And here's the official first chapter, I hope you like it.

Chapter 1

I could hear everyone rustling and shifting around in the cages we woke up in. I was the first one up –as far as I knew- and after what felt like hours everyone else started to wake up too. Hours is what it felt like, anyway. It was probably only minutes. Groans began filling the room and I knew they didn't know where we were yet. It was Iggy freaking out that snapped everyone back to reality.

"What's going on?" Iggy's hoarse voice croaked out. He panicked, and for a minute, the only thing I could hear in the pitch black room was Iggy thrashing about his cage, ramming his cage into I assume Max's cage and my own cage, making a loud ruckus that could wake a deaf man from the deepest sleep in the world. I reached my hand in, getting it knocked around a little bit and grabbed Iggy's shoulder firmly. He freaked out a bit more and a chorus of us bird kids formed, trying to calm him down.

"It's okay Ig," I said once he calmed down, removing my hand finally.

"No its not. We're in cages. Cages, Fang!" Iggy choked out. "Why are we in cages? What happened? Oh God, I feel sick…" Max spoke softly to him from the other side of his cage and I heard him scoot over to her. Max always knew how to calm us down.

"Fang…?" I looked the other way towards where I assumed was Angel. Hesitating, unsure if I was in the right cage or not, I stuck my hand through the bars and was reassured that I was right when her small hand gripped mine.

"Yeah?" I asked, lowering my voice to a whisper as to not disturb anything else in the room.

"I'm scared. Where's Total?" her tiny voice said.

"I don't know."

Silence. And then, "Why are we here?"

"I don't know," I said again.

Iggy continued freaking out. I had never seen something like that before. We knew we were in the School again. But none of us had the strength to fight back. We wondered exactly what happened to us, discussing quietly why, exactly, we had no energy, what was happening to us, and why we were back. But Iggy. It was insane; I had never, ever seen him like this. I never though it was possible for him to freak out this much. He must have been really sick, because in the time –what felt like days- we had been trapped in the cages, he had thrown up twice, and left to lay in whatever little food he had in his stomach that decided to make a reappearance into the dismal world we were trapped it.

At one point the White Coats had decided to relocate us into a brighter room. Most of us had no energy to fight back and try to break out of our cage. We were all stunned when Iggy began freaking out as his cage was lifted onto the cart they were moving us with. His cage was actually knocked onto the ground and flipped over a few times, sending Iggy crashing around in it. Eventually they ended up using a tranquilizer on him so that they could finish moving us.

The room we were moved in to was brighter, but still dimly lit. I was glad it wasn't a bright room. The few cages that surrounded us were disgusting, lined with bodily fluids and vomit, the kids…well, I feel like I shouldn't really call those horrible creatures in those cages kids. So, those creatures in the cages were horrible and deformed and the saddest things I had ever seen in my life. I watched one of them being taken away, and when it came back I watched in horror as it literally puked its guts out and died. I listened as Angel threw up in disgust during that, but everyone else was smart enough to look away. I'm sure my face was green for days after that. The sounds of their moans and groans and retching echoed throughout the room and kept me up at night.

The first thing Iggy did when he woke from his tranquilizer trip was vomit. Or at least try to, but he had nothing left in his stomach to come back up, so he just hunched over on all fours and heaved dryly as I reached into his cage and rubbed his back, scratching his folded wings in that way he liked. My guess it was the smell in the room that brought him to that sickening gagging feeling. It made sense to me, seeing as, since he was blind, his other sense were heightened, so the smell was probably ten times worse for him than it was for us.

While we stayed in that room we were experimented on. We all got shots, but that was basically it. We got one shot a day, and several times the White Coats would come in and see how we were doing, occasionally giving us one of those physical tests that I guess you get at doctors offices every now and then. It was very basic and actually, surprisingly easy to handle. The shots didn't really seem to do anything. Of course, that doesn't mean we liked them anyway.

Iggy, though, they seemed to have a great interest in. They took him away often times several times a day, and when he came back he was just getting worse and worse. All the lean muscles he had developed over the years disappeared and he was soon no more than skin and bone. His hair became dull and long; covering his pale blue eyes, as well as the majority of his now hallow face. His eyes, I noticed, had sunken in and had dark crescent shapes under them, as well as bags. His skin became so pale and clammy he started to look like a ghost, which, half the time, I was wondering if that was all he was. The worst part, though, was his wings. Iggy used to have huge and, for lack of a better word, fluffy white wings that seemed to glow in the light, and they were beautiful. Now the feathers had fallen out and I'm pretty sure one of them was paralyzed because it just laid there all sad and ugly like. And it was just the one wing, because when he laid in his cage motionless and like a dead man, on occasion the other twitched or moved a little.

Iggy laying there was another thing. He stopped talking and moving. He once went a whole day without moving at all and Max and I had a panic attack, we thought our beloved Iggy was dead. We started shaking him and when he finally moved and let out a grunt, we were satisfied. We tended to leave him alone. Whenever we started bugging him too much, he tried to bite us.

The White Coats continued to move us to new rooms, each one brighter than the last, as if letting us get used to the lighting for a trip outside or something, so we didn't go blind like Iggy. Each room we went to, we got new, clean cages which seemed to get progressively bigger. But that might have just been because we were getting smaller and weaker. Who really knows? We never took the time to find out, that's for sure. In each room there were less and less experiments, as well. And the ones that were in got progressively better in looks from the first room where it all started. It's as if they were trying to eliminate us. Or evolve us, maybe.

And then, one day, we all woke up outside.

"Max…what's going on…?" Angel's meek voice said off to my right. I didn't look over; my eyes were trained on the forest wall at least 50 yards away from us. I can't seem to tear my eyes away. It was freedom, sweet, sweet freedom. My first thought was to go find food. Enough food for a buffet that would keep us full for a week. Maybe more for Iggy, since he was in the worst shape out of all of us.

"I don't know, Angel," Max said.

"Max, we're in clean clothes!" the Gasman gasped. I looked down when I heard that, only to find he was correct. And not only were we in clean clothes, but it looked like our skin has been scrubbed free of all the dirt and grime that had collected on our bodies the past…what? Month? Five months? We were practically shinning in the clear sunlight. We all smelled good and I had more energy than I had in a while. I wondered why we were all still in these cages when the doors were spread wide open for us.

We were all wearing the same clothes, basically. I was wearing a white long sleeved shirt and white sweatpants. It wasn't that cold out; I wondered why they put us in warm clothes…and why all white? Somehow it did not bode well. I looked around and saw they were all wearing some sort of variation of what I wore. Max wore a more loose fitting shirt than I was, with pants that were more like jeans than sweatpants. Gazzy wore a baggy t-shirt and shorts, while Angel had more of a dress with leggings, as well as Nudge. Iggy had the same clothing I did. Why it's all different, I didn't know. Maybe they expected us to have different skills and the clothing helped with that…? I don't know, it wouldn't really make sense, now that I think of it. Maybe it's all they had. And then I noticed that all of the shirts had slits in the back where our wings could slip out through.

"Iggy, wait!" I heard Max say. "It might be a trap!"

All my attention snapped over to Iggy in the cage next to me. He was crawling…no, he was pulling himself out of the cage. Smelling the fresh air, he lifted his head and after hesitating, pulled up a clump of grass and brought it to his nose. He smelled it and his face lightened up. Before any of us knew it, Iggy was out of his cage, rolling in the grass, with the biggest grin I had seen on his face in ages. That, in turn, made me grin, and I moved to the edge of the cage flooring and stuck my bare feet in the lush green grass. A shiver ran up my spine and I stood up. I stretched and breathed in the fresh air; brushed my now clean and much longer black hair over my shoulder and turned to face Max. I offered her my hand and I pulled her out of the cage and to her feet.

"Whether we're just out here for the time being, or they're permanently letting us go, I don't care," I said. I glanced down at Iggy, who was laying face down in the grass, looking content. "It's just good to be out again."

And she nodded in agreement.

But somehow, somewhere deep down, I knew this couldn't last forever. I had a funny feeling that would be the highpoint of our lives from that moment forward. Somehow, it'll just get worse from there.

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