TWENTY-FIVE

Kill them, he'd said, like it was nothing. Like they were just two ordinary words. Basic instructions, like a recipe. Step one: Warm one tablespoon of olive oil in a pan. Step two: Add garlic and onions and sauté until translucent. Step three: Kill Jeb and Anne.

It bounced around my brain for what felt like forever. I wasn't aware of my ragged breathing; of the jolts still wracking my system, making me twitch like a rabid animal; of the look of utter defeat that had taken over me; all I knew was that in order to walk out of here, I had to kill two people with whom I had very complicated relationships—and even then, I had no idea how honest of a deal Scythe was cutting me.

I could do it. I could totally ignore my moral code, sacrifice what was left of my own humanity, and kill for my own benefit. And I'd started to mentally prepare to do that—to kill Scythe—but this was something different altogether.

Anne, to start, hadn't contributed to this chaos a fraction of what Jeb and Scythe had—or at least it seemed. She housed us for that period of time, and as insidious as her intentions might've been, she'd still had moments of legitimate, well, mothering. She'd tucked the kids into bed, she'd talked to me about my first date (bleh), and she'd attempted a Thanksgiving dinner. Despite wanting to control us, she'd seemingly done it in a more heartfelt way than others had.

Obviously, my feelings about Jeb were more complex. He'd taken us from the School, given us a home in that E-house, but why? If he was in control of the School, then it had to have been a part of some plan. Did he leave us alone to develop our own survival instincts? So that when they were ready to toy with us, we'd be up for the challenge? So that when they staged this elaborate game of cat-and-mouse, I'd be old enough to shoulder the immense feelings of responsibility, guilt, and failure I'd inevitably feel?

Were those years of him fathering us only that? Were his feelings of us strictly clinical? When he'd found me in my room in tears on Christmas that first year, wishing for a family I'd never have, was the mistiness of his own eyes orchestrated? Was the tenderness he showed Angel, just a baby and utterly hopeless, an act that he'd perfected?

And even if any of it was genuine—did it matter?

And even if none of it mattered, did he deserve to be dead?

And even if he did deserve to be dead… did he deserve to be murdered?

By me?

The caveat to all of this was that I had absolutely no way to guarantee that Scythe was being honest. The options he'd given me weren't ideal. If I killed Jeb and Anne, he said we'd walk out—but under his hand. But how did I know this wasn't some sort of experiment? What if I killed them and he kept us forever anyway? What if I didn't kill them and he let us walk—but still under his hand?

My gut told me not to do it. My heart told me not to do it. But my brain was doing backflips, trying to calculate odds, remembering the riddles from Iggy's logical thinking puzzle books a million years ago in the E-house—a king shows you three locked treasure chests, one of which is full of jewels—the other two are empty—

A soul-rattling shock rifled through my body again at this and I dropped, hard, to the ground, rolling and curling in on myself, fighting the urge to scream, but then it continued—time stopped indefinitely and I was on fire, every inch of me was being reduced to ash, and I opened my mouth to let a long, blood-curdling scream out—

Scythe's finger must've released the button, because the pain was gone, and I was left spasming on the ground as he spoke.

"You've taken long enough," he thundered. "It's a simple question. Do you want to walk free? Or do you want to stay here?"

We'd come this far—finally put all the pieces together—and this was where we'd ended up?

Where was Fang? Where was Angel?

I watched his thumb graze over the button in his hand.

"Please," I gasped, "please, I'm—"

Suffering. Again. I couldn't move, couldn't make it stop. I heard my own scratchy yells, unlike any sound I'd ever heard before, echo back at me. Faintly, I was aware of Nudge howling, of Iggy screaming.

There was no way I could take it much longer. My heart was racing. There was a crushing pain in my chest. I wasn't getting enough oxygen—my head ached, my skin was melting off, my bones were turning to dust in my body—

"Please!" I cried when he stopped again. "Okay, I'll do it, I'll do it!"

My world slowly merged back with reality. My muscles were quivering. Every inch of me felt rigid, but I pushed myself back to my feet, struggling to stay there.

An odd sensation passed over me—a gush of air, almost as if the edge of an oscillating fan's span had rippled the back of my shirt. I turned, agitating my muscles, and saw nothing.

Iggy's pleading voice behind me snapped me back into the present. He sounded ready to say more, but Scythe screamed, "Enough!" and Iggy, probably expecting me to be tortured again, shut his mouth.

"I'll do it," I said in as nasty a voice as I could manage. "And you'd better not be fucking with me."

Scythe squinted at me.

"We'd better be walking free after this."

"Always skeptical, aren't you?"

"My experience with people in slacks being honest isn't the best, if you can imagine, Silas."

I was positively seething. Everything about this was wrong, and I was almost certain this would do nothing for us, that he'd lock us in dog crates again and that would be the end of it.

But it was my best shot, in terms of odds. And something was better than nothing.

Scythe walked over to a control on the wall and lowered the glass wall that separated Jeb and Anne from us about halfway.

I noticed this time around that they were shackled to the wall and gagged at the mouth. Neither made a sound. They were both trembling with fear, an expression I'd never seen on either of their faces. No, not fear—terror.

These were the faces of two people looking death in the face with nothing at all in their power to stop it. Anne looked like she was ready to pass out at any minute, face as white as the wall behind her. She was drowning in her jumpsuit. She'd always been thin, fit; now, she was wasting away.

But what really got to me was Jeb. He blinked and tears slid down his cheeks, staining the already dingy rag that gagged him. There were paragraphs and paragraphs behind those eyes, blue like a tropical ocean, full of things he'd never get an opportunity to explain.

In this moment, it became excruciatingly clear that we were never just experiments to Jeb. At one point—whether he'd wanted it or not—we'd become something more.

It was clearer than ever that neither of us knew what that was.

The sharp smell of cologne bit at my nose and I startled when I realized Scythe was standing next to me.

"Wake up, Max," he said quietly. "Remember who these people are. What they've done."

Remember who these people are.

I did remember. I remembered all of it.

I remembered Jeb walking us to and from experiments at the School. I remembered him sitting next to me in that lab, telling me not to be afraid, explaining my importance, explaining that I needed to reproduce. I remembered being sawed open, watching Fang be attacked, learning Iggy was blind. I remembered Jeb taking us home to Colorado and bottle-feeding Angel and Googling how to manage Nudge's wild hair and teaching Iggy how to boil water and Gazzy how to rewire circuits and Fang how to read star charts and me how to… endure.

I remembered when I, scared and vulnerable after Fang's brush with death, met Anne for the first time. I remembered giving her shit, I remembered her giving it back. I remembered offering us her home, studying us respectfully from a distance, overcooking pasta and undercooking chicken. I remembered the look on her face when we flew away that last night, leaving her as nothing but a bad taste in our mouths and another adult that failed us.

They were people. They were somebody's—somebody. Somebody's coworker. Somebody's friend. Somebody's neighbor.

They'd been something to us, once. Still were, really.

I studied the pair of them again, then raked my eyes around the room. The Vector soldiers had since left, but were no doubt lurking just outside the doors. Iggy was still gripping the iron bars so tightly that it seemed his fingertips would never see circulation again. Nudge was looking intensely at me through wracking sobs. Gazzy was starting to show signs of life next to her. Fang was—somewhere. Maybe with Angel. I could only hope. In the end, these six people were the ones that mattered.

And if killing Jeb and Anne gave me the slightest chance of keeping them alive, maybe even setting us free, then kill them I had to.

I looked up at met Scythe's eyes, so full of sugar-coated maleficence and an insatiable hunger for power. I hated him more powerfully than anyone I'd ever hated in my life. This man was the source of a decade and a half of running, of hiding, or suffering.

I offered him one certain, promising nod. He smiled again and handed me something sleek, shiny, and silver—a pistol.

I recognized this gun. A Kel-Tec PF9, the exact same one Ari had shot me with. What had Iggy said when he'd identified it? Whoever shot you wasn't shooting to kill.

I didn't laugh. Any gun could kill. I'd just have to shoot them more than once and watch them die slowly. Maybe these bullets, like the others, were packed with a surprise that only revealed itself once it was imbedded in your flesh.

A shiver shot through me at the thought of Ari, and it wasn't just a residual from whatever sort of Taser Scythe had been using on me. This had all started with him.

Take them out and it's over, Ari had said. Truth really is stranger than fiction, isn't it?

Oh, if he could see us now.

I took the gun in my hand, feeling its weight, studying the barrel, the trigger, the grip. Instinctively, I raised it in my right hand, trying to fight how unbelievably wrong it felt in my hands. Life seemed to be moving in slow motion. I felt detached—because I had to be, if I was going to follow through with this.

There was a dull click from next to me. When I turned, it was like some other power was dragging my chin by an invisible string.

Scythe had a gun in his outstretched hand, too, only this one was much larger and pointed at Iggy, Nudge, and Gazzy. I recognized it as some type of sub machine gun, the type that could mow down a line of people in an alarmingly short amount of time.

"I don't expect you to get any stupid ideas, but if you turn that gun on me—well, you know," he said, gesturing with the gun. My eye was more fixated on the button in his other hand.

"Max," Iggy said uneasily, but Scythe flipped the safety and he decided against saying more. He met my eyes pleadingly, but for what he was pleading, I had no idea.

"If you're thinking of changing your mind," Scythe said with a note of mischief in his voice, "maybe a little bit of insider information will help you choose."

Something about the way he spoke was taunting. Like what he was going to say would break me and he knew it. My heart started pounding again.

"What?" I demanded.

"These people are responsible for a lot of pain," he said. "A lot of suffering. A lot of death."

My mind was racing so fast that it would undoubtedly stutter to a stop soon. Dread started to bubble up from my toes—I felt it rising to my chest as the smile on his face split his cheeks even further apart—what was he—?

"The little one, Number Six? And Number Two?"

Angel and Fang.

"Don't," I managed.

"I know you've been wondering where they are."

"DON'T!"

"These two people are responsible for so much evil; did you really think it would stop when I got my hands on them?"

No, no, no—

"The thing about me, Max, is that I don't pretend to be noble. I know who I am. What I am."

No, no, no—

"When I offered them life in exchange for Fang and Angel's, what do you think they chose?"

I think I stopped breathing. Somebody to my right was wailing. A voice—Iggy's—was roaring, enraged words penetrating his own sobs, things that I couldn't understand. Gazzy was yelling in confusion, in desperate sadness.

My world was a void. Colors ceased to exist. Rational thought had left me, comprehension of reality had long since dissipated.

Fang and Angel were dead?

Because of Jeb and Anne?

"Max?" came Scythe's voice.

The gun was in my hand. Cold. Smooth. Heavy. My eyes met Jeb's. Cold. Smooth. Heavy. Full of urgent things he needed to say. He bit at the cloth that gagged him. I could hear him straining, trying to scream, to talk, to do anything.

Fang and Angel are dead.

Time stretched on. My legs struggled to hold me up. My body ached to find the ground, to lay on the cold tile, to just stop. Iggy, Nudge, and Gazzy were a chorus of despair from the cage. I couldn't look at them. I couldn't move. I couldn't do anything.

I couldn't kill these people.

I dropped the gun.

My silent existence quickly dissolved yet again to a pain-filled one. This pain was different, though; it was distant. It was fire in a freezing world. It was electricity in an absence of anything. It was suffering in indifference. I screamed because my body thought it should. It was over—it could be over, and that would be okay—

The pain stopped. For one, fleeting moment, I held onto that thought—it could be over, and that would be okay—but then a fire exploded somewhere deep in me, a fire that had somehow burned through all of the darkest times, a fire that had been instilled in me from a young age by Jeb Batchelder himself. It was the fire that said, It's not over. There's always a reason to fight. Keep going.

Because it wasn't over. Not yet.

"He's lying!" Nudge was screaming. "Max, he's lying, he's lying!"

I scrambled for the gun and pointed it at Scythe, but we both knew I was bluffing—the second I so much as thought about firing, he'd have killed all three of them. I was stalling, trying to get my brain clinking on all cylinders again and searching feebly for some sort of plan.

Oh, God, Fang and Angel are dead.

An ear-splitting alarm blared through the building, and the unquestionable clunk of the doors locking rattled through my bones. We were plunged into darkness, save for crimson streaks of light that drenched the room in an eerie shade of red.

An automated sort of voice sounded loudly overhead.

"Lockdown in place. Zero-zero-one. Lockdown in place. This is not a drill. Please remain where you are until the building is secured."

"What did you do?" Scythe shouted, advancing on me. When I didn't answer, he let out a frustrated yell. "Answer me!"

Pain again. Worse than any of the pain before. I clawed at the tile and begged him to stop, begged it to stop, begged everything to stop.

I don't know how long it went on for. I had long since entered a realm of some kind where time ceased to exist.

The relief came, but this time I felt too weak to stand. I looked up and saw, against all odds, Scythe being tackled to the ground. At first, by nobody—but after a half second, a dark blur shimmered into view, cocking a fist and sending it flying into Scythe's chest. Scythe made a choking noise.

The pieces came together slowly—a dark blur. A tall, dark blur. A very alivetall, dark blur with a massive wingspan hanging from his back—

Fang.

"Fang!" I shouted. Relief pounded through me so powerfully that the world spun, but I could still make out Fang's strong fists positively throttling Silas Scythe. "Fang, don't! He has a—"

The gun fired a half second after Fang jerked out of the way. A bullet sailed through the air and lodged itself deep in one of the beams on the ceiling.

Since Fang's not a moron, he backed off. The button that had been in Scythe's left hand had clattered to the ground in the scuffle. Without hesitation, Fang ground the toe of his boot into it, crushing it into a useless pile of plastic fragments.

Scythe kept the gun raised, backed away from us in a wide semicircle, and found a spot in the middle of the room where he could see everyone. He looked positively enraged.

My body was trembling with residual shocks, making it impossible to stand. I peered up feebly and saw Angel, bruised and battered but alive, trying helplessly to maneuver the lock on the cage.

Alive. Scythe had lied and told me they were dead to try to persuade me to kill Anne and Jeb. But why?

There was no time to think. Fang closed the distance between he and I in seconds and stood with his back to me, knees bent, arms out in a defensive crouch. He turned his head so he could speak out of the side of his mouth.

"Are you okay?" His voice was tight with anger, but his profile showed concern.

"Fine," I said, trying to fight the spasms in my muscles as I rose to my feet like a newborn deer. My body still felt like it was on fire, but it was nothing but glowing coals in comparison to what Scythe's button had done. "Fang," I choked out, voice cracking pathetically, "I thought you were—"

"Shut up!" Scythe's voice boomed through the space, over the alarm, over the voices of Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy, and Angel. He raised the gun again and spoke into his chest, where there was undoubtedly a microphone.

"Get the systems back on line!" he roared.

"He won't," Fang muttered to me over the roar of the sirens. "Nudge hacked everything."

Not even this optimistic nugget of information could stop the hammering of my heart or the onslaught of emotions I was feeling. My voice was hoarse and sore and every inch of me ached.

"I thought you were dead," I repeated.

"Ditto," he said. It was clipped and haunted. I wonder how much of our time in this room he'd seen while invisible.

Scythe was still muttering into his microphone. Fang and I started slowly backing toward the cage. We'd nearly made it to Angel when Scythe fired another bullet—this one hit the wall about a foot above Angel's head. We stopped moving.

The siren was still screaming and dousing the room in streams of red.

"Another test, Maximum Ride," Scythe called in that slimy voice of his. "You failed."

What?

"It's always been your greatest flaw—you cannot carry out basic orders. You can't kill to save yourself or the ones you love. You too, then, are disposable."

Two gunshots fired. Instinctively, I dropped to the ground and turned away with my hands over my head, bracing for an impact that didn't come. Almost immediately after came the desperate, ear-piercing wail.

It belonged to Angel.

"Angel!" I sprang to my feet and dove at her with no thought to Scythe and his gun or the electricity still jolting every one of my cells. Her hands were clutched over her eyes and she was shrieking. Oh God, he shot her, I of Fang bleeding out on the beach, of Fang's sliced thigh, of how much littler Angel was, fragiler—

"Angel," I gasped. "Where did he get you?" My hands slid up and down her arms, then skimmed her sides and her jeans—no bullet hole, not even a scratch.

Does. Not. Compute.

From behind me came Fang's voice, so thick with dread that it was nearly unrecognizable.

"Max."

I cast another look at Angel; she had not, in fact, been shot. Not at all.

I stood to my full height, pulled Angel into my side, and turned a fraction to study Fang's face, pale and freaked. A deeply powerful feeling of foreboding settled over me like a wet blanket. I followed his gaze halfway across the room but stopped to close my eyes and swallow bile when I finally understood.

I hadn't killed Jeb or Anne. Out of mercy, or confusion, or pity—I wasn't sure which, if any.

I hadn't killed Jeb or Anne, because murder isn't a solution: murder is a last-line defense and nothing else.

I hadn't killed Jeb or Anne, because I know as well as anyone that a human being's life has value, no matter how evil, misunderstood, or down-and-out they may be.

I hadn't killed Jeb or Anne.

But Silas Scythe had killed them anyway.

A/N: I don't love this chapter; a lot of this was written months ago, but now that I'm here, I couldn't get it to fit exactly the way that I wanted... is what it is.