Okay, bear with me on this chapter. I had a concept, and I was running with it, and maybe it got a bit too risqué. Forgive me.

Chapter 36

There it was—the moment. I prepared for the ecstasy to wash over me, the pure joy…

But once I got there, the scene around me changed. I was no longer in a grassy clearing with Fang, but a spacious black void. Angel stood in front of me, and muttered "help me" in the most pitiful voice I had ever heard.

I collapsed onto Fang's chest, heaving with terror.

"Max?" he muttered. "Are you okay?"

I nodded uneasily.

"You've never done that before. Did I do something wrong? What'd I do?"

"Nothing, nothing," I said, waving my hand. "It was… it's just… we need to get the flock together. I need to talk to everybody."

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-

"I saw Angel," I told them. "It was different from before. I only saw her for a second, but she was terrified. She wants us to help her now. We… God, we've been sitting by idly doing nothing! We need to start taking some action."

"How could you have seen Angel?" Iggy asked.

"Um… what?"

"How'd this vision come to you?" he clarified. "I thought it was only when you were dreaming."

I looked around nervously. I'd been hoping to avoid that, but now it seemed everybody wanted to know. "The vision came when I, um… uh… we were making love."

Nudge tried, and failed miserably, to suppress an amused snort.

"It's not funny!" I said. "Look, that's how it works—when Angel contacts people with her mind, it's a real strain on her, very tiring. For what she's doing now, I think she can only contact me, since I'm the mind she's most familiar with, and then only when my mind is otherwise paused, like during REM sleep, or, evidently… you know, orgasm." I looked around at them. "Okay, it's sort of funny. You can make fun of me after we rescue her, but not until then! Don't you get it? For me to have seen her at that exact moment, she's probably searching for me constantly! Whatever the Survivors are doing to her, she's more scared than I've ever seen her. She asked me to help her. Come on, we all know Angel never does that. We have to save her."

Fang gripped my shoulder. "Max, there's nothing we can do. The tower still moves around. We'll never find it."

I clenched my fists. "This can't be happening…"

"And we're not being passive," Nudge supplied. "Danny is still tracking the tower. When the moment comes, he'll… well, he has some kind of plan, I guess."

I looked at the sun. Still high in the sky, and I wasn't tired at all. Sleep couldn't come soon enough. I needed to find out exactly what was happening to Angel.

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-

That night, I plopped down onto my pillow. My eyelids were heavy, but I couldn't get to sleep. I had to sleep, damn it…

It must have been an hour, with my eyes shut and my body perfectly motionless, trying like hell to just hit the sack, before I finally found myself in the blackness with Angel once again.

"Oh, thank goodness," she muttered. "When I only saw you for a split second, I thought maybe my powers were… running out…"

"Don't worry about it, Angel," I said. "What's your status?"

"My… my status…?" she said blankly. "Well, things aren't really… going well for me. Once they realized that I'd never, ever join them no matter what, they started… torturing me. At first I thought they were waiting for me to snap and switch sides, but now I figure it's all just for the fun of it."

"Oh my God, Angel. Tell me what they're doing!"

"They keep me locked up," she muttered. "I haven't had anything to eat for… for… I have no clue how long. There aren't any windows, no way for me to see the time… they keep my jaw locked shut, so I can't speak or eat or even scream… and I'm all covered in dirt, and…"

"Really? You look fine," I said.

She stared at me like I was an idiot. "This isn't really me, Max. You're looking at a dream vision. Like I want to put the effort into projecting an image of what I really look like right now."

"Sorry, sorry," I muttered. "But… the torture, then. Why would they torture you?"

"Because they can, I suppose," Angel said. "They've got this humongous mutant who's the torturer." An image flashed through my mind, overlapping the specter of Angel. The image she showed me was of a guy, about eight feet tall, with stone-gray skin and bulging muscles. And I mean muscles. The breadth of his shoulders was within an inch of his height. His biceps were wider than Airy was tall.

"Ugh," I sneered. "Get rid of it!"

He vanished, and I saw Angel again. "Can't get rid of him for me," she said solemnly.

"Cripes, if there was any doubt that my dear sweet mother the Director was involved," I murmured. "What does this guy do to you?"

She shrugged. "Knives. Fire. Poison. I don't want to talk about it. He'll haunt me forever, even if you can save me…"

"If?" I demanded. "There's no if about this, Angel. We're coming to save you."

Angel vanished and I promptly jerked awake.

"Just as soon as we figure out how the hell to find you," I muttered feebly.