Chapter 1
*I skimmed over a lot of the parts where in the book Katniss explains things about district twelve and the hunger games, so don't read if you haven't read both Maximum Ride and the hunger games.
I wake up biting my lip to keep from screaming. I just woke up from a nightmare, which was unsurprising. I had nightmares almost every night. What was surprising was when I reached over to the other side of the bed, instead of Angel; I feel the rough canvas mattress cover.
Within seconds I am on my feet and scanning my room. But Angel is just tangled in the blankets of the bet next to mine, Jeb's bed. I don't know why we kept it. I guess it felt like if we kept his things, Jeb would one day walk in the door and lay down on that bed after a long day of coal mining. It felt like he was still around.
When he was hear, Angel would crawl in next to him whenever she had a bad dream. Occasionally she still would when she had nightmares. She didn't usually have nightmares, but I'm not surprised she did today. It's reaping day.
When I stand up I nearly step on a black matted mutt I know to be Angel's dog, Total. He growls at me, indignant. That dog hates me, and the feelings mutual. I think it still remembers when I almost killed it for meat when Angel had first found it on our doorstep about a year ago. I knew a lady from the hob who would buy wild dog meat (although you wouldn't get much meat off of that scrawny thing). But Angel had cried and showed off her puppy dog face (a face unlike the actual dog), and I had caved. I hated having one more mouth to feed, but I could never say no to Angel.
Got dressed in my brown leather jacket and worn leather hunting boots, and put my dark blond curls into a side braid. On the table I see Angel left me some goat's cheese as a reaping present.
As I left, I made sure not to wake Angel. Most days I would wake her up, and she would come with me and would fly around the woods while I hunted, but today we couldn't with all the peacekeeper airships flying in. So I let her sleep.
We live on the edge of one of the poorer parts of district twelve, the seam. It seems eerie without the coalminers headed to work. Quiet. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I am still ill at ease until I make it through the un-electrified electric fence. Once I am in the forest, I instantly calm down.
I find the hollow log containing my bow-and-arrow and my double-edged fighting knife. The forest contained many dangerous predators kept out by the fence, and I couldn't let my guard down.
Jeb was the one who taught me that the forest was more than just a place to fly away from prying eyes. It was a source of food. If people had in district twelve had any hunting weapons then I'm sure they would face the death penalty for poaching as well. But my bow and my knife were rare. Jeb had made the bow himself, and the knife was the finest quality I had ever seen. It had an ivory handle and the blade never seemed to dull. Jeb gave it to me for my eleventh birthday. He never said where he got it.
You can't just sell weapons, or you risk public execution if any of the peacekeepers find out. Not like any of the peacekeepers care about much. They were some of our number one buyers. I wish I could see the look on their faces if the capitol knew how corrupt their system was.
I walk around the berry bushes and almost run right into my hunting partner Iggy. Between Iggy's strawberry blond hair and very pale skin, Iggy stood out like a sore thumb. I smile, not that he can see it. Iggy is blind.
"Hi Maxie!" Iggy says. He smiles, a big grin as he says it. He was the only one who I let call me that. To everyone else I was Max. My full name is maximum Ride.
When I first met Iggy I almost killed him. But in order to know why, you have to know the facts. Gather around children it's time for tragic back story time!
As I have mentioned before, I have wings. This is because I am not entirely human. Seventy-four years ago, when the districts rebelled against the capitol, the capitol genetically engineered certain species to help them win the war. They created things like jabber jays and tracker jackers. They also tried to make an army of avian-human hybrids that could fight from the air any have other abilities. All their experiments led to the death of the subjects.
Most people think that the capitol stopped genetic experimentation after they won the war but the capitol continued so that they would be able to fight if the districts rebelled again, and so they could use us as pieces in the hunger games.
They kept me in a small crate, when they weren't doing more experiments on me like injecting me with needles and making me run till I passed out. I wasn't the only one. Other experiments were put in dog crates next to me, most of them poor creature that died within a week. But five other experiments stayed there the entire time. They were all %avian, 98% human, like me. Bird kids like me. I was the oldest and two other boys were close to my age, Iggy and another boy named Fang. There was a girl two years younger than me named Nudge and a boy six years younger than me named the Gasman. The youngest of us was Angel, who was eight years younger than me.
We were all tortured, experimented on starved and abused. But we were together. We were family.
One day one of the scientists (who we call white coats) named Jeb felt sorry for us and decided to break us out. He snuck us into crates and smuggled us onto a capitol airship delivering rations to the districts. But when we landed, someone found out and tried to recapture us. We fought hard but there were about fifty peacekeepers and we got separated. I ended up escaping the peacekeepers and pick up Angel and sprint into the forest with Jeb at are heels. We hiked for days until we made it to district twelve. There, we created new identities and started a life. I feel like I failed my family, my flock. I always assumed all the rest of them were dead until I ran into Iggy while hunting when I was twelve.
My first thought was that it was a trap. That it wasn't really Iggy. I snuck up behind him and held a knife to his throat. "Who are you and what do you want?" He said. He said it calmly, but his voice broke erasing his calm façade.
At this point I was pretty sure it was Iggy, if it was a white coat they would have seen me coming. But that didn't mean I could trust him. "Why are you here?" I asked.
"Max!?" Iggy sounded genuinely surprised to hear my voice. "I'll ask one more time. Why are you here?" I was getting a bit choked up, which was really embarrassing. But what do you expect? I thought he was dead.
I took the knife off his throat and he explained that he had gotten away from the white coats too, and had made it into the forest. Instead of heading south west like we did, he had headed south east. I was saddened to hear he didn't know what happened to Fang, Gazzy, or Nudge. Up until now he thought all of us were dead.
Iggy is really good with directions, but walking through a forest he had never been in that was densely packed and had no pathways had been hard on him. It had taken him over a week to make it to district twelve. It had only taken us three days. He ended up getting to district twelve a few miles away from us. After begging off the streets with the men too old to work and the cripples, a nice family had taken him in and adopted him. He hunted for them, and they welcomed him as one of their own children.
He couldn't actually shoot a bow -and-arrow, but he set traps and gathered berries by feeling through the bushes. He lived it the section next to the seam, and entered the fence at a weak spot on the other end of the meadow.
I flew up and found Angel, who had hugged Iggy and cried. It had been a joyful reunion.
After that Iggy had become my hunting partner. I would gather berries while he collected squirrels and rabbets from the traps. Then he would help me hunt. I know it sounds weird, a blind person helping me hunt, but the kid had magic ears. He would stand next to me, point to wear he heard something, and I would shoot. I was ok with a bow, but with Iggy I caught twice as much. I didn't have to wait for then to leap onto a branch so I could see them. Then we would go to the lake a few kilometres into the forest and fish, an Angel would meet us there. But not today.
"Look what I caught! The rare bread bird! He exclaimed, a knife sticking out of a loaf of bread. Not just bread, fresh bakery bread. "I got it from the bakery for only a squirrel," Iggy explained. "I got it from the baker's son." He winked at me and I kicked him in the shin. Iggy had this idea in his head that the baker's son had a crush on me. He wouldn't drop it.
I cut up the goat's cheese and the bread and we split it. Breakfast of champions. He grabs a berry out of his basket. "Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor!" He says, in an exaggerated imitation of Effie trinkets accent.
I smile and we dig into the bread. We finish quickly, and then sit on a rock silently, listening to the sounds of the forest around us. I wish we could stay out here, live in the forest. But it is too risky. If we disappeared, people would notice. More specifically, peace keepers would notice. We would be back to the lab in days. It was better to just blend in and survive.
We gather more berries then head to the lake to fish.
After coming back from the Hob, we head over to the mayors house to sell strawberries. The mayor's daughter Ella answered the door. Today she is wearing a pretty purple dress made out of expensive fabric, and her hair is done up in pins.
"Hi Ella," I said kindly. "Oh, it's Ella", said Iggy. "Let me guess. You're wearing a nice dress that could feed a poor family for weeks?" Ella's face went red and she glared, then she stopped remembering that he couldn't see her. I punched Iggy in the arm. I didn't think it was fair to make Ella feel bad like that. She was really nice. At school she wasn't one to flaunt her superior wealth like some of the merchant class, and I respected her for it. Sometimes she came to sit with Iggy and me at lunch, but mostly she hung out with her other friends. I wasn't that into gossip. And judging on the gossip I had overheard, Ella had a bit of a crush on Iggy, so I really felt bad for her.
Iggy wasn't finished yet. "How many times did you enter your name in the games? Three? I had to enter thirty times." I don't know why, but Iggy always disliked the upper-class of district twelve. Maybe it was the week he had spent begging on the streets when he was ten and had just arrived in district twelve. Nobody had given him a scrap, except for a few merciful beggars who had shared a small bit of food because they had felt sorry for him. The ones who could afford to help him had done nothing.
I felt his anger was misplaced. It was the capitol people who had experimented on us for the first ten years of our lives. It was the capitol who watched with smiles on their faces as children fought to the death. Them I hated.
After we sold the strawberries we divided our earnings and headed home. "I'll see you at the square", I say. "Wear something nice-looking "he says, and I laugh and start walking home.
I come home to a surprise. Angel, who will usually sleep as long as she can, is up and ready. I'm guessing she's anxious for her first reaping. But what is even more surprising than her being up is the outfit she is wearing. She has a white, puffy sleeved blouse on and a pink skirt that looks like it was made of layers on silk. "Do you like it?" She asks. "It's lovely Angel, but you can't steal. We need to return it." "But I didn't steal it. I woke up this morning and decided to take a walk, and a nice lady walks by. She's a seamstress, and she's carrying this outfit. She was thinking about what a shame it was that it didn't fit her daughter. I walked over and told her what a nice dress it was, and she gave it to me."
"Angel." I said, reproachful. "Are you sure she wanted to give it to you, and you didn't accidentally make her give it to you?" I asked gently. Angel's power over people's minds was a touchy subject. She had always been able to read minds but it was just recently that she had developed the power to control minds.
The first time she did it, a kid had been making fun of her during lunch, and he had then banged his head into a wall so hard he had knocked himself out. I had found her afterschool in hysterics. She said that she didn't mean to, she had just thought that he something bad should happen to him to make up for what he did to other kids, only she had accidently said it in his mind. Afterword people said he had passed out because of hunger, which was not uncommon.
I was snapped into reality, because Angel had started to cry. "I hadn't even thought about that. What if that outfit was important to that seamstress?"
I calmed her down and told her that that lady obviously didn't need the cloths. Besides, it was getting late and we needed to go down to the square soon or else we would be late for the reaping, a crime punishable by whipping. She stopped crying, and I took off my hunting gear and took a washed. Afterwards I changed into my least dirty shirt and pants. Then Angel braided my hair into a halo braid that wrapped around my head.
After she finishes, I stand up and start for the door. But as I open it I realize Angel hasn't stood up. "What if I get picked, Max?" She asks quietly, her face downcast. I assure her that she won't. Her name is only getting put in for reaping once.
I notice that her bouncing curls don't quite cover her back, and the outline of the top of her wings is visible. "Fluff your shirt, little bird." I tease and she smiles. After she fixes her shirt we start walking to the square.
When we get there, Angel starts breathing hard. She hates crowds. Too many thoughts flying at her from all directions, and she had trouble blocking them out. I walk her over to the area for twelve year old girls, and then join the sixteen year old girls.
Ella's mom Mayor Martinez walks onto the stage and takes a seer on a chair at the back of the stage. Following her is a lady so florescent pink that she could only be Effie Trinket. As they look around for the person who is obviously meant for the third chair, I shove my way through the crowd till I'm standing right next to the rope dividing sixteen year old girls and boys. I ask one of the boys I know from the seam if he could find Iggy for me and he goes and gets him. With the boys help Iggy managed to find me through the crowd. I took his hand and squeezed it. Iggy hated crowds as much as Angel. There was too much noise.
I was about to say something to him when the Mayor walked up to the podium. The silence was instantaneous. The mayor then starts the same spearhead we get every year. History of Panem, war, the rules of the hunger games bla bla bla.
I zone out during the speech. I only start paying attention when the only alive district twelve victor Haymich Abernathy stumbles onto the stage and tries to sit down, but instead ends up slipping and falling on his ass. A chuckle escapes from my mouth, but I get a warning look from the nearest peace keeper, so I turn it into a cough. I do turn to Iggy and quietly whisper to him what just happened. He smiles, and I turn to look at the stage. Effie Trinket just walked up to the podium.
"Happy Hunger Games!" She proclaims. "And may the odds be ever in your favour!" I roll my eyes. "Ladies first!" She says, and reaches into the giant bowl containing girls names, containing fifteen of my name and one of Angel's, containing our fate.
The square is silent, the tension so thick it could be cut with a butter knife. Effie swishes her hand around and selects a piece of paper.
I hear Angel cry out from across the square and I instantly turn my head to see her panic stricken face as she looks at Effie, terrified. And I see it coming. "Angel", Effie reads.