It turned out that breaking into the subway was a lot easier than I had expected. We took the Q back downtown, switched to the N to get us closer to the hospital, and then, instead of going back up through the turnstiles, we just waited until the train left and hopped down onto the tracks ourselves.

"Nobody touch the third rail," Gazzy said.

Nudge gave the rail in question a curious look. "What happens if you do?"

"The rats get an all-you-can-eat bird kid barbeque buffet," Iggy told her. "Come on."

And just like that, we headed down the railway tracks. "Iggy, if you hear something, you give us the heads-up," I said.

"What if what I hear is the voice of my conscience telling me what a terrible idea this is?"

"Keep that shit to yourself," I said, and we both laughed. It was more of a nervous laughter than anything. Just a week ago we had been imprisoned in the School, and now here we were, actively seeking out—what? Another School? Something worse?

But I couldn't deal with not knowing. Maybe Angel was going crazy. Maybe I was, too, or maybe my recombined DNA was starting to unravel and pretty soon I'd drop dead because the massive blood clot in my brain had burst or whatever it was that blood clots did. But if there was something down here… if 433 East 31st Street was real in some way… then maybe the rest of this meant something. Maybe our lives weren't just going to be running from Erasers, breaking into houses, and stealing food out of Dumpsters.

My head was hurting in a way it hadn't before, a low-level throb that was just off the beat of my heart. To try to distract myself from it I glanced around our surroundings and failed to notice literally anything. "It is crazy dark down here."

"Huh," Iggy said. "Really? I didn't notice." He took in a quick breath. "What the—okay. This way. Careful of the third rail."

The six of us followed him into an equally dark tunnel, but with one notable difference.

"Where did the tracks go?" Nudge asked.

"I'm guessing we've been upgraded to the platinum package on our tour of New York's most infested rat holes," I said. "How did you know, Iggy?"

"The air's different," Iggy said. He sounded genuinely confused. "Didn't you notice?"

"Not all of us can Daredevil our way through life."

"Fang can," Nudge said. "He has the outfit."

Fang made an offended noise. "That's Batman you're thinking of."

I couldn't see Nudge's indifferent shrug, but I knew it was there.

"So, Angel," I said, keeping my tone as light as possible as we walked toward what might or might not be our certain doom, "Any idea of what's waiting for us?"

"Not people," Angel said after a moment.

I frowned. "There's no Erasers? No whitecoats?"

"There's nobody."

Well, that was good news.

Of course, some people didn't know how to not look a gift horse in the mouth.

"Nobody-nobody or nobody like you couldn't read Jeb's mind?" Fang asked.

"Look, I thought we had established that that was one thing," I said. "No way is an entire School going to have the entire situation as Jeb. Even Ari didn't, and he was Jeb's kid." A pulse of pain spiked behind my temples, and I let out a harsh breath and leaned against the wall of the tunnel until it passed. "Son of a gun, son of a gun, son of a gun," I muttered, trying to calm myself. Not that being calm helped in any particular way.

Fang put his hand on my shoulder, fingertips moving in small circles. "Breathe."

"Been doing that for fourteen and a half years just fine without you reminding me," I said, but I was still grateful for him. I put my hand over his and squeezed. In the dark, nobody could see me blushing.

We kept going on. The tunnel was long, and it was winding, and just when I was sure that we were on a dead-end track to nowhere, I saw light. A single fluorescent tube illuminated a door. It wasn't huge, or made out of metal, and if it weren't for the fact that it were at the end of a secret tunnel, there wouldn't be anything odd about it.

Well, aside from the lock. Most doors didn't have locks that required a full keyboard to open. I hesitated in front of it, fingers resting lightly on the keys.

"Try 'password'," Nudge suggested. "Most people make their passwords 'password'."

The password wasn't password. It also wasn't password1 or password 12 or password123. And it wasn't madscientistlair either, which I thought was a little disappointing.

Fang frowned. "Try the address."

I raised my eyebrows, but typed in 433E31 and hit Enter.

There was a click.

"Nice," I said to Fang.

He shrugged.

I pushed the door open. I can safely say that none of us were expecting what was behind it. As the door swung open, bathing all of us in a soft blue light, Nudge looked like she was going to burst into tears and Angel and Gazzy grabbed each other's hands. Even Fang looked surprised. He leaned over to Iggy and started describing the place, but his voice was flat with shock.

I took several steps forward, not quite believing my eyes. The second I crossed the threshold, a projector whirred, and a blue screen appeared on the white wall. "Welcome," a soft female voice said, "to the Institute for Higher Living." She kept going on in that vein, about "technological innovation" and "the future of the world" as some slideshow involving skyscrapers and pictures of Bluetooth headphones played, but I didn't care. And aside from the barest glance around the room to ascertain that there weren't cages full of mutants hidden behind all the weird-looking technology with its blinking lights, I didn't look at the room. There was one thing in this Institute that was drawing my attention like a magnet drew metal filings, and I couldn't look away from it even if I wanted to.

Jeb's laptop rested on a simple white table. It didn't feel like I was walking when I went to it. It felt like I was floating. Ghosting my fingers over the surface didn't set off any alarms, so I opened it up.

It was locked.

"Okay, guys," I said, trying my best to keep my voice steady, "Who knows Jeb's password?"

"Try 'password'," Nudge suggested.

I gave her a flat stare. "Can't you just hack into this? You like computers, right?"

"That's… that's not how hacking works. Like. At all. It's not like"—she drummed her fingers on the tabletop—"and then, you know, I'm in. It's… it's…" She turned away, hand over her mouth. The harsh light made her dark skin look grayish, and her shoulders were shaking slightly.

I let her have her space and tried our names, all six of them and then all seven of them, and then our initials. MFINGA worked as well as MFINGAA—not at all.

"There's a hint," Angel said, and pointed at the space just under the password box.

I read the text. "What do you want?"

What did I want?

Answers, for one. What was this place and, if it was a School, why weren't there any cages? Why didn't the School put us in cages when they caught us? What was in the lowest levels of their basement? Were there any people out there—real humans, not whitecoats—who knew about us? Who missed us? Jeb was dead, but did any of us have any birth parents or were we all just test tube babies? Why did Angel feel called to this place, of all the places out there? How did Jeb's laptop get here—were there some good whitecoats looking out for us, or was this just the School's latest attempt to find out how we worked?

But beyond answers, I wanted so many things.

For my confusing feelings about Fang to go away. A home where Erasers didn't come knocking. To not have to try to guess Jeb's password because he would be alive and able to unlock it for me. To see Dr. M and Ella again, and not have to worry about them being stalked by Erasers and in danger because of the School. To fly away from all of this mess and not stop until there was nothing around me but the clear blue sky for miles.

I made a fist and rubbed at my eyes. They were burning, and I couldn't cry. I couldn't show weakness in front of my Flock.

"I want the Erasers to all drop dead," Gazzy said. "Is that a password? If it's not then my password is that I want to be strong enough to protect us all from the Erasers."

"I want a place to sleep at night," Iggy said. "And my bomb supplies back. And my lock-picking kit."

Nudge sniffled. "I want to be normal again."

Fang shrugged. "Security."

Angel very gently rested her hand on mine, and I felt more confused than before. The screen was blurry, and I had to blink away tears—the lights in this place were too bright, and the air-conditioning was blasting me in the face—to see it. But when I did, I saw that I'd missed something.

The password hint hadn't just been one line. Instead it was two.

what do you want?
who are you?

Who was I? What kind of a question was that? I was Maximum Ride. I was the leader of this Flock—for real, now that Jeb was gone for good. I was homeless and angry and scared. But I knew all of those things, and I didn't think that they would make very good password answers.

"If this is this some sort of you-are-what-you-seek crap," I muttered, "I'm striking. Swear to God." Trying to think, I pulled my spare cookie out of my pocket where I had left it and bit into it. The chocolate didn't magically provide me with the password, but it tasted good and it made me feel safe.

Angel squeezed my hand. "We'll figure it out."

It should have been the other way around—me comforting her. But I pressed a kiss into her hair all the same.

And then the puzzle pieces clicked into place, and I knew the answer. It was like I was nine again, holding a baby Angel in my arms and listening to her first word, and it was like I was sitting at Dr. M's table eating cookies and getting painkillers. Still holding my cookie with one hand, I very carefully typed in mother.

The home screen appeared. For somebody who was on his laptop a lot, Jeb's screen was surprisingly empty. Actually, aside from two icons, it was completely empty. The text under the first icon read "For Max", and the second read "For Max (II)".

My stomach flip-flopped, and I clicked the first icon. It was a Word document.

Dear Max, it read;

If you're reading this then it's because it's time for you to grow up. I'm sorry that I can't be there to give you this talk in person, but the fact is that if you're reading this then I'm already dead.

I was reading the words aloud, softly, and had to stop to make sure that my voice didn't crack. Then I continued.

I've done my best to raise you and the Flock, and I'd say I did a pretty good job. Even if you can't scramble eggs you can throw a punch, pitch a tent, and survive in the wilderness on your own. You've grown from a scared girl in a cage to a strong young woman, Maximum, and I am proud beyond words of what you've accomplished. I know that you'll lead the Flock to great places, but I need you to trust me one last time.

There's a lot going on in the world around you. Everything is connected and, in a lot of places, you're what's connecting it.

You're going to save the world, Maximum.

I stared blankly at the screen for a long moment.

"Well, maybe he says how," Iggy said. "Keep going, keep going."

You're going to save the world, Maximum, I read again. That sounds insane, but it's the truth. From the moment you were born you were special. You had something most experiments didn't: a destiny, a soul. And while I know you're confused now, and probably angry at me for leaving you, you're strong enough to do this. I will always believe in you, and I will always be proud of you.

You must be confused, and that's okay. It's okay that you don't have all the answers right now. But there are a list of places where you might find those answers.

Fly on and stay strong.

My hands were shaking and a tear slid down my cheek. "He believed in us," I said quietly. "He always did."

Fang squeezed my shoulder.

Nudge let out a strangled noise and said, "I'm going to check this place out." She said it the same way she had been saying things for most of this week, and I gave Angel a worried look. Angel looked back at me, and then over to Nudge, but I shook my head. I had never gotten to have that talk with Nudge. I wanted to give her the chance to tell me what was wrong. I didn't want to have to pry into her head seconds after she just got done reading a letter from our dead dad.

I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket and clicked on the second icon. This one was also a Word document, but much longer than the first, full of addresses and pictures of buildings and scanned whitecoat ID cards.

At first I didn't get it. All the pages seemed to be the same, equally confusing and frustrating. It was an endless glut of information that I couldn't make head or tail of. But then, slowly, I realized—it didn't matter if it made sense right now. Jeb probably had his own reasons for leaving us a list of these specific places, and those specific people, and it was okay if I couldn't figure it out the second I got it. Because the majority of these places were Schools of some kind, I was willing to bet, and I was going to figure out exactly what made them so special.

I was going to figure it out thirty seconds before I burned them to the ground.

"Is there a printer?" Iggy asked. "We should print this."

"Laptops can break like nobody's business," Gazzy said.

There was a printer, and Jeb's laptop was connected to it, too. I set up both documents to print and while the machine whirred into life, I wandered around the place. There really weren't any cages, but there was a lot of electronic stuff. Headsets, mostly, and earpieces and a few helmets that looked more like cages for the head. The back wall was lined with cubbies full of the latter. Some looked like prototypes, others looked like they were straight off the set of a sci-fi horror movie, black and chromed up and evil as all-get-out. Everything had some kind of blinking light on it.

Walking through this place felt weird. It was pretty obvious that it had some specific purpose, but I didn't know what. What was it about it that drew Angel here? Aside from Jeb's laptop, what were we supposed to find?

I glanced over at the printer. A sizeable stack of paper had already been churned out, but it was still working hard. We had a while before it was going to be done.

The wall in front of me was full of neatly labeled headsets. Some were bulkier than others, like the boxy headphones I'd seen a couple of people wearing. Others were sleeker. They were all labelled with neat little patterns of letters and numbers that made absolutely no sense to me. On a whim I stopped in front of a more slender headset. It wouldn't hurt just to try it, right? It wasn't like my head wasn't already killing me. I smoothed my hair back behind my ears and reached out—

Only to have Fang catch my hand in a vise grip.

"Owww, Jesus! Don't do that!"

He gave me a bleak stare but slowly released my hand. "You were not," he said, "About to put that thing on. You weren't doing that thing."

"I was doing the thing where I made my own choices," I snapped.

"Your own choices are stupid sometimes!"

"Your face is stupid sometimes!"

He rolled his eyes. "Look. I get you're upset because you just read that letter. We all are. But that doesn't mean you can be Saint Max, protector of the weak and patron of getting her head exploded."

"What if it already feels like my head is exploding?" I snapped. "Every second of the day, and not just because whatever those freaks at the School did to me, but because I have to put on a tough face for the kids and pretend like I know what I'm doing when I'm just as scared as the rest of them. You think I'm tough, Fang, and I am. I know I am. But I'm not invincible, and I need to be. So excuse me for wanting to try to get answers."

Fang's almond-shaped eyes were full of an emotion I couldn't place, and then he leaned in, his face nearly touching mine. His mouth opened like he was going to say something, and then closed, and he withdrew.

Right. Because that helped me understand anything. I was torn between the desire to want to kiss him and the shrieking confusion that made me want to run out of this Institute and straight into the subway tunnels as a train was coming by. It felt like fireworks were going off in my chest. It felt like I was going to throw up.

I settled for yanking the headset off the wall. "I'm still doing this," I told Fang, and then I put it on before he could say anything else.

At first I didn't notice anything different.

And then I heard the voices.

It felt like there was a thousand of them, each one talking to itself about a hundred different things, slow enough for me to catch a few words but fast enough for me to not be able to understand sentences. The noise built like a tide, crashing over me, and the pain behind my temples spiked as the voices reached a crescendo.

There was a high, far-off screeching noise, and the ground rushed up at me.

Blackness.

For a sweet second.

And then white faded in. Something was cool against my cheek.

The floor.

The floor was cool against my cheek because I was lying on it. Because I had screamed and passed out.

Right.

Fang was staring down at me, somehow managing to say I told you so and Are you alright? without opening his mouth. The headset dangled limply from a clenched fist, obviously broken.

"Well," I muttered, "That went fantastically."

"Max! Max, are you okay?" Gazzy came barrelling down the hallway. "I heard you scream and—"

"I'm fine," I said, and put a hand to my head. The pain had stopped, sort of. I made a mental note to find a drugstore and get some aspirin when we got the hell out of this place. "Don't put on the headsets." I shook my head slowly. What the hell were those things? Some of them looked like the Bluetooths that the whitecoats had been wearing before, and I couldn't imagine anybody, even a mad scientist, willingly doing that to themselves. Maybe the Bluetooths were something different. I sure wasn't going to try to find out.

Fang stuck out a hand, and I took it. His help made standing up easier, but while I was still woozy, I didn't want to lean on him. I might do something stupid.

Angel hurried toward us. Iggy and Nudge were behind her, looking anxious and depressed, respectively. "We need to go," she said, blue eyes wide. "Ari's in the tunnel and he has company."

I wished I could run away from this fight. But I couldn't. "Angel, sweetie," I said. "The tunnel's the only way in."

"Oh," she said quietly. "Oh no. Oh no, this is all my fault and it's going to be everything else all over again—"

I cut her off. "It won't be. We're stronger now. We survived that, and we're going to survive this. And sure, we're stuck in here, but we're not going to be stuck in here with them." I looked up from Angel's eyes and saw my entire Flock giving me uncertain looks. "They're going to be stuck in here with us. Now let's kick some Eraser butt."

I balled my hands into fists and got into a defensive stance, and all around me the Flock did the same.

The door swung open.