Disclaimer: I do not own the characters portrayed in this story. I wish I had come up with them, but they are the result of the brilliant mind of James Patterson.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter 1

Max walked the fifty feet down the never ending hallway to her next class. Keeping a close eye on her sneakers, Max allowed her thoughts to wander slightly but soon found that that was a mistake. Her thoughts immediately returned to Oz. Today marked one year. One year of torture and pain, waking up every day wishing you were with the one person who filled that specific small spot in your life that you couldn't live without.

Before she knew it Max was at her next class. History wasn't a bad class, not her worst by far. The teacher was the best. Mr. Adams treated her like the rest of the students, no extra attention or no attention at all. He was by far her favorite.

The classes passed by with frightening slowness. Each second of people staring and whispered comments felt like a lifetime of dying slowly. Her only retreat was an occasional glance from Matt and Icarus in the hallways.

Everything was better at home. Frannie was there all the time now, having opened a smaller veterinarian business near the lake house. Kit flew in from Washington on the weekends where his job at the FBI demanded a lot of attention during the week. Even than he was on call all the time and frequently had to succumb to their orders back to Washington.

Frannie looked out the window of the kitchen where she was washing the grime off of her hands. Having a veterinarian business again demanded certain hassles, like rows of caged animals she was tending to at the moment. She had just finished cleaning those cages and was washing her hands when she looked out of the window.

Frannie saw out the window a scene that would shock many people. Frannie, however, was not a part of 'many people'. Her life and the life of six children had changed forever a fateful night almost two years ago. Children now reduced to five, five beautiful, good hearted children. Five children who had been created in a laboratory and made scientific history.

Max, Matthew, Icarus, Peter and Wendy.

The amazing story actually started almost two years in the small burg of Bear Bluff, Colorado, which is fifty or so miles northwest of Boulder.

Frannie was driving home late one night when she happened to see a streaking white flash-than realized it was a young girl running fast through the woods not too far from her home.

But that was just part of what she saw. Being a Veterinarian, Dr. Frannie just didn't accept what her eyes were telling her, so she stopped the car and got out. The strange girl appeared to be about eleven or twelve, with long blond hair and a loose-fitting white smock that was stained with blood and torn.

Frannie stepped back and steadied herself against a tree. After a while she realized that her eyes didn't lie to her. Along with a pair of foreshortened arms, the girl had wings!

That's correct...wings! About a nine foot span. Below the wings and attached somehow were her arms. She was double limbed. And the fit of her wings were absolutely perfect. Extraordinary from a scientific and aesthetic point of view. A giant mind altering dose of reality for Frannie.

She had also been hurt at the time, which was how Frannie was eventually able to capture and sedate her, with the help of an FBI agent named Thomas Brennan, known better to Frannie as Kit. They brought her to the animal hospital she operated where Frannie examined her.

She found very large pectoral muscles anchored to an overlarge breastbone, anterior and posterior air sacs, and a heart as big as a horse's. She had been "engineered" that way. A perfect design, actually. Totally brilliant.

Her name was Max, short for Maximum, and it was incredibly hard to win over any sort of trust at all. But Frannie soon got Max to open up to her. Max told Frannie things that would make you sick to your stomach and angrier than you've ever been.

Max told of a place called the School, where she'd been kept captive since the day she was born. Biologists, trying to break the barrier on human longevity had melded several types of DNA with human zygotes. The most successful attempts were with bird DNA. They had created Max and several other children. A flock.

Unfortunately the scientists couldn't grow the babies in test tubes, so the genetically modified embryos had to be implanted in their mothers' wombs. When the mothers were close to term labor was induced. The poor mothers were told that their premature children had died. The preemies were than shipped to an underground lab called the School. The School was, by definition, a maximum security prison. The children were kept in cages, and the rejects were "put to sleep," a horrible euphemism for cold blooded murder.

This is why Max had done what she had been forbidden to do. She had escaped from the School. They had even got to live with the kids for a few months at a place they had called the lake house. Kit and Frannie listened to what Max had to say and than went to rescue the other children still trapped at the School. The six surviving children, including Max and her brother, had than been sent to live with their parents.

After a fierce custody battle, the biological parents eventually won full guardianship. This arrangement was soon violently broken when men sent from a place called the Hospital came for them. The man who ran the Hospital was also in charge of the School. His name was Harold Hauer and he was over one hundred years old.

This man had successfully extended his own life through a radical and disgusting method. Hauer used the full organ systems from living humans to replace his own, the donor humans did just that, they would done out their very lives.

After a long run from this organization, the chase finally climaxed in a fierce fight in which Max's lover, Ozymandius, was killed. The five remaining children were captured and brought to the Hospital along with Frannie and Kit. Max, terrified at the prospect of being stuck in a cage after all that time of freedom, led a daring escape which eventually killed Harold Hauer and exposed the horrible things the hospital was doing.

The courts took this into account in their decision and ruled that the children stay with Frannie and Kit. Though this was the happiest day they had had in a very long time, it was still plagued with sadness. The seven remaining in the flock couldn't help but think of Oz, perhaps this is why the most horrifying aspect to the flock of this whole ordeal is the fact that Oz's body had mysteriously disappeared from the clearing where he had died. Still, Max faithfully traveled the miles to the clearing from the lake house, sometimes with the other children but most times without, and allowed herself to mourn him.