LIKE LIONS

Is it worse to see no future? Is it worse to be afraid?
And then we are like lions—pumping fire in our veins
We are born in perfect hunger, we are born with perfect need
And then we are like lions—we are baring all our teeth

ONE

"Okay. Everyone name one thing that they're grateful for."

"Food."

I rolled my eyes at this incredibly predictable answer from the Gasman, feeling my patience wane. "Maybe something a little more sentimental?"

"Oh, not this again," said Total, our pompous, impressively obnoxious talking Scottie. I kicked some dirt at him. "Hey!"

"Fire," said Iggy, forever our resident pyro, from next to me. He was pulling the turkey from our makeshift rotisserie. When I sighed exasperatedly, he looked offended. "What? It helps us make food. And bombs. And stay warm."

"All valid points," Gazzy said seriously.

It was Thanksgiving. We were camped out in a forest by the mountains in Middle of Nowhere, West Virginia, where we'd lived in tents for the past year, and were about to enjoy—get this—actual turkey. And celebrate—wait for it—an actual holiday.

I did my best to internalize my frustration at Iggy and the Gasman's immaturity. Part of the problem with being a ragtag band of mutants on the run was that nobody was around to stop them from being little twerps. Gazzy I understood—he was only ten years old, he was supposed to be obnoxious—but Iggy, who was on the tail end of fifteen, had no excuse.

I guess, in reality, it was my job to stop them from being twerps, because I'm the leader, but I'd learned from a very young age that I needed to pick my battles when it came to my pseudo-siblings/children.

Iggy hacked out a half-laugh and punched me in the shoulder affectionately with a greasy fist. I'd never get over his sightless accuracy—even after a decade of his blindness, it would never not be creepy.

"Aw, c'mon, Max," he said with a wry grin, sawing the turkey into perfect segments with our best knife. It was the same one I used to kill and clean the bird with, hours before. "Yada yada yada, we love each other, flock family forever, stack the fists, whatever—let's eat."

Iggy passed around paper plates full of sliced turkey. It wasn't the thirty-pound Butterball that Anne (FBI agent-turned-"mom" who turned out to be one of The Bad Guys—shocker) had prepared last year by any means, but it was certainly a lot less evil.

When Iggy handed me my plate, a certain important part of the turkey seemed to be missing from it.

"Um, hello? Drumstick please?"

"Drumsticks are for the strong manly men," said Iggy in a deep voice, handing a plate with one on it to Fang, who grinned wickedly and quickly dug in. "Gotta keep up our strength, you know."

I felt myself flush with rage. Uh, perdón? "I'm sorry—what manly man caught the turkey? Oh, that's right—it was me!"

Fang cleared his throat from my other side, gesturing to himself with the hand that wasn't holding the turkey leg. "'Us' may be a more accurate word. I recall you scaring off everything in a two mild radius while we were out there—"

I strapped on my Scary Leader Voice and held out a steady hand to Iggy, palm up. "I nailed the killshot, I cleaned the game, I get the drumstick. Now fork it over."

Total chortled. "Brutal."

Iggy groaned, swapping his plate for mine. "Heil. Please, vicious dictator, spare us all," he said flatly. "Man, it just keeps getting easier to push your buttons."

I brandished the turkey leg. "You'll be thanking me next time my womanly strength saves your skinny ass from certain death."

Across the fire, Angel was scooping canned corn and peas onto each paper plate. I held mine out and she gave me a generous portion. I beamed at her and she beamed right back, blonde curls bouncing, blue eyes glowing. A true living, breathing angel.

Happy Thanksgiving, Max, she said. In her mind. 'Cause she's creepy and twisted like that.

Angel fixed a plate for Total and deposited it on the log next to her. He leaped up, let her scratch him between the ears, and started to eat. "Not five-star," he mused, "but it'll do."

"Is this cannibalism?" Nudge asked uneasily from next to Angel, picking at a piece of perfectly crisped fowl skin with a frown. "Because it kind of feels like cannibalism."

"Are any of us part turkey?" I asked. Rhetorically, of course. Not to be racist, but I'd like to think we were more evolved than turkeys.

"Right, but we think I'm pheasant, and—"

"Nudge," I said gently, meeting her eyes and giving her the best reassuring grin I could manage. "Just don't think about it."

I pulled off my windbreaker and let my wings—yes, my wings; thirteen-almost-fourteen feet of tan, white-speckled awesome courtesy of my two percent hawk genes—unfurl a bit and warm up by the fire as I sank my teeth into dinner. Yep, you read all that right: wings. All six of us.

Iggy, six months my junior and the tallest at six-four, has the biggest set—fifteen feet and a beautiful, solid grey. Fang, the strongest and second-tallest at six-two, has a blue-black wingspan of fourteen and a half feet. Two months younger than me but shot up to six inches taller (and filled out considerably) over the past year. Unbelievable.

Gone were the days when we were evenly matched in a duel in terms of strength and size, unfortunately. But the quicker, smarter, better of us would always prevail. And, yes, that'd be moi.

At the very least, I was cleverer and more lethal with my words. It was easy to forget that Fang could communicate, some days.

Moving down the line, the flock gets smaller: thirteen-year-old Nudge has beautiful, tawny wings to match her mochaccino skin. Gazzy's are almost as big as hers, even though he's only ten, and barn-owl brown. Then Angel, our littlest at eight, has impeccable, untarnished, all-white wings.

And that's us. The flock. Six wayward experiments that were totally done being just that—experiments. That's all the recap you're getting. For the rest of the details, I'll refer you to books one and two.

"I'm thankful for us. That we're all together. That we're safe. That we have a home out here," said Angel, licking grease off her fingers noisily.

Well, I didn't say we had great manners.

Total made an odd choking sound. "Home!" he scoffed. "Imagine me—an aristocrat! Opulent in my own right!—living in a tent, drinking—bleh!—lake water!"

Fang turned to me and rolled his eyes so powerfully that I half expected them to fall out.

"Imagine that," Gazzy said with a straight face, blue eyes wide. "Lake water."

"It's okay, Total," Angel said. "It could be worse."

I smiled. That's my girl.

I turned and inspected our campsite. Total was partially right: it certainly wasn't fit for a debutante. But with two tents, a few sleeping bags, a couple of tarps over our heads, a fire pit Iggy and Fang had thrown together, fresh game all around us, and some pots, pans, and utensils we'd acquired, it was better than someplace new every night, better than the Subway tunnels of New York, better than that traitorous witch Anne Walker's house.

Infinitely better than somewhere Erasers or the School (or Itex or the Institute) might find us.

The mountains, covered in beautiful evergreen trees, provided a useful cover for us to fly. When we'd first arrived, me and Iggy (with his heightened, hyper-sharp hearing) had hiked miles and miles up, down, and around the area. Then Fang and I had flown an even wider perimeter, using our raptor vision to look for—well, anything. We found a lot of lakes, a lot of trees, and a lot of bobcats, but no signs of human life.

It was perfectly isolated. We were living as foragers, sure, and our main source of bathing was a spring-fed lake a quarter of a mile away, but it was the happiest and healthiest we'd been since the E-house.

A pang shot through me at the memory. Don't think about it.

"Hey."

I met Fang's eyes. His face was expressionless, as usual, but he raised an eyebrow, wordlessly asking if I was okay. Of course. The second my composure so as much flickered—or I felt one emotion other than faux optimism—and Fang caught it instantly.

A quick once-over revealed that the corners of my mouth were drooping in a contemplative frown. I fixed them immediately. "I'm fine."

Yeah, Max, that'll show him.

I tuned back in to reality just in time to catch the end of the Nudge Channel's latest episode: What I'm Thankful For Is.

"…and this turkey, because it's really good, and that at least we have somewhere warm to sleep at night—I mean, it gets kind of chilly, but sleeping next to Max and Angel keeps me warm—and these jeans that Max found at the consignment shop for five dollars, and that it doesn't rain on us a lot." She took a huge breath in and ended with: "And I'm mostly just thankful that nobody's trying to kill us anymore."

What, your teenage sister isn't thankful for not being hunted?

Ever the pessimist, Iggy snorted. "Yeah. Woohoo."

I reached over to thwack him on the back of the head, but he must've heard my jacket rustle, because he dodged just in time.

"Nudge is right, Iggy. We should be happy that we're safe here," said Angel brightly.

"Overjoyed," Iggy deadpanned, peeling a piece of meat from a wing. "Can hardly contain myself."

I moved more quickly this time and managed to clip his ear. "Watch it!" he said, swatting at me with his free hand.

"Lighten up, Ig," I jabbed, but he still looked less than enthused.

While it had always been hard (understatement) for all of us, it was chronically harder for Iggy; without his sight, he was a whole separate kind of lost in the world. And the worst part was that he remembered what it was like to see. When we'd first found the campsite, he'd asked me what it looked like. "You're not missing much," I'd told him. "Green."

"What kind of green? Like, army green, or evergreen green?" I'd surveyed the area around me. Lots of evergreens. When I told him as much, he nodded, a hint of a sad smile on his face. "That was my favorite color." His use of the past tense haunted me even months later.

Most of my turkey leg was unfinished. I took his free hand in mine and placed the end of the drumstick in it, withdrawing so fast that he didn't have a minute to argue with me.

"Max," he lamented, reaching over to me. "Cut it out. I'm fine. Take it."

"I'm not even that hungry." A lie. "I gorged myself on berries when I was out hunting earlier." Lie. "Plus, there's still some leftover squirrel if I change my mind." Another lie. I mentally begged Angel to keep her mouth shut, if she was listening. "Eat it."

"Would you—"

"Eat it."

"Max—"

"Man, I didn't know he was deaf, too," I said to nobody in particular.

Iggy heaved a massive sigh and grumbled something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like, "Women." But he ate it and said nothing more, which was good enough for me.

When we'd finished eating, we washed up by the lake and walked back, chilly, clean, and content. "Time to hit the sack," I announced to the younger kids, and I was met by a series of groans. "Long day tomorrow."

"Long day?" Gazzy grumbled. "What do we have planned? Camping?"

"We're going to brush up on flight techniques," I said firmly. More groans. "Hey! We haven't been working our wings nearly as much as we should be. We need to stay on top of things. Plus, me and Fang found a spot with a bunch of starlings hanging around. They're the coolest flyers ever."

The Gasman gave me a dead stare.

Blessedly, Fang stopped hanging our lake-washed garments over our makeshift clothesline and turned to back me up. "Very cool," he said. "Very complex."

And just like that, because Fang framed it as a challenge, the Gasman skipped off to their tent, dragging Iggy behind him and chatting about explosives. I would never, ever, ever understand the Y-chromosome.

My face must've looked disgusted, because Fang chuckled as he hung Angel's sequined jeans. "Jealous?"

"What, that you think like a ten-year-old boy?" I quipped, stuffing the cans of vegetables we hadn't used into a bag to stow away in the tent overnight. "Very."

"Once a ten-year-old boy, always a ten-year-old boy," Fang said with a smirk.

"Go away."

Fang laughed quietly again. He sat down on one of the logs to start banking what was left of the fire. The light from the flames chased the shadows from his face, leaving just Fang—his sun-warmed, olive-toned complexion; his strong cheekbones; his endless, impenetrable eyes—

I tripped over a root and barely caught myself from face planting. What was wrong with me? It had been happening more and more often; I was getting distracted and lost in my own head.

Fang raised an amused eyebrow at me. "Too much turkey?"

"Yeah. You know what they say about tryptophan."

"You didn't have to do that, you know," Fang said.

"Is this the part of the cliché where I ask what it is that I didn't have to do?"

Fang shot me a look that said, Spare me. "The turkey leg. He would've gotten over it. He always does."

I shrugged and sat next to him on the log, picking up a dead branch and poking the embers with it. "Yeah, but that's what I hate," I said quietly. "He shouldn't have to."

"Get over it?"

"He shouldn't have anything to even have to get over."

Silence met that one.

We prodded the fire for a couple of minutes, Fang separating the ash and slowly flicking it over the coals. The light began to die away, and the heat with it. I shivered and rubbed my arms with my hands.

"Maybe next time. When we're all reincarnated into real people. Or even real birds. Or squids, or elephants, or slugs. Anything would be better than this."

Fang was quiet again. After a minute, he spoke with a straight face. "I wouldn't mind being a snake."

My face screwed up immediately. I hated, hated, hated snakes, and Fang knew it. "Blech," I spat, shaking my head in disgust. "God, you just couldn't help yourself, could you?"

He laughed quietly and stood, offering me a hand. I took it and then used my stick to help him brush the last bits of ash over the glowing coals.

Fang and I walked back to the tents together. Between Iggy's supercharged hearing, Fang and I's impossibly light sleeping habits, and the anatomy of the forest around us, nothing would catch us too off-guard out here, so the days of staying up for watch were far behind us.

Fang clapped a hand over my shoulder and nodded his chin ever so slightly.

"Bright and early?" I said.

"It's a date," he said, and he ducked into the tent, leaving me flustered and flushed in his wake.

A/N: Welcome, y'all!

To start: this takes place about a year after SOF, but I've aged the flock a bit more than that.

Why, you ask?

Because I hate writing in the POV of a fourteen-year-old. The closer to eighteen I can get them without sacrificing too much time, the better. It also allows me to give them a more colorful (and therefore more authentic) vocabulary. Like, c'mon, James Patterson, you can't tell me a group of experimented-on, parentless, miserable teens and preteens wouldn't be dropping f-bombs and other fun four-letter words all the time.

Anyway, Max and Fang are approximately sixteen, Iggy fifteen and a half, Nudge thirteen, Gazzy ten, and Angel eight here.

Otherwise, this will be canon. If at any point I diverge, I'll give you some warning.

For those of you that read In the Woods Somewhere, these chapters will probably be shorter in terms of word count. I've found that my workflow is overall quicker—e.g., I write faster—without the pressure of "omg this chapter needs to be ten pages in my word doc."

I didn't plan on publishing this this soon, but I've been writing faster than I could've hoped. Forgot how much I loved canon.

Buckle up!