Author's Note: Yo yo! You know, I'm feeling a little unloved today, which might impair my posting… What's that you say? You want to make it up to me? No, no, I couldn't ask you to do that… No… Well, if you insist… There is ONE way to show me your undying devotion to my amazing FanFics… That pretty little review button, you know…?

:P

Disclaimer: Next time I wish upon a star, I'll wish for the legal rights to Maximum Ride. But as of right now, I do not own any of the Maximum Ride characters or scenarios. However, MY characters and MY scenarios are…wait for it… MINE!

We stared at the car in a moment of extreme tension.

To recap: 4 human kittens, 1 whitecoat, 1 lab, and 1 red sports car. Stolen from the lab, blah blah blah, et cetera et cetera.

And then the tension was broken by Levi, who whisper-screamed, "I call shotgun!"

How he knows that the front seat is called shot gun, I have no clue. No offense to his intelligence or anything, but we were raised in freaking dog crates. And we're part cat.

Then again, somehow, I also knew that it was called shotgun, so…

Sanchez laughed, and suddenly froze. Levi had bounced off the side of the car and jumped over the it and into the shotgun seat. Yeah, oh. He quickly composed himself, though, and invited the rest of us into the back seat. I slid in between Hash and Cleo. The whitecoat started the car and turned around to face us.

"My name is Julio Sanchez. It's spelled with a J, but you say it "Hulio". Most people call me Sanchez, though, and you can call me whatever you want. I'm taking you to a safe house I have prepared for you. It is well hidden, especially from Erasers."

He's saving us. "Saving". It's still part of the Experiment. I exchanged looks with Cleo and Hash. We all knew what was going to happen.

He's going to teach us to defend ourselves, disappear, and a year later the Erasers or Firenzes will come,Hash signaled. I could feel his sarcasm, his tiredness at all of it.

An explanation is long overdue, so:

I'm going to use the Flock kids as an example. Their savior was Jeb. Jeb taught them martial arts. When they were ready, he disappeared so that he could monitor them. Once they seemed like they could take care of themselves, the Erasers came back for the testing.

The Flock's testing was over, but they were still part of the Experiment. Hey, why not? Fix wings on a girl, train her, disappear, then tell her that her mission in life is to save the world and see how she reacts. It'll get you first place in the Science Fair and a sadistic pleasure in watching the subjects suffer.

Plus, there was still the confusing factor to figure out: Do they know that we know? Are we supposed to know? Because if we're supposed to know, well, we know and we'll run away and they'll track us somehow. And if they don't know that we know, we'll run away, they'll be surprised at first, but they'll track us anyways. There's no choice for us, really.

I was so, so tired, though. It didn't really matter in that moment, I decided. He could be going soft. He could really be nice. He'll take us to the safe house and teach us and cook us good food, I thought to myself, my head sliding tiredly onto Hash's shoulder. We can hope—for now—can't we?

~~~The Next Day~~~

I yawned and stretched out on the gray loveseat. Yesterday, we'd come into this long, low house and collapsed on the first thing we could find. Levi was sprawled out on the couch, Cleo was curled up in an armchair, and Hash was sleeping on a sheepskin rug.

The house, like I said, was long and low. There was only one level, plus a basement. The basic layout was this: A long hallway going down the whole length with rooms on either side. The roof was flat on top, without a ladder but (I'd noted) with many fun ways for a cat to climb up on. The basement had Sanchez's room, study, bathroom, whatever.

Some super mouth-watery smell wafted from the kitchen, and I dimly recognized it as bacon and eggs. I wasn't the only one, apparently; Hash stirred on his rug and Cleo shot me a smile from her armchair.

Sanchez poked his head out the window-thing (I don't know what it's called!) from the kitchen to the living room. (The living room, which was at one end of the house, connected openly into the kitchen. The other rooms either had doors and then the hallway or the hallway cut through them. Either way, it's still a pretty sweet house.) "All you can eat eggs, scrambled, fried, and over easy," he announced, "plus bacon, ham, mushrooms, peppers, and onions made to order!"

I had no idea what half of those foods were, but man, they sounded good!

In the end, the three of us had to all shake Levi awake at the same time for him to move. Levi definitely gets the Biggest Sleeper award in our crowd! We ate all we could, like Sanchez had offered, then went to tour the rest of the house.

Man, it was a neat house! A game room, a library stocked with books, the kitchen and living room, four rooms for us, two bathrooms, a study, and this thing Sanchez called a "hang room" that was almost like a second living room, but for us.

It was probably wired. But what heck.

I don't know if cats can actually see infrared, but we can. There didn't seem to be any cameras, but that didn't mean there actually weren't any.

There were four rooms for us, other than Sanchez's rooms in the basement: A black one, a dark green, a dark blue, and a dark purple. Cleo got the purple one by default, Levi got the blue one, Hash wound up in the green one and I got stuck in the black one. Whatever.

And then we went shopping. Shopping, glorious shopping! I love shopping. Shopping shopping shopping! All of you teenagers out there reading this are probably like, "Uh-huh, yeeeaaah." But I can bet my tail that you haven't grown up in a dog crate with nothing but the clothes on your back. When you don't have anything, being able to walk into a store and tell an apparently multi-gajillionaire like Sanchez that you want this or that, and actually getting what you want… It's just amazing.

Each of us wound up with a laptop and an iPod of our choice, except for Cleo, who just got it in one package: the iPad. In purple. She would. Then Cleo and I rampaged the stores in search of cute clothes and cute shoes and (most importantly of all) cute hats. You know, to cover our ears. Levi and Hash weren't so into this part of our mall trip, but chose jeans and cargo pants and baseball caps of their own.

And then, get this—we went to the freaking hair salon! Like I said, my curly black hair stays roughly at the same length—about down to my waist—if I don't cut it, which I never really had. Same with Cleo's bleach-blonde hair. Hash's and Levi's would be about down to their chins, if it had been clean and straight.

My hair stylist's eyes widened when she massaged shampoo into my scalp, around my ears, but I saw Sanchez slipping her a little something after she'd given me copper streaks, hacked off about a foot of and layered my hair, and cut thin side bangs on my right side.

They'd left Levi's hair long in the back, but cut it a little shorter on the sides so that it was in an actual style (bet he loved that!). Hash's hair had been cut so that it wasn't short or long, just in between, almost covering his ears. And Cleo's hair had been fluffed up and cut so it was just past her shoulders, and she'd been given bangs. She looked, as always, amazing.

We went home, ate our fill, blah blah blah. But if you thought that I'd been calm for a moment, that any of us hadn't been tense and paranoid, that we didn't think it was too good to be true…

…Think again.

There's that little blue "Review" button RIGHT THERE… I wonder what happens if you press it? And leave a review? Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I promise nothing will happen if you REVIEW! :)