five years

I never had learned to stop missing Fang, even though he was dead to all of us now. There was a gravestone in the backyard back at the house... well, a stone, anyway. We knew well enough what and who it stood for.

As far as saving the world went, I thought I was doing pretty good. The instructions dream-Fang had promised me three years ago had come from the Voice the next morning.

Sadly, they didn't involve violence. Well. Not as much as I would've liked, anyway.

I brushed stray hair out of my eyes. I was sweaty and covered in grime. It was only nine in the morning, and the temperature was already sky-high.

I was working with the CSM on installing improved solar panels here in the Nevada desert. Sure, the weather was terrible, but I didn't mind the work and they didn't ask questions. I was Valencia Martinez's daughter, and that was all anyone had to know.

Helping people convert to non-oil sources of energy had been one of the instructions relayed to me by the Voice. It hadn't said how I was supposed to do that, so I'd asked Mom for help. I know. Maximum Ride asking for help. Stop the presses.

But as it turned out, the CSM was working on just the kind of projects I needed to publicize.

Nudge's idolization of popularity was finally coming in handy. Getting my hands dirty working, and lending my voice to the many supporting alternative energy, I could kind of believe I was helping save the world.

Africa had been a hard awakening for me. At the time I'd had too much to think about to understand its true significance, but as time passed, I began to understand. Saving the world wasn't about beating up scientists, or even about protesting. It was about making a stand, making an individual difference. Making my stand - as Nudge had known since we first started showing up in tabloids, and as I had only recently come to see, our fame was a two-edged sword. I could use it for good, to promote a cause I believed in, or I could just be one of a million celebrities who didn't do anything special except be famous.

I'm Maximum Ride, I thought wryly, turning another shovelful of dirt. I have to be special.

My 'plan' was kind of working, as it happened. Five years without my prime co-conspirator had forced me to come up with ideas entirely by myself, without much of anyone to bounce them off of. I'd still managed to make alternative energy a 'cool' cause; it helped that Nudge was very publically learning to drive in a cute little electric car, while Iggy was helping to design more efficient steam engines.

What would Fang have been doing? I had to wonder. Gas was hovering around the four-dollar mark again, more in the Gulf and the major cities. Even my island-loving boy couldn't have denied that something had to be done. Would he be out here working with me?

I leaned on the handle of the shovel. He wouldn't a boy any longer, if he were still alive. He'd be twenty, almost old enough to drink.

Five years apart would have changed him, maybe beyond recognition. If he were to walk in front of me right now...

Stop it, Max, I told myself, and started digging again. You have to root the base of a row of panels pretty deep, and we were also going to be running wires through the earth to help them power each other on cloudy days. You've changed too.

I might not recognize him as he was now, but I knew that he wouldn't recognize me. I was tan from working in the sun, and I'd grown a few inches in the last gasp of my growth spurt. My hair was cut short, almost invisible under my dorky sun hat, and sunglasses covered my eyes.

Besides those physical changes, I was a different person than I'd been when we'd known each other.

My phone buzzed, saving me from any more obsession over someone who I'd sworn was dead to me (and yet who I couldn't keep off my mind).

I pulled it out of my pocket, glanced at the screen to see who was calling. Not a number I recognized, and for a moment, I considered hanging up.

Then I reconsidered. Maybe it was a telemarketer, but given my life history, that was supremely unlikely.

"Hey, it's Max," I said cheerily, but I barely got past 'hey' before a voice interrupted me.

"Max? I'm sorry, but I need your help."

I knew that raspy voice, though I hadn't heard it in a long time. "Forget it, Fang."

I heard a sigh and the rattle of static. "It's Jeb."

I didn't give him the dignity of an answer.

"Look, forget it," he rasped. "Forget I called. I'm sorry I bothered you."

He hung up on me.

Huh. Well, that was unusual.

I hadn't seen him in almost five years. Why would he call me now?

When I got back home that day - well, the motel room that was passing for home these days - the first thing I did was Google the phone number he'd called from. I knew his voice too well to think it was just some prank caller - my number is unlisted, and until now I'd thought only the flock and Mom knew it.

And I'd known him well enough to know that if we shared any characteristic, it was a refusal to ask anyone for help.

He woke up in the smell of alcohol. Usually when that happened he was face down on his desk in a lab he didn't recognize with preservative spilled everywhere after a late-night bout of shaky hands. But there was a pillow under his head, a real one, not a notebook or his arm, and he was in a bed, not slumped over a desk.

He opened his eyes and saw her there, the radio on and playing music, scrubbing her palms with something that reeked of bad vodka. The chair she was sitting in was coming apart at the seams, slowly decohering.

She didn't notice him, only kept scrubbing and humming to the music. She inspected her palm, slipped into whistling along with the tune.

She hadn't gotten that from him. He couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.

A lump of wet alcohol-smelling cotton thunked into the trashcan by his head. His lips were dry, he realized. And his mouth tasted like one part hangover to three parts of hopeless.

The radio clicked over to the soft murmur of a deejay - probably reading off the song title or something - as she bandaged her palms, gauze held on by a wrap of surgical tape. She flexed her fingers, clenching her hands into fists and hyperextending the joints.

There had been a point when he would have been very proud to see her doing something like this. Look. She has normal mobility, and the foresight to make sure her bandages won't restrict her movement. She's smart enough to clean her wounds so they won't get infected.

Now he just felt slightly ill, and very old. He'd been bandaging her scraped knees yesterday.

The room seemed to be rocking side to side when he closed his eyes again, but he couldn't hear waves. So he wasn't on a boat.

She seemed to have noticed him being awake; he heard footsteps as she got up and threw something away, then the sigh of abused springs as she sat back down.

"You're awake."

"You're not trying to kill me," he said, and dammit, the room was spinning now. More of a light drift to the left, but still highly distracting. "Therefore, I'm dreaming."

"You're not worth killing." The radio burst out in static and she turned it down. "Feeling any better? Last time Mom checked you had a pretty high fever."

There was only one woman he knew of who Max would ever call Mom.

So. Val was here.

"I hope you got the plates on that truck that hit me," he said. Even through closed eyelids the lights were too bright. This was absolutely not real.

The real Max would have left him... whereever he'd been before this. He couldn't remember where that was. His lab, probably; he seemed to recall spending a lot of time there lately.

Max sighed. "Since you're not asking, I'll just tell you. You're in the guest room at Mom's house in Arizona. The reason you're not somewhere else is because you told me, and I quote, 'no hospitals' when I picked you up."

He remembered calling her, faintly. For a moment it had seemed like a good idea to call for help, and then immediately after like an even better idea to just go it alone.

"How did you find me?" He hadn't given an address; he was pretty sure of that.

"You called me twice, Jeb." The radio started to crackle an insurance pitch and she turned it off entirely. "The second time you gave me an address."

He opened his eyes a sliver in time to see her lean forward, elbows on her knees and hands folded under her chin. "So tell me, Jeb, does that place always look like a meth lab, or did I just come at a bad time?"

It didn't look like a meth lab last time.

But then again, how long had it been since he'd really seen anything - even what his own lab really looked like? It had taken him weeks to notice the spray of blood down the front of his lab coat, after all.

"I have to pay the rent."

"It looked like you were living there." She shrugged. "Not like I really care," she said, and leaned back in her chair. "But I didn't think letting you die there would be the right thing to do. You rescued me once, so I rescued you. We're even."

But she'd spent her first ten years living little better than a lab rat, a feral child in cages and tiny rooms. He should have gotten her out the day she was born. Instead he'd been weak, had waited and waited for far too long.

She couldn't repay that weakness by saving him from himself; this time around, he deserved what was coming to him.

"We'll never be even," he said.