In retrospect, I wasn't sure which woke me up—the splash or the screaming. But it didn't matter. As I pushed myself up onto my elbows, body flooding with adrenaline, Nudge grabbed my arm. "Fang's hurt!" She pointed at the lake.

Instinct kicked over and I toed out of my boots, heart racing. "Angel, try to use your powers to find him. Gazzy!" He was knee-deep in the water already. "Get in the air and spot me. Nudge, if I'm down too long, you find me, okay?"

She nodded, her face tight with worry.

"Iggy!" I shouted. He had already taken to the air, his wings bone-white in the moonlight. I didn't know if he could hear me, or if he'd stop if he did, so I just settled for reassurance. "I'll take care of this!"

I didn't wait for a response before I ran headlong into the water, throwing my arms out to help me dive in.

Lake Michigan was freezing. Colorado winters were bad, and the air up high was worse, but the water of the lake reached into my bones and my lungs, choking me before I even started to use up my air. My muscles tensed up and my teeth jolted together, and I had to fight to go forward, further down into the cold, instead of leaping out of the lake and taking to the air.

Fang only had a few moments before he was dead for good. And that's assuming he was alive when he hit the water. He had to be alive, because God knew I wasn't getting hypothermia in my ass for a dead body.

Even with my eyes open, the water was impossible to see through. I ran out of air in an instant of blind fumbling around. I kicked my way to the surface and gulped in air as I frantically glanced around. I'd gotten pretty far out. If I squinted I could see the lake still rippling from my treading water, and further away there was another disturbance. That was where Fang was. It had to be.

I gritted my teeth and went back under.

It wasn't as bad the second time, but my limbs felt heavy. I extended my wings as far as they could go and used them to push me through the water. The cold hit me like a truck. I gritted my teeth, forcing myself onward. I'd get used to it. I had to get used to it.

I didn't get used to it. Muscle cramps wracked my body every time I pushed myself forward. But I kept going, down into the freezing black depths of the lake. Fang was here somewhere, he had to be somewhere I could find him…

A bad cramp had my legs spasming in the water. My eyes squeezed shut, I clamped my hands over my mouth to stop from screaming in agony and wasting all my air.

For a second I thought I was going to die. The cold waters of the lake would claim me and Fang, leaving us in a tomb even more anonymous than the shallow ditches Erasers dug for failed mutants. Maybe that was the entire point of this whole mess—to break me down, to take everything from me. No home, Jeb dying, Ari turning evil, and now no Fang—it only made sense that everything would end with me.

And then I heard a voice, and the sound was as sweet as windchimes on a lazy summer evening.

Max? Max, can you hear me?

It was Angel.

Sweetie, stay out of the water, I thought sluggishly.

I will. I'm in the air. I can hear Fang.

Those last four words set a fresh fire in my veins, and I pushed myself through the water, kicking hard despite the pain. I had wasted some air floundering around, but I still had a good two and a half minutes in me. I'd find Fang by then.

Go down, Angel told me, and I did. As I went deeper, she guided me. I could hear the strain in her thoughts, but I didn't have time to worry about it. I was running out of air, running out of time, and Fang was too. How long had he been sinking? What was I going to pull out of the lake?

Angel had heard his thoughts. That was the only consolation. He wasn't dead yet.

And then I floundered into something. The shock of hitting it when I hadn't been able to see squat had me let out a little-girl scream, which, when underwater, was a dumbass move. But when I realized that screaming had gotten me a mouthful of sodden feathers, I could have belted out the entirety of Bohemian Rhapsody.

It was Fang. I wrapped my arms around him and kicked hard, flapping too, doing my best to get us to the surface. I didn't feel the cold, didn't feel anything but gratitude. It was Fang, and Angel had found him, and she was yelling at me to hurry in my mind, too, and we were going to be okay. We were all going to be okay.

We broke the surface of the lake and I let out all the stale air I'd been carrying around. Treading water, I gasped and gasped and laughed, hysterical with relief.

Fang didn't say anything. He barely even moved.

And then I looked and saw that we were absurdly far away from the shore.

Oh, crap.

"Fang," I said gently. When that didn't get me a response, I squeezed him harder. "Fang!"

He was breathing. I could feel a pulse.

"Goddamnit, Fang, if you die on me I'll kill you," I said, and squeezed his stomach harder still.

He coughed, weakly at first, and then harder. The coughing turned into retching, and approximately half of Lake Michigan came out of his mouth.

"Gross," I told him.

Fang sputtered. "Y-your face."

"Classy as always. Listen, we need to get to shore. Can you swim?"

He was shivering in my arms, and shivered out a long string of m- m- m-.

"Maybe?"

"Michael Phelps," Fang spat, "Eat your heart out."

And then my enormous dumbass of a wingman tried to wriggle free. "No! No, we are not doing that, you moron, you nearly died, you nearly drowned—" My voice was going all hysterical and girly. I hated it, and I hated Fang for making me feel this way. "I'm not going to watch you sink like a rock again, Fang!"

Fang sighed. "Max," he said, "Can you swim all the way to shore?"

"Of course I can!" Out loud, the words sounded a lot less convincing.

"Carrying me?"

I hesitated.

The cold had started to creep back in again, but this time my legs didn't hurt. They were just numb. Treading water was getting harder by the second.

"Max," Fang said, very softly. He closed his hands over mine.

"No," I said. "No, Fang, don't you dare say some dumb self-sacrificing bullshit—"

That was when Iggy swooped down, the mangiest rescuing angel I'd ever seen. He was hovering about a foot above the surface of the water. "Hey, losers. Need a ride?"

"Yeah," Fang said.

"Grab my feet."

I wrapped an arm around his lower legs and held on for dear life as he towed us to shore. After what felt like years of freezing, we were finally on the beach, and I could haul Fang onto the sand and drop down next to him.

Fang let out a wheeze and rolled onto his side, hands over his stomach.

Ah, hell.

The rest of the Flock was surrounding us, faces twisted with concern. And while all I wanted to do was sink into the beach and fall asleep, I couldn't do that. My family needed me.

"We need to get the hell out of here," I said. "Iggy, take Nudge and get us a car. Preferably one with enough space for Fang to get a row to himself. Gazzy, Angel, I need you to get us first-aid supplies. Towels too. I don't care how, but be back in five minutes. Now go!"

They went, and I grabbed Fang by the shoulder and rolled him onto his back. "Come on. Where did he get you?"

Now that we were out of the lake and the stars were providing some light, I could see the scars on his face, and on his neck. "Are those bite marks? Jesus."

"Hurts," Fang said, which was about as expressive as he got when it came to talking about things like this.

I peeled his shirt off and saw that his torso was mostly bruise, and inky-black in more than one area.

"Ari did this," Fang wheezed, and it was just as bad as a punch in the stomach. Worse.

"Well, we won't take watch alone anymore," I said, and wrung his shirt out as best I could before dabbing at his face with it. He would need stitches for it. We heal fast, but getting beaten senseless and dumped into a huge freezing lake to die has a funny way of messing with the immune system. But, freezing lake or not, Fang was alive. And I was too. In spite of everything, we were both here.

I let out a shaky laugh, and Fang raised an eyebrow at me. It was hysterical. His dumb perfect face—

I leaned in and kissed his mouth, drunk with relief. His lips felt just as soft as they looked. "We're alive," I said, when I pulled back. "We're alive and we're okay."

And then I realized what I just did, and blood rushed to my face. "That is, um. Are you breathing alright? Are you cold? Let me get you a sweatshirt—"

It was only a few minutes before the other four came back, but it felt like centuries. I kicked sand over the campfire, gathered the few things we had accumulated over our days on the run into a pile, and tended to Fang as best I could. We didn't have much in the way of belongings, but what we did have, I didn't want to throw away. Who knew if we'd need it.

Gazzy and Angel were back before Iggy and Nudge, and when I mouthed headache at Angel she nodded and went over to Fang. He was huddled in blankets that I'd done my best to shake the sand off of.

The screeching of tires alerted us to Iggy and Nudge's presence. Nudge was behind the wheel, looking stressed and terrified at the same time, and when I went to take the driver's seat it took her a good minute to unclench her hands from around the wheel.

"I am never complaining about your driving again," Iggy told me. "Also, I think I need to throw up."

"Join the club," Fang said. Angel and I had patched up his face as best as we could, and he was holding a cotton pad over his cut-up cheek as he curled up across the backmost row of the minivan Iggy and Nudge had stolen.

"Gazzy, you're riding shotgun," I said. "Get a map."

Gazzy took his seat and rifled through the glove compartment. He moved with quick, rabbitlike motions. Fear reflex. I had it too when I was his age.

"Hey," I said, and put my hand on his back, "Don't worry, okay? Ari did this, which means he's been following us, but we're going to get away now. We're going to be safe."

"He's going to find us," Gazzy said. "They're always going to find us."

"We're going to go somewhere where nobody can find us," I said firmly. For the first time in days I felt like Angel's crazy mission had some good to it. "We're going to go someplace so big that even six bird kids blend in."

"Yeah?" Gazzy's blue eyes were full of tentative hope. He thought I could make this right. And if he was relying on me, I couldn't let him down.

"Yeah," I said. "Buckle up, everybody. We're going to New York."