hatch that the robot and come up from, and it's little platform was still there, raised about three feet above the ceiling, leaving a gaping hole practically inviting us in. I'm not one to be so impolite as to refuse that invitation. So I yelled "Race you to the lab!" tucked my wings in, and cut through the air like a laser beam to get inside. I zoomed through the three feet of space under the platform, narrowly missing a bullet, a concussion, and simply falling, but I made it, coming to a smooth landing on the ground below. Jake was right behind me, laughing.
"Shut up!" I whisper-screamed at him. He laughed more, and I rolled my eyes. Stupid boys. But we soon decided not to go for stealth, and stormed through the place, opening doors and peering in, looking for Cole.
"Not in here," we would say at almost every door and look to each other in dismay. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Where was the egomaniac?
Finally, of course the last door in the bright white hallway we were currently in, opened to a long room that seemed to stretch, fifteen feet wide and fifty feet long, along that whole side of the building. It was lined with cages, huge dog crates just like the ones we'd been imprisoned in. Inside were new "experiments" like us-people and animals that had been morphed together, their identities stripped away, more often given a product number than a name. Cole was evil, pure evil, and absolutely-
"Insane, I know," said an icy voice at the end of the room, not loudly but carrying through the long chamber. Another thing about Cole: all mutants have their own little powers. Cole's was mind reading. Mine was barking off orders like there was no tomorrow. Jake's was having overwhelmingly amazing brown eyes. Just kidding. Kind of.
I looked up the room at Cole, that little mind reading creep turning people's lives into experiments, and looked back at my wings. Maybe if you wanted wings, which some people do, this was great technology. I love my wings, don't get me wrong. It was spending the first four years of my life, running on treadmills with wires taped to my body, on IV drips all the time, living in a dog crate-that was the part I wasn't so happy about. Jake had saved me when he was six and I was four. We ran away and never came back, growing up in Arizona far from Cole and learning our strengths, training ourselves to come back and kill him. A little harsh, I guess, but somebody had to do it. Something had to be done.
Ok, maybe not kill him. But something.
"Cole," I said, spitting his name, turning to face him. Jake stood a bit behind me.
"Emily, I knew the day would come when you would return to me. I know how you're planning your attack, you can stop. I'm not going to hurt you. But I would like to reason with you." He spoke, trying for diplomacy, walking around the room with a gait that just screamed "I think I'm the most powerful person in the world."
Ha. Right.
"Cole, no way in heck am I making any kind of deal with you."
"Em," Jake interrupted the beginning of my rant. "Em, he wants us to join him, help him convince people to give up their kids to his experiments." Did I mention Jake can read minds, too? He just doesn't need to when it comes to me. It's kind of like he can turn it on and off-thank God.
But finding out what Cole wanted? That was the last straw. I unfurled my wings, bolted across the room and punched him straight in the face. While he staggered I jumped back and snapped a roundhouse kick right into his stomach. Being inhuman, Jake and I are much stronger than normal people, so I may have accidentally broken a few ribs.
"It's a shame, Emily. You could be such a great addition to the empire I am building," he taunted. But an evil plot works a lot better when you're not laying on the ground, spitting blood and panting and clutching your ribcage.
I placed one combat-booted foot over his neck, pinning him down. "Cole, I will never work for you." I gave Jake a signal, two fingers behind my back, to start listening in on my mind.
Look for empty crates, and keys, I told him. He gave an almost imperceptible nod and started walking around the room. I kept Cole pinned. Finally he held up a ring of keys, jingling them in the air. "Payback time, Cole," said Jake. Finally.
I picked him up, threw him in a crate and started unlocking all the other crates. Soon security guards were flooding in, mutants were fighting humans, people were lying on the floor it was an all out war zone. But finally, the freaks prevailed. Go mutants! We double checked that Cole's cage was locked and ran.
"Everyone follow!" I screamed over lizard kids and bird kids and dog kids high fiving and rejoicing and staring in wonder at their legs as they walked around freely. We ran out the room, Jake and I in the lead. There were a lot of bird kids, so bigger bird kids grabbed smaller non-bird kids and as soon as we got outside we shot into the air and into a v-shape like a flock of geese, Cole's goons running out the door and watching us and shouting things I won't repeat.
"We did it, Em, we did it," Jake said, reaching out for my hand and somehow balancing a tiny lizard girl on his back. I had a small winged child whose wing was broken clutching to my back, but I reached out for Jake's hand anyway. It was over. We were alive.
Sure, Cole would come back. But how many kids had we freed? It was good enough for me. So Jake and I—along with about fifty other kids—flew off into Arizona no man's land, free, safe, and hungry.
"McDonalds, anyone?"
