Gazzy and Angel were drumming their feet against the floor of the car. "I want to be a part of it—"

"New York, Neeeew York," Iggy joined in.

I groaned. "I swear to God, if I have to hear this song one more time I will turn this car around."

That got a giggle from Nudge, which was the most positive emotion I'd seen her display in the week since we had busted out of that hellhole of a School. Who knew, maybe the distance was helping. Or maybe just spending days in an air-conditioned gas guzzler was good for the soul, because that was what we had been doing. Instead of taking to the air, which had worked so well last time, we were stealing cars, abandoning them when they ran out of gas, and breaking into peoples' houses to pay for motel rooms. We were a bunch of little delinquents. It turned out that super-quick reflexes and the ability to fly didn't only make you a freak on the run from crazy scientists and their wolf-monster enforcers; but also gave you the ability to steal just about anything you could get your grubby fingers on.

Being untethered like this felt good, but it was almost about to end, because we were close enough to New York City to ditch our latest ride and get on a bus.

Or, as it turned out, a subway.

"Dang," I said, as I settled into my seat, "I've never seen so many people together in one place." The subway was crowded. We weren't quite packed in like sardines, but it was close. My stomach twisted when I realized, with a sick sense of irony, that my latest stay in Hell, California, had given me more free space than this train car did.

But even though my claustrophobia was kicking in like a rabid donkey, I could still appreciate the chance to people-watch. Categorizing everybody helped me take my mind off of the fact that I was in here too. It felt a bit like I was floating out of my body as I sorted people into groups—the ones in suits who probably had jobs in skyscrapers, the guys wearing work boots and jeans and vests who built the skyscrapers, and the scattered teens who were enjoying the summer. There were two in a far seat, curled up against each other. They were both lanky, but the paler one was wearing an outfit that would make Fang proud, with hair nearly as long as his but a bit curlier. The other was black, wearing denim cutoffs and a face full of makeup, and had an arm around the punk one's shoulders.

I kind of wanted to reach out to them. They looked about our age. Maybe they could tell us what life was like here, and I could tell them what it was like to be a mutant freak on the run from the mad scientists who had created you.

The last normal humans that I'd had any kind of dealing with—if we discounted motel clerks and fast food cashiers that I'd barely exchanged twenty words with each—were Ella and Dr. M. A little pang went through me, thinking about them. They had been nice. They had patched me up even when they didn't have any reason to. They had seen my wings and not treated me like a freak. And they had made the best damn chocolate-chip cookies I had ever had. Maybe one day, when all this settled down, I could go and give them a visit.

And maybe pigs would fly.

I leaned my head against the glass of the window as the train slowly made its way to midtown. My Flock was around me, all of them looking just as tired as I felt. Well, except for Fang, who just looked like Fang. My eyes landed on his, and he met my gaze, and I looked away fast.

We hadn't talked about that kiss, and we weren't going to. It had been a one-time thing. Just thinking about it made fear and disgust prickle cold down the back of my neck.

"Angel, you're sure you know where we're going," I said.

Angel nodded, which made all of one of us. As impressed and slightly scared as I was by Angel's psychic powers, this was something new. And with Fang scarred and Ari evil and Nudge quiet and my head hurting like crazy, it was getting harder and harder for me to be sure if it was something she was developing on her own or something that had been forced onto her.

I didn't want to think of what it would be like if Angel went crazy. She was just a kid. I had held her in my arms when she was a baby, when she still had her useless little chicken wings, and it had been me who she had said her first word to. It had taken her a while to talk, but she'd been articulate in a way that even Gazzy wasn't. That was my Angel. She knew what she wanted, even if it took her a while to express it. Sharp as a tack and quick as lightning, in a lot of ways she was my daughter. Which was why I was humoring her with this. Even if it was a trap—which it very well might be—it would be something. A mission. Something to do instead of just survive. Something to think about that wasn't literally everything else that had happened to us.

We got off the train, climbed into the open air, and…

Okay.

Wow.

New York City completely engulfed us, swallowed us up and wrapped around us, and it seemed like my entire world was skyscrapers and people rushing around. The air was full of car horns and huge billboards, closer up than I could imagine, advertised everything from clothes to phones to underwear, of all things.

"Oh my God," Nudge said, sounding like herself for the first time in forever, "Is that Macy's?"

Fang gave the building in question an interested look.

"Street dogs!" Gazzy crowed, pointing at a vendor. "Max, can we get—"

Angel took my hand, eyes wide with wonder. "Everybody's so fast and so loud."

"Is that meat? Who's cooking meat?" Iggy demanded. "Max, give me the money so I can buy some dead animal and put it in my face."

Ignoring all of them, I scanned the crowds. Nobody had the build of an Eraser, and the only folks lingering like us were a bunch of guys lining the streets with stands, selling scarves and bags and hats. "Okay, first things first," I said firmly.

Five pairs of expectant eyes met mine.

I grinned. "Let's get some food."

We spent an absurd amount of money on street meat and knishes and bottles of lemonade and wandered through Manhattan in a food-induced wonder daze. And yeah, we probably overshot 31st Street, but it wasn't like we were on any kind of schedule. Walking around like this, even with the throngs of people everywhere, was keeping the kids on their feet. Nudge even had gained back some of her chatter, and was excitedly pointing out different things to Iggy—mostly bookstores, clothes stores, and a few electronics places. It was even easier for me to pretend that the low-level migraine I had was a result of the noisy city and not whatever the hell was going on in my head.

I wished I had the painkillers Dr. M had given me. That would stop this. But the School had taken those from me like they had taken everything else.

"Oooh," Nudge said, and pointed at a large red brick building. The sign on it read Salvation Army. "Clothing!" She turned her big brown eyes on me. "Max," she said, voice trembling just a little bit, "Can we please, please, please—"

"Fine," I groaned. "You're evil, you know that? Evil."

Some indiscernible emotion crossed her face for a split second, but it was gone as quickly as it came, and she threw her arms around me and squeezed. "I love you, Max!" And then she was off, as quick as a gazelle, bounding the steps into the building.

I followed.

It turned out that Nudge did make good choices after all, and being able to change out of our old clothes and wear stuff that we actually liked did seem to have everybody feeling better. Iggy and Gazzy had teamed up to put on a frankly startling amount of camouflage, with Iggy also sporting a neon orange tank under his camo jacket. Fang had pulled together an all-black ensemble that could have been from his closet at home, with Nudge likewise managing to make thrift store clothing look chic the same way she always had. Angel had opted for an impractical frilly dress, with—thankfully—leggings and sneakers on underneath.

I brushed off my new-to-me leather jacket, shouldered my backpack, and gave everybody a nod. "Feeling better?"

"I don't look like a grape anymore," Nudge said. She tugged on the hem of her rainbow-striped t-shirt and smiled. Equally multicolored bobbles kept her hair separated into two afro puffs. "Seriously, though, what kind of person only wears purple?"

"Yes, let's judge people's fashion choices while we rob them stupid."

Fang shrugged. "It was a lot of purple."

Iggy groaned. "Can we go back to wandering around instead of boring me with this stuff? All y'all could be purple for all I know."

"Alright, alright, keep your pants on. This city is huge, so let's split up."

"Fan-tastic," Iggy said. "Gasman, my man—"

"Is with me," I said. "You take Angel." She would be able to guide him better than any of the rest of us, and the chances of them stealing a car or blowing up a building dropped drastically. "Fang and Nudge, together you can form a singular coherent sentence, right? You two go together."

Iggy frowned. "Max, are you sure this is a good idea?"

"Are you sure that you haven't forgotten who the leader is?" I retorted. And then I sighed. A headache was brewing, but I didn't need to take it out on Iggy. "Listen, this city is both huge and crowded, so we should be able to blend in without a problem. But we're a very specific group of kids. Ari knows what we look like, how we work—he grew up with us. Our best chance to beat him is to change how we operate."

"Max is right," Fang said. Those three words, they really get into a girl's heart. I gave him a look, and he gave me a look back, and a part of me really wanted to say screw it and wander off with him, and we could—

And we could—

I shook my head. Everything that I thought of had the kiss hanging over it like the world's biggest raincloud.

"You heard him," I said to Iggy, instead of saying anything to Fang. "Let's go." Talking fast, I laid out our plan of action, dividing up sections of the city for us to comb over. It was going to take us a while to find 433 East 31st Street, if it even existed, but that didn't mean that we couldn't try to find it.

As Gazzy and I headed off, I rubbed at the back of my neck. Sweat was starting to bead there. It was a hot summer day and I was used to the cool mountain air. Being all covered up like this didn't help either, but the alternative was letting my wings out and getting on the train to Cageville. Or Tinyroomville. Whatever they were calling it these days. So I was just going to sweat it out, and break in my combat boots while I was at it. Whoever had worn these before me must have had some really awful ideas about how to walk, because they pinched in places that my old boots never did.

I gave Gazzy a glance. My little trooper was holding up okay, it seemed. Out of all of us, he was the most normal.

Which was why my heart jumped in my chest when he looked up at me and said, "Ari was trying to kill Fang."

"He was," I agreed.

Gazzy's hands were in his pockets. "So it's okay if we kill him?"

"Yeah."

"Okay."

I put a hand on his shoulder. "You won't have to do it. I promise." Ari was a threat now, and in this world there was only one way to deal with that. I had to take him out before he could hurt any of my Flock ever again. If he ever tangled with us again, it was going to be me who took him down.

"Why didn't Fang wake us up?" Gazzy asked.

I frowned. "Huh?"

"When he fought Ari. It would have been six on one."

"If it had been me, I wouldn't have woken you up either," I said. "I wouldn't have wanted you to get hurt. Erasers tear up kids like nobody's business. It's for the best if you get away from them."

"I can handle myself in a fight. I did it fine before."

"Yeah, before. When you had bombs and weren't on the lam all day." I shook my head. "Fang probably…"

Fang's scarred chest and the way his face had looked when he had shown it to me was at the top of my memories, and I was really grateful that Gazzy didn't have his sister's psychic powers.

"Fang keeps things to himself," I said. "He pulls into himself because he doesn't want to get hurt, and he does that even when doing that gets him hurt. So we have to stick around him, because he's going to go ahead and do something macho and try to be tough and not ask for help because he doesn't want to."

"Huh," Gazzy said.

"It's a boy thing," I told him. "Being macho. It's really dumb. Don't be like that when you grow up."

"Iggy's not macho."

"Iggy is Iggy," I said. "Most guys are pigs."

Gazzy screwed up his face and made several eerily realistic oinking noises. I laughed and shoved his shoulder, and he nearly stumbled into a skinny lady in a black dress and suit jacket. She gave him a disgusted look before hurrying down the street, her long black hair thrashing around wildly inspite of the fact that the breeze was barely blowing. I very professionally did not flip her the bird. What was her problem? Gazzy was a kid. Kids horsed around.

We were in a fairly busy area of the city, but then again, all areas seemed to be busy. I had given us the eastmost third of East 31st Street. Apparently in New York City, streets ran like little ribbons across the map, while avenues were big long ribbons running up and down the map. Aside from Broadway, which had just been put there to confuse me, personally. And all the other streets that absolutely didn't follow that rule.

Our path had been, for the most part, a straight line. Sure, we had taken a few detours around side blocks and knocked on every door with so much as a 43 on it, but no good had come of any of it, so for the moment we were just wandering down the street. We weren't even on 31st Street, not really. It had just… stopped. So we were on 30th.

And it was about to just stop too, because I could see FDR Drive and the cars on it, and after that there was just the river. But before that, in-between First and FDR, there was a huge glass-and-metal building, tall enough to give my neck a crick when I stared up at it. And stare I did, because even though I'd gotten used to tall buildings over the hours that I had spent in this city, the sheer size of this one was astonishing for another, much more sinister, reason.

The numbers on buildings had been slowly but surely going up as we walked along, which meant that this monstrosity had to be 433 East 31st Street. The building Angel had heard about in the School.

The plain white lettering over the revolving doors read New York University Medical Center.

We were so screwed that I didn't have a word for how screwed we were. Automatically I went into a defensive stance, scanning the area for people with the telltale bulk of Erasers. "Crap, crap, crap," I muttered, stomach twisting. "Crap, crap, double crap on a crap sandwich of crap…"

The School had been bad enough, and this building was double its size, in the center of Manhattan. How could I have ever thought we were safe when there were whitecoats who could take the subway to work in the morning? Gooseflesh prickled the back of my neck. Forget Erasers. Any of the people crossing the street could be something a thousand times crueler and infinitely more dangerous.

The light had turned, and it was okay for us to walk. Powered half by shock and half by morbid curiosity, I started forward. Gazzy stuck with me. His little hands were balled into fists, knuckles even whiter than the rest of him.

"Listen," I said, quiet and intent. "If things start going bad, get out. Run. Bust through the window and hit the sky flapping, and meet up with the others in the park like I told you to. I can handle myself."

"Didn't you just say that we had to stick by Fang if he was going into stuff alone because he was being macho?"

"Yeah," I said. "But Fang doesn't ask for help because he doesn't want to reach out to people. I don't ask for help because I know what I can handle, and I can handle this. And if you stick around after I tell you to run, I'm going to feed you your butt through a straw. Capiche?"

Gazzy sighed. "Capiche."

We went through the revolving doors.

The interior wasn't what I expected. I didn't want to gag from the smell of bleach in the air, for one. There were a few people who gave me and Gazzy odd looks, but no stares lingered. Still, I kept a close eye on the kid as I headed for the nearest receptionist's desk. The woman behind it was Asian and didn't appear to have hit thirty. She didn't look threatening in the slightest, but after my run-in with the mad scientist mom from back at the School, I had learned that appearances didn't mean squat when it came to whitecoats. Just because they weren't salivating at the thought of dissecting you didn't mean that they weren't fine with you being in a literal prison cell.

But still, I had to play nice. "Hello," I said in my friendliest voice, "I would like the number of this building, please."

The receptionist gave me a confused look. "The… number…"

"Yeah," I said. "You don't have it outside."

Behind the rectangular frames of her glasses, her eyes widened. "Oh! This is 550 First Avenue."

"Huh," I said. That was kind of anticlimatic. "What's the next building?"

"Miss?"

"You know, if this is 550 then what's 551?"

She sighed. "Miss, do you have an appointment?"

I could see her eyes go over to one of the uniformed men over by the wall, and while they probably weren't Erasers, I didn't want to take that bet. "Okay," I said, talking as quickly as I could. Maybe this wasn't a School. Maybe I could get a helpful answer. And maybe it wasn't. But I was going to give it one last chance, for Angel. "I don't, but I'm lost. I'm looking for 433 East 31st Street?"

The receptionist looked up at me, and then down at Gazzy, who was attempting an imitation of Nudge's Bambi eyes. After a long moment she turned her attention to her computer. "I'm sorry, but that doesn't exist."

"What?"

"The highest number that 31st Street goes up to is 248. To get to where you want to go, you'd have to go out onto the river, and unless you're the second coming, that's not possible. Now, if you don't mind, this is a hospital?"

I got the hint. We hustled out of there, and although it only took a few seconds before we were on the street, I didn't feel halfway safe until we were down the block and away. Even if that had been a normal hospital, it still gave me the creeps.

The sun was starting to hang low in the sky, which meant that it was time for us to head over to the park. It was a thirty-odd-block hike, which wouldn't have bothered me if I hadn't already spent the whole day wandering around. Gazzy, who was younger and shorter than I was, was in even worse shape, so we ended up hopping over the subway turnstiles and catching the Q up to the park. We got off a few blocks away, and in the short walk that we had left, I found a sandwich shop. There. Dinner. Hunter-gatherers had nothing on the amazing Maximum Ride.

Plus, they had cookies. Chocolate-chip ones. Oven-warmed chocolate chip ones. Not as good as homemade, but hunter-gatherers weren't picky and so neither was I.

"Maybe the others will have found something," I said to Gazzy through a mouthful of cookie. It was my last mouthful of this cookie, and I put the other one in my pocket for later.

He sighed. "Maybe."

The others, in fact, had not found anything. And they all looked as tired as we were. As we sat in our little circle, shoulders hunched against the outside world, slowly chewing our sandwiches and sipping our drinks, bits and pieces of everybody's day spilled out.

"So there's a 433 out in Brooklyn," Nudge said. "But it's an apartment building. I pretended I was a Girl Scout and tried to scope the place out, but I really don't think it's some secret front for whitecoats." She took a sip of Coke and shrugged. "Being a fake Girl Scout was fun, though."

Angel, looking smaller than usual, sighed. "I thought it was maybe something to do with the subways," she said. "So we went on the 4 and the 3 and even the 1, and I looked all over the stops, and checked everybody's head, but nothing came up. And now my butt hurts from sitting too long."

"Yeah, we found something too," I said. "The closest thing to a 433 was a friggin' hospital." This got me and Gazzy more than a fair share of concerned looks, and even though Iggy didn't make eye contact with either of us, he still looked worried. "Don't worry, I'm pretty sure it's a real hospital. But yeah, Ange. 31st Street ends way before it hits the four hundreds."

"So this is a bust and we can go out to the mountains," Iggy said. "Fantastic."

I gave him a flinty look. "No," I said, "So today was a bust and we can try again tomorrow."

"We're not finding anything, Max, this is insane—"

"—Watch who you're calling insane, jerk—"

"—I've been bumping into people like an idiot all day, I can't do this—"

"—Nobody is allowed to quit, not now, not ever—"

"—All you care about is Angel and being right, have you even bothered to think about what we're going to do if the Erasers find us—"

"—What are you, a coward?"

"Alright, enough!" That was Fang. He was standing between us.

Oh. And we were standing. And grabbing each other. Iggy slowly loosed the brown leather of my jacket and in return I let go of his camo.

"Sorry," Iggy muttered. "It's been a long day."

I sighed. "Yeah. Same here."

"Are you done?" Angel asked. "'Cause this is my fault, and I don't want you to fight, and you should just—not—fight—" Her breath was hitching, and that wave of protectiveness washed over me again. I crawled over to her and patted her shoulder.

"Aw, Angel, no, it's not like that, okay? It's just…"

"We're all under a lot of pressure," Iggy said. He barked out a laugh. "I sound like a dad in a bad teen movie."

"Better than sounding like a jerk," I told him, and gave him a friendly punch on the arm.

"Maybe I was wrong," Angel said. "Maybe there isn't anything." She sounded small, beaten-down and broken, and even as I felt bad for her my head throbbed with the beginning of another migraine.

"No, it's not like that," I said quickly.

"Well, it wasn't in the subway and it's not in Brooklyn and we can't walk on water to get to it, Gazzy, I can hear that—"

"Wait," I said. The throbbing behind my temples had picked up. "What if it isn't on the water?"

Nudge frowned. "Do you mean, like, Roosevelt Island?"

I shook my head. "East 31st Street is too far south for anything on it to be on Roosevelt Island. But what I mean is… in all the maps, if we draw a line to where 433 would be, it's just… in the water. But what if there's something under the water? Something running through the whole city? Something general that's easily accessible by anybody, but something specific only a few people know about?"

"I think I get it," Gazzy said. He was grinning, wide and dangerous and delighted.

An answering grin spread across my face. "We're going to break into the subway."