Undisclosed location, Hinsdale County, Colorado
Everything hurt. And no, that is not an exaggeration; even my earlobe was in pain.
I cracked my eyes open, becoming aware as I did so that I was lying on my stomach on a mat of pine needles. My right shoulder throbbed and stung where the bullet hit me. With a little groan, I gathered my arms underneath me and pushed myself up—at least, I tried to. As soon as I'd moved an inch, somebody's hand pressed down on my back and forced me down again.
"Stay down, you idiot." It was Fang, and he didn't seem pleased.
"You sound pretty pissed for someone who didn't just get shot," I mumbled. Although I was being snarky, I stayed down like he'd asked.
"Well, we did have to catch you."
"And that wasn't much fun either," Iggy jumped in. I lifted my head to see him sitting with his back against a tree. "Seriously, how can you have hollow bones and still weigh that much, Max?"
Even though I knew he would not see it, I stuck my tongue out at him. Maybe he'd hear the wet mouth noise and get it. Then I turned my attention back to Fang, whose fingers were busy poking around the wound on my shoulder.
"What happened to the helicopter and the Erasers?" He brushed something sensitive, and I winced as a hot spike of pain lanced across my back and arm. "You know that hurts, right? Like, a lot."
He didn't respond right away, but his hands withdrew a minute later.
"What's the status, Doc?"
"It's not the safest place to be if they know where we are, but we should go back to the house and get the bullet out of your shoulder. Can you stand?"
"I'm offended. I'm shot, not paralyzed. Scoot. I'll get up on my own."
Cut to a few hours later: Fang tortured me for a straight twenty minutes digging the bullet out of my wing (and pulled about half my feathers out while he was at it), Iggy threw a couple sutures in there (bless his blind hands), we all more or less patched ourselves up, and now the six of us sat around preening one another. Me, mostly one-handed.
Fang picked carefully around the matted clump of feathers at my entry wound, cleaning everything off as much as he could. Nothing was seriously broken, thank goodness, but the location made it basically impossible to bandage properly and an infection was the very last thing I needed right now.
"So," I began with a look around at the others. "What's next? Where do we stand right now?"
"The Erasers know where we are." Nudge's voice was very soft, and filled with sadness. I saw Iggy pause grooming her to gently rub her shoulder.
"At least, they know we're here. They never got close enough to see the house," he reassured her.
I nodded. "True. But that doesn't make it a good idea to convince ourselves that we're safe. We should probably get out of here and lay low for a while, see what else happens without putting ourselves at risk. Jeb once said something about a lake a couple days from here by wing. We can go there to wait out whatever's going on," I decided even as I spoke it aloud.
"But Max, you can't fly right now." Gazzy lifted his head to look up at me through his pale eyelashes, his wide-eyed expression a perfect picture of concern for me.
I shook my head and flicked my hair over my shoulder flippantly. "I'll be fine. I can barely feel it anymore."
That was a lie.
I felt it. Felt it a lot, actually, and I knew I would feel it worse if and when I tried to fly with it. I could tell Angel knew it too when she froze in grooming Gazzy and looked at me sternly.
"Yes you can, Max. It aches all the way down to the joint with your back."
"Alright, you've got me there."
Nudge shot me a reproachful glare, and I sighed. When Angel called you out on a lie, there wasn't a whole lot you could do to rebut it. Add her youth to her ridiculous sixth sense, and she knew and would say more about you than you ever wanted her to.
She isn't psychic, at least not in the I-can-hear-every-thought-you-have kind of way. The details are a bit fuzzy to me, but as far as any of us understands it, Angel is capable of picking up on and interpreting emissions, spectrums, and pheromones well beyond those that the rest of us can detect. Some things she can even send back, clouding judgement or inspiring affection in whoever her receiver is. It is a pretty impressive skill. And it would have driven Angel completely off the edge if we'd remained at the School our whole lives—I remember tasting the pain and despair congealing in the air there even without her ability.
Fortunately, as it was, she ended up being a completely sane six-year-old with phenomenal intuition.
I nudged Fang away from my wings so that I could slowly stretch the right one out. My jaw clenched at the stab of pain as my muscles pulled and shifted around the injury, but I managed to extend both wings fully.
"It hurts like a bitch, I'll admit, and it's going to be stiff in the mornings. We'll glide and rest a lot. I can make it." Angel tilted her head slightly to the side and thought for a moment in silence. Eventually she nodded softly and without another word went back to coaxing burrs out of Gazzy's secondaries.
"Max, are you sure?" Fang murmured.
"My wing still functions, and this place is not secure enough to stay here anymore. My mind is made up that we must go. If it hurts a lot, so be it." I could feel Nudge's glare on me, but she didn't make any protest.
Everyone fell into silence, all six of us enjoying the pleasant feeling of preening and being preened by our partners. A few minutes after, Fang finished with my wings and the two of us swapped places. When I had thoroughly cleaned and straightened his dark feathers and hair, I pressed my nose to his neck and then stood up.
"When you're all done, go pack your necessities." I spoke softly, but I knew every member of the Flock could hear me clearly. "We should get out of here as soon as we can."
We didn't have a whole lot to pack; within forty-five minutes we were winging our way into the air.
The first couple downstrokes sent sheer agony shooting through me. To my credit, not a peep of complaint left my throat and I kept a mostly straight face, although my vision dropped off into darkness for a second. Honestly, it's a miracle I didn't careen straight back down to earth and crash.
Fang and Nudge must have noticed my jerky wobble and the strain on my face because they made sure to stick close to me. Annoyingly close. I would have taken offense at their babying if they hadn't been right to think I might need it. As it was, my own shaky flying and the occasional involuntary wince pissed me off more than anything.
"I'm sad we have to leave," Nudge called out to me from just above my right shoulder.
My guess is that she was trying to distract me from the fact that my wing had become a mass of pain. It probably wasn't going to work. I highly do not recommend getting shot, folks. 0/10, negative 5 stars rating. Misery all around.
"I wonder if they were really trying to kill us," she continued. I tilted my head in her direction, an eyebrow raised. "Well, I guess I just don't understand why the guys controlling the Erasers would want us dead… I mean, wouldn't you expect for them to want us back?" I shrugged. "We probably can't know though, can we?"
You'd think that Nudge would take my unresponsiveness as a hint to hush, but she just kept going.
"I mean, even if they are unhappy that Jeb snatched us away from them, we're only valuable to them alive. So then why did they shoot you? Of course we don't want to be captured or killed either way, so their intentions on that side don't even matter, but I can't help but wonder."
Okay, Nudge, that's enough talking…
I admit that she voiced some pretty legitimate thoughts. Still, I was in some serious pain. Wondering after the intentions of our attackers was so far off my agenda. The relief I felt when the Nudge Station fell silent and angled her wings to increase the distance between us once again cannot be overstated. I swear, that girl's motor-mouth could make Saint Paul an axe murderer.
We flew another few dozen miles before stopping.
My landing was rough and almost ended in my face becoming well-acquainted with a tree trunk. As it was I found myself covered in various foliage after my lopsided flapping sent me careening into a tumble across the forest floor.
But hey, any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. I managed to haul my sorry bum upright afterward; therefore, my landing was fine. Not that that argument had any sway over Fang or Nudge or Angel, all three of whom filleted me with their grumpy looks when I tried to help set up camp for the night.
"Fine, fine, fine," I muttered in response.
My vision wavered alarmingly as I adjusted my wings behind me, but I think only Angel noticed my wobbles as I stumbled a few steps and flung myself down at the base of a tree. I leaned back against the trunk and spread my wings out on either side of it to dry the sweaty feathers.
We all sat in silence for a while, letting the faint breeze and coolness of the incoming dusk warm down our tired bodies.
The wound in my wing pulsed in time with my heartbeats for a while, but eventually more pain rose up and the throbbing smoothed into a constant ache once again. It was steady enough that I forgot about it again and very nearly dozed off. Honestly, I would've, if an obnoxiously loud stomach growl hadn't ripped through the silence.
My eyes flipped open to see Nudge covering her giggle with one hand. A few trees over, Gazzy made a sheepish expression and wrapped his arms over his stomach, as though that would make it shut up.
The Flock was hungry. We needed food.
"Alright, then." Fang stood up and brushed the back of his pants free of pine needles. "I saw a town underneath us a few miles back. I'm going to go check it out to see if I can scrounge up something for us to eat."
I grunted and hauled myself to my feet with some support from the tree behind me.
"I will come with you."
Fang shot me a look. "No way."
"Excuse me?"
"Max, you were half a second away from passing out when we landed, and now you want to fly to this town?" His voice twisted with sharp, sarcastic humor.
I frowned and set my jaw. "I'm not interested in sitting here and waiting for somebody else to feed me, even if you are my partner. So, Fang, I am coming with you." He looked as though he still wanted to object, so I pulled out my trump card.
"Orders."
From the corner of my eye I saw Nudge scowling and Iggy shaking his head. Obviously, Fang didn't like it either, but they all knew I meant business. He heaved a resigned sigh.
"Fine."
Springdale, Utah
Life lessons from Max: dumpster diving sucks.
Dangling on the edge of a dumpster by your hips is not fun. Having your face full of literal garbage is even less fun. Add them together and you get the exact opposite of a good time. Unfortunately, this was the only method we knew of to find food for the Flock.
Pawing through trash upside-down also did not help my wounded arm and wing, which both still ached and oozed blood as I rifled through trash bags for edible food. Not that I was going to let that stop me.
"Are you done in there yet?"
Fang's voice was both muffled and amplified in a tinny, echo-y way by the walls of the dumpster, but my genetically-engineered hearing was sharp enough to understand him. I did not answer right away, and instead dug my fingers into a sealed garbage bag and tore the plastic open. Bingo. The thing was full of day-old pastries. The convenience store customers might have been too good for them, but we sure weren't.
I hauled myself out of the dumpster with a grunt. Fang pushed himself away from leaning on the dumpster and raised one eyebrow at me. I hefted the black bag with my good arm to show him.
"Eureka!"
He nodded, not saying a word or changing his expression. Heck, he was stubborn about that stoicism thing of his.
"Aw, c'mon, celebrate with me!" I spread open the rip in the bag and shook it, wafting the saccharine smell toward him. "Say 'Yum, Max, Angel and Gazzy are gonna love it.' Validate me, tell me I did a good job."
Words cannot capture how completely unimpressed by my antics he looked.
"Congrats, tonight we'll find out if bird kids can get diabetes." Ooh, a snappy comeback.
I drew breath to fire right back, but we both stopped short at the sound of sound of sneakers on pavement. They were coming our direction.
We scurried into the shadow behind the dumpster where we couldn't be seen from the alley. Hot pain laced through my wing from pressing it into the wall, but I bit down on the hiss.
A few tense heartbeats passed as we listened to the footsteps draw closer. The pitch of the person's panting breath suggested they were a girl. She paused where the alley opened into the street but then kept moving, and for an instant relief washed me at the thought that she was going to pass right by us. But everyone already knows that the universe hates me. As soon as I figured we were safe, she turned last-minute into the mouth of our hiding place.
'Be chill, Max,' I told myself. 'Give her a minute to rest and then she'll be on her merry way, jogging for fun the way all the crazies do.' It reassured me for a hot second—and then there were more footsteps.
My heart sank into my stomach as a gang of four men turned the corner into the alley behind the girl. They didn't look immediately threatening, but then I caught a faint wisp of the girl's fear scent mingled with her sweat. I felt Fang tense beside me as his nose picked it up as well. A careful glance over the edge of the dumpster revealed a predatory gleam in the men's eyes. I swallowed.
This, whatever this was, was ugly. And we did not want to be here to see it play out.