She broke down the other day, yeah you know
Some things in life may change
But some things, they stay the same

Like time; there's always time on my mind
So pass me by, I'll be fine
Just give me time

TWENTY-FIVE

Just as Fang was ready to force her to look away from Jeb, like the flick of a switch, Max curled herself into a ball on the cold concrete, hands clutched over her head, and made the most devastating, heart-stopping noise he'd ever heard anything—human or otherwise—make, a shrieking sort of wail that he had no idea she was capable of.

He leapt to action instantaneously, wiping his filthy hands off on his jeans before skimming them over her arms, legs, back, face, trying to search for another obvious injury aside from where the bullet had clipped her ribcage and her bicep. Then he registered the dirt on the side of her head and the bundle of cartilage that had once been her already-bruised nose. And then it made sense.

She'd been kicked with a steel-toed boot. In the head. And she was already concussed.

He had almost lost her again, because of that monster. He gave Max one last long look and then tapped the back of Iggy's hand before rising to his feet and stalking across the concrete.

In the moments he'd been distracted, Charlie had somehow ended up crumpled in the corner of the room, a puddle of deep, red liquid growing beneath him. It was particularly concerning that he was not moving, and a ghostly whisper flitted through his brain: "I can't leave my father daughterless."

Fang glanced to the left.

The Gasman was one giant, walking bruise. One eye was swollen almost entirely shut. Mallory landed a blow to his side and Gazzy staggered back, limping on one foot until he collapsed to his knees.

Nudge dropped from the air onto Mallory, shoving a boot into the base of his neck. There was a crack but Mallory barely flinched, raising an arm to bat Nudge away like a bothersome insect. She dropped like a stone to the cement, moaning and pulling herself onto all fours. Her eyes met Fang's, pretty face tugged into a grimace.

This was the time for a split decision:

Tend to Charlie and make sure he was okay, knowing he'd made an incredible sacrifice to help them, help Max—or protect the flock, his little brother and sister, the only family he'd ever known.

It was a no brainer.

I'm sorry, he thought. And he turned to Nudge and the Gasman.

They were outmatched, Fang knew. Mallory had been so mutated, so augmented, that no amount of agility and street smarts would defeat him. Fang knew his only option was something Jeb had forbidden and Max had strongly enforced.

Fang clenched his teeth. Neither was in any shape to do anything about it now.

He shot knowing glances to Nudge and Gazzy, who, bless their hearts, seemed to understand him. Then he turned his focus to Mallory, who was already glowering at him.

"You're dead, you know," the bigger man said, smiling wide enough to show his yellowed, rotting teeth. "It's over."

Fang's voice reached a lethal pitch. "You're right," he hissed. "I think it is."

In a flurry of movement, Gazzy leapt up and charged Mallory, who raised his gun and aimed to kill. As his finger found the trigger, a blurred, brown figure zipped from behind him, throwing an elbow and knocking the gun out of his hand. It clattered to the floor and its momentum carried it across the concrete to Fang's waiting feet.

Everything happened very quickly then.

The Gasman eyed Nudge, who Mallory had grabbed by the hair, and shot Fang a panicked glance. "Fang!"

Fang ducked for the gun and rose to his feet. He'd shot a gun before, once, when Jeb had given them all a crash course—rule one is to never use a gun, Jeb had said somberly, but rule two is to know how to use one properly, if you ever have to—but Mallory had Nudge by the head and Fang knew it was now or never, he had one chance—

Fang's finger found the trigger. He aimed carefully at Mallory's chest and fired once.

Before Fang could wonder if he'd made contact, Mallory collapsed to the ground.

Gazzy's reaction was immediate—in a second flat he'd roared up to Nudge and grabbed her under the arms, hauling her as far away as he could manage.

But Fang wasn't finished.

As far back as he could remember, he had never felt like this. Not when the whitecoats took Iggy's sight, not when they ran Nudge to the point of heat stroke when she was five, not even when he'd found out about what Max had gone through back at Eugenics United. This was an emotion unlike anything he could ever imagine.

It was rage, multiplied by a million. It was agony.

Without thinking, he fired the gun again. And again. A fourth time. Mallory's body jerked as it absorbed each bullet, but Fang could still see the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

Fang threw the gun aside and dropped to his knees in front of the body. Mallory's eyes rolled lazily in their sockets, finally finding Fang's.

A twisted smile came to his pale lips. "She's… mine," Mallory heaved out. Blood coated his mouth and bubbled over onto his chin and chest.

"Bullshit," Fang spat, and bent down to pound a punch into Mallory's nose.

Fang wanted to watch the life drain from his eyes, wanted to force this sick, sorry man to beg for mercy as he suffocated on his own blood. He threw another punch—thwack, and Mallory's right cheek shattered under his knuckles—Max was still screaming behind him—thwack, left cheek—Iggy was talking loudly to what sounded like himself as he tried to decide what to do—thwack, chin—Fang hauled his arm back, hand coiled in a white-knuckled fist, ready to strike again and he—

—stopped, when he felt Nudge's hand on his shoulder.

For a moment, all Fang could hear was his own panting, his blood racing in his ears. All he could see were her eyes.

For as long as they'd been a flock, Nudge had always been the most expressive. Her beautiful face bloomed with each emotion she felt. There was no "poker face" or "stoicism" or "masked feelings" when it came to Nudge.

So now, the compassion written all over her features was almost enough to knock Fang right on his ass.

Nudge knelt close to him, eyes angled up to meet his. "She needs you," she whispered, tipping her head toward Max. "It's over. We won. You did what you had to do. Let Gazzy and I handle the rest."

Her eyes said the words that she did not. This is not who you are. This will haunt you. It's already going to.

Fang nodded once and rose, diving to Max's side.

Angel was there, eyes huge in her face. She shot a glance at Max and then cried out, clasping her hands over her own head as she did so.

"Oh, not good," she moaned. Her eyes popped open again and she gave Fang a panicked look. "Her thoughts—"

Max screamed again, and Fang was sure he would die from the sadness and rage and agony that sliced through him. She rolled back and forth on the ground, hands cradling her head, muttering gibberish and nonsense in between cries—

"What's happening?" Iggy said from beside him. His tentative hands dusted over Max's body, and he, too, couldn't find another injury. There was a distinctive terror to his voice. "Fang, what's happening?"

The hairs on the back of Fang's neck stood up and he whipped his head around—

"He's dead," Nudge said as she threw the first aid kit at Fang's knees and crouched next to him. She unzipped the bag and started rifling through its contents, apparently at a loss as to what she should be looking for. Gazzy was hot on her heels, and Fang took a moment to process the amount of blood on his clothes before his mind compartmentalized and returned to Max.

"Who's dead?" Iggy cried.

"Mallory," Fang forced out through gritted teeth. "Where is she hurt?"

"The bullet only grazed her but then she started screaming—"

Max started to gag, and Iggy dove into action, turning onto her side with milliseconds to spare. Even in her odd state of semiconsciousness, she groaned as she vomited, a hand still feebly pressed to her temple.

"Fuck," Iggy muttered, fisting a hand into his hair. Fang recognized this as an unparalleled panic, a type of fear that he'd never once seen in Iggy. "Fuck, fuck, fuck. This is bad. This is bad."

"This feels like more than a concussion," Angel whimpered. "Oh, man…"

That was it.

"I'm calling it," Fang said, rocking back onto his heels. His hands were smeared with Mallory's blood, his heart was thrashing in his chest, he was certain he was going to throw up.

He would not lose her to this.

"Fang—"

"We're our of options. We're going. I'm calling it."

Iggy looked terrified. "How are we going to—"

"Hey!" the Gasman interrupted. He was standing tall, wings ruffled out slightly behind him, face wild with fear and anxiety. Blood was spattered on his shirt, his face, his hands. He looked like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed angel of death. "None of this matters if she's dead! So let's get a move on!"

Each time he looked at Max, he felt his heart break a little bit more.

The crisp linens were pulled to her chin—she was unconscious, but he knew she was cold. She had not a cubic inch of fat on her and was finally recoveringfrom both her torture and the two weeks of absolute insanity that followed it. He would do just about anything to even marginally increase her comfort.

Beneath the sheets, her skin was marred. He already had her injuries memorized and had started meticulously planning their care for whenever they made it out of here.

The laceration to left side of her head, just above her ear, had earned her twelve stitches, two inside and ten externally. The stitches would dissolve with time. That part of her head had been shaved, baby hairs already growing in thanks to their rapid cell replication. He'd watched the brainwashed nurses (thanks to Angel, the entire medical staff was blissfully unaware of or indifferent to her wings) clean the area with a saline mix three times daily over the course of the two days they'd spent here.

The gunshot wounds, albeit scarier looking, were markedly less worrisome. Because the bullet had hit the muscle-ridden area of her bicep, Max would be sore for "months" (Fang guessed a week tops, judging by how his abdominal muscles had responded to his old bullet wound). Her ribcage had taken the worst of the hit, and he knew that splintered ribs hurt like a bitch, but they'd been hurt worse dozens of times.

Her nose would never look the same, not that she or anyone would care. They'd done their best to set it, but it had been broken so many times that he knew it would undoubtedly heal more crookedly than the times before it.

The impressive bruising head to toe was hard to look at but would fade with rest. Knowing this didn't make it any easier to look at.

Angel stepped back into the room, looking like she'd recently been resurrected from the dead. Fang couldn't imagine the exhaustion she was experiencing—her abilities were far more advanced than years ago, but the magnitude of staff she had to ward off was growing with each passing hour.

Like with so many other things in their life, Fang could not help her. There was no way he could ease this burden. They had no choice: she had to do it.

Wordlessly, Angel dropped like a stone into the chair by Max's bedside. Fang perched on the arm and wrapped an arm around her, pulling her blond curls tight to his side.

Angel collapsed into him. Fang felt her sigh heavily into the scratchy, hospital gift shop tee shirt he'd replaced his ragged, bloody one with two days ago.

"She's going to be okay," Angel whispered. It was more of a question than a statement.

Fang opened his mouth to speak but found he had no words. His cheeks were tight from the heavy frown that had settled on his lips, his forehead hurt from the wrinkle that he saw in the mirror every time he splashed his face in front of the bathroom sink.

She had to be okay. They'd made it this far. She'd made it this far. This was not the way he would lose her, this was not the way she would go.

So Fang just nodded and rubbed his hand up and down Angel's cold, slender arm, humming an agreement that was not quite a question, not quite a statement, but a prayer.

I woke up to soft beeping, scratchy sheets, and an overwhelming certainty that I was totally, all-encompassingly, and downright fucked.

My body moved on autopilot. Instantly, I flailed into a defensive seated position, panicking further when I felt wires attached to my chest and the definitive prick of an IV in my arm. My hand flew to the site and ripped at the dressing there. I felt like I couldn't breathe.

"Stop, stop, stop, Max, stop—"

Fang. Fang's hands were at my sides, in my hair, cupping my cheeks. He moved his face directly in front of mine, centimeters away, and refused to blink. The bloodshot hue of his sclera contrasted starkly with Challenger-Deep blue of his irises. His face was flushed, heavy bags sat just over his cheekbones, and he looked deeply troubled.

Shit, I registered blankly. He looks like shit.

"Hey. Look at me. Breathe. You're safe. You're safe. Everything is under control. I have everything under control. I need you to relax."

A brief moment passed in which I considered listening to him—he was Fang, after all, and if he was handling the situation, then I'd be okay—but a split second later, monitors started screaming all around us and I threw myself toward the side of the bed. I felt something tear on my left side, near my armpit.

Where am I? How did I get here? What's going—

There was a flurry of movement and then Angel was next to me, looking even more exhausted than Fang. An influx of calm thoughts tried to penetrate the panic but dissipated like wisps of smoke. "I can only do so much, Fang," she said nervously, "there's so many of them, I can't brainwash all of them at once—"

"You're doing great, Ange—just keep it up a little bit longer—Jesus, Max, you already ripped your stitches—" Fang's gentle hands were pushing me back to the side of the bed. Nausea rolled over me like a thundercloud and I gagged. An emesis basin was thrust into my hands and I retched into it miserably.

The monitors had quieted down back to that muffled blip, blip, blip that I could only assume was my heart rate. My head was throbbing, and I could not piece together the information that had landed me here.

I decided to go with what typically landed me up the creek: my own stupidity.

"I'm sorry," I gasped, pressing a hand to my forehead. He shook his head, but I needed to get the words out, needed him to know how sorry I was. "Fang—"

I had subconsciously reached a hand out to him and he grabbed it, tightly.

"I didn't have a choice this time." His voice shook when he spoke. "We thought you were bleeding internally—you weren't making any sense, you kept throwing up, you were losing all this blood from the bullet wound... They did imaging once we got you here and it's just a pretty serious concussion, but..."

Fang finished with an odd sort of grunt and Angel's head swiveled at him, eyes wide with concern. She turned to look at the door again, no doubt focusing her energy on keeping everyone's attention away from my room, but one of her hands found his shoulder.

While Fang had shown a whole new spectrum of emotions over the past few weeks, he had not shown whatever this one was.

Fang composed himself quickly and held my gaze, raking a hand through his messy hair repeatedly. It stood like overgrown, jet-black grass atop his head. "We've been through a lot," he said quietly, tiredly, "But that was the most afraid I've ever been."

"They said it presented exactly like a brain bleed," Angel added. She looked about a hundred years old. "Which would've killed you. They said this could've, too. You had a seizure after we got you here. They gave you some medication to help with the swelling, and they have a different pill they want you to take for the next week. You're also on some pretty heavy pain medications." She held up a little baggie in her right hand, evidently full of medications that she'd probably swiped from the nurse's station. They were all different sizes and colors.

Angel, reading my mind, attempted a reassuring smile and rattled off a couple of gibberish-sounding words that I assumed were names of medications. "Got it covered."

My brain was still swirling so wildly that I wasn't sure which way was up. I wasn't sure if it was from the narcotics, the concussion, the panic, or some fantastic goulash of all three.

"Need to pee," I said shamelessly. My head was so heavy but the rest of me was feather-light. I felt dangerously close to a hallucination.

"That's from the medication," Fang said. "You have a catheter in. So just go."

I didn't have the capacity to be mortified. "Need to get out of here."

Angel and Fang shared a significant gaze. I opened my mouth to ask about it, but Angel sighed and started talking. "You really should stay here for a few days, even with our healing. But…"

"But Angel picked the brains of the doctors, and between her and Iggy you'll probably be safer recovering somewhere else," Fang finished. He brushed a stray hair out of my eyes. "Where you can lay low."

I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing—in, out, in, out. They found you in the forests of Massachusetts, I thought. In, out. They found you in Death Valley. In, out. They'll find you in this hospital. In, out. Need to keep moving.

"Let's go," I said simply.

After a lengthy process of Angel summoning her favorite brainwashed nurse and instructing her to remove my catheter and IV and do some in-depth discharge teaching, we were trying to inconspicuously travel down the halls of the hospital, Angel projecting the most potent mind-clearing thoughts she could manage as Fang rolled my wheelchair behind her.

"Almost there, Ange," he said under his breath. "You kicked ass today."

"I feel like I need to sleep for the next week," she mumbled. I barely had enough energy to grunt in agreement.

Our trip out of the huge medical center was mostly silent. Angel was nursing a slightly bleeding nose and what I imagined was a skull-splitting headache, and though I knew he wanted to comfort me, Fang was certainly battling the overwhelming smells that came with being in a hospital. No amount of assimilation into society could remove that knee-jerk reaction.

I could feel the emotions I should've been feeling washing over me, horrified embarrassment, panic, confusion; but nothing could penetrate my drug-induced haze. Fang had one hand firmly on my shoulder as he steered the wheelchair with the other.

"Everyone is outside," Angel said from ahead of us. The hallway stretched beyond her endlessly. "I told them we're leaving."

I grimaced as a stretcher clanged by. "How long…?"

"Two days," Fang said tiredly. It was about what I'd guessed based on the bags under his eyes.

I groaned in response anyway.

"We didn't have a choice, Max. Everything is fine," Fang said. "Don't worry."

"It wouldn't have been safe to move you," said Angel.

We emerged from the hospital to greet a thankfully dreary day, although the muddy light still gave me a crippling migraine. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, Nudge was in front of me, shoving a giant pair of sunglasses on my face before throwing herself a bit violently at me.

"Easy, Nudge," Fang said.

To her credit, Nudge dialed it back about half a notch. But instead of her typical Nudge channel, hyperactive bubbliness, I was encompassed by a very different girl. A more somber one.

For a long time, she said nothing. Then, delicately: "I was so scared. Thank God you're okay."

"We gotta go," Iggy said. "Fang, can you drive the getaway car?"

Fang braked the wheelchair and walked around to face me. "Can you walk?"

I nodded vigorously and stood…

…and then promptly lost my balance and pitched forward.

Fang grabbed my shoulders, but it was Iggy who wrapped his arm around me and essentially dragged my weight to the van as Fang clambered into the driver's seat.

"Glad to have you back," Iggy said from his spot next to me in the back seat. I could hear the emotion locked behind those words. "Half-conscious again, I see."

Bite me, I thought, but the words never made it to my lips—Fang started the car and I was gone, gone, gone.

The next day was Thanksgiving, and we spent it in a motel in Wyoming. Not quite as glamorous as the Venetian, but the fact of the matter was that Angel had been far too exhausted to work the muscles of her mind any further—I was told later that Iggy had essentially half-carried her (while Fang carried me) through the lobby while the Gasman tried to distract the staff from what was certainly the most suspicious group of people to have ever entered the building.

To be honest, I don't remember much about that stretch of days. I remember being fed mashed potatoes and finely sliced pieces of turkey while I rested in a musty bed. I remember laying on the poorly upholstered couch with my bandaged head in Fang's lap while a cheesy, made-for-TV movie played. I remember participating meaningfully in conversations, albeit quiet, short-phrased ones.

I remember being told Mallory was dead, and so was Charlie.

As I got clearer, I was informed the decision had been made to camp out at the motel for at least a full week to allow me to heal, much to my chagrin. Finances weren't an issue—yet. But soon enough, we'd be a band of mutants on the run again, at least for a little while.

On my first fully lucid day, I pulled Fang and Iggy into the bedroom, closing the door behind me.

It had been a couple of days, so my finely-tuned sense of sarcasm and untamable stubbornness was back in full swing.

"I am more than capable of sleeping in a cave right now," I said to Fang and Iggy tightly. My strength was still poor, so I perched on the edge of the bed, frustrated as all hell, and stared up at their composed expressions.

"Mhm," said Iggy, nodding in an obviously facetious way. Fang said nothing.

"I'm still the leader around here!" I fumed, trying to mask the fact that every time I spoke, a lightning bolt shot from my bandaged left temple across to my right.

Fang, of course, picked up on this immediately.

"You can't even look at a lamp without wincing."

I bit back a scream of annoyance. "That doesn't make me an invalid!"

Iggy had a look of extreme sincerity on his face, but his voice was sarcastic. "All great points."

"Don't fuck with me," I warned.

Fang sat next to me on the bed, placing a giant hand on my bouncing knee. "Doesn't make you an invalid. But it means you deserve—and need—a couple more days of recuperation." When I opened my mouth to protest, he said, "In a real bed."

My eyes trailed to the window, where a few inches of snow had already accumulated on the sill outside. December had announced itself with a storm.

"Do you really think it's all over?" I asked in a tiny voice, hating how weak I sounded.

Iggy knelt in front of me, took my hands in his own. He raised his eyes to try to meet mine, though his gaze ended up somewhere over my right eyebrow. "Yeah," he said with a half-smile. "I do. But until we're certain, we still need to play it safe. Which means keeping all of us alive, especially the concussed, Swiss-cheese-bullet-holed one of us."

My hand found the bandage at my left temple as I flinched. Iggy breathed a huge sigh, bowing his head.

"I'm never going to win this argument, am I?"

Fang shook his head, face stony.

"Okay," I said, pushing myself up from the bed. I slowly made my way to the door, ignoring the screaming pain in my side where the bullet had gotten me. "What's for dinner, then?"

The motel only had a small kitchenette with a hot plate, a toaster oven, and a mini fridge, so it took Iggy an hour or so to put together a mutant-sized dinner of spaghetti and meatballs.

As we ate, I grilled the flock about what had happened in Oak Creek. Earlier in my recovery, they had refused to tell me the details of the escape. No one said it, but I knew Fang and Iggy had deemed me too fragile to be able to handle it, and that's why everyone was tight-lipped.

Now, though, five days later, I was ready to start throwing punches if they continued to hold out on me.

"I deserve to know what happened," I said, smearing some butter on a piece of garlic bread. "Stop babying me."

Directly across the table, Fang's jaw was tight as he scrutinized me. "What do you remember?" he asked finally.

"Everything is clear up until he kicked me, and then most of it is jumbled," I admitted. "I remember getting shot. I remember not feeling anything, and… then I felt everything."

Iggy's mouth was set in a pale, thin line. "That's probably when you started screaming."

My stomach started to twist. "Jeb gave me something," I remembered. "A note or something. It had my name on it."

Iggy stopped chewing. "You remember that?"

"What did it say?"

Nobody said anything.

Finally, Iggy, looking guilty, spoke lowly. "It got lost in the shuffle. I'm sorry, Max."

"Nobody read it?"

"We were a little preoccupied."

Gazzy was scooping a third helping onto his plate. "Who cares what that scumbag had to say? Good riddance."

Suddenly, I remembered what Mallory had said back in Oak Creek, when it was just he and I. "Mallory said Jeb was just a useless pawn," I blurted.

Silence.

"Whaaaaat?" said Nudge.

"Back in Colorado—I completely forgot," I said. I pushed my plate away, suddenly not hungry anymore. The pasta sat heavy in my stomach. "He said Jeb was a useless pawn and said everyone who worked for him knew I was his."

Five pairs of shocked eyes stared back at me.

Fang's knuckles were white where he gripped his fork, muscles of his face impossibly terse as he chewed methodically. Without meeting my gaze, he turned to Iggy, who seemed to know Fang was staring at him.

"And the plot thickens," Gazzy sighed miserably.

"Does it really matter who was in charge, at this point?" Angel said after swallowing her bite. She still looked lifeless from the forty-eight hours of mindbending she'd done back at the hospital. "All of them are dead anyway."

Gazzy met my eyes. "Really, this time. We made sure of it."

"How did we get out of there?"

"We got you back to the van and Emily was gone. No trace of her anywhere. Must've fled on foot," Iggy said, scowling.

My mind clicked into overdrive despite its inability to make meaningful connections. "Why?" was all I could manage.

Fang's face was locked in a grimace. "We were never supposed to come back. She was waiting for Charlie."

"There's no question anymore about that chip in your arm," Nudge said quietly, looking utterly defeated. "I hacked their system. They were tracking you the whole time."

Realization washed over me like a terrible, traitorous wave. "Charlie brought us there to be captured." I paused, waiting for someone to tell me I was wrong. Nobody did.

He'd been a bad guy the entire time.

"No," I breathed.

"I can't believe it still surprises us when people turn out to be fucking traitors," Gazzy muttered.

Oh, my God, they aren't kidding, I thought.

Iggy looked exhausted from his place on the couch. "Think about it. He was desperate to get his family out of that place. Just decided to take the most selfish route possible," he said.

"Then why did he try to help me get out?"

"By letting us do the hard part," said Angel. "We're the ones that blew EU up. We're the ones who rescued his family. It was one big, stupid—"

"Convincing," Gazzy mumbled furiously.

"—convincing act."

I don't know why I so desperately needed this betrayal to be untrue; it made me feel sick.

"You said you read their minds," I said to Angel. "That they were good guys."

Angel looked almost guilty. "I couldn't read Charlie's thoughts, because of his mutations. But Emily… either she had no idea, or she was really good at changing her thoughts."

"I think she was out of the loop," Nudge said thoughtfully. "I bet he told her that if we came back without him, she should run. Maybe she was hiding."

"Charlie said he's the one who got me out the first time," I said, still grasping at straws. "He—"

"—lied," Fang finished softly. He still looked furious. "He lied, Max."

In my concussed haze, I felt tears prick the corners of my eyes. Not because I was sad about the death of Charlie, not because he specifically had lied. It was more an immense grief over the circumstances of my life, our lives. No one was good. No one was kind. We had each other. That was all. And every time we forgot that, it was like shooting ourselves in the foot.

Fang's hand enveloped mine from across the table, breaking me from my reverie. "It's all over. We're free," he said softly, with the whisper of a grin on his lips. "You're free."

"Older Chests" – Damien Rice

Just an epilogue left, folks! Thanks so much for enjoying this journey with me.